On Ageing: Coming Home (Jung Forum)

The recently published book, Jung’s Shadow Concept, will form the basis of this series, with each Jung Forum featuring a talk by the author of one of the chapters. This evening will interweave short readings and reflections by Chris and Ewa Robertson, together with small group reflection and sharing. Maggie Cochrane will be the chair for this evening’s talk.

Ageing is no accident. It is part of being human. What we do with the experience is as much what we make of it as what happens to us. Shadows can obscure and they can illuminate. Ageing can be a self-fulfilling prophecy of becoming useless or it can be a bright Shadow offering the burnishing of character in the exposure to life's challenges.

It takes light to create shadow. We aim to explore some of the psychospiritual challenges of our times for the older generation and what light the Shadow casts on these. Drawing on experience with clients and ourselves, we explore ageing as much as a cultural construct as that of a biological reality. Traditional cultures have held elders in high esteem as keepers of ancestral wisdom. Ageing can become an initiation into this wisdom which can feel like shedding old skins to reveal a challengingly different and potentially unique phase of living.

Chris Robertson, UKCP, has been a psychotherapist since 1978; is a supervisor, trainer and co-founder of Re-Vision and was chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance with whom he still works. His publications include A Matter of Life and Death (2022) (co-author); Culture Crisis: a loss of Soul in Depth Psychology and Climate Change (2020).

Ewa Robertson, UKCP, is a psychotherapist, supervisor, and trainer. She co-founded Re-Vision in 1988, a transpersonal integrative psychotherapy training centre. She specialises in relational psychotherapy, the mystery of interplay of body and psyche and trauma. She is the author of “Roots and Seeds” and “The Third Body” in Transformation in Troubled Times (2018).

This talk is open to the wider bpf membership, as well as analysts, psychotherapists, and trainees from other organisations.