About Us

The

Comox Valley C. G. Jung Society

is a non-profit volunteer group

Our Roots: Formed in 2010, we are dedicated to providing engaging and accessible lectures and workshops on the provocative writings, art and theories of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, whose works became the foundation for analytical and depth psychology.

We hold approximately six lectures a year, usually on Friday nights at 7-9 pm, in the Stan Hagen Theatre, 2300 Ryan Road at North Island College, Courtenay, BC. We also offer at least one all-day workshop per year in other venues. Annual Membership (Sept-June) is only $15 a year, forms are available at any lecture or sign up online! Fees for lectures are $20 for public/drop-in, $15 for members and $10 for students. While we are in a pandemic, all lectures are offered online via ZOOM.

We feature local, national and international Jungian speakers and published authors that use various aspects of Jung’s works to inspire deeper understandings of ourselves and others.  Jung’s extensive theories and writings on topics such as dream analysis, psyche, archetypes and mythology, relationships, individuation, shadow, synchronicity, and active imagination are proving to be increasingly relevant in addressing our personal and collective modern-day issues.  

Since 2010, the Comox Valley C.G. Jung Society has continued to grow in membership and in its range of guest speakers. Starting as a small group exploring dream analysis in a college classroom, we now have over 50 active members and 380 email subscribers! Clearly, the draw towards all things Jungian is growing, which has allowed us to continue to feature international speakers, analysts, and dynamic authors from across Canada, the US and Europe. Welcome to our Community!

Carl Jung:

A Brief Biography

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) was born in Kesswil, Switzerland as the fourth and only surviving child of his parents. He was the son of a country parson and a mother with an interest in the supernatural.

He was an unusual child absorbed in fantasies and dreams, an outsider to his peers, and interested in mythic images and motifs. He did well in school and university graduating from medical school in 1900 and taking up the specialty of psychiatry. He spent about ten years at the Burgholzli Hospital working with Eugen Bleuler on understanding schizophrenia. His work on schizophrenia, his theory of complexes and his word association studies drew the attention of Sigmund Freud. Jung, in turn, supported Freud’s work on psychoanalysis. After their first contact in 1906, their friendship developed to the point where Freud saw Jung as his heir apparent. In 1913 the relationship came to an end. Jung resigned as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1914. A major reason for the split was their disagreement over the extent of infantile sexuality. Jung also introduced the collective unconscious and archetypes as parts of his analytical psychology. The collective unconscious is a type of universal unconscious that transcends any individual but contains the primordial images and ideas that have been common to all members of the race from the beginning of life.
Archetypes are the cumulative effect of perpetually repeated experiences on the development of the human nervous system. The repetitive subjective emotional reaction to the event is impressed on human unconscious mental processes, and it is this internal state, this predisposition to react in a similar way to repetitions of the physical event, that is transmitted to future generations. Thus the collective unconscious archetypes are a residue of ancestral emotional life.

The shadow is an archetype that involves the repression of aspects of ourselves that we would rather not know. Animus and anima are archetypes that reflect the masculine side of woman and the feminine side of man respectively. The persona is the archetype of the social mask that we wear in public. These concepts reflected the movement of Jung away from hardcore rationalism and natural science to a more interpretive approach to understanding the human psyche in symbolic and mythical terms. Jung’s focus is on the individuation of a person. The process might be described as being all that we can be by uncovering the hidden parts of our personality through dreams, active imagination and self-observation. The aim is to balance conscious and unconscious forces at work within the psyche. The tendency of human beings to balance these forces with their psyche is what Jung calls the transcendent function. Jung saw himself as an outsider struggling against opposition.

However, he was successful in gaining the support of both Bleuler and Freud. Initially, his relationship with Freud was as a student to a professor. He skillfully aligned himself with Freud. As their friendship developed Jung became increasingly worried about losing his independence by becoming Joshua to Freud’s Moses. His disappointing relationship with his father made him vulnerable to attaching himself to a new father (Freud).

In his work, Jung noticed that the dreams of the schizophrenics paralleled the themes of certain myths. This led him to believe that myths were the repositories of archetypal themes that spanned historical time. His exploration of myth, symbol and religion caused a drift away from materialism to maintaining that the psyche is more than just brain.

Jung also introduced the categories of extrovert (one who is outwardly focused) and introvert (one who is inwardly focused). He also introduced functions of personality such as sensation, feeling, thinking and intuition. He described personality with combinations of these functions.

The notion of synchronicity was introduced to explain the occurrence of events that occur in different places, that seem to have a connection in terms of meaning but are not explainable in terms of cause and effect. Jung’s psychology was called analytical psychology in order to distinguish it from psychoanalysis. Jung’s psychology emphasizes myth and spirituality. Although its ambiguity was frowned upon by hard-nosed empirical psychologists it has continued to prosper and grow.

In 1903 Jung married Emma Rauschenbach (1882 – 1955). They had five children. Jung died on June 6, 1961, in Zurich, Switzerland. He was 86 years old.

Courtesy of C. G. Jung Society of Victoria