Musings from Your Editor


Volume 49, Newsletter #5April 2024


Musings From Your Editor

 

This has been a turbulent and troubling year. Wars are raging on many fronts with little sign of reprieve. And so the subjects that our guests have addressed in this past season have been dark if not downright depressing. Evil seems to be on the march; goodness absent the public stage.

Nevertheless, we are pleased at the quality of the guests we have invited and the level of participation of our community at large. If our speakers have not resolved the problems of the world—what Murray Stein has called the umbra mundi—they have offered some useful perspectives. As the vicious cycles of violence persist, one may note Susan Meindl’s consideration of reverie and fantasy as a possible antidote to a growing collective shadow.  

Meindl will be presenting talks on April 12 and 13 on the subject of fantasy. Her Friday talk is titled: “Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On: The Role of Fantasy in Jungian life.”

In her Saturday, April 13 seminar, Susan will continue to elaborate on “Parallel Lives: Disorders and Delights of Fantasy and Imagination.” A follow-up session for  therapists only will take place from 3:15-4:15 p.m. (EDT) This weekend will be a Hybrid event– both in-person and also accessible via our habitual Zoom mode.  

Susan Meindl is an OPQ licensed Psychologist and a Psychoanalyst in private practice in Montreal. She is a graduate of McGill Counselling, the Argyle Institute and the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society training programs. She has a long-standing interest in Jungian Psychology and serves on the steering committee of the Montreal Jung Society. Her email address is susan.meindl@gmail.com.

She has previously addressed our society on subjects like highly sensitive persons and mature empathy.

Susan has also presented to the Houston Jung Society and recently to the local Freudian psychoanalytic group.

CE credits will be available for those in the helping professions.  Up to 5 credits.

Both events will take place In-Person at the Thomas More Institute, 3405 Atwater Ave. AND by Zoom. There will be limited seating capacity at TMI so please reserve  your spot. See the flyers enclosed with the newsletter for more details.   

On four Thursdays in April and May, we will engage in conversations on Stefano Carpani’s Anthology of Contemporary Theoretical Classics in Analytical Psychology: The New Ancestors. Our semi-annual reading seminars are always a stimulating way of exploring ideas in a  group setting. Among the themes to be addressed are: The Dao of Anima Mundi; Hesitation and Slowness; On Jung’s View of the Self; and From Neurosis to a New Cure of Souls:

Among the notable authors are Murray Stein and  Sonu Shamdasani.

See the flyer for details.

Stefano Carpani came to the attention of the Jungian world during the pandemic with his online “Breakfast at Kusnacht.” The interviews featured many well-known Jungian analysts, including Murray Stein and Andrew Samuels. The series was translated into a book by the same name. (Chiron, 2020) Before his Anthology, he also wrote The Plural Turn in Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies. (Routledge, 2021)

Carpani’s prolific output is evident in another remarkable online series—War as Reset. “Psychosocial Wednesdays” was another Carpani production. As a Jungian psychoanalyst and sociologist by training based in Berlin, his focus is as much on the external political world as the inner one.

This anthology and its fourteen essays, however, is more psychological than political. In his Introduction, subtitled The New Ancestors and the “Agenda 2050” for Analytical Psychology,” Carpani presents his quest for the post-post-Jungian sources that might move the field forward for generations to come. After the first-wave “influencers” like Marie-Louise von Franz, Edward Edinger and James Hillman. Their subjects include themes somewhat overlooked such as the psycho-social, the relational, and the extraverted. In this collection, the reader might glimpse the influence of Andrew Samuels.

Looking forward to our next year, we are excited to report that among our stellar guests will be James Hollis, Ann Ulanov  and  Henry Abramovitch.  Ancestors in their own right. Henry will explore friendship, a subject he deems to have been sorely neglected in psychology.

Readers might be charmed by a 50-minute audio recording made by Henry and his new friend Murray Stein–“My Lunch with Thomas.” (Blue Salamandra films) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1nnKLBUHUo&t=5s

More recently the brothers of another mother issued another product of their fruitful collaboration:—“Speaking of Friendship.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNALS3pF5nM

We are approaching the fiftieth year in the life of our Montreal Jung Society. Thanks to the dedication of a local psychiatric nurse and devoted fan of the works of C. G. Jung, Alice Johnston, we began our journey half a century ago.

Alice was a pillar of strength in our early decades and a guiding light. Pretty much a one-woman show.

More will be revealed as the 2024-2025 year unfolds and as we make our way into the anniversary year. You can expect some special events to mark the landmark occasion.

We might be asking our friends of long-standing to recall significant moments or influences over that long period of time.

Names that come to mind, from a much earlier time, are Edith Wallace, Beverly and Austin Clarkson, David Miller, Guy Corneau, and Marion Woodman. 

Local colleagues of note who contributed mightily were Jackie Wilson, Jocelyn Tanner, Florence Hays Perella, Ron Wareham, Carolyn Zonailo, Jean Shepherd and Cassie Cohoon.

Harvey Shepherd was the editor of our newsletter and the long-time president of our society. Harvey was a central figure whose President’s Notes always wove the various threads of a season together in consummate and articulate fashion. His adoration and dedicated reviews of books from such Jungian analyst/scholars as Wolfgang Giegerich was remarkable. His journalistic skills were sans pareil.

We are considering collecting these impressions and perhaps sharing them on our website. Say, our own contribution to a collective of Memories, Dreams, Reflections.                

              

         —Murray Shugar 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   


Volume 49, Newsletter #4; February 2024


Musings From Your Editor

 

It has never served our community to ring alarm bells for troubled times. After all our Jung Society is there primarily to bring glad tidings or at least wise counsel. Our esteemed guests, with their astute insights and deep font of experience, always offer us ways of seeing through troubles, both personal and collective.

In the recent past we have engaged in conversation about such topics as the Apocalypse while perusing the works of Edward Edinger. This becomes so much more disturbing when the real world seems to be on the brink. It now seems that the Spirit of our Times has presented us with a host of dreadful scenarios that we could hardly have envisaged not long ago.

In these perplexing times, we seem to have chosen our winter/spring lineup in a very timely manner.

Thomas Singer will have presented his perspective on cultural complexes in his talk to us in January, blending psychological and political dimensions in his analysis of what the Hell is going wrong! In America and in the world at large.

Our next guest is a very well-known author, erstwhile publisher and astute veteran in the Jungian universe.

The fact that Chiron Publications has just released Volume 7 of Murray Stein’s Collected Writings would indicate to those who do not know of his prolific erudition on Jungian matters that he is one of his generation’s wise old souls.

Chiron has simultaneously been publishing the Collected Works of Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung’s most trusted “interpreter” of an earlier generation.

A treasure trove of Stein’s books can be found on his homepage: https://www.murraystein.com/wp/books/

Last year a celebration of Stein’s 80th birthday led to a Festschift in his honour. See Roman Rogulski’s review in this newsletter.

A second review, written by Harvey Shepherd, a long-time fan of Stein’s work, addresses the subject of Volume 7, the Problem of Evil. This will be the focus of Stein’s talk on February 17 via Zoom.

Stein was the co-founder of Chiron Publications back

in the 1980’s with his colleague, Nathan Schwartz-Salant. This was a flourishing source of both clinical and general Jungian wisdom and remains so into the 2020’s.

Chiron has been in the most capable hands of Len Cruz and Steve Buser for a decade, since 2013-14.

A loving memorial tribute to Schwartz-Salant, hosted by Stein, from three years ago, can be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCzfAciTqqc

Stein last spoke to our society and the Zoom world at large on Dante’s Divine Comedy back in October 2021.

He has been, and remains, a formidable presence on the Jungian “stage.” 

For all his serious contributions to the field of analytical psychology, the latter-day Stein seems to have become more “playful.” His extra-curricular activities lnclude collaborations with Jungian analysts, like the play he co-wrote with Henry Abramovitch, “The Analyst and the Rabbi.” The actual encounter in 1946, between Jung and the chief rabbi of Germany during WWII, Leo Baeck, became “an imaginative construction of what might have happened in this historic meeting of two great men.”

Stein recently collaborated again with Abramovitch on “My Lunch With Thomas,” about a train ride en route to Eranos, the Swiss lake-side oasis where for decades Jung crossed paths with scholars from diverse fields engaged in intellectual and soulful cross-cultural enquiry.

What might be most striking in the gamut of our winter offerings is the crossover from psychological to political, religious and, perhaps most pertinent to our times, ethical dimensions.

Our March speaker, Otto Betler OSB, has a far more modest pedigree than Stein. Betler is a practicing analytical psychologist, an active Catholic priest, and the master of novices for Europe’s largest men’s monastery, the Benedictine Archabbey of St. Ottilien, about 50 kms west of Münich, Germany.

His November 2020 Fay Lectures on “The Gospel of Jung” were a splendid demonstration of his astute scholarship. He elaborated on the complex relationship between Jung and Victor White, an English Dominican priest   with   whom   Jung   engaged   in   an   extensive correspondence. This is the context that Murray Stein will likely be drawing upon in his February talk.

Betler   has   chosen   another   of   Jung’s  important interlocutors, Erich Neumann, as his subject. Jung and Neumann also engaged in a lengthy correspondence. As presented in the 2015 book Analytical Psychology in Exile. This relationship, unlike others Jung had, did not fall apart. 

Neumann fled Germany in the 1930’s for Israel, where he lived until his untimely death in 1960. His scholarship encompassed his own Jewish roots while also furthering Jungian ideas. Among his best-known books are The Origins and History of Consciousness, The Great Mother, Creative Man, and Amor and Psyche.

On Saturday March 16 Betler will address Neumann’s 1949 book Depth Psychology and a New Ethic.

Stein’s pastoral background often informs his concerns and his writing; his father, like Jung’s, was a pastor. So too Otto Betler bridges two worlds. As a Catholic priest and a Jungian analyst, he explored the tension between Jung and White over Jung‘s daring “Answer to Job.” (1954) His enquiry into Neumann’s seminal “Ethic,” written in the aftermath of the catastrophe of WW II and the Holocaust—and at the dawn of the rebirth of Israel—may offer an antidote to our current crises.

Otto Betler’s Fay Lectures showed him to be a very warm-hearted and engaging speaker. We can expect a wise spirit to guide us through the fraught domains of shadow, projection, evil, and collective madness to find, through Neumann’s insights from another time, a way to a saner attitude in a darkened world.

 

                      Murray Shugar 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                                                    

Volume 49, Newsletter #3January 2024


Musings From Your Editor


As we enter a new year, the world seems to be on fire.

The Middle East is once again in turmoil, perhaps as never before; interminable war is dragging on in Ukraine; a presidential election south of the border points to a real existential crisis.

Is this a unique time in history or is it the same old world-weary round of eternally recurring strife and struggle? 

What’s a Jungian perspective to make of this terrible brew?

Our new season will offer some remarkable talent to help us analyze the “breaking news” of our times.

Our first guest on January 20 will be veteran Jungian analyst Thomas Singer. Singer‘s original contribution to depth psychology is the “cultural complex,” a term he coined in a book that he co-authored with Samuel Kimbles: The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society. (Routledge 2004)

What makes this book and this concept so significant and increasingly relevant is that they carve out a vast dimension that lies between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

Singer’s chosen subject on his first virtual visit to Montreal will be “Cultural Complexes in Our Times: The Russia/Ukraine War and Other ‘Cases.’”

Singer has recently released a book entitled Mind of State. (2023) The book consists of conversations on the psychological conflicts stirring U.S. Politics and Society.

Drawn from the Mind of State podcast that ran from 2019 through 2021 by some of the co-authors and contributors to the New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, this collection is as relevant now as it was when Apple Podcasts featured it as “New and Noteworthy.”

While America has been his primary focus over the past few decades, Singer’s penetrating insights might lend themselves to the broader context of Russia/Ukraine and perhaps even the fraught perplexities between Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian people.

Singer’s analytic and cultural perspective has been shared by such groups as the With Ukrainian Analysts group (WUJ) who have been presenting conversations between Ukrainians and their colleagues in other countries. This project of solidarity has been going since Russia invaded Ukraine in the late winter of 2022.

Jung famously named the two spirits that he felt were pressing on him during his famous “confrontation with the unconscious” in the years surrounding WW I. For Jung, and ever since in the Jungian universe, the Spirit of the Depths has claimed paramountcy over the Spirit of the Times.

Aren’t both perspectives equally necessary?

It may be noteworthy that Tom Singer was a leading figure at the International Analysis and Activism/Presidency Conference held in San Francisco in Autumn 2020, sponsored by ARAS (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) and the IAAP (International Association for Analytical Psychology).

He served on the Program Committee along with Andrew Samuels and members from Italy, the U. K. and America. The first meeting of IAA took place in London in 2014.

Whether the arc of history bends toward justice or not, our Winter/Spring program may seem intentional, as though it were designed. It was not. The first three speakers will all address, each in his own particular way, the political, moral, religious, and psychological issues that beset us.

On February 17, Murray Stein will be visiting us again via Zoom from his home in Zürich. Last time he presented an eloquent talk on Dante’s Divine Comedy. This time there will be no comedy. 

He will be addressing the problem of Evil. Without doubt, he will be referencing the complex correspondence between Jung and Dominican priest Victor White.

This was one of the subjects addressed by our March guest, Otto Betler, in his 2020 Fay Lecture series. This time he too will be taking on the moral and psychological dilemmas that humanity faces in times of crisis. Betler will focus his gaze upon the pivotal work of one of Jung’s close collaborators, Erich Neumann: Depth Psychology and a New Ethic! (1949)

Home-town heroine and psychologist Susan Meindl will close out our calendar year with a two-day conference in April. On April 12 she will elaborate on the subject “Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On” and on  April 13, she will explore “Parallel Lives.”

This weekend event will include a training component.  It will possibly be a Hybrid event.

The earlier Winter/Spring programs will be exclusively via ZOOM.

For those who cannot attend any event, we usually send recordings to everyone who has paid and registered.

Also in April, there will be a second reading seminar in this year related to Jung’s work. Over four weeks, we will engage in conversation about four essays selected from Stefano Carpani’s 2022 Anthology of Contemporary Theoretical Classics in Analytical Psychology: The New Ancestors.

The contents of the book and its fourteen chapters can be seen at:

https://www.routledge.com/Anthology-of-Contemporary-Theoretical-Classics-in-Analytical-Psychology/Carpani/p/book/9780367710200

 

Erratum: It was reported in a previous newsletter that Gary Sparks was the Editor of Inner City Books. In fact, Scott Milligen is Inner City’s publisher and CEO.

Inner City Books has announced that they are about to launch audiobook versions of five of their most popular titles. These include James Hollis’s The Eden Project and Marion Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection. ICB encourages purchases by noting that they are suitable for long trips and are a benefit for those with vision impairment.  https://innercitybooks.net/

          

  Murray Shugar


________________________________________________________________________________________

Volume 49, Newsletter #2November 2023


Musings From Your Editor


Our season seems to be heading in an interesting direction: Back to Jung.

In early September, the folks at Chiron Publications launched a new book, a Festschrift in honour of its founder Murray Stein. For decades Stein helmed this publishing house, issuing a respected Jungian journal with studies in depth psychology and many titles by Jungian authors …  but enough of that for now. We will be hosting Stein by Zoom once again next February, at which time our readers will see more of the fruits of his lengthy labours of love.  

In the meantime we plan to go even further back, to the source. 

Our seasonal reading seminars give our community–here and now at large—a chance to scrutinize more closely the works of a given Jungian author. Previously we have considered the works of Edward Edinger, James Hollis, James Hillman, Marie-Louise von Franz, and even the notorious Jordan Peterson, whose latter-day productions are now only very loosely based on Jung’s works. Themes have included The Works of Ann Belford Ulanov; The Aquarian Age; Female Authority; and The Feminine in Fairy Tales and Folk Tales.

This year we will dedicate both of our reading seminars to Jung. This November, on four Thursday evenings, we will explore his writings on the following subjects: The Undiscovered Self; Dreams; Personality Development; and Eastern and Western Thinking.

Next spring, we will follow up with a recent anthology edited by Stefano Carpani: Anthology of Contemporary Theoretical Classics in Analytical Psychology: The New Ancestors.

All of this is by way of introducing the next public event in our autumn calendar.

Roman Rogulski will address the issue of “Why Jung’s Psychology Is Vital In These Troubled Times.”

Roman Rogulski was a formidable presence in our community when he was living on Montreal’s South Shore, in Longueuil. His “past lives” include a lengthy stint as a manager in a large international re-insurance company. His passion for Jung and his psychology was evident in Roman’s attendance at several Jungian Odysseys in different locales in Switzerland under the auspices of ISAP.  (The International Society for Analytical Psychology)

Roman played a vital role on our planning committee. He presented a talk and slide show on the art works of musician David Blum“Appointment With the Wise Old Dog.” He also designed and co-led several courses at Montreal’s Thomas More Institute: on Jung’s Red Book; and another one on fairytales with a decidedly Jungian flavour.

While not a formal practitioner of the Jungian "arts,” Rogulski is passionately interested in and absorbed by the Jungian world-view. In various reading and seminar groups, Roman’s proficiency in Jungian matters has always been astounding.  

Please note that this event will be taking place at the Thomas More Institute, 3405 Atwater Ave. on Saturday, November 18 from 1 p.m. until 3:30 p.m.

There will be hybrid access for those who prefer to participate from home or live too far from Montreal to attend the event LIVE. This will be our second hybrid event and we hope to avoid any tech glitches.

Recordings are almost always available after our programs for those who have registered and request a copy.

Why a retrospective on Jung’s actual writings in our November reading seminar?

Perhaps it is the aging of the Jungian elders who are still among us. James Hollis, now in his eighties, has written yet another book (reviewed in newsletter #5 last year. The recent collections of the writings of the esteemed Murray Stein and the Collected Works of the prolific and venerable analyst Marie-Louise von Franz now at Volume 8implicitly evoke the source. The rejuvenation of the publishing houses, Inner City and Spring, add to the mix.

Titles from other publishers have come to our attention lately.

Daemon Verlag has unreleased material from Aniela Jaffé’s conversations with C. G. Jung as they prepared Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung in the late 1950’s. Ms. Jaffé reworked her many unpublished notes and created a manuscript that is now appearing for the first time under the title, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C. G. Jung.   Just this month, Orbis Books has published Ilia Delio’s The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole. 

Some of these books might find their way to the pages of future newsletters of the Montreal Jung Society and our readers through the diligence and thoughtful insights procured by reviewers.

This edition of the newsletter contains varied material. As Pat Berry and James Hillman were bringing Archetypal Psychology to America in the 1970’s and into the 80’s and 90’s, Berry researched Jung’s early psychiatric writing before he sought his soul and began to formulate his theories. In this issue, we will present a review of Spring’s publication of her thesis at the University of Dallas in 1982. Berry offers many critical insights into Jung’s work in the early 1900’s and the lacunae in this work in an effort to promote the newly minted field of its psychological American cousin.

In a thoroughly researched study, with both social and clinical dimensions, the American Jungian analyst Robert Tyminski offers a contemporary view on immigration. Herself an immigrant, Mary Harsany assesses this most revealing and highly relevant book.

As a preview of our winter program, we will be hosting, via Zoom again, guests from California (Thomas Singer); Switzerland (Murray Stein); and Germany (Otto Betler). Stein and Betler are both transplants from North American soil!

Our season finale will feature local talent, Susan Meindl. A Nova Scotia girl by birth, a Montrealer for decades, it should be known that Susan has deep Germanic roots.

Finally, in returning to our programming, we are grateful for your continued support.  Bringing speakers, even by Zoom and from faraway places, requires funding. All the more so with the revival of our in-house programs, at least in part. We thank you in advance for the renewal of your membership.

       Murray Shugar

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Volume 49, Newsletter #1September 2023


Musings From Your Editor


As we approach a new year of programming, our society has considered a number of operating options. The Zoom format has been a tremendous boon to us, allowing us to host numerous speakers and new visitors from farflung places, from New Mexico and North Carolina to Switzerland and Australia. There have been many profound and friendly exchanges.

Since the pandemic has largely waned, we trust that many of our local supporters are eager to see each other face-to-face. And so we have decided to include some live events once again, beginning with the second of the season!

Jan Bauer is no stranger to most of us. Along with Guy Corneau and Tom Kelly, Jan was one of the first graduates of the Jung Institute in Zürich from Québec back in the early 1980s.

Her splendid career as a Jungian analyst here in Montreal­—the city she chose and not the city of her birth—has included a stint as Director of Training for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. She notes in her biographical sketch on the flyer for our September event that she “has sort of resolved her tension of opposites by settling in Québec, Canada for the last forty years.” A stalwart presence in Montreal, Jan has kept the Jungian light burning for decades with her smart and accessible talks to our society and on the Jung “circuit.”  

Among her numerous lecture titles have been: Puer/Puella; Artist/Adolescent (1987) The Negative Mother (1989); Time, Money and Psyche (2003); Transformation: Hoax or Hope (2005); Carriers of Shadow, Bearers of Light (2008); Disappointment: Always, Everywhere but Why? (2019); and Doing it Right—Grief in Today’s World (2020). There were also two very engaging conversations with her fellow Montrealer Guy Corneau, before his untimely death at 65 early in 2017.

On Saturday,  September 23, Jan will be revisiting a talk she first gave back in February 2000. Its title then was Bedazzled. This time around, she will speak about Charisma   Then   and   Now:   A   Changed   Notion  in  a Technological World.

See the enclosed flyer for details on this Zoom event.

During the latter stages of the Pandemic, Jan joined forces with several other analysts and therapists to offer their insights and reflections on this disruptive time. There was a Zoom panel en français, which featured Jan and Tom Kelly along with local psychologues, Yvon Blais and Pamela-Andrée Nerette.

An English-speaking panel brought us Jan and Tom again, along with David Pressault from Victoria, B. C. and the current president of the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts (OAJA), Stacey Jenkins.  

We were very impressed by Stacey’s warm presence and thoughtful insights and she was glad to be invited to take the stage here in Montreal as we resume our in-person events.   

Stacey’s website attests to her many interests. https://staceyjenkins.ca/ Among these are the importance of dreams, symbols, and the creative process. In another life, she had professional experience in television and film production. She is a faculty member of the OAJA Analyst Training Program.

Stacey’s title—Sacrifice and the Individuation Process—promises a rich exploration of a perilous but necessary subject. Among other themes, Jenkins will address Jung's idea that "every step forward along the path of individuation is achieved only at the cost of suffering." The talk will take place LIVE at the Atwater Library, 4023 Rue Tupper. (Metro Atwater) The building has been renovated and now has an elevator.

You can attend this event Live or via Zoom. See the flyer for more information.

It will begin at 1 p.m. and will go until 3:30. On Saturday, October 21.

This past year has seen the revival of two venerable Jungian institutions. Both Spring Publications and Inner City Books have emerged from the ashes.

After decades at the helm of the publishing house he founded, Daryl Sharp died in 2019. His successor is Gary Sparks, a Jungian analyst and author whose home is Indianapolis, Indiana. (NOTE) See Below.

The first book of the new incarnation of Inner City is Sparks’s latest: The Call of Destiny: An Introduction to Carl Jung’s Major Works. Title #146  https://innercitybooks.net/

Spring Publications has also returned. Under the guidance of Klaus Ottmann and an illustrious Board of Directors that evoke Spring’s storied history, the publishing house has been issuing some new releases and several reprints of classics. https://www.springpublications.com/

We are pleased to see these tried and true publishing houses join with Chiron Books in presenting Jungian titles.

Many readers will know that James Hillman created Spring in the late 1960’s with Patricia Berry in Zürich before returning to America, where it first took root in Dallas and later in Connecticut.

This past year has also seen the publication of the second volume of the biography of James Hillman by Dick Russell. This book is reviewed in the current newsletter by Hillman’s long-time friend and colleague, Montreal’s own Ginette Paris. The author of several noteworthy books herselfPagan Meditations and Pagan GraceGinette was a faculty member at the Pacifica Graduate Institute for many years. She had been a psychology professor at UQAM for decades before getting the call to California.

She was a long-time advocate of Hillman’s brand of post-Jungian psychology– archetypal psychology.

A special edition of our 2011 newsletter featured a tribute to James Hillman who had died that year. The tribute includes an eloquent contribution from Paris.

https://sites.google.com/site/cgjungmontreal/resources/essays-by-jungian-analysts/homages-to-james-hillmans-2011

This is but a sample of our website’s contents.

Oh, the glories of our society’s past!

Finally, our Jung Society mourns the passing, this past spring, of Stephen Sims. Steve was a long-time friend of our society. One of his final acts was a trilogy he compiled from his decades-long search for wisdom. The Noble River contains snippets of wisdom gleaned from such sources as the Dalai Lama, and, most pertinent to Jungians, the writings of James Hollis, who wrote an endorsement to Steve’s final work.

This past summer we conducted a survey—via SurveyMonkey—to assess the interests of the people on our extensive mailing lists. During the long Covid confinement, our Zoom events attracted large numbers of people with an interest in Jung and perhaps our unique programming!

Not surprisingly perhaps, most of our “friends” are over sixty years old; have a strong interest in personal growth and spirituality; and are ready to participate in our upcoming programs either by Zoom, by hybrid, or face-to-face.

If you wish to support our society, you can find a membership form on our website: sites.google.com/site/cgjungmontreal/contact-membership.   

You can also pay for your membership by credit card or by Pay Pal: http://www.jungsocietyofmontreal.ca/membership.html


–Murray Shugar


(NOTE) ERRATUM: Inner City Books never died! Scott Milligen has been its publisher since the death of Daryl Sharp in 2019, and not Gary Sparks. We regret our error.

And we celebrate inner City's long life.   


______________________________________________________________________________


Newsletters 2022-2023

Volume 48, Newsletter #5April 2023

Musings From Your Editor


We mark the end of this calendar year with a last-minute visit from our dear friend James Hollis who is once again on the circuit. We are thrilled at the prospect.
      Save the date: Saturday, May 6.

 Only a few months ago, he presented a series of talks on poetry sponsored by the Jung Society of Washington entitled Quartet: Reflections on Life, Death, and the Troubles In-Between.

Its themes were beginnings,  love and hate, relationships, and end things.

With his usual eloquence and erudition, and with seeming ease, he tracked the psychological threads running through a selection of poems.

At this time, we are also pleased to note that Inner City Books has returned from a long hiatus, after the death of its founder and publisher, Daryl Sharp, in 2019.  

Sharp founded Inner City in 1980. Its last title was #145: Carl Jung and Arnold Toynbee: The Social Meaning of Inner Work by J. Gary Sparks. (2017)

Inner City Books was the first publishing house to produce the works of James Hollis during the 1990’s, his most prolific writing period.

Scott Milligan has now taken on the mantle of editor.

As of March 2023, this uniquely Canadian Jungian institution has released its first title: #146, The Call of Destiny, also written by Sparks.

You can find a splendid interview from February of this year, conducted by Laura London with Sparks, from his home in Indianapolis, Indiana at: https://speakingofjung.com/podcast.

The revival of Canada’s own Inner City Books is meaningful especially for the vital role it played in publishing Hollis’s early works. During the 1990’s, Inner City Books published five of the eight books of his they would issue under their aegis. Some of the titles are: The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (1993); Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places (1996); and The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other (1998).

  The early 2000’s saw the release of three more books under Inner City before Hollis moved on to other pastures: Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path (2001); On this Journey We Call Our Life: Living the Questions (2003); and Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World (2004).

  As a society we have been privileged—dare we say blessed?—to have been privy to his always thoughtful works. Although not face-to-face, this next visit will still bring great joy to many who have come to cherish his profound ideas through his books and through the deep places he has explored with his readers. 

 In the review of his most recent book, The Broken Mirror, you will read many revelations about his personal life. Perhaps the most telling, and disturbing, is the issue of his physical health. Faced with double diagnoses of cancer and ongoing treatments as well as two major replacement surgeries in recent years, he summoned the courage to forge a mantra of “militant submission” to mortality and the disorders of the flesh. In so doing, he writes, “personal dignity and spiritual independence“ are never lost.

 This book testifies to Hollis’s resilient and indomitable spirit. It is also surely a testament to the deep value of living a Jungian life, imbued with profound experiences of loss, both personally and in relation to the thousands of people he has been connected to. He also reveals in poetic form the splendid gains that have emerged from vigorous inner work.

  Not least of these gains would be his wife Jill, whose artwork has emerged to adorn his most recent book covers.

  He presents a loving account of first meeting her in the chapter “Down and Out in Zürich.” And a spectacular dream that portended her fortuitous arrival in his then miserable life in the library of the Jung Institute, after labouring mightily to dispel the ghosts that had been haunting his life.

    Read about that encounter in the book review in this newsletter.

  We have also included another review from a cohort of ours two decades ago. Stephen Morrissey was a big fan of Jim Hollis and his words capture well the gist of Hollis’s 2001 book Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path.

   This review is one of several dozen that appear on our website.

   And so as we follow our stoic friend as he continues to track the latter-day gods of our times, we are pleased to  acknowledge  that our searches, and our projects, if not Edenic, have been deeply informed by the undaunted scholar/poet/analyst James Hollis.

   As we enter a new year, we will continue to reach out from Montreal via Zoom.

  We may resume some live programming for those who miss the social face-to-face dimension of things. 

   For your summer ruminations: Behold! This July will see the release of yet another book by James Hollis: A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity.


                           —Murray Shugar


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                                                

Volume 48, Newsletter #4 – March 2023


Musings from your Editor

 

As we wend our way into the new year, we are pleased with its strong beginning. John Vervaeke gave us an eloquent account of how cognitive science and various wisdom traditions can mesh with many Jungian ideas about meaning and myth. David D’Andrea provided a rich and challenging array of questions to which the professor gave very thoughtful responses.

John Hill brought us into the more comfortable world of Jungian concepts with a lively and evocative presentation on the multi-faceted meanings of home.

His easy poetic style was in marked contrast to the brilliant academic rhetoric of the Toronto professor.

We are now looking forward to a visitor from the American west coast. Ken Kimmel of Seattle, Washington has over thirty years of clinical experience as a psychotherapist. He received his Diploma in Analytical Psychology in 2006 from the North Pacific Institute for Analytical Psychology where he is currently a clinical and faculty member. His present interests concern the interface of Analytical Psychology with contemporary psychoanalysis, postmodern philosophy and mystical traditions.

His subject, narcissism, seems to be everywhere these days. Whether evidenced by the ever-present selfie mania or the American fascination with the likes of the Kardashians or the world of Trump, we might truly be living in an era afflicted by narcissism. 

Kimmel’s book Eros and the Shattering Gaze: Transcending Narcissism (Fisher King Press, 2011), will be the subject of a two-day event on March 24-25; C.E. credits for professional training will be available.

The Jung Platform will be hosting an event on that very same subject a week later, from March 30-April 3. We seem to be one step ahead of the game!

Kimmel‘s book is replete with wide-ranging references: the Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo; the Arthurian Grail legend of Parcival and the tragic romances of liebstod (“love-death”) from the Courts of Love; modernity’s great Western literature including Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazov; philosophy (Emmanuel Lévinas and Friedrich Nietzsche); and contemporary film and song (Leonard Cohen).

As part of his Friday presentation he will be exploring the 2006 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and so Kimmel strongly suggests, if possible, that we watch the film in advance.

 In his Introduction, Kimmel writes: “(the book) is meant to bring to light the prevalence of narcissism in our culture and the possibilities for its transcendence. It does so through storiesstories old and new, epic and personal, fictional and historic.”

The Saturday seminar will explore more deeply the dynamics involved in therapeutic work.

Its intent is to reveal “the culturally and historically embedded defenses of narcissism, and those themes that expose, and potentially unbind the lethal patterns that poison the human psyche’s capacity to love, and to show care and concern for the other.”

See the flyer enclosed with the newsletter. 

On Saturday, April 15, Artemis Papert of Montreal will address the fraught subject of Abandonment in Fairytales and in Life: The Archetypal and the Personal. Artemis has long been an ardent student of fairy tales and has done an in-depth training in Jungian dream analysis.  

Artemis' first career was as a research biologist. She now practices the healing art of Shiatsu Massage, a Japanese therapy that connects body and soul.

In 2020 Artemis presented a talk to our Society on  “Typology, or How I Saved My Sanity!” When she is not practicing the healing arts, Artemis is creating art with paper and paint or digitally. 

Artemis has also been a pivotal figure on our planning committee. Her impeccable technical wizardry has facilitated our ability to reach way beyond our local confines. EventBrite and Zoom have become normal features of our formatting, for which we owe Artemis a huge debt of gratitude.

The three-year period of isolation rendered by the Covid pandemic has strangely been a boon to our society thanks to the reach of Zoom.

Jungians have long been attracted to the world of fairy tales. Marie-Louise von Franz is probably the foremost authority on the subject. Her Collected Works series is currently being published by Chiron Books; the first seven volumes have been released over the past few years. You might expect a review of one of the volumes later in the new year. 

The Maiden’s Quest and the Hero’s Journey are some of the motifs that are explored in these volumes.

Any notions that, like myths, fairy tales are untrue or “false on the outside but true on the inside”, are conveyed by reading von Franz’s works; or by attending the lecture and reading seminar this April.

As if to complement Papert’s presentation, it is no coincidence that our Society’s semi-annual popular reading seminar in April will address the subject of the feminine in fairytales and folk tales.

There will be a diverse range of authors and themes.

You can see the richness of the offerings on the flyer within this newsletter package.

Reading texts from such wide-ranging authors as the notorious Jordan Paterson’s take on The Oedipal Mother in Hansel and Gretel to Robert Bly and Marion Woodman musing on the Russian arch-crone figure Baba Yaga, we will surely be able to recognize the villains and heroes of our times and our lives through the prism of this simple but profound genre.

We are most pleased to announce that James Hollis will be visiting us, by Zoom, on May 6. This will mean an extension of our usual schedule, from September to April.

Hollis has just completed a four-part Zoom series sponsored by the Jung Society of Washington. This “Quartet” presented several sets of poems observed through his uniquely Jungian lens.

After dealing with some considerable medical issues, Dr. Hollis is once again back in the saddle. We are so grateful to have him grace our society one more time. His subject: The Zen Paradox: What You Have Become is Now Your Chief Problem.

More on this event and his 2022 book, The Broken Mirror, in our next and final newsletter of the year.

 

       Murray Shugar ________________________________________________________________________________                                                

Volume 48, Newsletter #3 – January 2023


Musings from your Editor


In a time of conflicting narratives, wisdom and patience are sorely lacking. Would it not be fit and timely for a Jung Society to offer a sane and thoughtful antidote to a crisis of meaning in our society?

John Vervaeke, Associate Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto for almost thirty years, has become a public intellectual, like some of his more notorious fellow academics. His fifty-episode online series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” attracted tens of thousands of avid followers over the past few years.

His sharp intellectual acumen explored the ideas of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Tillich, Corbin and Jung. Philosophy has been at the core of his extensive study.

Other themes under his scrutiny fall readily into the academic domain of cognitive science including distributed cognition; 4E; hyper objects; Artificial General intelligence (AGI); salience landscape and, perhaps most notably, relevance realization.

Realizing the overwhelming domination of the field of clinical psychology nowadays by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), it should not surprise us that academic psychology has cognition at its core.

In sharp contrast, on most Jungian web sites, there are a myriad of entries about the goddess, healing and shamanism. Experimental work is hardly required in Jungian studies; amplification does not require corroboration.

Perhaps Vervaeke’s focus on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and his considerable online following attests to a hunger for sane and reasonable discourse on the confused state that has overwhelmed many, especially among the young.

His directorship of the Consciousness & Wisdom Studies Lab at the University of Toronto and his long-time practice of Buddhist and Taoist techniques of meditation and movement surely indicate an inclination beyond mere cognition, one that would be relevant to those seeking equanimity.

 A key phrase appears in the Lab’s mandate: “Consciousness … is a defining feature of our humanity, and transformations of consciousness are the hallmarks of our spirituality.”

Consciousness; Spirituality; Wisdom; Meaning; Do I sense a Jungian connection?

Tune in on Saturday, January 28 when John Vervaeke will visit our Jung Society via Zoom in conversation with David D’Andrea.

See the enclosed flyer for more details.

We owe this visit by John Vervaeke almost exclusively to David D’Andrea. David has been teaching in the Humanities Department at Vanier College for several decades and he joined our planning committee a few years ago. He was a pivotal figure in our bi-weekly Zoom gatherings during Covid times.

What had been primarily a reading group became increasingly more interested in watching videos and podcasts. The medium may indeed be the message of our times.

Being a generation younger than most of our wizened cohort and in touch with a still younger set of his CEGEP students, David is a coveted asset to us. He follows a different drumbeat. Beyond his academic assignments and his voracious reading habits, his attention is focused on the multiple podcasts and virtual educational platforms in the multiverse. He has already fruitfully led us to Jonathan Pageau and now John Vervaeke. Long may he and we thrive. And may our diverse communities come to know one another better.

For those who may find the Vervaeke approach too left brain, John Hill’s talk on home might provide a right brain corrective—pace Iain McGilchrist and his work on the bi-cameral mind. 

John Hill has been a leading light in Jungian circles for decades. He has written numerous essays and articles for Jungian journals. He is perhaps best known for his book At Home in the World: Sounds and Symmetries of Belonging; Spring Journal Books (2010).

This edition of our newsletter contains a review of this book from our newsletter of October 2011. Hill’s talk to us on Saturday, February 18 will likely be an updated revision of that book.

Probably his most impressive credentials are those found on his website: “He trained at the C. G. Jung Institute Zürich, has practiced as a Jungian analyst since 1973, and is a training analyst at the International School of Analytical Psychology (ISAP Zürich).”

Among his numerous articles, attesting to Hill’s wide-ranging interests, are “Fairy Tale Drama: Enacting Rituals of Play, Laughter and Tears;” Jung and Moreno; ed. Craig Stephenson, Routledge (2013); and “One Home, Many Homes: Translating Heritages of Containment.” Facing Multiplicity: Psyche, Nature, Culture; Proceedings of the 18th Congress of the IAAP, Editor: Pramila Bennett (Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 2015) pp. 35-47. {Montreal (2010)}

Besides his book on Home, Hill co-edited five volumes of The Jungian Odyssey Series (Vols. I-V), 2009-2013addressing themes such as Intimacy; Destruction and Creation; Trust and Betrayal; The Playful Psyche; and Love.

On his website (johnhill.ch), he cites Jung’s words in MDR as a kind of credo: “I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidarity underlying all existence and continuity in my mode of being.”

Hill has shown his acting “chops” in several Jung-centred theatrical performances. He played Rabbi Leo Baeck, Jung’s adversary, in the play “The Analyst and the Rabbi,” co-written by two Jungian analysts, Henry Abramovitch and Murray Stein. Among other roles, he played the English Dominican priest, Victor White, who, over a fifteen-year friendship and correspondence, challenged Jung’s views on God and Evil, especially at the time that Jung was writing his Answer to Job. The play was based on the Jung-White Letters, a compilation edited by Ann Lammers.

We know that neither the left nor the right brain alone will bring us sanity or salvation.

May we continue to persevere in holding the tension of the opposites both personally and as a society.

We hope that our society’s programming reflects a diversity of subjects and offers a wide range of speakers to engage your attention and your imagination.

Please renew your membership and show us your support.

 

               —Murray Shugar

________________________________________________________________


Volume 48, Newsletter #2– October 2022


Musings from Your Editor

We are eagerly awaiting a visit from Connie Zweig, via ZOOM of course, on Friday evening, October 14. It may be more than coincidence that we are starting our year with two speakers addressing the subject of spirituality. This is clearly a theme that speaks to most Jungians. We presume that her talk will resonate with some of what David Tacey had to say about Jung and spirituality in September.

      From what Zweig has written in her most recent book, The Inner Work of Age: Making the Shift from Role to Soul, it is possible that her perspective will differ somewhat.

      Zweig was a foundational figure in the consciousness-raising generation that boomed in America during the 1960’s. She was also an activist in the civil rights battles against injustice. This time she is advocating for the potentials of aging. 

     She was an executive editor of Tarcher Books in the 1980’s, a leading publishing house and proponent of the Human Potential Movement.

     She is a life-time meditator and strongly urges her readers to do the same. Her book provides spiritual lessons at the end of each chapter to accompany the shadow work that the book proposes as we shift from role to soul.

     As evident on a recent video, the Australian Tacey has a somewhat darker view of American optimism and the New Age spirit that Zweig seems to promulgate. 

    Zweig herself is quite familiar with the dark side. She collaborated with Jeremiah Abrams in co-editing Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side (1991). She also co-edited, with Steve Wolf, Romancing the Shadow (1996) It is largely due to these books that Zweig is best known as “the shadow expert.”

     As you will see on the flyer for her October event, “Her new bestselling book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, extends her work on the Shadow into midlife and beyond and explores aging as a spiritual practice. It won both the 2021 American Book Fest Award and the 2021 Best Indie Book Award for best inspirational non-fiction.”

     And Zweig has promised that “this lecture can help you discover how to reorient by turning within, attuning to your soul’s longing, and cultivating a spiritual shift in identity from what we do to who we truly are.”

      Rather than seeing “late life” as a time of decline and decrepitude, she sees this stage as vitally important, even a sacred zone, a fertile ground for Elder wisdom.

      Her book contains many stories and interviews with illustrious figures who have left a dramatic mark on the cultural life of America over the past few decades, like Ram Dass, Zalman Schachter–Shalomi, Deena Metzger and Ken Wilber.

      A review of her book can be found in this newsletter. 

      There is also a review of a book that Zweig wrote on the shadow side of spirituality. 

     This season will also feature a local Jungian-oriented psychologist, Mathieu Langlais, who will speak to us on Friday, November 11 on Conspiracism.

     His workshop the next day, Saturday, Nov. 12, with OPQ credits available, will address some of archetypal psychology’s practicesFrom Symptom to Image to Psyche: The What of Archetypal Psychotherapy.

       It will examine the what and a few hows of clinical work using that approach.

   Mathieu is a psychologist and psychotherapist and a member of l’Ordre des psychologues du Québec. He was trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy, Jungian psychology and Archetypal Psychology. He practices in Montréal, and teaches in Québec and abroad. His interests are in working with dreams, images, and film, and the interdisciplinary treatment of disease.

    He has previously presented to our society on  “Imagination's Body: A Soul Perspective on Psychosomatics,” and he shared the podium with several of our colleagues in discussing the subject: Beyond the Talking Cure. He was present at a Film Society event where he showed his savoir faire in the world of cinéma.

   Mathieu sees an aspect of Dionysus in the upsurge of dissidence in our contemporary society. He identifies what might be a resurgence of the Titans, an order of deities that preceded the Greek pantheon, a deeper and darker force, mostly unfamiliar to our Judaeo-Christian world.

   He has worked under supervision with Pat Berry, a pivotal figure in the foundation of Archetypal Psychology, created with James Hillman, her husband at that time.

 There is certainly a dark spirit afoot in our current political and cultural milieus.  Accusations fly as two sides dig in, ever  more  fully  entrenched.  Could there be a third way, an alternative perspective, that might shed light on our current dilemmas?

Who is holding the tension of the opposites?

Whether we see our world from a bright or dark side, the American Jungian analyst and prolific author Edward Edinger might bring us some insights. He is one of the most lucid interpreters of Jung’s writings. We will be hosting another of our 4-week seasonal reading seminars this November, on consecutive Thursday evenings, on a selection of his writings.

Edward Edinger (1922-1998) is the author of many books on Jungian psychology. Most notable are Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche; Encounter with the Self; and Transformation of the God Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job. He has also penned works on Melville’s Moby Dick and on Goethe’s Faust.

Among the subjects to be read and discussed are the mythic underpinnings of our dramasThe Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology; a clinical perspective on the Inflated ego (from Ego and Archetype); and selections from Edinger’s several books on Answer to Job, a work that came to Jung “in a fever” at the age of 75.

See the flyer for the details for each night. 

We hope to see you as our season progresses.

                                               Murray Shugar

______________________________________________________________________


  Volume 48, Newsletter #1September 2022


Musings from your Editor


 As we begin a new year under far more auspicious circumstances than in the past few years, we tread gently and hopefully.

 Our upcoming program will remain virtual and online. This is mostly out of exceeding caution but also because we have grown accustomed to the new Zoom format.

 The disruption of the pandemic has, in a most fortuitous way, given us access to a much wider world for which we are so grateful. 

 Visitors from Europe and from all over the North American continent have come to our door to attend our events. These have featured stellar guests from far-flung places like Zürich and Santa Fe, New Mexico, Victoria, B.C. and just across the line in upstate New York.

 The old adage of thinking globally while acting locally has remained on our mind. Our small local community/Jung society with its modest membership has managed to reach out, on any given event, to almost 200 participants!! It has remained stalwart, as best we can tell, from the names of attendees at our events! 

 A return to the familiar old waysgatherings at our local colleges and watering holeswill come to be at some future imperfect moment.

 Meanwhile we can promise you a delectable menu for our 2022-23 year.

 Our new season will begin early, on September 9, when David Tacey will speak to us from his home in Australia! (David has been on our radar for decades.) A Jungian scholar, David has written extensively on Jungian matters, with a keen interest in the interface between spirit and psychology. His book titles include Jung and the New Age (2001); Religion as Metaphor: Beyond Literal Belief (2015); and The Postsecular Sacred: Jung, Soul and Meaning in an Age of Change (2019). His presentation to us is entitled “Jung, Spirituality and The Modern Situation.”

 We have included in this newsletter a review of his “New Age” book written by a fellow Aussie, Anne di Lauro, more than twenty years ago. At that time, Anne was a valued member of BOTH Montreal Jung societies, such was her fluency in English and French. 

 Anne has been back in Brisbane for many years, where she has been active in the life of the Queensland Jung Society. She recently presented a talk on Jung and alchemy.

 You can catch a glimpse of Tacey’s recent work in the following video in which he expands on the role of Christianity in Jung’s ideas, or its lacuna in his project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUh70GTaLWk.

 A glance at his book titles and talks shows David’s spiritual leanings: the return of the sacred; beyond literal belief; spirituality and religion. His next book is due to be published in 2023 by Aeon Books; its title is Jung and Spirituality.

 In a lovely confluence with Tacey’s chosen theme, Connie Zweig will describe her own psychological and spiritual quest in October. Zweig has been called the “shadow expert.” Her experience over a lifetime has been devoted to the cultivation of a spiritual practice. She has also been a Jungian psychotherapist dedicated to enhancing the growth of consciousness. Her fellow travellers include Ram Dass, Ken Wilber, Stan Grof. Zalman Shacter-Shalomiformidable members of the 1960’s Aquarian Age revolution.

 Now that this group has grown into old age, Zweig has focused her gaze on the role this generation has begun, and might continue to play, as elders.

 See the review of her book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, in our next newsletter.

 She will speak to us on Friday, October 14 and tell us of her spiritual quest and a cultural shift she sees occurring. Her story may apply to many readers of this newsletter.

 Our autumn season will end with a four-part reading seminar exploring the writings of a classic American Jungian author, Edward Edinger. Along with Marie-Louise von Franz, he was probably the best interpreter of Jung’s work. Among the selected readings will be his analysis of Jung’s “Answer to Job.”

 A recurring theme connects several of our offerings this year with those of last yeara spiritual or religious attitude regarding our search for meaning.

 In January we will be bringing to our “house” a scholar in the Canadian academic and the virtual world. John Vervaeke is an assistant professor of psychology and in the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Toronto. His interests also include mindfulness and Buddhism.

 Vervaeke has a large following among the wisdom seekers beyond our Jungian precincts. The subject of his interestthe Meaning Crisisis central to the Jungian enterprise as well as to a younger and wider world.

 One of our newly minted committee members, David d’Andrea, a veteran CEGEP teacher, has brought Vervaeke to our attention and will interview him.

 Last year, in a similar manner, we trangressed our usual boundaries when Jonathan Pageau opened our year. Pageau is a YouTube sensation whose focus on the symbolic life and meaning has attracted the attention of many caught adrift in our disillusioned age. His life is devoted to the Eastern Orthodox Church with its images, rites and rituals and to sculpting sacred objects in that tradition. 

 Our speaker next February will be John Hill, a prolific author and veteran Jungian analyst, whose “specialty” is the subject of “home.”

 Narcissism will be addressed by another Jungian analyst, Ken Kimmel, of Seattle, in March.

 And abandonment seen through fairytales will be given a deep dive in April by our newly minted, local Jungian analyst Artemis Papert.

 If you want it darker, Mathieu Langlais will address a disturbing subject of our timesConspiracythis November, around the same time as our southern neighbours determine their future in a mid-term election. Conspiracies will no doubt be filling the air at that time. 

 We remember fondly the life of Jim Tremain who passed away this past March. Jim was a stalwart presence in our society and played a very active role on our committee. He served most effectively for some time as our treasurer and coordinated our space arrangements. An engineer by trade, Jim was involved in supporting l’Arche, the work of Jean Vanier. After a fulfilling married life with Kiki for more than fifty years until her death, Jim moved to Kingston for the final chapter of his life where he lived happily with his beloved Joan.

 Harvey Shepherd has been shepherding our society and been the chief scribe in its newsletter for decades. His PrezNotes have been a mainstay of our community, a desirable takeaway for our members who were constantly and efficiently informed of our activities and given valuable insights about current speakers. 

 Harvey’s talents as a journalist shone through in his perennial efforts on behalf of a project that he has long held dearour local Montreal Jung Society.

 Following in Harvey’s determined footsteps, I will try to keep the newsletter a valuable resource for our community.

 We hope that you continue to support us on our joint venture. And please let your friends know about our programs.

 The beginning of the year is always a good time to show your support by renewing your membership.

 Please note that our new Society phone number is (514) 971-8664.


         –Murray Shugar


r