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In this presentation, drawing on the work of CG Jung, Peter Levine and in particular the contributions of Donald Kalsched (1996), I will explore the process of psychological dissociation that may result from cumulative relational stress and traumatic circumstances. I will also present Kalsched’s model of the trauma complex, (the psyche’s protective response to traumatic material), which he calls, “The Self Care System”.

Using material from my therapeutic practice I will demonstrate how dissociation and “The Self Care System” are given symbolic form in the psyche through dreams, nightmares, and other imaginal processes. These symbolic forms bring powerful ongoing inner destructive aspects of trauma into consciousness which in turn provide the foundation for therapeutic exploration, containment and integration.

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Lois Whiteman has been practising social work for over thirty years. In the last fifteen years in her private practice she has specialised in complex trauma therapy with adult clients who have experienced traumatic or dysfunctional family lives, major loss, depression and anxiety. Since 1997 Lois has also worked at The Queensland Program of Assistance to Survivors of Torture and Trauma (QPASTT) providing psychotherapy and support to clients who have come to Australia as refugees and asylum seekers; clinical supervision to counselling staff, and training in areas of trauma recovery, dreamwork and sandtray therapy.

Her current position at QPASTT is Clinical Services Manager. She is also a qualified yoga teacher. For more information visit her website, www.loiswhitemanpsychotherapy.com.au

John will be presenting the case that human spirituality was originally archetypal in essence. It was humanity’s way of coming into relationship with the sacred patterns of life and reality. This shifted with the advent of “world religions” which rebuilt spiritual foundations on a mythical-ideological base. The scientific endeavour and post-modernity have deconstructed these religious narratives. This is leading to a return to the archetypal nature of spirituality for many people (this time hopefully more conscious of its character) in which Jung’s insights will play an increasing important role.

John Power has a background in comparative religion and philosophy and has worked over the last 30 years as a spirituality and philosophy educator in schools in Australia and the UK and as an Anglican priest training clergy and lay people in creative responses to Australia’s shifting spiritual landscape. For many years he convened “Numinous”, the spirituality interest group of the Jung society in Melbourne. John currently works as the leader of St. Paul’s Spirituality Centre in Byron Bay and runs the website archetypalspirituality.org.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber talked about, living under the shadow of Auschwitz, that humanity lived with the ‘eclipse of God’. I now wonder if we have moved beyond this ‘eclipse of God’, or as Nietzsche would say, ‘the death of god’, to a time of the ‘eclipse of life’.

We live in a time where political life has usurped the social and ecological life-worlds, rendering unbelievable violence towards people and ecosystems. The decay of democracy is underpinned by unprecedented collusion between corporations and government, and is allowing, or facilitating, the manipulation of the masses. The oceans are dying, and there is a proliferation of the death of many species.

The core of the problem, enabling this kind of violence and death, is a predominant worldview in which the world is understood as mechanical and dead – observed and experienced in increasingly abstract form. In this way of being, the world and the ‘other’, cannot be loved.

In this, the mythical ice-queen is a victor. She rules the land and it turns to ice. And she is everywhere, hell bent on destruction and making the land barren.

Revering abstraction, this lecture from dialogue, to soul, through to phenomenology, will consider my most recent work in both Creating Us: Community Work with Soul (Tafina Press, 2016), and Soul, Community & Social Change (Routledge, 2016). Drawing on a three-fold framework of soulful practice, ‘soul-of-the-world’ and ‘soul-force’, the works of R. Tagore and J. Hillman are examined before arguing for a phenomenological way of re-thinking social practice that is life-giving, and works from the ‘inside-out’. Henri Bortoft of Schumacher College, Mary Watkins of Pacifica College, and Allan Kaplan of The Proteus Initiative, provide signposts for a way forward in this ‘inside-out’ and phenomenological way of practice.

Peter Westoby is an Associate Professor in Social Science-Community Development at the School of Public Health/Social Work at Queensland University of Technology (QUT); a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Development Support, University of Free State, South Africa; and a director with Community Praxis Cooperative.

He teaches and researches on community and social development theory and practice, dialogue studies and forced migration studies. He has worked in youth, community and organisation development for 28 years, within South Africa, Uganda, Vanuatu, PNG, the Philippines and Australia. He has published ten books, and 40+ professional journal articles. He is known for monograph’s such as Dialogical Community Development (2013) (Routledge), Soul, Community and Social Change (2016) (Ashgate/Routledge), and The Sociality of Refugee Healing (2009) (Common Ground); and has also edited several volumes including, with Shevellar, Learning and Mobilising for Community Development (2012) (Ashgate).

Peter particularly loves bush walking, swimming, hanging out in independent book shops, drinking good quality coffee, and home-making.

‘Wisdom of Changes’ is a film about Richard Wilhelm, the acclaimed translator of the I Ching. It is a documentary made by his granddaughter Bettina, whose father was Wilhelm’s youngest son. The importance of Wilhelm, both for the West’s understanding of the breadth and depth of Chinese wisdom, as well as his profound influence on C. G. Jung, cannot be underestimated. From the cover of the DVD:

Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930) is regarded as the European who discovered China’s spiritual world. ‘Wisdom of Changes’ is a documentary film about the life and work of the most distinguished translator and mediator of classical Chinese culture to the West. Like C. G. Jung, with whom he was friends from the 1920s, Richard Wilhelm went in search of the universal wisdoms of mankind, those that resist the changes of history.

The voice of Richard Wilhelm: Jonathan Pryce.

This talk explores the emergence of parallel ideas from diverse realms of human thought. It begins by examining the so-called “Law” of the Excluded Middle between opposites in Western logic, and quickly moves into a discussion of Buddhist logic. Having introduced Buddhism, it is then characterised as a religious philosophy which seeks to move between extremes or opposites, through the Middle.

Colin will then show that Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, was also seeking to take the middle path between opposite views in his investigation of consciousness. But Husserl was also a mathematician seeking to understand its very foundations and so this naturally leads into the world of mathematics where simple ideas can introduce us to an infinity of infinities, and the coming together of finite and infinite. He will explain why Buzz Lightyear was right! And then show that these ideas of different kinds of infinity may be found in, of all places, Mahayana Buddhism.

But for one kind of Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, there is no inside or outside, no going between options, indeed no concepts of any value at all — even Buddhist ones. Zen according to DT Suzuki, is “a wafting cloud in the sky” (IZB, 41). Zen is the iconoclast here, shooting down any dependence on conceptual thinking.

Most interestingly, Jung wrote a foreword to the Suzuki book on Zen quoted above and this naturally takes us on to Jung and his writings on Buddhism. The talk finishes by focussing on Jung’s notion of opposites and the part they play in his understanding of the psyche. In the process light is also thrown on one of Jung’s key influences, Nicholas of Cusa (or Cusanus) who speaks of the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) in his mathematical theology.

Dr Colin Weightman is currently a freelance scholar and writer. His career began by completing an honours degree in pure maths. He then studied a diploma in education and spent two years as a teacher in Bordertown. At this point he became increasingly religious and returned to Adelaide where he obtained a degree in theology, while tutoring maths for a living.

On completion he gained a position as a pastoral assistant in the Southport UC parish. This led to him becoming a UC minister. While a theology student he obtained a doctorate in religion and philosophy-of-science at UQ . This was published by Peter Lang, New York in 1994. In addition he studied Buddhism in his pre-doctoral studies. He became a minister for 10 years, but became increasingly disillusioned with the church, eventually leaving. This was a traumatic time, and he reverted to the occupation of maths tutor, but it was through his students that he was introduced to Jung by a masters candidate, Gail Godfrey and collaborated with her while she completed her training in Guided Imagery and Music.

His main task now is to finish seven books on topics from Nepal to music to spirituality to sexuality to mathematics.

About a decade ago in Dharamsala, in discussion with the Dalai Lama, the experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger raised the possibility that knowledge, or knowing, may be more fundamental than material reality. This is not a new philosophical position either in the East or the West but it is particularly significant, especially in view of the strong materialistic bent of the West since the Enlightenment, in that it emerges so naturally out of the paradoxes of quantum physics.

Indeed, it was very much because of the perplexing anomalies of microphysics that C. G. Jung was so keen to collaborate with Wolfgang Pauli in the development of his philosophical ideas, including the theory of synchronicity. The position they arrived at has in recent years been described as the Pauli-Jung Conjecture, and is really only now starting to get the mainstream recognition it deserves. It also provides an explanation for what the physicist Nick Herbert has called the ‘great quantum dilemma’.

Most people have an idea that some sort of quantum weirdness exists below the level of everyday reality. However, this is not something taught in schools or discussed in the media in much more than a cursory or superficial way. Fortunately, it does not require a degree in physics to understand the quantum enigma and hopefully this presentation will be helpful at least in providing some food for thought.

Laurence Browne was awarded a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Queensland in 2014. He lives in Brisbane with his wife and younger daughter and enjoys travelling and writing. In 2017, his thesis was published by Imprint Academic of Exeter, UK, under the title The Many Faces of Coincidence.