To work with images without literalizing, resisting, or disembodying them is an alchemical discipline that enlarges imaginal capacity—the ability to see through what is arising rather than be possessed by it, or to repress it (another kind of possession). Our ability to feel fully what is arising and present, without taking it personally, is the muscle we being to develop when we can see begin to see our experience in relation to the animate and archetypal. Seeing archetypally enables the release of some of the impact of our projection from the object that carries it, a processes that co-arises with the body’s ability to know instinctually, experience life (including its hardships) erotically, and respond with creativity. The pain of our desires and suffering galvanizes this process. Through it, eventually, body becomes sacred and, no longer burdening the world with the unconscious expectation of the archetypal god, we can begin the journey of actual relationship - to life, the self, and the other - with aliveness and appreciation for all that is.

 Myth gives this process a human face in the story of Psyche and Eros. Psyche, is the mortal portion of beauty who the god Eros falls in love with, accidentally pricking himself with his own arrow. Their union is not immediate or idealized; it unfolds through longing, frustration, betrayal, and commitment. Eros names the forward movement of desire and its inherent inhibition that draws us into relationship (both inner and outer). Psyche names Soul - the view to see through, and to touch the ineffable beauty of of life in its full display. To stay with the trouble of the emergent, the labor of suffering, and the task of differentiation, and appreciate them with aesthetic sensibility, is to make real love, beyond fantasy, possible. Psyche and Eros’ eventual marriage does not bypass difficulty; it is forged through it. In this way, inner marriage (alchemically known as heiros gamas), and the work of attaining it does not replace outer relationship with inner—it makes it possible.

This series of courses engages major themes of psychotherapeutic practice - starting with some of the founding myths of psychology that began with Freud, to a post-Jungian perspective of major themes such as mother, farther, dark fantasy and moods, and the wound.

Theory is supported by artistic and somatic strategies to open as to a depth of image and emergent experience

Year One consists of two 8-week courses and one 6-week course, beginning with an exploration and revisioning of the myths of mother and father through a Jungian and post Jungian lens:
What's the Matter with Mother and Oedipus Revisited. To mythologize these figures in their complexity is to explore how they constellate the child, the hero, the innocent, the underworld, and the puer aeternus in relation to the senex and the fathering spirit. Through the work we deepen the psychic ground necessary to see though the surface narrative of our experience, and cultivate our insighting witness, to support the conditions through which suffering and complexes may reveal both their necessity and their telos.
 
The Wound and the Eye follows what is perhaps a simultaneously enormous theme coming out of the developmental mode of psychology and its Christian inheritance - that of the original ‘wound’, or childhood infliction. Rather than fixating on woundedness or the perceived injustices of childhood as deviations from an imagined perfection, we turn our attention to the soul’s impulse and necessity to pathologize. By developing the capacity to descend beneath suffering’s more superficial forms, we uncover how trauma might not only deepens us, but also holds intimate keys to our eroticism and aliveness.