“It is generally the creative artist who creates the future. A civilization that has no creative people is doomed. So the person who is really in touch with the future, with the germs of the future, is the creative personality.”
~ Marie Louise von Franz

Depth Psychology has long maintained a paradoxical position to creativity and to the creative individual. On one hand, the artist is singled out as the one “who creates the future,” while on the other, creativity is likened to an instinct shared by all. This six-week series will explore the paradoxes, perils, and reveries of creative “making,” what the Greeks called poesis, through the insights of Jungian and archetypal psychologies, as well as through mythology, philosophy, and artmaking itself. Whether you consider yourself an “artist,” a “craftsperson,” or simply long to answer a calling that will not subside, this course will both ground and transform your understanding of yourself as a member of an archetypal lineage of world-bridgers, shapeshifters, mystics, philosophers, healers, magicians, and alchemists. What unites these figures? What is their mission in our modern world? “The creative,” according to James Hillman, “is an achievement of love,” while for novelist Franz Kafka, “art, like prayer, is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace that will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.” What are your gifts? How do you bestow them? What are your achievements of love?

“Art is capable of the total transformation of the world, and of life itself, and nothing less is really acceptable.”
~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Format:

The six-week series features three primary areas of engagement: 1) curated weekly recorded lectures, readings, and links to auxiliary materials; 2) weekly live Saturday morning gatherings; plus 3) the opportunity to deepen and share the course content throughout the series via shared creative expression such as poetry, song, dance, film, performance, visual art, and discussion with fellow participants.

Overview of Weekly Topics:

Week One: An Archeology of Soul, Creativity, and Transformation

Week Two: C.G. Jung: Reluctant Artist, Servant of The Creative Spirit

Week Three: A Thousand Voices: Inflections and Interpretations of Jung’s Creative Vision

Week Four: Archetypal Creativity: James Hillman’s Legacy of Imagination and Instinct, Image Making and Soul-making

Week Five: Mythopoesis: The Archetypal Ancestors of the Modern Creator

Week Six: The Soul, the Creative, and the Archetypal Artist in the Modern World

Learning Objectives:

As a result of attending this program, participants will:

• Locate the deepest roots of depth psychology within the arts, humanities, and primal/indigenous healing practices. As Freud confessed: ‘Everywhere I went, a poet had been there before me.”
• Gain an understanding of key depth psychological concepts related to creativity, such as the archetypes of the collective unconscious, archetypal images, symbols, synchronicity, and soul-making as articulated by C.G. Jung, James Hillman, and others.
• Analyze and articulate what depth psychology can offer to contemporary makers and creators, especially its multi-cultural, world-bridging applications and its attunement to an enduring, archetypal shamanic pattern shared by all creators.
• Identify depth psychological thought, and ways of being in the world, in the writings of beloved and diverse modern creators such as Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavio Paz, Amanda Gorman, and Brittany Howard among many others.
• Interpret and apply the intertwined strands of wisdom found in artmaking, mythology, philosophy, and depth psychology to participants’ own creative practices and to the mentorship of others.
• Create weekly interpretations and elaborations on the course topics that bypass the intellect by means of poetry, song, dance, short film, collage, or any type of creative expression.