Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Marked by Fire and the Gathering of Souls


Contributors Present: Chie Lee, Sharon Heath, Jacqueline Gerson, Naomi Lowinsky,
 Karlyn Ward, Patricia Damery,  Dennis Patrick Slattery, Jean Kirsch,
Robert Romanyshyn, Claire Douglas, Gilda Frantz, at Saturday evening dinner.

Several of the Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way authors traveled to Los Angeles on April 14 & 15 for the official book launch hosted by the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. The Saturday evening before the launch, one of the contributors, Chie Lee, President of the Los Angeles Institute, hosted a dinner for the authors and their spouses. Eleven of the thirteen contributors were able to be present.

Henry Abramovitch on Skype
from Jerusalem.

Jerome Bernstein via
Skype from Sante Fe. 


Sunday's book launch was a full house at Temple Isaiah across the street from the Los Angeles C.G. Jung Institute. Christophe Le Mouel, Executive Director of the LA Institute, arranged Skype so that Jerome Bernstein from Santa Fe and Henry Abromovitch from Jerusalem could also join the celebration.








Marked By Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way








Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 
Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 
and a growing list of alternative titles. 

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Merritt on "The Hunger Games," Politics, and the Environment

by Dennis L. Merritt, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Ecopsychologist
                                       
The movie The Hunger Games at one level depicts the adolescent's world on steroids and at another level relates to powerful forces stirring in America. As a nation we are struggling to find a new identity as the myths that have sustained us are showing their age and ineptness while the controlling powers are expressing themselves more strongly. In Games those controlling forces directed by President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland, are challenged by a powerful feminine energy in the form of sixteen year old Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence.

The Story from an Archetypal Perspective

In the film the rule of the archetype of the Old King as embodied by the President is nearing its end. The King represents the dominant features of a culture depicted in its values, attitudes, behaviors and systems. (1) Old systems in Snow's realm are showing signs of strain in a decadent society that has lost its soul. The ruling power uses intimidation, deceit and diversions to maintain its position. The Capitol is the powerhouse and center of President's domain, a place of ultra modernity in its buildings, machines, and electronic marvels. It is inhabited by a ruling elite of shallow people living in luxury who are caricatures of humans with their bizarre clothing, makeup and behaviors. This society without a heart is epitomized by an annual event—The Hunger Games—captivating the entire culture. The games cruel nature is symptomatic of the absence of the Queen archetype—there is no feminine companion/counterpart to the President. The Queen symbolizes the Eros or archetypal feminine in a culture, the feeling values and how people relate to each other. In the film a primary feminine figure is the woman who reaps the tributes from the districts: a shallow, empty, painted woman enamored with the allure of the games.

Outside the Capitol lie twelve poor, starving, downtrodden districts still being punished for a rebellion over 74 years ago. Twelve is an archetypal number associated with wholeness (twelve months, twelve apostles). Here we have a kingdom of the haves and the have nots, reflecting the 1% and 99% in American society. Every year a male and a female between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected at random as tribute (sacrifice) to represent their district in The Hunger Games. The randomness highlights the cruel uncertainty of fate, subjecting everyone to its fears. The games are an annual reminder of the punishment for rebelling against the powers that be, a punishment meted out in the form of human lives for the entertainment of the populace and a means of maintaining a fear in both city and country of the ruling power.

The tributes get trained in the arts of combat and survival before being thrown into a dog-eat-dog world—the ultimate survival show—teenage gladiators in a Thunderdome sport. To survive they must generate interest in sponsors, selling themselves to their captors' conscious and unconscious desires. Game activities are manipulated for audience appeal and the rules changed accordingly, including a manufactured love scene. READ MORE


Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 
Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 
and a growing list of alternative titles. 

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

News Release - Sundered


April 17, 2012

Just Published

Sundered

poems by Phyllis Stowell

“This is not what is true, merely true.” Images of intrusion, aggression, martyrdom, achievement, pilgrimage move in and out of these poems as they move in and out of our dreams, their relation to the lived life real but imponderable. Phyllis Stowell’s writing seems to acquire a new clarity and strength of purpose, paradoxically, as it plunges into the mysterious. For me this stands with Arc of Grief at the top of her work.
—Alan Williamson

Phyllis Stowell is Professor Emerita and Founding Member of Saint Mary’s College of California MFA. Her poems have appeared in over forty traditional and avant-garde reviews. In addition to Sundered, she is the author of several other poetry collections. She is co-editor of Appetite: Food as Metaphor: An Anthology of Women Poets. Phyllis lives in Berkeley, California.
Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 
Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 
and a growing list of alternative titles. 

News Release - Solar Light, Lunar Light


April 17, 2012

Just Published

Solar Light, Lunar Light

by Howard Teich

“The perception that masculine and feminine traits represent oppositional forces has contributed to a long history of personal and cultural dysfunctions. Through a skillful interweaving of modern psychology, mythology and ancient history, Howard Teich, PhD offers a thought provoking thesis that these polarizing traits are actually cooperative partners in evolution’s dynamic dance. Solar Light, Lunar Light is a healing journey that encourages readers to transcend misperceived limitations so that we may write a new empowering chapter in human evolution.”
–Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D., Cell biologist and bestselling author of The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles and coauthor with Steve Bhaerman of Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (And A Way To Get There From Here)

“This is a significant, life changing book. Howard Teich’s work is crucial to understanding and healing the damage our rigid ideas of gender have done to us all, women and men alike. This is a book that can change how you see every problem you encounter and point you toward deeper more creative responses. Here is a psychology that has the potential of restoring us all and our world to wholeness.”
–Susan Griffin, author of A Chorus of Stones and Woman and Nature

"Howard Teich has discovered a brilliantly simple and invaluable way of helping men and women move towards wholeness and healing. With vivid examples from his therapeutic practice and from his own life, Solar Light, Lunar Light presents Teich's pioneering development of the solar/lunar polarity, and his sharp distinction of this from the masculine/feminine polarity with which it has long been uncritically and often destructively conflated. Recognizing this distinction, and moving towards a deep integration and rebalancing of the solar and lunar principles, represents a crucial task not only for every individual but for our civilization."
–Richard Tarnas, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies, Author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

“Howard Teich has created a skillful and sensitive therapy based on the solar and lunar archetypes. His work is a fascinating enrichment of Jungian psychology that combines modern scientific theory with his own personal experience of emotional crisis. Solar Light, Lunar Light is a significant contribution to contemporary psychotherapy.”
–Theodore Roszak, Professor emeritus of history at California State University, Haward.  Author of The Making of a Counter Culture and The Voice of the Earth

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 
Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 
and a growing list of alternative titles. 

Monday, April 2, 2012

News Release - Marked By Fire


Marked By Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way

"This life is the way, the long sought after way to the unfathomable which we call divine" —C.G. Jung, The Red Book

When Soul appeared to C.G. Jung and demanded he change his life, he opened himself to the powerful forces of the unconscious. He recorded his inner journey, his conversations with figures that appeared to him in vision and in dream in The Red Book. Although it would be years before The Red Book was published, much of what we now know as Jungian psychology began in those pages, when Jung allowed the irrational to assault him. That was a century ago.

How do those of us who dedicate ourselves to Jung’s psychology as analysts, teachers, writers respond to Soul’s demands in our own lives? If we believe, with Jung, in “the reality of the psyche,” how does that shape us? The articles in Marked By Fire portray direct experiences of the unconscious; they tell life stories about the fiery process of becoming ourselves.

Authors of Marked By Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way

Henry Abramovitch, Ph.D., is training analyst and founding President of Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology. He has served on Ethics and Program Committees of the IAAP and provides supervision to Developing Group in Poland. He is Professor at Tel Aviv University Medical School and served as President of Israel Anthropological Association and as co-facilitator of Interfaith Encounter Group. He is author of The First Father (2nd edition, 2010) and forthcoming volume on brothers and sisters. His special joys are poetry, dream groups, and the holy city of Jerusalem, where he lives with wife and family.

Jerome S. Bernstein, M.A.P.C., NCPsyA., is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a senior analyst on the teaching faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe of which he is a former President. He was the founding President of the Jungian Analysts of Washington (D.C.). He is the author of Power and Politics, the Psychology of Soviet-American Partnership (Shambhala 1989), Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma (Routledge 2005) and is co-Editor, along with Philip Deloria, of the groundbreaking book, C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Spring Books: 2009), in addition to numerous articles concerning international conflict, shadow dynamics in the collective psyche as well as various clinical topics and lectures internationally on these and other subjects.

Patricia Damery, M.A., is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in private practice in Napa, California, where she and her husband farm a Biodynamic organic ranch. She has published numerous articles, as well as a book detailing her analytic training and simultaneous entry into Biodynamic farming: Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation. Her novel, Snakes, the story about the demise of the family farm and the impact on one family, told through the mythology of the snake, was published by Fisher King Press in March 2011. Her forth coming novel Goatsong, a story of the resilience of love, is to be published 2012.

Claire Douglas, Ph.D, is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst. She trained at the New York Association for Analytical Psychology and has been a training and supervisory analyst with the C. G. Jung Institute of LA since 1992. She lectures and writes books and articles on Jung and on women’s psychology. Her latest, The Old Woman’s Daughter, was the fourteenth of the Fay Lecture Series. She is deeply grateful to live and still practice in a house on a bluff looking out over the Pacific Ocean.

Gilda Frantz, M.A., is an analyst practicing in Santa Monica, California. She is co-editor in chief of Psychological Perspectives, a Jungian Journal of World Thought, and is a Director of the Philemon Foundation, Emerita. She served on the Board for five years, during the planning and publication of The Red Book. Gilda lives with her mixed poodle/terrier, Spike, whom she found at an animal shelter.

Jacqueline Gerson, J.A., is a Jungian analyst with a private practice in Mexico City, where she works as an analyst, teacher and supervisor. With a life long passion for dance and movement she first approached dreams as spontaneous choreographies created by the psyche. That discovery led to her to the study of analytical psychology eventually to become an individual member of the IAAP . She lectures on topics related to analytical psychology throughout the world and has been published in The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, with Daimon Verlag, Brunner-Routledge, Spring Journal, as well as the Mexican Magazine Epoca.

Sharon Heath, M.A., is a certified Jungian Analyst in private practice and a faculty member of the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. She writes fiction and non-fiction exploring the interplay of science and spirit, politics and pop culture, contemplation and community. She has given talks in the United States and Canada on topics ranging from the place of soul in social media to gossip, envy, secrecy, and belonging. She served as Associate Editor of Psychological Perspectives and Guest Editor of the special issue The Child Within/The Child Without. Her novel The History of My Body was published by Genoa House in 2011.

Jean Kirsch, M.D., is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst practicing in Palo Alto, California. She is married to the Jungian analyst Tom Kirsch, the son of Hilde and James Kirsch, who were instrumental in founding the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. She is past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where she continues teaching as a member of the faculty. Her current interests include grandmothering, writing, and teaching Analytical Psychology, both in San Francisco and for the several developing Jungian groups in Taiwan and mainland China.

Chie Lee, M.A., is a Jungian analyst with a private practice in Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles. She received a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology in 1990 from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She was trained at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and received her diploma in 2000. Chie has been an active member of the Los Angeles Jungian community. She teaches and supervises in the Institute Training program and serves on the Board and many Committees. She has given seminars on Chinese fairy tale, movie and Avant-Garde art. Chie served as the President of the L.A. Institute from 2010-2012.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ph.D., is an analyst member of the San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute, and a widely published poet. Her recent memoir, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way tells stories of her pushy muse. She is also the author of The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find her Female Roots and three books of poetry. The most recent is Adagio & Lamentation. Lowinsky has written many essays in what she considers her “Jungian memoir” mode, They have been published in Psychological Perspectives and in the Jung Journal. She teaches and lectures in many settings. She is the winner of the Obama Millennium Award for a poem about Obama’s grandmother.

Robert D. Romanyshyn, Ph.D., is a Senior Core Faculty Member of the Clinical Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute and an Affiliate Member of The Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. Author of six books, numerous chapters in edited volumes and journal articles, he is currently working on a series of small books that explores outside the boundaries of academia various ways of saying soul. Two works in this series are his recently completed DVD, Antarctica: Inner Journey in the Outer World, which explores the chiasm among images, music and words, and a book of poems, Leaning Toward the Poet.

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D., is Core Faculty in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is the author , co-author, editor or co-editor of 17 books, including four volumes of poetry. The author of dozens of articles in journals, magazines and newspapers, Dr. Slattery continues to work in the cross-currents of poetry, myth and depth psychology. He offers Riting Retreats on one’s personal myth across the United States and in Europe. His new book, Day-to-Day Dante: Exploring One’s Personal Myth Through The Divine Comedy, is available on his website. He is finishing a new book, Riting Myth, Mythic Writing: Plotting Your Personal Story.

Karlyn M. Ward, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., is an analyst member of The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and is in private practice in Mill Valley, California. She writes and teaches on the relationship of music to the psyche, works with music as an entré to active imagination, and is a Fellow in the Association of Music and Imagery. Her DVD, Anchored in the Heart: Redeeming the Dark Feminine explores the implications of the figure of Mary of Magdala in word, art, and music. Her book Visitation in a Zen Garden almost wrote itself after a family of grey foxes (parents and four kits) took up residence in the backyard zen garden designed by her husband, Richard Ward. She is continuing to write about her archetypal experiences.
Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 
Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 
and a growing list of alternative titles.