Join us for an exploration of the archetypal and collective mythologies that defined classic cinema. Looking at film through the lens of Jungian theory provides a valuable map and language that the intrepid film maker, critic, or aficionado may use to orient themselves within the imaginal landscape of the motion picture art. As we begin to understand our collective myths through the language of classic films so too can we begin to understand ourselves.
What’s included?
- A series of six virtual lectures presented by Jungian analysts and academics followed by an interactive QnA session (via Zoom).
- The above presentations will be recorded for those who cannot attend the event live.
- Participation in a private and facilitated Facebook forum where you will interact with other students and facilitators on the films’ themes.
- Time requirement: 1.5 – 4 hours per week.
* Due to copyright and territorial distribution restrictions we sadly cannot provide the viewing of the actual films in their entirety as part of our offering. Please check Apple TV+, Google Play, Amazon Prime or other streaming platforms for film availability should you wish to view the films prior to the presentations.
Duration: 6 Weeks
Start Date: 20 April 2024
Registration closes midnight 19 April 2024 PST.
PROGRAMME
20 April 2024
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Chinatown is seen as the last Hollywood film led by a producer, writer, director and star working together, and not by executives trying to justify their existence. Playing J. J. Gittes this was Jack Nicholson’s first role as a leading man. Yet he spends half the time with a huge bandage on his nose. The wound is not only on his face, but on the face of Los Angeles where corruption holds the city to ransom over its water supply. That’s the collective level. At the personal, where the waters run deep, corruption is shoved in Gittes face when he is confronted by incest.
The name of the perpetrator (played by John Huston, in a rare moment that side of the camera) is Noah Cross. What a name. Flood, sacrifice and tension between opposites? Or simply the Old and New testament? Talking of names, why Chinatown? The writer Robert Towne quotes a cop, “You don’t know who’s a crook and who isn’t a crook. So in Chinatown they say: just don’t do a goddamned thing.” Chinatown is not a place it’s a state of mind.
These are some of the things I will be talking about.
~ Christopher Hauke
27 April 2024
Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)
Ridley Scott’s landmark 1982 science fiction film, Blade Runner, has been lauded as one of the key films of both its genre, and of the 1980s. Despite a troubled production history and an initial lukewarm box office take, the groundbreaking production design and highly influential visuals ensured that the film successfully transcended its initial cult status, and it soon came to be regarded as a genre classic.
With a number of highly ambiguous onscreen individuative journeys present, there are rich rewards in analysing the film from a post-Jungian perspective. This talk will discuss and explore the various themes, discourses, archetypes and symbols that abound within the film, and map out how they are still relevant today. Finally, the film’s legacy in terms of the sequel Blade Runner 2049, (Villeneuve, 2017) will be explored in reference to the contemporaneous advance of AI and robotics and their potential cultural, social and societal impact.
~ Toby Reynolds
4 May 2024
It’s A Wonderful Life (Capra, 1947)
The Angel’s Message: It’s Wonderful Life’ begins at a critical juncture in the protagonist’s life: on Christmas Eve 1945, in Bedford Falls (NY), George Bailey is contemplating suicide. From this moment on – and with the help of George’s guardian angel – we will travel backwards, becoming witnesses of this man’s adventures: from his early years as an audacious child to his present as a husband and father of four. What has gone so wrong in George’s life? What darkness hovers over him?
‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ talks to us about the struggles of the individual – while painting a larger portrait of a place and a time in American history. The film has become a beloved Christmas movie for how it conveys Christian values and delivers its message of redemption and hope. In this talk, however, I will offer a Jungian reading centered on the process of individuation.
In particular, I will focus on themes regarding midlife crisis (and the feelings of frustration, disorientation and despair that often accompany it); the role of the daimon/angel as guide and protector; and the difficult relation between the ego and the Self. All of this while looking at the elements that make of this film such a rewarding and enduring cinematic achievement.
~ Cristina Álvarez López
11 May 2024
The Godfather Trilogy (Coppolla, 1972-1990)
The Godfather Trilogy– widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements in cinematic history – resonates with audiences because of its ability, it will be suggested, to capture the complexities, phantoms, and invisible loyalties governing family life. The films are a springboard to exploring both Jung’s thinking on the psychology of the family and the powerful role of the family unconscious in shaping individual development.
The trilogy not only stages the emotional consequences of, and psychology behind, how we interact with family members, but it also expresses, when read from a depth psychological perspective, why we may be compelled to do so. Crucially, not only are we responsible for the family bonds we may cultivate, break and repair, we are equally accountable for the relationships we foster with an internal cast or ‘family’ of archetypal figures, which we ignore at our peril.
~ Kevin Lu
18 May 2024
Gaslight (Cukor, 1944)
The term Gaslighting gained traction, becoming ubiquitous, after the 2016 U.S. election; by 2022 it was named “word of the year.” This 1944 film, Gaslight, based on the 1938 play, is the source of the term. A husband plots to convince his wife, Paula, that she is going insane because he is after money and jewels left to her by her aunt, whom he had murdered years before when she was a young girl. To gaslight someone is a form of psychological emotional abuse causing the victim to question, doubt, and undermine her/his own feelings, instincts, and sanity.
In the film, the image of the gaslight is a potent living symbol representing her ego consciousness as it is overtaken, possessed by his manipulative control of her and her own identification with the negative animus figure of her husband.
We watch, horrified and helpless, as Paula decompensates from an independent, self-possessed woman to a frightened, passive, submissive-like child with her psychopathic husband. Her vulnerability to being tricked by his predatory, humiliating, calculating deception has roots in her own repressed trauma. Coerced into complicity with his relentless assault on her inner knowing, Paula appears “ready” against her own instincts to believe she is insane because there is no other way of facing or denying the unbearable alternative: that her husband is trying to drive her insane. The film then becomes a critique of romantic love, of pressures society places on women to commit themselves to men without question, without discernment, of suppressing a connection to their own body-knowing intelligence when it conflicts with a romantic ideal in intimate relationships. As the psychologist Carol Gilligan argues in her seminal book Why Patriarchy Persists: Women take themselves out of relationship by suppressing what they know, for the sake of preserving the relationship.
We will explore how the film reveals the embodied movement and unfolding of the archetypal energies of the trickster and the animus, in both their negative and positive poles. This classic, award-winning film, resonant of a Bluebeard fairy-tale, continues to illuminate relational dynamics in our patriarchal culture.
~ Judith Cooper
25 May 2024
Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964)
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1990) was a London born film writer, producer and director who developed a keen taste for the dark thrills of life; suspenseful yet often invisible threats, erotic tension, and the intensity of psychological suffering to mention just a few characteristics. He was a masterful film director/ producer who oftentimes seemed to delight in sadistically terrifying as well as exciting his viewers making room for some projection on my part here. Hitchcock introduced the stylistic element of the cameo appearance of the producer/director in his own films. His unique style of camera work facilitated a capacity to bring the human psyche in all its dark reality to the big screen. Commentary on Hitchcock supports the idea that much of the fodder for his films were based on his own life traumas. The theme of an artists’ muse being their own personal suffering is well known in creative circles and this dynamic never tires.
Hitchcock, a rather mercurial character, struck me as an excellent choice for a Jungian approach to films. His themes so often deal with the shadowy aspects of the human psyche. We are revolted, captivated, terrified, disgusted, and fascinated by his frank and mysterious approach to the complexities of the human spirit. The movie “Marnie” released in 1964 was Hitchcock’s 49th film. The film circumambulates around an innocent looking, beautiful, mysterious dark female protagonist called Marnie. Is she a thief, a seductress, a young woman suffering from a severe neurotic condition, an anima projection of the male protagonist Mark? What does she illicit in the viewer? This controversial film presents sexual and dark erotic themes as well as it amplifies themes of personal and collective aspects of Carl Jung’s notion Shadow. In many ways it painfully reveals attitudes towards the feminine, paternity and patriarchal violence that continues to plague humanity. How do we relate to feminine aspects of ourselves? What needs greater healing and integration? What does it evoke in you? Lets watch.
~ Ronnie Landau
FACULTY
Christopher Hauke is an IAAP Jungian analyst and PhD supervisor at Goldsmiths interested the application of Jung’s psychology to cultural phenomena and film. His books include: Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities (2000); Human Being Human. Culture and the Soul (2005); Visible Mind. Movies, Modernity and the Unconscious (2013).
He has co-edited two collections of film writing: Jung and Film. Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image (2001) and Jung and Film II – The Return (2011). As C. C. Hauke, he now writes fiction. Having completed two novels he is working on the third. Christopher’s short films and documentaries have premiered in cinemas in London and congresses in Barcelona,
Zurich, Montreal and New York. See all the films here: www.christopherhauke.com
Toby Reynolds is an independent film scholar specialising in gender, auteurs, film history, and post-Jungian screen perspectives. His first book, The American Father Onscreen is now available from Routledge, and he has also had chapters published on American Beauty for The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies, and on the Jason Bourne franchise for Gender and Action Films (Emerald Press). His cinema podcast on under-rated and under-appreciated films, Dr Kino’s Film Emporium, is available from a number of major streaming sites. He also likes good coffee, a nice Shiraz, and vintage leather jackets. Preferably black.
Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic, writer, filmmaker, occasional teacher, and general practitioner of image sorcery. During childhood, she became fascinated by the power of words and images; most of her adult life has been spent pursuing different ways of approaching and combining them. She started to write professionally about film in 2009. She has contributed chapters to a dozen books, her texts and audiovisual essays have regularly appeared in print and online magazines, and she has lectured at different schools and universities. In 2017, she encountered the writings of C. J. Jung for the first time, while collecting stones at the beach.
Since then, she has been steadily reading, wrestling with and incorporating Jungian and post-Jungian psychology to her work and life (with special interest in tracking and elucidating the meaning and value of crisis, depression and “the dark night of the soul”). In 2020, she began making little films and experimenting with different kinds of image-work. Over the last years, she’s cried a lot—but (amazingly enough) she has also started remembering her dreams. Recently, in collaboration with Adrian Martin, she’s been making a series of multimedia lectures on film and compiling a selection of their audiovisual essays. In 2022 she decided to concentrate her efforts on pursuing her creativity independently, at her blog Laugh Motel.
Kevin Lu, PhD, is Professor of Applied Psychoanalysis and Head of Department (Practice) at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. He is the former Head of the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (University of Essex), was Director of the MA Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies between 2009 and 2022, and is now an Honorary Professor in PPS.
He has served on the Executive Committee of the International Association for Jungian Studies and is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute. His publications include articles and chapters on Jung’s relationship to the discipline of history, Arnold J. Toynbee’s use of analytical psychology, critical assessments of the theory of cultural complexes, sibling relationships in the Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora, Jungian perspectives on graphic novels and popular culture, and therapeutic, arts-based approaches to archival research. His papers on racial hybridity and archetypal thematic analysis (the latter co-authored with Ann Yeoman) were awarded the scholarship prize for best article published in the IJJS (2019 and 2023 respectively). He is the co-author (Also with Ann Yeoman) of C. G. Jung’s Collected Works: The Basics (2024).
Judith Cooper, PsyD is a clinical psychologist and diplomate Jungian Analyst in private practice in Chicago. A graduate and member of the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago, she teaches and supervises in the Institute’s Analyst Training Program, the two-year certificate Jungian Psychotherapy and Studies Program, and has lectured widely on the anima/animus and the use of film in clinical treatment.
Dr. Cooper served as a clinical supervisor and director of training at an APA-accredited psychology doctoral internship program at a community mental health center. She taught a year-long course in the Institute’s Analyst Training Program on Eros in Analysis in 2016, and more recently a class on love and sexuality, Seeking Embodiment. She presented at the Art and Psyche Conference in Sicily, Italy in 2015 on Jung and Barthes, When Art Wounds. A book chapter, co-authored with Gus Cwik, Psy.D., “Numinous images of a New Ethic: A Jungian view of Kieslowski’s The Decalogue” has been published in The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies, 2018.
She taught a weekend workshop, in May, 2019, to the Chicago training group on the archetypal Trickster entitled The Subversive Outsider within: Trickster as an Agent Provocateur of the Paradoxical Self. She presented at the IAAP Congress in Vienna in August, 2019 on Hail, Aphrodite!: Re-sacralization of the Goddess of Love & Sex in David Ives’ Venus in Fur. Along with a colleague, Dan Ross, they have recorded and posted on the Chicago Institute’s website, seven podcasts in a series called Healing Cinema, analyzing classical and contemporary films from a Jungian viewpoint; films include Hitchcock’s Rear Window, The Lost Daughter, and most recently, the acclaimed film Tar.
Ronnie Landau MA, LPC, is a Certified Jungian Psychoanalyst and senior training analyst and supervisor with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. Her private practice is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ms. Landau has served the Jungian community in her previous roles as President and Director of Training for the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. She is currently President Elect for CNAJSA. (Council of North American Jungian Societies) Ms. Landau lectures widely throughout the U.S and Zurich, Switzerland. She is the author of The Queen of Sheba and Her Hairy Legs, The Exile and Redemption of the Erotic Feminine in Western Monotheism and Jungian Process. Ms. Landau is currently interested in cultural trauma, genocide, and the impact of these forces on the psyche and the collective.
FACULTY
Christopher Hauke is an IAAP Jungian analyst and PhD supervisor at Goldsmiths interested the application of Jung’s psychology to cultural phenomena and film. His books include: Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities (2000); Human Being Human. Culture and the Soul (2005); Visible Mind. Movies, Modernity and the Unconscious (2013).
He has co-edited two collections of film writing: Jung and Film. Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image (2001) and Jung and Film II – The Return (2011). As C. C. Hauke, he now writes fiction. Having completed two novels he is working on the third. Christopher’s short films and documentaries have premiered in cinemas in London and congresses in Barcelona,
Zurich, Montreal and New York. See all the films here: www.christopherhauke.com
Toby Reynolds is an independent film scholar specialising in gender, auteurs, film history, and post-Jungian screen perspectives. His first book, The American Father Onscreen is now available from Routledge, and he has also had chapters published on American Beauty for The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies, and on the Jason Bourne franchise for Gender and Action Films (Emerald Press). His cinema podcast on under-rated and under-appreciated films, Dr Kino’s Film Emporium, is available from a number of major streaming sites. He also likes good coffee, a nice Shiraz, and vintage leather jackets. Preferably black.
Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic, writer, filmmaker, occasional teacher, and general practitioner of image sorcery. During childhood, she became fascinated by the power of words and images; most of her adult life has been spent pursuing different ways of approaching and combining them. She started to write professionally about film in 2009. She has contributed chapters to a dozen books, her texts and audiovisual essays have regularly appeared in print and online magazines, and she has lectured at different schools and universities. In 2017, she encountered the writings of C. J. Jung for the first time, while collecting stones at the beach.
Since then, she has been steadily reading, wrestling with and incorporating Jungian and post-Jungian psychology to her work and life (with special interest in tracking and elucidating the meaning and value of crisis, depression and “the dark night of the soul”). In 2020, she began making little films and experimenting with different kinds of image-work. Over the last years, she’s cried a lot—but (amazingly enough) she has also started remembering her dreams. Recently, in collaboration with Adrian Martin, she’s been making a series of multimedia lectures on film and compiling a selection of their audiovisual essays. In 2022 she decided to concentrate her efforts on pursuing her creativity independently, at her blog Laugh Motel.
Kevin Lu, PhD, is Professor of Applied Psychoanalysis and Head of Department (Practice) at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. He is the former Head of the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (University of Essex), was Director of the MA Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies between 2009 and 2022, and is now an Honorary Professor in PPS.
He has served on the Executive Committee of the International Association for Jungian Studies and is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute. His publications include articles and chapters on Jung’s relationship to the discipline of history, Arnold J. Toynbee’s use of analytical psychology, critical assessments of the theory of cultural complexes, sibling relationships in the Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora, Jungian perspectives on graphic novels and popular culture, and therapeutic, arts-based approaches to archival research. His papers on racial hybridity and archetypal thematic analysis (the latter co-authored with Ann Yeoman) were awarded the scholarship prize for best article published in the IJJS (2019 and 2023 respectively). He is the co-author (Also with Ann Yeoman) of C. G. Jung’s Collected Works: The Basics (2024).
Judith Cooper, PsyD is a clinical psychologist and diplomate Jungian Analyst in private practice in Chicago. A graduate and member of the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago, she teaches and supervises in the Institute’s Analyst Training Program, the two-year certificate Jungian Psychotherapy and Studies Program, and has lectured widely on the anima/animus and the use of film in clinical treatment.
Dr. Cooper served as a clinical supervisor and director of training at an APA-accredited psychology doctoral internship program at a community mental health center. She taught a year-long course in the Institute’s Analyst Training Program on Eros in Analysis in 2016, and more recently a class on love and sexuality, Seeking Embodiment. She presented at the Art and Psyche Conference in Sicily, Italy in 2015 on Jung and Barthes, When Art Wounds. A book chapter, co-authored with Gus Cwik, Psy.D., “Numinous images of a New Ethic: A Jungian view of Kieslowski’s The Decalogue” has been published in The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies, 2018.
She taught a weekend workshop, in May, 2019, to the Chicago training group on the archetypal Trickster entitled The Subversive Outsider within: Trickster as an Agent Provocateur of the Paradoxical Self. She presented at the IAAP Congress in Vienna in August, 2019 on Hail, Aphrodite!: Re-sacralization of the Goddess of Love & Sex in David Ives’ Venus in Fur. Along with a colleague, Dan Ross, they have recorded and posted on the Chicago Institute’s website, seven podcasts in a series called Healing Cinema, analyzing classical and contemporary films from a Jungian viewpoint; films include Hitchcock’s Rear Window, The Lost Daughter, and most recently, the acclaimed film Tar.
Ronnie Landau MA, LPC, is a Certified Jungian Psychoanalyst and senior training analyst and supervisor with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. Her private practice is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ms. Landau has served the Jungian community in her previous roles as President and Director of Training for the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. She is currently President Elect for CNAJSA. (Council of North American Jungian Societies) Ms. Landau lectures widely throughout the U.S and Zurich, Switzerland. She is the author of The Queen of Sheba and Her Hairy Legs, The Exile and Redemption of the Erotic Feminine in Western Monotheism and Jungian Process. Ms. Landau is currently interested in cultural trauma, genocide, and the impact of these forces on the psyche and the collective.
TESTIMONIALS
I believe artists that create movies can be intuitive, but films are also created in collaborative interaction. For me, relationships frequently trigger new ways of thinking and realizations that may not have happened outside those connections. This world-wide class has been one of those endeavors. Who knows what will happen? We just need to be willing to go there. THANK YOU to everyone associated with this outstanding program!
~ Sandy Snook
First of all I would like to share my appreciation for the Jungian Film School program. A special thank you goes to all of the speakers and to all fellow participants who journeyed with me during the ten-week program. As an introductory program it was an excellent learning experience from a Jungian viewpoint on films, archetypes, and personal reactions and responses. At least for me, the encounter with the powerful archetypes at the beginning served to open up my psyche allowing me to participate in a deep way from the first meetings. I also appreciated the applications which provided me with the opportunity to reflect on the movies, the archetypes presented by the lecturers, the story lines, and the personal life experiences tied to the archetypes and/or the movies. I am a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist, and I make use of movies in my work with my clients, besides using other media such as fairy tales, myths, literature, drama, etc. I have found movies to be useful when working with children, individuals, couples, and families to provide psychoeducation, gain insight into one’s situation, learn emotional, social and behavioral skills, to understand oneself and know oneself (Know Thyself), etc. I was attracted to the Jungian Film School program because of my lifelong passion for movies.
~ Nerina Cecchin
Hello fellow Jungian film appreciators, now aficionados! I wish I could take the course all over as each module was so deep, it is hard to fathom their implications in a single week’s time. Good to be on a journey with you all and I wish you well in the days to come.
~ John W Comeford (Film maker)
Grazie a Tutti! Thanks to All!
This fate that got us together.
The movies we watched.
The Images and thought we created.
The connection beyond our Egos.
Grateful and Blissful experience.
Enjoy the rest of the Movie!
~ Elisa Superbi