Caught up with the challenges and demands of everyday life, it is not always easy to leave home and travel. Our Jung on the Hudson online seminars provide an ideal opportunity to sit back in the comfort of your own home or office while exploring what lies within.
Our seminars offer the opportunity to stretch ourselves psychologically — an in-home vacation from the demands of everyday life and an opportunity to better balance spirit and matter and find meaning in our lives.
This year marks the 32nd anniversary of our Jung on the Hudson Summer Seminars! From the start, we have taken great pride in offering meaningful, in-depth content. What began as a small, in person program held in Rhinebeck, New York, thanks to the wonders of technology, the program has become internationally attended with participants last summer joining us from 29 different states and nine countries.
We hope you will join us for what promises to be another thought-provoking and stimulating time with like-minded colleagues from all over the world.
July 14-18, 2024 | Weeklong Live Online Seminar
Our lives are permeated with relationships from the day we are born. As we go through life, we form innumerable connections with others. The relationships we make are influenced by other relationships in our lives, positively or negatively. No matter the nature of these relationships, they are an integral part of sustaining our sense of self and serve as vehicles on our road toward individuation — often significantly shaping who we are as individuals.
One type of relationship is friendship — a state of mutual caring, enduring affection, and trust between people. Other than family relationships, friendship is perhaps the most complex relationship of all. A good friendship means you can be yourself without fear of judgment and assume a level of honesty necessary to transcend the pitfalls that can deteriorate any relationship. The bonds that are based on shared interests, beliefs, values, and goals can often lead to deep connections. All cultures view friendships as important relationships through one’s life. For some, they are circumstantial and fleeting. Others are nurtured over time and go deep, reminding us that love is not just reserved for romantic relationships. A deep friendship can have all the characteristics minus eros. Sometimes we form deep friendships in our romantic and familial relationships, growing them beyond the traditional roles.
Friends are precious, but relationships are fragile and demand great care to sustain them. They can be impacted by time, distance, beliefs, societal influences, and modes of communication. They can easily fade into the background of our lives if we don’t make an effort to keep them relevant. In this time of rapidly advancing technology, the very methods by which we communicate are changing the ways we relate to one another — from simple face-to-face conversations to electronic communications using phones, email, video, and social media.
This seminar, taught by Jungian analysts and authors, will examine whether these modern methods of communication help or hinder. Explore friendship in relationship with others as well as our own unconscious Self, consider friendship through the stages of life, and reflect on the famous friendship of C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud.
Presentations
Sunday Evening, July 14 | 6:00–8:00 p.m. ET | JAMES HOLLIS
The Re-Membrance of a Lost Home: If Only the Kids Would Pipe Down, I Could Hear the Other Relatives Complain
These musings on friendship begin with the premise that no relationship with others can be any more evolved than our relationship with ourselves. Unfinished business within ourselves invariably shows up in outer forms and often undermines the promise of friendship. This presentation will explore this idea and the questions: How is it that we live with such unruly intra-psychic contents? and How might we begin to bring some relative order to the household?
Monday, July 15 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET | CHRIS DOWNING
Jung and Freud: Stories of Their Relationship
Exactly 50 years ago, the letters Jung and Freud exchanged during the blossoming and deterioration of their friendship were made public. These letters make clear that each had a different understanding of their friendship from its very beginning. Each would have told the story differently. It’s also clear that each of us who reads these letters comes away with a different understanding, one that says as much about us as about them. I clearly remember how I read them back then and am curious to discover what they say to me now — and to you. This presentation will explore the nature of their friendship and how their friendship illuminates our own experiences.
Tuesday, July 16 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET | ERIK GOODWYN
Does Social Media and Technology Help or Hinder our Desire for Connection with Others?
Early this year, the Surgeon General released a report highlighting the worsening depression epidemic. In fact, over the last hundred years, depression, anxiety, suicide, and addictions have all gotten worse despite tremendous progress in medicine, social justice, and technological advancement. Though the emphasis is on expanding mental care and access, an important question remains: Why are we getting more and more miserable? This presentation will explore one of the leading cultural causes — the loneliness epidemic — along with four key ways in which to fight against this trend. Human beings are social animals. We will look at important ways we can feed our starving social instincts. Of key importance here is the role of social media, technology, and the way we communicate with one another. Are these innovations in the way we connect adding to the misery, or might they be part of the solution?
Wednesday, July 17 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET | ANN BELFORD ULANOV
The Unguessed Friend: Assistance from the Unconscious
As varied and different as friends are in conscious life, we have similar unexpected friends from the unconscious. Friendship extends to inner life, the parts of us that are uncovered in analysis and through life experiences. Examples might be the shadow that may feel negative but initiates a change in who we are by making us befriend what we prefer to reject from our identity. Or it may be a sliver of a golden shadow of which we were truly unaware. Even more startling is the Self that requires our attention to defeat a mistaken ego plan. To enlarge the scope of our awareness, this presentation will explore Jung’s perspective about living with an Other — feeling the regard of a greater authority that ushers us into the community of being human and a part of humanity on this earth.
Thursday, July 18 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET | TOM SINGER
Friendship, Stages of Life, and the Self
Drawing on the work of Erik Erikson and Jung’s notion of the Self, Tom Singer will explore the interconnection of three essential themes of our experiences as humans: friendship, stages of life, and the Self. He will also reflect on his own experiences of the depth and richness of friendship throughout his life. He will weave in fundamental theoretical considerations about the stages of life along the lines first articulated by the work of Erikson and also examine Jung’s notions of the Self and how we might see the experiences of friendship as contributing to and evoking the Self in relationships at various stages of our lives. Participants should be prepared to share their own experiences in these realms.
July 19-20, 2024 | ASHOK BEDI
Profiles of the Self in Relationship and Over a Lifespan
Friday, July 19 | 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. ET and
Saturday, July 20 | 12:00 – 1:30pm & 2:15 – 3:45p.m. ET
Relationships are the soil in which the seed of the soul blossoms to its fullest potential. Our life journey begins in the matrix of relationships with the mother and father. It is enriched by friendships, ripens into an erotic relationship, then returns to the Self in old age and engages the transcendent in preparation for death, in uroboric conclusion of our journey to our celestial origins.
This weekend, we dive into these relationships and stages of life with Jungian psychoanalyst and a board-certified psychiatrist Ashok Bedi.
Throughout life, friendships can be mirrors to our soul. We will draw on Eastern spirituality, analytical psychology, and emerging neuroscience as valuable guidance in navigating these encounters. The Yoga Sutra, written by the sage Patanjali, crystallizes four types of relationships. Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut proposes three modes of friendship. Together, we will explore these tales of tangled souls, asking: What are the rules of engagement? Is your enemy your most precious friendship?
Intimate relationships become the matrix of projections and reintegration for the Soul. When we work through and withdraw these projections, how do we experience the other? The tale of Krishna and his 16,000 lovers, from the Hindu Bhagwad Purana, is instructive to address this mystery.
Eventually we arrive at old age, where we ask, What do we hold and what do we fold? How to triage the priorities in aging? Is there life after death? We will explore this issue based on recent research, including Atul Gawande’s thesis “On Being Mortal.” As death is certain for everyone, how do we prepare for death and dying? We will also examine how the ancients engaged this mystery of death, transcendence, and life after death. The Eastern Upanishads and Jung’s commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as his own preparation for death, will prove instructive in guiding us to bring our Soul back to our celestial home.