Alliance member, author, and Pacifica faculty member Robert Romanyshyn has a lot going on and I'm delighted to feature him here in the online depth community. I've had the distinct pleasure of attending several of Dr. Romanyshyn's classes and workshops and have read three of his powerful books: Technology as Symptom and Dream, The Soul in Grief, and The Wounded Researcher. Dr. Romanyshyn's work is truly poetic and transformational. If you've had the pleasure of working with him and would like to share, let us all know by responding here!
About Robert Romanyshyn:
Robert Romanyshyn, Ph.D., is an Affiliate Member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and a Senior Core Faculty Member in the Clinical and Depth Psychotherapy Programs at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has authored six books, has contributed chapters to numerous edited volumes, and published essays and reviews in many professional journals. In addition to lectures and workshops presented in the U.S., he has taught and lectured in Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and parts of Africa.
For thousands of years, the Antarctic has been a place in the collective imagination as well as a geographical location. Just as explorers have traveled to those regions, poets and writers have explored the polar regions of the soul. In November 2009, Dr. Robert Romanyshyn traveled to the Antarctic, connecting to a dream he had over thirty years ago about a journey to the polar regions of the Earth.
This exciting Jung Platform launch lecture will explore the intertwining of psyche and nature in the context of the ecological crisis of the melting polar ice. After reviewing how Carl Jung’s description of the psychoid nature of the archetype – the non-psychic aspect of the archetype seen as a bridge to matter in general – Dr. Romanyshyn will draw on a series of images from this journey that have been set to music. They will show how the body as an aesthetic response to the world is the place where psyche becomes nature and nature becomes psyche.
Here is a video excerpt from a larger lecture. The Jung Platform has made the lecture available for "on demand" purchase which entitles you to view the lecture as many times as you want for 90 days.
ROBERT ROMANYSHYN NOVEMBER 2011 SCHEDULE
WORKSHOPS & LECTURES
Nov 11, 2011 Portland, Oregon Friends of Jung
Lecture Psyche and Nature: Inner journeys in the Outer World
With his idea of the psychoid archetype Jung explored a level of the unconscious where psyche and nature are one. In this lecture, I will show how what we have called the unconscious is at this level the conscious of nature within us. Presenting a DVD I made after returning from a journey I took to the Antarctic in Nov. 2009, I will describe how this journey in the outer world began with a journey in the inner world of a dream of more than 30 years ago. I will also suggest in this lecture that the format of the DVD, which presents 86 images set to music accompanied by a voice over, deepens a psychology of mind, where the inner world of psyche and the outer world of nature are separate, into an aesthetics of the heart, where the inner and the outer intersect each other. In addition I will also consider how psychology as an aesthetic response to nature can be the foundation for a radical ecology that attends to the crises of nature as a symptom calling us to re-member the broken connections between the world and us.
Nov 12, 2011/Friends of Jung-Portland, OR
Workshop Left by the Side of the Road: Individuation and Homecoming
This workshop explores the connection between the psychoid archetype presented in the Friday evening lecture and individuation. Beginning with that beautiful story of the rainmaker that Jung tells in Mysterium Coniunctionis, we will explore how a radical ecology that puts us in harmony with nature presumes and requires a sense of harmony within oneself.
For Jung individuation refers to those moments and occasions in one’s life when one is called to follow the law of one’s own being, to become the person one was meant to be. Such moments often occur in mid- life, but they can take place at any moment of important transitions. Anxiety most often accompanies these moments and they are also quite often expressed in dreams and symptoms. Individuation is a crisis but as such it is not only a danger, it is also an opportunity. Individuation presents each of us with the chance to transform one’s fate into a destiny.
In this workshop we will explore Jung’s theme of individuation as a process of homecoming and show how in coming home to oneself one also comes home to the world. Through music, film, story and poetry we will create a space of reverie in which we will make use of dream material, symptoms, fantasies, and writing exercises to tap into the creative unconscious in order to begin the work of transforming memory into memoir. Together we will engage in a journey whose steps include slowing down, learning to linger in the moment and adopting an attitude of hospitality that allows us to be turned back toward and to be addressed by those aspects of ourselves that have been forgotten, ignored, abandoned, left behind or otherwise sacrificed. Along this path we will engage those who wait for us with the unfinished business of our lives.
The goal of this workshop is for each participant to begin crafting a narrative of homecoming that arises within a slowness that reaches toward the stillness of a solitude that reaches toward the silence of a sorrow that reaches toward and be-comes serenity.
Nov. 18, 2011/Society of Existential Analysis/London, England
Lecture Technology: Alienation and Homecoming
“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main…And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”(John Donne)
Through a DVD I made of my trip to the Antarctic in Nov.2009, I explore the connections among technology, nature and psychotherapy. The DVD demonstrates how the continuing belief in a self isolated and alienated from nature is a root of our suffering and is dangerous, unethical and even delusional. It narrates how the silent splendor of the uncanny beauty of this landscape awakens us to the therapeutic power of re-membering our broken connections with the world.
This lecture will be conducted on Skype between 10:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Pacific Coast time.
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