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Deldon Anne McNeely, Ph.D.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
7:30 pm
Free to members, $10 nonmembers
Parker United Methodist Church
1130 Nashville Avenue, New Orleans
2 CEUs

Jung proposed that human nature is instinctively receptive to spirituality, sometimes referred to as a “religious instinct.” The failure of our materialistic age to support transpersonal principles resulted, thought Jung, in great suffering and frustrated longing for spirit. As militant atheism becomes increasingly vocal and popular, how does Jung’s proposal stand today? Is there evidence of Jung’s proposal, which Jung claimed was his empirical observation? Did he, as some think, give us the beginnings of a new myth or religion that is more meaningful for our time? This lecture will consider some perspectives on the possibility that we are, or are not, each subject to innate, spiritual motives.

Deldon Anne McNeely received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Louisiana State University and is a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology. A senior analyst of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, she is a training analyst for their New Orleans Jungian Seminar. Publications include Touching: Body Therapy and Depth Psychology; Animus Aeternus: Exploring the Inner Masculine; Mercury Rising: Women, Evil, and the Trickster Gods; and a new book, Becoming: An Introduction to Jung’s Concept of Individuation, being published this fall by Fisher King Press.

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The prince kisses Sleeping Beauty and she awakens; Psyche seduces Eros with kisses to get her way; Vasalisa warns the prince not to kiss his sister, but he does and forgets Vasalisa; Gawain kisses the loathly lady and transforms her into a beautiful maiden; the Babylonian gods Ansar and Marduk kiss before battle and courage is born. Judas kisses in betrayal, Job in faithfulness, Mary Magdalene in love, and Jesus, in a Gnostic Gospel, explains the kiss as conception. As archetypal images, these kisses of fairy tale and myth have a dynamic nature – they move psychic energy backward to an old way of being or forward to a new adaptation. With your kisses, you too are being moved. Imbued with emotion, the numinous quality of the kiss translates, in modern language, as “chemistry” and speaks of the desire, the longing of the soul.

Active Imagination: Engaging the Other Marilyn Marshall, MA, LPC Tuesday, November 2, 2010, 2010 7:30 pm 2 CEUs Free to members, $10 nonmembers Parker United Methodist Church 1130 Nashville Avenue, New Orleans

Active imagination is the conscious engagement with the unconscious in dream images, fantasies, bodily sensations and emotional moods. In our September meeting, we’ll have an opportunity to explore Jung’s account of his active imaginations in The Red Book and discuss some of the profound effects of those experiences. In November’s program, Marilyn will explore others’ experiences in the use of Jung’s method of active imagination through the writing, painting, poetry, needlework, sculpture, and dialogue she has gathered from friends, colleagues, and analysands and, where possible, hear the effects of this conscious engagement of the unconscious.