Instructor: Richard Stein, MD
4 CE CREDITS available for this course
"The spirit of the depths is pregnant with ice, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror."--C.G. Jung, "A Descent into Hell in the Future," The Red Book, p. 238
"I am the victim of titanic ills, I am the doer of demoniac deeds; I was made for evil, evil is my lot..." --Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, p. 507
In the first decade of the 20th Century, there was a general optimism about the future of humanity. Science and reason were emerging as great powers to solve human technical and social problems, and religion was on the decline. Nietzsche had declared that God was dead, Darwin had laid the foundations of evolution and genetics, Marx’s theories were touted as the solution to social injustice, and Freud’s theory of the unconscious revealed the well springs of human behavior. Humankind seemed on the brink of entering a golden age of reason.
Yet there were also uneasy rumblings about the social, artistic, and spiritual developments that were coming with this change in the weltanschauung. Great artists and thinkers were catching glimpses of something dark and destructive in human nature that could not be controlled by the modern mind. If the intelligence and powers once projected on God were no longer external and transcendent, then what of the dark and demonic forces of Satan? If heaven is a projection of human imagination, then what of hell?
In 1912, as Jung broke away from Freudian psychoanalysis, his personal turmoil led to intuitions of the dark times to come. His visions (1912-13) formed the basis of The Red Book (2009). It begins with an inner conflict.... (Read more on the site...)
In our Saturday seminar, we will examine the confrontation with hell and death in spiritual transformation and look for personal, clinical and collective answers to this ongoing struggle.
RICHARD STEIN, MD, is a psychiatrist and an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Following a stay in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (1973-4) he returned to San Francisco where he trained as a Jungian analyst. He has written about Sri Aurobindo, the archetype of initiation, and Jung’s shadow problem, as well as teaching and lecturing regularly in the analytic training and public programs of the Jung Institute and other training centers. He has been in private practice for over 30 years in San Francisco.
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