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Up Against the Wall: Politics, Community, Psyche
Up Against the Wall: Politics, Community, Psyche
Details | Overview | Featured Presenters | General Information

Up Against the Wall: Politics, Community, Psyche

Details

Conference: 

  • Saturday: 2:00pm – 9:00pm
  • Sunday: 8:30am – 4:00pm

There is no on-campus housing available for this program – please contact the Best Western Inn Carpinteria for availability.

Conference Rates:

  • $225 – Pacifica Student Rate
  • $275 – Pacifica Alumni, Full Time Students, & Senior Rate
  • $325 – General Rate
  • $15 – CEC fee
  • $35 – Andrew Samuels (Sat. Evening Lecture Only/No CECs)

All registration fees include meals. Conference meals include: Saturday dinner through Sunday lunch

Parking is limited at the Lambert Road Campus and is available on a first come, first served basis; additional parking is available at the Ladera Lane Campus with shuttle service to Lambert. Please arrive early to either secure parking at Lambert or for the Ladera shuttle service.
The Retreat
805.969.3626 805.969.3626
retreat@pacifica.edu

Overview

The inherently intertwined relationship between the psyche and the polis, coupled with the urgent need for progressive action, demand that psychology become both politically conscious and socially engaged. This conference celebrates the thirty-year history of Pacifica’s Clinical Psychology program by continuing to advance a depth psychological orientation to the world. Explore the relationship of depth psychological theory and practice applied to the current political situation with internationally known Jungian analyst and political commentator Andrew Samuels in both a keynote address and workshop. Additional conference sessions feature Pacifica faculty, alumni, and graduate students addressing issues of social oppression, social liberation, psychological citizenship, and the collective imagination.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Saturday

  • Oksana Yakushko
    Reverse Engineering Happy and Productive Brutes: On Revolutionary Freedoms of Human Subjectivity
  • Eva Blodgett
    Are Immigrants Becoming the “New Black”? The Repetition Compulsion in the History of Immigration in the United States.
  • Michael Sipiora
    James Hillman’s Political Legacy
  • Jason Butler
    Poetic Sensibility and Decolonizing the Imagination

Keynote

  • Andrew Samuels
    A New Therapy for Politics?

Sunday

  • Andrew Samuels
    The Political Self: Getting in Touch with your Inner Politician
  • Fanny Brewster
    Imagine Freedom:  From Abolition to Liberation Psychology
  • Fanny Brewster & Andrew Samuels in Conversation
    Where Do We Stand? What Can We Do?

Session Descriptions

Andrew Samuels
A New Therapy for Politics?

This talk will discuss whether the many projects that seek to couple politics and psychology/therapy can in fact succeed in changing anything. Some ways in which we might do the ‘analysis and activism’ thing better are suggested, and tribute is paid to the approaches being pioneered at Pacifica. Discuss will cover a range of political concerns from the perspective of ‘therapy thinking’. Topics for further exploration will be determined in co-operation with the audience. They could include:  Leadership – the ‘Good-Enough Leader;’ Political violence as a rational act; The economy – it’s the stupid economy! Why people deny climate change; and The political contribution of transgressive styles of personal and intimate relationships.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Explore how analysis and activism can be both contrasted and integrated.
  2. Differentiate and illustrate different styles of leadership.
  3. Evaluate the political violence in relation to both rational and irrational motives.

The Political Self: Getting in Touch with your Inner Politician

This “political clinic” will explore a variety of themes including: The role of the body in politics. The personal roots of your political views and acts. The question: “How political are you anyway?’ Political types (like psychological types). Social spirituality. A responsible and relational way to work directly with political material in the therapy session. There will be some seminar style input as well as working in pairs and small groups.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Identify and describe political types.
  2. Compare and contract ways of working with political material in psychotherapy.
  3. Analyze the relationship between embodiment and politics in the therapeutic encounter.

Fanny Brewster
Imagine Freedom:  From Abolition to Liberation Psychology

The African Diaspora continues to seek political and personal freedom. This search reaches critical points at various historical moments, evidenced by the constellation of a cultural complex of racism.  The Abolitionist Movement was a major contributor towards an initial African American revolt from slavery. Decades later the Civil Rights Movement, and now the Black Lives Matter Movement, demand that we once again attend to America’s racial cultural complex.  Liberation Psychology resonates philosophically with these movements.  What can Depth Psychology contribute, as we work to decrease the personal and collective psychological suffering of racial complexes, with its history of American slavery?

Learning Objectives:

  1. Identify three Jungian Psychology theories:  Shadow, Opposites and Complexes, their relationship to the Jungian concept of Other, and to the concepts of Liberation Psychology.
  2. Integrate new knowledge regarding cultural complexes that supports the exploration of self-identified personal complexes.
  3. Recognize, label, and discuss at least three (3) American cultural complexes that have led to intergenerational Collective societal trauma.

Oksana Yakushko
Reverse Engineering Happy and Productive Brutes: On Revolutionary Freedoms of Human Subjectivity

Prejudice, social violence, and scientism have shaped psychology as a field, both in its past and present. This presentation will examine how these forces can be traced in American psychology from eugenics movement, behaviorism, to current positive psychology. Reflections on prejudice in history of depth psychology will also question the need to acknowledge its historical contributions to both social violence as well as its revolutionary thought. The presentation will document how oppression has left a festering scar on American cultural psyche, including through psychology. Examination of how psychological scientism (unquestioned application of natural sciences to understanding human beings) interacts with culturally normative demands to construct humans as perfectly controlled animals as well as possibilities of freedom through acknowledgement of depth psychological subjectivity or social complexity will play with radical possibilities for a different future for psychology.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Examine and apply critical historical understanding of use of scientism in support of ideologies in U.S. psychology
  2. Learn about differentiation between contextual applied sciences and non-contextual scientistic paradigms in psychology research.
  3. Examine and apply to clinical practice as well as clinical research concepts related to depth psychological subjectivity, complexity, and critical social awareness.

Eva Blodgett
Are immigrants becoming the “New Black”? The repetition compulsion in the history of immigration in the United States.

The aggressive rhetoric on immigration and immigrants during the presidential campaign has materialized in intensified deportation efforts, hurried executive orders on travel ban, and the mobilization of ICE and border patrol forces. New linguistic categories such as “bad hombres,” “filth” and the like emerged as a result of campaign promises to restore the order and get the illegal immigration under control. The language employed in current political discourse reflects the not so distant history of eugenics, exclusions based on race, class, and ethnicity, and xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants. Examining current narratives about immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, illuminates the present in light of the past, and calls for the scrutiny of the political unconscious in a repetition compulsion in the history of immigration.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Apply critical and depth psychological theoretical lens to understanding prejudice and xenophobia.
  2. Examine and integrate historical forms of racism, xenophobia and social exclusion to current political milieu.
  3. Develop greater awareness and learn about clinical implications of xenophobia in the lives of recent immigrants and refugees to the U.S.

Michael Sipiora
James Hillman’s Political Legacy

While Hillman’s project was to re-vision psychology, his legacy extends beyond the discipline to the world at large. While his revival of the ancient notion of the Anima Mundi has been influential in depth psychology’s alliance with ecological movements, his concern with the affairs of the polis also deserves consideration. He called for therapy to be a cell of revolution sending patients back out into the streets as psychological citizens, and offered the culture a therapy of ideas that called into question the unconscious assumptions of capitalist economics and American Empire. Based on Hillman’s work, this presentation proposes both a politically responsible direction for therapy and a rhetorical mode for depth psychological cultural critique.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Appraise the social dimensions of individuals’ clinical symptoms.
  2. Contrast hyperindividualism with a relational concept of the self.
  3. Formulate a depth psychological mode of cultural critique.
  4. Reevaluate the relationship between psychology and neoliberalism.

Jason Butler
Poetic Sensibility and Decolonizing the Imagination

The rupture between event and meaning has shown itself to be a key issue plaguing collective psychology. This rupture requires as remedy a poetic sensibility that can imagine the central images or root metaphors which make experience qualitatively intelligible, an imaginal literacy that reads images while also making new images from that which is presented. Bachelard’s (1988) notion of images as liberatory, disentangling one from superficial impressions by transmuting surface to depth, and Hillman’s (1975) move of ‘seeing through’ the archetypal images expressed in events will serve as foundational ideas for the description of poetic sensibility as the capacity to read and make images through ‘deform[ing] what we perceive’ (p. 1). This presentation will highlight the central function of poetic sensibility as an essential engagement of imagination required by any movement resisting the neocolonial policies and ‘inverted totalitarianism’ (Wolin, 2003) of the corporate and political state.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Learn about and apply understanding of poetic sensibility as critical component of psychological practice and research.
  2. Gain skills in working with imagination, image, metaphor in clinical, scholarly, and social justice activities.
  3. Recognize applications of poetic sensibility as both a clinical practice as well as a social, cultural, political liberatory tool.

Featured Presenters

Andrew SamuelsAndrew Samuels, PhD, is recognized internationally as one of the foremost political commentators and theorists from the perspectives of psychotherapy and depth psychology. He has worked as a consultant with political leaders, parties and activist groups in several countries, including the United States. He also consults to Britain’s National Health Service. He draws on a wide range of approaches to psyche, including post-Jungian, relational psychoanalytic and humanistic ideas. But he roots his work in citizens’ lived experience, and in what can be learned from therapy work carried out with political awareness.  While Andrew does not disguise his background in progressive and left-wing politics and his commitment to diversity and equality, he remains open-minded and celebrates many different takes on social and political issues.


Fanny BrewsterFanny Brewster PhD, is a Jungian analyst and author of poetry and nonfiction. Her book African Americans and Jungian Psychology:  Leaving the Shadows has recently been published by Routledge (2017).  A forthcoming book, Archetypal Grief:  Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss is forthcoming later this year.  Her poems from Journey:  The Middle Passage have recently appeared in the Psychological Perspectives Journal (2016) in which she was Featured Poet.  Dr. Brewster is a core faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute, the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts and the New York C.G. Jung Foundation. She is a lecturer and workshop presenter on Jungian Psychology related topics and will be a presenter at the San Francisco Institute Public Program, Phantoms and Dreams of the Underground in October, 2017.


oksana-yakushkoOksana Yakushko, PhD, is the Chair and core faculty in Clinical Psychology department at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her publications and presentations focus on xenophobia, feminism, and social justice from lens of depth and critical psychology paradigms. She has received awards for her work on human trafficking and immigration, including receiving American Psychological Association’s Presidential Citation in 2007 and being named the Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 2016. Her recent publications include articles on indigenous psychologies and women, including on history of witch-burning as a form of suppression of indigenous and women’s knowledge. In addition, she has written on gendered and cultural unconscious in research, on women’s spirituality, on systematic exclusion of depth psychological perspectives in mainstream psychology, and on ideological paradigms in psychology that promote social oppression (e.g., eugenics, “positive” psychology). She has collaborated with foundations and organizations, which address historical and current xenophobia, including the U.S. Holocaust Museum. She is active in psychoanalytic, humanistic, and feminist organizations that focus on lives and experiences of diverse communities.


Michael SipioraMichael Sipiora, PhD, is the program’s Director of Research. He joined the Pacifica faculty after spending over twenty years as a tenured professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh where he was an award winning teacher in both their APA approved clinical program in Human Science Psychology, and School for Leadership and Professional Advancement. Before that, he taught psychology, philosophy, and literature at community colleges in Dallas. The author of numerous peer reviewed articles, book chapters, and an edited book, areas of Dr. Sipiora’s teaching and publication include existential-phenomenological psychology and philosophy, archetypal psychology, hermeneutics, classical rhetoric, and narrative theory. He earned a Bachelors and Masters in Philosophy at San Jose State University where his studies focused on phenomenology with an emphasis on the work of Martin Heidegger. His Masters and Doctorial studies in psychology with a concentration in literature were carried out at the University of Dallas. Dr. Sipiora is a licensed clinical psychologist in both Pennsylvania and California, and he has a wide range of clinical experience in both private and community mental health settings. Currently he has a therapy practice in Santa Barbara. While in Pittsburgh, he was co-founder of an organizational development and individual coaching company that worked with small business, non-profits, and educational institutions.


buttlerJason Butler, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and an assistant professor in the Holistic Counseling department at John F. Kennedy University. He received his doctorate in Clinical Psychology with a specialization in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and his master’s degree in Transpersonal Psychology from Saybrook University.  The title of his doctoral dissertation was Imagining an Archetypal Approach to Psychotherapy and his master’s project was titled The Practice and Doctrine of Lovingkindness Meditation in Mainstream Buddhism and its Applications in Clinical Psychology.His recently published book is entitled Archetypal Psychotherapy: The Clinical Legacy of James Hillman, in the Routledge series on Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies.


Eva BlodgettEva Blodgett, M.A., is a Doctoral Candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her recent publications and presentations focused on Lacanian and psychoanalytic explorations of xenophobia, immigration, and oppression, including in the lives of survivors of Stalinist persecutions, undocumented immigrants, and immigrant therapists. She has received prestigious mentorship awards in psychoanalysis, including psychoanalytic research and international psychoanalysis. Her dissertation work is focused on examination of xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric utilizing Lacanian discourse analysis.


General Information

CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDIT

This program meets qualifications for 9 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 9 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 9 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 Lambert Road Campus, 249 Lambert Road, Carpinteria, CA 93013

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

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Pacifica Retreat 2018-02-08T11:07:20-08:00

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