Please note this is a two part seminar and workshop. Tickets can be purchased separately.
Although jealousy and envy are often used interchangeably, they are not the same. Envy is wanting something someone else has but you don’t; it’s a two-person thing. Whereas jealousy is the result or fear of losing something, usually someone, that you have (or think you have) to another; so it’s a three-person thing, a triangle. And triangles, as Hillman saw so clearly, bring energy into a relationship, enliven it. I will be looking at both, but with more emphasis on jealousy because I am more in touch with its potentially transformative power.
To explore these powerful energies in a genuinely depth psychological way, we need to consider but also move beyond the rather abstract discussions put forward by Freud and Jung and Hillman to a more experiential consideration, to look at them as events not ideas. So there need to be stories: traditional, mythic stories and also the stories put together by great writers who have the gift of turning their experience into stories that illuminate our own, like Marcel Proust. And of course our own stories.
The stories are always in a sense about “pathological,” intense, archetypal jealousy or envy. They are about “big” experiences that like “big” dreams continue to reverberate. Jealousy or envy may enter our lives when we ourselves are taken over by them, but they may also enter just as forcefully when we discover ourselves to be the objects of another’s jealousy or envy. Neither is ever simply an intrapsychic experience; both pull us into the world of others. So a depth psychological engagement with these energies can not only deepen our understanding of ourselves but also deepen our understanding of the desires and needs of the other, their soul.
**Please note, Saturday's workshop will be from 10am to 1pm, with only a short break.**
We will explore further implications and more stories about how jealousy and envy enter into our lives in both destructive and creative ways. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect on and share some of their own engagements with these archetypal forces. We will probably do some writing, so be sure to bring along paper and pen or an electronic tablet.
Presenter Biography
Christine Downing, Ph.D., has been teaching at Pacifica Graduate Institute since 1987, primarily in its Mythological Studies program. Before that for almost twenty years she taught in the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University (a good part of the time as Chair of the Department) and concurrently served as a member of the Core Faculty at the California School of Professional Psychology. Christine has also taught at the Jung Institute in Zurich and lectures frequently to Jungian groups both here and abroad and at American and European universities. Her many books include The Goddess, Journey through Menopause, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, Women's Mysteries, Gods In Our Midst, The Long Journey Home: Revisioning the Myth of Persephone and Demeter for Our Time, and Psyche’s Sisters: Re-Imagining the Meaning of Sisterhood.
