Seminars

Liz asked me to blog about what I actually did in Zürich (i.e., studied and heard), rather than about the peripheral experiences (admittedly the latter often make better stories – dinners with the Italians, bars and friends, day outings).

Lots of seminars, some informational, some more investigative. A few workshops – these often have a tendency to treat us as 'patients' rather than students; some of that happens because the teachers generally have backgrounds as therapists of one kind or another, and not all of them are incredibly experienced at teaching.

Then there's the limitation of what I respond to or understand... we become acutely aware of personality types, as some students enthuse about seminars and teachers that leave others cold. I of course tend to expect a certain sort of linear density to the stuff being offered – I want to be intellectually challenged, more often than I want my feelings to come to the fore. However, I've gotten a lot better at accepting that feeling-charged workshops, even when they seem to be circling around a narrow range of ideas, are doing work that I need, and need to learn from.

So what stuck with me the most, out of eighty single-spaced pages of notes?... Verena Kast talked about fairy tales – a famous analyst talking about what would seem to be a familiar topic. However, I've started to become more alert to Kast's more remarkable abilities: she can show the complex and unexpected ways that experiences and crossovers between conscious and unconscious, between what happens in the world and what we do with it, not only lead into each other, but also work through strange flips and inversions. It's basically as though she is so familiar with mental territory that she can not only see the straight paths, but also all of the twisted and conceptually weird paths – sort of a combination of traditional and deconstructive awareness – and all of it done without any fanfare at all.

I was reading her book, A Time to Mourn, while working on my 'symbol paper' – a seminar paper on a symbol of our choice; I've chosen Nachiketas, of the Katha Upanishad, and the widening circle of embodiments of death and transformation. Her book moves onward in a reasonable and aware manner; but I kept having to reread the last three chapters, as they kept continually flipping and twisting through some very unexpected processes – but without seeming to flip or twist: unlike the French post-structuralism I teach, there was no spectacular twistiness, no playfully extravagant presto-changeo gestures. Kast is less of a showperson, but she knows what she is doing in some very bizarre territory: so she can lead through the winding paths where the mind tries to justify itself, and solve impossible problems, while seeming not to do anything very remarkable.

She's really good.... I'm increasingly impressed, and glad I've gotten her as my examiner for fairy tales (hoping, however, that I don't blunder through the crucial junctures of the exam tales, as I may well do).

Another startling episode was the seminars by the New Yorkers in the last three or four days of the period. Margaret Klenck and Morgan Stebbins, two New York analysts, gave several different classes on aspects of sex, love, power, analysis, and gender constructs. As they're smart, fast-moving New Yorkers, the entire tone was more assertively in the present, more definitely engaged with a world on the leading edge of things. I missed their seminar on sex and power, because I was signed up to do another workshop that was good for me personally, if not anything I would use professionally; Alessandra, in particular, kept telling me to sneak out of that workshop and come hear the New Yorkers, but I thought I should stay where I was. But after that I cancelled and moved several things to attend all the New York stuff.

Most remarkably, they wanted to take on something that leaves most Jungians confused these days – the gendered natures of anima and animus, the clearly defined male/female structures that seemed so important and essential(ist) for Jung. Other people have tried to work through this of course, notably several gay Jungians (Hopcke's book was smart but inconclusive; my own analyst Mitch Walker's theory of doubles is interesting but doesn't seem, at least to me, to apply to more than a minority of people, gay or straight). Most 'post-Jungians', including as they do a lot of people who are not in particularly traditional gender roles, simply step around the problem, idealizing anima and animus beyond gender distinctions, and sidestepping gender identity when they can (in a sort of Judith Butler move that at least fits a lot of contemporary thought).

Margaret and Morgan didn't want to do that: it seemed to them that anima and animus outline real sexual differences, and that in fact the male and the female are truly sexually different, though individuals may have more complicated positions in relation to either/both. As they work in New York, and have a number of gay, lesbian, and transgender clients (as well as students who work in transgender clinics), they wanted to find ways to acknowledge the parts of Jung's original structure that still seemed to work, and at the same time account for valid variation among living people.

This is tricky, and they're still working on it – and I shouldn't misrepresent or prematurely publicize the ideas that I did manage to follow. But they have accepted that 'typical' male and female sexuality, with its evolutionary roots, is indeed different – typical patterns of sexual fantasies and desires, as shown in many studies, are not the same – but that it remains possible for people to develop erotic connections that link up in several ways, including both homo- and hetero- among others. The charts got complex for this seminar, but were ultimately reasonable; the basic idea that gay men are relating to each other with different parts of themselves (different unconscious and conscious aspects, through different archetypes, etc.) than straight men to straight women, and yet making viable internal structures, ultimately rang true. They were able to show different possible patterns for different kinds of identities, without either making everything alike in a sort of desexed polymorphousness (as is often done these days, pace Butler) and without valuing one pattern over another.

And there were lots of other lectures, seminars, workshops... one that stands out was Cedrus Monte's workshop on the body (mentioned above). She gave us an excellent, if rather bizarre, technique for doing active imagination on an image or dream (essentially it tended to tie up parts of our conscious mind that would interrupt or manage the process – including tying many knots in a long red string, over and over – just distracting enough for the hands, especially for someone no more coordinated than I am, to completely divert consciousness)... but exactly what I worked on was my own, and not for discussion here. Startling, and I was slightly disoriented by how plain its message was, though....

Comments

[Liz King]

Sounds like a very rich and intriguing experience. I'm interested that there seem to be so many approaches to the canon of knowledge - more like literature class than science class.