President's Notes: 2014-2021

Volume 45, Number 4, February 2020

A Note From the Co-President

Our next lecture and seminar, March 20 and 21 will focus on empathy and its potential benefits both to empaths and those they empathize with.

They will also look at potential dangers. A series of four reading seminars in March could touch on the same topic, especially the potential downside.

These events will have other things in common. Both will offer insights from two clinical psychologists—not Jungian analysts, but professionals with a deep appreciation of Jung.

Both may owe their existence in part to the Web.

This is certainly true of the reading seminars on the four Thursdays in March, at which participants will discuss a small sampling of readings and video clips created by Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His popularity and even the creation of his latest book owe much to his online activity.

The seminars will as usual be led by volunteers. Peterson, who did lecture and lead a workshop for our society in 2003, when he was less in demand than he is today, will be present only in spirit this time.

I am not so sure about what relation, if any, there may have been between Web content and our other program, but I recently discovered there is a lot of stuff on the Web about empathy and empaths these days. Some folks in cyberspace apparently think, in words from one book I saw advertised, that we are living in “the age of empathy.”

Be that as it may, I am confident that those who come to the March 20 lecture on “Naïve Healers: Empaths and Empathy” by Susan Meindl, a psychologist with a practice in Montreal who is also on the planning committee of our society, will be in for a presentation well grounded in psychology, including but not limited to that stemming from the work of C. G. Jung. A seminar the next day will focus on whether empathy is an intuition, an art or a science.

This is Susan’s first presentation on this topic anywhere, but she has presented, to our society (in 2017) and elsewhere, on the gifts and pitfalls of “highly sensitive people,” a related topic.

In her lecture, Susan will focus on the experiences of highly empathic individuals and make a link between the Jungian archetype of the wounded healer and the way that empathic individuals often function unconsciously as naïve healers to the wounded people around them.

“I’m going to talk about how empathy develops and functions, the emotional and cognitive skills that underpin healthy empathy and the ways in which the development of empathy can be hampered,” she told me.

She said she will use Jung’s “criss-cross” model of conscious and unconscious communications between a psychoanalyst and a patient. Jung saw analysts as often “wounded healers,” attracted to the analytical profession because of their own psychic wounds; he proposed that there is often communicaton between the conscious and unconscious of the analyst and those of the “wounded” patient.

Susan expects to look at how this same interaction functions in daily life between empaths, as “naïve healers," and their “wounded” friends and loved ones, whom they seek to understand and care for.

She will discuss what the "naïve healer" needs in order to use empathy without becoming exhausted or exploited.

“In the half-day Saturday seminar, we are going to look at a couple of the common interpersonal difficulties that empathic individuals struggle with and I will propose a moral perspective which permits empathy without martyrdom. Through the use of a short story, we will also consider the poignant moral dilemmas that human empathy encounters at a societal level,” Susan writes.

Her comments about the moral ambivalence of empathy reminded me of some of the things I have been reading in Jordan Peterson’s best-seller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This might surprise some people, who accuse Peterson of being anti-women.

I don’t know how much our March seminars on extracts from Peterson’s writing and videos on a wide range of topics will focus on controversy over his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. (I will be one of the four moderators.)

To be sure, some of his comments on such topics as the use of indoctrination or quotas to get rid of gender disparities can be pretty caustic.

For example, in12 Rules for Life he writes that some studies imply “that we could probably minimize the innate differences between boys and girls, if we were willing to exert enough pressure. This would in no way ensure that we were freeing people of either gender to make their own choices.”

He continues sarcastically: “But choice has no place in the ideological picture: if men and women act, voluntarily, to produce gender-unequal outcomes, those very choices must have been determined by cultural bias. In consequence, everyone is a brainwashed victim, wherever gender differences exist, and the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them straight …

“Such things are often pushed past any reasonable limit before they are discontinued. Mao’s murderous Cultural Revolution should have taught us that.” (pps. 316-317)

A page further on, however, we find Peterson discussing people, especially women, more as individuals and the tone seems to shift—although I don’t think there is really any contradiction--much closer to that of, well, Susan Meindl’s “empathy without martyrdom.”

Under a subheading “Compassion as a Vice,” Peterson writes:

“Many of the female clients (perhaps even a majority) that I see in my clinical practice have trouble in their jobs and family lives not because they are too aggressive, but because they are not aggressive enough. Cognitive-behavioural therapists call the treatment of such people, generally characterized by the more feminine traits of agreeableness (politeness and compassion) and neuroticism (anxiety and emotional pain), ‘assertiveness training.’ Insufficiently aggressive women—and men, although more rarely—do too much for others. They tend to treat those around them as if they were distressed children. They tend to be naïve.” (pps. 318-319)

(Naïve? Now, where have I seen that word recently?)

—Harvey Shepherd

Volume 45, Number 3, January 2020

A Note from the Co-President

She was a lass of the low country

And he was a lord of a high degree.

She loved his lordship so tenderly,

Sing sorrow, sing sorrow,

For she sleeps in the valley where the wild flowers nod

And nobody knows she loved him, save herself and God.

A folk song haunts me as I anticipate the movie to be featured Sunday, January 26, at our annual joint event with the Cinéclub Film Society.

The screening and a day-long seminar on February 22 will lead us to reflect on love, death and grief, asking whether there may be new occasions for grief in this postmodern world—perhaps abuse, unrequited love (or involuntary celibacy), childhood trauma, climate change or even the loss of a pet.

These events come at a time when many of us mourn the death, October 8, of Daryl Sharp, a Toronto analyst and founder of Inner City Books, publisher of books by Jungian authors.

The movie is “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” a 1948 romantic drama directed by Max Ophüls, starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan.

The movie is set in Vienna at the start of the 20^th century, where a teenager living in an apartment building becomes fascinated by a new tenant, a concert pianist. But he ignores her. Years later, she does have a brief affair with the pianist, who promptly ditches her. She gives birth to their son, who subsequently falls ill and dies. Facing death herself, she writes a letter to the pianist.

Like the folk song, the movie is a tale of unrequited love. You might say they share an archetype.

At the screening there will probably be deeper Jungian commentary than that. Matthieu Langlais, a psychologist versed in Jungian psychology who has lectured to our society and has long been a member, will offer some comments.

As a psychologist, Matthieu has had a private practice in psychotherapy in Montreal for three decades. He studied psychotherapy at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, and Jungian psychotherapy for six months at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, with further studies in Montreal under the auspices of the Inter-Regional Association of Jungian Analysts. Other diverse items in his record include teaching in a university art therapy program in Lausanne, Switzerland.

When I was younger, an amazing black contralto and virtuoso guitarist called Odetta captivated me when I listened to the ballad quoted above on one of my favourite LPs. It still choked me up when I heard her sing it via the Web as I prepared these notes.

Maybe a phrase from the ballad—“Sing sorrow”—could be the title of our seminar Saturday, February 22. Three Montreal therapists, professionally acquainted with grief, will offer some insights about sorrow—and, judging by their credentials, may make them sing!

● Jan Bauer, a graduate of the Jung Institute and a Montreal Jungian analyst since 1983 and well known to us, says there used to be right and wrong ways to grieve and occasions to grieve. She will discuss new contexts in which grief appears today. “In a postmodern world are all griefs the same?” she asks.

● Corrie Sirota, a psychotherapist and lecturer in the McGill University School of Social Work, is also co-host of the radio show Life Unrehearsed on CJAD 800. She has more than 25 years’ experience helping grieving families; this presentation will focus on grieving children.

● Chris MacKinnon will explore the personal and collective shadow­—“aspects of ourselves, those we serve and organizations that make us uncomfortable”—as they turn up in bereavement. After almost ten years as a palliative care psychologist, he founded a private clinic in Montreal.

The seminar is open to anyone, but continuing-education credits from the Ordre des psychologues du Québec are likely to be available for those eligible.

You can find an obituary for Daryl Sharp on the website of Inner City Books, which he founded in 1980 and which has published about 150 titles by about 50 Jungian analysts, including about 30 titles of his own. He wrote the obituary himself; it appeared in Another Piece of My Heart, published by Inner City in 2014.

Books by Daryl himself include some references handy for any Jungian, such as the Jung Lexicon, along with readable essays and fictional romances, which mingle Jungian musings with the adventures, often amorous, of his alter egos. Even the naughty romances are packed with wisdom.

Yes, he liked to come across as a ladies’ man. However, if you looked more closely, his thoughts on women were respectful and nuanced and he could also be quite spiritual, in romantic contexts or not.

Here’s an extract from his Eyes Wide Open: Late Thoughts, published in 2007:

Until recently I was so taken up with what was right in front of me that I seldom thought about soul from one day to the next. But when I do, yes, I can readily see my life in terms of soul—meaningful encounters with my parts unknown. Clearly I have projected my anima-soul onto many others (especially women), as they have projected their animus onto me, and subsequently suffered its loss (as have they). Now I experience soul when I stare at the wall in the dead of night. Soul is there when I am in conflict with myself, when I struggle for answers. Soul is what I am, as opposed to what I seem to be. Soul is forged in the interactions between me and my inner and outer women, and I see it daily in the material presented to me in my analytic practice. (pps. 105-106)

I was introduced to Daryl before he became an analyst, by a friend from my late adolescence, who became his wife for thirteen years and the mother of three of his, ultimately, four children. Some years later, Daryl introduced me to much of Jung through an introductory course in Toronto led by him and the late Fraser Boa, not long before I moved to Montreal.

–Harvey Shepherd

Volume 45, Number 2, October 2019

A Note from the Co-President

For Jungian analyst Brian Mayo of Toronto as for C. G. Jung, the living psyche does not just nestle in the inward unconscious but manifests outwardly, in the things we say and do.

In his second visit to our society on Friday evening and Saturday morning, November 29 and 30, he will lecture and lead a seminar on how the unconscious manifests in three areas of popular culture—graffiti, the tattoo and the comic book. He and two other people I want to discuss in this note share a penchant for discerning the psyche in the world around us.

One is also presenting to us soon. We are mourning the sudden death of the other.

Not quite a month before Brian Mayo’s visit, Ted Fillery, a graduate of the Jung Institute in Zürich and an erstwhile member of our planning committee, will draw on his remarkably varied career and on his awareness of current trends in aboriginal culture to discuss profound challenges in sexual and gender awareness in today’s world. He will speak and lead a seminar Friday evening and Saturday morning, November 1 and 2.

I pay tribute to Cassie Cohoon–or Cassie Deveaux Cohoon, the name she used as an author, reflecting her Acadian heritage. Her two novels could hardly be labelled Jungian. However, in telling how an Acadian people came into being and survived among what began as an isolated group of French colonists, in the face of privation, isolation, oppression and exile, she emphasizes how important culture and struggle and the land and sea were in shaping the Acadians and a consciousness that lives on, especially in Atlantic Canada.

In the prologue to her novel, Severine, published in 2007, a fictional modern Acadian woman who has been living in Montreal and has other similarities to Cassie, recalls conversations with her grandmother back in Chéticamp, on Cape Breton:

It was Grandmère who told her stories of the brave and virtuous Acadians. She had told her little granddaughter that the history of the Acadians was the “Bible” of the Acadians. It was the story they lived by. Although she said it in a low voice so nobody else, and perhaps especially God, would hear. Sevvie had asked Grandmère if it was important to be Acadian, if it mattered to them now. And Grandmère said that one day she would understand.

Those who knew Cassie were shocked and saddened by her sudden death on September 4 after a traffic accident while she was out walking near her apartment in the N.D.G. district of Montreal. She was 84.

Cassie was for me a prime example of an individuated person as described by Jung: someone of growing psychological wholeness. Such a person may or may not be individualistic in the ordinary sense of the word. Cassie’s was the individuation of someone with a private and dignified persona.

She played a pivotal part in our Jung society at a transitional time. Cassie was an active member from its early years. This may have grown out of her deep involvement with the Thomas More Institute, an adult-education body in Montreal, with which our society continues to have harmonious relations. When Alice Johnston, founding president and editor of the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal until 1987, stepped down as editor of our newsletter in 1996, Cassie, who had some background in journalism, succeeded her as editor.

Cassie, in turn, retired as editor and a member of our planning committee in 2000. Almost two decades later, her contribution influences the newsletter you are reading at this moment.

The two novels to which she devoted much of her energy since about 2000 tell the story of the birth and development of the Acadians over three centuries through the day-to-day experiences of Acadians, particularly women. Severine, first published in 2007 and still available online, traces the lives and experience of a succession of fictional women of that name through the years; Jeanne Dugas of Acadia, published by the University of Cape Breton Press in 2013 and I believe still available in print, tells the story of the Acadians through the eyes of a historic ancestor of Cassie’s.

In Chapter 34 of Severine, an elderly Acadian woman comments: “Women’s stories have not been valued through the centuries, have they? It’s always the stories of politics, and wars, and power that survive. But I think it’s important for us to tell our stories. We’re told we talk too much, but we don’t talk about the important things the way they really are. We Acadians, especially. If something bad happens to us, we’re supposed to just put it behind us and forget it. And so we always say that it’s all right, whatever it is. But often it isn’t all right.”

Ted Fillery, who will present to us November 1 and 2, would no doubt concur and push farther. Mining ancient and modern theories from anthropology and biology and aboriginal lore, he will sketch his ideas about prospects for the evolution of a “neutriarchy” that would push past patriarchy and matriarchy to a new egalitarianism.

He has a remarkably varied background in science and culture and has practiced as a Jungian analyst in Toronto, Montreal and Brisbane, Australia and was on our planning committee for a few years.

Those who attended his presentations to our society, in 2016, which dealt in part with the “two-spirited” approaches to sexuality recognized by some North American aboriginal activists, will recall that Ted is not afraid to stir up controversy. His presentations Nov. 1 and 2 should be no exception to this rule.

Current issues regarding sexuality and gender may be on the agenda at the end of November when Brian Mayo will discuss how the unconscious manifests these days in graffiti, comic books and tattoos. (Tattoos were the topic of his previous talk to our society, in 2002.)

I, for one, have been trying, for example, to get my head around the fact that as I move around Montreal, tattoos seem to be as popular with women these days as with men.

On the Saturday, Mayo will combine discussion of graffiti with a Jungian look at Todd McFarlane’s comic Spawn. I am not familiar with Spawn but gather that he is a superhero created in 1990 in print and later in animation, who came back from a fiery grave as a creature who must choose between life on Earth and a throne in Hell.

I guess that would rate as an encounter with the Shadow!

Notwithstanding all this talk of gender egalitarianism and moral ambivalence, let me close on my usual patriarchal note. Please take out or renew your membership for 2019-20 if you have not already done so. Membership provides some modest benefits but also helps provide a financial cushion so we can offer some financially risky programs on occasion.

––Harvey Shepherd

It seems to me there are implications for our C. G. Jung Society of Montreal.

We began about forty-four years ago as an effort to provide alternative means of access to Jungian psychology in a city waiting for Jungian analysts. We need to continue that tradition because there are not going to be more than a few analysts any time soon. We should continue to profit from the presence of those analysts here, of course, but we are still largely on our own.

A casual get-together in Westmount Park July 24 underlined for me that Montreal still needs a Jungian organization made up largely of lay people. Of about twenty people present, about half came from our society’s link with the Montreal Meetup network.

At the same time, provincially certified psychologists are among the leading members of our society. Perhaps our society could do more to build bridges between therapists of different disciplines, including psychologists, Jungian analysts, and creative-arts therapists.

This brings me to the upcoming events of October 4 and 5. The weekend will be strongly interdisciplinary. It’s a collaborative venture with the Creative Arts Therapies community at Concordia University and is being organized by Stephen Snow, a drama therapist with impressive credentials, who will also direct the play. He’s working in collaboration with his wife, Shelley Snow, a psychotherapist and music therapist and founder of Montreal’s Dorian Centre.

I hope the weekend will help revive the soul-making to which creative arts therapies contributed to our society in the past. Stephen and Shelley were among those who played an important part in this.

The playwright is among strong representatives of the lay contingent in our society. Neither analyst nor psychologist, Margaret Piton is a retired newspaper reporter (just like me). One of several plays that she has written, this one takes a light-hearted look at how Jung’s Red Book is received by a motley crew.

The Friday evening program will wind up with a panel. Four therapists with different specialties will discuss how The Red Book has touched them. They include Robert Landy, (see the next paragraph), Montreal Jungian analyst and sandplay therapist Yvon Rivière and two creative arts therapists on the Concordia faculty: art therapist Janis Timm-Bottos and music therapist Guylaine Vaillancourt.

On Saturday, an all-day workshop offering “experience in creative-arts therapies” will be led by Robert Landy, a creative-arts and drama therapist recently retired from New York University, where he started the drama therapy program in 1984. He lectures internationally and has over 35 years of experience treating children and adults with psychiatric, cognitive and other challenges, some of them in prisons.

One more thing: the short title for the Saturday’s exercise in embodied active imagination will be “The Red Book as Hero’s Journey.” These little coincidences tempt me to believe in synchronicity.

The phrase “the hero’s journey,” is known to many as identifying the “monomyth” central to the work of the renowned mythology specialist Joseph Campbell, who died in 1987.

And, lo and behold, writings by Campbell will be featured in this fall’s reading seminar series, on the first four Thursdays in October. Members of our society will moderate discussion of readings from his voluminous writings.

There are links between the later years of Campbell’s life and the early years of our society. He lectured in Montreal on a few occasions in the 1970s and early 1980s just before and after our society was formally established. Our society was sometimes a sponsor or co-sponsor. The visits were largely thanks to Malcolm Spicer, who taught in the department of theological studies at Loyola College and then the Loyola Campus of Concordia.

Like creative arts therapies, Campbell and his visits to Montreal, his writings, his TV interviews and his influence on the media, transmitted his passion for myth and brought a vitality to our society that I hope we can recover today. He was also a leading scholar and interpreter of Jung, to whom he acknowledged a great debt. For example, he edited and contributed a masterful introduction to The Portable Jung, published by The Viking Press in the 1970s.

At the same time, there were significant differences. In the words of an online Encyclopedia Britannica biography by scholar Robert Segal, “Jung regarded myth as a useful part of therapy because it was a way for the conscious mind to uncover unconscious meaning and apply it to everyday life. For Campbell, myth provides sufficient access to the unconscious, and to have a myth is to need no therapy … Rather than confine his subject matter to myth and the human mind, Campbell found in myth the key to the cosmos as a whole.”

Let me close with a reminder that annual memberships in the society are now due for renewal.

—Harvey Shepherd

President's Notes from our 2018-19 Newsletter

Volume 44, Number 4, March 2019

A Note From the Co-President

The governing archetype for the last few months of our current program year may be the Trickster.

That wily shape-shifting rascal, patron of thieves, creativity and a whole lot in between, will be the theme of our spring term reading seminar series.

Four members of our society’s planning committee will lead discussion on selections from the writings of C. G. Jung, James Hillman and other luminaries about this archetype on the four Thursday evenings in April. One of the four moderators will be Rosario Lopez-Larroy, a relatively recent addition to our planning committee and already a pillar of the society. Kathryn Archibald, Artemis Papert and Murray Shugar will also animate sessions.

But this elusive archetype, whom C. G. Jung described as “a forerunner of the saviour, … both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness” (CW 9i, Par. 472) will be with us more than that.

I expect the Trickster will also be behind the scenes in the two major public activities that will bookend the seminars. One of the two remarkable speakers will be a perennial favourite, the other an exciting newcomer. Both will come with a bag of tricks (metaphorically speaking) that will challenge and enlighten us.

Jan Bauer, a much-appreciated speaker over almost four decades, will speak on disappointment on Friday evening, March 29, three days before April Fool’s Day. She has me interested already, but in thinking about what to expect I find the topic as hard to pin down as Br’er Rabbit or the Spirit Mercurius. As Jan acknowledges, disappointments always occur everywhere—large and small, annoying or world-changing—and I wonder which ones she will choose.

But let me speculate a little:

--Our association with Jan began about thirty-seven years ago, when our society had existed for only a few years and she arrived in Montreal to begin her practice as an analyst. She arrived at a time of bright hopes for Jungian analysis and Jungian psychology in Montreal.

Not all these hopes have been realized; there have been disappointments for her and for us.

—She wrote a book on “impossible love” and has spoken several times on that subject and related ones. What a potential treasure trove of disappointment!

—She has a keen interest in political subjects. Have there been disappointments on the political scene? Don’t get me started!

Anyway, it’s a plus that Jan is Trickster enough to have me guessing already. I’m confident that her “Disappointment” won’t disappoint us.

I had been looking forward to the presentations Friday evening and Saturday, April 26 and 27 by Tom Cheetham, who lives with his wife on a homestead in rural Maine and is a former university teacher of ecological subjects who still teaches and lectures. I admire his understanding of Islam, Henry Corbin (the scholar of Shia Islam and a contemporary of C. G. Jung) and James Hillman, the “archetypal psychologist,” who owed much to Corbin. I felt Cheetham, a fellow of the Temenos Academy in London, could help us to better understand, Islam, Corbin and Hillman.

I still think so. But imagine my surprise on reading publicity blurbs from Cheetham and finding nary a word about Islam, Corbin or Hillman. Instead, I read that Cheetham is “the author of five books on the imagination in religion, psychology, the arts and sciences and one book of poems.” His Friday evening lecture will be titled “Art, Imagination and the Light of Nature: The Flame of Things” and the Saturday workshop “Learning the Flowers: Eros and the Precision of Imagination.”

Cheetham, you Trickster!

Actually, having read several of the books, I can tell you it’s all true. They are a wonderful source of information and insight about Islam, Corbin and Hillman. And they are also wonderful “books on the imagination in religion, psychology, the arts and sciences.”

Cheetham’s books, actually, had given me notice that his approach is evolving.

“Over the years,” he writes in Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman (Spring Publications, 2015, Page 15), “it has mattered less and less to me whether I was getting Corbin right and more and more whether I was getting me right.” His lecture and presentations will no doubt carry that forward, but without wholly neglecting Islam, Corbin or Hillman. I can hardly wait. We need to hear Cheetham’s arguments for the renewal of imagination.

In Imaginal Love Cheetham writes:

Hillman says that Henry Corbin’s work to re-establish the reality of the imaginal world “can be seen as political action of the first order: it (is) meeting terrorism, fanaticism, nihilism right at (their) roots in the psyche.” I (Cheetham) want to try to get at those roots, to work into that tangle … Entry into the imaginal signals not a change of place but a change in your mode of being. Just as finding one’s “soul” is not the discovery of a thing but a change in your mode of being, so entering the imaginal involves a fundamental change in the condition of the world. It involves a kind of opening. And, mystics tell us, the openings go on forever. (pps. 79-80)

Oh, about those publicity blurbs from Cheetham: As usual, in these notes I try to minimize duplication of matter already in our calendar and publicity flyer. In this case please read the flyer. The blurbs are poetry in their own right. If time and circumstances permit, look up his website and blog too. Your search could start at https://sites.google.com/view/tom-cheetham

Let me mention one nasty trick the Trickster has played on us. Ginette Paris, a close and long-standing friend of our society and an emerita professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA, is leading a day-long seminar in French on abandonment, mourning and depression on April 27. The date clashes with our Cheetham seminar so some people may face a difficult choice. But check our website or visit hers at www.ginetteparis.com.

—Harvey Shepherd

Volume 44, Number 3, January 2019

A Note From the Co-President

On Sunday, Jan 27, we will screen Orson Welles’ 1941 classic film Citizen Kane, this year’s co-sponsored event with the Ciné-Club Film Society. Montreal Jungian analyst Tom Kelly, a key figure in the Jungian scene in Montreal and internationally, will offer a commentary on the movie.

This movie has enormous resonance today. Philippe Spurrell, president of the film society, really knows how to pick them!

Citizen Kane is set amid the rise of new populist media—newspapers eight decades ago that were the predecessors of such outlets today as Fox News and the National Post. Like them, the yellow journals of yesteryear did seem to offer ordinary people a hearing lacking in the established media, but could also be voices of reaction and threats to democracy.

Citizen Kane was released shortly before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the Second World War. The movie is set in a world where individual liberty is threatened by polarizing forces. Then they included communism and fascism, today we have xenophobia, identity politics and populisms of the right and left.

The movie focuses on the complex and conflicted personality of a man who parlayed a talent for appealing to ordinary people and making money into great wealth and power. Among other things, the partly fictional Charles Foster Kane wound up with a big estate in Florida.

Sound familiar? Well, the parallel isn’t perfect. In the movie it isn’t the president of the United States who fits that description but Kane, a fictional prewar version of, let’s say, Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch. Kane, played by Welles himself, is a newspaper tycoon said to be based on real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and others. Hearst tried to block release of the movie and forbade its mention in any Hearst newspapers.

Orson Welles was about 26 when Citizen Kane was released and C. G. Jung about 66. I don’t know whether Jung had any influence on Welles but I know we are in for a presentation rich with archetypal figures and situations. Tom Kelly will have plenty of material for what is sure to be an insightful presentation.

But speaking of symbols, watch out for rosebud!

Seminar to focus on addictions

The four speakers at our day-long seminar on Saturday, Feb. 9, on addictions—obviously a topical issue, what with the legalization of marijuana in Canada and the opioid crisis—all possess impressive qualifications.

The event will be open to the public but eligible participants will also be able to earn continuing-education credits with the Ordre des psychologues du Québec to help them maintain their professional standing as psychologists or accredited psychotherapists.

The ability to offer such credits is an advantage our society gets from co-operating with the Ordre des psychologues, a body about which I have mixed feelings. A couple of colleagues in the society have asked me to soft-pedal these for the moment and for the moment I will.

Yet one point, perhaps not negative in itself, bears mentioning. Previous seminars for which we have offered OPQ credits have usually offered speakers with both strong professional qualifications to commend them to the OPQ and some special interest in Jung or related matters to commend them to us. The four speakers at the February 9 seminar have stellar qualifications but, so far as I know, only one has a special interest in Jung.

The speakers:

● Dr. Patricia Conrod is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry at the Université de Montréal, with a research team based at Ste.-Justine Hospital. She has been internationally active in research on addiction.

She focuses on cognitive, personality and biological factors that may lead to drug abuse and on how addictive behaviours may correlate with certain mental disorders. She oversaw a study published last October that followed 3,826 Canadian adolescents for four years, compiling data on cannabis and alcohol use and on cognitive performance and crunching the data in complex ways.

Dr. Conrod was quoted: "Of particular concern was the finding that cannabis use was associated with lasting effects on a measure of inhibitory control, which is a risk factor for other addictive behaviours.”

● Dr. Kathryn Gill is an associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University and directs research in the addictions unit of the McGill University Health Centre. Along with her other teaching and research activities, she treats patients at the addictions unit for drug and alcohol dependence, using group and individual psychotherapy. She also runs a research program on mental illness, substance dependence and gambling among urban aboriginals and gambling practices and addiction among the Cree peoples of James Bay.

● Dr. Jean Ruth Caplan is a psychologist in private practice who uses several kinds of therapy. She was once a registered nurse, working largely with premature babies. While working with alcoholics she realized that their family members were also affected by the disease and later found that the same was true for family members of other types of addicts.

She feels that “It’s important to remember that no one becomes an addict for the fun of it. There are usually underlying painful issues that the person is trying to alleviate by ‘self-medicating’ with their addiction.”

● Susan Meindl, who will provide the day’s Jungian content, is a Montreal psychologist and psychoanalyst in training—and a member of our planning committee. She notes that organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous and Jung argued that moral and spiritual development are useful in supporting lasting change for addicts, whereas many therapists today shy away from what they see as a moralizing attitude. She will also provide an overview of the day before the speakers entertain questions from the room.

I invite you to pay your membership fee for 2018-19 if you have not yet done so. Members receive the newsletter and pay reduced fees for workshops and lectures. The current membership year expires in August, so the financial benefits of joining are modest at this time of year, but this is a way of helping maintain a Jungian presence in Montreal.

—Harvey Shepherd

Volume 44, Number 2, October 2018

A Note From the Co-President

Once again, upcoming events in our program seem even more topical than anticipated earlier.

The presentations to our society by analysts Marcel Gaumond on Friday evening, November 2 and Angela Pessinis on Friday evening, November 23 (both followed by Saturday workshops) will delve into the psychological and cultural history of the 20^th century in ways that could help us to understand better what is going on so far in the 21^st.

These events will be a bit historic for our society. Gaumond, based in Quebec City, was the first fully qualified Jungian analyst to settle in Quebec and Pessinis, based in Lachine, is one of the most recently qualified. While she has presented to us before, I believe Gaumond’s lecture and workshop will be his first to our society.

I do recall him speaking to the Cercle C. G. Jung de Montréal some years ago, when it existed. Indeed, his presentation to us, in French, is part of an effort on our part to contribute in some way to a possible revival in Montreal of the French-language programming that the Cercle used to offer.

Gaumond’s and Pessinis’ presentations will not be primarily political, but both speakers have an interest in political issues.

I expect both may help us to understand some of the roots of what is becoming an early 21^st-century phenomenon: identity politics.

As you read this, you may be reflecting on the success of the Coalition Avenir Québec, led by François Legault, in the October 1 Quebec election. Or maybe not: perhaps the Liberals will have managed to squeak back into power with a reduced majority.

My crystal ball is not especially well polished; I’m just repeating what the media seem to be saying as I write this note during the election campaign. But I discern something in my crystal ball that I will venture to pass on. Whatever the outcome of the election, media and academic commentators probably draw on the concept of identity politics to elucidate it.

Some may also mention some comments by Maxime Bernier, erstwhile maverick member of the federal Parliament and founder of the new People’s Party of Canada, suggesting that the current federal government goes overboard in promoting diversity.

Farther afield, observers have noted a widespread upsurge in identity politics, and not all of it on the right. Donald Trump appeals to a largely blue-collar base to help him wall out undesirable immigrants and make America great again. The Islamic State wreaks havoc. Myanmar persecutes Rohingya Muslims. And so on and so on. On the left, a good deal of current feminist activism, the Black Lives Matter movement and agitation by and on behalf of LGBT people, aboriginal groups and other minorities have also been cited as examples of identity politics.

The phrase has been used by, among others, the U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama. In an article in the August edition of Foreign Affairs and in his book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, which came out in September, he argues that in the first decade of this century growth in electoral democracy and economic prosperity slowed and reversed in the world’s democracies and elsewhere. There were complex technological and economic reasons for this but he thinks identity politics played a big part, even if he does not think identity politics are always bad.

“Again and again,” Fukuyama writes in Foreign Affairs, “groups have come to believe that their identities—whether national, religious, ethnic, sexual, gender, or otherwise—are not receiving adequate recognition. Identity politics is no longer a minor phenomenon, playing out only in the rarified confines of university campuses or providing a backdrop to low-stakes skirmishes in ‘culture wars’ promoted by the mass media. Instead, identity politics has become a master concept that explains much of what is going on in global affairs."

Marcel Gaumond is no stranger to organizational and cultural matters. In the Jungian community he was, among many other things, one of the four founders (with Jan Bauer, Tom Kelly and the late Guy Corneau) in 1988 of the Association des psychanalystes jungiens du Québec, of which he was president for eleven years. He has written a column for a cinema magazine and led discussion groups in Quebec City on its content for over twenty years. Since last year he has been co-editor of the international Revue de psychologie analytique.

He won’t exactly be speaking to us on identity politics, but will be focusing, I gather, on what might be the other side of the coin: a feeling of lack of identity, a frequent worrisome feeling of somehow being a foreigner or stranger. He will discuss how this is embodied by the archetypal figures of Oedipus, Moses and Jesus Christ, as described by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung—and also how Freud and Jung encountered such feelings in their 20^th-century analytical practices and in their own lives.

(His presentations will be open to the public. For those eligible, continuing-education credits to meet requirements of the Ordre des psychologues du Québec will be available for a modest additional fee. Check the flyer or phone our office for details.)

Like Gaumond, Angela Pessinis is a movie buff. She identifies deeply with her native Greece and its culture. Her presentations will deal with some basic opposites in psychology and life, such as Apollonian and Dionysian, Logos and Eros, and body and psyche, as presented by Nikos Kazantzakis in his book Zorba the Greek and the 1964 movie based on it. She will introduce and screen the movie on the Friday evening and lead a discussion of excerpts on the Saturday. She could hardly have selected a vehicle richer in identity issues to explore such classical Jungian themes as typology, shadow, the anima, relationships and individuation.

I have only seen publicity extracts from Francis Fukuyama’s new book and I doubt that he has become a closet Jungian. However, our two upcoming speakers may bring us a tiny bit closer to fulfilling a hope he expresses at the end of the preface:

… Human psychology is much more complex than the rather simpleminded economic model suggests. Before we can understand contemporary identity politics, we need to step back and develop a deeper and richer understanding of human motivation and behaviour. We need, in other words, a better understanding of the human soul.

A quick PS:

We encourage those who have not renewed their memberships to do so.

We now offer the option of online payments through PayPal.

But don’t worry: for those who prefer more traditional methods we will continue to accept cheques and cash. For now the PayPal option is set up for paying memberships and for donations. We are working on making this option available for payments for events too. For online payments, use a new website, www.jungsocietyofmontreal.ca, which is for this purpose alone. (Our website for most purposes continues to be https://sites.google.com/site/cgjungmontreal.)

—Harvey Shepherd

Volume 44, Number 1, September 2018

A Note From the Co-President

I caught my breath when I saw the topic of the lecture by James Hollis that will open our 2018-19 program year: “In-Between Times: Something Gone, Something Not Yet Born.”

In numerous presentations to our society and elsewhere over several decades and in a number of his fifteen books, he has often returned to the topic of the mid-life passage or crisis.

Who better than James Hollis—who has an analytical practice in Washington, D.C., official heart of the Empire, and is director of the Jung Society of Washington—to relate the concept of the personal life crises to the current collective life crises in the United States, Canada and rest of the world?

Inspired by his spoken and written words through the years, I look forward with keen anticipation to what he may have to say to us.

However, I will leave geopolitical matters for now and focus on in-between times closer to home.

I have a strong sense that both I in my personal life and the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal are in liminal times, mourning recent losses and anticipating unknown and perhaps promising futures.

Let me mention that we are mourning the recent death of Leo Ten Bokum, who had had a career in science and a passion for long-distance sailing, was a lively and independent participant in some of our activities recently and was briefly our treasurer.

I want to focus on two recent deaths in the Jungian world in Canada that represent something gone, the end of an era, for many of us, in Montreal and elsewhere.

I will concentrate on the impact of Marion Woodman and John Dourley on me and our Montreal society, but I urge people to consult the more comprehensive obituaries on the website of the C. G. Jung Foundation of Ontario at www.cgjungontario.com and the Marion Woodman Foundation at https://mwoodmanfoundation.org, among other sources. There is a touching (and irreverent) personal tribute to John Dourley by his good friend Daryl Sharp of Inner City Books in Toronto, publisher of several of John’s (and Marion’s) books at www.innercitybooks.net.

I think that the first lecture by a Jungian analyst I ever attended was the first lecture in Canada delivered by Marion Woodman as a newly minted Jungian analyst, just graduated from the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. She died July 9 at almost 90 years of age,

I think it was in 1979 that Marion, who had been a teacher in London, Ont. for about twenty years, addressed the Toronto counterpart of our society, then called the Analytical Psychology Society of Ontario. This was just before I moved to Montreal for career reasons and shortly thereafter joined the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal.

This lecture was at the beginning of a brilliant career for an analyst, charismatic speaker and author, who played a significant role in the early years of the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts. She also had an influence extending beyond Jungian circles and beyond Canada in promoting her approaches to the conscious feminine through body and movement work and other activities.

Woodman’s career helping to establish the local underpinnings of Jungian work and then reaching out to broader horizons, largely around issues of masculinity and femininity, had a lot in common with that of Québec’s Guy Corneau, who died at the beginning of last year at the age of only 65.

Marion Woodman’s presentations meant a lot to such local groups as the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal. I recall once taking an opportunity to talk shop and compare notes with some people from the Halifax society.

“Well, you know,” said someone, “we lose money on a few speakers and then bring in Marion Woodman and make it all back again.”

“Same thing for us,” someone replied.

I was inspired and comforted by her affirmation of both the feminine and masculine, through her own efforts and in collaboration with the U.S. poet Robert Bly. She struggled against (to quote from the introduction to her early book Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride) “the dynamics of evil when the masculine principle loses its standpoint in its own reality, and the feminine principle of love succumbs to calculating, intellectualized ambition.”

It was not long after arriving in Montreal that I heard and read appreciative comments by the late Alice Johnston, the leading founder of our local Jung society, about a remarkable Roman Catholic priest and Jungian analyst in Ottawa named John Dourley. She said some people found it remarkable that he managed to carry on as a priest while publishing trenchant critiques of the church.

I too became a great admirer of John Dourley through a number of his thirteen books on Jung and religion and several lectures to our Montreal society.

A lifelong resident of Ottawa, he was ordained to the priesthood in the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1964. His teaching career began the next year and ended at Carleton University in Ottawa in 2001. However, he also studied at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich around the same time as Marion Woodman and Guy Corneau and practiced as a Jungian analyst from 1980 until his apparently sudden but peaceful death June 22, at the age of 82.

(His irreverence was not confined to theological matters. I remember greeting him as he arrived to deliver one lecture. He was somewhat pleased with himself. It seemed he had arrived in Montreal the evening before and found himself passing the old Forum, then still home ice for the Montreal Canadiens. A home game had been under way a while and the doors were open and unguarded and he was able to stroll in and watch the third period or so for free.)

I came to share much of his vision that the unconscious could bridge the gaps between belief systems and between them and non-believers—that, as he wrote in the first few pages of The Illness That We Are: A Jungian Critique of Christianity, published in 1984, “Christianity, with its central symbol of death and resurrection, could be the candidate among the monotheisms to … affirm itself by transcending itself—to die in its present configuration in order to rise in some form of more inclusive consciousness.”

Marion Woodman and John Dourley made an enormous contribution to the in-between time in which they lived and worked. They pointed the way out of stifling patriarchy and

fundamentalisms, whether religious ones or ideological “isms” like communism and fascism. To be sure, the era now being born could turn out to be worse, marked by resurgent

fundamentalisms, religious and political, and a “non-binary” rejection of the masculine and feminine alike. Or, inspired by their example, we can work for something better.

Inspired as well by thoughts like James Hollis will share with us Friday evening and Saturday morning, September 21 and 22. Note the venue: Fulford Hall of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, 1444 Union Ave. (behind Christ Church Cathedral and beside the Hudson’s Bay store.)

Note also that the Saturday conference, at which he will outline a mythopoetic approach to psychology, will be only a morning program, and therefore quite affordable. It will be open to anyone but for an additional fee, continuing-education credits from the Ordre des psychologues du Québec will be available to health-care professionals who qualify.

Anyone who wants to further explore James Hollis’s thought through his writings is invited to participate in a series of weekly reading seminars in October. Members of our society will lead discussion of selections from his works. (See the enclosed flyer)

Finally, as a new program year begins I urge you to give the society a boost by joining us or renewing your membership.

—Harvey Shepherd

President's Notes from our 2017-18 Newsletter

Volume 43, Number 5, April 2018

A Note From the Co-President

As I look forward to events coming in April and May, I find that the anticipation also brings back memories.

In particular, the upcoming presentations to our society Friday night and Saturday, April 20 and 21, by Ursula Carsen remind me what a vibrant, almost magical presence Marion Woodman was for many members of our society and other Canadian Jungians a few decades ago. She seemed to bring healing to the wounded feminine and masculine (and attract audiences that helped restore society funds).

At 89, Marion Woodman is no longer active in the way she once was but her influence continues through the Marion Woodman Foundation, based on Jung’s psychological insights “and Marion Woodman’s passionate commitment to articulating the sacred feminine and bringing embodied consciousness into our lives,” according to the foundation website.

The Marion Woodman Foundation is now a vibrant community of women and men dedicated to practicing and broadening the reach of BodySoul Rhythms®. We continuously draw on the insights of C. G. Jung and Marion Woodman, bringing the unconscious to consciousness and embracing the unlived life, while enhancing, deepening, and making this work accessible in the world.

Ursula Carsen is a Toronto-based registered psychotherapist and instructor in body-soul work, with training in psychodynamic and Jungian traditions. She was taught by Marion Woodman in a leadership training of the foundation twenty years ago and has co-led “BodySoul Intensives” with her. Carsen will speak about the role of dream, voice, mask, metaphor, movement and the imagination.

The Saturday workshop will be even more experiential and embodied than the Friday lecture. It will have “symbol in the body” as a core exercise and will focus on something called the “Dance of Three.” There will be art-making, writing, and personal and group process.

It seems to me that hands-on activity of this kind has become less a part of our society’s programming than it used to be, at least for activities for relatively large groups. Our Saturday with Ursula Carsen may be something of a welcome revival.

However, we have sought to make up for this to a degree with an activity in a more intimate format, called Soul Collage™, in which a relatively small group meet with a facilitator, in our case Joan Palmer of Burlington. Vt., in the home of one of our members. The next session will be Saturday, May 12, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Registration is essential. For more information, call (514) 485-0263.

In the last newsletter, I mentioned a 12-week reading course on “Jung’s Mysterious Red Book” that will begin Tuesday, April 3, at the Thomas More Institute with sessions moderated by people with backgrounds in both our society and the institute. And on the four Thursdays in April our own society will be offering a series of reading seminars on Islam and the psyche.

These two seminar series and their sponsoring organizations are officially quite separate from each other. However, there is a history of casual but complementary co-existence from time to time extending over more than four decades between our two adult education organizations. (We in the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal rarely describe ourselves as an adult education organization, but we could.) Naturally, we hope that a few of the eighteen participants in the Thomas More series (their allowed maximum) may be encouraged to get closer to our society.

However, it might be just as worthwhile if not more so for more people in our society to become more aware of the Thomas More Institute, which since 1945 has been offering lifelong learning experiences to adults.

Notwithstanding its insistence that it is a secular institution, it is probably fair to associate the Thomas More Institute with a cluster of Catholic groups around the Loyola College and then the Loyola Campus of Concordia University that had some fruitful relations with the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal around the time we were established about 43 years ago. This was probably based on a mutual interest in Jung and his work.

Incidentally, a little disambiguation might be in order at this point.

The Thomas More Institute, according to its website, is named for Thomas More (1478-1535), a great scholar of the Renaissance, who “contributed significantly to the critical shift from the medieval to the modern world by articulating and promoting education for men and women alike.” More was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author and statesman and councillor to Henry VIII, and Lord High Chancellor of England; when he refused to acknowledge Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England and to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, More was convicted of treason and beheaded.

Thomas Moore, 77, the U.S. psychotherapist, former monk, and writer of popular spiritual books influenced by the writings of Carl Jung and James Hillman, including Care of the Soul (1992) is someone else, notwithstanding his interest in spirituality.

Our April reading series on Islam and the psyche, like our other reading series, owes an unofficial debt to the Thomas More Institute in that the format is inspired by that of the reading seminars at the institute, even though there is no formal connection.

The flyer for the Islam reading seminars went out with the previous newsletter. For information visit our website or call (514) 481-8664. For more information on the Thomas More Institute course, contact https://courses.thomasmore.qc.ca/spring-2018-jungs-mysterious-red-book-philosophy-2/ For more on the Soul Collage call Mary Ellen Baker at (514) 485-0263. Information on the Ursula Carsen weekend is enclosed with this newsletter.

—Harvey Shepherd

Volume 43, Number 4, March 2018

A Note From the Co-President

In one of his books dealing with Henry Corbin, the French scholar of Islamic mysticism, Tom Cheetham, writes, “One of the many effects of anima consciousness is that she makes us feel the ‘personality’ of the personified cosmos we inhabit.”

On Page 179 of Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman, a book I review elsewhere in this issue, Cheetham goes on, “She awakens both the anima humana and the anima mundi: the human soul and the soul of the world. Without her there can be no faces, and as Corbin says, ‘what would a world without a look, without a Face, without a look, actually be?’”

Perhaps that is a theme of our activities in the next five weeks or so. One way or another, I think the idea is probably reflected in most of the readings on the theme of Islam and the psyche that participants will discuss in our reading seminar series on four Thursday evenings in April.

But I think concern for both the soul of the individual and that of the world also characterizes Polly Young-Eisendrath of Montpelier, Vermont, one of our favourite speakers for many years.

She will be back on Friday evening and Saturday, March 23 and 24, with a lecture and workshop to describe what she sees as an unprecedented challenge confronting many couples—and a form of couples therapy that she proposes.

She thinks that for many adult couples decades of struggle for gender equality and sexual freedom have not led to intimate and reciprocal love. Rather, in her view, conjugal relations are in many ways more problematic and unhappy than they were when marriages were based largely on impersonal loyalties.

She thinks that the “Personal Love” based on equality, reciprocity and mutuality that such couples seek is something new in intimate relationships.

You can find more details in the flyer. Let me underline that the weekend programs are eligible for continuing-education credits from the Ordre des psychologues du Québec for professional psychologists and certain other professionals. (They will know who they are.) Anyone may attend the Friday evening and Saturday events; and those qualified can pay an additional fee and receive the credits.

I found Polly’s website at https://young-eisendrath.com particularly helpful about her revised dialogue therapy, especially a couple of the video clips to be found there.

I would also interject a personal comment. It seems to me that there is a kinship between the phenomenon Polly describes and the viral #MeToo phenomenon in which large numbers of people, often anonymous, have taken to social media to describe incidents of sexual abuse or harassment. Many of these people are young women, or were when the incidents they describe took place.

There are major differences between the two phenomena. In particular, the #MeToo descriptions tend to refer to incidents between people quite different in age or status, suggesting a strong element of coercion. Polly seems to be offering her dialogue therapy, by contrast, to couples who already have some commitment to equality, reciprocity and mutuality, although they report difficulty achieving these goals.

In both instances, however, it appears that people are refusing to live with situations an earlier generation might have been willing to accept. This may be a healthy change in many cases, but I am beginning to suspect that a long trend toward sexual permissiveness is beginning to reverse and we may be moving toward a new puritanism, a prospect I find somewhat worrisome.

(Now I will get back to the reading seminars.)

An acclaimed new novel provides a fictional account of Muslim expatriates torn between personal yearnings, social values, families, and political commitments, some of them extreme. It is set largely in Britain and the United States but its themes are a topical subject in today’s Quebec. Home Fire is the eighth novel by Kamila Shamsie, now 44, who has lived and written in her native Pakistan, Massachusetts and London.

It has been enthusiastically received by a number of readers. I am not yet one of that happy band, owing to deadline pressures for this newsletter, but look forward to reading it, or at least part of it, soon. That’s thanks to one satisfied reader, Munirah Amra, of South African Indian origin, who taught English at Collège International Marie de France in Montreal and was artistic director of a theatre group for some time. She is currently a course leader at the Thomas More Institute.

It was there that she met Murray Shugar, the editor of this newsletter, who, with Roman Rogulski of our society, have designed a course on C. G. Jung’s Red Book, which they will lead at the Institute this spring. (Along with our friend Valerie Broege.) Brian McDonough, a long-time friend of TMI and Director of the Social Action Office for the Archdiocese of Montreal, was instrumental in proposing this course. He recently designed and co-led a course on Islam at TMI with Munirah and introduced her to Murray. I expect that she and Home Fire will be an especially stimulating and topical part of our spring term seminar series on the over-all subject of Islam and the psyche.

I (Harvey Shepherd) will be moderating the first evening of the reading series on April 5 (at the Argyle Institute, near the Alexis Nihon Plaza at 4150 St. Catherine St. W., Suite 328). We will discuss a selection from an introductory work on Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, formerly of the University of Tehran and professor emeritus of Islamic studies at George Washington University in Washington, D. C.

The co-president of our society, Mary Harsany, will lead a discussion on April 12 of selections by and about the celebrated Persian Sufi mystic and poet Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi. Munirah Amra and Home Fire will be with us April 19.

I’ll be back April 26^th, when the readings will be from a book by Tom Cheetham, not the one I review in this issue but similar in subject matter.

Finally, more good news. Our C. G. Jung Society of Montreal will soon be included in Meetup Montreal. This social network, created in 2001, helps people with specific interests meet with like-minded individuals. Meetup has facilitated hundreds of thousands of meetings worldwide, which, among other things, has fostered knowledge, creativity, physical activity and leisure.

—Harvey Shepherd

Volume 43, Number 3, January 2018

A Note From the Co-President

Our first public event of 2018, a joint event with the Cinéclub Film Society of Montréal will take place on Sunday, January 28, a year and eight days after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Shortly after that, on Saturday, February 10, our society will be hosting an all-day seminar on psyche and politics.

The film soirée is the second such program in a collaboration between us and the film society, aimed at enriching our experience and perhaps that of regulars of the film society through mutual projects.

The program will include the short film “In Search of the Soul,” a BBC documentary on the formative years in the life of C. G. Jung, along with a feature movie.

The movie, Les Orgueilleux, is a 1953 Franco-Mexican co-production, in black and white, directed by Yves Allégret, that was distributed in English as The Proud and the Beautiful. The late philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had a tenuous involvement with the screenplay.

The movie deals with sex, disease, death and the interaction of white visitors from France with residents of a squalid town in Mexico. Perhaps I could allow myself to associate the disease and pain depicted in a Mexican village in the movie with the contagion, metaphorically speaking, from which Trump wants to protect the United States by means of a wall.

Of course, there may be only a distant relationship between real Mexicans and those depicted in the film, let alone those in the president’s imaginings. Words from the Jungian lexicon like “shadow” and “projection” come to mind.

Montreal Jungian analyst Tom Kelly will draw on his extensive experience travelling in international circles to comment on this film. He recently served as President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). Tom has previously presented to our society on several occasions, often using film as a medium that offers rich insights.

For our all-day seminar on Saturday, Feb. 10 we have sought people with a range of viewpoints. Two of the four are Jungian analysts with practices in Montreal, including Tom Kelly. The other two are scholars from disciplines other than psychology, who, so far as I know, would not describe themselves as especially “Jungian.”

I was particularly pleased to discover that one of the favourite causes of Carlos Fraenkel has been described as nurturing a “culture of debate” among ordinary people with strong convictions. A recent book of essays by Fraenkel, a professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at McGill University, is called Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World and actually describes efforts to stimulate discussion in several exotic settings in different countries.

This is particularly timely when freedom of debate seems to be threatened from the left as well as the right in places including university campuses. One target is Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto, who gave a couple of stimulating talks to our society a few years ago, before he was as well known as he is today.

(By the way, Lindsay Shepherd, the teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, who got into trouble with politically correct faculty after showing her class a video clip of Peterson in discussion with another academic, is not a relative of mine but could become one of my heroes.)

Eran Shor, associate professor of sociology at McGill, will take a look at how some Canadian newspapers have treated “honour killings” perpetrated by people with Muslim or South Asian backgrounds. He will apparently suggest that such killings and family or spousal killings perpetrated by people with less exotic origins have more in common than the newspaper coverage might suggest.

Montreal Jungian analyst Jan Bauer, long a favourite among our speakers, will suggest that in political violence there is often an impossible love that is trying to become possible. Her colleague Tom Kelly will draw on his extensive background of leadership in international Jungian circles to address such questions as conflicts between an individual’s duty as a professional and as a citizen.

I have described the four speakers in the reverse of the order in which they will speak and provided less information about them and their presentations than the publicity flyer and other sources like the Web, which I commend to your attention.

Where discussion turns to political individuals, attention will focus, as I think it should, not on whether Trump (or any political leader) is crazy, but on such questions as what archetypes and complexes he constellates in us, especially in collective groups, American and other.

I would guess that if any discussion of the current president (or any other prominent politician) takes place it will be in informal exchanges among our speakers or in questions from the floor and replies to them.

I close with a personal comment. For various reasons, I generally agree with the implicit decision of our planning committee and maybe our speakers not to focus on issues related to the Trump presidency directly, for the most part, in this particular seminar. I would not, however, like to leave the impression that I think Jungians should always steer clear of such topics.

On the contrary, I have found comments on the Web on the Trump presidency by such people as Sean Kirkpatrick of the Jung Center in Houston, Murray Stein, Robert Henderson and Polly Young-Eisendrath to be particularly helpful.

As we enter the second term of our 2017-18 program year, I urge you to consider buying a new membership or renewal for the year at $40, or $25 for students and seniors. The chief benefit of doing this is to help support our society. A sustaining membership is also offered for $100 or any voluntary amount.

Other membership benefits include a subscription to our newsletter and discounts for admission to most events. However, these tangible benefits obviously decline in value as the end of the program year–which runs from September to May–approaches. —Harvey Shepherd

Volume 43, Number 2, October 2017

A Note From the Co-President

The ouroboros, the circular image of a snake or dragon devouring its own tail, recurs to me as I think of our program at the tail end of 2017.

Several things about both the series of reading seminars on dreams that will take place on the four Thursday evenings between October 26 and November 16 and the lecture by Francis X. Charet to which we look forward on Friday evening, November 10, will be circular in the sense of being old and new at the same time.

Francis Charet’s lecture will be a return visit after an absence of something like two decades. However, he will be re-examining the same basic theme as he did in his two lectures to us in the years after the publication of his 1993 book Spiritualism and the Foundations of C. G. Jung’s Psychology, but this time in the context of today. That book focuses not only on spirituality but also on the overarching idea that Jung’s psychology lives between science and religion. This time, Francis will be referring to the recently celebrated Red Book in support of his idea that Jung’s journey has its roots in the liminal region where psyche and spirit intermingle.

The Red Book itself is at once new and old. Crafted by Jung between 1915 and 1930, early in his career, it was released to the public in a lavish edited version only in 2009, long after Jung’s death.

When I refer to the ouroboros, I am not just thinking about the idea of cycles in history, or the little history of something like the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal. The ouroboros is a creature that feeds on itself, an image that reflects the idea that some—perhaps some of the best—psychology, philosophy and religion feeds on itself: the psyche (or consciousness or whatever you call it) that is under consideration is also the faculty that does the considering.

I suspect that this notion will influence Francis’ lecture. My evidence for this is largely that, roughly since the last time he spoke to us, he has been on the faculty of Goddard College, a small and unconventional private institution based in Plainfield, Vermont. There, he developed and co-ordinates a program called Consciousness Studies.

A Montrealer with degrees from the University of Ottawa and McGill, he writes in a faculty profile for the college that: