Featured Presenters
Ann Belford Ulanov, PhD, 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.
David Tacey, PhD, is a public intellectual and a recognized international authority on psychoanalysis and spirituality. He has published several bestselling books on mental health, spirituality and gender. David is an interdisciplinary scholar who works across several fields, including literary studies, psychoanalytic studies and religious studies. He studied literature, philosophy and art history at Flinders University, and earned his PhD at Adelaide University in the fields of literature and psychoanalysis. After winning the Bentham Prize at Adelaide he was one of four Australians to be awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Harkness Foundation, New York. He worked under the supervision of James Hillman in psychology (Dallas Institute of Humanities) and Thomas Moore in religious studies (Southern Methodist University). David spent his adolescence and early adulthood living alongside Aboriginal cultures. This was the impetus for his lifelong interest in Aboriginal religions and the spiritual relationship between land, nature and human consciousness. David’s many books include: Beyond Literal Religion; The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality; The Jung Reader (Ed.); Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical and Mental Wellbeing; Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth; The Idea of the Numinous: Contemporary Jungian and Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Ed.); The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality.
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, PhD, 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.
Ann Taves, PhD, 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, PhD, is a Jungian psychoanalyst, psychologist, author, and speaker. She is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont, founding faculty at the Vermont Institute for the Psychotherapies, and past president of the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies. She is in independent practice with individuals and couples in central Vermont. Polly is the author of fifteen books, as well as many chapters and articles. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her most recent works 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). In 2018, Shambhala Publications will publish True Love Ways: Relationship as Psycho-Spiritual Development. 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