C.G. Jung Society, Seattle C.G. Jung Society, Seattle
Lecture: Friday, December 7, 2001, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m.
Good Shepherd Center, Room 202, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., Seattle
$10 members, $15 nonmembers
Since the dawn of human history, evil has been the major problem for both theologians and philosophers. In the middle of the 19th century, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche overthrew all previous speculations on evil by saying that God was dead and that humans must go beyond good and evil. Both Freud and Jung were strongly influenced by Nietzsche's work. Freud tried to account for evil by proposing Thanatos, the death instinct. For Jung the problem of evil was more complex and compelling. In his book Answer to Job, Jung made the claim that God was both good and evil—a Gnostic concept—and that evil was expressed in humans via the alien aspect of the unconscious, which he called the shadow.
Dr. Horne will discuss Nietzsche's work on evil and show how subsequent speculative philosophers, theologians and Jung make responses to Nietzsche's claims, in light of the proliferation of evil in the first half of the 20th century. He will explore Jung's writings on evil in Answer to Job and the Collected Works. He will then contrast Jung's ideas with those of the protestant theologian Karl Barth, a Swiss and contemporary of C.G. Jung. Barth endorsed the traditional Christian view of evil, that God is all-good and that evil has no existence on its own, being only the absence of good. From philosophy, Dr. Horne will outline the views on evil of Martin Heidegger, also a contemporary of Jung, who was the founder of existentialism and, for a time, a Nazi collaborator.
Workshop: Saturday, December 8, 2001, 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Good Shepherd Center, Room 202, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., Seattle
$30 members, $40 nonmembers, $25 student/senior members, $35 student/senior nonmembers
To learn about preregistering for the workshop, see Preregistration Policy and Form.
While the Friday lecture outlines these thinkers' concepts of evil, on Saturday we will discuss together and elaborate these concepts in light of the expressions of evil in personal, social, and political life.
Michael Horne, M.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Seattle. He is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington, where he teaches psychoanalysis. He is especially interested in using philosophy and theology to understand processes of psychic transformation. These include, in particular, processes of reasoning from philosophy and processes of revelation from theology. He is interested in applying these processes to the study of psychic transformation.
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