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Friday Evening Lecture
Swamplands of the Soul

Date:	February 8, 2008  7:30 – 9:30 p.m.
Presenter:	James Hollis, Ph.D.
Location:	St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Inwood at Mockingbird
$15.00 non-members (wine and cheese reception)

There is a recurrent fantasy that the goal of life is to achieve happiness. Who does not long to be permanently happy? Yet our own psyche apparently has a contrary agenda that frequently derails our fantasy and pulls us under into an emotional swampland. It seems our own nature intends that we spend a good part of our journey in dismal dwellings; paradoxically, these dread places provide many of the most meaningful moments of our journey. In such swamplands as loss, betrayal, and depression, the soul is fashioned and forged, character is tested, and values are enlarged by the soul's agenda beyond the ego's limited purview.

This lecture-discussion will select swamplands such as depression, addiction, anxiety; identify the developmental tasks each invites; and consider the most effective therapeutic strategies. Jung considered soul-making the only resolution of suffering that honors spiritual integrity and moves the individual from victimization to collaborative participation in the rigor of life.

Saturday Workshop
Working Through

Date:	February 9, 2008  9:30 a.m. – 11:30
Presenter:	James Hollis, Ph.D.
Location:	St. Thomas Episcopal Church
$40.00 non-members (coffee and rolls provided)

We are driven daily by charged images, unmet needs, desires, complexes that operate unconsciously. This workshop will invite each participant to respond, in writing and discussion, to questions designed to identify such psychological formations that are, like icebergs in the North Atlantic, adrift and likely to cross our consciously charted courses. Many of these unconscious contents have shaped the character of our lives, our relationships, our choices. As long as they remain unconscious and unchallenged, they continue to direct us.

Please bring pen and paper to reflect personally on these questions. Only when we become more aware of what psychic engines drive our lives can we begin to create a different pattern for the second half of life.

James Hollis, Ph.D., is a Zurich-trained Jungian Analyst, Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center of Houston (www.junghouston.org) and author of twelve books, most recently Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding our Darker Selves.

 

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