Susan Rowland: Saving the Feminine through Jung and Art – March 18
March 18, 2022
7:00-9:00pm PST on Zoom
We live in tumultuous times. They are tumultuous because of a paradigm shift. Western modernity, characterized by the subject/object split struggles to engage with the necessary re-weaving of the psyche to know that we are all part of one planet, conjoined to it and within it. Put another way, the gender split severing of masculine from feminine, in which the earth is considered feminine and lesser, must give way to a new consciousness of connection and participation. Some call this a rise of feminine consciousness because it is a new valuing of what patriarchal modernity tried to cast out as ‘the feminine,’: body, Eros, sexuality, nature, matter, the irrational, the unconscious, the other, material creativity.
The new feminine consciousness is one that includes and honors the masculine just as its matter is inspired or inspirited matter, the body as creative participant in individuation, the planet as immanence connected to transcendence. Put another way, such feminine consciousness is art, art-fullness, individuated, embodied, ecstatic, Dionysian, collective and eco-centric. It is more than Jung’s reconciliation of Eros and Logos for it recognizes as he did not, that modernity has to radically re-form. One important way of engaging with the transformative potency of the feminine consciousness is through Jungian Arts-based Research because it de-centers Logos as the dominant mode of knowing and being. The talk will explore the radical implications of the new Jungian Arts-Based Research for individuation, soul-making and for making deep connections via synchronicity. Jungian Arts-Based Research is doing therapy with the world.
The lecture will also explore two examples of saving the feminine through JABR: “The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico” by Joel Weishaus and Susan’s novel, The Sacred Well Murders (Chiron 2022).
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Susan Rowland (PhD) is Core Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. Previously Professor of English and Jungian Studies at the University of Greenwich, UK, she has published extensively on Jung, literary theory, gender, myth, literature and detective fiction. Her books include, Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002); Jung as a Writer (2005), The Ecocritical Psyche (2012), Remembering Dionysus(2017) and Jungian Literary Criticism: the Essential Guide (2019). Her new book is Jungian Arts-based Research and the Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico (2021), and her latest project on the feminine, the novel, The Sacred Well Murders (Chiron 2022). Founding chair of the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) in 3 2003, Susan lives in California with digital literary artist, Joel Weishaus. Email: srowland@pacifica.edu
