It is the personal,
Interior life that gives us something to think about.
The rest is only drama.

John Ashbery, American poet

As the gods constituted the inner world in ancient Greece so Jung allowed the figures of his psyche to work on him. He let them instruct him. Being in Jungian therapy is an ongoing invitation to enter a Socratic dialogue in which the question at stake is not what is being talked about, but who is doing the talking. In the language of today it is the voices of the inner world, the images of our dreams that do the talking and that constitute the psychological life.

We know from the Red Book that Jung took the images and the voices that came to him with utter seriousness. His psyche had things to tell him. And he felt that he needed to listen. He felt he needed to take what was said at face value even to take it literally: the tone, the manner, the language, the very accent.

The organising image for this talk will be the delightful Persian poem The Conference of the Birds by the 12th century Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Henry Corbin, the French scholar of Islamic philosophy called it a “peak of mystical experience”.

Dr. David Russell has a psychotherapy/psychology practice in Darlinghurst (Sydney CBD). In his therapeutic work his intention is to attend to the experiential nature of desire and compulsion as experienced in everyday life. David is a past president of the Sydney Jung Society and past Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at Western Sydney University.

 Date: 15th June 2018
Time: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Venue: Mitchell Theatre Level 1 Sydney Mechanics' School
of Arts, 280 Pitt St, Sydney
Cost: Members $15 Non-Members $25 Non-Member
Concession $20

*Psychotherapists and other practitioners can obtain credit for Professional Development hours recognised by PACFA and ACA for this presentation.