In response to current global and national crises, Pacifica Graduate Institute is proud to present this landmark conference featuring thought leaders and community partners standing together at the radical edge of depth psychology and social engagement. Changing times call for a changing conference – and a conference on change – that is community-based, liberation-centered, and engages directly with the numerous threats now at the threshold of our political horizons. Pre-conference workshops and keynote presentations on trauma, narcissism and rage, the role of “genius” and mythic thinking, as well as themes of embodiment, psyche and technology, archetypal activism, and war-induced trauma, weave their way throughout this powerful weekend of shared vision and renewed mission. Join us at Pacifica as we respond with depth psychologically-informed insight to both the plight of the present and the pull of the future.

DETAILS

Pre-Conference Workshops:

• Friday, 9:30am – 3:30pm

Conference:

• Friday: 7:00 - 9:00pm
• Saturday: 9:00am - 9:00pm
• Sunday: 9:00am - 12:30pm

Pre-Conference Workshop Rates:

• $75 – Pacifica Student, Alumni, & Seniors Rate
• $125 – General Rate
• $15 – CEC (Kalsched only)

Conference Rates:

• $225 – Pacifica Student Rate
• $275 – Pacifica Alumni, Full Time Students, & Senior Rate
• $325 – General Rate

All registration fees include meals. Pre-Conference meals include: Friday lunch. Conference meals include: Saturday breakfast through Sunday lunch. Lodging is not included in the registration fees.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Pre-Conference Workshops (Friday, June 16)

• Michael Meade
  Agents of Creation: Healing and Renewal in Chaotic Times
• Donald Kalsched (CECs)
  Trauma, Dissociation and the Soul: The Self-Care-System and its Archetypal Basis

Opening Plenary Address (Friday, June 16)

• Michael Meade
  Touching the Soul of the World: A Mythological and Soulful View of Chaotic Times

The Clinical Edges of Depth Psychology: 30th Anniversary Panel (Saturday, June 17)

• Donald Kalsched
  The Core Complex of a Traumatized Psyche (Keynote)
• Oksana Yakushko

Concurrent Conference Sessions I (Saturday, June 17)

• Stephen Aizenstat and Doug Thomas
  Dreaming as Response: The Global Dream Initiative
• Michael Sipiora
  Psychology at the Edges of Blockadia
• Rae Johnson
  Queering/Querying the Body: Sensation and Curiosity in Disrupting Body Norms

Concurrent Conference Sessions II (Saturday, June 17)

• Susan Rowland
  Dionysus as God of Drama, Psychology, and Transdisciplinarity: Depth Psychology and the Arts
• Joseph Bobrow
  Turning Ghosts Into Ancestors: War, Peace and the Alchemy of Transforming Trauma
• Craig Chalquist and Thyonne Gordon with Romeo Keyes
  Archetypal Activism at the Edge: Transformation through Storytelling

Evening Performance (Saturday, June 17)

• CalArts Center for New Performance/ Duende CalArts will present selections from "Shelter" by Marissa Chibas. A play about unaccompanied children seeking refuge in the US.

Call to Action: Mobilizing for Conscious Change and Deep Transformation: Community Partners Panel
(Sunday, June 18)

• David Ragland, Black Lives Matter and the Truth Telling Project (Keynote Speaker)

PANELISTS:

• Alisa Orduna
  (Homelessness Policy Director, Office of Mayor Eric Garcetti)
• Maricela Morales
  (Executive Director, Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, CAUSE)
• Lizzie Rodriguez
  (Chief Collaborative Coordinator, Restorative Community Network)
• Nuria Ciofalo
  (Facilitator)

CLOSING RITUAL

• Michael Meade

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
(Please choose one)

Michael Meade
Agents of Creation: Healing and Renewal in Chaotic Times

Ancient people relied on ritual to heal the wounds of culture and draw upon the life renewing energies of nature. The modern world faces global climate issues and growing social problems that also require the transcendent imagination and restorative energies that ritual and myth can provide.

Surprisingly, the increasing threats of division and collapse can provoke a deeper sense of wholeness that reunites nature and culture.

The world may be increasingly troubled, yet it remains a place of ongoing creation. Creation wishes to continue, yet can only work through the souls of those alive at a given time. When oriented from the deep self and soul within us, our choices can become redeeming and our experiences can become revelatory rather than isolating or traumatizing.

There may be no better time to reclaim and relearn the ancient art of making rituals in order to assist with the healing of nature and the renewal of culture.

Donald Kalsched
Trauma, Dissociation and the Soul: The Self-Care-System and its Archetypal Basis

In this day-long workshop, Dr. Kalsched will present his dissociative model of the psyche as a universal “trauma complex.” The model describes a dissociative system of daimonic inner personifications representing powerful affects and defenses that structure the unconscious mind, and define the universal struggle in human life to actualize a sacred core of true selfhood under environmental conditions that are often unfavorable. Myths and Fairy Tales record this struggle in their narratives, which always portray a heroic figure (often a “child”) suspended between the powers of light (love) and darkness (hate), aided by benevolent powers and thwarted by malevolent ones. When trauma enters this individuation story, it injures the capacity for feeling-in-the-body upon which the life-forces depend, thereby strengthening the malevolent anti-life forces of defense and driving the soul out of the body and into the “spirit-world.” Learning how these oppressive forces operate in the personality helps us to become more effective in our work with trauma survivors.

KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS

Michael Meade
Touching the Soul of the World: A Mythological and Soulful View of Chaotic Times

We live in a time of seemingly impossible tasks, amidst radical climate changes, the expansion of human tragedy and the growth of collective fear and anxiety. The modern world also suffers from a loss of soulful connections and a lack of the cohering narratives needed to orient life.

Yet, something deep in the soul of humanity responds to the rattling and roaring of the world.

In mythic terms, transformation is the secret aim of all the conflicts and tensions encountered in the world around us. The individual soul is unique and original; it is the radical root of change and the irrational factor that can alter the course of history and reconnect us to the ground of ongoing creation.

Regardless of age or gender, despite current condition or past actions, each person carries an innate connection to the accumulated treasure of the human soul. This inner inheritance includes both surprising capacities for creation and deep instincts for survival. Secretly, each soul is connected to the Soul of the World and the alchemy of the awakening soul becomes the source of meaningful change as well as the root of remedies for what ails both culture and nature.

Donald Kalsched
The Core Complex of a Traumatized Psyche

In the past 45 years of Jungian analytic practice, in two major books and many related papers, Dr. Kalsched has discovered and elaborated what he sees as a universal archetypal “complex” or “system” that shows the Spiritual “forces” that are liberated in the unconscious and recruited to form a sophisticated system of defenses following the catastrophic wound of early trauma.

This model, described as the Self-Care-System, holds open the possibility of a new way of thinking about the symbolic processes in trauma, a new way of understanding other contemporary dissociative models of the mind, and a new way of envisioning the unique contribution of Jungian Depth Psychology to modern clinical practice.