“Ways of Seeing: Living the Symbolic Life Through Sustained Attention to Images"
Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes
Three Sessions: April 23, 30 & May 7
Thursday 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm
Via Zoom
This three-session study group, led by San Francisco Jungian analyst Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, will deepen and further explicate material introduced in the April 23rd program, Symbols as Catalysts for Transformation.
Participants will be introduced to the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS; aras.org), and learn a method of working with symbolic images that emphasizes disciplined attention and “symbolic seeing” rather than interpretive mastery. Drawing on Carl Jung’s understanding of the importance of symbolic thinking, the group will explore amplification, circumambulation, and imaginal engagement with images. Experiential practices and reflection will invite participants to approach symbols as living phenomena that deepen analytic and creative work.
This group is open to all members of the Society, on a first-come, first-served basis, with a maximum of ten (10) members. Please register online here by clicking REGISTER. It is free to all members of the Society at all levels as a benefit of Society membership.
Participants are expected to attend all three meetings. If there is any assigned or recommended reading, it will be distributed to study group members via e-mail.
"Now, we have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of [it] …. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul … and because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are “nothing but”…. [A]nd that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of … that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war. They are all glad when there is a war: they say, “Thank heaven, now something is going to happen – something bigger than ourselves!” These things go pretty deep, and no wonder people get neurotic [when] there is no symbolic existence into which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling … my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life."
Jung, C. G. (1976 ed). Collected Works, Vol. 18: “The Symbolic Life,” para. 627-628.
