The Blessing and Peril of Trauma, Guil Dudley, PhD & Jungian Analyst (a Friday Evening Talk)

Scottsdale, AZ, August 18, 2014 --(PR.com)-- The word trauma is taken from the Greek word for wound. These wounds can occur from a single event or chronic and repetitive wounding over time, such as child abuse, imprisonment, military combat, battering relationships, or enduring deprivation. Trauma takes us to the edge, where we can be overwhelmed by death, annihilation, depression, or psychosis. But it is also an "edge" where a spiritual transformation or epiphany can occur. Jung calls such a dramatic reversal an enantiodromia, occurring when the psyche’s one-sided experience builds to a point where its opposite is unleashed. These reversals can either expand the soul or push it aside in a drive toward grandiosity. The speaker will illustrate with references to a manuscript he is completing about a father and son, the father reversing his repetitive disempowerment as a child and teenager and becoming swept into a drive to power, projecting his disempowerment on his son, crushing him. On the other hand, Helen Keller, Anne Frank, Cesar Chavez, and Harriet Tubman are widely disparate examples of people whose souls seem to have expanded under the grinding traumas of deprivation.

Guil Dudley, PhD, is a Jungian analyst and a member of the Santa Fe Institute of Jungian Analysts, where he is active as a panelist on the Institute’s public programs. He teaches in the Advanced Students Program and in the Institute’s Analytic Training Program. Guil practices in both the Albuquerque and Santa Fe areas. He is the author of two books and contributor to a third. He is completing a memoir that deals in part with generational patterns of early trauma and a compensatory “will to power” (Nietzsche’s term), and persona enhancement among successful corporate executives, investors, and others in the country’s top one percent of income earners.

Phoenix Friends of C.G. Jung was formed in 1984 as a non-profit educational society, meeting to share through lectures, workshops, and related events, our common interest in the depth psychology of Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Carl G. Jung. In addition, we provide activities for growth and individuation by bringing in speakers for lectures and workshops. For more information about our group or to join, please see our website at http://phoenixfriendsofcgjung.org/wordpress/.

Friday Evening Talk September 19, 2014 7:30—10:00 p.m.
Santa Barbara Room, The Casa Franciscan Renewal Center, Phoenix, AZ
Member is $15: Non-member is $25