I just spent the last two days at the Pacifica Graduate Institute hanging out with people who worship Jung. There are less worthy entities to worship. I have always been drawn to Jung's works, saying that I'm more Jung than Freud, which is a dichotomy kind of like preferring algebra to geometry (which I also do). I'm still coveting The Red Book, which I've wanted someone to buy me for my birthday for years; it's still selling even on Ebay for about $200. Jung's discussions of dreams, archetypes, mythology, memories, symbols, and the collective unconscious is stil resonating with people after all these years.
Several of my friends have become therapists through Pacifica, and though I don't have any intention of becoming a therapist (though I honestly think I'd make a good one--Derek jokes that I should open an office with Melanie Senn, ULMFT --unlicensed marriage family therapist on the door), Pacifica is training, and I believe training very well, much needed therapists. But they have other degrees too. I took a workshop today from a man who had gotten his master's degree from there in Depth Psychology and Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities. On his presentation slides he shared his favorite quote, from Dr. Iain McGilcrhirst:
Attention is a creative act.
Amen, I thought. He put us in groups and had us move about the room in different ways. If I were looking in the window, I might think, "How hokey." But what he did with us and how he talked about it and what I gained from it might be the closest I've ever gotten to curing my lifelong stagefright.
When I first got there, I felt msyelf skeptical and resistant. But after seveal workshops, lectures, and conversations with my fellow participants, I found myself all-in to this summer camp for the psyche. I met a gentle man from Districto Federal (Mexico City) who shares my son Diego's name--we had a long conversation mostly in Spanish about why it's good and important, if these concepts and ideas float your boat, to allow yourself to explore them. I made friends with an awesome woman from Trinidad, a playwright who currently lives in the San Fernando Valley where I grew up. Even as I felt myself wanting to be snarky or ironic--to resist the invitation to feel emotions and take them seriously, I gave myself over. Glad I did.
I taught reasoning and argumentation for so long, eschewing the spiritual and emotional and esoteric for that which was logical and rational. It was interesing, all that critical thinking, but now I'm ready for and open to discussions about and explorations of the unconscious and what it means to be human.
Unabashedly ready.
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