Jung for/with Feminism? The Gendered Imagination and Jung’s Infamous Quote.

Speaker: Susan Rowland PhD

How do we in the 21st century deal with Jung’s infamous quote about seduction, beating and rape?

No matter how friendly and obliging a woman’s Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus. Often the man has the feeling – and he is not altogether wrong – that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of persuasion.

Jung, CW9i para. 29

Should not an analytic community be reading such words in conjunction with the astonishing, under-reported, infrequently punished, and pervasive culture of rape in our societies? In an expanded session from a paper first given at the Analysis & Activism Conference in London 2014, Dr Susan Rowland will offer archetypal, historical, collective, political and embodied context for “Jung’s infamous quote” which will argue for its productive potential for healing transformation, as well as for its role in awakening us anew to sexual trauma. Persephone is a hero for our time and not only for women.

Biography: Susan Rowland (Ph.D.)is Chair of MA Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and formerly Professor of English and Jungian Studies at the University of Greenwich, UK. She is author of a number of books on literary theory, gender and Jung includingJung as a Writer(2005);Jung: A Feminist Revision(2002);C. G. Jung in the Humanities(2010) andThe Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung(2012),The Sleuth and the Goddess in Women’s Detective Fiction(Spring Journal and Books, 2015).

This meeting is open to practising analysts, psychotherapists and trainees.

Please reserve a seat – email: aja@dircon.co.uk

Tickets £12 – AJA Members / Candidates – No charge

AJA Bell 3, 7 Eton Avenue London NW3 3EL – Tel: 020 7794 8711