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Facilitated by Jeff Pinnette
Third Sunday every Month:
Starting October 28, 2018
10 to 12 pm

FREE for members; No pre-registration is necessary

Required Text: Psychology of the Future by Stanislav Grof

This is an accessible and comprehensive overview of the work of Stanislav Grof, one the of the founders of transpersonal psychology. It serves as a summation of Grof ‘s enormous contributions to the fields of psychiatry and psychology, especially his central concept of holotropic experience, where holotropic signifies “moving toward wholeness.” Grof maintains that the current basic assumptions and concepts of psychology and psychiatry require a radical revision based on the intensive and systematic research of holotropic experience. He suggests radical inner transformation of humanity and a rise to a higher level of consciousness might be humankind’s only real hope for the future.

Stanislav Grof heads the Grof Transpersonal Training Program. He was formerly Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute.

For more information and detailed syllabus, see:

Psychology of the Future 2018-19 Discussion Group Syllabus

Bio: Jeff Pinnette is a long-time member of the Center who served on the Board for six years including two as Board co-chair and four as Program Committee chair.

Myth of the Labyrinth
Saturday, May 4, 2019; 10 am to 4 pm
Members $50, Non-Members $60

The labyrinth serves as an archetypal symbol of the journey of consciousness and as integration of various parts of ourselves, bringing us closer to the “Self” as eternal.

Using active imagination and expressive tools, we will explore how the Greek Myth of the Labyrinth provides a metaphor for this process. In this myth, the bestial minotaur is imprisoned in the labyrinth by King Minos, who embodies aggression and greed. It was designed to protect others in the same way that we bury and compartmentalize our own inner shadow characters.

King Minos has a daughter, Ariadne, whose name means “Most Holy”. Ariadne appeals to Theseus, promising him that she will give him the means to slay the minotaur and a string to guide him out if he will take her with him when he leaves, which he does. Theseus comes to symbolize the power and limits of our inner heroism.

Lois LeBlanc, LCPC, CPT, is a psychotherapist and certified polarity therapist whose work and life is informed by her interest and training in energy fields and depth psychology. She is a past president of the Maine Mental Health Counselors Association and currently serves on the program committee at the Maine Jung Center. Her intimacy with the natural world and her love of people provides the platform from which she functions personally and professionally as clinician and educational presenter. She lives in rural Maine.

Bodhi Simpson, LCPC, ATR, is a Registered Art Therapist. She is a Past President of the Maine Mental Health Counselors Association and is student at Wisdom University working toward a Ph.D. in Wisdom Studies. Bodhi provides individual and group sessions, workshops, trainings, and retreats that incorporate creative expression and work with imagination, intuition and metaphor.

Major Spring Program 2019 – Beverley Zabriskie
Emotion: The Alchemistry of Life

(Lecture) Friday, May 17, 2019; 7 to 9 pm
Members $20, Non-Members $25

(Workshop) Saturday, May 18, 2019; 9:30 am to 1:30 pm
Members $40, Non-Members $50

On the one hand emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes. But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.
– C. G. Jung

Friday Lecture
Emotion moves us, and is a force by which we are moved. Emotion is a dynamism and daemon in, through, and across the spectrums of our beings and lives. Emotion harmonizes or divides, attracts or repels, injures or fosters selfhood and resilience, enables repair after rupture. It colors, resonates, imprints, and impacts both self and other.

In nature, emotion serves survival. In relationship, our emotions foster connection and internal balance, or trigger trauma and chronic disorientation. In culture, it leads to creativity.

Jung’s view of psyche as an emotional process allows us to experience and engage, endure and recover as we reflect and imagine ourselves and our world.

Saturday Workshop
Emotion is the essential factor in nature, culture, and psyche. This discussion will evoke species-wide wisdom, the Jungian perspective on the affective psyche, dream imagery, and current neuroscience to explore how emotions appear and are processed in the considered and experienced life.

Jung once wrote that the fateful alternatives in life are between bitterness and wisdom. How we engage emotion in day-to-day contexts, how we receive the emotional narratives of our conscious reactions and dreams determines our memories, expectations, and felt sense of personhood in engagement with self, society, and universe.

In therapeutic and educational settings, the capacity to engage the range of emotion shapes our learning curves, and sculpts our receptivity, authenticity, and integrity while engaging with an inner and outer other.

Do we have emotions? Or do our emotions have us? In Jung’s view, emotion links or severs body and mind, provokes reaction, or fuels insight and imagination. In his scheme, emotional equilibrium allows us to be the subjects of our own lives, rather than the objects of our history. Our ability to feel, recognize, and express the spectrums of emotions informs our resilience in meeting and enduring the destructive and healing emotions implicit in our species’ existence.

Beverley Zabriskie is a Jungian Analyst in New York City, a founding faculty member and former President of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (JPA). She is a past President of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP), and past Vice-President of the Philemon Foundation which published The Red Book and other volumes by C. G. Jung. She is currently on the Executive Committee of The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Her many publications include “Spectrums of Emotion” in Research in Analytical Psychology: Applications from Scientific, Historical and Cross-Cultural Research, Vol. 1 (2018); “Energy and Emotion: C. G. Jung’s Fordham Declaration” in Jung in the Academy and Beyond: The Fordham Lectures 100 Years Later (2015); “Time and Tao in Synchronicity” in The Pauli-Jung Conjecture and Its Impact Today (2014); and “A Meeting of Rare Minds”, the Preface to Atom and Archetype: The Pauli-Jung Correspondence (2001).