Memories, movies, and dreams are kindred imaginal mediums; each transports us beyond the ordinary, weaving image and story into moving pictures permeated with symbolic meaning. Guided by depth psychology, mythic imagination, and the language of dream, we’ll delve into dream sequences from masterful memory-centered films, elucidating multiple forms of cinematic memory: opening scenes, nightmares, insights, visions, reveries, fantasies. Via lecture, film clip analysis, and discussion, we’ll observe how cinema, like dream, is rooted in and driven by symbol and metaphor. Films include The Long Day Closes, My Winnipeg, Vertigo, The Thin Blue Line, The Elephant Man, Heart of a Dog.

This program aims to expand and deepen participants’ visual literacy, dream wisdom, and depth psychological film appreciation.

Terry Ebinger, MS, is a passionate film scholar and retired psychotherapist with nearly four decades of experience as a depth psychological practitioner, educator, dream consultant, spiritual director, and multidisciplinary group leader. Her cinema studies incorporate mythic imagination, depth psychology, cultural history, dreaming, and film language. Terry’s approach to teaching is dynamic, soulful, practical, and playful. She teaches at several Jungian Institutes and Lifelong Learning programs across the country and through her own online Cinema Café programs. www.cinemaandpsyche.com

Beginning in the years leading up to the Great War, both C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien independently began to undergo profound imaginal experiences. Jung recorded these fantasies in a large red manuscript that he named Liber Novus, referred to simply as The Red Book. For Tolkien, this imaginal journey revealed to him the world of Middle-earth, whose stories and myths eventually led to the writing of, The Lord of the Rings, a book he named within its own imaginal history, The Red Book of Westmarch. This presentation explores the many synchronistic parallels between Jung’s and Tolkien’s Red Books: the style and content of their works of art, the narrative descriptions and scenes in their texts, the nature of their visions and dreams, and an underlying similarity in world view that emerged from their experiences. The two men seem to have been simultaneously treading parallel paths through the imaginal realm.

Becca Tarnas, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her research interests include depth psychology, archetypal studies, literature, philosophy, and the ecological imagination. Becca is an editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, and author of the book, Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. She is currently researching and writing a biography of Stanislav Grof, a co-founder of transpersonal psychology.

The artist, the alchemist/magician, and the activist are distinct archetypal manifestations, yet their patternings merge in a powerful hybridity that blurs distinctions and challenges perceptions of the nature of creativity and its power to reveal and transform. This talk will highlight the work of contemporary creator/ theorist/activists who exhibit this type of hybridity alongside the work of C.G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, and James Hillman. The more esoteric writings and practices of these three depth psychological icons offer revelatory insights into psyche, matter, and creative processes; insights that hold tremendous value–not only for those who identify as creative individuals, but for anyone called to a co- creative/co-operative and activist relationship with nature, society, and the cosmos.

Mary Antonia Wood, PhD, is a visual artist, writer, and Chair of the M.A. Depth Psychology & Creativity Program with emphasis in the Arts and Humanities at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA. She completed an M.A. and Ph.D. in Mythological Studies with emphasis in Depth Psychology, also at Pacifica, and an earlier BFA focused on visual art at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. She is the author of, The Archetypal Artist: Reimagining Creativity and the Call to Create. She resides in Santa Barbara, CA and mentors creative individuals via talismanmentoring.com.

This presentation explores Goddess KALI in her unknown avatar of the dancing goddess who holds passion and desire. Along with her fierce destructive form, we explore how she holds the projection of the human shadow that has the untamed capacity for violence and darkness.

A short video of the KALI festival from Kerala, India, takes you on a journey to the heart of tantra, bringing alive the archetypal image of the goddess, and how she lives in the human psyche today – unknown and untouched. The Hindu mytho- cultural frame presented, opens a bridge for one to access their desire as you hear the story of love and war and how she embraces the inner lover in the dance of desire.

KALI today becomes an image for the collective to ponder as she holds the polarity of being a dark void that evokes terror, holding the projection of the unending greed, lust and destruction and at the same time becoming a container that can hold the darkness like a womb to create life. Join me in this evocative journey which brings alive the oral tradition from India through myth, art and poetry.

Sunitha Sivamani is a Jungian Psychotherapist in private practice in Bangalore, India, and is associated with the Bangalore Society of Analytical Psychology (BSAP). She is a certified Bodydreaming Practitioner trained under Marian Dunlea (Body Soul Europe). Sunitha works with mythology, dreams, art, poetry and sandplay. She comes from a matrilineal ancestry and works at weaving the mythological, ritualistic traditions with psychological work, through the symbolic lens. Amongst her published works: An Ode to the Goddess Navaratri, in the Body Soul Europe Journal, Spring Edition 2024. Serpent’s Calling – Video Documentation of Sarpam Thullal tantric ritual from Kerala.

Poseidon is best known as the fierce and temperamental god of the sea. We know of his anger and vengeance that in mythology caused sea storms and earthquakes. But he was much more, and his rich mythology and history is largely unknown. Poseidon was a king god before Zeus, an archaic chthonic god, a source of primordial energies, a god of horses and fertility, a father figure, and a savior and protector as well as destroyer. Through myth, collective, family, and personal histories, meditation, and guided imagery, we will explore the full complexity of Poseidon’s mythology and archetypal nature. We will discover the ways this archetype has surfaced in our lives and histories, how to integrate it, and how to shape Poseidon’s primal and instinctual energies for growth and creativity.

This lecture introduces my new book: Passage to Poros: In the Sanctuary of the God of the Sea, forthcoming from Inner Traditions.

Edward Tick, Ph.D. is an archetypal psychotherapist, author, educator, international pilgrimage guide and activist, and advisor to the Jung Association of Western Mass. An expert on ancient Greece and the origins of medicine and psychotherapy in the Asklepian tradition, his books, The Practice of Dream Healing, War and the Soul, and Soul Medicine, are modern classics. His latest book reports on Ed’s encounters and explorations of the Poseidon archetype.

Ed has pioneered archetypal and culturally-based healing for over forty years. In addition to his private practice, Ed works in Greece and Viet Nam on holistic and spiritually-based healing and the restoration of ancient practices. He has led more than twenty healing pilgrimages to Greece and nineteen to Viet Nam. Author of eight previous books including the award-winning, War and the Soul, Ed uses the Greek tradition extensively in healing, writing, and teaching.

Working with fairy tales brings us into relationship with our inherited traditions in ways that make them answerable again to our individual conditions and to the spirit of the current time.

The Seal Woman tale, from the Irish and Scottish coasts, has much to teach us. This story of the capture of a wild and mythic creature, a selkie maid, and her return to the sea, has profound implications for our relationship with the natural world. The trauma, guilt and loss we experience because of human abuses of nature leave us separated and bereft, longing for reconnection. We are called to a metanoia, asked to perceive, to grieve, and to heal the models of exploitation and domination that injure our connection with our native elements.

Like the Seal Woman’s children, we are creatures of dual lineages, drawn to the enlivening, though chaotic depths of sea, yet required to make our lives on land. Attentiveness to longing helps us foster our ongoing connection with the inexhaustibility, creativity and wildness of psyche-in-nature. We will use poetry and concepts from alchemy to deepen our engagement with this tale, turning toward our own longing, to understand it as a force drawing us out of alienation into the vital core of our own becoming. We will let the Seal Woman instruct us on how to bring our depths into embodiment in this world..

Angie Brenner is a psychotherapist in private practice in Melrose, MA, and an analyst-in-training at the C.G. Jung Institute of New England. Her interests include trauma, integration of the Feminine and marginalized genders in the life of the soul, the human relationship with nature, and the transformative potential of mythopoetics on our lived experience.

This lecture helps us to grasp Jung’s understanding of the creative, healing capacities of the unconscious through the imaginal realm. Jung developed the method of embodied active imagination to access this vital resource. The Sufis’ spoke of the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, where one engages in a conscious dialogue with the personal and collective unconscious. Through this imaginal realm we descend into a spiral journey that weaves together the conscious and the unconscious, the personal and the archetypal, the somatic unconscious and the subtle body. Employing neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist’s knowledge of the left and right hemispheres brings clarity to the importance of Jung’s work in our times.

Erica Lorentz, MEd, LPC, Diplomate Jungian Analyst (IAAP) Her book, Body as Shadow: Jung’s Embodied Individuation Process, will be published in the fall of 2025. She is a training analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of New England, where she has served on the Training Board. She has been an adjunct faculty at Antioch New England Graduate School of Professional Psychology, and a training analyst with the Inter-regional Society of Jungian Analysts. Pacifica Radio and the Jung Platform have featured her work, and her lectures can be found on her website or on YouTube. Her area of expertise is working with the embodied mythopoetic process in analysis and the inter-active field. In 1975, her initiation into Jung’s Embodied Active Imagination Process started when she began studying Authentic Movement with Janet Adler.