April 3rd, 2022: Giovanni Colacicchi
C. G. Jung’s ethics
ZOOM 4 pm ET, 10 pm Italy, 9 pm UK, Moderated by Ris Swank
In this seminar, Dr. Colacicchi will discuss his research on the ethical foundations of Jungian psychology and hopes to receive many questions and comments from the participants.
Jung appears to have developed his ethical outlook, which has a deliberately “wider” scope than Freud’s (see Merkur, 2017) from a variety of (not always acknowledged) sources: Kant, Nietzsche, Aristotle and Christian ethics in primis (Colacicchi, 2021).
Many post-Jungian authors appreciate the Kantian dimension of Jung’s ethics (even if they are not aware that it is Kantian): Jung’s focus on the moral obligation of the patient to “make the unconscious conscious” and integrate the shadow has indeed a decidedly Kantian flavor, albeit of a 20th Century Kant who has read Freud; others – again, mostly unaware of the fact – enjoy the Nietzschean Jung, with his focus on individual ethics vs collective morality, Nietzsche’s “master morality” vs “slave morality”; and many others, perhaps the majority of those who have been drawn to Jung as opposed to Freud, consider Jung’s ethical stance as an unorthodox way of maintaining the main moral tenets of Christian morality: a psychological re-vision of Christianity, for sure, but still within the Christian framework of sin (in Jung’s model, unconsciousness) and redemption (which for Jung is individuation, an openness to the Self – which may or may not coincide with an openness to God). Finally, other authors, such as the philosopher John Cottingham and the psychologist Ladson Hinton, have highlighted Jung’s Aristotelian approach to reason and emotion and his focus on practical wisdom.
Would it be a mistake to try and reconcile the kaleidoscopic variety of ethical views which are found in Jung’s vast opus since they reflect his pluralistic conception of the psyche (Samuels, 1989)? Or can a coherent ethical model be drawn out of his work, a model which may be called, for once and for all, “Jung’s ethics”?
SELECTED REFERENCES:
Colacicchi, G. (2021), Psychology as Ethics: Reading Jung with Kant, Nietzsche and Aristotle. London, Routledge.
Cottingham, J. (1998) Philosophy and The Good Life: Reason and Passion in Greek, Cartesian and psychoanalytic ethics. Cambridge, CUP.
Hinton, L. (2019) “Jung, Time and Ethics” in Jung and philosophy (Edited by Jon Mills). London, Routledge
Merkur, D. (2017) Jung’s Ethics: Moral Psychology and his Cure of Souls (Edited by Jon Mills). London, Routledge.
Samuels, A. (1989) The Plural Psyche: Personality, Morality and the Father. London, Routledge.
GIOVANNI IVISON COLACICCHI, PhD, is an Anglo-Italian philosopher, independent scholar and teacher in the humanities. He holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Florence, his hometown, and a doctorate in Jungian Studies from the University of Essex. He is the author of Psychology as Ethics: Reading Jung with Kant, Nietzsche and Aristotle (Routledge, “Philosophy and psychoanalysis” series, 2021). https://www.routledge.com/Psychology-as-Ethics-Reading-Jung-with-Kant-Nietzsche-and-Aristotle/Colacicchi/p/book/9780367529239. He is a contributor to the blog L’indiscreto (www.indiscreto.org) on which he has written on the relevance of Jungian psychology to the understanding of contemporary “selfie culture”, the cult of celebrity, and Dante’s Comedy. He lives in Ferrara, Italy, with his partner, Elisa, and their son, Francesco.
Correspondence: giovannicolacicchi@gmail.com
June 4th, 2022: Eugenio Ordóñez
The importance, influence, and impact of the ancestors
ZOOM two hours. 10 am Mexico City Time, 8 am Seattle time, 4 am UK time, Moderated by Robin McCoy Brooks
Bio: Eugenio Ordóñez holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Depth Psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is trained in Family Constellations, which he has facilitated in groups for over 12 years. He is also certified as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, a methodology for the resolution of psychobiological trauma. He participated in the close groups with elder and shaman Malidoma Somé and became an initiated elder following the ancient Dagara (West African) tradition. He has also been involved in the study, practice, and teaching of the ancient wisdom of Kabbalah, at the Kabbalah Centre for over 10 years. He wrote a book that weaves the work and insights of C.G. Jung and James Hillman with the practical work and powerful healing resolutions discovered by Bert Hellinger, together with the ancient teachings about ancestry as they were shared by Malidoma Somé. The book’s title is Ancestry: The deep field of reality. Eugenio is a therapist, speaker, teacher and writer. He works with individuals, in group sessions, and facilitates retreats following a methodology that he and his working partner coined as Medicine-Community®, a way of healing that is body-based, trauma-informed, systemically oriented, spiritually nurtured, and soul-focused. His website is: www.quechelah.org.
July 2022: Briony Clarke
Animate Being – Tracing the Tacit through Jungian Arts Based Research
In seeking to extend Jung’s practice of the image to new mediums via speculative game design I am mobilising my art practice as a research methodology. My practice is one of speculative worlding where I use design processes as a means of structuring my explorations. Here I am working through an iterative design process. This is a cyclic process in which the designer will move through not once but repeatedly as they ideate, prototype, test, analyse and refine. This spiral movement creates a unique territory where I am able to reveal how ideas enter into, collide, move and develop through practice as research as visual forms. As part of my research I have documented this process in a ‘playbook’ and I am sharing extracts of this document with the IAJS community alongside a selection of interactive game vignettes.
Bio: Briony Clarke is an artist with a deeply design led practice. It is an applied craft of design fiction, a tentacular and ludic way of finding and being in the world and thinking about possibilities through speculation, making and myth. She trained in Architecture at London Metropolitan University, before postgraduate studies in Fine Art at Central St Martins and Communication Design at The Royal College of Art and she completed an MA in Jungian Studies at The University of Essex in 2018. She is currently working towards her PhD where under the supervision of Dr Kevin Lu, and the poet Dr Holly Pester, she is pursuing her research through a practice as research methodology as she seeks to extend Jung’s practice of the image to new mediums via speculative game design.
She has exhibited widely in the UK and worldwide including most recently the Venice Biennale in Italy, The Experimental Game Design festival at Somerset House in London and the Self Design Academy at the MU in the Netherlands. She was nominated for the John Ruskin Artist as Polymath prize and has received support from Arts Council England to pursue her work and produce several public facing projects. Most notably this included a four year period of residence in the constructed destination of Portmeirion Village in North Wales where she conducted a long term lived experiment exploring the contextual boundaries of speculative fiction.
August 14th, 2022: Evangeline Rand
C.G. Jung as Artisan Cross Connections with India Considerations in Times of Crisis (2022) bio, abstract and details forthcoming
September 18th, 2022: Susan Rowland
HOW AND WHY DO JUNGIAN ARTS-BASED RESEARCH.
Susan Rowland offers a sequel to previous talks on Jungian Arts-Based Research, which this time focuses on examples and possibilities. How can Jungian ideas and Jungians contribute to multiple topics and modes of research from autoethnography to weapons of mass destruction, from tackling cultural complexes to give the marginalized a voice. The webinar will include an introduction for those unfamiliar to this new dynamic intervention into scholarship. The zoom lecture will invite those with JABR projects to share and enhance their work.
Bio: Susan Rowland (PhD) is Core Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California where she co-Chairs the MA Engaged Humanities and the Creative life. Previously Professor of English and Jungian Studies at the University of Greenwich, UK, she has published extensively on Jung, literary theory, gender, myth, literature and detective fiction. Her books include Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002); The Ecocritical Psyche (2012), Remembering Dionysus (2017) and Jungian Literary Criticism: the Essential Guide (2019).
The seminar will explore issues from her new last scholarly book: Jungian Arts-based Research and the Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico (2020).Western modernity split art from knowledge-making as part of splits now seen as disastrous, such as between self and world, culture from nature. Now, art is being to be recognized as important ways of knowing and being.
From now on, Susan is doing Jungian arts-based research by writing detective fiction. For art is a kind of alchemical magic participating in the changing of the world. Susan lives in California with digital literary artist, Joel Weishaus. See his Jungian arts-based research at: https://weishaus.unm.edu/ Susan’s Email: susanr183@gmail.com
Fall: Nora Swan Foster Jungian Analyst
Jungian Art Therapy: Images, Dreams, and Analytical Psychology, bio, date, abstract forthcoming
November 12, 2022: Mary Watkins
2 hour ZOOM, 9 am PST, title, summary bio forthcoming
In peace and chaos,
The IAJS Seminar Committee,
Robin McCoy BrooksRis SwankMarybeth Carter