Garbage: We incinerate it, bury it, ship it south, and may one day fling it into orbit. More typically, we push it deep into the ground, bury it, scent it with an acrid aroma and give it plastic pipes to belch and groan. We spend vast sums of money disposing and ‘managing’ what we consider useless! Collectively, we seek to rise above our trash but that usually entails a costly dissociation from it. Since waste is such a necessary and unavoidable aspect of our lives, why do we do such a horrible job of managing it? We can’t seem to live with it, and we can’t live without it! Our modern ways of waste management have unconscious and archetypal roots that both help and hinder our relation to garbage.
In this talk we will ‘dumpster dive’ in the psyche exploring how unconscious attitudes, defense mechanisms and collective beliefs influence our dissociative tendencies toward outer waste. We will imagine the unconscious as a landfill that is bursting its confines necessitating our urgent, conscious relation to it. We will dig up and examine neglected aspects of the personality that Jung called the shadow; we will explore the archetypal significance of waste; and we will learn how to align with our psyche in metabolizing ‘waste’ through an appreciation of the rhythm and flow of psychic energy. Underlying all of this will be an appeal to the soul of garbage and an imaginative inquiry into what the soul of garbage longs for.
NOTE: Friday's lecture will be held at Best Western Village Park Inn, in the Edgemont room. Free underground parking is available at the event. Park, then register your vehicle's licence plate at the hotel registration desk.
Saturday's workshop is at Parkdale United Church.
Presenter Biography
Matthew Kelly, Dip. Analytical Psych., M.A., B.Ed., Hon. B.A. is a graduate of the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts Training Programme. He’s an eclectic Jungian psychoanalyst with experience as a Waldorf teacher and teacher of gifted and behaviorally challenged youth. He has degrees in philosophy, education, psychology and comparative religion. He’s studied, taught or lived in Quebec, Vancouver, Guelph, Toronto, Ann Arbor, Tibet and India and on the islands of Haida Gwaii, Sumatra and Japan. currently he is happily settled with his partner on naturally beautiful Quadra Island in B.C.
Find out more on his website: www.depththerapy.ca