Category: Events

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Corinne Bourdeau

Corinne’s talk is called, “The Magic Lantern: An Exploration of Myth, Depth Psychology, and Imagination in Cinema”

The Magic Lantern: An exploration of myth, depth psychology, and imagination in cinema. Cinema provides a gateway into the rich imaginal worlds of psyche and imagination. The Magic Lantern presentation is a dynamic, lively and interactive presentation consisting of film clips, lecture, storytelling, and a suggested viewing list of mythic films that feature archetypes, depth psychology and myth in cinema. The Magic Lantern presentation explores topics such as:

  • The Mythic Filmmaker – filmmakers who weave myth into their films (George Lucas, Guillermo Del Toro, Federico Fellini and Julie Taymor)
  • What Dreams May Come: Dream and Film – a rich exploration of how filmmakers use dreams in their creative process and films
  • Mythic Creatures and Films
  • Films and the Underworld
  • Ecotherapy and Film 
  • Symbol and Imagery in Film
  • Tenemos: The Myth of Place – the exploration of mythical landscapes in films
  • The Enchanted Screen: Fairy Tales and Film

This presentation is based on a book titled The Magic Lantern, consisting of over 400 pages of research in film, myth and cinema. It is also intended to provide thought provoking ideas and content for the upcoming Pacficia film festival and conference in Fall of 2021.

About Corinne

Corinne Bourdeau is the founder and president of 360 Degree Communications, a boutique entertainment marketing firm that specializes in independent films. Under her leadership, the company has worked on hundreds of films including  Boyhood, The Celestine Prophecy, The Way, Fantastic Fungi, Music of Strangers and the Academy award winning films The Cove and Free Solo.  Corinne is also the founder and director of the Esalen film festival.  She has a Master’s Degree in depth psychology and mythology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is currently writing the book The Magic Lantern:  Exploring Myth and Mysticism in Film based on her studies at Pacifica.    

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Joyce McCart

Joyce’s talk is called, “Chasing Aphrodite . . . Manifestations of Desire”

Our recourse is to Aphrodite, and our first way of discovering her is in the disease of her absence. (Hillman, The Thought of the Heart 41)

The ancient Divine Feminine’s energetic re-emergence in western culture’s 21st century—through the diverse cacophony of women’s political voices, the fracturing of binary gender identity, the break-through genetic research of the double-X chromosome, and the focused rage of Millennials’ warrior energy—aids in neutralizing hubristic, Oedipal, and ancient core causes of resistance to the Divine Feminine that move Her from sacred to profane into alterity. Theorized as desire for a sublime embrace with the Divine, “Chasing Aphrodite. . .” looks into the opaque underrealm of humanity’s virginal psyche, where penetrating truths and undifferentiated values collide.

Hubris shadowing the feminine camouflages the Soul’s desire for anima consciousness and manifests resistance to psyche | soul | anima as a vehicle of distress within humanity’s collective unconscious. Insight into what underlies such resistance is embedded in the prolific writings and lectures of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, and the revelatory writings of archetypal psychologists Patricia Berry and Rafael Lopez Pedraza.

The layered complexity within Berry’s book of essays entitled Echo’s Subtle Body informs that desire-for-embrace commences with The Mother, and illuminates resistance as undifferentiated impersonal values imprisoned within a virginal psyche. Berry’s clarification of virginal resistance as archetypal, Lopez-Pedraza’s mantra “stay with the image,” and Hillman’s writings on soullessness as an absence of anima advocate the power of listening to hear—a meta-hodos to hear what the Soul wants, and diffuse heuristic methods of resistance maintained within postmodern western cultures.

“Chasing Aphrodite. . . Manifestations of Desire” offers interpellations exposing ancient methods, subjectivation, and codified hubris normalized within the ethos of western thought and its monomythic socio-political culture; clarifies core causes of resistance that feed western culture’s virginal psyche; and re-deposits the paradox that western culture’s resistance to the Feminine replicates an Oedipal heroic style (see Hillman, “Oedipus Revisited” 97), which is also soul-making.

About Joyce

Dr. Joyce McCart is a research scholar whose formative inquiry tracks core causes of resistance to the feminine Other and the methods and values that feed/sustain hubristic resistance to the feminine. Her research focuses on western culture’s enigmatic obsession with “Chasing Aphrodite” as desire to embrace the Feminine Divine. A mother of two adult daughters and grandmother to three grandsons, Dr. McCart infuses her professional work with socio-political activism through engaged witnessing, applied educational methodologies, and open dialogues to illuminate discriminatory practices by policy makers. As an artist, she is an accomplished educator, theatre director, playwright, essayist, and poet. Dr. McCart holds a B.A. in Literature and advanced degrees in Theatre and Mythological Studies with emphasis in Depth Psychology. She lives in Austin Texas and the coastal Redwoods of northern California.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dylan Young

Dylan’s talk is called, “Logos of Folly, Folly of Logos: The Psychological Difference of Missing the Point in ‘Being There’”

Misunderstanding often presupposes there to be an object of knowing and an imagining of having ascertained its meaning. There is surely something to get by ‘not getting it’, however, or in the failure to understand the joke other than the arrival of tragedy. By missing out on an understanding, knowledge that is in view of something sublated arrives. This presentation stumbles into necessary questions in such a scene: What is the point of knowledge for psychological life, why does the desire for it seem to frustrate ‘getting the point’—especially within human relationships—and who is the psychological benefactor inculcating these questions with expectations for further skullduggery? By reevaluating the Greek notion of logos as legein (known to Heidegger as “gathering”), or listening, this presentation discloses archetypal fools and clowns as the perennial stylers of metaphorical listening and, perhaps, the neglected necessity of errancy that is savior and saboteur to our mis/understandings. The film ‘Being There’ (1979) is discussed to demonstrate the aesthetic qualities of listening as procedures of Roberts Avens’ “new gnosis”—a coniunctio of Hillmanian and Heideggerian imaginings—through which knowledge is occasioned by splitting the (psychological) difference in soul’s presentation to reveal its absolute negativity, in Wolfgang Giegerich’s terms, or what is gathered in and by the film’s audience.

About Dylan

Dylan Andrew Young, M.A., is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, Associate Professional Clinical Counselor, and solivagant living between Santa Barbara and Santa Fe. He holds a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a Bachelor of Arts in Audio Arts & Acoustics from Columbia College Chicago. In addition to making ecologically informed sound art, Dylan is the author of Out of the Blue: An Errant Exploration Into the Imaginational Listening of Aisthesis (2020) and a volunteer archival technician at OPUS Archives and Research Center.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Kayden Baker-McInnis

Kayden’s talk is called, “Tracking the Dionysus Myth in The Goldfinch Film and Modern Life”

At the heart of the film, The Goldfinch, aspects of the Dionysus myth emerge guiding us back home from loss and death to renewal. Donna Tartt’s substantial novel won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, now adapted for film. This coming of age story follows the lives of Theo and Pippa, teenagers who survive a bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and who continue to live in the deafening aftermath. Through a mythological and depth psychological lens, the underlying mythic structure of this film is explored as a living, vital encounter with Dionysus, what Rafael Lopez-Pedraza calls a culturally repressed and misunderstood archetype. Within Donna Tartt’s carefully curated characters and the director’s choices for image and silence, an archetypal resonance emerges. Central to the storyline is a seventeenth century painting functioning as the archetypal image of irrepressible life, the essence of Dionysus. Theo’s dream to face his mother echoes Dionysus’s journey to the underworld to immortalize his mother. When asked where she found inspiration for this book, Tartt indicates that it is The Odyssey and the Greek tragedians that continue to inspire her. This presentation makes the case that cultivating a mythic consciousness continues to be a modern imperative. 

About Kayden

Kayden Baker-McInnis is a PhD candidate in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in Depth Psychology working on an ecological dissertation focusing on the Greek figure Dionysus in relation to nature, body, and gender. She teaches language arts to school-aged students and offers adult myth classes. Her workshops include a humanities-based writing process engaging comparative mythology, cultural studies, and depth psychology in Salt Lake City.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Kristina Dryža

Kristina’s talk is called, “The Archetypal Necessity for Descending into Hades”

Exploring the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Kristina will ask: How does the soul come to love Hades and that which lives in the underworld? How are we even acquainted with and initiated into this subterranean realm? Why is it necessary to be abducted from our intense identification with Demeter’s life lived on the surface to encounter Hades, and all that lies below? And how, like Persephone, can we belong to, and partner with, both the upper and underworld?

About Kristina

Kristina Dryža is recognized as one of the world’s top female futurists and is also an archetypal consultant and author. Kristina has always been fascinated by patterns and feels we are patterned beings in a patterned universe. She writes and speaks about the patterning of seasonal, tidal, lunar, and circadian rhythms and their influence on creativity, innovation, and leadership. She also explores archetypes and mythology to perceive the patterns in the collective unconscious and their expression within our psyches, society and media. You can view her TEDx talk on ‘Archetypes and Mythology. Why They Matter Even More So Today’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4PYNroZBY&t=8s

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Gelareh Khoie

Gelareh’s talk is called, “A Preliminary Mythology of Disco”

My talk is about the dance music genre known as disco. I will discuss the enduring influence of this movement on popular culture in terms of the mythology and archetypal underpinnings tying it to universal religious expressions such as the sphere of illumination and the liberation of consciousness through ritual, dance, music, and symbolic engagement. In particular, I will discuss the presence in my life of an archetypal image I call the Disco Prophet—a feminine dance, love, and music guru who comes from a magical and mythological world of synthesizers, neon tights, and glitter. Her image is the mirror ball and her land is the mythical dance floor beyond logic, deep in the religious precincts of soul. I will use images, prayer, music, dance, and a mirror ball to re-enact an experience of this mythical world.

About Gelareh

Gelareh Khoie is an Iranian-American artist, writer, scholar, and DJ. She holds a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and two MA’s in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Gelareh is currently enrolled in the Jungian and Archetypal Studies program at PGI, working towards her Ph.D.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Maryam Sayyad

Maryam’s talk is called, “Outstaring Darkness: The Fellowship of Myth and Psychology in Lord of the Rings, the Film”

The Lord of the Rings is roughly 1100 pages long. Half a million words are devoted to this Lord. Whether the word “Lord” refers to the ring itself or to its maker the dark lord, Sauron, this much is certain: Tolkien named his entire saga after the principle of darkness. In essence, he’s invited us to take a sustained look at darkness–linger a while and dig down into it. Even though I discuss Peter Jackson’s film and not Tolkien’s book, I nonetheless consider Tolkien to be its creator, as well as its main protagonist. I view the film as a projection of what hunts his psyche. In other words, I take a psychological approach to the saga, and instead of amplifying its multitude of images outward by means of the great mythological record, I locate the inward psychological phenomenon they describe. I ask for indulgence as I dare to simplify The Lord of the Rings down to one simple sentence.

About Maryam

Maryam Sayyad, MA, is a dissertation candidate in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute where she eagerly studied and received her masters degree in the same field. She completed her BA in Philosophy and Art in Athens at the American College of Greece. Maryam has worked in theater since childhood, and run interior design firms for many of her adult years. She’s an academic writer, a poet, lecturer, and myth consultant for storytellers. She is an adjunct instructor at the Los Angeles Studio School teaching philosophy and writing in the myth-based general education department. Aside from her dissertation, her most recent creative project is myth-consulting, co-writing, and set designing for a contemporary theatrical adaptation of Sleeping Beauty. What makes this version special is that it openly discloses the mytho-psychological elements in the story. This play, funded by the Department of Mental Health, is scheduled to go on stage this fall.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Sara Lovett

Sara’s talk is called, “The Actor at Risk: Personal Myth as Self-Care”

A four-year study conducted by The British Office for National Statistics showed that artists “are up to four times more likely to commit suicide” (Grae-Hauck, 2018). The actor’s central work tool is their psyche and soma, both of which are most certainly at risk. Actors and the role they play are joined by one common thread: they grow inside of the same body. With every character, actors are asked to live out another’s story, embodying each emotion through the vehicle of their own flesh. Neuroscience tells us that we store emotion and memory in the body, unless it is moved onwards, through and out.

Through a somatic, depth psychological lens this presentation considers how the actor might withstand this mind/body onslaught through a process called self-landscaping (a titrated version of body mapping). Using ritual and an open dialogue with the archetypes who have taken up residence in the body, the actor has the option to stand in the doorway of the myth they are living with an open heart of recognition. As the actor tells their own story, it enables them to embrace another’s from a healthier, more embodied place. Holding onto a stronger sense of self-awareness, the actor waits at the gate for Hermes to deliver the invitation, a sacred contract from the ‘other.’ “Your body is my body, walk me through all that I am.” And the actor will not be afraid, because of the unyielding felt sense of their own story.

About Sara

Sara Lovett M.A. is a writer, performer, and dialect coach who works with actors on self-care and embodied performing. She has a BFA in acting from The University of Texas at Austin, and an M.A in Somatic Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Somatic Studies in the Depth Psychology program at Pacifica as well. Her research centers on the effects that embodiment practices have on self-care for the actor. She is the author of the memoir, The Invisible Bones, and speaks publicly on abortion healing, releasing shame, and recovering voice.

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Leon Aliski

Leon’s talk is called, “Persistence and Change: Historical Memory of Euro-American Migration and Settlement”

We will begin by considering the cultural legacy of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which toured Europe in 1889 and 1905, and its influence on the Western, a film genre that began in the early 20th century.  As described by one of the characters in James Welch’s novel, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, the performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was seen as a representation of recent history: “Buffalo Bill says they are disappearing — like the bison. He says their culture is dying and soon they will be gone too.” 

Following in the footsteps of the Wild West narrative, the film industry has depicted a version of North American history that often portrays a story of heroic conquest and Euro-American settlement coinciding with the disappearance of Native peoples in the name of civilization. We will explore some of the ways in which this historical narrative has been shifting through the discussion of two contemporary films: Neither Wolf Nor Dog (2016) and Indian Horse (2018).

About Leon

Leon Aliski, Ph.D. holds a doctorate in cultural mythology and depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. His dissertation entitled, “Wild Bison and the Buffalo People: Reimagining ‘The Heart of Everything That Is’,” examines a selection of historical narratives inspired by Euro-Americans and the Western Christian heritage in which these narrative themes are rooted. He is a supporter of Cloud Horse Art Institute, dedicated to Lakota traditional arts, performing arts, culture camps, and the Reel Jobs Film School located on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. 

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Mythologium 2020 welcomes Dr. Margaret Mendenhall

Margaret’s talk is called, “‘The Perfect Mate’: The Embodiment of Anima and Animus Projection in Star Trek: The Next Generation“

Using Jungian ideas to explore the various Star Trek films and television series, a futuristic interpretation of the American myth, is a way to make Jung’s teachings more accessible to the world at large. This paper looks at how the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Perfect Mate” — in which the beautiful female alien Kamala comes aboard the Enterprise commanded by Captain Jean Luc Picard — elucidates Jung’s concept of anima and animus projection in popular culture.

Highlighting the filmmaker’s use of mirrors throughout the episode to frame the interaction of Kamala and Picard, this paper will propose that this reflects Jung’s theory of the projection of the anima and animus onto our own perfect mate. I will discuss both Jung’s writings, some of which are problematic in his portrayal of “the feminine,” as well as work by Jungian and post-Jungian scholars in attempts to soften or reframe his ideas to address this. I will also touch on the patriarchal nature of the underlying narrative of the utopian future represented by Star Trek and how it projects the androcentricity of the American culture into the future.

About Margaret

Margaret (Maggie) Mendenhall, JD, PhD, currently resides in Long Beach, California, and is a graduate of Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program. Her dissertation examined the rise of female rescue characters in German-language opera from the perspective of Eurydice. She is also currently a student in Pacifica’s Depth Psychology Program, Specializing in Jungian and Archetypal Studies. Margaret has presented papers on Star Trek-related topics at various conferences, including the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, Mythgard Institute, and the American Academy of Religion, Western Regional Conference. As an edutainer, she has written, performed and produced two myth-based one-woman shows: Dancing to the Edge of a Cliff: A Mythical Journey Toward Wholeness and Soul Trek: My Sci-Fi Journey Toward Wholeness, and has just begun research on a potential one-woman show based on the life of Emma Jung. Margaret produced and hosted the public access television series Myth Is All Around Us and has been published in legal journals and Pacifica’s Mythological Studies Journal (online) and Between Literary Review.