Public Workshops:

The Soul's Journey into the Darkness to Celebrate Life

“Death is psychologically as important as birth and like it, is an integral part of life”

- C.G. Jung cw 13 paragraph 68

Our soul cannot embrace life fully unless we acknowledge our death. Our first breath is our first step towards death, change and transformation. In “The Soul and Death”, Jung discussed the importance of exploring the existential issue of death. By confronting death. we can then celebrate life. We can know life best through images and symbols. By embracing the images that define our souls, we can have a fuller relationship with our lives. Our images and symbols provide access to the depths of our inner world and connect with the breadth of our archetypal potential.

Many cultures live closely to their symbolic lives and have rituals that help them integrate death and thus embrace life. In Ghana, Africa, the most revered ritual is the funeral. It is three days of drumming, dancing, and creating imagistic coffins to help the soul cross over and find its new path.

This workshop will weave together Kate’s cross-cultural experience in Ghana, her Jungian based expressive arts approach into a journey into the darkness discovering images of the psyche to celebrate life.

On Friday, night by first exploring the Ghanaian funeral ritual through slides, video and discussion, participants will delve into the space in between our first and our last breath.

On Saturday, participants will be invited to engage in Expressive Arts processes to discover seminal images that define their psyche. Using the life breath as the creative moment, we will explore the body and allow images to flow from breath and movement of the body. Each participant will create with these images, a sacred vessel that will house the symbols of the psyche. By embodying these images, we will create the rituals that will help celebrate our life and open the door to new beginnings personally, collectively and spiritually.

Additional Information

• Course Syllabus
• Reading List

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A Transcendent Journey through the Mother-Line:
A Voyage with Helen Hardin, Southwest Artist

March 7-8, 2008 in Arcata, CA: Living Arts Counseling Center

Credits: 8 CEU's available for MFT's and Psychologists
Cost: $125
To Register: Call Caren Wise at (707) 826-1400 ext. 23

"Searching for meaning connects us to the soul and the spirit, resulting in a life that is more open, more joyful and closer to the true self. By connecting with arts and creative expression on a profound level, we are able to more fully explore and understand our life experiences, wounds and strengths."

— Kate T. Donohue

(image © Helen Hardin Estate)

Helen Hardin, a southwest artist created her own imagistic mythology. She called these images her feminine trinity: Changing Woman, Medicine Woman and Listening Woman. They combine universal themes and Tewa spiritual legends. These images emerged from her investigation of the Motherline: the unconscious feminine legacy of one’s family: personally, culturally, creatively and spiritually. Stories from the Motherline are pivotal in the individuation process. Using the life and transcendent images of bi-cultural Southwest artist Helen Hardin, we will explore first her Motherline individuation process by delving into the personal, maternal, cultural and spiritual paradoxes that molded her experience and exploring the dynamic of bridging these paradoxes, the transcendent function. By contrasting her early childhood development to her adult behavior, we see the compensatory function at work. Through her images, we see how she formed a relationship with her shadow, her animus and to the sacred. Her individuation process through the Motherline lead her to numinous experiences and to the sacred feminine.

By using expressive arts therapy process, participants will delve into their own richly layered and complex Motherline journey of individuation. Using poetry, visual arts and movement, each participant will have the opportunity to explore bi-cultural issues, the dualities and injuries in his/her family, shadow relationships within the family's feminine line, spiritual wounds and the complex interactions one has with the world as an artist. They will also have the opportunity to explore their compensations for these injuries in their adult lives as well as to explore the passions that have difficulty being expressed in their outer lives. Participants will also learn how to bring these processes into their clinical work.

Through the sharing of the images created during this workshop, participants will find their own personal relationship with the sacred feminine and the universal themes of the mother-line that emerge through those images. In closing, we will come together to create useful processes to keep the relationship to the feminine alive in our lives and into the lives of those with whom we work.

Learning Objectives

In this workshop, participants will learn about:

• the Jungian concept of the individuation process, the process of becoming whole and its application to their clinical practice.
• the Jungian concept of the mother-line, the feminine unconscious legacy to the family and its application to clinical practice.
• learn about Tewa themes of spirituality and the application the spiritual beliefs in their client’s individuation process.
• the transcendent journey of a creative personality through the mother-line, and apply this understanding to therapeutic processes.
• how to use expressive arts therapy processes by creating images of mother-line, exploring one’s experiences of paradox, precision and passion.
• the relationship between the individuation process, expressive arts therapy and the Sacred Feminine.
• the use of expressive arts therapy group process through the sharing of poetic, visual and kinesthetic images the collective, universal images of the mother-line.

Additional Information

• Course Syllabus
• Reading List

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Paradox, Precision and Passion: Passing on the Spirit of Southwest Tewa Artist, Helen Hardin, 1943-1984

Workshop Description

(image © Helen Hardin Estate)

Paradox, precision, and passion are woven into the life, paintings, and etching plates of Helen Hardin. A Southwest Native American artist, Hardin strove to imbue each creation with her passion and spirit. As a contemporary artist, her work was a bridge between the paradox of her warring internal worlds. Her precision was a compensatory function balancing her unpredictable chaotic childhood and led her into a numinous state in which she danced with her Tewa spirits. This workshop will explore these three themes through a Jungian analysis of her work. The session will culminate in a discussion of her most significant work, her Feminine Trinity - Changing Woman, Medicine Woman, and Listening Woman, her representation of the sacred feminine.

• Explore the healing powers of the imagination, the creative process, and the transcendent function.
• Explore the theme of the motherline; the feminine legacy, culturally (Tewa), and personally, and universally.
• Explore, via Jungian analysis, the healing, transformative powers of Helen Hardin's work: compensatory function; not animus driven perfection, but a new aspect of the feminine.
• Explore the spirit that Helen Hardin passed on to her descendants and admirers in collective images.

Learning Objectives

• Using a Jungian lens, participants will learn about Helen Hardin's individuation process (striving for wholeness) as a creative personality an exploration of her transcendent function in art making that served to heal her paradoxes.
• Participants will learn how Hardin healed her motherline personally and culturally by connecting to her personal Tewa spirituality and the collective unconscious.
• Participants will explore the Tewa collective and universal themes of the mother and women in her Feminine Trinity, her opening to the sacred feminine.
• Participants will also explore her creation of androgynous Tewa thinking feminine that permitted her to birth a new image of the Self, the ultimate culmination of the transcendent function.

Additional Information

• Course Syllabus
• Reading List

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Embracing the Inner 'Other': Archetypes, Arts and the Body

Workshop Description

Though the individuation journey asks each of us to open to the unknown and discover our wholeness, it does not occur in isolation. Kinship Libido, our desire for connection and search for wholeness through relationship, is most dramatically experienced in a collaborative weaving of the arts.

This workshop will invite participants to engage in an expressive arts approach, exploring the intersubjective relationship between the individual and the collective that Jung understood as the participation mystique. Through this experience we will discover what evokes and nourishes relationship, illuminating the power of creativity and the participation mystique in this transformative process. Beginning with storytelling evoked by sacred found objects, participants will investigate how images hold intrapsychic, interpersonal, and transpersonal meaning for the individual and for the group.

Concepts that will be examined include the participation mystique/intersubjective field, the power of images to evoke and explore the transcendent function, and a theoretical approach to weaving the arts into healing and transformative tapestries.

Participants, individually and through group interaction, will then apply these concepts in an experiential process integrating Authentic Movement, Visual Arts, and Poetry. A form of Jung's active imagination, Authentic Movement invites a descent into the body and psyche within a safe environment; an opportunity to bring awareness, expression, and form to the soul's deeper callings as they are expressed through natural movement.

Fresh from their own inner landscape, participants will discover how each person's mysteries may have been revealed in the encounter with others and deepened through this interaction. Together, we will discover ways each individual informs the collective and the collective informs the individual in the vibrant web of life.

Learning Objectives

Participants will understand and learn how to incorporate the following elements into their lives and work:

The concept of the "participation mystique" and how it informs the intersubjective experience of an individual and the community.

How the arts are integral in the development of the intersubjective experience of the individual and the community.

How to access images in a variety of creative modalities, exploring their intrapsychic, interpersonal, and transpersonal aspects.

An increased sense of comfort and appreciation for one's own bodily experience - its wisdom, intuitive, and feeling responses - toward enhancing self care and empathy and effectiveness in working with others.

Additional Information

• Course Syllabus
• Reading List

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Kinship Libido and the Participation Mystique: Archetypes, Arts and the Body

"In the deepest sense, we all dream not of ourselves, but out of what lies between us and the other."

- C.G. Jung

Workshop Description

Though the individuation journey asks each of us to open to the unknown and discover our wholeness, it does not occur in isolation. Kinship Libido, our desire for connection and search for wholeness through relationship, is most dramatically experienced in a collaborative weaving of the arts.

This workshop will invite participants to engage in an expressive arts approach, exploring the intersubjective relationship between the individual and the collective that Jung understood as the participation mystique. Through this experience we will discover what evokes and nourishes relationship, illuminating the power of creativity and the participation mystique in this transformative process. Beginning with storytelling evoked by sacred found objects, participants will investigate how images hold intrapsychic, interpersonal, and transpersonal meaning for the individual and for the group.

Concepts that will be examined include the participation mystique/intersubjective field, the power of images to evoke and explore the transcendent function, and a theoretical approach to weaving the arts into healing and transformative tapestries.

Participants, individually and through group interaction, will then apply these concepts in an experiential process integrating Authentic Movement, Visual Arts, and Poetry. A form of Jung's active imagination, Authentic Movement invites a descent into the body and psyche within a safe environment; an opportunity to bring awareness, expression, and form to the soul's deeper callings as they are expressed through natural movement.

Fresh from their own inner landscape, participants will discover how each person's mysteries may have been revealed in the encounter with others and deepened through this interaction. Together, we will discover ways each individual informs the collective and the collective informs the individual in the vibrant web of life.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will understand and learn how to incorporate the following concepts into their lives and work:

1. The concept of the "participation mystique" and how it informs the intersubjective experience of an individual and the community.
2. How the arts are integral in the development of the intersubjective experience of the individual and community.
3. The relationship between Authentic Movement (embodied active imagination) and other Expressive Arts Therapies.
4. How to access images in a variety of creative modalities, exploring their intrapsychic, interpersonal, and transpersonal aspects.

Additional Information

• Course Syllabus
• Reading List

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Kinship Libido: Our Desire for Connection and Transcendence through the Arts

Kinship Libido, our desire for connection and search for wholeness
through relationship, is most dramatically witnessed in the collaborative
weaving of the arts. Using a multi-modal approach to the arts therapies,
participants will begin to understand and experience the intersubjective
relationship between the individual and the collective. Beginning with
story-telling evoked by sandplay objects, participants will explore how
images, no matter what modality, hold intrapsychic, interpersonal, and
transpersonal meaning for the individual and the group. Concepts related
to the intersubjective field, the power of images to evoke and explore the
transcendent function, and a theoretical approach to weaving the expressive
arts into healing and transformative tapestries will be discussed.

Participants will then engage these concepts in an experiential process
integrating Authentic Movement, Visual Arts, and Poetry, both individually
and through group interactive processes. We will end by exploring how each
person's mysteries may have been revealed in the encounter with others, and deepened through this interaction. What evokes and nourishes relationship? And what is the role of creativity and the "participation mystique" in this transformative process? Together, we will discover ways that each individual informs the collective and the collective informs the individual in the vibrant web of life.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand the concepts of Jung’s “participation mystique”.
2. Understand how this informs the intersubjective experience of an individual and the community.
3. Understand how the arts are integral in the developing of the intersubjective experience of the individual and community.
4. Understand the relationship between Authentic Movement and Expressive Arts Therapy.
5. Understand how to enter images in any modality and explore its intrapsychic, interpersonal and transpersonal aspects.
6. Learn ways of incorporating this into your work and life.

Abstract:

Kinship Libido, our desire for connection and search for wholeness through relationship is experienced through the weaving of the arts. Integrating sandplay, Authentic Movement, visual arts, and poetry, participants will explore the intersubjective field and discover how images hold not only the individual experience, but the collective and the transcendent.

Bios

Kate T. Donohue, Ph.D., REAT, co-founder of the International Expressive
Arts Therapy Association, founding faculty member: Expressive Arts Therapy at the California Institute of Integral Studies, is in private practice in San
Franciso. She has worked with groups focusing on community building through the arts.

Tina Stromsted, Ph.D., ADTR, Dance therapist and international teacher of Authentic Movement and Somatic psychology, has thirty years of clinical practice, is in private practice in San Francisco and is a Candidate at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

Additional Information

• Course Syllabus
• Reading List

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“Death Dances Around My Bed”
Frida Kahlo, and the Archetype of Death
Kate T. Donohue, Ph.D. REAT

May 1-4, 2008
Arts and Psyche Conference
call for more information

Baruch Gould
Director of Extended Education
C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
415-771-8080
FAX 415-771-8926

Description:

"Death Dances Around My Bed"

Frida Kahlo’s words about her death dance became a vivid portrait of how our unwanted agonies can be our greatest teachers. This Mexican artist’s paintings illuminate her life story and illustrate that Frida’s artistic images were her psyche’s voice. For Frida, life and death existed simultaneously from her birth till her death. This paradox compelled her to create images of her bloody and golden body. Frida boldly painted her reality with its pain, losses, and betrayals. The shadow usually hidden is revealed, and then a metaphorsis took place on her canvas. (image © Frida Kahlo Museum)

Frida imagined herself wearing a Mexican death mask, a symbol of being born of a dead (depressed) mother. Her father’s love and adoration caused a series of injuries to her sexuality and created complex family dynamics, holding both the pain and joy of being the father’s daughter.

Without personal relationships to help her metabolize her family complexes, Frida turned to her imagination, and her child’s archetypal energies and began to paint from an early age. This death mask became a symbol of all her family complexes.

Through a deep appreciation of her Mexican and Aztec motherculture, Frida felt connected to Coatlique, the Aztec goddess of death, destruction, dismemberment and life. She suffered from polio at the age of six. At the age of 18, a bus accident changed the course of her life.

Frida was gravely injured. Pain and suffering ruled her life. Frida was confined to her bed for a year and had numerous surgeries, suffered from infertility and turned from her medical career to art. Coatlique guided Frida’s brush to paint the tortured body she experienced daily.

The loneliness of her confinement allowed her to develop an empathic mirroring through her self-portraits and led to her deepening relationship to Diego Rivera, her husband. Their relationship was tumultuous, laced with infidelities and betrayals, allowing her to enact her family dynamics and complexes. Paradoxically, Diego was her artistic, cultural and political mentor. He intensified her bond with her motherculture, which opened her to more archetypal images in her art. Her paintings helped her metabolize these horrific experiences, quietly first as Diego’s wife and boldly later as an icon of the wounded and triumphant feminine.

Frida’s latter paintings and self-portraits changed dramatically as life started to leave her body. Her art now held the ego and archetype and manifestations of the self and Self.

This presentation will delve into the intimate relationship between Kahlo’s art and the Archetypal Death. Using a Jungian expressive arts therapy lens, I will discuss her psyche’s relationship to her art through a power point, DVD and verbal format. Participants will be invited to express their experience through inner-directed somatic, visual and poetic active imagination processes. We will close with a group discussion.

Learning Objectives:

1. Exploring the archetype of death and its relationship to a
   creative personality through an Expressive Arts Jungian Lens.
2. Experiencing expressive arts processes that can aid ourselves and
   our clients in facing death, illness, miscarriages and symbolic
   death such as failure and rejection.
3. Learning about cross-cultural differences in forming a
   relationship with the archetype of death that can influence our
   clinical expressive arts private.
   

Biography of the Presenter:

Kate T. Donohue, Ph.D. REAT is a founding faculty member of CIIS’ EXA program and founding IEATA board Professional Standards Board Member.
She coordinates the EXA group supervision program and has conducted numerous supervision workshops and Jungian oriented expressive arts consultation groups. Dance and painting inform all her expressive arts therapy and supervision.

Frida Kahlo References

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