We are pleased again to invite David Tacey back to Perth to give a series of four lectures and to discuss the content in his new book Gods and Diseases.

Last year you may remember we were treated to David Tacey’s remarkable insights into the modern Australian psyche and its challenges, in his lecture series Edge of the Sacred : Jung, Psyche, Individuation. This year David looks at a broader picture of the ailments afflicting modern society in an age of rationality, science and desacralization.

In this series of lectures starting Friday night David Tacey proposes many problems in today's society cannot be resolved by applications of reason, logic or medical science. Such problems include child sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide. Numerous mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression, and phobias, are seen to have risen dramatically, and there seems to be no solution in sight.

In these lectures, David Tacey will outline a Jungian or archetypal approach to these epidemics and diseases. Tacey contends that, in some ways, Jung's ideas were ahead of their time, and they are only able to be fully appreciated today, as medicine and psychiatry begin to wrestle with such thorny issues as "meaning", "soul" and "spirituality".  If the 20th century was dominated by Freud, perhaps the 21st century could be the one in which Jung's ideas come to fruition and are widely disseminated.

Dr David Tacey is a public intellectual who teaches at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author of twelve books on Jungian psychology, spirituality and mental health. His most recent book is Gods and Diseases: Making sense of our physical and mental wellbeing (HarperCollins, Sydney, 2011). It is a study of psychological and symbolic patterns in symptoms and social epidemics. His other books include Re-Enchantment: The New Australian Spirituality (2000), The Spirituality Revolution (2003) and Edge of the Sacred (2009). Five of his books are on Jung and analytical psychology, and these include The Jung Reader (2011), The Idea of the Numinous (2006) and How to Read Jung (2006). His books have been translated into several languages, including Cantonese, Korean and French.