2018-2019 Programs

Tattoo is a practice that is thousands of years old, appearing in virtually every corner of the world.  The emerging story is one in which choosing, receiving, and wearing a tattoo can be a valuable part of what Jung called “living the symbolic life.”  The rich and colorful visual imagery supporting this presentation ranges from the contemporary to that of 5,000 years ago, preserved in the glacial ice of the Alps.  

Friday Evening Presentation: We’ll explore how wearing a tattoo may function as an expression of psyche in today’s world.  What might the contemporary resurgence of tattoo mean in collective terms?  The cultural complex that colors how we see it will be brought into focus through an exploration of tattoo’s deep roots in history.  Laura Buss will draw on her 24 years of professional experience, bringing insights gleaned from a qualitative study she conducted with her own clients, encouraging them to reflect on their motivations and experiences with tattoo. 

Saturday Workshop: Linking the Outer & the Inner Moment: Living with Visual Symbols.  When Jung’s patients encountered psychologically resonant images in dreams or fantasy, he strongly encouraged them to embody those images in paint or clay or some other tangible form.  This belonged to “living the symbolic life,” a concept whose meaning we’ll explore in this experiential workshop.  Stories and images from the tattoo world will be shared, but the focus will be on participants’ identifying and creating a “tattoo” for themselves: a symbolic image of their own to live with, imagined (if not literally inscribed) on the skin.  Art supplies will be provided, but participants are encouraged to bring a clipboard, paper, and perhaps a favorite pencil or two.  Not confident in your artistic skills?  Don’t let that stop you.  There will be plenty of visual imagery from the tattoo world available to draw upon - and guidance from Laura, with her long experience with customized tattoo design work.  

Laura Buss is a tattoo artist with over 20 years of experience in the field. She founded and operates Authentic Tattoo in San Francisco. Laura is also a painter, whose works in oil have been shown in galleries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. Inspiration for her artwork across platforms includes the natural world, the human figure, and archeology. Her tattoo website is textattoo.com. Her fine art website is bussfineart.com.

Karen Hodges, Ph.D. is a Jungian analyst in private practice since 1996 in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a diplomate of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland. She has led seminars on a wide variety of topics at the intersection of psychology and the humanities. Currently, she writes and lectures on psyche's relationship with the natural world. For more information, see her website: jungiananalyticpraxis.com/karen-o-hodges.html

Time/Place: Friday Evening: 7:30 pm.  Registration begins at 7 pm. Movement Dialogues Studio 4805 Park Rd., Suite 200, Charlotte, NC 28209 at the corner of Seneca and Park Road. Saturday: 9:00 am – 1 pm. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m. Same location. 

Pricing: Friday evening - $10 members and students; $15 non-members. Saturday workshop - $40 members and students; $45 non-members. Partial scholarships are available, please contact the treasurer at 704.236.2337

There is no place without Gods and no activity that does not enact them.  James Hillman     

There are perhaps few more pressing needs in our time than the restoration of a deep sense of soul to our collective understanding not only of the human being but of the world itself. This recognition has been at the heart of the evolving Jungian perspective, which we will explore this weekend through the contributions of the great archetypal psychologist James Hillman and the striking insights afforded by archetypal astrology.

Friday Evening Presentation: Reflections on the Thought and Legacy of James Hillman  James Hillman served depth psychology’s double task, ever more critical in our time, to affirm “soul” as essential to any true psychology, and to bring psychology out of the consulting room into the world. This task he performed decade after decade with astonishing inventiveness, style, and learning. Hillman was wonderfully European, deep-cultured and multilingual, yet a born American, jazzy, ever improvising, a rebel subverting the old dogmas. He saw through, endlessly, like a postmodern deconstructionist. And yet he saw, vividly, the gods, the spirits, the depths, like an ancient poet. He held an allegiance to the fallen world, yet he risked a large vision. Above all, Hillman championed the imagination in its high rightful place at the center of human reality. And he saw the anima mundi, the soul of the world, in ways no one had seen before.

Saturday Workshop: The Gods at Play: Archetypal Powers and Patterns in the Arts  The capacity to discern archetypes – the cultivation of what Hillman called an “archetypal eye” – requires not only our thinking but our emotional intelligence, imagination, aesthetic intuition, moral sensibility, relational capacity, our whole being. Because the arts engage all these dimensions of the human sensibility, this presentation will use representative works of art as windows into the archetypes. Our approach will draw on both depth psychology and archetypal astrology, a combination that permits an extraordinarily precise focus on the specific archetypal complexes most prominently at work in a given individual, work of art, or cultural era, and that through the arts helps us perceive and experience the great archetypes themselves.

Richard Tarnas, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He frequently lectures on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network, and is the basis for the upcoming documentary film Changing of the Gods. He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and served on the Board of Governors for the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

 Friday Evening: 7:30 pm. Registration begins at 7 pm. Movement Dialogues Studio, 4805 Park Rd., Suite 200, Charlotte, NC 28209 at the corner of Seneca and Park Road. Saturday: 9:30 am – 1:30 pm. Registration begins at 9:00 a.m. Same building as above.

Cost: Friday evening - $10 members and students; $15 nonmembers. Saturday workshop - $40 members and students; $45 nonmembers. Partial scholarships are available, please contact the treasurer at 704.236.2337.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® assessment (MBTI) was created for the purpose of transforming Jung’s personality theory into a practical tool for helping healthy adults become more effective through expanded self-awareness and appreciating the differences of others. This dynamic system helps to clearly identify areas of our life that will feel easy and natural, along with areas that could potentially separate us because of the preferences we don’t share with others.

Friday Evening Presentation: An intimate look at your MBTI preferences, including a sneak peak at using type to improve all of your love relationships (partner, children, parents, friends). With all the MBTI look-a-likes on the web, and people using the tool with minimal or no training, there is a possibility that you have been “typed” incorrectly.  This experiential session will begin with you guessing your type (usually as accurate at predicting true type as taking the actual assessment), and then guessing the type of a loved one who appears different than you. We will discuss how these differences both support AND drive you nuts, and conclude with identifying at least one strategy that will help you to thrive with differences.

Saturday Workshop: Improving your relationships by deeply understanding the type language of those you love. After a quick “guess your type” session (for those that didn’t attend Friday night), we will experientially explore how each of the preference pairs (E/I, S/N, T/F, J/P) play out in our love relationships by discussing everyday situations that often separate us. You will leave this session with concrete and actionable strategies for more fully appreciating and thriving BECAUSE of your type differences, instead of being separated by them. 

Catherine Rains is an MBTI Certification Trainer and MBTI Master Practitioner, who worked for the publisher of the MBTI for 20 years. Catherine’s expertise includes instructional design, stand-up training, program development, train-the-trainer sessions, and team-building strategies. Prior to joining CPP, Catherine was director of career services at Winthrop University in South Carolina and associate director of career development at Long Island University. Catherine has a master’s degree in counseling from C. W. Post, Long Island University, specializing in career development.

 Time/Place: Friday Evening: 7:30 pm. Registration begins at 7 pm. Movement Dialogues Studio, 4805 Park Rd., Suite 200, Charlotte, NC 28209 at the corner of Seneca and Park Road. Saturday, 9:00 am – 1 pm. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m. Same building as above.

Cost: Friday evening - $10 members and students; $15 nonmembers. Saturday workshop - $40 members and students; $45 nonmembers. Partial scholarships are available, please contact the treasurer at 704.236.2337. 

Friday Evening Presentation: Jung and Shakespeare the American: How Shakespeare helped to Archetypally Create Modern America  Ten years after the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were to be found in… Stratford upon Avon, England, looking for America’s cultural founding father, William Shakespeare! For the next 150 years, Shakespeare would be the most performed author, popular amongst pioneers, cowboys, city slickers and politicians. What were the archetypes, characteristics, plots and preoccupations that Shakespeare brought to the new nation? Is Shakespeare relevant now in a time of profound cultural division? The lecture will explore the dreams of the “new” world brought to these shores in plays and rehearsed in performances and readings over the decades. Jung believed that some literature can compensate for cultural bias and/or foretell the future. What of Shakespeare for America now? Can the plays serve as an archetypal lens for discontents and confusion as well as glories, enthusiasm, idealism and ecstasy? Is there something Shakespearean still about what we aspire to, dread, or love? Finding climate change in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and crumbling masculinity in Hamlet, can Shakespeare still offer wisdom? This lecture tackles these and other questions for the new millennium.

Saturday Workshop: Comedic Ladies and Tragic Gentlemen: Entering the Magic and Alchemy of Shakespeare's People and Plots. Shakespeare like Jung expresses deep creation myths bound up with so called feminine and masculine modes of being. After exploring these large frameworks in both authors we will look at practical examples of comedy and tragedy as psychic forms of personal transformation. The workshop will then seek out Shakespearean archetypes in the participants by a short intuitive exercise. We will explore how a mask provided by a character in a play is actually a psychic revelation. Shakespeare’s comedic ladies and tragic gentlemen walk among us and exist in our own internal theaters. This is the alchemical theater that is both outside us on stage, and inside in our own many persons or archetypes. Shakespeare keeps on making America through us and the workshop will show how.

Susan Rowland, Ph.D. is Chair of MA Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and teaches on the doctoral program in Jungian psychology and Archetypal Studies. Author of nine books on C.G. Jung in relation to creativity, modernity and transdisciplinary studies, her new book is Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C. G. Jung and James Hillman (Routledge 2017). Rowland’s other books include Jung as a Writer (2005); Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002); C. G. Jung in the Humanities (2010) and The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung (2012). She is current President of the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies (jungiansociety.org) and was founding Chair of the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS jungstudies.net) 2003-6. Rowland was educated at the Universities of Oxford, London and Newcastle, and now lives in California, USA. 

Time/Place: Friday Evening: 7:30 pm. Registration begins at 7 pm. Movement Dialogues Studio, 4805 Park Rd., Suite 200, Charlotte, NC 28209 at the corner of Seneca and Park Road (see map). Saturday 9:00 am – 1 pm. Registration begins at 8:30 a.m. Same building as above.

Cost: Friday evening - $10 members and students; $15 nonmembers. Saturday workshop - $40 members and students; $45 nonmembers. Partial scholarships are available, please contact the treasurer at 704.236.2337.