CIPA’s Southern Institute (Istituto Meridionale) marks the anniversary of Federico Fellini’s death with a one-day conference on Saturday October 3.
The conference grows out of ARAS’s own publication on Fellini, and takes up a relationship that runs deep in Jungian history. Fellini’s connection to analytical psychology began in earnest around 1960, when, in the grip of a creative crisis while making 8½, he began analysis with Ernst Bernhard, the German-born psychiatrist who had fled Nazi Germany for Rome and become the founder of Jungian analysis in Italy. On Bernhard’s advice, Fellini began recording and illustrating his dreams from 1960 onward, eventually amassing the notebooks published posthumously as Il Libro dei Sogni (The Book of Dreams), a private companion, in its way, to Jung’s own Red Book. Fellini later visited Jung’s tower at Bollingen himself, an encounter he described to Aldo Carotenuto as leaving him with the impression of “something modeled in clay,” at once monumental and childlike.
The day’s programme reflects this legacy directly, with several contributors to the ARAS publication presenting their work. Caterina Vezzoli opens with a look at Fellini’s Satyricon, followed by Salvo Pollicina on “Fellini the Eskimo.” Gabriele Ajello turns to the prophetic language of dreams across cinema, storytelling, and artificial intelligence, before Maurizio Nicolosi examines the sacred, religion, and faith in Fellini’s work, and Livia Di Stefano closes with a paper on Juliet of the Spirits and the search for the anima.
For readers wanting to go deeper beforehand, you can read Sylvester Wojtkowski’s ARAS essay Federico Fellini and the Giantess: Individuation of the Monster. The essay traces the individuation of what he calls the monster in Federico Fellini’s inner life: a recurring giantess who first appeared to him at fourteen and returned throughout his career, initially projected onto actresses like Anita Ekberg before gradually revealing herself as an autonomous creative daimon in her own right. Drawing on Jung’s writing on individuation and Hillman’s “acorn theory,” alongside more than sixty dreams recorded in Fellini’s own illustrated dream diary, Wojtkowski follows this figure’s transformation across five decades, from a terrifying sea-monster to a mother goddess, an androgynous shadow, and eventually a fully differentiated being that Fellini learns to direct rather than simply be swept up by, tracing how this relationship shaped his filmmaking itself.
The conference will be held simultaneously at its Catania and Palermo venues, connected to each other by video link, with a separate video-conference option for anyone joining remotely from outside Sicily. You can register here.