Jungian Keynotes: September 2025

Uncertainty: Is It a Gift?
We feel cultural foundations we have relied upon are upended: polarization, violent projections, anxiety abound. Have we access now to truth? Gifts psyche offers are creative gestures, found in energy from recalling projections, from exploring integrative projections, from locality and naming, and in new forms of communication and of liberation from destructive complexes.

Synchronicity, Complexity and the Psychoid Field: Towards Re-Enchantment
This presentation will begin with a brief history of the origins and development of Jung’s notions of synchronicity and the psychoid. Complexity and field theories will then be used to contemporize these ideas. Examples of synchronistic phenomena from the presenter’s practice will be explored using this approach. Further selected examples from the history of culture (especially where artisans or artists were able to represent profound knowledge of highly-complex natural phenomena well ahead of any scientific understanding) indicating the reality of psychoid fields will be offered.

Cultural Complexes and Politics
Cultural identities and narratives have an essential impact on the self concepts of nations and their political behavior. In times of social media with mass manipulation, with reactivated enemy projections and digital anesthesia regarding war or ecocide, we see a revival of archaic archetypal patterns threatening the basics of democracy. Analytical Psychology can contribute to a better understanding of these dynamics and become a resource for inner balance.

What Does Jungian Psychology Stand for in the World Today?
The lecture will be followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. Suggested reading for the lecture is the soon-to-be-published volume, The Self, Individuation, Communitas: Reflections on Fundamental Values in Analytical Psychology, edited by Murray Stein and Emilija Kiehl (Chiron Publications).

This presentation highlights and explores in depth two themes: the role of the productive imagination and the particularly analytical concepts of relationship – for the unconscious, between analyst and analysand, and for the individual in society. Jungian psychology, uniquely, initiates a dialogue between the reproductive and the productive imagination modeled in alchemy. Similarly, a creative dialogic relationship with the unconscious is fostered through the analytical process. Both imagination and relationship form healing modalities for the individual and for their role in society.

This lecture will describe how an inner authoritarian system of dissociative defenses, typical of traumatized individuals, compromises the democratic nature of the psyche and tyrannizes it with fearful authoritarian “voices.” When a culture suffers traumatic anxiety, the same authoritarian system structures its cultural narrative and leads to the extremism and polarization we see today in the West.

“Therefore, I behold death, since it teaches me how to live.” (C.G. Jung, The Red Book)
The psyche is a self-regulating system. So, too, is nature. What happens to the psyche when nature is no longer self-regulating? What happens to the natural world when the psyche is no longer self-regulating? What does the possible demise of the natural world constellate in the psyche, and what role might analytical psychology play when considering this outcome?

The Dreaming Mind and the Unus Mundus
Jung said dreams are symbolic communications from the Self, compensating for the conscious attitude, arising from the collective unconscious, the place where the Unus Mundus – the world soul – speaks, as seen in Wolfgang Pauli’s dream of the world clock (which developed his thinking about the structure of the atom).
Our minds form symbols using the executive network, the salience network, and the default mode network. Dreams develop empathy, memory and creativity, and connect us to the spiritual life of our planet through the transcendent function.