We are sadly in need of a new concept of divinity; the old idea of God as a divine parent, judge, or celestial mechanic no longer serves. Many people with a strong personal sense of the sacred no longer find this dimension within traditional religious systems. However, new forms of the sacred are to be found in areas such as relationships, the natural world, the body, our psychopathology, and within the spontaneous products of transpersonal levels of the psyche. This lecture will describe some of the implications of the idea that attention to the larger psyche is becoming a new religious practice.
Workshop: Saturday, November 8, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
In this workshop, Dr. Corbett will suggest a depth psychological approach to the problems of evil and suffering that is different from theological, philosophical, political or socio-logical approaches. The depth psychological method is to address these issues both from within the psychology of the individual and also in relation to the objective psyche. Suffering and evil have to be understood in a highly individual way, by locating their meaning within the overall psychology of the person, while also attending to the comments of the Self about the specific situation.
Dr. Lionel Corbett trained in medicine and psychiatry in England, and as a Jungian analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. His primary dedication is to the religious function of the psyche, especially the way in which personal religious experience is relevant to individual psychology, and to the development of psychotherapy as a spiritual practice. Dr. Corbett is on the faculty of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. His book, The Religious Function of the Psyche, is published by Routledge.