Religious experiences can lead to a dangerous level of psychological inflation, witness Marshall Applewhite and the Heavenšs Gate cult. The great archetypal images function as attractors and offer solutions to life's perplexing questions, which can entice a vulnerable ego into identification and even states of possession. The result is what Jung called the "mana personality." People turn into seeming gods and make pronouncements about ultimate meaning and value. Others follow them, needing guidance and leadership. Cults are spawned. Did Jung himself fall into this trap? Did he found a cult? Or did he apply critical understanding to his own experiences of the numinous?
In his lecture, Murray Stein will argue that analytical psychology offers a "middle path" between the dedicated secularist's denial of the importance and value of religious experience and the ardent believer's state of possession and dismissal of rationality and reality. It is a method that can deal with the insanity of religious extremism without falling into the opposite extreme of equally fixated atheism.
Workshop: Saturday, October 11, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
In the Saturday workshop, Dr. Stein will expand on the themes presented during Friday's lecture. He will offer some concrete ways to pursue the spiritual life. "On Being Spiritual and Grounded at the Same Time" will introduce the technique of active imagination as a way to relate to the religious factors in the collective unconscious.
Murray Stein, Ph.D., is the author of In Midlife, Jung's Treatment of Christianity, Solar Conscience/Lunar Conscience, Practicing Wholeness, and Transformation (in press). He is also the author of numerous papers and the editor of Jungian Analysis, Psyche's Stories (three volumes, with Dr. Lionel Corbett), Psyche at Work (with John Hollwitz), and the Chiron Clinical Series. He is a training analyst with the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago and has a private practice in Wilmette, Illinois. He is currently Vice President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology.