First Lecture:

Jung, Spirituality and Medicine

07:30pm-09:00pm

Friday 21 October

Jung was at least a hundred years ahead of his time in terms of finding links between spirituality, health and medicine. In his own day, his insights seemed oddly 'unscientific' or against the mainstream, but medicine today is finally beginning to realise that the human person is a complex field which includes mind, body, spirit and soul. Ironically, many of the new works in the area of holistic health do not include references to Jung or draw from his insights, but medicine itself is definitely moving into a more 'Jungian' mode, as doctors seek deeper responses to our illnesses and diseases. Psychiatry seems more willing to go in this direction than academic psychology, which remains more defiantly materialistic. As 'meaning' is recognised as an agent of healing, Jung's contribution to the psychology of meaning-making needs to be acknowledged.

Second Lecture:

Cancer Phobia as a Doorway to Soul

10:00am-11:30am

Saturday 22 October

This talk is based on my own attempt to re-read Jung's case study in his Terry lectures at Yale in 1937, 'Psychology and Religion'. Jung boldly attempts to view cancer phobia, and cancer, as the body's turning against itself due to unconscious confusions in the psychic energies of the patient. Jung believes that the 'unlived life' of the psyche can turn against the person and manifest as a lethal carcinoma in the body. His reading is based on the view that if we do not develop parts of the psyche that demand expression, these parts will turn against us and destroy the individual. He does not suggest that this approach is appropriate for all cancer cases, but he feels that a psycho-spiritual component is to be found in some cases of cancer, and cancer phobia.

Third Lecture:

Sexuality, Incest and Alcoholism

01:30pm-03:00pm

Saturday 22 October

Freud thought that religion and culture were expressions of sublimated sexual energy, whereas Jung tended to read human experience in reverse: sexuality is often burdened by needs and demands that are spiritual or cultural in nature. Hence a great many sexual disturbances, for Jung, are to be 'seen through' for the spiritual impulses and longings that are found at their core. The interpretation of incest was an issue that Freud and Jung argued about, and eventually their conflicting views forced them to separate. Freud took a literal approach to incest motifs in dreams and fantasies, but Jung read them non-literally and metaphorically. So too, in his approach to alcoholism, he adopted a symbolic approach: he found an unconscious hunger for spirit in this addiction, and this insight was seminal to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. I will discuss alcoholism with reference to Australian experience, especially to Aboriginal cultures.

Fourth Lecture:

The Healing Field of the Numinous

10:00am-11:30am

Sunday 23 October

In a famous letter of 1945 to P. W. Martin, Jung said that the numinous is the real source of healing. He said healing came not so much from the therapist's words or techniques, but from the core of mystery to which the analysis pointed. In thinking about how contact with the numinous might heal, I utilise the wave/particle theory from physics. It could be that the human being has a 'wave' and a 'particle' aspect, and the ego is the particle, while the collective unconscious might be imagined as a wave. To live properly and well, we need to live in both modes, but modern society keeps us locked inside the 'particular' life of the ego, and that is why we are sick and suffering. Contact with the numinous will be discussed in modern and traditional contexts, and the talk will seek to differentiate between curing and healing.