As author George B. Hogenson writes in chapter 1: “Jung’s memory of the ocean passage (from Jung’s memoirs, recording a voyage to America with Freud) focuses our attention on the central problem of this essay: What does it mean to lay claim to personal authority in a world where biography and autobiography have become thematic for an entire cultural discourse?
How are we to comprehend authority in psychoanalysis?” So begins this exploration into the relationship between Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud, a broken friendship, which has profoundly affected 20th century thought.
Zoom Link to Join: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZErf–trTovEtfZj0FcnAEzX5IQAT_Wd5pj
In this talk, Leah Larwood will discuss the land between dreams and poetry, and how these processes can support one another. She will talk about how poetry therapy and dream work combined can be a potentially powerful approach, and specifically, how turning a dream into a poem can be a compelling experience, too.
She’ll discuss the liminal dream states and how these spaces can be a treasure trove for exploring wellbeing and creativity. She’ll touch on her own experiences of time spent in ‘the belly of the whale’ and how working with dreams and writing poetry helped with the integration process.
We’ll also hear about how lucid dreaming can be a fertile ground for developing poetry and other creative projects, and how poetry can play an integral processing role in supporting emotionally charged nocturnal experiences such anxiety dreams, nightmares, and self-induced shadow lucid dreams.
What to bring: Bring a dream from recent times, or if you’re not currently recalling dreams, bring a dream from the past that has stayed with you. If time, we will do a short writing exercise using your dream for inspiration. (You will not be asked to share your dream or process, unless you would like to.)
Leah Larwood is a poet and writer based in Norfolk UK. By day she’s a hypnotherapist and a wellbeing writer for Red magazine, Breathe, Planet Mindful and Female First. She’s also currently studying to become a UKCP accredited Gestalt Psychotherapist, a Certified Poetry Therapist (IFBPT) and a MBLC Mindfulness Teacher. By night, she works with dreams and has a particular interest in using shadow work integration within lucid dreams. She often uses her dreams to inspire and create her own poetry and has various poems published by Poetry Society, Mslexia, Poetry News and has been placed in various poetry competitions.
She runs various online workshops teaching people how to use lucid dreaming and other liminal dream states to support their wellbeing and creativity and also hosts a 6-week poetry therapy series ‘The Royal Road to Dreams’ which combines poetry therapy techniques with dream work: www.themoonlab.net
The Best of James Hollis: Wisdom for the Inner Journey is a collection of excerpts from the writings of James Hollis, PhD, Jungian psychotherapist and author. These selections, compiled by editor Logan Jones, span across his body of work from The Middle Passage (1993) to Prisms (2021) organized into different topics ranging from the psychological concepts of Carl Jung to the everyday tasks of our living and callings.
Hollis’s wisdom will challenge readers to find their own path, to be who they are called to be, to take the risks to trust their soul, and thus live a life worthy of their unique gifts. Hollis’s writings ask us to live a deeper and more authentic life.
To celebrate the upcoming release of The Best of James Hollis, Chiron is offering a combo pricing special on the new release with the recently released Prisms. Purchase a paperback copy of each for a total of $39.95.
Prisms: Reflections on the Journey We Call Life summarizes a lifetime of observing, engaging, and exploring why we are here, in service to what, and what life asks of us. These eleven essays, all written recently, examine how we understand ourselves, and often we have to reframe that understanding, the nature and gift of comedy, the imagination, desire, as well as our encounters with narcissism, and aging.
Hollis, a Jungian Analyst in Washington, D.C., explores the roadblocks we encounter and our on-going challenge to live our brief journey with as much courage, insight, and resolve as we can bring to the table.
In Hauntings, James Hollis considers one’s transformation through the invisible world—how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms—spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries—which move through us, and through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come.
James Hollis, Ph.D. is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Washington, DC. Originally a Professor of Humanities, he is the former Director of the Houston Jung Center and the Washington, D.C. Jung Society.
He is Vice-President emeritus of the Philemon Foundation, author of seventeen books, and a frequent public speaker. He lives with his wife Jill, a retired therapist and painter, and together they have three living children.
James Hollis, Ph.D., a Jungian Analyst in Washington, D.C., explores the roadblocks we encounter and our on-going challenge to live our brief journey with as much courage, insight, and resolve as we can bring to the table.
Drawing on the Analytical Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, on the discoveries of modern science, and on mystical traditions from numerous world religions, this book proposes a psychological mysticism that preceded, and now replaces, the historical theological mysticism that has been dependent on theistic images of god. Such images are no longer meaningful for many people – or necessary.
Readers today are especially thrilled by the prospect of good news. Drought and global warming, civil war and famine, poverty and economic inequity—yes, bad news abounds. This book by Dr. Stephen Wilkerson, on the other hand, is about hope and optimism for the future. The recorded history of our world is largely one of a sometimes worthy patriarchal striving.
It has, however, all too often been tarnished, marred, and horribly disfigured by the hatreds, intolerance, and destruction that have accompanied it. And the good news? There is another way, poignantly and persuasively outlined nearly two hundred years ago by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, involving the Divine Feminine.
Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly’s PassionatePoiesis concerns itself with the contemporary art work of Cy Twombly and his radically innovative and necessary forms of creating for our times as seen against the deep background of classical Greek mythology.
In particular, the two entwined figures and images of Orpheus, lyre player, lover and journeyer to the underworld, and Dionysos/Bacchus, god of wine, ecstasy and madness, are taken up as the two principal thematic leitmotifs which animate and overarchingly inform Twombly’s entire artistic oeuvre across all the mediums in which he worked, both literally and symbolically, from the early 1950’s until the last series of brilliantly colored paintings he made just before his death in 2011.
Around the year 1100 a genius mind—woman or man—created an image, which has not lost its meaning even to this day. It was made by hundreds of busy hands as a colorful goblin most likely used originally for centuries as a canopy in the Romanesque Cathedral of Gerona, North east of Spain. The original tapestry showed all the signs of a mandala: a big circle surrounded by a square with a central symbol and many interesting details. What makes this mandala unique, is the fact that it unites pagan symbols in the form of nature gods (rivers, winds, the year), as well as the genesis of the Jewish Tora (the creation myth), the holy cross of Christianity held by the roman emperor Constantine the Great and according to Muslim tradition the tapestry as a whole and its mandala shape.
Barbara Child put her heart and soul into a letter to her partner, Alan Morris, while he was at the cottage they shared in Florida and she was away at school in California. He was a Vietnam War veteran, and she was taking a seminary course on war—in particular, the Vietnam War. A little more than two years later, the war finally took its toll on Alan. He put a Colt .45 to his head and pulled the trigger.
That letter led to one thing, then another. Eventually, Barbara began analysis with a
Jungian psychologist and shared the letter with him. She began talking more and more about Alan. She began writing more and more about Alan. From those writings came this book.
Wired This Way explores why mental health issues, burnout, and stress-related illness among entrepreneurs are not due to weakness, but to a rich inner complexity that’s prone to imbalance. Using tools of self-study, entrepreneurs can harness all that they are—their light and dark—to create with health and fulfillment.
Chiron Publications is pleased to announce the release of both the paperback and ebook version (Google Play only) of The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz Volume 2.
The Hero’s Journey is about the great adventure that leads to a cherished and difficult to obtain prize. In these fairytales, the Self is often symbolized as that treasured prize and the hero’s travails symbolize the process of individuation. In its many manifestations, the hero embodies the emerging personality. “In the conscious world, the hero is only one part of the personality—the despised part—and through his attachment to the Self in the unconscious is a symbol of the whole personality.”
Von Franz’s prodigious knowledge of fairytales from around the world demonstrates that the fairytale draws its root moisture from the collective realm. This volume continues where Volume 1 left off as von Franz describes the fairytale, “suspended between the divine and the secular worlds (…) creating a mysterious and pregnant tension that requires extreme power to withstand.” The resistance of the great mother against the hero and his humble origins, as well as the hero freeing the anima figure from the clutches of the unconscious are universal archetypal patterns. The spoils retrieved by the hero symbolize new levels of consciousness wrested from the unconscious.
The Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz is a 28-volume Magnum Opus from one of the leading minds in Jungian Psychology. Volume 3 turns to the Maiden’s Quest within fairytales.
The maiden/heroine navigates a complicated maze of inner and outer relationships as she builds a bridge to the unconscious. The heroine contends with the animus in many forms like a devouring and incestuous father, demonic groom, the beautiful prince, an androgenous mother, a cold dark tower, and through conflict with the evil stepmother.
Dangers and pitfalls await her as the conscious feminine strives to make connections with the unconscious masculine. The maiden is the undeveloped feminine and the promised fruit of her struggle with the animus is the coniunctio. Volume 3 is a masterwork of cross-cultural scholarship, penetrating psychological insight, and a strikingly illuminating treatise. With her usual perspicacity and thoroughness, von Franz gathers countless fairytale motifs revealing a myriad of facets to the maiden’s quest.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Bluebeard
Chapter 2. The Pastor’s Wife
Chapter 3. The Woman Who Became A Spider
Chapter 4. Sedna
Chapter 5. The Girl and the Skull
Chapter 6. The Two Sisters
Chapter 7. Mother Holle
Chapter 8. Ingebjörg and the Good Stepmother
Chapter 9. The Wages of the Stepdaughter and the House Daughter
Volume 1 – Both paperback and hardcover – are now available. Fairytales, like myths, provide a cultural and societal backdrop that helps the human imagination narrate the meaning of life’s events. The remarkable similarities in fairytale motifs across different lands and cultures inspired many scholars to search for the original homeland of fairytales. While peregrinations of fairytale motifs occur, the common root of fairytales is more archetypal than geographic. A striking feature of fairytales is that a sense of space, time, and causality is absent. This situates them in a magical realm, a land of the soul, where the most interesting things happen in the center of places like Heaven, mountains, lakes, and wells.
Jill Mellick explores the grace, challenges, and gifts of an unexpected, instantly deep friendship with Marion Woodman. She documents with letters, calls, journals, memories, and photographs.
Timeless moments—singing, dancing, opening arms to storms, holding public events or retreats by the Pacific and on an island in Georgian Bay, home stays, creating words and music together—unfold. Across decades, they exchange letters about external and internal journeys. Their friendship and love endure, together, apart, through harrowing, life-threatening illnesses each; Mellick even secures Woodman a second opinion, which saves her life.
Riotous tales of travels gone right and wrong over home dinners. Laughter, love, and insatiability for natural beauty and bodies of water. Silent hair brushing rituals juxtapose with honorary doctorates. Loving poetry and dogs equally, with a dog as muse they craft Emily Dickinson and the Demon Lover and Coming Home to Myself.
The friendship deepens, strengthens—in a perfumed courtyard in Palo Alto under a night sky, on a balcony over Georgian Bay, on separate continents at the turn of the millennium, through illnesses denying contact—even in a last poignant, joyful meeting.
“In this amazing epistolary memoir, Dr. Jill Mellick penetrates the heart, reason, and spirit of a female friendship. This is her tribute to a budding and then flourishing relationship with a soul mate and colleague, the renowned psychologist and author Marion Woodman. Mellick, herself a scholar, clinician, and artist, reveals the sinews of the bonds—aspirational among women—-between them that permit trust, understanding, tolerance, honesty, and love. In turn, each woman truly becomes her authentic self. This is a beautiful and beautifully written tribute to friendship.”
-Edith B. Gelles, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford. Her books include Portia: The World of Abigail Adams, The Letters of Abigail Levy Franks, 1733-1748, Abigail Adams: Letters (Ed.).
Jill Mellick, Ph.D, professor emerita, is an author, practicing Jungian psychologist, and multimedia artist.
Publications include The Red Book Hours: Discovering C.G. Jung’s Art Mediums & Creative Process, The Art of C.G. Jung (contributing author), The Art of Dreaming (Foreword by Marion Woodman), Coming Home to Myself with Marion Woodman, and The Worlds of P’otsunu with Jeanne Shutes.
An Australian, she resides in Palo Alto, California & Kaua’i, Hawai’i.
