A guest post by Robert Bosnak

It all started 46 years ago when, after a long and almost fatal illness, I ended up at the 1971 Eranos conference for my honeymoon. After close to a year in the hospital, Western medicine was no longer the ‘be all and end all’ of healing for me. I had experimented with psychedelics (it was the 1960s after all), and my perspective on life exploded. At Eranos, learned people talked about a cosmos alien to anything I had ever heard of and yet it all felt eerily familiar. I walked up to a comparatively young man standing by the open terrace doors during the intermission of a fascinatingly incomprehensible talk in French and said to him: “Dr. Hillman, I have used LSD and I’m trying to make sense of it.” I had his instant attention. I was 23 and he was 45. My children are now around the age he was then.

I started to attend the Jung Institute in Zurich and my wife and I became secretaries to the Eranos Foundation. From then on my fascination with alchemy never left me.

A guest post by Joseph Bobrow, Roshi, Ph.D.

From April 2016 to February 2017, tens of thousands of people journeyed to Oceti Sakowin, Seven Fires Camp, in Cannonball, North Dakota in support of the water protectors on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in a momentous gathering of tribes, their allies, and people from all walks of life and all ages, standing in solidarity to put a halt to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and protect the water of 17 million living downstream. They won a major victory when the Army Corps of Engineers denied a key permit to the builders (Energy Transfer Partners) and insisted on a thorough Environmental Impact Study. Soon after Donald Trump took office in January, 2017, he ordered that construction resume without the study [1]. The pipeline sprung leaks even while being tested. Now, it is in full operation.

The impacts from the remarkable community of solidarity and action at Standing Rock did not end when camp was closed, the teepees and communal structures razed, and the holdouts arrested. Other protest camps are springing up around the country, including Camp White Pine in Pennsylvania, where residents are working to stop the Mariner East 2 pipeline, and in Louisiana where a multifaith alliance is organizing a camp to block the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. The ripples from Standing Rock was also felt on July 4, 2017, when tribes gather in Black Hills, SD for “Reclamation of Independence.”

To convey and keep alive the power and joy of Standing Rock, I want to share my experience as part of an action by 524 clergy on November 3, 2016. At Standing Rock multifaith spiritually-informed direct action was the interplay, in a remarkable contemporary context, of the principles of Native spirituality: The Great Mystery (Wakan Tanka, also Great Spirit) and All My Relations (Mitakuye Oyasin).

Keynote presentation by The Truth Telling Project co-founder David Ragland, Ph.D. at Response at the Radical Edge: Depth Psychology for the 21st Century
Summary article by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

When political philosopher Hannah Arendt reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the pivotal organizers of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, for the New Yorker in 1963, she described a disturbing fact. In his defense, Eichmann, who was certified as “normal” by a half a dozen psychiatrists, only insisted that he was doing his job; that it had been his duty to obey his superiors in his daily work by hastening millions of Jews to their deaths on trains bound for concentration camps [1].

Eichmann’s refusal to take responsibility for his actions is illustrative of what Arendt referred to as the “banality of evil.” Her notion of banality suggests that evil exists in everyday life, and by not taking a stance against it, by not making the effort to eradicate it, we become complicit [2].

This article first appeared in the 2017 edition of Hearing Voices. Displacing Boundaries of Race and Politics of Space in Los Angeles by Alisa Orduna, Dissertation Student in the Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology Specialization.

As the Mayor’s Director of Homelessness Policy, our City’s homeless community of 28,000 residents is my primary constituent base. For far too long, L.A. has addressed homelessness and poverty through policies of containment- isolating persons with severe mental illness, substance use disorder, sexual minorities, and African Americans – in “designated” spaces of the City. Homelessness and poverty were also addressed through therapeutic models that focused on assimilating the individual into a biased model of a “productive citizen” of society.

Opening Keynote presentation by Michael Meade, Response at the Radical Edge: Depth Psychology for the 21st Century
Summary article by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

In a 4000 year old poem, a weary man argues with his ba soul (the unique spirit of a person) because the man feels deeply troubled by the increase of injustice, greed and unrest in the culture, which makes him want to end his life, begins mythologist Michael Meade, in a compelling keynote address at the recent "Response at the Radical Edge: Depth Psychology for the 21st Century" conference at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

When there is wounding in our culture, there is wounding to the soul of the world. Many may be feeling “world weary” at this moment in our modern world, and in fact, we are seeing an increase in suicide in all ages right now. But this mood of despair has happened before, Meade points out. This poem is an ancient story. A distortion in the culture, whenever it occurs, weighs on everyone in the culture—but people have survived this before.

The Art of Transformation: Images, Dreams, and Alchemy—An Interview with Jungian Analyst, Stanton Marlan
A Guest Blog Post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

For Stanton Marlan, a Jungian analyst and author of the iconic tome, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, his interest in alchemy may be traced in some part to his childhood stone collection. As a child, Marlan used to use his stones to “write” in wonderful colors, and delighted in the way each had a certain capacity to express themselves in a unique way without crumbling in the process.

The stones, which he kept in front of his grandmother’s house where he lived, became a very early “image” for Marlan, carrying a great deal of meaning. When his grandmother determined the stones were cluttering the front yard and threw them away, it resulted in a sense of profound loss for the boy whose colorful stones were so rich and valuable to him. In some deep way, Marlan reflects, the search for the philosopher’s stone, or the search for meaning in stones, was an early imprint on his mind as a young child.

Pacifica represents at the 2017 Biennial Conference for the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA)

This team of students, faculty, and alumni largely represent the Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology Specialization of the M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program here at Pacifica.

We are excited to share this amazing body of work that our students, faculty, and alumni are engaging with and wish them well presenting at the University of Ottawa, in Ontario, Canada where the conference is being held.

Here is a list of Pacifica community members presenting at the conference:

Pacifica Graduate Institute Clinical Psychology Program Faculty Member Receives Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC)

Dr. Avedis Panajian, who is Core Faculty in Pacifica’s Clinical Psychology Program has been awarded the Psychoanalytic Center of California Certificate of Recognition for his significant contributions to the founding and work of the PCC. Panajian is one of the primary founders of this internationally approved advanced analytic training for psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals.

Counseling and Community Mental Health: A Soul-Based Calling An Interview with MFT Consortium Stipend Recipient, Minh Tran
A Guest Blog Post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

In his senior year of college, Minh Tran, a “first and a half” generation Vietnamese immigrant who moved to the U.S. as a child, started volunteering community organizations doing lay counseling work, including HIV testing, harm reduction and substance abuse counseling, and outreach. Tran spent much of his time focusing on harm reduction, a specific approach to counseling which tends to bring the unconscious to the fore by restoring choice or changing thoughts and behavior. Harm reduction attempts to reduce harm by any means, especially by addressing an individual’s strengths, Minh states. Whatever one is already doing in their life that's working—such as exercising, for example—can be engaged.

A guest post by Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D.

I just offered a seminar in Dream Tending to our students in the Integrative Therapy and Healing Practices Specialization of the Depth Psychology Ph.D. Program. What a delight it was to do so. This community of diverse professionals came to “the work” with a passion and background in the Healing Arts. On this day they brought their empathy, creativity, and experience into the classroom. The imaginal field in South Hall at the Lambert Road Campus activated in generative ways. The “inner-subjective imaginal field” opened widely, including dream images, dreamer, and dream tender, an essential dimension of hosting the embodied, living images of psyche. When the relational field, in this case a specific learning environment, resonated with care, curiosity, and high regard, the figures in dream became particularly vital and presented themselves in potent ways.