Workshops & Talks

Emerging Images and Mercurial Myths
Saturday March 9, 2019; 9 am to 3 pm
Members $60, Non-Members $70

In this hands-on, expressive arts workshop, we will discover mythological imagery through a painting exercise similar to finding images in the clouds or in grains of wood. The use of active imagination in this workshop is similar to Jung’s use of active imagination in dreamwork.

Emerging images can be seen as communications from the unconscious that are not only meant for our own development but also for the healing and development of the collective. Through the use of emerging image art, a dialogue takes place as a dance between that which wishes to emerge from our psyche and that which we are able to allow to emerge. Jung directs us to exert as little influence on this inner conversation as possible, discovering the images and giving them life without judgement or critique.

The resultant images bear with them symbols that suggest myths that are both individual and collective. These myths also emerge over time, changing as we emerge, mercurial in nature.

Each participant will produce an emerging image artwork on a square canvas, and the emerging myths will be collectively and individually discovered. Supplies will be provided. You will take home a 12” x 12” painting.

Susy Sanders, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and artist with a private practice and retreat center in Phillips, ME. She has studied Jungian and depth psychological theory since the age of 18, in 1971, beginning with the Wilhelm Edition I Ching.

Tools of Individuation
Cooked in the Vessel: A Personal Experience of Alchemy in the 21st Century
Saturday, March 16, 2019; UPDATE: 9:30 am to 12 pm
Members $20, Non-Members $25

Jung abruptly stopped work on The Red Book to pursue alchemy, which he saw as a mirror image of the individuation process. “The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world,” he wrote in Psychology and Alchemy. What was it that he saw? What the alchemists called the Philosopher’s Stone, Jung thought of as the Self. In this presentation, Diane Croft will show how she got “cooked” in the alchemical vessel in the same way the alchemists described the transformative operation centuries ago. She will bring life and currency to a psychological process that is not about changing a person into someone else; it’s about bringing something out in a person that has been there all along.

Diane Croft, Ed.M., is a graduate of Wittenberg and Harvard University. She spent most of her career as a publisher at National Braille Press in Boston, MA. For three years, Diane had access to a hidden, animated realm, described by C. G. Jung as “the collective unconscious,” which she describes in her book The Unseen Partner: Love & Longing in the Unconscious. A recent review in Quadrant described it as comparable to Jung’s Red Book but easier to understand.

A Valentine Celebration and Gathering
Seven Ways in the Art of Loving… Body, Soul, Mind, and Spirit
New Date: Saturday, March 23, 2019; 2019
Sunday, February 10, 2019; 1 to 3 pm
Members $20, Non-Members $25

Nothing is possible without love…for love puts one in a mood to risk everything.
– C. G. Jung
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
– Laozi

A gathering and conversation to explore, discover, recover and FOCUS on a synchronistic, healthy, “mature” way to love and be loved. This will be an exciting, powerful, dynamic experience in the content and process of how, when and why­—not in ways and means.

Utilizing SELFMAP, we will explore and experience integration in the art of loving and being loved in your life. We are masters of our own excuses, if not deceptions. Let us “search” together to explore Jung’s understanding of loving and being loved.

Rev. Dr. Richard A. Dannenfelser is Bronx born and bred, a Presbyterian minister, clinical psychologist, certified sexuality counselor and therapist (trained by Masters and Johnson). In private practice in Providence, RI, he is a specialist in PTSD. Dr. Dannenfelser will be teaching The Spirituality of C. G. Jung at Yale University Divinity School in the Fall of 2019.

“The only time we’ll have peace on earth is when the power of love surpasses the love of power.”
– R. Dannenfelser
“The world is much too big for anything but the truth and too small for anything but love.”
– R. Dannenfelser

Death Café
Sunday, April 14, 2019; 1 to 3:30 pm
FREE for Members and Non-Members
(Donations Welcome)

Maximum Participants: 14

In this meeting lasting for two and a half hours, we will gather to eat cake, drink tea, and discuss death. The objective is ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’. This is a group-directed discussion of death with no agenda, objectives, or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a grief support or counseling session. Death Cafes have been held across the U. S. and much of Europe.

These Cafes are offered on a not-for-profit basis (participants may be invited to make a minimal donation), held in an accessible, respectful, and confidential space, and are open-ended having no intention to lead people to any conclusion, product, or course of action. Refreshments, including cake, are provided.

Teresa Arendell, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst practicing in Maine. She has taught and offered lectures and seminars and served on committees at the Maine Jung Center, the Boston Jung Institute, and various other Jungian associations.

Will Furber, J.D., is a Jungian analyst from North Bath, Maine. He helped found the Maine Jung Center 30 years ago and is a former Board Chair. He is a faculty member of the Boston Jung Institute, where he co-leads a recurring seminar which has as one of its principal aims the enrichment and development of collective life.

The Individuation Process of the Transgender Individual Using the Major Arcana of Tarot
Saturday, April 27, 2019; 1 to 4 pm
Members $30, Non-Members $35

This talk will use the images of the Major Arcana of the Tarot, often referred to as the Fool’s Journey (from nigredo to individuation), to paint a landscape of the individuation process of the transgender individual.

Topics to be covered include: analytic dynamics, coming out, community, rites of passage, parents and mentorship, sexual orientation, the Self, politics and justice, liminality, the struggle for equality, sexual differences, addiction, mental health/substance abuse disorders, the use of language, self-acceptance, and individuation.

Rick Bouchard, LCSW, IAAP, is a clinical social worker and Jungian analyst. He has been in private practice in Southern Maine since 1999, working with adolescents, adults, couples and offers an ongoing dream group. Rick received his analytic training at the C. G. Jung Institute-Boston. He is a member of the New England Society of Jungian Analysts (NESJA), and has taught on the faculty of the Jung Institute analyst training program. Rick works with the transgender community in his analytic practice. He currently attends Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis working on his Doctorate in Psychoanalysis. He is a student of the tarot and did his Diploma Thesis for graduation from the Boston Jung Institute on The Use of Tarot in the Jungian Analyst.

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).

The Enneagram and Conscious Relationships
Saturday, June 1, 2019; 1 to 3:30 pm
Members $30, Non-Members $35

Everything that irritates us about others can lead to an understanding of ourselves.
– C. G. Jung

Often, we’re aware that certain relationships in our lives challenge us, but we aren’t sure how to improve them. We may ask, “How can she behave that way?” or “Doesn’t he have any feelings?” or “What could that person be thinking?” And we may experience the same frustrating relationship pattern repeating itself with different people.

This workshop will cover the nine Enneagram types and how each is oriented toward relationships with others. Understanding our type—and the types of those around us—can liberate us from stuck patterns of interaction and behavior. As we bring awareness to the inner blueprints we carry unconsciously, we can begin to “wake up” to the authentic potential every relationship holds.

Through lecture, small-group exercises, guided meditation, and music, we will explore the typical “object relations” of each type, how to identify and work with our “instinctual stack,” and some key ways to improve any relationship. This workshop is appropriate for those who are new to the Enneagram as well as longtime aficionados.

Grace Holland, M.A., received her teaching certification from the Enneagram Institute in 2010. Her teachers, Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, are renowned Enneagram scholars and authors of The Wisdom of the Enneagram and other bestselling books. Before becoming an Enneagram teacher, Grace worked for a number of years in the fields of communication and publishing. She has used both the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs as a personal and career coach, as well as in her family life. Grace is a member of the International Enneagram Association and has taught in university, church, and small group settings. She lives in Maine with her husband and their two teenage daughters. Grace also helped parent three stepchildren.