CAncelled: Sept 10 - 12, 2021
Psychological approaches to the God-image
This discussion will describe a range of psychological approaches to belief in God, including reductive psychological approaches to such belief and psychoanalytic opinions. I will describe various evolutionary, biological, and cognitive theories that purport to explain belief in God and the relationship of this belief to recent discoveries in brain science. I will continue with a description of the relationship between family dynamics in childhood, psychodynamic factors, and the individual’s God-image, based on object relations theory, attachment theory, behaviorism, and psychoanalytic self-psychology. I will discuss the relationship between the human imagination and the God-image, and then discuss the notion of revelation and dreams sent by the gods. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Bible as mythic truth, the psychology of religious narcissism and intolerance, and the value of Jung’s psychological approach to the God-image.
July 9 - 11, 2021
Jung's psychology in relation to the non-dual spiritual traditions
This talk will describe the main ideas of the non-dual spiritual traditions, especially those based on the Upanishads, such as Advaita Vedanta. I will then describe how Jung’s psychology, in particular his idea of the Self, fits or does not fit with non-duality and with the Atman-Brahman of the Upanishads. I will discuss Jung’s resistance to the idea of the dissolution of the ego and suggest ways in which his psychology can be seen as a bridge between East and West.
May 21 - 23, 2021
Psychological Aspects of Belief in God
This talk will discuss some of the traditional arguments for and against the existence of God in our scientific age and will describe some of the newest thinking among scientists in this controversial area. I will describe a wide variety of ways in which people claim to experience the divine, and discusses the epistemological problems raised by these experiences. I focus on the importance of numinous experience to Jung, and the ways in which he developed Rudolph Otto’s ideas about the numinosum from a psychological rather than theological point of view. I will then discuss some of the philosophical problems faced by traditional theists that are avoided by Jung’s notion of the Self. I will discuss some of the classical and contemporary arguments for atheism, which are by-passed by Jung’s approach. I will also discuss the psychology of faith and
the problem of theodicy, and ask whether notions of the holy are merely the projection of human wishes and fears.
March 5-7 2021
The religious function of the psyche: Jung’s approach
This lecture will describe an approach to spirituality based on personal experience of the sacred, as an alternative to traditional religious approaches. For many of us today, traditional religions do not express the ways in which we experience the sacred, which may appear in ways that are not recognized by the western monotheistic traditions. The depth psychological approach to spirituality, based on Jung’s work, focuses on revelation by means of dreams, synchronistic events, visionary experience, the body, and our emotional difficulties. Using a depth psychological approach, the lecture will describe a variety of ways in which we may develop a personal form of spirituality. The psyche reveals the sacred in the form of numinous experience, and manifests the Self, which is an image of the divine in the psyche; the psyche is therefore sacramental. Because the Self acts as a kind of blueprint for the individuation of the personality, there is no firm distinction between our spirituality and our psychology, or between psychological and spiritual problems. This lecture will illustrate this idea with examples from people's experience.
