Announcing “Earth, Climate, Dreams”—the BOOK! 13 in-depth conversations with Depth Psychologists on how we address these critical topics in the Age of the Anthropocene.

Contributors include Jungian analyst Jerome Bernstein; climate scientist and Jungian, Jeffrey Kiehl; Jungian scholar, Susan Rowland; Depth educator/author Robert Romanyshyn; Depth educator Veronica Goodchild; plus other scholars, educators, or Jungian analysts including Steve Aizenstat, Sally Gillespie, Susannah Benson, Nancy Furlotti, Michael Conforti —co-edited by Jon Marshall and Bonnie Bright

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Over time, humans in western cultures have undergone a profound restructuring of the psyche resulting in a traumatic sense of separation. In modern day, we face a growing set of challenges on ecological and social fronts, in part due to the significant impact of human activity on the planet, an era now informally called the Anthropocene.

If humans are going to deal with climate change, ecological destruction, and the recognition of an age in which humans are changing the very structures of our world, then we need both social and psychological change.

This crisis requires that we reflect on our situation from a depth psychological perspective, contemplating how we might tap into the underlying archetypal themes at work in the culture and begin to articulate them in ways that inspire and move us to personal and collective action.

Indeed, without some understanding of our psychological processes and our unconscious dynamics, it is unlikely that any social change we can generate will solve the problems we face. Our psychological drives will continue the crisis.

Yet, in this book, Jungian analysts, therapists, and academics with an interest in Depth Psychology discuss their approaches to these problems with Bonnie Bright, Ph.D., a certified transpersonal coach and the Founder of Depth Psychology Alliance, with hope and inspiration. Together, they contemplate psychological issues of ecological collapse, our conceptual separation from nature, the cultural complexes that drive us, and the importance of attending various Jungian, depth, and transpersonal modalities—including our dreams—for engaging with what may well be the challenge of our age and of ages to come.

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CONTENT

Facing Climate Change through a Jungian Lens

Jeffrey Kiehl in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright

Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in Jung and Hillman

Susan Rowland in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright 

Dreams and the Animated Earth

Stephen Aizenstat in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright         

Navigating the Great Transition

Susannah Benson in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright          

Dominion Psyche, Reciprocity Psyche, Borderland Consciousness

Jerome Bernstein in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright         

We Need to Talk about Climate Change,
with Depth

Sally Gillespie in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright  

The Frankenstein Prophecies: The Untold Tale

Robert Romanyshyn in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright

The Human Soul in Transition at the Dawn
of a New Era

Erel Shalit in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright        

The Role of Primary Narcissism in the Ecological Crisis

Michael Conforti in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright

Complexity, Depth Ecology and Climate Change

Jonathan Marshall in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright

Dreams, Synchronicities and our Relationship
to the Earth

Veronica Goodchild in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright

Revisiting the Well at the Dawn of Life: Teachings of the Maya

Nancy Swift Furlotti in Dialogue with Bonnie Bright

Culture Collapse Disorder: What the Bees
Can Teach Us

Bonnie Bright Interviewed by Jonathan Marshall

Multi-logue on the Cultural Complex of the English-Speaking West

Group Discussion

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PRAISE FOR EARTH, CLIMATE, DREAMS

Depth psychologist Bonnie Bright and her colleagues help us understand that climate change is not just an environmental, economic, social or security challenge - although it is all of these - but a deeply psychological crisis that demands “a new psychological position and understanding.” A must-read for anyone wanting to better understand why we’re in our current mess and how to get out of it!”

—Linda Buzzell, Co-Editor, Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind

These interviews are, at one level, a fine tribute to Jung’s vision that the human psyche cannot be considered in isolation from the wider forces that govern life on Earth. But Bonnie Bright’s collection of dialogues also has a far more urgent relevance: the Anthropocene has now been unleashed and it remains an open question whether we can act in time to maintain a habitable planet. The answer will lie in a myriad of policy and behavioural decisions and underlying them all is the need for humankind to transform its notions of self-interest in the light of Earth consciousness. The interviews in this book are both signposts and beacons in that all-important journey.

—Adrian Tait, Co-Founder, Climate Psychology Alliance

Dreams open a portal to another way of seeing the world, offering access to the personal and collective unconscious. Dreams encourage the imagination to flourish. Sometimes, dreams can offer another way to approach seemingly insoluble problems. So this anthology arrives at the perfect moment, offering insights and inspiration in this time of climate chaos and global crisis, with contributions from leading thinkers in the field of depth psychology, science and education.

—Mary-Jayne Rust, Co-Editor, Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis

“This work provides a unique perspective on the issue of climate disruption. Science has provided us with all the evidence necessary for immediate action, yet too little is being done too slowly to address this global threat. As Jung noted, in such times of deep disarray, perhaps we should ask the unconscious what to do. The dialogues in this work do just that. Here we are given an opportunity to listen to psyche’s concerns about our planet.”

—Jeffrey T. Kiehl. Climate Scientist, Jungian Analyst, Author of Facing Climate Change: An Integrated Path to the Future

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PUBLICATION DATA

Earth, Climate, Dreams: Dialogues with Depth Psychologists in the Age of the Anthropocene—A collection of interviews with Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, scientists, educators, and scholars in conversation with Bonnie Bright, Ph.D., edited by Bonnie Bright and Jonathan Paul Marshall. Published July 10, 2019, by Depth Insights; $14.95 trade paperback (ISBN#978-0-9979550-2-6), 450 pages; $9.99 Kindle. Available on Amazon.com.

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U.K.-based psychotherapist and activist, Andrew Samuels has a long history as a consultant to political clients on the presidential and prime ministerial level. While Samuels first published Politics on the Couch in 2001 and The Political Psyche in 2015, his newest book, A New Therapy for Politics? delves ever more deeply into the intersection between psychotherapy and politics and lends a critical eye to his own chosen profession in an effort to bring the two together.

Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, both pioneers in the field of psychotherapy, wrote about politics over the course of their careers, Samuels points out, but psychotherapists have generally been “magnificently unsuccessful” in creating a significant contribution to the political arena.

Jung was very aware of “how the political world penetrates into the silent, pure space of the consulting room,” Samuels maintains, but most psychotherapists don’t have much of a reach outside their own community of therapeutic professionals.

Notably, they tend to be completely caught up in their own language and their own concept. The inclination to maintain that “everything is psychological” results in hierarchical dynamics where psychologists or therapists place themselves above the everyday fray that makes up politics. This positioning weakens their capacity to add value or engage in a meaningful way, a position that is exacerbated by... READ the full post here

As the newly appointed President and CEO of Pacifica, Dr. Joseph Cambray was drawn to Pacifica in part because he perceived the powerful opportunities it offered to pursue new directions in depth psychology and to help grow depth psychology on the world stage.

NEW! *Read a written transcript of this interview here

In this interview, Sandra Easter, Ph.D., author of Jung and the Ancestors: Beyond Biography, Mending the Ancestral Web, speaks movingly about how developing a relationship with our ancestors and ancestral past can help us heal, both individually and collectively.

Sandra offers workshops in ancestral soul work and transformational visioning for individuals and organizations, and she will be presenting about ancestral soul work at the C.G. Jung Psychology and Spirituality Conference in Santa Fe, NM, which takes place June 9-16, 2017.

The 2017 conference, “Nature and Soul: Cultivating a Relationship with the Wholeness of All,” seeks to provide an opportunity to explore the integration of Jungian Psychology and spirituality by means of in-depth lectures by Jungian Analysts, creative expression, rituals, and excursions to sites that enhance the experience of the world of C.G. Jung.

The vision is that the conference will go beyond a traditional format to serve as a retreat. Participants will be eating meals together, attending daily dream circles and talking circles, spending time socializing and networking, and also going on excursions into nature, history and the artistic communities of Santa Fe.

Conference presenters include Jerome Bernstein, Jeffrey Kiehl, Thomas Elsner, Monika Wikman, John Todd, Puddi Kullberg, and Frank Morgan, along with Sandra Easter

Get details or register for the Conference at www.JungConference.org

WATCH the video interview

LISTEN to the audio version here

READ a written transcript of this interview here

In this latest interview from Depth Alliance founder, Bonnie Bright, PhD, Dr. Jean Houston makes a passionate call for us to each "elect ourselves" and to "become party to all our parts." There couldn't be a more compelling and poignant call at this critical time in our world....

Jean Houston is almost legendary in popular culture for her passionate engagement, poetic rhetoric, and her poignant appeal for transformation and belief in what she calls “the possible human,” also the title of one her nearly 30 books.

One of her many current projects is the collaboration and production of a play which will be previewed at Pacifica Graduate Institute on March 4. “Tonight in Dreamland,” a “serious comedy” as Houston refers to it, was written with Cheri Steinkellner, an award-winning writer and producer of a multitude of plays and TV shows (including the hit series, Cheers), and who is also currently a student in the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life program at Pacifica.

Having just returned from the “Sister Giant” conference in Washington D.C., where presented alongside Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson, Thom Hartmann, and Robert Thurman (among others), Houston’s passions were clearly stirred when she sat down to speak with me.

That conference, also streamed live around the world, explored the intersection of spirituality and politics—a befitting arena for Houston’s long track record of advocating and fostering leadership and personal and social transformation. We are powerfully connected, she asserts, because we don’t just live in the universe; the universe also lives in us. We are called now, more than ever before, to use the incredible powers that exist in us, tapping into powers that we have rarely collectively been required to use... (Read the full post or access the audio interview)

Even before getting her Master’s degree in Counseling psychology at Pacifica, Adriana Attento was working in the field of psychology. During that same period, she was also doing a lot of writing—meeting with a friend to free write next to the ocean every morning for an hour—and she was also meditating as a regular spiritual practice. Somehow, she now believes, the combination of these two practices opened something up for her, creating a “flow, and abundance of images that images that felt very potent.”

While some of those images that arose during her practice represented personal reflections for her, others seemed to be larger, carrying a kind of “cognition,” evoking an experience that included “a knowing beyond rational or logical thinking.”

At that time, Adriana reports, she developed a specific awareness that there is something very powerful about the force of the imagination. She also came to realize that much of her writing was very self-reflective, facilitating a process of self-inquiry by which she could examine various aspects of her experience of being in the world. This understanding ultimately led her to consider psychology as a field of study— and especially the study of psychology that takes the imagination into account.

Not long after one of her “big” experiences with the imagination, she happened on a book edited by a Jungian analyst named Joan Chodorow, entitled, “Jung on Active Imagination.” The book seemed to explain a lot of what Attento had recently experienced firsthand through the transcendent experience that had originated from her practice of writing and meditation. She began reading some of Jung’s works, and ultimately... (Read the full post or listen to the interview here)

Excerpt from a powerful new post by Jungian analyst and climate scientist, Jeffrey T. Kiehl:

“If we are stumbling into an era of dictators, Caesars, and incarnated States, we have accomplished a cycle of two thousand years and the serpent has again met with its own tail. Then our era will be a near replica of the first centuries A.D., when Caesar was the State and a god, and divine sacrifices were made to Caesar while the temples of the gods crumbled away. You know that thousands in those days turned their eyes away from this visible world, filled with horror and disgust, and adopted a philosophy which healed their souls.”—C.G. Jung CW (18, par. 1342)

...Jung wrote the above quoted words in 1936, a time when many Caesar’s were appearing in the world, a time when nationalism was on the rise in Germany, Russia, and Italy. Here he observes that the appearance of dictators occurred in the past and a common response for some in such times was a turning away to find a way to heal the soul. Such soul-based philosophy requires a turning within in order to transcend the materialistic poverty of the outer world. In reaction to the outcome of the US election there is a call for immediate action. I do not deny action is essential, but of equal importance is taking the time to look quietly within, which opens us to healing our wounded souls.

At such pivotal points we need to balance ‘doing’ with ‘being’ so that our actions come from a deeper place within us, a place rooted in consciousness, connectedness and caring. At this pivotal point in our history we are in need of soulful approaches for working with our highly fragmented world. Depth psychology roots us in the varied dimensions of psyche and provides us with skillful means for exploring shadow and light in imaginative ways.

How did we get here? Earlier in his 1936 essay Jung (CW 18, par. 1330) says that,

“Nations in a condition of collective misery behave like neurotic or even psychotic individuals. First they get dissociated or disintegrated, then they pass into a state of confusion and disorientation.”

Here in the US we have felt this state of confusion and disorientation for a while. There is dis-ease in... (Read the full post on Jeff's site)

Check out a new interview and blogpost from Bonnie Bright: "Encountering Sabina Spielrein: Forging Paths To & Through Powerful Women in Depth Psychology" with Angela Sells, who is teaching on the topic this Fall at Meridian University!

Thanks, Angela, for a fascinating conversation!

In 2011, Sabina Spielrein became something of a household name due to the debut of a mainstream film called A Dangerous Method, starring well-known actors including Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Viggo Mortensen. The film purported to tell the story of Sabina Spielrein, a young woman psychiatric patient and acquaintance of the infamous doctors Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, pioneers of the modern psychoanalytical and depth psychology movements.

When Angela Sells, who earned her degree in mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, first heard of Spielrein in a class at Pacifica, something about Sabina captured her imagination. She began to research Spielrein’s life and work, quickly discovering that Spielrein was a young Russian woman from a well-to-do Jewish family who was institutionalized for psychological distress when she met Jung at age 19. Spielrein’s sister had died at a young age when Sabina was just 15 years old, initiating a profound crisis of faith and much psychological distress. Sabina ultimately was diagnosed with hysteria, leading to her extended stay at the clinic where Jung treated her as an inpatient for an 8-month period of time, and then as an outpatient for a number of years afterward. During that time, Jung engaged in a romantic relationship with Spielrein, a controversial affair that followed both of them throughout their lives, but which affected Spielrein, who entered the affair when she was just nineteen, quite dramatically on both personal and professional levels.

While some of these details correlate with the narrative provided by the film, A Dangerous Method, Sells notes, the story is not only highly fictionalized, it unfortunately amplifies and proliferates the stigma that has followed Sabina Spielrein into the current century. For Sells, who was led to study Spielrein’s personal journals in some detail and has formed her own carefully researched opinions about the psychological wounding that occurred to Spielrein as a result of the affair, the topic of contention is primarily about how Spielrein has been represented in modern scholarship. Much has been made of “just eight months in the life of a teenager” who had an affair with Jung, but, as Sells points out, history has effectively reduced the memory of Sabina Spielrein to that of a teenage girl in treatment who notoriously had a relationship with Jung—when, in reality, she went on to complete her doctorate and to become a brilliant Freudian analyst who made great contributions to the field.

In fact, Spielrein became friends and later colleagues with Freud and was the second female member of the Vienna society of Freudian analysts, where she presented her research. She also became one of the first—if not the first—child psychoanalyst. in 1912, Spielrein originated the idea of the death instinct, a concept which Freud himself took up in 1920. Though the two had different takes on the idea, Freud did reference her work in his own research. Spielrein’s work was often overshadowed, though, in spite of the fact that she had profound ideas as an analyst in her own right, Sells maintains. Among those contributions, Spielrein worked in some depth with the idea of “union,” and what it means both psychologically and mythologically, and reflected upon what our own impulses and instincts are regarding union and the innate desire to want to dissolve into what she referred to as the sublime.

It’s a detriment to Spielrein’s reputation to maintain such focus on her very youthful relationship with Jung when there’s so much more to her as a woman and a psychologist...

CLICK HERE To read the full post and get the link to the audio interview on Pacifica Post

In light of the recent shootings at Isla Vista/UCSB [Update June 5: Now adding Seattle Pacific University] as well as the hundreds of other gun violence incidents across the country and the world, I wanted to share/re-share some depth psychological resources and discussion around the topic. But first, some statistics courtesy of NBC News

• Every year in the U.S., an average of more than 100,000 people are shot, according to The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence.
  
  
• Every day in the U.S., an average of 289 people are shot. Eighty-six of them die: 30 are murdered, 53 kill themselves, two die accidentally, and one is shot in a police intervention, the Brady Campaign reports.
  
  
• Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 335,609 people died from guns -- more than the population of St. Louis, Mo. (318,069), Pittsburgh (307,484), Cincinnati, Ohio (296,223), Newark, N.J. (277,540), and Orlando, Fla. (243,195) (sources:  CDF, U.S. Census; CDC)
  
  
• One person is killed by a firearm every 17 minutes, 87 people are killed during an average day, and 609 are killed every week. (source: CDC)