To celebrate the life and memory of Shirley M. Fontenot, the Jung Society has created an honorary chair for Shirley in each of our study groups. What this means is that one person will be chosen by lot among all who have registered for a particular study group and will be refunded the amount paid.
Shirley was devoted to creating and facilitating study groups on many topics, including the Harry Potter books, sand play, and books by James Hollis. Her coffee table was always spread with mini-chocolate bars as defense against the presence of Dementors!
There will be a Shirley Fontenot Chair in both in-person and Zoom study groups, donated by the Jung Society. Thank you, Shirley!
Save the date! The first weekend in October (Thursday, October 3 to Sunday, October 6), the C.G. Jung Society of St. Louis invites you to participate in our eighth biennial Jung in the Heartland Conference, Earth Speaks, Psyche Dreams: Jungian Perspectives on Our Shared Ecologies.
This year marks the Society’s return to an in-person conference offering and our first year at Mercy Conference and Retreat Center off Geyer Road in St. Louis County. Meaning will unfold through presentations, workshops, music, dialogue, art, dream work, poetry, massage, yoga, and ritual.
Jung in the Heartland Faculty: Jungian Analysts Lori Pye and Stephen Foster
The Society will welcome Lori Pye and Stephen Foster as its 2024 conference faculty.
LORI PYE is a Founder and President of Viridis Graduate Institute (Ecological Psychology and Environmental Humanities – viridis.edu). As an executive director for international marine nonprofits, Lori worked with numerous NGOs to co-develop the Eastern Tropical Pacific Biological Seascape Corridor with the Ministers of the Environment from Costa Rica, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. Lori received her B.S. at Texas A&M and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Lori has multiple publications in peer-reviewed journals and serves on the Editorial Board for Ecopsychology Journal. Lori lectures at Viridis Graduate Institute and the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). She formerly taught at Pacifica Graduate Institute (clinical psychology, counseling psychology, depth psychology, and mythological studies programs), and at Kaweah Delta Mental Health Hospital Psychiatric Residency Program. Forthcoming textbook: Fundamentals of Ecological Psychology, Routledge.
STEPHEN FOSTER is Senior Training Analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts (IRSJA) teaching with their Memphis-Atlanta Seminar. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor and a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, with a private practice in Boulder, Colorado. Stephen teaches on a wide range of subjects including nature and the environment, alchemy, Norse mythology, Fairy Tales, and the Tarot (See his website: www.BoulderJungianAnalyst.com).
Before becoming a Jungian Analyst, Stephen worked as an environmental scientist studying the risks and impacts associated with hazardous chemicals in the environment. The combination of these experiences results in his book Risky Business: A Jungian view of environmental disasters and the Nature Archetype, which expands on his interests in the psychology of environmental problems, nature, and archetypes related to humanity’s interactions with nature.
Conference Program Highlights
Jung on the Human Psyche’s Split with Nature
There are forces at work in the human psyche that treat the earth as an object and deny the obvious: that we also mature in our relationship with the earth. Jung discussed this split from the Nature Archetype, which has become activated on personal and collective levels due to climate crisis. It is often through literature and art that our psyches are enlivened, re-animated, and re-connected with the natural world.
Attendees will explore nature in their dreams. By paying close attention to the natural setting of dreams and using Jung’s synthetic method of associative and amplification techniques, participants will search for transcendent symbols that might provide both personal and collective insights.
Our externalization of human wastes into the environment is causing a wide range of problems for humanity, which are forcing us to adapt. Although the earth and humanity are adaptable, the accelerated time scale for adaptation is untenable. Our conference closing will examine Jung’s thoughts on adaptation and consider what this may mean for nature and ourselves as we search for the Lumen Naturae (the Light of Nature).
Earth-Human: Climates in Crisis
Over the course of the weekend, a few ideas will be shared from ecological psychology and the examination of one of the planet’s overarching processes, the necessity of change, to offer ways of sensing and responding differently to a suffering planet.
The Conference sessions will include intra-active workshops and outdoor walks to deepen our ecopsychological (an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field that focuses on the synthesis of ecology and psychology) understanding of change.
We will convene in a beautiful retreat center with trails, gardens, and a labyrinth. It is only 25 minutes from the St. Louis airport; the food is delicious and locally sourced when possible. Vegetarians, vegans, those requiring gluten-free options, and those with food allergies are easily accommodated. All rooms are individually thermostat controlled and have private baths. An exercise room is available. Rooms and buildings are non-smoking. See Mercy Center’s website for more details and driving directions.
Accommodations at Mercy Conference and Retreat Center are limited and filled on a first-come, first-served basis. If all rooms are filled when your registration with a room request is received, nearby hotels are available.
Open Art Studio
An area will be set aside and materials provided for creating mandalas using paint, collage, markers and found objects. When we create mandalas, we are making a personal symbol that represents who we are in the moment.
Conference Schedule
On Thursday, October 3, check-in opens at 3:00 PM and dinner is served from 5:30 to 6:45 PM. The Opening Session of the conference starts at 7:00 PM. The program continues all day and evening on Friday and Saturday. Sunday’s session on October 6 closes the conference at noon, followed by lunch. A detailed schedule will be distributed to attendees on opening day.
“We should not rise above the earth with the aid of ‘spiritual’ intuitions and run away from hard reality…”
Refund Policy: Full refund of conference fees if canceled by September 1, 2024. Fifty percent refund of conference fees (less $50 registration fee) if canceled by September 12, 2024. No refunds of conference fees after September 1, 2024. Membership fees are non-refundable.
All rights are reserved by the Conference Directors to make faculty substitutions and/or request that disruptive participants leave without a refund. All content of presentations and events represents the views of the speakers only and may not represent views of The C.G. Jung Society of St. Louis.
CEs: A total of 12 CEs are available to LCSW, LPC, LCPC, and General Studies applicants for the conference proper through the Chicago Jung Center. Additional details will be available as soon as registration opens.
This year marks 30 years of The C. G. Jung Society of St. Louis!
We are pleased to convene our 7th biennial Jung in the Heartland Conference, reimagined to provide both outstanding faculty and varied experiential offerings in a fully virtual format. We welcome individuals from all fields.
Our Polarized Culture: Healing the Individual and the Collective
Conference Program Highlights
DONALD KALSCHED, PH.D.
The Polarizing vs. the Integrating Psyche
Enduring patterns of dividing and differentiating and—on the other hand—unifying and integrating exist in all of us as individuals and in the collective as well. This lecture will explore how in unstable situations, polarizing tendencies often get the upper hand, leading to psychopathology, and how both are necessary for psychological growth and differentiation.
Culture Wars and the Hijacked Imagination In this lecture, Don Kalsched will describe how fear hijacks the imagination and justifies defensive anger and splitting in both the individual and the collective, and describe how this is evident in culture wars around conspiracy theories, climate change, abortion, immigration, gun violence, and beyond.
THOMAS SINGER, M.D.
Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America: A Way to Frame the Psychology of Polarization
How do cultural complexes contribute to the profound divisions as well as the possibility of soul making in the U.S.? This talk focuses on the interrelationships between soul, cultural complexes, and polarization in the United States today.
The Imaginal as a Way to Heal Polarization in the Individual and Collective Psyche This talk will focus on how the imaginal can provide ways of “seeing” our individual and collective splits in the hopes of finding ways of healing and even transcending them.
Schedule
On Friday, September 30, our lectures will begin at 10 AM Central. We will break for lunch from 12:15 to 1:45 Central. We will meet back on Zoom for interactive afternoon sessions from 1:45 to 4:30 Central.
Saturday, October 1, will follow the same schedule, with lectures beginning at 10 AM Central, a lunch break from 12:15 to 1:45 Central, and interactive afternoon sessions from 1:45 to 4:30 Central. Our reimagined, virtual conference activities will be done at 4:30 PM Central both days.
Presenters
Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., is a Jungian Analyst and Clinical Psychologist who practices in Brunswick, Maine, and lives in nearby Topsham with his wife Robin van Loben Sels. He is a member of the C.G. Jung Institute of New England, a senior faculty member and supervisor with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and lectures nationally and internationally on the subject of trauma and its treatment. His first book, The Inner World of Trauma; Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit, described a core complex of the dissociating psyche (Self-Care System) and demonstrated its clinical applications. His most recent book, Trauma and the Soul: Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption, explores how psychotherapeutic work with trauma survivors sometimes provides access to an ineffable world of soul and spirit.
Thomas Singer, M.D., is a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst who trained at Yale Medical School, Dartmouth Medical School, and the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He is the author of many books and articles that include a series of books on cultural complexes that have focused on Australia, Latin America, Europe, the United States, and Far East Asian countries, in addition to another series of books featuring Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche. He serves on the board of ARAS (Archive for Research into Archetypal Symbolism) and has edited ARAS Connections for many years.
Participants will be able to identify the basic characteristics of cultural complexes.
Participants will be able to identify archetypal defenses of the group spirit as a primary human response to challenges to group identity and security.
Participants will be able to identify how certain cultural complexes become trigger issues that are amplified by social media and the internet.
Participants will be able to differentiate the psychological factors responsible for extreme polarization in the collective.
Participants will be challenged to engage with what Robert Lifton calls our “National Reality Disorder” and to see how it manifests as a major psychological defense against feelings.
Participants will be able to apply the insights of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death to better understand the defenses behind the culture wars that currently besiege the body politic.
Participants will learn how the inner world of the traumatized psyche manifests in the collective when fear is heightened in the population.
Participants will be able to differentiate three levels of the psyche that are constantly intermingling: individual, cultural, and archetypal.
Participants will be able to see a connection between cultural complexes and the experience of soul in America at the collective level of the psyche.
Participants will be able to contextualize the role of imagination in the healing of splits in the individual and group psyche.
