Visiting Lecture Series
Ann Ulanov
November 6 and 7, 2015
Madness and Creativity
Friday Lecture and Discussion – November 6, 2015: 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Reception after the Lecture: 9:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Cost: $25 2 NASW and MHC ceus
Location: Great Hall in the Newton Highlands Congregational Church
54 Lincoln St, Newton, MA
Jung writes in The Red Book: “Who should live your life if not yourself? ….There is only one way and that is your way….no other way is like yours….you must fulfill the way that is in you.”
Decades of clinical work and reflection have shown me that madness and creativity share a kinship. The suffering places in our human psyche, so intimately related to the sufferings in our world, are inextricably connected to our creativity and service to shared existence with others. We experience this kinship in terms of the major complex that dogs our days, despite all our work to relieve it, release it.
New questions confront us: what is our madness faithfully trying to communicate to us? How does healing happen? How does it lead us to find our path to creative living and to service with and to others?
Meaning Matters
Saturday Workshop: November 7, 2015: 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Cost: $75 3 NASW and MHC ceus
Location: Brandeis University, Mandel Center for the Humanities Mandel Theater, First Floor, G-3, 415 South St., Waltham, MA 02453 (There is a parking lot located next to the Mandel Center)
In Jung’s The Red Book he discovers that we ordinary human beings are “the site of transformation.” Transforming happens in us, not in the esteemed religious and meditative figures, the philosophical or political goals ‘outside’ ourselves. If transforming happens, it begins here and influences our devotion to what matters and our sense of meaningfulness of existence we share in the world in which we live.
This shift sets our efforts to heal our problems in a bigger bowl, so to speak, in which the psychoid quality of unconscious processes emerges as pivotal in transference/ counter-transference dynamics of clinical work and as a dimension of everyday life. Transition to this ‘space’ can inflict dread of erasure, a blanking of mind, as well as joy of abundance, of freedom from encumbrance, of soul to be lived. Lecture discussion and examples.
Ann Belford Ulanov, M.Div., Ph.D., L.H.D., is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Religion, Emerita, at Union Theological Seminary, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and a member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. With her late husband, Barry Ulanov, she is the author of Religion and the Unconscious; Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer; Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying; The Witch and The Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality; The Healing Imagination; Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima and Animus; by herself she is the author of The Feminine in Christian Theology and in Jungian Psychology; Receiving Woman: Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine; Picturing God; The Wisdom of the Psyche; The Female Ancestors of Christ; The Wizards’ Gate; The Functioning Transcendent; Madness & Creativity, 2013; and Knots and Their Untying, 2014, among other publication.