A co-production of San Francisco ARAS and The Extended Education Program at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

Initiation in Ancient Greece and Modern Psyche: 

A Workshop with Virginia Beane Rutter and Thomas Singer

Both Virginia Beane Rutter and Tom Singer have had separate lifelong Greek journeys which have included  frequent travels to Greece and extensive research into ancient Greek materials.  Now their mutual interests in the archetype of initiation in ancient Greece and modern psyche have converged. Both Singer and Beane Rutter's personal and scholarly investigations are the focus of this workshop in which each of them will present material from their new book, Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche: Archetypes in the Making.

At the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

Date: Saturday, October 29, 2011

Time: 10 am – 2 pm

Salon Fee: $50 General Public, $40 Member analysts and candidates, $30 full-time students (with valid ID)

Virginia Beane Rutter: Saffron Offering and Blood Sacrifice: Transformation
Mysteries in Jungian Analysis.

Virginia Beane Rutter will analyze a group of wall paintings created 3700 years ago in the Bronze Age settlement of Akrotiri on the Greek Cycladic island of Thera. The devastating volcano that erupted around 1630BCE blew apart the island, leaving a thin crescent of land, now the modern island of Santorini. The Akrotiri frescoes were buried and preserved by ash until the site was found and excavation began in 1967. The images Beane Rutter discusses depict female initiation through a strong connection with the natural world and worship of the Mistress of Nature, a goddess of healing. She will describe each phase of the initiation ceremony depicted in the frescoes as she weaves in dreams from her analytic practice to show how a modern woman's unconscious taps into the archetypal elements of initiation.

Thomas Singer: Leaping for Themis:  A 40-Year Long Active Imagination (Singer) Built on a 100-Year Old Book (Harrison) Based upon a 3,500 Year-Old Myth (Hymn of the Kouretes).

Thomas Singer surveys his 40-year relationship with the Greek island of Ios, visible from Santorini, through the lens of Jane Ellen Harrison's seminal work, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). Singer uses an ancient Greek hymn as a way of reflecting on his decades-long journey with a small band of young men who purchased property together on an isolated bay on Ios shortly after he graduated from medical school in 1970. Based on his long study of Harrison's Themis, Singer "sings" his own version of the ancient hymn and observes what it can teach us about modern society and male initiation rites.

You can order Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche here. 

Presenter Biographies 

Virginia Beane Rutter, MA, MS is a Jungian analyst who trained at the C.G. Jung Institutes of Zurich and San Francisco.  Her first Master's degree in Art History, taken at the University of California, Berkeley, together with an early sustaining love of Greece developed into a passion for studying ancient myths and rites of passage through art, archaeology, and psychology. These studies grew out of her clinical practice and coalesced around archetypal themes of initiation as they manifest in the unconscious material of women and men today. She is the author of three books including Woman Changing Woman: Feminine Psychology Re-Conceived Through Myth and Experience (Harper SanFrancisco 1993) republished by Spring Journal Books 2009. Her previous articles include "Meinrad Craighead: A Study in Feminine Vision," in Meinrad Craighead: Crow Mother and the Dog God: A Retrospective 2003 and "The Archetypal Paradox of Feminine Initiation in Analytic Work," in Initiation: The Living Reality of An Archetype (Routledge London 2007) which she also co-edited.

Thomas Singer, MD is a Jungian analyst and psychiatrist.  After studying religion and European literature at Princeton University, he graduated from Yale Medical School and later trained at Dartmouth Medical Center and the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.  His writing includes articles on Jungian theory, politics and psychology and he has written and/or edited the following books: Who's the Patient Here? Portraits of the Young Psychotherapist; A Fan's Guide to Baseball Fever: The Official Medical Reference; The Vision Thing: Myth, Politics and Psyche in the World; The Cultural Complex:  Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society; Initiation: The Living Reality of An Archetype, Psyche and the City: A Soul's Guide to the Modern Metropolis.  Dr. Singer currently serves as the General Editor of Spring Journal Books' Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Culture Series.

In praise of Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche:

"In this wonderfully inspiring book the authors have forged an entirely new relationship between Ancient Greek myth and our modern psyche.

Never before has there been such a committed and sustained exploration of how the images, dramas, and energies of Greek myth are still vitally alive in our dreams and imaginations and in the mythic structures of our lives.

The editors' passionate love of Greece shines joyfully through the pages, making a delight of its profound scholarship and illuminating the ancient texts from personal experience, which in turn is enlightened by the archetypal perspective of myth. So the rituals of the Ancient Mysteries re-emerge as modern symbols of transformation.

This exciting book is itself a consecration to the rite of individuation."

Jules Cashford, author of The Moon: Myth and Image (Cassell Illustrated, 2003) and co-author of The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Penguin, 1993)