Jung Forum: Power in Contemporary Theory and Practice

Power dynamics are intrinsic in the process of challenging unconsidered ways of working in analysis. On conscious and unconscious levels, they can bind the theoretical (what informs us) with the clinical (what we do in the consulting room) as well as blowing apart pre-conceived notions of what underpins the analyst’s work. 

Jane Johnson and Julia Ryde will present their clinician research drawing on peer group discussions that took place in 2019 – 2021. In these, BJAA members discussed four key theoretical concepts which were felt to have problematic aspects if used unquestioningly in contemporary practice: The Primitive, Inner and Outer Worlds, Contrasexuality and Participation Mystique.

At the time of their research, the artist Cornelia Parker was exhibiting her work Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View at Tate Britain in London. They felt the resonance to the project of critiquing old and problematic aspects of analytic thought. Describing her suspension of objects remaining after she arranged for a garden shed and its contents to be blown up by the Army, Cornelia Parker says in the exhibition booklet:

'I chose the garden shed because it’s the place where you store things you can’t quite throw away … In the gallery as I suspended the objects one by one, they began to lose their aura of death and appeared reanimated … The shed looked as if it was re-exploding or perhaps coming back together again.'

(Parker 2022)

The aim of the BJAA project was to shake up thinking. The research findings are a snapshot, a moment in time, of this shake-up. At the Jung forum you are invited to view some of this snapshot, respond to it, and to continue the shake up

Image from Visual Hunt.com

 

About the Speakers 

 

Jane Johnson is a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst in private practice in Hampshire. She is a senior member of the BPF and a training analyst for the BJAA. Her background is in psychodynamic psychotherapy training and teaching, including as a past Jungian director of the M.Sc. Psychodynamics of Human Development (Birkbeck College). She is co-chair of the New Approach to Theory group that delivers theory seminars in the BJAA clinical trainings. This new approach is psycho-social, engaging with colonial, heteronormative and gender biased roots of traditional psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic thinking. 

 

Julia Ryde is a Jungian analyst with a private practice in London. She is a senior member of the BPF, a training analyst and training supervisor for the BJAA and a training analyst for IPCAPA.  She previously trained as an art therapist and has many years experience as a clinician and trainer in both Jungian analysis and art therapy. She has been involved in various research projects, one of which was looking into clinical examples of Daniel Stern’s Moments of Meeting in a group with other clinician/researchers .