The International Association for Jungian Studies has named Ann Belford Ulanov the winner of its C.G. Jung Award for 2026, and will mark the occasion with a one-day online gathering on December 6 titled “Female Voices.”
Ulanov, MDiv, PhD, LHD, is a Jungian analyst and Professor Emerita of Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where she held the Christiane Brooks Johnson Memorial Professorship. Her work has spent decades bringing analytical psychology into dialogue with religion, spirituality, clinical practice, creativity, and the feminine, and she is a past winner of the Oskar Pfister Award and the Gradiva Award. Alongside the award presentation, the day brings together contemporary female voices from different parts of the world, creating space for exchange across generations, cultures, and clinical traditions through a series of presentations, reflections, and conversations.
For readers wanting to hear Ulanov’s own voice ahead of the event, two free recorded talks are available on YouTube. “Root, Uprooting, Rootedness,” her keynote address for the Jung Institute of Chicago‘s 2019 Founders’ Day Symposium, explores soul awakened in three stages, to root, to uprooting, and to rootedness, moving beneath intellect, adaptation, and differentiation toward a more creative relationship with personal and collective life. And in “Navigating the Depths: How the Psychoid and Unus Mundus Can Help Us Transcend Trauma,” an interview with Bonnie Bright, Ulanov discusses her book The Psychoid, Soul and Psyche: Piercing Space-Time Barriers, describing the psychoid as an unrepresentable layer of the unconscious that we live through rather than know directly, and its connection to Jung’s concept of synchronicity and the unus mundus, the sense of a larger, shared world we participate in without fully grasping.
Ulanov’s bibliography spans more than five decades, ranging across religion, the feminine, and clinical practice. One of her most recent titles from Daimon Verlag include Knots and Their Untying: Essays on Psychological Dilemmas (2020). Among her most widely read works are Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying, co-written with her late husband Barry Ulanov, and The Wisdom of the Psyche, both published by Daimon Verlag, alongside Finding Space: Winnicott, God and Psychic Reality, which won the Gradiva Award. Her earlier books, including Religion and the Unconscious (1975), Receiving Woman (1981), and Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer (1982), helped establish her reputation at the intersection of depth psychology and theology, a thread she continued in The Living God and Our Living Psyche: What Christians Can Learn from Carl Jung (2008) and Female Ancestors of Christ (2006). Given the themes of this seminar, her 2014 book The Witch and the Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality (Chiron Publications) is also worth a mention, alongside Madness and Creativity (2013), part of the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology.
We have put together a collection of her extensive published works, on the Directory, here.
Previous winners
Ulanov joins a distinguished list of past recipients. Andrew Samuels (2021), the award’s first recipient and co-founder of the IAJS itself, has spent decades bringing Jungian thought into direct contact with politics, authoring The Political Psyche and, more recently, A New Therapy for Politics?, and working as a political consultant to parties and activist groups internationally. Renos Papadopoulos (2022) is known for his work with refugees and survivors of political violence and torture, directing the Centre for Trauma, Asylum and Refugees and founding the first postgraduate course on refugee care, alongside editing the four-volume C.G. Jung: Critical Assessments. Susan Rowland (2023), the IAJS’s founding Chair in 2003, has written extensively on Jung’s relationship to literature and feminism, including Jung: A Feminist Revision and Jungian Literary Criticism: The Essential Guide. Sonu Shamdasani (2024) is best known as the editor behind the long-awaited publication of Jung’s Red Book, and continues to shape how Jung’s unpublished and historical writings reach the wider world. And Jean Shinoda Bolen (2025), a psychiatrist and author, has spent her career connecting readers to archetype and myth through widely read books on goddess psychology, helping bring Jungian ideas on gender and the feminine to a broad popular audience.