Trauma + Transcendence: Depth Psychology, Spirituality and the Sacred

“If there are supernormal powers, it is through the cracked and fragmented self that they enter.”
~ William James, Lowell Lectures

Depth psychological pioneers from William James and Frederic Myers, to Sandor Ferenczi and C.G. Jung have described the intimate relationship among spiritual, paranormal, or otherwise revelatory encounters, and the psychological fragmentation caused by trauma and dissociation. Join us at Pacifica Graduate Institute for an immersive weekend symposium featuring internationally renowned scholars and analysts in dialogue at the intersection of trauma and transcendence.

As a result of attending this program, participants will:

• Define and compare models of the unconscious from differing religious and spiritual traditions with the Jungian model of the collective unconscious
• Gain awareness of the role of culture in defining models of trauma and spiritual experience
• Understand key points regarding the relationship of voice-hearing in psychosis and in PTSD
• Utilize depth psychological theory to understand motivations behind religious fundamentalism
• Learn of Jung’s notion of the psychoid level of unconscious process and its healing potential

“Mineralogists tell us that if you want to understand the basic structure of a crystal, you should examine the places where it is broken.”
~ Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul

Post-Conference Workshop, Sunday, June 24, 2018

Featuring Donald Kalsched and Joseph Cambray
Trauma and Synchronistic Phenomena in the Analytic Setting

In analytic work with those who have experienced significant trauma in their lives, especially in early childhood, synchronistic phenomena are often observed.  The intensity of these events is variable but tends to be impactful on the therapeutic process, often with a feeling of the numinous being constellated.  In this workshop we will look at examples of such phenomena, how to understand and employ them.  Countertransference reactions often hold important clues to deeper meanings of these occurrences and we will seek to explore the use of these reactions.

As a result of attending the Post-Conference Workshop, participants will:

• Develop an understanding of clinical synchronicities occurring with clients who have early trauma history in terms of complexity theory
• Identify and metabolize countertransference reactions to synchronistic phenomena
• Recognize and explore a spectrum of synchronistic events, from the subtle, barely noticeable ones, to those that threaten to captivate the participants in awestruck states

Program Descriptions

David Tacey is unfortunately no longer able to participate in the conference.  New York Jungian Analyst Craig Stephenson will be joining us instead

Ann Ulanov – Trauma and transcendence: A spatiotemporal framework for opening to new experiences

Here we will focus on Jung’s multiple meanings of transcendence and its relationship to his notion of psychoid processes of the unconscious, with reference to the unrepressed unconscious of Matte Blanco and Bion’s notion of infinity. We will explore further understandings of transcendence that may emerge when trauma opens up our usual meanings of the term, and examine what keeps the person alive despite the destruction trauma inflicts. Clinical examples will be offered with attention to the Jungian focus of transference and countertransference.

Craig E Stephenson – A Soldier’s Story: Trauma, Trickster and Transcendence

The Brothers Grimm took up a story by Grimmelshausen and combined it with a traditional folktale, to tell of a soldier who returns from a war and, now jobless, falls into despair and finds himself bargaining for his life with a cloven-hoofed trickster. This lecture will connect the Grimms’ narrative to current issues about PTSD and combat trauma, including the implications for the transference/counter-transference relationship of such precarious experiences of numinosity.

Donald Kalsched – Glimpses through the veil: Encounters with the numen of clinical work

In depth psychology, we tend to privilege two avenues or pathways that provide access to the mysteries of the unconscious and its potentially healing energies: transference and dreams.  In this presentation, Dr. Kalsched will describe specific “moments” where work in the transference opened important dreams that in turn led to a deep sense of shared meaning.

Lionel Corbett – A depth psychological approach to fundamentalism and terrorism

This talk will describe the psychology of religious fundamentalism and its relationship to terrorism. We will look at the unconscious motivations that seem to drive violent terrorism, with special attention to what is known about the inner world of the terrorist.

Tanya Luhrmann – Is the shaman schizophrenic, after all? How religious practice may change distressing voice hearing

When anthropology was a young discipline, people smitten with the romance of cultural relativism argued that those who were diagnosed with schizophrenia in our society would simply be artists or shamans in another. When the biomedical model began to dominate psychiatry, it seemed clear that this romantic vision was a mistake. In recent decades, however, not only anthropologists but also psychiatrists have begun to wonder whether forms of cultural practice might alter the experience of even so profound an illness as schizophrenia in powerful ways. They have also begun to wonder whether these illness experiences are in fact a response to trauma. In this talk I offer the best evidence I have seen for these new approaches by examining a spirit possession practice in Ghana.

Ann Taves – Trauma, transcendence, and culture:  The role of appraisal processes in distinguishing spiritual, anomalous, and psychotic experiences

Although depth psychological pioneers recognized the overlap between spiritual, paranormal, and psychotic experiences, we know relatively little about what makes some such experiences distressing and others transformative.  This talk will draw upon data collected in the US and India via the Inventory of Non-Ordinary Experiences to discuss the role of appraisal processes — and by extension differences in belief and practice — in differentiating such experiences across cultures and the implications of cultural differences for thinking about trauma and transcendence.

Polly Young-Eisendrath – The Gates of Mercy: Portals of Transcendence According to Jung and Buddhism

This presentation draws principally on two models of substrate consciousness: Jung’s collective unconscious and the Buddhist (Yogacara) alaya-vijnana or store-house consciousness. Looked at from the perspectives of everyday life and psychotherapy, these models of mind are mapping the way to an awareness that is wiser and more transcendent than mundane consciousness. When we collide with loss, trauma, failure, pain, hurt, and some aspects of dreaming and meditating, our sense of a continuous self is disrupted. These disruptions are potential openings to a transcendent reality. I will present and compare these two models of mind and talk about how and why the human mental construct of self creates an illusion of control and how dropping that control is the only true path to grace and healing.

Ann Belford Ulanov, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in New York City, a member of the Jungian Analytic Association, and former Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary. An internationally known lecturer and prolific author, among her many articles and books are the highly acclaimed Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying; Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work; The Wisdom of the Psyche; The Unshuttered Heart: Opening to Aliveness/ Deadness in the Self; The Living God and Our Living Psyche; and Madness and Creativity.

Joseph Cambray, Ph.D., is President and Provost of 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.

Lionel Corbett, M.D., trained in medicine and psychiatry in England and as a Jungian analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. Dr. Corbett is a core faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute, teaching depth psychology. He is the author of Psyche and the Sacred: Spirituality Beyond Religion and The Religious Function of the Psyche. He is co-editor, with Dennis Patrick Slattery, of Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field and Psychology at the Threshold: Selected Papers. He is currently working on a forthcoming book, Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Practice.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Ph.D., is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing.  She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007.When God Talks Back was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. She has published over thirty OpEds in The New York Times, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Science News, and many other publications. Her new book, Our Most Troubling Madness: Schizophrenia and Culture, was published by the University of California Press in October 2016.

Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., is a Jungian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. He is a senior faculty member and supervisor with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and teaches and leads workshops nationally and internationally. His celebrated book, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit, explores the interface between contemporary psychoanalytic theory and Jungian theory as it relates to clinical work with survivors of early childhood trauma. His recent book, Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption, explores the mystical dimensions of clinical work with trauma-survivors.

Craig E Stephenson, Ph.D., is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institut Zürich, the Institut für Psychodrama auf der Grundlage der Jungschen Psychologie, Zumikon, and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.  His books include Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche (2009/2016), Anteros: A Forgotten Myth (2011), and Jung and Moreno: Essays on the Theatre of Human Nature (2013). For the Philemon Foundation, he edited On Psychological and Visionary Art: Notes from C. G. Jung’s Lecture on Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia (2015). He serves as Director of Training for the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, New York City

Ann Taves, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she teaches courses on religious experience, new religious movements, and comparative worldviews and supervises the interdisciplinary Religion, Experience, and Mind Lab Group. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, 1999), Religious Experience Reconsidered (Princeton, 2009), and Revelatory Events, a study of the emergence of three new spiritual paths: Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous, and A Course in Miracles.  She is currently working with collaborators to develop and test a cross-cultural Inventory of Non-Ordinary Experiences.

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Psychologist, author; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Vermont; Founder and Director of Institute for Dialogue Therapy; and in private practice in central Vermont. She is chairperson of the non-profit “Enlightening Conversations: Buddhism and Psychoanalysis Meeting in Person”. She has published many chapters and articles, as well as sixteen books that have been translated into twenty languages. Her most recent books are The Present Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Discovery (Rodale, 2014); The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance (Little, Brown, 2008); and The Cambridge Companion to Jung: New and Revised, of which she is co-editor with Terence Dawson (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Polly’s forthcoming book, Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path, will be published in 2018. www.young-eisendrath.com

“Whether a divine being really exists or not, the psychological fact remains that we tend to experience traumatic events as if they were in some sense divine. Just as God has been described as transcendent and unknowable, a trauma is an event which transcends our capacity to experience or reckon with it.  Compared to the finite nature of the traumatized soul, the traumatic event seems infinite, all-powerful, and wholly other.”
~ Greg Mogenson, A Most Accursed Religion

Location:

Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Ladera Lane Campus
801 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93108

Continuing Education Credit:

This program meets qualifications  for 14 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 14 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 14 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.

Cancellations:

To obtain a refund on your registration fee or housing, please email retreat@pacifica.edu. Full refunds will be provided up to 10 days prior to an event.  Cancellations made after this time will receive a 50% refund. There is no refund for cancellations made on the day of your scheduled arrival.

Disability Service On Campus:

It is the policy of The Retreat at Pacifica Graduate Institute to accommodate attendees with disabilities in compliance with state and federal laws and regulations. Please contact retreat@pacifica.edu in advance if you have special needs or require assistance due to a disabling condition while you are attending a program. If you are accompanied by a service dog, please contact Disability Services directly (805.679.6125), as all animals visiting campus must have pre-approval. For additional information regarding Pacifica’s policies, visit https://www.pacifica.edu/student-services/disability-services/.

For additional information, including travel, cancellation policy, and disability services please visit our general information section.