Schedule Overview
Join us at CIIS to celebrate Jung's 150th birthday and explore how his psychology continues to offer meaningful perspectives on personal growth, collective healing, and cultural transformation during these challenging times.
Exploring Jung's Continued Relevance
From depth psychology to psychedelic healing, from cultural complexes to ecological trauma—experience 43 presentations exploring how Jung's insights address our most pressing contemporary challenges. Each day offers unique explorations connecting ancient wisdom with modern applications.
Explore Jung's core concepts through contemporary and transdisciplinary lenses—from Steiner's anthroposophy to psychedelic therapy, from Chinese worldview to somatic approaches. Features visionary art therapy, archetypal healing, and collaborative individuation.
Examine Jung's relevance for social transformation through cultural analysis, racism healing, and collective trauma work. Includes explorations of AI, transhumanism, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and American cultural complexes.
Discover Jung's influence on modern healing modalities, from Holocaust writings to ecological trauma, Persian mysticism to embodied practice. Half-day sessions conclude with reflections on Jung's decolonized future.
Day 1
Friday, September 19 | 10:00am - 11:00am
Opening Keynote Speaker
Rick Tarnas, Ph.D.
Jung and Our Moment in History
To understand our moment in history—our present condition, our identity and meaning—we must begin by recognizing that the present is always deep, not a mere point in a horizontal continuum. The present contains the entire past deeply layered within it. We all contain that larger past, dynamically interacting within our depths. This recognition is Jung’s great focus. Impelled by the power of his own encounter with these depths, Jung was able to translate that encounter into an` articulate vision of the deep psyche and of human life, both individual and collective, along with multiple practices for us to carry forward that long journey of self-understanding and transformation.
Friday, September 19 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
River Lu, Ph.D.
Spirited Words, Living Psyche: Animism and the Chinese Worldview as Collective Individuation
This presentation brings Jung’s vision of re-enchantment into dialogue with the enduring animistic Chinese worldview. Drawing on Jung’s concept of individuation and its resonance with the Chinese tradition of self-cultivation, it explores how reclaiming animistic consciousness—through language, poetry, and cultural memory—can foster collective psychological healing. The Chinese language, rich in pictorial and tonal nuance, offers a living “soul-language” that sustains an embodied, interconnected view of self and cosmos. Through classical poetry, symbolic figures, and music, the presentation evokes a sensuous experience of wholeness in a disenchanted world.
Friday, September 19 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Jason Butler, Ph.D. and Shanna Butler, Ph.D.
Psychedelic Soul-Making: Imaginal Approaches to Internalized Shame in Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy with Queer, Non-binary, and Transgender Clients
This paper proposes a Jungian and Hillmanian imaginal approach to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, emphasizing active imagination and soul-making as methods for engaging the rich imagery of expanded consciousness. Rather than pathologizing psychedelic content, this method honors emergent figures and landscapes as meaningful expressions of psyche. With a focus on queer, nonbinary, and transgender clients, we explore how imaginal praxis can help metabolize internalized homophobia and transphobia as forms of shame. Through detailed case material, we show how this approach fosters emotional truth, compassion, and self-affirmation, demonstrating the ongoing relevance of Jungian thought in addressing contemporary psychological and cultural challenges.
Friday, September 19 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
John Tresch, Ph.D.
A Springboard for the Jungian Century: The Eranos Meetings
Jungian ideas have transformed contemporary culture. A secret laboratory for shaping and amplifying them was the Eranos meetings, held annually in Ascona, Switzerland from 1933. At these lakeside conferences, organized by Jung and artist Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, adventurous thinkers explored spiritual practices and philosophies from religions worldwide. Major archetypal concepts were launched and elaborated there: Jung’s “synchronicity,” Mircea Eliade’s “shamanism,” Paul Radin’s “trickster,” Erich Neuman’s “Great Mother,” and more. Its unique ambience inspired James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, and Esalen’s founders. Understanding the “banquet” of ideas at Eranos offers insight into the reach, complexity, and vitality of Jungian thought today.
Friday, September 19 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Matthew David Segall, Ph.D.
Remembering the Repressed with Jung and Steiner
Jung’s question to Western religion, philosophy, and psychology—“Where is the fourth?”—could not be more relevant to our currently climaxing cultural crisis, a crisis driven from the depths by modern civilization’s wounded repression of the earthy, instinctual, shadowed element who completes the traditional Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. This talk revisits Jung’s analysis of Christian, Platonic, and Hermetic symbols to show how individuation requires integrating the “inferior” function and acknowledging evil as a necessary counterpole to the good. Juxtaposing Jung with Rudolf Steiner’s Luciferic (inflated spiritualism) and Ahrimanic (cold materialism) personifications of evil, I read Steiner’s anthroposophy and Representative of Humanity statue as a pedagogy of archetypal balance. To remember the missing fourth, I propose cosmopolitical practices as forms of psychosocial hygiene that fuse ritual, imagination, and ethical action. The call is to move beyond worshiping integration to carrying the cross of opposites together, now.
Friday, September 19 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Dr. Butterfly
A Mandala for Mutual Aid: A Post-Jungian Approach to Ethnosexual Mythologies
What if the Kemetic mythology of Auset and Asar was not merely a symbolic narrative but also a program for liberation? As part of a doctoral dissertation that performed an alchemical conjunctio of Jung and Fanon, four Black queer men made art based on our African cultural heritage while discussing the impact of colonialism on our lives and communities, resulting in a mandala for mutual aid in the form of a music video. Juxtaposing Romanyshyn and Armstrong with Brewster and Kimbles, the paper presents an Afrocentric model for psychological research in which mythological consciousness facilitates alchemical transformation of cultural complexes.
Friday, September 19 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Daniel Deslauriers, Ph.D.
Transsubjectivity, Reciprocal Embeddedness and the Collective Unconscious
Jung proposed the existence of a Collective Unconscious and it often used to speak about the source of dream images/motifs or common archetypes across cultures. Missing is a phenomenological discussion of the interconnection between self and the collective. While the shared space between people is captured in terms such as intersubjectivity, I postulate the notion of Transsubjectvity to speak about the encounter between self and the Collective Uncs. I propose an ontological model of our inherent embeddedness in shared Uncs. Furthermore, I introduce the notion of Reciprocal Embeddedness to shed light on the mutually permeable boundaries between self and the collective.
Friday, September 19 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Angie Hensley, Ph.D., LMFT and Gabriela Alisa, LCSW
The Trickster Archetype in Times of Social Upheaval
With the current climate of political instability and civil unrest, change is all around us. The archetypal energy of the trickster is running rampant as a disruptor and as needed medicine for the people. This shape-shifter appears as a hero, hooligan, buffoon, sacred clown, or villain, and sometimes a little of all of these, pushing boundaries and revealing deeper truths. The trickster loves contradictions, paradox, and debunking binaries. This energy enables us to hold opposites, speak truth to power, critique structures, and expose injustices. Chaos is a necessary force, but we can gather insights, tools, and practices to navigate it’s tumultuous terrain. During our session, we will explore the diverse forms the trickster takes in various eras and cultures through myths, teachings, and lore.
Friday, September 19 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Jane Clapp
Soul in Motion: A Jungian Somatics™ Experience
Soul in Motion is an experiential journey into Jungian Somatics™, where the body is honoured as both symbolic threshold and sacred terrain, both portal to the shadow and the divine. Through spontaneous movement and drawing, and embodied active imagination, we explore the kinetic spirit and mystical aliveness that live within the soma. This work invites a felt encounter, not to fix or transcend, but to listen. In a world aching for depth and reconnection, Soul in Motion calls us back to the soul's language of sensation and symbol, where we learn to see with new eyes by letting the soul move as it must.
Friday, September 19 | 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Felicia Matto-Shepard, MFT and Jerome Braun, MFT
Beyond Individualism: Collaboration, Psychedelics and Individuation
When Jung experienced a Confrontation with the Unconscious, he and Tony Wolff navigated this together. Wolff brought intuitive meaning-making to the eruptive visions Jung accessed. This collaboration was fundamental to the practice of Analytical Psychology. In response to the modern overvaluation of individualism, this presentation explores the value of collaboration, particularly when approaching the non-ordinary. The two presenters will share their discoveries in psychedelic-enhanced experiences within communal settings, where multiple individuals’ consciousnesses join in expanded states, accessing an intersection beyond individualism. Stretching the boundaries of Eurocentric rational-empirical bias, we inquire into shared non-ordinary realities - and how this can aide individuation.
Friday, September 19 | 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Ben Blum, Ph.D., MSEd
Healing the Inner Pantheon: Archetypal Misassignment and Reinstatement in Aspect Substitution Therapy
Aspect Substitution Therapy (AST) extends Jung’s archetypal psychology by integrating it with contemporary parts‑based modalities such as Internal Family Systems (IFS). AST operationalizes archetypes as “Aspects”—functionally distinct subpersonalities that collectively form the integrated Self. When an Aspect (e.g., Caregiver, Hero, Guard) is overwhelmed, another Aspect may “sub” for it, a coping strategy that can solidify into psychopathology. This talk introduces AST’s novel approach to archetypal diagnosis and presents a case study of a 58‑year‑old subject with ADHD symptoms, who experienced rapid improvements in executive functioning after three sessions of archetypal reinstatement with AST.
Friday, September 19 | 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Jeffrey Hipolito, Ph.D.
Psychology and Theurgy: Jung and Barfield
Owen Barfield considered Carl Jung to be the preeminent psychologist of the twentieth century, but, convinced he was hampered by an inconsistent metaphysic, offered him one based on the Mandukya Upanishad, in which mind, not matter, is primary. This was meant to supplement and support Jung’s account of individuation as a path of initiation, what Barfield called “turning inside out.” The need for this self-aware, methodical, poetic, and theurgic path is increasingly urgent in our materialist and literalist age of psycho-social crises and unconscious collective initiation, in which the boundary between private subjectivity and public objectivity is becoming increasingly porous.
Friday, September 19 | 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Greg Bogart, Ph.D., MFT
Jung, Astrology, and Dreams
Jung was an avid astrologer who studied his patients’ birthcharts, in addition to analyzing their dreams. After examining Jung’s natal chart and key transits, this talk describes the method of combining dream analysis and chart interpretation, an effective technique in clinical practice and self-healing. We’ll explore how dreams reflect the symbolism of natal and transiting planets, and how astrology infuses dream symbols with deeper meanings. The union of astrology and dreamwork intensifies our feelings, memories, and imagination, clarifies current individuation tasks, and awakens our creative energies. Greg will present examples of astrological dreamwork and address audience questions about this practice.
Friday, September 19 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Nisha Gupta, Ph.D.
Integrating Spiritual Emergency through Visionary Art Therapy: My Version of the Red Book
This presentation describes a spiritual emergency I experienced six years ago, for which I embraced Jungian psychoanalysis and visionary art therapy to heal myself—akin to Jung’s artmaking during his period of ‘divine madness. Like Jung’s Red Book, I translated my visionary artwork into theory to birth an innovative, six-stage model of psychospiritual trauma healing: (1) violent initiation; (2) mystical dissociation; (3) sacred rage; (4) shadow integration; (5) Self-realization; and (6) agape love. This presentation showcases my visionary artwork, describes my six-stage model of psychospiritual trauma healing, and offers suggestions for therapists to help clients integrate spiritual emergencies through visionary art therapy.
Friday, September 19 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Helge Osterhold, Ph.D., MFT
Gazing into the abyss: On mortality and the path to wholeness
This paper presentation explores the transformative potential of engaging with death and mortality from a depth psychological and cultural perspective. It examines the denial of death as a form of cultural shadow, or cultural complex, and considers the conscious confrontation with mortality as a critical task in both individual and collective individuation processes. Drawing from depth psychology, wisdom traditions, contemporary clinical studies, and psychedelic research, the paper argues that encountering death and befriending mortality can catalyze individuation and support meaningful and more peaceful living. A contemplative inquiry may be offered to the audience as part of the presentation.
Friday, September 19 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Timothy N. W. Jackson, Ph.D.
Before, between and beyond the individual: from Jung to Simondon and back
In Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic philosophy of individuation, individuals emerge as contingent “resolutions” of problematic tensions present in a pre-individual field which is “more-than-a-unity”. Whilst physical individuals may achieve their finality via an exhaustion of their “pre-individual charge”, vital individuals maintain this charge, facilitating ongoing individuation, including at the collective – transindividual – level, which itself exists by virtue of a shared pre-individual milieu in which individuals remain embedded. This talk will include readings of several passages from Jung – including excerpts from Brother Klaus, Answer to Job, and Psychology and Alchemy – utilising a Simondon-inspired conceptual lens and drawing on evolutionary systems science.
Friday, September 19 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Barbara Holifield, MSW, MFT, SE
Being with the Body in Jungian Analysis: Trauma and its Transformation in the Unspoken Realm
Jung spoke of the body as expression of the psychoid layer, linking us to ancestors through the collective unconscious, yet rarely elaborated clinically on the bodily basis of psychic life. Recent neuroscience reveals the living entwinement of body and psyche—essential for keeping Jungian approaches relevant today, especially when working with trauma and early states.
My presentation will discuss these themes exploring how listening to the bodily basis of experience allows dissociated affects to link with memory, image, archetype, and meaning. In this way the body serves as portal to numinous dimensions of the soul’s life, where meaning emerges from direct experience.
Day 2
Saturday, September 20 | 10:00am - 11:15am
Featured Speaker
Thomas Singer, M.D.
Cultural Complexes in Contemporary America
Based on his new book, A Field Guide to American Cultural Complexes: The Battleground of the Splintered American Psyche, Dr. Singer will explore some of the cultural complexes that are so profoundly dividing our society. The notion of cultural complexes is a natural development of Jung's original complex theory, extending that notion from its original, primary focus on the individual to the group or cultural level of the psyche. We are literally being flooded/swamped with cultural complexes that have taken on a life of their own in the politics, psychology, and spirit of our nation. Can we begin to recognize these complexes for what they are and bring some new consciousness to them before they destroy our society?
Saturday, September 20 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Featured Speakers
Thomas Singer, M.D. and Ipek S. Burnett, Ph.D.
American Mandala: A Jungian Approach to Cultural Healing
America has probably the most complicated psychology of all nations,” C. G. Jung observed in 1930—a statement that still resonates amid today’s political polarization, cultural warfare, and deepening social fragmentation. Drawing on Jungian psychology, in this session we will create an American Mandala—a symbolic image of wholeness that holds the tensions of our collective experience. What if we imagined the United States itself as a mandala—an archetypal container capable of holding the tensions and contradictions of our collective consciousness, while also inviting a deeper orientation toward integration and transformation.
Saturday, September 20 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Ian McCabe, Ph.D., Psy.D.
Bill Wilson, Carl Jung and LSD: Was Jung behind the times in relation to psychedelic treatment of Alcoholism?
Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA was an advocate of using LSD as a preparation for recalcitrant alcoholics who had difficulty grasping the spiritual aspect of the 12 steps. Wilson wrote to Carl Jung detailing his own use of LSD and the success two psychiatrists in Canada had in treating alcoholics. He asked Jung for his comments. Jung read Wilson’s letter but died a week later. This lecture focuses on the early links between Jung and Wilson and also refers to Jung’s hostile opinions on psychedelics: It poses the question; was Wilson ahead of his time and Jung behind the times?
Saturday, September 20 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Johanna Baruch
Painting at the Intersection of Psyche, Science and Mystery
The creative process remains veiled and mysterious, as does what awakens an artist’s imagination. Painter Johanna Baruch invites us on an image-rich journey through art, science, and history, exploring the cosmos both outer and inner. Her presentation weaves together her own celestial paintings, many works from other artists, and awe‑inspiring images from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. Drawing on ancient stargazing traditions, she reveals painting as an alchemical act that transforms raw materials and inspiration into living meaning. Through this exploration, we discover that creativity can open a portal to the infinite, eternal cosmos within ourselves.
Saturday, September 20 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Karen Jaenke, Ph.D.
Retrieving Eurydice and Underworld Experience
The neglected underworld and its psychological meaning is explored through the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In Depth Psychology, the underworld refers to the unconscious psyche and darker aspects of human experience. Archetypally, Eurydice exemplifies underworld experience, being twice and permanently consigned to the underworld. Her story, together with the presenter’s life in parallel, illuminate the psychological meaning of permanent underworld existence. Elements of the underworld personality include: trauma, keen awareness of death and despair, explosive dreaming, solitude, and interiority. Eventually, underworld rebounds to upper world. Eurydice’s transcendent perspective and resolution of despair support today’s emergence of planetary consciousness.
Saturday, September 20 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Gisele Fernandes-Osterhold, MFT
The Archetype of the Mother in Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy: Holding the Sacred in Scientific Spaces
This presentation explores the archetypal dimensions of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy through a Jungian lens, focusing on the Mother archetype. Drawing on clinical experience with psilocybin therapy, it highlights often-overlooked symbolic, relational, and intuitive aspects of healing. As psychedelic research emphasizes data and symptom-reduction, this talk offers a counterbalance—centering deep presence, feminine embodiment, and the sacred mystery of inner journeys. By honoring both scientific and soulful approaches, this Jungian perspective invites a more holistic vision for psychedelic therapy that values transformation not only as measurable change, but as meaningful engagement with the psyche’s deeper layers.
Saturday, September 20 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Featured Speaker
Lynn Alicia Franco, LCSW
Roots in Multiple Worlds 1: The Role of Cultural Complexes in the Process of Individuation
Lynn Alicia Franco will discuss how the analytic concept of "Cultural Complexes," developed by Tom Singer and Sam Kimbles, has been crucial to her individuation process. Of significance was a conceptual psychological language that corroborated her felt experience of being inextricably embedded in a socio-cultural matrix. Significant was the recognition that cultural complexes germinate in historically traumatic soil and continue to manifest and frame emotionally energized unconscious identifications and rationales of oppositional stances. Lynn will examine how her immigration accentuated an experience of alienation when engaging the mentality of a cohesive group culture and will elucidate the relevance of the social-cultural group perspective as it relates to her personal and ancestral understanding of authority and leadership.
Saturday, September 20 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Doug Ronning, LMFT, RDT-BCT and Tami Lubitsh-White, Psy.D.
Dramatic Resonances on Jung's "The Soul and Death"
This experiential workshop will explore themes in Jung’s profound essay, The Soul and Death, using communal dialogue and dramatic play. When contemplating subjects as unknowable and profound as the soul and death, utilizing dramatic play in the imaginal and archetypal realms can free us from a purely rational frame, offering alternative perspectives and insights. Through embodied experiential activities (movement, sound, tableaus, and improvised scenes) inspired by the essay text, the presenters aim to foster fresh personal and collective understanding of Jung’s contemplation on aging, mortality/immortality, being in and out of body, and the transformative journey of the soul.
Saturday, September 20 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Stephen Julich, Ph.D.
“Entirely Untrue in any Given Age, and yet True in all Eternity”: Jung, the Magician, and a Higher Union at the End of Time
When viewed through the lens of politics, Jung’s ideas have been challenged as inadequate and even shortsighted. This critique is significant, especially regarding his discussions of gender and race. However, judging him without recognizing that his psychology was rooted in his personal psycho-spiritual development, and that this development constitutes a spiritual awakening, does a disservice to his comprehensive vision. Here, I will explore Jung’s ideas on the evolution of consciousness and humanity’s future from his perspective as an explorer of his unconscious depths. Beginning with the Red Book and continuing through Jung’s two late-life masterpieces, Aion and Mysterium Coniunctionis, I will revisit his ideas on the evolution of the individual and the collective, with a particular focus on his relationship with his mana figure, the magician Philemon. Throughout, I will pay close attention to the tension between surface and depth, inner and outer, and what it means to be the alchemical balance point at the center of the personal, political, and universal in a troubled age.
Saturday, September 20 | 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Sean Kelly, Ph.D.
Individuation in End Times: Eschaton, Aion, Pleroma
Deepening into Jung’s understanding of the nature of the Self as complexio oppositorum and the archetype of wholeness, and taking my cue from his profound near-death experience following a heart-attack and his later death-bed vision, I explore an emerging sense of identity that is at once personal and planetary. The psychospiritual resources that this identity can access, and which might also be needed to sustain it, include a more integral experience of time. This experience and its associated insights can counter the risk of despair and dissociation attendant upon those who consciously choose the path of individuation in end times.
Saturday, September 20 | 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Featured Speaker
Natalia El-Sheikh, MFT
Roots in Multiple Worlds 2: The Role of Cultural Complexes in the Process of Individuation
Natalia El-Sheikh will explore how cultural complexes have shaped her individuation process as a bi-cultural immigrant in her personal and professional life. By weaving personal narrative, ancestral grief, and political context, she will examine how individuation in the context of migration, is less about integration into a dominant culture and more about reclaiming one’s psychic and symbolic roots. She will share how she has come to understand the role that cultural complexes have played in her marriage to a Palestinian man in the diaspora, as well as in raising their children. Cultural complexes not only distort experiences and relationships but can also bring people together and deepen their understanding of each other.
Saturday, September 20 | 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Willow Pearson Trimbach, Psy.D., LMFT, MT-BC
Alchemy of the Divine Feminine: Dis/identification and the Transcendent Function
Yin, Tasting Space, and Mirror, Mirror are three songs from Willow Pearson Trimbach’s new album, Caesura’s Cry (lionessroars.org/music/caesuras-cry), featuring collaborator/producer Ben Leinbach. The songs are an alchemy of the divine feminine and the transcendent function. They variously disclose the transcendent/immanent, embodied, spiral psychospiritual path of dis/identification. Songs will be performed live, followed by a conversation of Jung’s sense of development as a path of the tension of opposites (anima and animus), with further exploration of a post-Jungian embrace of a multiplicity of being. Together an alchemy of the divine feminine, through dis/identification, as nonduality-through-multiplicity, will be musically welcomed.
Saturday, September 20 | 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Margot Estabrook Stienstra, ISAP Analyst
A Septet of Possibilities for Rekindling Right Relationship to Today's World via Jung's Enduring Wisdom
We’ll consider together Jung’s persisting value via seven motifs that continually prove their worth in my life and practice, as we steer seas of ‘rapid change and deep uncertainty’: Alarm in the Zeitgeist as a beckoning to attend to inner life; increasing our personal responsibility and relinquishing overdependence on systems; taking seriously living a “symbolic life”; maintaining complexio oppositorum within the collective, including body-mind; eco-spiritual maturation; examining fear concretely; and deepening our relationship with love and the deep Feminine.
Saturday, September 20 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Rob Coffey, MIACP
Jung and Transhumanism- What we can learn from Jung in the age of AI?
As we enter the age of AI, what can Jung teach us about the dangers of transhumanism? As we enter an of age of increased fragmentation and disconnection, the work of Jung reminds of the importance of connection to our 'muddy roots', to the cycles of nature, and to the ancient roots of the objective psyche.
Saturday, September 20 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Jun Wang, Ph.D. and Stephen Julich, Ph.D.
Dream Interpretation in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Jungian Psychology
In this paper, we will compare different perspectives on dreams in Jungian Psychology and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). While Jung’s approach mostly sees symbols as reflections of psychological issues, TCM interprets dream symbols as diagnostic indicators of physical and viscera health imbalances, analyzed through the frameworks of Five Phases (wuxing) and Yijing cosmology. Drawing on dream examples from TCM clinical practice, we will present both a TCM framework and a Jungian framework, exploring their implications for enhancing cross-cultural understanding, and offering fresh insights into Jungian dream analysis and TCM’s therapeutic application.
Saturday, September 20 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Hubert L. Ivery, Ph.D.
Racism Conditioning and the Distorted Soul: A Core Spiritual Process for Healing and Wholeness
This session explores racism conditioning as a fragmentation of the soul and a manifestation of disowned shadow material, particularly within white cultural consciousness. Drawing from Jungian depth psychology, Afrocentric spirituality, and my Core Spiritual Process model, I frame racism not only as a social system but as psychic and spiritual conditioning that creates fragmented inner voices of fear, superiority, silence, and denial. Participants will be guided through a reflective practice to engage these disowned parts, opening space for Spirit-led integration, reconciliation, and the formation of authentic community.
Saturday, September 20 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Terese Gjernes, Psy.D.
Dialogue with psyche and soma: Somatic Experiencing, embodied active imagination, and the transcendent function
This experiential session integrates embodied active imagination through Authentic Movement and Somatic Experiencing practices. We will engage in somatic dialogue -- tracking sensation, imagery, affect, and impulse. We will work with the dynamic tension of the transcendent function and enable embodied expansion and integration through movement, drawing, writing, and speaking. Somatic Experiencing (SE) principles will help build safety, foster embodied resilience and help mitigate places of challenge to support expansion of our regulatory window. This synergistic combination helps create an embodied container -- a temenos -- anchored in creativity and resourced vitality. No prior movement experience needed.
Day 3
Sunday, September 21 | 10:00am - 11:00am
Becca Tarnas, Ph.D.
Jung's Participatory Imagination
The Red Book of C.G. Jung is a personal record of one man’s experiential encounter with the great mystery of the unconscious. And yet, The Red Book also documents powerful visions and fantasies with collective import pertaining, in some ways, to the whole of humanity. This presentation posits the idea that the fantasies Jung encountered through the practice of active imagination can be understood not just as a subjective experience, nor as an objective spiritual disclosure, but as a participatory co-creation between the human faculty of the imagination and the archetypes of the collective unconscious.
Sunday, September 21 | 10:00am - 11:00am
Emily Marinelli, MFT and Leonore Tija, MFT
Secretaries and Babygirls: A Jungian Approach to Power and Transformation Through the Symbolic Language of BDSM
BDSM has the power to act as an alchemical process that brings about transformation. Within this symbolic Underworld of archetypes, taboos, and transgression lies the potential for relational and transpersonal healing.
Our experiential workshop Secretaries and Babygirls: A Jungian Approach to Power and Transformation Through the Symbolic Language of BDSM analyzes archetypal journeys of regression and transcendence in the films Secretary (2002) and Babygirl (2024). Using arts-based inquiry, group discussion and pop culture analysis, participants will explore the alchemical journeys experienced by characters in these films, as well as the ethical, cultural and clinical implications of BDSM's potential for healing and integration.
Sunday, September 21 | 10:00am - 11:00am
Hannah Armbrust, Ph.D.
The Colonial Unconscious of Jung: A Borderlands Perspective
This presentation explores the colonial unconscious in Jungian psychology through a decolonial, ancestral, and symbolic lens. Drawing from my books I Am the Border and Decolonizing C. G. Jung (Routledge, 2026), I introduce Archetypal Intersubjectivity, a theory of the psyche as relational, ancestral, and cosmological. I reflect on Jung’s typological thinking, cultural exclusions, and the reparative power of dreams. Through symbolic analysis and ancestral material, I invite participants into a living dialogue between Indigenous knowledge, feminist critique, and depth psychology. This is a call to rework Jung – not to discard him, but to walk alongside him, toward healing and epistemic transformation.
Sunday, September 21 | 10:00am - 11:00am
Dalia Balsamo, M.D.
Searching for the Modern Simurgh: Persian Mysticism, Universal Love, and Collective Action
This paper will revisit the 12th century Persian poem, The Conference of the Birds, and explore its continued relevance in today’s society. This tale, a hero’s quest rich in imagery and symbolism, continues to influence countless people, ranging from artists to cognitive scientists. Its archetypal themes help us reflect on the importance of not only embracing each other’s diversity but also accepting our own shadow parts. While the poem is traditionally seen as a Sufi allegory of the soul’s individual search for divine union, some modern interpretations also depict it as a tale of migration and displacement.
Sunday, September 21 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Jeanine M. Canty, Ph.D.
Atonement to the Earth Mother Cybele: An Ecopsychological, Ecofeminist, Archetypal Remembering
From across an ecopsychological, ecofeminist, as well as a Jungian archetypal perspective, the myth of Cybele and Attis is quite complex. Jung’s focus on this myth was with Cybele as both mother and beloved, Attis’s mother-complex and self-castration, and both of their madness. Yet Cybele has much deeper roots as an Anatolian, Phrygian goddess and there was no Attis in her earliest story. This presentation will unpack and re-story Cybele as the tale of the disembodiment of human from nature, the original trauma, the separation of the divine feminine and masculine, as well as offer remembrance of our deeper story.
Sunday, September 21 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Barbara Morrill, Ph.D.
The Jungian Inspired Holocaust Writings of Etty Hillesum; Her Voice for Our Times
Based on her new book, Barbara Morrill will explore Etty Hillesum’s self-realization from both a Jungian inspired and feminist point of view by reflecting upon her significant unabridged diary. Diary writing that was suggested to her by her Jungian analyst, Julius Spier, in the first session.
In addition to Etty’s action of writing, choosing not to go into hiding, her care of others, and her teaching through her own presence and equanimity were subtext for her standing in her own truth against the dystopian forces of her time. Her hope for herself and others others was to “develop ourselves” in order to recognize our own shadow projection before blaming or ultimately annihilating the other.
Sunday, September 21 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Abhranil Das, Ph.D. and Soham Sircar, Ph.D.
Ecological Trauma in the Collective Psyche: a Psychedelic, Transpersonal, and Non-Dual View
We present the climate crisis as ecological trauma occurring in the collective planetary psyche, and manifesting as climate anxiety in our individual minds. We integrate this understanding with psychedelic experiences, Jungian and transpersonal psychology, and cultural philosophies that view the cosmos as a unified entity. We envision a field of emotional energy that underlies this collective consciousness and transmits intergenerational psychic imprints, and explore how psychedelics catalyze its transformation. We critically examine how these perspectives contrast with the scientistic worldview, and highlight both the promise of the psychedelic renaissance in fostering climate consciousness, and its pitfalls. Finally, we outline suggested directions for future thought and action.
Sunday, September 21 | 11:15am - 12:15pm
Tina Stromsted, Ph.D., LMFT, BC-DMT, SEP
Embodied Jung: Nourishing the Soul in Uncertain Times
In these polarized times, we are called to draw from healing energies deep within. Dreams, imagination, and embodied experience offer powerful renewal, personally and collectively, connecting us to each other and nature's intelligence. Authentic Movement, rooted in Jung’s Active Imagination and furthered embodied through Marion Woodman’s integrative approach, draws on natural movement to bridge body, psyche, and spirit in a safe space. Through presentation, movement, sharing, and reflection, we’ll explore how to find light in darkness and access inner resources—– for ourselves, as healing practitioners, and as world citizens attuning to an evolving planetary call. No experience needed—just openness and curiosity to explore the unknown.
Sunday, September 21 | 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Closing Keynote Speaker
John Beebe, M.D.
Jung's Search for a Little-s Self
Jungian psychology is often presented as a bipolarity between ego, the subjectively experienced center of awareness, orientation, and agency, and Self, the organizer of a more comprehensively objective psyche, which carries the potential to bring conscious and unconscious together to transcend the limits of both. Jung’s many contributions fit into this model, observing how the purposeful coordination of the two centers can proceed or get stuck. What is less apparent is his own voice as a locus of experiencing both ego and Self that insists on its amateur status as a smaller self that can think about its own psychology more personally, transcending both the narrowness of the ego and the inflation that attends attempts to overidentify with the big-S Self. This lecture will show how Jung searched throughout his life for a way to talk about this little-s self. A more humble standpoint, which he came to call at different times creatura, esse in anima, and, most enduringly, the individual, it is the enduring self in Jung that accepts limitation as a premise and lives its life in a reciprocally objective sympathy for other selves facing the same quandaries. The lecture will follow this thread to discover where his individuality as a depth psychologist can serve as an example for us today.
