A depth psychological perspective on current events
A FREE event co-sponsored by The C. G. Jung Society, Seattle and Antioch University, Seattle
Registration Required for this Free Event at alumni.antioch.edu/Psyche
Extinction Anxiety in the Age of Trumpism – Randy Morris, Ph.D.
“As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” -- Abraham Lincoln
“Rather than a wall, America needs to build a giant mirror to reflect on what we have become.” -- Sign at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church, NYC
We live in a self-conscious age of anxiety. For the past 72 years we have lived in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, threshold events that continue to haunt the collective imagination. Since that initiation into an awareness of our own extinction, new threats to the human species have arisen, including climate change and political extremism amongst nuclear armed states. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has reactivated a fear that we are sliding down a path of no return in which the atavistic desires of human power and pleasure will run amok. But Trump’s extreme politics is an opportunity to wake up from a trance, to re-imagine the world we want for future generations. We will consider the nature of extinction anxiety and how it can be understood to be a self-corrective impulse of the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, who desires nothing less than a flourishing planet and a human consciousness that can appreciate it.
Randy Morris, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at Antioch University where he coordinated the Spiritual Studies and Psychology areas of concentration and continues to teach classes in dreams, mythology, depth psychology and spirituality. He also serves on the board of Rite of Passage Journeys, where he led Vision Quests for many years. He is the co-author of Nagasaki Spirits, Hiroshima Voices – Making Sense of the Nuclear Age and editor of Rites of Passage Into Elderhood.
Power and Love in the Reign of Trump -- Elizabeth Clark-Stern, MA.
“Where love reigns, there is no will to power, and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other.” –C.G. Jung (CW 7:78)
Each morning we face a new Tweet from the man who lives in the White House. Our anger, shock, fear and indignation are crucial ingredients in the alchemical cauldron of our individual and collective psyches. Peering into the cauldron with us is the goddess of paradox: Kali of the East, the Black Madonna of the West. She holds the coexisting realities of darkness and light, creation and destruction. She can help us peel back the layers of Trump’s personality disorder and see him as only one more outrageous manifestation of the Will to Power that has dominated the Archetypal (and actual) Feminine for thousands of years. Trump’s narcissism, recognizable to anyone who has raised a child to age 3, demands attention, and calls us to join with Kali and the Black Madonna to bring forth new power within ourselves, born, not of the will to power, but of the will to love. Pair this with a commitment to descend into our own depths, and we can become more alive, more focused, more impassioned, more in love with ourselves and others, and more integrated into the activist community than ever before. This presentation illustrates these themes with short readings from Elizabeth’s new play The Language of Water.
Elizabeth Clark-Stern, MA, is a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist and a playwright. She has an M.A. in Psychology from Antioch University and has been a licensed mental health counselor since 1994. She completed a 2-year professional seminar at the North Pacific Institute for Analytical Psychology, for therapists who use Jungian psychology in their works. Her depth oriented plays have been performed at Jungian conferences and organizations throughout the world.
Trump & Titanism: Patriarchal Predation in an Archetypal, Evolutionary Perspective – Terry Gibson, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst
Time changes and power passes. It is the pity of the world. -- Li Quinzhao
The face of Trump is the face of a regressive, global form of menacing patriarchy. It is the face of a Putin, a Modi, a Xi Jinping, a Duterte. Wherever it manifests, it appeals to and exhorts a nativist, racist, sexist, capitalist-consumerist, parochial, and militarist sentiment that arouses a dark and destructive cultural complex. How can a culture awaken itself from such a complex-driven stupor to recover a more individuating cultural path that better serves the collective enterprise of an evolving, compassionate humanity living in a sustainable balance with Mother Earth, with the restored Anima Mundi?
The tragedy is that most of the people who say they care about [the world] do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits. – James Baldwin
Terrill [Terry] Gibson, Ph.D. is a diploma Jungian analyst and Approved Supervisor with the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy who has practiced for forty years with a non-profit organization in the South Sound. His writing, teaching, and consulting centrally focus on integrating spiritual and depth-psychological paradigms. When not doing analysis, he travels widely, does wilderness landscape photography, writes journal-poetry, and kayaks.
