“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
Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, Jungian Analyst, and former Editor-in-Chief of the Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. He is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, is a member of the IAAP (International Association of Jungian Analysts), and sees private practice patients in San Francisco and Palm Desert, California. He is a board member of National ARAS in NYC and a general editor of A Guide to ARAS. He attended the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University as an undergraduate and trained in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in graduate school at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) in Berkeley, CA where he received an MA and PhD. He also engaged in an intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy for nineteen years. He has been trained in child and family therapy and in group relations (Tavistock) for many years. Through a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) traineeship, he studied clinical services research at the Department of Psychiatry, Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, University of California, San Francisco. As a civilian, he was Director of Psychological Services in the HIV Evaluation and Treatment Unit for the United States Army at Letterman Army Medical Center, San Francisco, CA, served as a member of the scientific advisory committee of the Americal Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), and co-authored numerous papers and two books on early care for HIV disease. Later in his professional career he entered a Jungian analysis for many years and was inspired to become a Jungian Analyst. He now teaches and supervises the next generation of Jungian candidates in training.
Description:
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.
