Chiron Publications Blog
Chiron March Newsletter
- “Women Who Create: The Feminine and the Arts” transdisciplinary conference (which will take place both online and at Cambridge University on March 25-26). Proposal deadline has been extended until March 5 for anyone in the Chiron community who may like to participate. All the details can be found at https://labrc.co.uk/2023/01/
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- A Psychreative (Zoom) event will be on March 5, 7 p.m. London time. Featured guest Aaron Mason will be giving a talk titled, “Living Models of Gender and Sexuality: A Personal & Archetypal Bricolage.” To register, please go to: https://us02web.zoom.us/
meeting/register/tZAuf– gqjIuH9RJmTe1s7ZRESn32nubghN-
- “Engaging with researcher reflexivity through making and working with images of countertransference,” an online workshop by the ingenious Louise Austin on March 8, 6 – 8.30 p.m. London time. This workshop is aimed at researchers, academics, creatives, clinicians, and scholars who have an interest in exploring arts-based and psychological approaches to qualitative research. To register, please go to: https://labrc.co.uk/2023/01/
09/engaging-with-researcher- reflexivity-making-and- working-with-images-of- countertransference/
Bridging from personal story to the collective and archetypal, Chiron Publications‘ The Schizophrenia Complex is a ground-breaking account of the feelings and emotions generated by what we call schizophrenia. Also, here is a story about the quintessential power of Eros to constellate hope, even when we are faced with the chaos of the unconscious.
This volume of the Collected Writings of Murray Stein contains the authors works on the topic of C.G. Jung’s personal relationship to his own religious tradition and his analysis and critique of Christian theology and practice. These were topics that preoccupied Jung’s mind during the entire course of his adulthood. The author argues that Jung’s constructive suggestions can be of assistance to Christianity in the 21st Century and beyond.
Depth Calls to Depth: Jungian Psychology and Spiritual Direction in Dialogue draws on the author’s dual background as a certified Jungian analyst and psychologist as well as a spiritual director with a master’s degree in theology.
March Book Spotlight: The Symbol of the Dog in the Human Psyche
This volume of the Collected Writings of Murray Stein contains the authors works on the topic of C.G. Jung’s personal relationship to his own religious tradition and his analysis and critique of Christian theology and practice. These were topics that preoccupied Jung’s mind during the entire course of his adulthood. The author argues that Jung’s constructive suggestions can be of assistance to Christianity in the 21st Century and beyond.
Depth Calls to Depth: Jungian Psychology and Spiritual Direction in Dialogue draws on the author’s dual background as a certified Jungian analyst and psychologist as well as a spiritual director with a master’s degree in theology.
The goal of the therapist is to find the child. When we have found the child, the child has also made an attempt at being seen. So there we are, face to face with the obstacles and disturbances between us.
Two towering figures thread their way through this book: St Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite saint, writer and reformer and C. G. Jung, the founder of modern depth psychology. Through sharing fifteen key papers, chapters and talks written over nearly twenty-five years, the author draws on their writings to focus on, and explore, the interface and relationship between the Christian mystical tradition and Jungian, depth psychology.
The stories of this collection were written over a span of several decades beginning in 1985 and ending in 2022. A few of them were translated by Manisha Roy from her mother tongue, Bengali. Despite the geographical and other contextual differences, the narrative shifted and at times translated itself as if the author traveled easily between different landscapes—both external and internal.
Jungian analyst Eve Maram’s The Schizophrenia Complex focuses on the thoughts and feelings constellated by encounters with what we call schizophrenia, for those who experience symptoms, and for those others impacted by them. To do so, Dr. Maram had to face her own fear, denial, resistance, and ultimate not knowing. The events inspiring her were beyond her control and rearranged her life without her permission.
Aurora Consurgens, the rising sun, is a vision forged in the pseudo-Aristotelian tradition that became a cornerstone of medieval Church doctrine and the centerpiece of the Dominican and Franciscan traditions. While its authorship has been shrouded in mystery and controversy, Marie Louise von Franz furnishes ample evidence that this was a final work of Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church. His vision begins with an anima figure of the Sapentia Dei.
This medieval alchemical text is rich in symbolism and offers a glimpse into how unconscious contents can be understood through their interactions with the material world. Marie Louise von Franz places Aurora Consurgens squarely in the tradition of visionary spiritual writings similar to the visions of Hildegard von Bingen or John of Patmos. Aquinas’s visions and his final commentary on the Song of Songs appear to have been the result of a state of ecstasy into which he fell just before his death. Marie Louise von Franz excavates a psychological treasure from his work.
Announcing the Release of Being Found: Healing the Very Young Through Relationship and Play Therapy
Witnessing two – eight year olds requires that we therapists must be ready and willing to travel where development is still working out implicit memory and implicit reality. The implicit is an interior worldview that is feeling-driven, emotionally perceived, and restlessly stored in a memory that remains fluid and extremely permeable in relationship. Being Found addresses being remembered: finding where the child lives and where each child makes meaning from the relationship and events in their lives. And to find each child, one at a time, the therapist must be willing to have faith in herself and the child to drop down into the relationship the child initiates. This openness becomes the nourishment and the container for co-transference. In this effort, the child takes the lead, as the therapist remains conscientious to the many pathways the child might utilize to communicate. Oral language is not high on that list.
The unheard voices of our children must in themselves be understood. Voices from young children express themselves in behaviors, in how their bodies move through space, in felt attunement between adult and child, and in the play elements the child chooses. A vital pathway exists: to remain in the verbal silence, learning from each child just how that child speaks. Because the child’s interior world has come about through the feeling tones of rapport, that rapport is where their voices live.
About the Author
In 1999, Dott founded Jumping Mouse Children’s Center, focused on children ages 2½ through 12. She expanded her emphasis on young children while training and supervising over 60 therapists. Dott was recognized by Sandplay Therapists of America for her training in in-depth work of sand, symbol, and metaphor.
Trained in Sexual Assault programs, she has mentored domestic violence advocates working with children. Dott has consulted in school programs, in interagency meetings with state Child Protective Services, and in court systems. She teaches workshops in clinics and universities about infant trust, trauma, development, and working with the very young.
IAJS 2022 Book Awards Winner: The Self in Jungian Psychology by Leslie Stein
Carl Gustav Jung had the realization of the existence of a center deep within our being, the Self, the discovery of which is the goal of individuation: the process of psychological development. Unable to find analogies to the Self in Christianity, he turned to Eastern religions, uncovering and finding a reflection of this miracle in Daoism and Hinduism, while also examining Buddhism and Sufism.
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Now Available: Polly Young-Eisendrath’s Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted
Since then, it has become a classic read for those readers—to use a cinematographic expression—who want to use analytical psychology to shed light on what women want. This book, when first published, was described (and still is) as “provocative and vital.”
More than 20 years after its publication, this book still shows effectively “how to break out of this double bind so that” women “can encounter the challenges of choice and responsibility for our own desires.” The author “wisely uses mythological and personal stories to help us take control of our sexual, relational, material, and spiritual lives.” Therefore, “If you feel confused, resentful, or trapped in a life that does not seem to be fully yours, then you can find a clear path to your true self, once and for all, with the help of Women and Desire.”
First published by Element Books in 1997, Verena Kast’s Father-Daughter, Mother-Son has become a classic read for those adventuring into Carl Gustav Jung ́s concept of complexes—what they are, how they affect our life and shape our relationships— and for those wanting to understand more about the relationship between fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons—of whatever sex and gender.
This book is not only a must read for psychoanalysts and psychologists, but it is also comprehensible and very useful for those that have little knowledge about this field and those eager to know more about themselves.
Psychological Transformation through Crisis
Common to many different kinds of crisis is a turning point, where old attitudes and behaviors must make way for change. It is at this moment, signaled by anxiety, even panic, that the creative leap is required.
Verena Kast, in her wonderful narrations of actual case histories, describes the typical psychic background of a crisis, as well as the developmental possibilities contained in them.
February Book Spotlight!
The philosopher Emmanuel Kant speculated that a dove might think it would find flying easier without the encumbrance of air around it. He observed that such a bird would, of course, soon discover flight in a vacuum impossible.
Aldo Carotenuto here demonstrates that, like Kant’s dove, the analyst cannot exclude the transference and countertransference from the analytical field—that movement toward healing is not possible without the medium of relationship, created by the interacting personalities of analyst and analysand.
Carotenuto explores this subject in historical depth, reflecting on the development of depth psychology from its earliest beginnings in mesmerism and hypnotism. He invokes this history as evidence in support of the importance of transference and countertransference despite the long standing cultural stigma attached to deep relationships between doctor and patient. Finally, he defines the fine line to be walked in the deeply emotional, yet strictly verbal, interaction that must develop as a necessary requisite for effective therapy.
Pre-order Today! The Alchemy Fire Murder: A Mary Wandwalker Mystery
Murder and theft are complicated by the disappearance in the UK of a witch mysteriously connected to the scroll. While Mary’s colleague, Caroline, risks her sanity to go undercover in a dodgy mental hospital, her lover, Anna resorts to desperate measures. These, and Anna’s silence over blackmail, threaten the survival of the Agency.
A simple job turns deadly when Mary Wandwalker, novice detective, is hired to chaperone a young American, Rhiannon, to the Oxford University Summer School on the ancient Celts. Worried by a rhetoric of blood sacrifice, Mary and her operatives, Caroline, and Anna, attend a sacrifice at a sacred well. They discover that those who fail to individuate their gods become possessed by them.
For the so-called Reborn Celts, who run the summer school, have been infiltrated by white supremacists. Could their immersion in myth be less a symbol for psychic wholeness and more a clue of their intent to engage in terrorist violence? Who better to penetrate their secret rites than an apparently harmless woman of a certain age?
Mary agrees to spy on the Reborn Celts, then learns, to her horror, of Anna’s passionate affair with the chief suspect, Joe Griffith. With Griffith also the object of Rhiannon’s obsession, Mary realizes too late that that these 21st century Celts mean murder.
The Reborn Celts draw Mary and her friends into three rites to summon their gods: at an Oxford sacred well, by the Thames on the way to London, and in Celtic London, where bloodshed will restore one of the Thames’ “lost rivers.”
Before the fatal night of the summer solstice, Caroline and Anna race to London seeking Mary, who has been kidnapped. Will she end as the crone sacrifice? Or will the three women re-make their detecting family, so re-constituting a pattern of archetypal feminine compassion?
Jung Society of Washington hosts four-part webinar with James Hollis!
Register Today!
Hauntings – Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
What does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons? Are we here just to propagate the species anew? Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then die? Does life matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion? What guiding intelligence weaves the threads of our individual biographies? What hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and direct the multiple narratives of daily life?
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.
hence the key word ‘toward.’ So this essay is rather a processing of memories that keep coming to the surface, apparently because there is some serious affect attached,” James Hollis, The Broken Mirror.
Hollis 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.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Chiron book spotlight artist Cy Twombly
Naming the Gods: Cy Twombly’s Passionate Poiesis 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.
“Gary Astrachan literally gathers the reader up into an entrancing meditation on the transformative power of art to change our minds. His book evokes the healing poiesis of art and is a precious gift to our troubled and chaotic times.” –Murray Stein, Ph. D., author of The Mystery of Transformation
