Here are the talks and workshops that happened at the Monterey Friends of CG Jung.

African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows, by Fanny Brewster—with John Dotson

“Jung met the challenge of making the unconscious conscious. His willingness to search far and wide in service of the psyche is admirable… I have shown where and how he was unable to be sufficiently inclusive in his model of all of those in the human collective, unable to put into practice what he was preaching. A basic core value of American Jungian psychology is that it must have as its nature the potentiality for being different, for changing its own consciousness, for seeing its own Shadow. The issue of diversity and racism within Jungian psychology must be explored and discussed amongst those of us best able to have the dialogue.” —F. Brewster

Jordan Peterson: Positions and Polarities —with Gary Lowe, Eileen Murphy MD, and John Dotson

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Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto. He received widespread attention in the late 2010s as the self-proclaimed “professor against mandated political correctness.” An early book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, establishes a common landscape

between mythos and biology, citing Jung, Campbell, Neumann, Hillman, Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn, and Dostoevsky. His highly popular online presentations and the book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos have had major influence with young males. We will discuss Peterson’s positions and controversy in the light of his popularizing of Jung’s work.

From Insect Pathologist to Jungian Analyst—From 1968 to Donald Trump: Lessons Learned from Berkeley in the Late 60s—with Dennis Merritt

After being 1-A for the Viet Nam War draft, I arrived in Berkeley in the fall of 1967 to begin working on a PhD in insect pathology and microbial control of insect pests. I soon realized I was in the perfect place to experience a revolutionary period on the planet. Jung was “in the air,” and within nine months of reading him I applied to train at the Jung Institute in Zürich in 1974. I had been transformed by my Berkeley experience, and the lessons learned guide me to this day. Big Dreams

established the foundation and inspirational base for integrating Jungian psychology, science, Native American spirituality, and Winnicott in my four volumes of The Dairy Farmer’s Guide to the Universe— Jung, Hermes, and Ecopsychology. Since 2007 I have been focusing on our dysfunctional relationship with the environment and climate change, emphasizing Jung’s concept of a necessary paradigm-shift that in 1940 he labeled a “new age” and “age of Aquarius.” My recent blog posts on George Floyd and the pandemic compliment earlier articles I’ve written on “Guns and the American Psyche” and Hunger Games from a Jungian political and environmental perspective. I posit Trump as an archetypal Trickster figure with his evil genius ability to expose and amplify many aspects of the American shadow. <JungianEcopsychology.com>

Transdisciplinarity: a method to interact and understand our place in the world —with Gregory Brun

In an increasingly complex world, and confronted with issues of planetary scale, it seems more and more difficult to find ground for collective actions that can deal effectively with the “Big Picture.” After “the death of God, the death of Man, the end of ideologies, and the end of History,” we find ourselves considering scientific knowledge as the only way to address the great challenges of our times. Objectivity has become the sole requisite for problem solving. Subjectivity, prerogative of the arts and humanities, is at best tolerated.

What is the price to pay for objective knowledge? What is the shadow side of a World of “Experts”? 

Helped by the writings of Basarab Nicolescu, theoreticalphysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, we’ll discuss the concept of Transdisciplinarity as “a new narrative, a new way to interact and understand our place in the world.” Tonight, by laying down Jung’s concept of transcending the opposites, Werner Heisenberg’s levels of reality, and Stephan Lupasco’s questioning of the tertium non datur principle, we’ll venture beyond the silos of modern knowledge

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Jung Legacy Series: James Hillman’s Revisioning Psychology —with Rev G.F. Kohn, PhD

In his seminal work Revisioning Psychology, James Hillman presents his Archetypal Psychology in the direction of “soul making.” Hillman is a major influence at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara where his archives are located. The Legacy Series is a seminar study. Open discussion is encouraged as we work our way through the book. All are welcome to join our ongoing discussions of Hillman’s approach to depth psychology.

The Profound Social Community Influence of Cannery Row’s Caretaker Edward F. Ricketts—with Wes Stillwagon

In the novel Cannery Row, John Steinbeck describes

…a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

The book offers a heart-warming story of a well-planned, lovingly tended social flower-garden, with important lessons to be learned about individual maturity, functional styles, and attitudes. In the mid-90s I was walking on Cannery Row with my friend Jim Kent, who mentioned that his organization operates with an assumption that even within relaxed political structures and casual social networks, individuals gravitate to specific roles. I have applied Jim’s description of the “Caretaker” role to a study Ed Ricketts as an example of an individual working selflessly, without an inflated ego, with exceptional effectiveness and social responsibility.

Wes Stillwagon is a retired Training Manager and instructional
designer who worked for RCA, Pennsylvania Electric, Loral
Electronic Systems, Honeywell, ATT, New Jersey Blue Cross
and Blue Shield, and KPMG Peat Marwick. He was a training
manager for a large Job Corp center in New Jersey. Earlier, Wes was an Electronics Technician in the US Navy on the USS Hornet. He has independently studied the works of Jung since about 1964 and is a Steinbeck scholar.

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