Overview
“Rosebud” is the last word spoken by the dying tycoon in Citizen Kane—a fragment of lost childhood, untouched by power or success. What is the ‘Rosebud’ in your life? What was formative, fragile, almost forgotten but continues to shape your life path?
This course offers an immersive space to explore your spiritual autobiography not the facts of your life, but the mythic structure that underlies it.
Over six in-person gatherings, we will reflect, write, listen, and begin to recover the symbolic logic of our lives: the stories we inherited, the personas we wear, the moments we return to in memory or dream.
Guided by Jungian archetypes and supported by literature, film, music, and shared reflection, this is not (just) a writing workshop it is a space to ask:
🜂 Who am I?
🜄 Who am I becoming?
🜁 What is calling me?
What to Expect
• A deep dive into spiritual autobiography through a psycho-spiritual lens.
• Readings, music, films, and provocative questions to guide each week’s theme
• Gentle writing prompts to help you give shape to your inner story
• A closed group of participants, offering community, safety and an opportunity for depth.
• Time to develop one or two short autobiographical pieces, that you will share during the course of the programme.
• An option, for those that wish, to share these at a closed evening with friends and family.
WEEKLY THEMES
Without revealing too much, here’s a glimpse into our journey:
WEEK 1
The Stories That Shape Us
Is seeing believing – or believing seeing?
What happens when you tell your story aloud? Why do some stories save us? Drawing on the storytelling structure of Alcoholics Anonymous—and Jung’s surprising connection to it—we explore the primal need to speak one’s experience into being.
🎬 Drunks (1995)
🎧 Slaid Cleaves – One Good Year
📖 AA Big Book, Bill’s Story, Jung’s letter
WEEK 2
The Genre of Your Life Story
Are you the hero—or merely a guest at the party? We explore metanoia, redemption arcs, and alternatives to the classic hero’s journey. Critical factor here – answering the quandary that opens David Copperfield: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Is the entire heroic mindset the only story to strive for? If you’re not the life of the party, is it OK to just be one of the guests?
🎬 Finding Vivian Maier / Citizen Kane
📖 The Hero of This Book
🎧 Joni Mitchell – People’s Parties
WEEK 3
Persona and the Private Self
Public vs. private, professional vs. personal: how many faces do you wear? What masks have fused with your skin? For most, we’re divided up between the personal and the professional. How do you navigate these? Are these well integrated, or better kept separate? What happens when they work well together – and when they don’t? What does it mean to have a calling? What if you don’t?
🎬 How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Severance
📖 The Art of the Deal + ghostwriter’s perspective
🎧 Rolling Stones – The Promo Man
WEEK 4
A Woman’s Perspective
The feminine gaze: interior, intuitive, image-rich. What does it mean to see – and be seen?
🎬 Gas, Food, Lodging
📖 Annie Dillard – Seeing
🎧 Shawn Colvin – Polaroids
WEEK 5
A Man’s Perspective
The masculine mythos: searching, defending, surrendering. What must be remembered and what must be forgiven?
🎬 The Tao of Steve< / Deep Water documentary
📖 St. Exupéry – Wind, Sand & Stars
🎧 Johnny Cash – A Boy Named Sue
✍️ Continue shaping your story, with optional group feedback.
WEEK 6
Rosebud Told Aloud
You are invited to speak what you’ve written. In a listening space, we share fragments of self, dream, and memory.
📖 Yehuda Amichai – Try to Remember Some Details
🎧 The Beatles – Rain
COURSE DETAILS
| When | Six Tuesdays, 26th August-30th September 2025 |
| Where | The Athenaeum, Newlands, Cape Town |
| Format | In-person only |
| Time | 18:30-21:30 |
| Cost | R2500 |
Who This Course Is For
- Anyone called to explore their personal mythology
• Writers, seekers, artists, therapists
• Those standing at a threshold or turning point
• People drawn to Jungian thought, story, and the symbolic life
No previous experience required – only a willingness to reflect and remember.
Something in you remembers. Let’s begin there.
Join us for a journey into the stories beneath the story.
Rosebud & Revelations begins soon.
REGISTRATION
Please complete the Registration Form below to enroll. You will receive an invoice via email.
Registration for Rosebud and Revelation
For more information contact anja@appliedjung.com
FACULTY
Carl Lindemann (Facilitator) – Carl Lindemann is a writer and consultant with wide ranging interests from interfaith dialogue, to our understanding of the cosmos. He holds a degree in Philosophy from Wesleyan University and studied biblical hermeneutics at Harvard Divinity School. Originally from the United States, he was a member of the Religion Department and campus ministry at Philips `Exeter Academy. He also served in the ministry at First Church in Salem (Massachusetts), famous for its role in the infamous Witch Trials. He wrote exstensively about online culture at the advent of the World Wide Web and was the creator of Cyberscene: The Socially Significant Cyberspace, a daily feature for public broadcast.
More recently, he is the author of Santa Soaked: A story for all Ages, a re-imagining of the foundational story of our consumer culture to shift us towards a sustainable society. His screenplay adaptation was a semi-finalist in the Hollywood Climate Summit’s “pitchiest” competition in 2023. He serves on the advisory board of the Cape Town Interfaith Initiative and has maintained a daily Vipassana meditation practice for some twenty years.
Supported by: Stephen Anthony Farah – Stephen Anthony Farah, MA is the co-founder and Head of Learning and Research at The Centre for Applied Jungian Studies South Africa. He is the current co-Chair of the International Association of Jungian Studies. Stephen holds an honours degree in analytical philosophy from the University of the Witwatersrand and a master’s degree in Jungian and Post Jungian Studies from the University of Essex. Stephen’s areas of interest include psychoanalysis, film, psychoeducation, consciousness, individuation, and Future Studies.
His published papers include ‘True Detective and Jung’s Four Steps of Transformation’ published in ‘The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies’ (2018) and ‘The Freak: in Search of Jung’s second Personality’, in the anthology ‘The Spectre of the Other in Jungian Psychoanalysis: Political, Psychological and Sociological Perspectives’, (Routledge 2022) which Stephen co-edited.
And Alexia Athalie Figgins – Alexia Athalie Figgins started her Journey with The Centre for Applied Jungian Studies in 2013 when she enrolled in the 12 Steps to Individuation Programme. She later went on to complete the Conscious Living Program and is currently in the Centre’s Master Class. In 2021 she received certification from The Jungian Coaching School International.
Alexia manages the Centre’s social media pages, and co-facilitates the Cape Town classes and workshops. Alexia is a course creator, coordinator and moderator in the area of the arts & depth psychology. She is also interested in embodiment praxis (being an ex-ballet dancer) and how healing happens through the body.
TESTIMONIALS
I found the program to be really engaging, inspiring and informative. I appreciated how the lectures and the embodied practices wove together.
This course was a wonderful exploration of intellectual material woven into body based movement work.
Exhilarating and provocative, it introduced me to new ways of thinking and to thinkers and artists new to me. It has emboldened me in its way of overturning and subverting received ideas, normative and coercive ideas that are rarely dismantled.
I got so much more than I even expected. It has been very stimulating and inspiring. Most speakers brought new perspectives and opened to critical thinking. I was inspired in having conversations with friend and family about what I learned.
I looked forward to each session! I learned many new ideas about ways of being from each speaker. Because I’m passionate about moving, dancing, and expressing myself physically, I especially loved the embodiment sessions with Nico. I liked the back and forth between lectures and embodiment.
