Living in an Uncertain World

Course Description

We don’t get to choose the times we’re born into. Existentialist philosophers call this our thrownness: we’re placed in a specific moment, country, culture, community, family, language, and body. Nor do we get to choose the broad social currents or the movements of collective energy that often are only visible when we experience crises. This means that the things in our lives that appear stable hold a strong pull, and when that stability is shaken, it can feel deeply unsettling, even catastrophic.

Humans have lived through periods of profound change before–it is a bit of a fool’s game to try to compare our times to others. Yet, in just a brief moment of our evolutionary history, we’ve seen incredible advancements. We’ve harnessed the power of the automobile, antibiotics, and vast computational abilities. We can communicate instantly with anyone, start our day on one side of the planet and end it on the other, and access nearly all of humanity’s knowledge with a few clicks. At the same time, we also hold the power to make our planet uninhabitable, whether through nuclear conflict or the impacts of climate change.

In this course, we will explore what it means to live in this particular moment of uncertainty, and how the insights of Jungian psychology are particularly helpful in navigating the change we are collectively experiencing. Through conversations with Jungian analysts and scholars, we will map the dynamic relationship between what Jung called the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths. And through conversations with each other, we will hold the tensions of our uncertain times and look for what transcendent possibilities might emerge.

In each session, we will look at the core themes of an essay drawn from the book Our Uncertain World: Challenges and Opportunities in a Dark Time. We’ll do this through interviews with its author, large-group conversations, and focused, small-group discussions about how these psychological dynamics are reflected in our personal and collective lives.

This program is ideal if

• Discover how the urgent demands of our time are intertwined with the grounding presence of our inner depths.
• Examine the deep psychic patterns underlying contemporary crises.
• Gain insight into the paradoxical way in which the growth of consciousness has meant exile from the natural world and how simple practices can heal that split.
• Explore how the difficult work of connecting with the suffering of others can deepen our psychological growth and inspire constructive, engaged social change.

Course Overview

Class 1: We Live in Two Worlds – Margaret Klenck

How do we navigate the turbulence of our current moment? Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck writes that “we are all being swept up into a time of great strife and dread.” Jung suggested that we live in two worlds at once: the spirit of the times, and the spirit of the depths. Engaging in one without connecting with the other leaves us vulnerable to the intense forces active in both. In this conversation, we’ll explore how connecting with our depths can offer grounding. Through practices like personification, engaging with the arts, and amplification, we can find balance as we consciously work to survive and create meaningful change in the world.

Class 2: This Apocalypse Has Three Horsemen – Jan Bauer

Our current collective dis-ease includes three major disruptions: the pandemic, the effects of climate change, and the specter of war in Ukraine (as well as in the Middle East). These phenomena have archetypal backgrounds: illness and healing, nature, and war. And each has mobilized collective energy in very different ways. In this conversation with Jungian analyst Jan Bauer, we will explore how differences in our cultural experiences of these archetypal realities have influenced our ability – and inability- to collectively address each of these crises.

Class 3: There’s Nothing New About Uncertainty – Tom Singer

From the earliest stages of life, children learn to split off what they see as “bad” within themselves and project it onto the world to protect what they see as “good.” This way of coping, dividing others into good and evil, can offer a false sense of certainty and safety, but it comes at the cost of complexity and wholeness. With the help of Jungian analyst Tom Singer, we will explore how managing our experiences of uncertainty is the task of psychological growth. We will discover how “reflective thinking in peace,” socio political engagement, and the mythopoetic imagination offer important ways to break through the dystopian mood of our time. 

Class 4: Nature Is Uncertain – Jeffrey Kiehl

From the perspective of Jungian psychology, the engine of our extraordinary growth as a species – our capacity to reason – contains within it the cause of our current environmental crisis. As Jung wrote, “…it is the special tragedy of man that in order to win consciousness he is forced into dissociation with nature.” The health of our environment depends on the health, or wholeness, of our psyches. And the path to wholeness involves expanding our relatedness to include intuition, feeling, and sensation along with reason. In this conversation with Jungian analyst Jeffrey Kiehl, we will explore simple, powerful practices to work personally and collectively with the uncertainties of the climate crisis.

Class 5: It’s the End of the (Ego’s) World – Morgan Stebbins

The apocalypse is a deep, eternal pattern in human experience. It’s archetypal. Throughout history, major changes in the consciousness of a culture have triggered fantasies and fears that the world is ending. In a sense, it is: an old way of being is coming to an end. Jungian analyst Morgan Stebbins asks us a powerful, and useful, question: “How do we distinguish the great problems of our age, or the things in life that need action and physical change, from a psychological call to insight?” In this conversation with Morgan, we will explore the possibility that our fantasies of disastrous change are actually a psychological sign of opportunity. 

Class 6: Locating the Thorns in Our Collective Spirit – Sean Fitzpatrick

How do we encounter the suffering of others without becoming overwhelmed by it? Jung famously wrote that “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” He continued with an important sentence that is much less famous: “The latter procedure [making the darkness conscious], however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”  Keeping our attention on what is difficult and painful – whether in our individual lives or the lives of our communities and societies – is necessary for growth. In this conversation, we will explore how to deepen our capacity to engage with the suffering of others as a path toward psychological growth.

By the end of this course, you will be able to

• Learn how accepting and navigating uncertainty is essential to the work of healing and seeking wholeness.
• Understand how engaging with our depths grounds us as we try to bring change in the world.
• Recognise how our apocalyptic fantasies and engaging with the suffering of others can call our attention to opportunities for growth and change.
• Be able to see that the path to wholeness involves including intuition, feeling, and sensation to our capacity to reason.