Jung’s experience as a child of having ‘two personalities’ impacted the development of analytical psychology in numerous ways, but its most important influence was upon the emergence of Jung’s notion of individuation. Individuation, the central notion of analytical psychology, is all about the avoidance of one-sidedness. Through the operation of the ‘transcendent function’ Jung saw individuation as a way to transform creatively in the direction of wholeness.

In his later psychology in particular, Jung became particularly interested in utilising these ideas to overcome the dominant Cartesian split within modern consciousness, and specifically the dichotomy between the psychological dimensions of interiority and exteriority.  The three arenas in which he was able to explore this question at the greatest depth were Transference/Countertransference, Alchemy and Synchronicity. It was his research into these three topics that enabled Jung to extend the notion of psyche beyond the individual and to put into question the subject/object divide.  My goal in this seminar is to explore Jung’s notion of the extended psyche through a clinical lens. I want to look at how individuation shows up within the analytic vessel and particularly through the trans-subjective energetic field that Jung called “the third”. My aim is to show how a Jungian approach to these clinical questions differs from, for example, the psychoanalytic approach.  I will then go on to explore the possibility that these ideas of Jung offer an opening toward the psychosocial, potentially enabling us to make an authentically Jungian contribution to political and social questions.

Mark Saban, P.h.D, is a senior Jungian analyst (a member of the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists) and a lecturer in Jungian and post-Jungian studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, Essex University. He recently co-edited Analysis and Activism – Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Psychology, Ed. Emilija Kiehl, Mark Saban, & Andrew Samuels (Routledge) 2016 (Finalist American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize, Nominated Gradiva Award for Best Edited Book). Recent articles include, Jung, Winnicott and the divided psyche, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2016, 61, 3, 329–349 and Secrete e Bugie. Un’area cieca nella psycologia junghiana, Rivista di psicologia analitica, 2017, n. 43 Volume 95.His website http://www.marksaban.co.uk/.

Live Lecture & Discussion Details: 

This lecture took place on Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024.  The recording can be accessed below. 

Module 1 Materials Are Available Below

Reading Material

Click on the links below to download your articles for this module.

Questionnaire

Please complete the quiz at the following link:

Module 1 Quiz

Module 1 Bonus Lecture
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

This bonus lecture by Dr. Mark Saban addresses the place of Archetypes and the Collective unconscious in Jung’s psychology, with a particular focus on clinical applications of these concepts. In the first part of the seminar  Dr. Saban outlines Jung’s ideas about archetypes and the role they play within his overall psychology, then he moves onto various critical approaches to the archetype that have arisen in post-Jungian literature. With these critiques in mind, Dr. Saban will then move onto the ways archetypes show up in clinical practice and how archetypal theory can inform work with patients, with a particular emphasis upon the experiential dimension of the archetype and its relation to dream, complex, and symptom.

The slides for the presentation can be found at this link, and the video recording can be watched below:

https://appliedjung.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Archetypes-and-the-Collective-Unconscius-Webinar.pdf

Bonus Lecture Reading Material

Below is a selection of readings provided by Mark Saban, for the bonus lecture on Archetypes.

This module explores the meaning of individuation through stage representations of crisis and transformation. Individuation is a central idea in Jungian psychology. The project of developing and integrating one’s self over the course of a lifetime is rarely explored in other schools of depth psychology; we will consider some of the meanings and opportunities that open out from this idea.

I will use scenes from opera, music theatre, and film to explore individuation as it appears in different characters and narratives. We will see how staged symbols connect unconscious archetypal material with ego consciousness in ways that support and direct various processes. The amplified images, patterned situations, and articulated emotions of screen and stage works are designed to reflect not merely our desires, but all the things that engage us, positive and negative. We use these materials to dream ourselves through the joys and disasters that make up our lives, opening up unexpected possibilities for our own individuation.

Paul Attinello is a diplomate analyst who studied at the C. G. Jung-Institut in Zürich, as well as a senior lecturer at Newcastle University. He has taught at the University of Hong Kong and as a guest professor at UCLA, received his PhD from UCLA, and has lived and worked on four continents. He has published in a number of journals, collections and reference works on contemporary musics, HIV/AIDS, and cultural, philosophical and psychological topics.

Live Lecture & Discussion Details: 

This lecture took place on October 19, 2024.  The lecture recording can be watched below.  Please note:  there were audio problems for a couple of the video clips Paul played in the first half of the talk — so I have included links below to streaming versions, where you can listen to them separately (as the audio in the lecture recording cuts out for parts of those clips). The rest of the video clips he played had no issues so can be watched & listened to in the recording.

Links to clips that may have audio issues: 

Module 2 Materials Are Now Available Below

Reading Material

Click on the links below to download your articles for this module.

a)  In this module, songs and theatre pieces are used to evoke various stages of the individuation process, through their emotional content, dramatic moments and turning points they may contain.  Contemplate a stage of self-growth, transition, or even confrontation with disparate parts of yourself, that you have experienced at some point in your own life.  Then choose a song that reflects or relates to what you were experiencing at that time, in retrospect.  If not a song, perhaps a visual art work or a scene from a movie, tv show or book may speak more directly to what you remember of the process. Explore for yourself how that work speaks to that experience.

b)  Now contemplate your clinical work or practice. Choose a song or playlist that speaks to your practice as you currently engage in it, or as it is developing.  With that selected music (or other artwork), reflect upon the telos of your work, your therapy setting and practice, and your relationship with it now.  What does that music or art piece evoke?

Questionnaire

Please complete the quiz at the following link:

Module 2 Quiz

In the early twentieth century, Carl Jung proposed the existence of a “collective unconscious” capable of responding to life’s challenges in a way that was largely independent of one’s own life history. That is, he proposed that each of us has the inherited potential to respond to typical human life challenges with timeless story structures that would spontaneously emerge during those times to help us adapt and thrive, which he called “archetypes”. His insistence that such responses are innate, however, entails that his hypothesis is not merely psychological one but also biological. That is, capable of independent verification–or indeed, modification–via the findings of various contemporary biosciences. For decades after Jung’s death, however, biosciences were still not sophisticated enough to tackle such a nuanced and complex idea. Now, however, recent findings in psychogenomics, psycho-neuro-immuno-endocrinology, code biology, embodied cognition, and the neuroscience of spontaneous thought reveal that not only is Jung’s theory broadly verified, we can integrate such findings to refine our understanding of archetypes, the Self, and individuation. In this talk, we will review the above findings for the non-specialist and provide clinical examples. 

Erik Goodwyn is a psychiatrist who has listened to the dreams and fantasies of suffering people from in both military and civilian settings. He is also a scholar published in anthropology, dream analysis, mythology, ritual, philosophy, and archetypal psychology. He has been invited to give lectures in Ireland, Swizerland, Germany, and all over the United States. His passion is the imagination in all its manifestations, which is why he is also an author of upcoming fantasy novel King of the Forgotten Darkness (Roundfire Press, 2025).

Live Lecture & Discussion Details:

The lecture & discussion took place on Saturday, November 2, 2024.  Watch the recording of it below.

Additional Module 3 Materials Are Available Below

Reading Material

Click on the links below to download your articles for this module.

The Human Body is the Collective Unconscious
Erik Goodwyn, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2024, 69, 3, 1–23

The Innate Story Code
Erik Goodwyn, BioSystems 244 (2024) 105285

Questionnaire

Please complete the quiz at the following link:

Module 3 Quiz

The intergenerational transmission of individual and collective trauma has emerged as a significant area of focus in my analytical practice during the past ten years.  As my practice has expanded to have an international focus in Russia, China, Latin America and Isreal, I have encountered clients who come to analysis with traumas that are often related to past generations of survivors, and which have had a significant impact upon the current generations psychological, creative and spiritual development, as well as causing impasses in the processes of individuation.  In the U.S. and Isreal I have been working with the second and third generations of holocaust survivors, in Russia with the impact of Stalin’s gulags, in China with the impact of the cultural revolution and other collective traumas; and in Latin America with the impact of the ‘dirty wars’ and severe political oppression.  These collective traumas are often conflated and layered alongside individual personal traumas which become the major focus of the analysis.  I have also been conducting analytical research utilizing the infant observation technique (Esther Bick method) in these different cultural contexts, and have been focusing on the ways in which collective trauma is communicated and transmitted from one generation to the next through affective and bodily interchanges between the infant and their caregivers.  I will be utilizing clinical material from my analytical practice to demonstrate how these generational transmissions emerge within the analytical temenos, as well as infant observations from China and Russia that demonstrate the transmission of collective and personal trauma in infancy.      

Brian Feldman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist (UC Berkeley), and served as chief psychologist in the Department of Child Psychiatry @ Stanford Medical Center where he received the distinguished teaching award. He trained as a child analyst with Michael Fordham over a ten year period, and teaches Fordham’s work in a number of Jungian Institutes world-wide. He is a certified child, adolescent and adult analyst (CGJISF, IRS-JA), and is a founding and training member of the International Association of Infant Observation (AIDOBB). He has held visiting professorships and has lectured @ the University of Dakar, Senegal; the Institute of Psychology, State University for Humanitarian Sciences in Moscow; the City University of Macau, and the University of Campinas, Brazil. He has published extensively in the areas of infant observation; the psychic skin; attachment; and child, adolescent and adult Jungian analysis. His work on the psychic skin and attachment was honored by the Psychoanalytic Consortium of Washington, D.C. in 2013. He maintains a private practice in Palo Alto, California.

This lecture took place on Saturday, November 16, 2024.  The recording of it can be watched below. 

Additional Module 4 Materials Are Available Below

Reading Material

Click on the links below to download your articles for this module.

After the Catastrophe
Brian Feldman, Palo Alto

The Cultural Skin & Transmission of Trauma in Infancy
Brian Feldman, Palo Alto

Questionnaire

Please complete the quiz at the following link:

Module 4 Quiz

In this closing forum, we welcome students to share thoughts and questions with other members of the international student body participating in this course.  This is an opportunity to discuss concepts explored over the last 2 months, and how they may apply to your own practice as well as personal journey.

Closing Peer Discussion Forum:

This discussion group took place on Saturday, November 30, 2024.  The recording can be accessed below.  This session brings the course to a close.  Please check your email for info on CPD Certificates and Upcoming Editions of Clinical Concepts.  If you are interested in the January-February 2025 installment, “The Other”, and are not already enrolled, you can find out more about it and register here.