Ars Alchemica: The Art and Alchemy of Transformation
Details
August 25-27, 2017
Pre-Conference Workshops:
- Friday, 9:30am – 3:30pm
Conference:
- Friday: 7:00 – 9:00pm
- Saturday: 9:30am – 9:00pm
- Sunday: 9:00am – 12:30pm
Pre-Conference Workshop Rates:
- $75 – Pacifica Student, Alumni, & Seniors Rate
- $125 – General Rate
- $15 – CEC (Stromsted only)
Conference Rates:
- $225 – Pacifica Student Rate
- $275 – Pacifica Alumni, Full Time Students, & Senior Rate
- $325 – General Rate
All registration fees include meals. Pre-Conference meals include: Friday lunch. Conference meals include: Saturday breakfast through Sunday lunch
Overview
The ancient art of alchemy – the transformation of base materials into a nobler form – continues to captivate the imaginations of artists, poets, scholars, seekers – and depth psychologists. One of the earliest material technologies found throughout the world, many alchemical traditions over time developed into highly elaborate esoteric systems until nearly being eclipsed at the dawn of the modern scientific era. In the late 1920s, after undergoing his profound Red Book experience, C.G. Jung was synchronistically introduced to Daoist alchemy through Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower. This encounter catapulted Jung away from his inner exploration of the Red Book images, and into the world of alchemy, capturing his imagination and profoundly influencing his scholarly output for the remainder of his life.
This weekend symposium draws upon the rich influence of Jung’s alchemical psychology, while expanding it for a new generation of scholars, seekers, and practitioners. Scholars of alchemy and Jungian analysts of international renown join to offer diverse perspectives of cross-cultural alchemical systems and their implications for analytical practice and personal growth and transformation. Join us at Pacifica for this inter-disciplinary odyssey into the rich and diverse worlds of alchemy and depth psychology as they are brought into creative dialogue.
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Pre-Conference Workshops (Friday, August 25)
- Tina Stromsted
Embodied Alchemy®: Awakening Spirit in the Body - Robert Bosnak
Daily Life against a Background of Alchemical Colors: Green, Black, Blue, White, Yellow, Red - Kwame Scruggs
Sacred Storytelling and Personal Transformation in Myth: Creating Temenos with Alchemy
Opening Plenary Address (Friday, August 25)
- Stanton Marlan
Divine Darkness and Divine Light: Alchemical Illumination and the Mystical Play between Knowing and Unknowing
Symposium Session I (Saturday, August 26)
- Dominic Steavu, Daoist Alchemy
- Stanton Marlan, Respondent
Symposium Session II (Saturday, August 26)
- James Hillman’s Alchemical Psychology (Panel): Alchemy in Dallas
Patricia Berry, Michael Sipiora, and Joseph Cambray
Symposium Session III (Saturday, August 26)
- Kwame Scruggs, Our Alchemical Vessel: Transforming a Black, Blacker than Black
Alchemy in Practice: Keynote Session and Panel Discussion (Sunday, August 27)
- Tina Stromsted, Body & Soul in Transition (Keynote Session)
- Alchemy in Practice, (Panel Discussion): Tina Stromsted, Stanton Marlan, Pat Berry, and Joe Cambray
PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
Embodied Alchemy®: Awakening Spirit in the Body
Tina Stromsted
“Our task is not to create more images of light, but to release the light that is trapped within the darkness.”
~ C.G. Jung
How do we evoke the light in the dark body? How do we embody the soul spark, bring it to consciousness, and live it more fully in our daily lives?
In this workshop, we will explore the impactful role of embodied experience and the spiritual dimensions of the healing process. Participants will have an opportunity to engage the Alchemical metaphor in relation to the embodied individuation process in healing and development. Elements from Jungian theory work will be interwoven and further integrated through movement, drawing, and discussion.
The Alchemists’ aim was to study nature and to learn from its profoundly regenerative capacities, discovering the ‘gold’ in matter. Alchemy’s basic elements can deepen our understanding of embodied transformative processes, experienced spontaneously through natural movement rooted in Jung’s Active Imagination process.
These practices bring awareness to what we least value, ‘cooking’ unwanted material to generate new life. Alchemy provides an ancient map of the stages in the individuation process: our journey to wholeness. Such a map can help orient people in their therapeutic work, particularly when they are immersed in unconscious material that may cause feelings of anxiety, impatience, or dissolution.
As a result of attending this workshop, participants will:
- Engage and reflect on the concept of Alchemy as a metaphor for the embodied individuation process in healing practice through teaching, movement, drawing and discussion.
- Understand and discuss Alchemy’s major stages as an ancient map of the stages in the individuation process: our journey to wholeness.
- Further the ability of the psychotherapist to integrate embodied experiences and symbolic expression as it relates to healing and development.
Daily Life against a Background of Alchemical Colors: Green, Black, Blue, White, Yellow, Red
Robert Bosnak
Participants will present emotional life situations from matters personal, creative, medical, and professional. These practical issues will be viewed from a variety of alchemical perspectives as if they were embodied substances being cooked in a vessel. Alchemy views matter through the prism of 6 primary colors that each conveys particular atmospheres and moods. When matter is put under pressure, movements through a color spectrum begin to take place. Green refers to beginnings, black to decomposition, dark blue to the blues, light blue to the heavens and creative sparks, white to mental reflection, yellow to fermentation and embodiment, red to radiating into the world. By finding the right chromatic background to life events, they fall into place.
Sacred Storytelling and Personal Transformation in Myth: Creating Temenos with Alchemy
Kwame Scruggs
Many of the myths, traditions and rituals that once guided us on our shared journey of the human experience—and helped give purpose to our lives—are lacking in our modern world. As a result, we often wander hopelessly while our spirit aches for a safe place where we can face our fears and explore our true calling.
Alchemy, a non-profit organization based in in Akron, Ohio, creates just such a safe environment—a temenos—where through the telling, discussion and analysis of mythological stories and fairy tales urban adolescent males learn to “become the hero in their own story.” Utilizing this same approach, adults will work through a myth while the myth simultaneously works through them. “Myths are not just for putting children asleep, but for waking adults up.” This workshop is designed to assist in an awakening, a transformation of sorts—where through the simplicity of dialogue and personal insight, one becomes reintroduced to the myth they are living.
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Featured Presenters
Patricia Berry, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst, trained in Zurich, Switzerland. She is the author of Echo’s Subtle Body: A Contribution to Archetypal Psychology. Other more recent articles include: “Image in Motion,” “Rules of Thumb,” “A Little Light, ” and “Dr. Jekyl and Mr.Hyde: The Impure Salt.” She teaches and lectures internationally and has served as president of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts. She is now living in Woodacre, California.
Robert Bosnak, is an internationally noted Jungian psychoanalyst with 45 years of experience. He pioneered the Embodied Imagination® (EI) method that is being used worldwide for psychotherapy and medical healing. He has now extended this approach to accessing the creative imagination in science, business and the arts. At M.I.T. the Embodied Imagination method was developed for actors and those in the arts and developed further at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. At Stanford University it was “workshopped” for engineers. And it has been used by therapists and physicians in medical contexts. The Embodied Imagination method has also has been applied to business problems with startling results. Robert Bosnak is the author of multiple books, including the classic Little Course in Dreams appearing in 12 languages. He is past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and is a novelist whose novels have been published in multiple languages. He teaches alchemical psychology online at www.jungplatform.com
Joseph Cambray, Ph.D., is Provost and Vice-President of Academic Affairs at Pacifica Graduate Institute as well as a Jungian analyst. He is Past-President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, and former US Editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. For years he was on the faculty of the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies at Harvard Medical School. His numerous publications include the book based on his Fay Lectures: Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe; a volume edited with Linda Carter, Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Psychology; and a two volume compendium on research in analytical psychology co-edited with Christian Roesler and Leslie Sawin currently in publication. In addition, he has published numerous papers in a range of international journals.
Stanton Marlan, Ph.D. ABPP, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Pittsburgh. An adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology and Clinical Supervisor at Duquesne University Psychology Clinic, and teaching and training analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, Dr. Marlan holds doctorates in both Clinical Psychology and Philosophy, and is Board Certified in both Clinical Psychology and Psychoanalysis. He currently serves as President of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis, and President of the Pittsburgh Society of Jungian Analysts, as well as being a member of the Board of Trustees of the ABPP. Author of The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness (2005), and a forthcoming book on Jung and Alchemy entitled, The Philosophers’ Stone: The Alchemy and Art of Illumination, he has edited four books and written numerous articles on alchemy and Jungian psychology.
Kwame Scruggs, Ph.D, holds a Ph.D. and MA in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and is the founder and director of programs for Alchemy, a non-profit organization in Akron, Ohio established in 2003. Alchemy uses mythological stories to engage urban adolescent males.
He is a recently appointed board member of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and serves on the National Advisory Committee of the Creative Youth Development National Partnership.
For more information, visit www.alchemyinc.net.
Dominic Steavu, Ph.D., teaches medieval Daoism and Chinese esoteric Buddhism at UCSB. He publishes on the history of alchemical, meditative, and sexual practices in medieval China. He previously taught at Karl Ruprechts University in Heidelberg, Germany and conducts research in China, Taiwan, and Japan.
Tina Stromsted, Ph.D., MFT, LPCC, BC-DMT is a Jungian analyst, Board Certified Dance therapist, and Somatic psychotherapist. She was co-founder of the Authentic Movement Institute and a founding faculty member of the Women’s Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Currently, she teaches at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, the Depth Psychology with Specialization in Somatics Studies Doctoral program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and as a core faculty member for the Marion Woodman Foundation. With roots in theater and dance and 40 years of clinical experience, her numerous publications explore the integration of body, mind, psyche and soul in healing and transformation. She is the founder of Soul’s Body® Center and teaches at universities and healing centers internationally. Her private practice is in San Francisco. www.AuthenticMovement-BodySoul.com
Michael P. Sipiora, Ph.D, is a professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program where he is Director of Research. For over two decades, he was on the psychology faculty at Duquesne University where he received awards for teaching excellence. The author of numerous articles, book chapters, and an edited volume, areas of Dr. Sipiora’s teaching and publication include existential-phenomenological psychology and philosophy, and archetypal psychology. He is a licensed psychologist whose practice includes psychotherapy and business consulting.
General Information
CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDIT
Tina Stromsted Pre-Conference Workshop Only
This program meets qualifications for 5 hours of continuing education credit for Psychologists through the California Psychological Association (PAC014) Pacifica Graduate Institute is approved by the California Psychological Association to provide continuing education for psychologists. Pacifica Graduate Institute maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Full attendance is required to receive a certificate.
This course meets the qualifications for 5 hours of continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. Pacifica Graduate Institute is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (#60721) to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. Pacifica Graduate Institute maintains responsibility for this program/course and its content. Full attendance is required to obtain a certificate.
For Registered Nurses through the California Board of Registered Nurses this conference meets qualifications of 5 hours of continuing education credit are available for RNs through the California Board of Registered Nurses (provider #CEP 7177). Full attendance is required to obtain a certificate.
To learn more about Continuing Education Credits please visit our general information section.
LOCATION:
Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Ladera Lane Campus, 801 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93108
For additional information, including travel, cancellation policy, and disability services please visit our general information section.