The C.G. Jung Society of Queensland

President’s Letter

The Energy of Place

Dear Reader,

Yesterday, I chatted with a friend who took up camping for the first time last year. Recently, she camped with her family first at Cylinder Beach on Stradbroke Island and then in Giraween National Park. She talked about unexpectedly finding at Giraween a completely different energy to the seaside-and-surf energy of Straddie. She described Giraween as 'eerie' and she had wondered, half jokingly, how many nights she would be able to remain with such intense energy. I do not want to put anyone off going to beautiful Giraween. But I do understand my friend's sensitivity to the energy of place.

In Ireland, there is a famous tourist destination called Kate Kearney's cottage. It lies in a pleasant valley, whose name I have forgotten, on a side road off the beautiful tourist drive known as the Ring of Kerry. You can hire a pony and trap at Kate Kearney's cottage and go for a jaunt up to the end of the valley where the road rises before dropping down into the next valley. The jaunting cars turn back before entering that next valley. I have not forgotten its name: the Black Valley. Few tourists seem to go there. But I, having run out of daylight, camped there one night on a cycling trip. The energy of that place was so starkly intense and oppressive by comparison to the lighter feeling of the tourist valley only a half a mile back. I left quickly the next day.

The earth's energy, varying from place to place, is always with us, always influencing us.

Therapeutic work, requiring special sensitivity, is particularly influenced by place. Deep internal work depends greatly on the therapist whose job, among others, is to provide enough safety and security for the clients to explore the psyche through a particular therapeutic mode: imagery in my case. A certain commitment and courage from the members of the group is also necessary. In addition, and seldom mentioned in detail in the literature, is the way in which the energy of a place 'holds' a group or a person.

Imagery group at Camp Bornhoffen

During my social work training, we were taught some awareness of how a therapeutic session could be helped or hindered by the choice of place in which the therapy or counselling would occur: typically the client's home, the worker's office or some neutral venue. It is not difficult to imagine the energies these places might carry. When I began to run independent therapy groups myself in the late nineties, my choice of venue expanded beyond limited institutional choices. I was free to choose any venue of my liking although of course within a certain budget.

The venue that stands out most in my mind was Cosmos Lodge. (Sadly, it is no longer available as a venue.) Perched on the east side of Mount Nebo, it overlooks the Samford Valley. As a group we would work on the lawn or inside the main room, both locations with a view of Moreton Island in the distance beyond the valley stretched out below us. Behind the house is a huge hilly lawn with many trees, reminiscent of an English demesne. Cosmos Lodge was remarkable not just for its beauty and outstanding views but also because there was a quality in the place that enabled people to focus deeply within themselves. Perhaps more accurately, people reached deep therapeutic places within themselves at what seemed like an accelerated pace. I later discovered from talking to the owner that the woman who first bought the property intentionally for healing work did so with the full awareness that the place itself was special and would contribute its healing energy to whatever work went on there.

C.G. Jung Society of Queensland, 74 Camp St., Toowong, Q 4066. Tel: 3371 1285

Another energetically-charged venue that I still use is Camp Bornhoffen. Like Cosmos Lodge, it too is situated at the top of a valley, in this case Numinbah Valley in the Gold Coast Hinterland. Originally established as a youth camp, it has become popular with many community and therapeutic groups. Again, its beautiful natural setting provides opportunities for outdoor or indoor groups. Some who participated in my groups at Bornhoffen have had profound experiences of the valley  'speaking' or communicating to them in an intensely personal way reflecting crucial aspects of their inner lives at the time.

A third venue that I find supportive of therapeutic work is the Friends' Meeting House (Quakers) in Kelvin Grove: surrounded by a 1.5-acre forest yet only five minutes from the city centre. It too is popular with groups who focus on inner work. ( I am biased about this one since I caretake the venue and manage its bookings.) All three venues have in common a close relationship with the surrounding natural setting. The buildings on each site were designed to interact sympathetically and respectfully with nature.

I was prompted to write on this topic by the talk and workshop last year from Ruth Amman, Jungian analyst, president of the International Society for Sandplay Therapy and whose first professional qualification was as an architect. She lives and works in Zurich where she has had access to Jung's home and tower as well as close contact with members of Jung's family. Ruth showed us many slides of places in Jung's life while discussing how they may have shaped his development. In Ruth's sandplay workshop, a discussion arose about the setting of therapeutic work including sandplay. Ruth talked about the origins of sandplay in Jung's work. He worked with clients often in his house but he also loved to work outside by the lake. Jung's lakeshore was essentially the first sand tray.

Jung built his tower at Bollingen as a dialogue of his spirit with nature, as a way to give outer expression to his inner life and to make space in the world for the inner spirit. The building expresses various aspects of himself such as the feminine, the masculine and the ego. On the one hand, the place isolated him from the outer or the social world. On the other hand, it took him deeply into a relationship with himself and with that place. Jung understood that the individual life is shaped directly from the earth in the place where one is born. One is never isolated from it. Thus, for him, the particular character of Europe's descendants in North America, including the characteristic American physique, are shaped by the place. So Americans today look completely different from their European ancestors. Whether in the brief hour of therapy or in the hundreds of years following European migration to America, the earth constantly influences us. We are always in a dialogue with nature albeit unconsciously for the most part.

Jung’s place at Bollingen

Therapy is a dialogue with nature, both our inner nature and the nature of place. Seeing therapy as a process that goes on between people behind closed doors and isolated from the world seems to me to limit what is possible in therapy. That view reflects more the sterile nature of a laboratory experiment and it fits more with the medical model and the scientific method both of which, despite their multiple benefits to society, tend to isolate and detach us from the natural world. The client-therapist relationship should include at least an awareness of the influence of place and ideally it should include an invitation to place to be a third party to the healing process. Native peoples in North America, for example, know very well how to do this, inviting as they do Father Sky, Mother Earth and the spirits of the four directions to bless and positively influence their ceremonies. We of European descent have largely forgotten, although we are learning again from indigenous peoples[1], how to experience our relationship with place. I know that the exigencies of everyday life mean that we often have to make do with less than ideal settings for our work. Mostly, we are stuck in cities, towns and offices built for purposes other than what we have in mind. However, even within everyday limitations, it is possible to choose therapeutic venues guided by an awareness that the living energy of a place can contribute to —or inhibit— healing.

Best Wishes,

Frank Coughlan, President

Upcoming events at the Jung Society

February 2005

INDIGENOUS AND WESTERN SPIRITUALITY

A presentation by Mary Graham

Preceded by our Annual General Meeting

Thursday February 3, 2005

AGM 6 pm

Presentation 7:30 – 9:30 pm

St. Mary’s House, Cn Merivale and Peel Sts, South Brisbane

 Members and concession: $5; non-members $10

NB: This talk was originally scheduled to be held in December 2004 but will instead launch our 2005 season..

Mary Graham is an aboriginal elder of the Kombumerri people on the Gold Coast. Mary has lectured on comparative spirituality in the School of Social Work at the University of Queensland. She is highly knowledgeable of both aboriginal and western religious and spiritual traditions. Her talk crosses the divide between both cultures finding common ground where it exists and highlighting unique features in each tradition that could be of value in the other one.

Annual General Meeting

6 pm, Thursday February 3, 2005

Behind the scenes at the Jung Society

The lectures and workshops, the membership, the finances, the publicity, the newsletter, the library, are all arranged and taken care of by a committee.  The committee meets in a congenial atmosphere approximately once per month. At the beginning of each year, all positions on the committee become vacant and need to be filled. These are:

President

Secretary (currently divided into Committee secretary and Membership secretary)

Treasurer

Events coordinator

Workshop coordinator

Newsletter editor

Person responsible for publicity

This is your opportunity to contribute your ideas and talents to continuing the work of the Society. If you would like more information about what is involved in these positions, please contact one of the current committee members listed on the back page of this newsletter.

Thank you to all those who have contributed to and supported the Society in the past year:

The speakers, the members, the committee members,

Those who arrive early and help arrange the furniture

Those who stay back and help put away the chairs and clean the kitchen.

A big thank you to Ghislaine Salter who has volunteered to be responsible for bringing tea and coffee to our monthly meetings in 2005.

March 2004

AN INTRODUCTION TO EMBODIED DREAM IMAGERY

A presentation by Anne Di Lauro

Thursday March 3, 2005, 7:30-9:30 pm

St. Mary’s House, Cn Merivale and Peel Sts, South Brisbane

Members and concession: $5; non-members $10

In the Embodied Dream Imagery method of working on dreams, developed by Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak, the dreamer is helped, through gentle questioning, to re-enter the landscape and atmosphere of the dream. The action and images of the dream are slowed down to permit the dreamer to feel the emotions and associated body feelings that arise from the dream. The dream belongs to the dreamer and is not “interpreted”. The dreamwork has been found to have a variety of outcomes such as heightening dreamers’ awareness of the reality of situations in their life and putting them in contact with spiritual aspects of their psyche and their innate ability to heal from past wounds.

Anne will outline the theoretical basis of Embodied Dream Imagery and give a practical demonstration.

This presentation will also serve as an introduction to the April weekend with Robert Bosnak.

Anne Di Lauro is a counsellor in private practice in Brisbane. Born and educated in Australia, she spent more than half her life living and working in Europe and North America. She has had an ever-deepening interest in Jungian psychology for a very long time. She first encountered Robert Bosnak seven years ago when he gave a workshop in Montreal, Canada. She has been involved with Embodied Dream Imagery ever since. She has been trained by Bosnak as a dream worker and as a facilitator for dream groups. She belongs to several international dream groups established by Bosnak and his colleague Jill Fischer, that meet regularly over the Internet using a voice software (see www.cyberdreamwork.com). Anne has a Master of Counselling from Queensland University of Technology, for which she carried out a research project on “The Experience of the Dreamer in Embodied Dream Imagery”.  She can be contacted at dilauro@ozemail.com.au.

April workshop

WEEKEND WORKSHOP ON EMBODIED DREAM IMAGERY

 with Robert Bosnak (Jungian analyst)

Friday night 8 April to Sunday afternoon 10 April, 2005

Please note that the Friday night venue differs from the Saturday and Sunday venue:

Friday night 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm (Registration from 7 pm), Rosicrucian Centre, 156 Norman Avenue,  Norman Park

Saturday 9 April and Sunday 10 April, 9:30 am to 4:30 pm, Theosophical Society meeting room, 355 Wickham Terrace

Members $220; Non-members $250; Concession (full time student or pension): $190

Refreshments will be provided. Please bring lunch to share.

Robert Bosnak is a Dutch-born Jungian analyst, who trained at the C.G.Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland from 1971 to 1977. For many years he was in private practice in the United States, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has recently taken up residence in Sydney, Australia. In the late 1970's he pioneered a radically new method of dreamwork, based loosely on the work of C.G.Jung, especially on Jung's technique of active imagination and his studies of Alchemy.

From the point of view of the dreaming state of mind, dreams are real events in real environments. Based on this notion, Robert Bosnak developed methods to re-enter dreams by inducing a hypnagogic state--a state of consciousness between waking and sleeping--through a process of careful questioning.

He is particularly interested in the use of embodiment and imagery in treating illness and in the sharing of dreams in multicultural settings. He travels the world teaching the dreamwork method that he created.  His books include A Little Course in Dreams, Christopher Dreams : dreaming and living with AIDS, and Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming.

For further information, please telephone Anne on 07-3511 0167.

To reserve your place, please return the booking form inserted in this newsletter, together with your payment (cheque made out to the C.G. Jung Society of Queensland), to: C.G. Jung Society of Queensland, 74 Camp St., Toowong, Qld 4066.

It is time to renew your membership for 2005 !!

Please fill out the membership renewal form inserted in this newsletter and mail it with your payment

Or hand it in at the next meeting.

CGJI / ANZSJA Professional development seminars

in Australia and New Zealand

Through 2005 and early 2006, the C G Jung Institute of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts (CGJI / ANZSJA) will be offering a series of professional development seminars. These two day seminars are open to current practicing clinicians from psychologically-informed disciplines, and those who are working towards training in such disciplines in the near future. The seminars will be clinical in nature and will be based on groups of presentations from ANZSJA analysts from New South Wales, Canberra, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the north and south islands of New Zealand.

Auckland, New Zealand 5^th & 6^th March 2005 (Regional Organizer: Chris Milton)

WHAT REALLY HAPPENS IN ANALYSIS: DIALOGUES ON THE PLURALISTIC REALITY OF ANALYTIC TECHNIQUE 

As clinicians we declare allegiance to a particular ‘technique’ both directly and indirectly. What we say we do and what we actually do are, however, often different. In this seminar we will be exploring the pluralistic reality of our analytic technique. We will be inviting discussion about the things which we really do on a moment to moment basis when we are working with people, and our reflections on why we do what we do in any given moment. For example how do we build a dialogue with a patient and how do we make shifts in analytic focus between empathy, interpretation, education, transference/counter transference, dreams, amplification and so on? Specific questions will be responded to by ANZSJA analysts in order to stimulate discussion. These questions include:

1.      What prompts me to empathic atonement and what shifts me towards interpretation?

2.      When and how do I move into the role of ‘educating’ my patients and what leads me to do so?

3.      What do these shifts tell me about what I really think and feel about transference, counter transference and the analytic container or tremens?

4.      In what way does transformation enter psychotherapy and what is my role in it?

Date:              Saturday 5th March and Sunday 6th March 2005, 10am - 4.15pm.                                

Venue:           Wellesley Campus Conference Centre, Wellesley St, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland.

Cost (inc. light lunch):           AU$295 (GST inc) for both days

                                                  AU$270 (GST inc) for both days, if booked before 31^st December, 2004

No refund for cancellation after 14^th February, 2005.

Gold Coast, Early August 2005 (Regional Organizers: Leon Petchkovsky and Patrick Burnett )

MINING JUNG’S BANK OF CLINICAL INTUITIONS

At the core of Jungian theory is an articulation of a defining and organising paradigm for the 21st Century's understanding of subjectivity and depth psychodynamics. Embedded in Jung's theory of complexes is a model of dynamic patterning which operates across scale, offering ways of engaging with the question of Self versus radical Other which dominates contemporary thought and clinical practice. If properly engaged, an awareness of the implications of Jung's understandings offers exciting and challenging possibilities for  post-Jungian praxis, already arguably the most radically intersubjectivist of all the depth psychology methods. Just what this 'proper engagement' might constitute is at the heart of this clinical forum and our ongoing debates about the nature of a Jungian 'method'. Whatever 'proper engagement' turns out to be, it must gesture towards, and resonate with, the shocking nature of spirit, creativity, and intimacy.

Canberra 5^th & 6^th November 2005 (Regional Organizer: Leslie Devereaux)

THE RECYCLABILITY OF MADNESS

Jung wanted to know how the human mind reacted to the sight of its own destruction. He thought psychiatry's renunciation of the symbolic in favour of normative functionality was "an articulate expression of that biological reaction that seizes upon the so-called healthy mind in the presence of mental illness." What else, then, can be done with madness? These days, relational and intersubjective approaches to analysis make use of the contagion of madness: empathy, vicarious introspection, counter-transference, all regard the mind of the clinician as the instrument which may move the eruptions of the unconscious [neurotic or psychotic] into a shared space, rendering it human, recognizable, and therefore able to enter consciousness in symbolic form. What are the limits to this? Do we sign up for such personal commitment as analysts, when we might feel safer behind the screen of objective insight? Can all madness be recycled into something creative? Is analysis a vehicle through which one can, as a clinician, come to know one's mental instrument well enough to survive what walks in our door? How do we know when a form of madness is unrecyclable by us?

Melbourne February/ March 2006 (Regional Organizers: Joy Norton & Gillian Clezy)

SYMPTOMS,
                                    SYMBOLS, RELATIONSHIPS - Transitions...

Using clinical material, experiential
                                    understandings, and a range of analytic approaches, 

this seminar will explore transitions in the analytic encounter
                                    around symptoms, symbols and relationships. 

Of particular interest is how these three aspects of clinical
                                    work may unfold when working within the frame 

of analytical psychology.

For further details of all seminars see ANZSJA’s website at: http://www.anzsja.org.au, (go to Events Listing). Bookings can be arranged by emailing pds@anzsja.org.au or calling Jan Blackburn on +61 2 9875 4079. Other queries should be directed to Margaret Caulfield on +61 2 9380 5409.  

Bulletin Board

The Bulletin Board briefly lists upcoming events that might be of interest to members. For fuller information, please contact the persons named.