with Dr John Beebe
16:00 – 18:00 London
(17:00 Paris, Berlin, Warsaw; 11:00 New York; 08:00 San Francisco)
The Journal of Analytical Psychology is pleased to offer an online (Zoom) workshop, led by Dr John Beebe. Part of the work of an analyst is to help clients see that it is possible to negotiate ambiguous, conflictual situations without doing unnecessary harm. In this seminar, John Beebe will discuss with participants how the analyst’s integrity is also challenged within the analytical relationship itself and point out some stars we can steer by in the darker waters of deep work, when complexes emerge on both sides of the interaction.
This seminar will build upon insights to be found in John’s 1992 book, Integrity in Depth, which suggest how integrity applies to the way we work with patients in Jungian analysis. There he points out that for an analysis to be lastingly therapeutic, it will often have to depend upon the degree to which integrity is able to emerge and be felt on both sides of the therapeutic interaction. The following passages from his book remind us that this can still happen even when the field of the analytic relationship is also, as in other human interactions, shadowed by complexes stubbornly taking up defensive positions:
…The dialectic of integrity depends, as Socrates knew, upon an endless self-questioning, driven by an uneasiness at the core of the questioner. In the language of psychoanalysis, this uneasiness is both signal anxiety, telling us the self is in danger, and separation anxiety, indicating that a vital relationship is at risk. It is the sign of an unconscious perception of separation from the self. Pursuing this uneasiness is the most frequent way that we stumble upon the fact that there is something there to lose….
The reality of the shadow provides ample occasion for such anxiety. Jung once summarized the findings of depth psychology in an arresting image, when he pointed out that any of the individual complexes of our unbidden emotional life—greed, ambition, lust, resentment—can “set up a shadow government of the ego”. What Jung calls a shadow government of the ego, the psychoanalyst Leo Rangell has called a compromise of integrity, pointing to the superego failure involved. Because of the continuous activity of the complexes, integrity cannot survive without an attitude of vigilance, and we are always, in effect, restoring our integrity from some attempt at compromise. For this reason, Confucius, like Socrates, urged that we continually question ourselves.
Yet many of us find it irritating to sustain the vigil. It is hard not to resent the anxiety that is integrity’s method. Who wants to heed a warning light that is always going on in the control panel of the car? It is easier to assume that the signal is wrong—a sign of immaturity, fatigue, or “mental illness”. More people today label and treat integrity’s signal with this quasi-medical thinking than ever before. They need perhaps to consider that the part of ourselves that worries may be the healthy part, the strength of our moral fiber. When this part suffers anxiety, the signal is not wrong, it is telling us that our integrity is somehow at risk.
…Our moral sense seems best to express itself nowadays in symptoms like shame and anxiety, and psychotherapy has been right to realize that we need to befriend these symptoms of integrity with the attention and respect that is their due.
- excerpts from Integrity in Depth,
Texas A&M University Press. (pp. 34–35, 40, 69)
One of John’s aims in this workshop will be to explore with analytical colleagues how similar insights of their own can effectively guide the way moral and ethical questions that hover over a therapeutic analysis are taken up so that they may be faced and consciously lived within the analytical relationship. There, the patient is already able to feel, and should be freed to discuss, the limitations as well as the moral strengths of the analytical process. The quality of the therapeutic interaction that ensues can then bear its own witness to the ethical character of the process, so that analyst and analysand alike will begin to find, with enthusiasm and moral creativity, an integrity in the analytical enterprise that releases this part of its healing potential from the shadow of suspicion.
JOHN BEEBE, MD, analyst, author, editor, and teacher, is a past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and also on its teaching faculty. Lecturing on many topics in analytical psychology, including typology, dreams, and the individuation of integrity has taken him in person and over the internet to Jungian training centres in North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and the author of Integrity in Depth and Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness.
Cost: £65
A concessionary rate of £45 is available for candidates in training/routers and students.
Fees can only be refunded (less 25% administration charge) if a written notice of cancellation is received no less than 14 days before the event. No refund can be made after that time.
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