Christiana Morgan and My Grandmother's Husband

March 30, 2023

“You are a pioneer woman.”

-Carl Jung to Christiana Morgan

My grandmother, Anita Figueredo, told a story at my grandfather’s funeral almost twenty-five years ago that I still find myself thinking about all the time.

My grandparents met in New York on their first day of medical school in 1936. One of only four female students in the class, my grandmother went on to become a pioneering cancer surgeon, breaking all sorts of barriers for women in medicine. She also paid particular attention to female patients who were otherwise overlooked and underserved. She was the doctor for the nuns in her community, for instance, who had no other way to receive medical care comfortably, and she was personally trained by Dr. George Papanicolaou in the early detection of cervical cancer, helping to integrate the Pap smear into standard preventative care for women across the US. My grandmother is still remembered widely for the tenderness and skill with which she treated her patients, as well as for the operating theaters and board rooms she entered at a time when women were systematically and methodically kept out.

But, of course, that history may very well have never been.

The story my grandmother recounted at my grandfather’s funeral was of a day in the early ‘50s, some ten years into their marriage, when she returned home from work to find the house a disaster and the children (they ultimately had nine) crying or fighting. Their housekeeper, overwhelmed, had just quit. My grandmother greeted my grandfather in tears when he returned home and told him that the situation was not sustainable; she had come to the clear conclusion that she would have to give up medicine. She would become a housewife, she told him, like every other woman they knew, and stop pretending that anything else was possible. My grandfather looked her in the eyes, placed his hands on her tiny shoulders (she was not even five feet tall), and told her: “We both went to medical school. We are both doctors. You are not giving up your practice. We will figure this out.”

And so, my grandmother, against unquantifiable odds, continued to go straight from conducting surgery to the delivery room—literally. She retired at 80 years old with an illustrious life story. Her name isn’t as known as perhaps her family would like it to be, but her legacy is well respected and she is remembered.

I have been reflecting on all of this a lot over these past months in particular following our recent seminar on Christiana Morgan. Throughout our reading and discussions, I was reminded over and over again of all the ways in which women’s careers can be derailed not only by the countless social and cultural obstacles in their paths, but by the men in their lives. My grandfather is celebrated for not having colluded with the status quo and instead supporting his wife fiercely in her career. (He was so proud.) But had he agreed with her that day instead about what was needed, he would never have been looked down upon; it was simply the way things were. His career would have continued to flourish and he, rather than her, would have been the brightest star of the family.

Luck has nothing to do with it but, as they say, Christiana Morgan was not so lucky. The work of so many other women is “anonymous” or published under the name of their professor or husband, or professor-turned-husband, if they are able to publish at all.

In the case of Christiana Morgan, a true pioneer in the field of psychology, the original co-author of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) still widely used in psychological assessments, the subject of Jung’s Vision Seminars, and Claire Douglas’s biography, Translate this Darkness, the majority of her work was co-opted in some form by the men in her life, lost, buried, hidden in archives or degrading without care and concern for her legacy, or her name was erased entirely. Despite the very clear history around which Morgan led the creative work and development of the TAT, for instance, Harvard removed her name completely; she is no longer listed as a co-author.

Christiana was denied a formal education because of the era in which she was born female, yet she was a highly trained psychoanalyst and psychologist and was one of the founders of the field of American psychology. It’s a tragedy for all of us that her work is not more known and respected; a repeated assault on all of our sense of history that it was exclusively men who founded the field of psychology and made the advances. We know, pulling back the veil just slightly, that women were systematically excluded from academia and professional circles, muffled or sexualized when they made their way in, and then—if they did still somehow manage to produce work—were published under a more decorated man’s name or removed from history after the fact.

This history absolutely needs to be corrected.

I’ll be writing more about all of this in the future because a great deal was stirred up in the course on Christiana and there are now actions popping up all over the Salome community to protect her work and enhance her legacy. We’ve had the great honor of developing a relationship with Christiana’s granddaughter, Hilary Morgan, who is informing and collaborating in this work and there’s a great deal more to come. Please stay tuned. And if you already know you’re interested in helping, drop me a line.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

The Iraq War, WWI, and the Activation of the Collective Unconscious

March 23, 2023

For our first class on Jung’s Red Book last Friday, we read through and discussed editor Sonu Shamdasani’s introduction, in which he explores the historical and personal context of the work, as well as some of Jung’s relevant ideas. A particular passage has stuck with me this week as we mourn the 20-year anniversary of the start of America’s wholly unjustified war in Iraq—a time during which I experienced my most significant psychological crisis.

Jung “differentiated between two situations in which the collective unconscious became active. In the first, it became activated through a crisis in an individual’s life and the collapse of hopes and expectations. In the second, it became activated at times of great social, political, and religious upheaval. At such moments, the factors suppressed by the prevailing attitudes accumulate in the collective unconscious. Strongly intuitive individuals become aware of these and try to translate them into communicable ideas. If they succeeded in translating the unconscious into a communicable language, this had a redeeming effect.” (pg. 58)

I was a junior in college when my country began the “shock and awe” bombing campaign in Baghdad. I vividly recall watching television in anguish as little bursts of fire lit up an otherwise dark city scene; all signs of actual life had been hidden from American viewers until a bird flew across the sky and my heart skipped a beat. The protests I was organizing on campus and joining regularly in downtown Portland seemed to have no effect. I felt entirely helpless and hopeless and filled with almost unbearable grief. My country, my country, was killing people and destroying the environment for the capitalist desires of a small group of men and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I now understand that my psyche in those years felt porous in the way that Jung reflects in his Red Book journey before and after the start of WWI. Amidst my almost constant inner despair, there were also prophetic dreams and a sense that whatever was happening for me psychologically and personally was not at all just personal. Somehow, the collective unconscious and my personal unconscious were weaving together, forcing me to carefully differentiate what was mine and not mine, as well as what was time-based and what was from another time entirely.

I was only 19 when the war began, and 18 during 9/11, but I’m clear that those years laid the foundation for the rest of my life and work since. As Jung wrote in his epilogue to The Red Book: “My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.”

So it feels particularly poignant, I’m realizing, to explore The Red Book again right now. Our times are no less painful. Every day there is news that threatens to break any of us. But somehow, always, I find medicine in seeking “the redeeming effect” in it all.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

The Core Message of Carl Jung's Red Book Is Often Lost in the Scholarship

March 16, 2023

In this wonderful 2009 NPR piece about the initial publication of The Red Book, editor Sonu Shamdasani says this:

“The overall narrative of the book is how Jung recovers his soul, [and] recovers meaning in his life through enabling the rebirth of the image of God in his soul.”

What is very often forgotten and lost in the further scholarship about this core work, however, is that Jung’s soul was feminine and that Jung also seriously considered the possibility that God is female.

“Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard—are you God? Is God a child, a maiden?”

-C.G. Jung, The Red Book

Unfortunately, the culture-wide amnesia from which Jung was trying to heal as he re-discovered his long-suffering soul still afflicts most of the scholars who write and lecture on The Red Book today.

Over and over, they miss, I dare say, the whole point.

The Red Book is the chronicle of a wealthy, successful, heterosexual man at the top of his career who is in the throes of a massive inner crisis and wrestling with the necessity to acknowledge his soul and feminine self as real and worthy of attention.

“I thought and spoke much of my soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. …

[T]he spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.”

-C.G. Jung, The Red Book

Given our age-old cultural reference points, it seems so much easier to understand Philemon in Jung’s Red Book, a gray-haired wizened old man who conveys riddled wisdom to Jung. It’s certainly far easier to understand this than follow Jung through his own detox and transformation to face the possibility that the life-giving force within him is a blind, neglected young “maiden” whom Jung initially mistook (due to thousands of years of misunderstanding) as a dangerous, salacious seductress to be avoided like the Devil.

Yet this feminine soul whom he over and over struggled to accept because of her youth, her sexuality, and her “banality” was the antidote to his crisis.

It was Jung’s understanding of this that transformed his life and then created the groundwork for his psychology so that we all might be able to follow what he learned. It’s so important then, that we do our best to make sense of this source work and not abandon its magic to the secondary interpretations of others!

But don’t take my word for it. Please join me to explore this extraordinary work page-by-strange-page in a new seminar starting tomorrow.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

You Carry the Future: A Taste of the Bounty That is Jung's Red Book

“Protect the riddles, bear them in your heart, warm them, be pregnant with them. Thus you carry the future.”

-C.G. Jung, The Red Book

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March 9, 2023

I was recently interviewed for the Joseph Campbell Foundation podcast and am excited to be able to share the episode with you. In this conversation on “The Podcast With a Thousand Faces,” John Bucher and I spoke about a wide range of topics, from human development and Quarterlife (of course) to masculinity and the Hero’s Journey beyond the gender binary, and much more. I hope you enjoy it!

Meanwhile, The Red Book course is coming up soon! I sent out the welcome email to all registered students last night, with the reading assignments for our eight weeks of study together and an invitation to share what brought each person to this course at this time. I wrote some about my own journey with Jung’s magnum opus for the newsletter last week, and I’m loving hearing about other people’s experiences with this work—from those who have never opened its covers, to those for whom it has already played a big, leading role.

The value of this book is hard to grasp or convey concisely, which is why I keep coming back to it again and again. Over some 400 pages, Jung travels via active imagination into the inner reaches of his psyche and encounters characters fit for a Hollywood blockbuster. There’s the blind maiden, the black snake, the wise old philosopher, the anchorite, the portly cook, the trapped and lonely daughter, the wandering souls, the hanged man, the dead girl, the giant with an ax, the red man, the alchemist magician, and more. Amidst all of the characters and stories, there are also countless (countless) nourishing and mystifying quotes that you want to hold in your mouth and let roll around on your tongue.

“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak. I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again.”

“The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.”

“As a man you are part of mankind, and therefore you have a share in the whole of mankind, as if you were the whole of mankind.”

“It is unclear how great one’s humility must be to take it upon oneself to live one’s own life… since nothing matches the torment of one’s own way.”

Those morsels are just a tiny taste of the bounty contained in this book, selected at random as I flipped through the pages. It’s a wild journey, The Red Book, and one that is likely to illuminate your life or change your life when you step in to explore—especially with this incredible community of curious, loving, wise folks from all over the world, and all walks of life.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

My Life with Jung's "Red Book"

My mother gifted me a copy of Jung’s Red Book in the winter of 2009, shortly after it was first published. I spent the following weeks on my bed crouched over the enormous volume, enthralled. (The original folio version is too big to comfortably read at a table.) Though it’s cryptic and novelesque, this massive book contains the foundation of Jung’s entire psychology, and I felt the magic of that as I began to pore over the sentences. This was where it all began. As Jung wrote, “Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, the integration into life.”

Since those early days, The Red Book has been as precious to me as I anticipated it would be.

2010: A blurry photo of me at The Red Book museum exhibit opening in Zurich

Within months of that first encounter, I had the opportunity to join the small staff of The Philemon Foundation, which edited and published The Red Book. Within a year, I traveled with them to Zurich to assist in the opening of The Red Book exhibit at the Reitberg Museum. I spent an extraordinary week in Switzerland, with a private tour of Jung’s home and the chance to sit at his desk, along with many hours spent at dinners with the Jung family and the scholars surrounding his work.

Since that time, this wonderous, cryptic book has continued to enhance my life with its mystery and brilliance. I’ve written about it a great deal, named an institute after its main female character (Salome!), and led many reading groups on its stories. I’ve also delivered lectures on its meaning, co-created a podcast all about it, and quoted it at the opening of my own book, Quarterlife:

2023: My book Quarterlife and Jung’s Red Book both Staff Picks at Powell’s in downtown Portland, OR.

“What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.”

The Red Book is all about the mystery of individuation, of following your own singular journey through life. It is not, in my mind, a story just of midlife or of a man in midlife. It’s a human story, and a deeply courageous journey into madness, grief, and emptiness, and back out again, through the support of the feminine and the living psyche.

I’m excited to dive into its pages again soon with a new seminar in which we will read The Red Book together, along with the weaving-in of some of the (even more foundational) material from Jung’s original notebooks, The Black Books. This new eight-part seminar kicks off on March 17th! I’ll be sending out reading assignments and opening up the online seminar page soon. Of course, I would love to have you with us, if you’re not already registered.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Disability, Mothering, and Dealing with the Projections of Others

Guest post by Jenny Montgomery

February 9, 2023

Guest post by Jenny Montgomery

My son Heath and I were eagerly browsing cheese at a local grocery store when a young man noticed him ambulating in his spiffy four-wheeled walker. The gentleman approached and asked Heath politely whether he could pray for him. 

“Sure!” he said. I could tell Heath wanted to see where this was leading. The earnest man put his hand on Heath’s head and asked God to help him overcome all his challenges. Heath caught my eye ironically. As we both know, his biggest challenge is dealing with others’ projections onto his body and his life. 

Heath giggled after saying goodbye to the kind yet inappropriate interventionist. He wasn’t laughing at the man’s religion, but at his obvious blunder in assuming he was in a terrible plight. Heath embraces his moderate physical disability (cerebral palsy) and cure is the least of his concerns. He may contend with the dragon of being different, but he has learned to live beautifully in its embrace. I tell this story not to mock the man personally—Heath accepted his offer, after all—but in order to highlight the prevalence of projection in the lives of disabled individuals and their families, as well as the complexities and paradoxes we encounter in the wild territory of disability.

As a caregiver, C.G. Jung’s concepts and topographies of psyche have been invaluable to me. Jungian analysis has helped me delve into the history of disability in my family, to grapple with the animus-driven medical model of disability we all internalize, and to examine my own inner limitations and constraints. Jung’s ideas (and those of James Hillman, Marion Woodman, Barbara Hannah, Murray Stein and others) have also provided frameworks I can discuss with my now-teenaged son as he grows toward a mature self-concept as a disabled individual.

Traveling in the caravan of disability culture has awakened me to Jung's view of the “vulnerable” nature of the human psyche. “It is frail, menaced by specific dangers, and easily injured,” he wrote in Man and His Symbols. Illusions about normality, wholeness, or the capacity to control our lives may not be ones we wish to examine. Yet limitation, fragmentation, and fate all stand resolutely in our shadows, so close we can feel their breath. Are they worth confronting? Can they add depth and treasure to our lives, if we are open to integrating them? In my experience, they are and they do. 

I look forward to sharing time with Satya, my friend Charlie Hall, and those of you who plan to participate in the upcoming Salome salon, “Disability as the Human Condition.” We will share stories, stretch our imaginations, listen deeply, laugh loudly, and consider Jung’s legacy in the light of disability—an experience that touches us all.

Guest post by Jenny Montgomery

Charles Hall On the Paradox of Disability, Jungian Psychology, and Other People's Projections

Guest post by Charles Hall

February 6, 2023

Guest post by Charles Hall - join us for “Disability as the Human Experience” on February 11, 2023

When I was five years old, I was in a hardware store with my Dad. He was holding me when a lady walked up and said, "You and your wife must have been horrible people for God to have punished you with a child like that.”

I'm never going to have hands, a face that looks normal or be able to speak as clearly as others. God knows I tried through countless operations, but at 62, the medical knowledge when I was growing up was nowhere near where it is today or where it will be 20 years from now.  

It took me 50 years to put the pieces of my life-puzzle together so that I felt good about myself in a nearly integrated way. I say “nearly” because I want more.

Speaking about the issue of disabilities is always an issue of dichotomies and paradoxes. Everything that I say about “disabilities” can, at some point, be contradicted because the issue is so large and complicated. And because so many disabilities are invisible or unseen by others. The "real disability" keeps us from being the person we were meant to be, no matter our circumstances. It comes back to our Individuation journey, a never-ending process. The physical might never go away, seen or unseen, but who we choose to be can transcend the physical to the spiritual. 

One simple aspect of being disabled that is so often overlooked is that we all have the same psychological issues or needs. As in so many Grimm’s Fairytales, every individual needs to have the opportunity to “go out” into the world and find their way to the best of their ability. This is individuation, a human truth no matter who you are. My definition of a disability is anything that keeps us from doing, or trying, or feeling good about ourselves.  I use the issue of disability as a metaphor because it matches my inner and outer “being.”

Satya asked a question in the community forum one day, “How did you get introduced to Jung?” But, for me, it’s the re-introduction to Jung that stands out. My inner life begins anew over and over; thus, at each metamorphosis, Jung takes on a new form, a deeper meaning.

I was in an extraordinary high school class in Dallas, TX, in the 70s called “Man and His Environment.” It was a three-hour-a-day class focused on the humanities. Our first year introduced us to anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, or books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and In True Blood by Truman Capote. I was in the class for two years. In the second year, my emphasis was on psychology. Each semester we had a major project in which we decided on the subject, formulated a hypothesis, and then defended it in front of the class. These four semester-long projects have defined my life. My first was On Death and Dying. I met the chaplain who introduced Elizabeth Kubler-Ross to her first dying patient; he is mentioned in the forward to her first book. My second was on Parenting the Disabled. The issue of disability is my passion. The third was entitled “How Art Enhances Education. And my fourth and final project was where I became totally immersed in Carl Jung was on Reconciling Science and Religion.

I was a Junior in High School with an incredible intellectual life but no inner life. I was living as a disabled individual proving to others all that I could do in the physical realm. This work was transformative for me. In college, I spent some time at The University of Dallas where I had professors like Robert Romanyshyn. The Dallas Institute for Humanities was beginning during this time as well, where people like Thomas Moore and Robert Sardello taught, and my mother was involved. At another University, my Episcopal Chaplain was very Jungian-oriented. He introduced me to my first Jungian analyst, who had studied with Robert Johnson and John Sanford out of San Diego. I was 24 at the time and worked with her for five years. During this time, I sobered up at 26 and found myself in the middle of Jungian Therapy, Family Systems, Adult Children of Alcoholics (working closely with John Bradshaw and others), AA, and the beginning inner work on the Archetypes influenced by Hillman.

From 1987 to 1990 since I had no job, I could read extensively about Jung. I was reading writings by Jung, June Singer, Jean Houston, Edward Edinger, Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson, John Sanford, and more. At 30, I decided to return to school, focusing on finance and accounting. I needed to prove to myself and others that I could survive in “the real world.”  Sadly, for the next 20 years, Jung and my inner work took a back seat. After leaving the corporate world, I began a company that hires approximately 20% of the workforce with some form of disability. My life has had many turning points. This last one was when I was integrating disabled individuals into the non-disabled world.  Somehow what I was doing in the outside world integrated itself into my inner world and life for the first time in my life. Today I have a life that I could only dream about for years. At 61, I am still totally sober and committed to Jung.

Guest post by Charles Hall - join us for “Disability as the Human Experience” on February 11, 2023

Christiana Morgan: On Gender and Age in Jung's Concept of Individuation - Part 2

January 26, 2023

Gender and age are deeply bound-up with the original conception of individuation in Jung’s psychology. Classically speaking, the notion goes something like this: men are oriented towards logos or thinking and have an inferior eros or feeling, which is represented by the anima—the inner feminine soul; women, meanwhile, have a far more developed feeling function and underdeveloped thinking, which is represented internally as the animus, or inner masculine. An underdeveloped anima shows up in men as overpowering moodiness and depression, and a reliance on women for feeling. In women, the ignored animus shows up as strong but untested—and unoriginal—opinions. (In reality, let’s be clear, all genders are prone to all of the above.)

In his brilliance, Jung was adamant about the need for both men and women to develop “the Other.” He understood this calling for rounding out of lopsidedness to come around Midlife—once the external gender roles had been properly performed and exhausted. At this point, men would be desperate to truly feel and know their inner lives in new ways, and women would be desperate to exercise their brains and perhaps engage in business and career after a life of being at home caring for others.

While revolutionary in the sense that Jung saw an equal path for women to become whole people, and a journey for both men and women that meant pursuing wholeness through a kind of psychological androgyny, it goes without saying that this simplistic binary framework has ended up being quite harmful to people of all genders and ages. (My book, Quarterlife, tackles these old troped to modernize them beyond gender and age.)

In the case of Christiana Morgan, about whom I’m leading a three-part seminar soon, Jung offered some of his most radical and damaging views on individuation as regards sex and stage of life.

Christiana Morgan was 28 years old when she initially began analysis with Jung. Though much younger than the anticipated midlife, Jung saw that she was unequivocally engaged in the journey of individuation. “Obviously her fate is benevolent,” Jung expressed. “I have seen people even at sixty who finally discovered that they had seen only half the world, that they had lived only half of their life… Now this woman has got to the other side of the world at thirty.”

And yet, while Jung made a profound allowance for her age within his model and had a deep respect for her journey, he also got quite trapped by the gender binary and the rigidity of his own model of women being aligned with feeling and the unconscious, and men being aligned with thinking and the conscious mind. This rigid thinking arguably proved fatal for Christina—a thinking type.

I’ll say more about all of this next week! And if this interests you, please do join me for my upcoming seminar on Christiana Morgan, the extraordinary subject of Jung’s Vision Seminars, and the topic of the remarkable biography, Translate this Darkness by Jungian analyst Claire Douglas. Christina’s story is truly riveting and with some incredible synchronicity and bizarre side stories throughout history. I know you may never have heard of Christiana, but her story offers a lens into the history of Jung’s psychology, the psychology of men and women, and Jung’s thoughts on open relationships, all while providing tremendous insight into the role that sex and gender play within his scholarship. Oh, and there’s a quite sad connection to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, that I uncovered in my own research about this story too. It’s illuminating, to be sure.

Also, also, coming up this Sunday, is my 2.5 hour workshop, “My Two Conflicting Selves”! I’ll share some accessible techniques of active imagination and inner witnessing to find a way through personal conflict or confusion and towards the birth of the third—a new, creative way beyond the confusing binary of “this” or “that.” Scroll down to learn more. Would love to see you there!

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

See here and here for two related articles.

The External World is Not an Illusion: Depth Psychology and Survival in These Times

January 19, 2023

Okay, the world is still burning. Ukraine is still fighting for its life. Several certified white supremacists have received new committee assignments in the U.S. Congress. Black men are still being murdered in cold blood by police. Iranian Quarterlifers are still being hung in public executions, while many more are being disappeared from society and tortured. Wives are still being murdered by their husbands. The unbelievable flooding in California, alongside the extreme drought in Arizona, remind us again that extreme weather is here to stay and totally our fault. And, frankly, this is really just scratching the surface of daily tragedy.

These are not easy times.

I have learned over the years the necessity of compartmentalizing some suffering in order to survive, but there are plenty of times when no amount of compartmentalizing can keep at bay the gut punches of life. There are times when I don’t know how any of us are surviving, or what the best strategies are to keep up hope.

I don’t know why I was born in these times or, perhaps, why I was born this time in these times. But I know that I am here, and I concluded years ago that the best medicine is to commit to living fully while I am here. The in-between place in which I was caught for years (decades) did not better serve humanity, my family, or myself. So I strive to make meaning from this madness while doing what I can to mitigate damage to the earth, ease suffering, and add to the love, ideas, art, and beauty of the world.

Remembering the guidance of alchemy and the gnostics, whom Jung studied faithfully, always helps me to reconnect to the winding path of existence and the necessity of transformation versus merely making-it-through.

Last night, I was moved by a lecture by novelist Lauren Groff in which (partially via exploring the ecstasy of Hildegard of Bingen and other religious women), she expressed the value of religious experience amidst—always amidst—the anguish of life. (If you need a good book, Groff’s novel Matrix is delicious.)

Of course, this tenant of the religious experience is core to an understanding of the unconscious within depth psychology. It is not religion, rules, or dogma that offer up the medicine we seek, but the numinous; the experience of numinosity.

The depth psychological attitude does not suggest that the external world is an illusion, aiding in ways to bypass the suffering of existence. Instead, the general worldview of depth psychology is one which affirms the reality of the external world and its tragic suffering and extraordinary beauty, alongside the very real link of the outer world to the inner world of us all. It’s like an infinity loop in which human beings (and likely all of life) sit squarely at the crosspoint. We are responsible for co-creating the universe for better or worse.

I frequently think about this quote from Jung. Near the end of his life, he wrote to his beloved colleague and translator, Cary Baynes, about his disappointment at what he felt was an insufficient impact of his psychology on the world at large. “Psychology like mine prepares for an end or even for the end,” he wrote. “The question is only, what are we going to kill: ourselves or our still infantile psychology and its appalling unconsciousness.”

This question and this worldview are behind each of the courses I’m teaching this spring. One of the guiding ideas in Jung’s Red Book—that “the outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition”—underlies my upcoming workshop on Sunday, January 29th, as well as all that follows. I hope you’ll join me. For me, the material itself, as well as our extraordinary community, help enormously in maintaining a connection to my own soul, and the anima mundi.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Looking Back at 2022: Fifty-Five Gatherings and So Much More

December 31, 2022

In preparing to write you this end-of-year missive, it was illuminating for me to reread the newsletter I sent you last year at this time. Somehow, fifty-two weeks move quickly, and with so many global, national, and personal events unfolding at any given time, I realize how easy it is to lose sight of everything we do together in a year!

This year at The Salome Institute, we gathered online fifty-five times, joining across continents and time zones to study, discuss, ask questions, learn active imagination and explore our dreams. In particular, we spent time learning ways to work with the unconscious, met for thirteen different new moons with Carol Ferris, learned Taoist thinking with Ann Carroll, worked dreams in two community dream groups, and explored the timeless search for stability in meaning in our lives and in fairy tales. In 2022, we also launched a new subscriber program and formalized our Socially Relevant Salon series, in which we heard remarkable stories of revolution in the US and Iran in our Democracy & Voting salon, and of gender and individuation in our recent Trans Ways of Knowing salon (about which more than a few people wrote me to say was “life-changing”). In April, we held a fundraiser for Ukraine in which Carol Ferris and I read aloud Jung’s 1938 interview titled “Diagnosing the Dictators,” and raised over $5,500 for refugees.

In 2022, we also provided over $22,000 in scholarships and discounts to anyone in financial need who made a request for our events. We have done the same since the start of our online programming, and we’re committed to continuing this practice next year in order to guarantee the accessibility of our seminars and salons.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I did not mention the publication of my first book in July of this year! There’s no question that the preparation for the launch of my book was both in the background and foreground of The Salome Institute throughout 2022. I’m so grateful for the ways this community has shown up to support me through buying my book, sharing it with your loved ones, leaving me online reviews, attending my Salome Institute book talk, or coming to one of my live book talks in Portland and LA. I loved seeing you in person! Thank you for all of the above.

Suffice it to say, I could go on! There are many things I have not mentioned (for instance, this series about abortion rights past, present, and future), but it would be impossible to name everything that happened this year!

I can only pray that 2023 feels more like a step in the right direction for all of us globally, and that we’ll each do our best to make gold out of the events in our own lives and in the collective that do not go (at all) as we’d hope. To that end, I truly hope that The Salome Institute will provide you with support in the alchemical work of life and world transformation.

I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching (so much…) around the direction of our work here at The Salome Institute and the charter of my own creativity, and feel pretty excited about what is to come in our Spring 2023 calendar, I really hope you’ll join me for some (or all!) of what we have in store.

Until then, sending you oodles of love, many blessings, and a very Happy New Year!

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

America Has a Problem: Gun Violence and the Fear of the LGBTQ Community

November 23, 2022

America has seen thirty mass shootings already this month. No words convey the degree to which gun violence is out of control in this country, nor the degree to which the population that defends their gun ownership will double down on their right to do so. But what is behind this preoccupation with pre-meditated, armed self-defense? And what about this obsession with an (always-shifting) perceived enemy of the non-white, non-male, non-conservative, non-Christian, non-straight “Other”?

There is a direct link between the fear-based rhetoric about this Other—be it “the Democrats,” “the libs,” "the feminists,” “the abortionists,” “the Jews,” “the immigrants,” “the Muslims," “the thugs,” “the teachers,” “the queers,” or “the drag queens”—and the desire for gun-ownership to protect the status quo. The group on the receiving end of this targeted hatred is always shifting because it’s not really about that group but the fear of change. This need to find an external enemy—an enemy who is, in fact, not a threat—is a profound act of projection. And because I can imagine the arguments: this is not currently a 50/50 relationship of responsibility. Yes, we’re all guilty of projection. But this dynamic in America is akin to an abusive relationship in which no matter what one partner says or does, the other partner will ultimately resort to screaming about their victimhood and violence. Yes, both partners can be human and can be flawed. Both partners can be scared. But when one partner is threatening the very survival of the other and tormenting daily life in the household, the responsibility for self-awareness is simply not equal. That argument either seeks harmony over truth, or blame over self-inquiry. When one population drums up fear and hatred and is heavily armed, people end up dead. Day after awful day.

To an individual or a collective society that wants safety and to maintain the status quo, change is the danger. Change is a threat. The lives of others that do not conform to your own life are perceived threats to your own life because you do not want to deal with change. You want things to continue just as they are. And so, the actor of change may—just like in nightmares—appear to you as the Devil or evil, a monster that has to be eradicated, no matter the truth of their essence. It’s too scary to have to consider the possibility that the Devil is actually your own unaddressed life, joy, and soul.

Like a crisis in any individual life that demands evolution, we each have a choice when confronted with social change: dig in our heels and resist, resist, resist; take to substances, shouting, and violence; or find the healers and the curiosity of others needed to step into the transformation and grow along with it.

The mass shooting on Saturday at Club Q in Colorado did not happen because one young white man was mentally unwell, or even just because he had access to military-style weapons. Those two issues alone must be addressed. But this young man was also being pumped full of fear and hateful rhetoric from his right-wing culture about the “dangers” of LGBTQ people, trans children, and drag queens, a constant refrain that the right is propagating right now under the banner of “protecting children.” Even since the shooting. As a result, trans and queer people were targeted, murdered, and injured that night (while one unarmed trans woman helped to subdue the killer).

According to Everytown for Gun Safety: “2021 was the deadliest year on record for trans and gender non-conforming people in the US—and this trend has continued in 2022—overwhelmingly impacting trans women of color.”

The LGBTQ community is not a threat, but they are threatened every day. Meanwhile, whether we are conscious of it or not, the LGBTQ community contributes every day to the psychological and social liberation of all of us, on the streets and in the very fact of their own self-liberation. Because individuation demands the recognition of what sets us apart, and the courage to live the life that calls from within.

Please join us on Saturday, December 3rd to learn from and spend time with three truly brilliant trans artists, academics, and souls: Cybele Brandow, Rae Davis, and tyler redskye.

No matter what you already know—or think you know—about the trans experience, this is a time for solidarity, curiosity, and self-expansion. No one will be on a soapbox. Even though we could speak for hours about the tragedy of current events and politics, I doubt we’ll spend much time there. This is an opportunity for community. We’ll sit in a virtual living room together to learn about the life journeys of three incredible people. Because I know these people, I truly hope that you’ll join us.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Trans + The Transcendent Function

November 10, 2022

“How can I speak more authentically, when the language I was brought up to speak does not fit, yet its words are the only ones I know? …I cannot get away or separate myself from my alien culture, as I am part of it: born of warlike people in a waring age and, like them, divided and contentious.” — Claire Douglas

I recently found a used book by one of my very favorite Jungian authors that I’d long meant to read. I brought it to bed with me last night and cracked the covers, intending to read a chapter or two before sleep. Within minutes, I was so overwhelmed by synchronicity and by the clarity of the author’s voice that I closed the book again like a stunned child who had just discovered a magical novel with roaring lions and bright streaming light. Sometimes psyche is right where you need it and the energy is astounding.

“Whether one defines oneself as male or female (or as a mixture, as we all are), the world needs authentic voices resonating within it. Authentic voices rise from forgotten circles of relatedness and contribute crucial new and old ways of knowing to this beleagerd planet.” — Claire Douglas

Claire Douglas, a Jungian analyst in California, has helped to break down old stifling language and prisons of understanding. We all need new, authentic voices and new ways of knowing. Ways of knowing that draw from the ancient and the deeply personal; from the deep center of one’s being and from the friction of opposition.

At the core of Jungian psychology is an understanding that we are all, as Douglas puts it, a mixture of male and female, of the masculine and feminine. And yet, the Jungian field has struggled to truly make sense of what this means within patriarchy for the lived experiences of heterosexual cis men and cis women. Let alone for the experiences of trans people. And yet. This is an area of learning that can blow open the doors of understanding for each of us.

I am truly honored, therefore, to finally be able to announce a new salon that has been in the works for some time: Trans Ways of Knowing. Coming up on Saturday, December 3rd, we’re proud to offer our community and the Jungian world at large an opportunity to see through political rhetoric on trans people and the old ways of knowing about gender and learn from three trans artists, academics, and artists about their lived experience and deep philosophical and psychological understanding.

In this two-hour special event, Cybele Brandow, Rae Davis, and tyler redskye (all members of the Salome community) will share some of their experiences on the path to individuation as trans people, convey ways in which imagination and dreamwork has supported and confirmed their trans identities, and how Jung’s understanding of the Transcendent Function mirrors trans identity and the emergence of “the third” within the gender binary.

We would love your presence at this important event. Please join us and spread the word within your communities. I feel confident that it’s an event you won’t want to miss.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Reflections on my father, US Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and the needed marriage between Psychology and Democracy

Guest Post by Mimi K. Stokes

Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach confronting Governor George Wallace as he attempts to block integration at the University of Alabama. June 11, 1963. Photographer: Warren K. Leffler.

October 11, 2022

Guest Post by Mimi K. Stokes

My parents’ marriage was a marriage of Psychology and Democracy.

My late father was the former US Attorney General, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who confronted George Wallace at the University of Alabama and later got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts through Congress. My mother was a Freudian psychoanalyst, painter, and poet. My father had deep respect for my mother’s psychological intelligence and creative giftedness, and her psychological perspective influenced his understanding of democracy.

Influenced by my mother, my father developed the view that people could have psychological issues that made them vote for someone they identified with, someone like them, in an unconscious act in which an individual votes to empower themselves.

What he believed was needed for a functioning democracy and free society was to vote for an Other who had qualities of character, knowledge, and experience, to sustain and evolve the US democratic project of a free and just society. He saw a vote driven by unconscious identification—and needs for power for oneself, whatever the source of those unconscious needs—as undermining Equality and Civil Rights. Racists voted for racists like them; white men voted for white men like them, further embedding structural, endemic racism and sexism in society. The unconscious citizen who makes an unconscious vote was, in his view, a danger to the democratic process.

What was needed was a civic psychology that could address the internal factors of unconscious voting.

My father saw a vital need for a form of civic psychology to overcome generations of the living experience of racism. He saw racism as being passed down in families, from one generation to the next, deeply embedded in the intimate realm of family, making healing the long US history of racism a complex ‘family matter.’

That racism could be healed and transcended, he believed possible. Or, at least, he believed that we had to believe it was possible, or else we could not declare ourselves authentically committed to the democratic project.

He believed that whites had a vital role to play in a healing transcendence of racism.  His thinking was that sustaining the Civil and Voting Rights acts depended on whites tirelessly and passionately advocating for the rights of Blacks to vote. By definition, racism gives whites more power and agency. Democracy, therefore, gives whites the moral, and ethical responsibility to use their agency to advocate for the rights of others, not only for oneself.  And so, again, we are at my father’s fundamental view that democracy is about Self and Other, not just Self.

If I had to give a name to my father’s ’psychologized’ democracy, it would be an Empathic Democracy. My father often lamented that the North had no idea of the living experience of the South; whites had no idea of the living experience of Blacks; men had no idea of the living experience of women because listening to each other’s lived experiences, with empathy, respect, and dignifying each other’s emotional experiences as citizens, was not a democratic US value. 

In a sense, my father saw the therapist as having a skill that citizens and leaders needed to transfer from therapy to democracy. US democracy needed the therapist’s skill of listening to the emotional experience of an Other with empathy, respect, and an attitude of amelioration and commitment to relieve the suffering of a citizen-Other. 

“Empathic Democracy” is not a phrase my father ever used. As I said, it is my name for the kind of democracy that my father and mother’s marriage of Psychology and Democracy awakened in him—or engendered in him, through the union of feminine and masculine, anima and animus, of a sacred, inner, marriage of psychology and democracy inside of him that mirrored his marriage with my mother.

Guest Post by Mimi K. Stokes

"Women, Life, Freedom!" Nazli Rahmanian on Mahsa Amini, the Feminine, and the Protests in Iran

Guest post by Nazli Rahmanian

October 4, 2022

Guest post by Nazli Rahmanian

There is much grief in my heart. In the last two weeks, I have started nearly every day in tears. After the senseless killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s “morality police,” brave young women across my country are taking to the streets, taking off and burning their hijab in defiance of the country’s oppressive laws, being beaten and shot at by brutal government forces. They are invoking Mahsa’s name and chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom!” Meanwhile, I am here in Portland, crying in between my meetings, in the shower, and at night. A reel of scenes of brutality in the streets along with memories of my own old wounds plays in my head. Women of my country have been fighting against these cruel and oppressive forces for as long as I remember. I have not suffered my sisters’ daily suffering for a long time.

I left Iran years ago, but I remember the anxiety and sense of injustice at being harassed and threatened continuously. I remember the first time I was stopped by the morality police as a 12-year-old and threatened by a black veiled woman: “Cover your hair girl! or I will take you to a place your parents will never find you.” I still feel the pain of losing several of my beloved family members to this brutal government. And now I am here, watching my people’s courage in the face of the same old brutality. It looks like an old story but I feel something new and different about it. The feminine has had enough and is emerging with incredible power. There is much grief, and I feel it is the kind of grief that could hug and nurture a seed of relatedness.  

I wrote something last week about the fear and hatred of women, of the feminine. It exists and it exists everywhere, not just in Iran. It is a disease that ravages our civilization and it will not go away until we accept, love, and live the feminine within ourselves. I feel that a part of living our own feminine nature, regardless of our gender, is to opt for living in relationship to the world rather than seeking domination over it. It is the absence of relationship that opens the door to the idea of ownership. Ownership of the bodies and destinies of living beings so that they serve as mere resources for the “chosen few’s” endless quest for dominance. This false story has created and normalized slavery: Slavery of women, of indigenous people of the land, of black people, of those whose sexual or gender identity is different than the predefined “norms,”; of migrants and refugees, and of the living, bleeding Earth herself. The part of us who deeply relates and knows of the Oneness of all Being cannot participate in such atrocities, because it hurts and it bleeds with the suffering of her sisters and brothers, human or more than human. Unless we include the feminine in the story, in slavery we shall remain.

There is much grief, and there is also courage and beauty. Iran’s recent uprising is a revolution led by women and girls and also mostly by quarterlifers. They are in the forefront, demanding back control of their lives, their bodies, and their choices. And right beside them are men. Men whose hearts hurt for their sisters, mothers, lovers. Men who choose love and relating to dominance. Men who are ready to offer their lives for the freedom of women. And many have.

I also have seen and heard so much beauty in the form of art, spoken words, and songs pouring out of people. One is a song called “Baraye” or “For,” written and sung by a young man, Shervin Hajipour. Each verse counts the reasons why people have taken to the streets, and the reason he sings:

“For my sister, for your sister, for all of our sisters, for the friends we have lost on the way, for the future, for the street children and their dreams, for the Sun rising after a very long night, for woman, for life, for freedom…”

Shervin is now paying with his freedom for speaking in beauty. He was detained and put in jail a few days ago.

There is so much grief, and there is also love and gratitude. I want to say “Thank You!” to the women who bravely demand what is theirs and what has been denied them for a long, long time. “I wish that I could be by your side. I love you!” I want to say “Thank You!” to the men who stand by their sisters’ side no matter what the cost. “I love you!” So much love in my heart, sitting next to grief and opening space.

Much has been lost in the last couple of centuries as this modern civilization has lived a divisive story of colonialism and capitalism. The myth of endless economic growth has brought so much destruction to our planet and all Her living inhabitants for the apparent gain of a few. The old story and its empty promises are falling apart. As I grieve the loss of so much that is beautiful and sacred, I hold in my heart a dream for a new civilization. One that is rooted in the story of relatedness. One that cannot be born without the inclusion of the feminine. One that is born from the sacred marriage of feminine and masculine. How sweet the day that women, men, rivers, and trees sing their true song. And the Earth too.

Woman, Life, Freedom!

Listen to Shervin Hajipour’s song here

Guest post by Nazli Rahmanian

Sex & Gender in Jung's Concept of Individuation - Part 1

September 29, 2022

After I wrote about biological age in Jung’s concept of individuation three weeks ago, I told you that I’d write “next week” about sex & gender in individuation. I’m late, but it could not feel more relevant to me today.

Last night, I joined an incredibly inspiring fundraising call for a winnable race in Montana (donate!) that would help to protect abortion access for Montana and the entire region. Surrounded by some very red states, Montana’s right to abortion is protected in the state constitution. But because Montana has taken a dark swing from solidly purple for decades to MAGA red recently, those abortion protections are in serious danger. (Donate! This is not a sexy national race, but it’s winnable and will save lives.)

Meanwhile, in entirely related news from Iran on the results of misogynistic fundamentalism: 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was murdered by the nation’s morality police because she was not wearing her hijab the way they wanted her to wear her hijab. In response, women-led protests have taken over the streets, day and night. Women are removing their legally required hijabs and facing harassment, imprisonment, physical attacks, and the threat of death as a result. They’re also changing the direction of their country and inspiring people all over the world. (I’m grateful to say that one of our Iranian community members is writing a piece about this for the newsletter that we’ll share soon.)

There are two core ways in which to understand and unpack these events in the States and Iran through Jung’s psychology.

First: without women’s rights and trans rights and LGBTQ rights, there is no right to individuation. As long as gender, gender expression, and reproductive rights are being policed, the fundamental right to live one’s own life is also being policed.

The field of psychoanalysis is familiar with what happens when a person’s parents seek to repress their self-expression and choices about their future. When it is an entire nation and the government that seeks to control choices on one’s basic self-expression or life choices, there is nowhere to go. When it is the state acting out this kind of repression, we have a mass-minded cult masquerading as religion or culture. Mass-mindedness is the opposite of a society filled with individuated people. Cults seek unconscious participation in a pre-defined direction, not evolution, transformation, or individuation.

The second way we can begin to unpack these events is this: as long as the fear of the feminine is legitimized as an “out there” issue and not owned as a projection from one’s own neglected and miserable feminine, the issue will never, ever go away.

This second point may be the most fundamental issue in all of Jung’s psychology.

When Jung encountered the disheveled, discarded, lonely, and terrifying (to him) image of Salome in his own unconscious, he initially reacted in horror: “I dread you, you beast.” But as we see throughout The Red Book, the inner work that Jung then pursued was, at its root, about acknowledging Salome and her female counterpoints as fully human. The inner images transformed as a result.

Jung’s inner work with the feminine was a linchpin—arguably the linchpin—of his journey of individuation, a lesson he went on to speak about far and wide.

I’ll quote here from the introduction to Erich Neumann’s book, The Fear of the Feminine, heavily influenced by Jung’s work:

“Understanding the Feminine is an urgent necessity not only in order to understand the single individual but also to heal the collective…if the patriarchally masculine world that has fallen ill, thanks to its extreme one-sidedness, is again to return to health.”

There was no question in Jung’s psychology that society was ill. He observed the violent, patriarchal mass-mindedness of WWI and WWII sweep across Europe. And there is no question that we are up against similar threats today.

Until these fundamentalist cults recognize that what they actually fear is the misery of their own souls, we’re stuck trying to survive their projections: their obsessions over women’s clothing, trans children playing soccer, and fetuses, with no regard for the human in which those fetuses reside.

In talking about sex & gender in Jung’s concept of individuation, there’s really another whole area left to explore. I’ll try to tackle that soon in an upcoming newsletter.

Individuation is also the topic of my upcoming seminar—which starts Friday! Together, we’ll explore our own journeys in family and society to individuate. I’ve drawn most of the assigned reading this time around from fairy tales to allow us to sink into the timeless pursuit of ourselves through symbolic thinking, storytelling, and self-exploration. I’d love to see you in there.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Defining Individuation in Jung's Psychology

September 9, 2022

"Individuation" is one of the major buzzwords of Jungian psychology, but it doesn’t carry the same meaning as the common use of this term. For instance, a parent may speak about their child "individuating” to explain the process of their becoming their own person. In this context, individuation is used as a synonym for "differentiation” or “the differentiation of self,” a concept that is core to Murray Bowen’s work in Family Systems.

But in Jung’s exploration of this term, the meaning is quite different. Jung analogized individuation far more with the yogic path or the alchemical process than with interpersonal growth, and he tended to speak of it as possible only after midlife. Joseph Campbell elaborated on the journey of individuation through the Hero’s Journey monomyth.

An editor at Psychological Perspectives asked me to define individuation for my 2015 paper, The Inner World of the First Half of Life, in which I explored the possibility for this psychological work before the second half of life—an idea that is often antithetical to classical Jungian ideas and which is the topic of my book, Quarterlife. In that article, I wrote about individuation this way:

“No matter the age, the trust of an inner source, with the ego strength to parse and manifest its guidance, is the path of individuation.”

And like this:

“[The] loss of faith in social prescriptions, the inability to see the value in cultural expectations, may prematurely prompt the goal of individuation: to create a life that adheres to inner direction and inner laws, versus those imposed by the social collective.”

Individuation, while often tied to biological age in the literature, ultimately has nothing to do with biology. Individuation is about the development of consciousness and a working relationship between the conscious self and the unconscious. It’s work that requires a healthy, strong, and flexible ego, an asset that often comes with age—but not always.

I’ll write more about this next week and the roles that sex, gender, and heteronormativity play in Jung’s definitions of individuation. As always, I speak about these ideas with my 80/20 rule: in exploring Jung’s work with the discernment of a person in 2022, I tend to see 80% of the writing as transformative and even still ahead of its time and 20% that is, well, in need of revision.

I’ll also break all this down further in my upcoming seminar, The Timeless Search for Stability and Meaning which starts September 30th!

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

The Evolution of The Salome Institute and What is to Come

August 14, 2022

The Salome Institute was conceived in the Spring of 2016. Its clarity of purpose arrived while I walked in the sun one day and it came to form initially in whatever venue I could find: a church, a finished basement, or my then small condo living room. I knew I wanted to explore depth psychology with others and host conversations that I didn’t hear being had within the field, conversations around the psychological roots of war and tyranny, of racism and sexism, of violence and mass-mindedness, and how they could be prevented, acknowledged, or transformed. I wanted to engage with the core of Jung’s work and its modern value, not get lost in the disembodied esoterica that too often dominated lecture halls.

I named the institute after Salome from Jung’s Red Book and Black Books. Salome is core to Jung’s work—sensual, embodied, matter, and soul—and yet, in so many of the discussions, lectures, and conversations among scholars of his work at the time, she was barely acknowledged. We’d learn about Philemon, the Gnostic influences, and the symbolic references, but where was Salome, Jung’s teacher and soul, the feminine figure who transforms through his devoted attention and who transforms him in return? How could it be that after all of Jung’s work to find her again, to accept her as she was, she was just once again buried in the scholarship and forgotten?

The Salome Institute soon found a home in the living room of some now dear friends. For a couple of years, while hosting Carol Ferris’s feminist reimaginings of Lilith and Dr. Fanny Brewster’s work on The Racial Complex, I led conversations around various works and topics, from Edward Edinger on Alchemy to “The Integrated Masculine,” “The Multiplicity of the Feminine,” Red Book reading groups, the inferior function in Jung’s typology, the depth psychology of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil, and instruction on The I Ching. Many of these classes were on Friday mornings with a core group of “Salomates,” as they came to be called, in that beautifully adorned living room with cut flowers on the table and lit candles everywhere.

As I now understand the evolution of The Salome Institute and where we’re going next, that initial phase is what I call—borrowing from the iterative language of tech speak—Salome 1.0.

Salome 2.0 began with the lockdown. A new phase was born, along with so many things, when a global pandemic changed our world.

I had just begun teaching a bit online, so when we were suddenly separated from one another and from our living room gathering space, I was prepared (more or less) to switch gears. I moved my classes online, and Carol Ferris and I began our Red Book Sunday gatherings: twenty-nine free morning meetings in which we traveled together through Jung’s magnum opus page by page, seeking to understand the depths of a work created 100 years prior amidst world war as we ventured into a global crisis of our own.

These last two and a half years have been a vibrant time for The Salome Institute. We’ve hosted many speakers, Gary Lachman, Fanny Brewster, Kwame Scruggs, Ayana Jamieson, Kayleen Asbo, Ann Carroll, and Daniel Baumann to name a handful. Carol Ferris has gifted us with monthly New Moon salons and deep dives into the astrology for the coming year. We created a podcast from The Red Book gatherings whose episodes have been downloaded 140,000 times. Things moved at a feverish pace and it was wonderful and invigorating.

I knew, as I listened to myself, that there was another shift coming. As we all began to get vaccinated, the world began to adapt to a less intense period of the pandemic, and as my book—long on the horizon—finally approached publication, I could feel a need to slow things down a bit, to host fewer speakers, and to begin teaching more myself again.

And so, Salome 3.0 is what we’ve been shifting into for the last several months at Salome and what we’ll be deepening into with more consistency going forward.

Salome 3.0 will have expanded opportunities for community, drawing upon what we’ve been building with our new community platform. I will also be offering more consistent seminars and salons, and coming back more clearly to our roots around “socially relevant psychology.” This phase of Salome will look something like this:

1. A new membership program that provides access to a regular online community for discussion and conversation, with weekly prompts

2. Monthly “socially relevant” salons in which I dive deeply into a particular topic around social justice or current events, sometimes in conversation with others

3. Regular seminars that I lead, drawing more on the ideas of depth psychology and how they apply to our own lives and to the world

4. Regular groups for dreamwork and/or divination that provide more live community engagement and direct work with the embodied psyche

5. Occasional hosting of brilliant thinkers as related to the intersection between depth psychology, social justice, and broadening access to these ideas

I am excited to share with you what we’ve been working on in the background. We hope to expand upon what we’ve created together over these years and will be announcing some new seminars and salons—and a new membership program!—very soon.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Feelings as Civic Duty

July 14, 2022

Within minutes of each other yesterday morning, two New York Times alerts popped up on my phone announcing the collapse of the governments in Sri Lanka and then in Italy, joining the turmoil of governments worldwide. Questions of fascism, corruption, and violence in leadership have always loomed, but there’s another reckoning taking place globally: what will the people tolerate, what will the people choose, and who will the people decide to be?

The instability of our democracy here in the US is a constant presence. The January 6th hearings, to which I am regularly glued, are certainly a lesson in civics: if we don’t participate thoughtfully—and doggedly—in the work of maintaining a healthy society, we could lose it all. And yet, over and over again, another core lesson presents itself as even more fundamental: the psychological work of being a citizen through attending to our own beliefs, reactions, alliances, fanaticism, and feelings. When do our bodies tell us, “something isn’t right”? When do we feel frozen in our hopelessness? When do we know, in the silence, that we disagree with what’s unfolding? This isn’t just watching our “shadow,” a common Jungian talking point that I think can sometimes miss the mark. It’s also about attending to our buried griefs, or unacknowledged doubts, and even our unheard longings. 

In each of the January 6th hearings, I am reminded that each one of us has the potential to act as either water or kindling to a social brush fire. We are observing in the committee’s methodical presentation the pervasive potential for collective mind-control and blind obedience, but also the capacity for even those deep inside of totalitarianism and extremism to wake up and then do something else.

This is the testimony of one witness from the latest hearing who first joined the radical extremist group, the Oath Keepers, in Oregon.

JASON VAN TATENHOVE: There came a point — there were many red flags and I probably should have broke with them much earlier than I did. But the straw that broke the camel's back really came when I walked into a grocery store. We were living up in the very remote town of Eureka, Montana and there was a group of core members of the group of the Oath Keepers and some associates, and they were having a conversation at that public area where they were talking about how the Holocaust was not real.

And that was for me something I just could not abide. And you know, we were not — we were not wealthy people at all. We were barely surviving. And it didn't matter — I went home to my wife and my kids, and I told them that I've got to walk away at this point. I don't know how we're going to survive or where we're going to go or what we're going to do, but I just can no longer continue, and put in my resignation.

I want to say too that there’s a parallel to this experience of waking up and doing something else that I heard this week in an entirely different form of media through the interview with Billie Jean King on Glennon Doyle’s “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast. Billie Jean King, of course, is a feminist icon, the woman appropriately credited with transforming women’s sports through her tennis career and decades of activism. But in this interview, King talks about how close she came to not being that person—that massively positive influence on millions of lives—because she couldn’t wake up to her own truths.

I leave you with that. Transforming the world isn’t just about battling the “bad guys” or even “the bad guy within.” This work is also always about becoming ourselves, even when it’s scary, and listening to the uncomfortable truths—as so many spiritual and civil rights leaders in history have taught us—that speak from within.

I look forward to seeing some of you on Sunday morning as I read from my book—for the first time!—and share more of what’s inside. As always, if you can’t join us live, you’re welcome to register to receive the same-day recording.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Ukrainian Jungian Analysts

I was so grateful last month to be able to attend the gathering online for (and with) Ukrainian Jungian analysts and interns caught up in the war. Two Jungian analysts in Ukraine spoke with incredible depth about their experiences as sudden refugees and how they’re drawing on Jung’s work in their daily lives. Then, New York analyst Ann Ulanov delivered an extraordinary paper on the topic of Ukraine, War, and Jung’s Red Book entitled, “Making the Unsayable Experiential”, in which she speaks quite a bit of Jung’s Salome. It was a truly special event.

It’s a gift to all of us that a recording of the full 2-hour gathering has been made available for viewing and that Ann’s paper is now also available to download.

While the group is not still accepting donations for Ukrainian Jungians (due to the complication of distribution at this time) they are directing people to the IAAP site which has links for ways to offer support at this time.

Our gathering/fundraiser is also now available to watch for free. I’m proud of the $5,200 that our community raised and distributed to two very worthy organizations supporting refugees and displaced peoples worldwide. Here are a couple of updates on the ongoing and tireless work of these groups in Ukraine, work that is engaging the crisis from two very different and two very crucial angles.

• World Central Kitchen

• Women’s Refugee Commission

Love to all of you. Happy Solstice! Happy Summer! Hope to see you next Thursday for our June gathering with Carol Ferris around the New Moon in Cancer.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

What Abortion Means: Part 3

On Mothers’ Who are Grateful for the Abortions They Had

Carol Ferris and Ursula k. Le Guin (Ursula K. Le Guin image by Marian Wood Kolisch ©)

This is the third installment in a series on abortion and the implications of the seeming impending loss of federal abortion protections in America. Part 1 in this series can be found here; part 2 is here.

June 16, 2022

The much-beloved author Ursula K. Le Guin spoke poignantly about the abortion she had while in college. In a short lecture titled, “What it Was Like” in the collection, Words Are My Matter, Le Guin conveys the extreme undue burden that even a shared, consensual act can place on women. This is from 2012:

“My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, ‘We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?’ And he laughs at the good joke.”

Not only is a young woman terrified to be pregnant and abandoned by the boyfriend who got her into this situation, but she is also then painted with ease—like a timeless gag—to be a “slut,” “loose,” “without good morals,” a “whore.” How many times have scared, jilted, cowardly boys and men enacted this dangerous theater throughout history and never known the impact? How long must girls and women be caught somewhere between the hatred of the feminine and the perception of the feminine as a plaything, an “other” who must be in on the joke of her own debasement or be the silly girl with no sense of humor?

With the remarkable support of both of her parents, Le Guin was able to receive an abortion. White, highly educated, and economically privileged, her parents had the resources and networks to support their daughter. And they did.

Though not without difficulties and shame at the time, Le Guin never regretted her choice. In fact, as she shared in that lecture in 2012, she is pained to think of what she would have lost if she had not had the abortion.

“If I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents through the pregnancy, birth, and infancy, till I could get some kind of work and gain some kind of independence for myself and the child, if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, for the anti-abortion people, the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have borne a child for them, their child.

But I would not have borne my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children.

The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses, or children, or lives, or whatever you choose to call them: my children, the three I bore, the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met and married.”

I had somehow never read this story from Le Guin, nor had I read her essay, “The Princess,” available in Dancing at the Edge of the World, in which Le Guin writes of her need for an abortion in the style of a fairy tale from the Dark Ages, to which, she urges, we must never return (a deeply poignant reflection).

It was Carol Ferris, our resident astrologer, my co-host in the Red Book salons and podcast, and a dear friend, who introduced me to this history of Le Guin’s when she shared with me her own story about life before Roe v. Wade.

Carol saw parallels between her journey as a college student and Le Guin’s, in particular in that the abortion she had then allowed her to become the mother that she is today. It’s a point that isn’t emphasized enough in the conversations about abortion or motherhood, yet it is one that many mothers share—whether their children know it or not.

This is Carol’s story, which she titled, simply and beautifully: “Abortion Then”

“The party was at the philosophy TA’s house, and it roared late, with people pairing off into the various bedrooms. I woke up with a hangover and a pregnancy. It was 1964, I was a sophomore in college, and the county health test confirmed the missed period. With no birth control to speak of and limited choices now—marriage not on the horizon, nor becoming an 18-year-old mother—I sought an abortion, then illegal. I wasn’t the only girl with little sex education or preparation in my generation or on that campus. The dorms and sororities harbored a rich underground of information about abortions. I phoned the number given to me.

The abortionist—fortunately for me—was the infamous Ruth Barnett, a retired RN in Portland who bribed the law and carried on (you can read her version of that story in her book, They Weep on my Doorstep). Rumor had it that she was the most expensive but the cleanest and the safest. My roommates and I hustled up $350 (no surprise that the philosophy TA made himself scarce when the hat was passed) and drove to Portland to meet at 1 pm at the corner of SW Salmon and Vista. It was there that I would be picked up in a black Lincoln Town Car; my friends would return in an hour to pick me up at the same spot.

Barnett herself drove us uphill to her home overlooking downtown Portland, a splendid view of the Willamette River and Mount Hood, and opened the door from the circular driveway into her laundry room. ‘There,’ she said, motioning to the washer and dryer, covered in padding overlaid with towels. ‘Take off your pants and lie down on your back.’ 

She fitted my feet into stirrups, swabbed my nether parts, injected me with a local anesthetic, and went out for a smoke while the shot took effect. With surgical instruments, she performed a simple dilation and curette into the wash tub abutting the dryer, cleaned me up, instructed me to get dressed again, gave me a drink of water, and waited to see if I would stand up or pass out. I stood up.

We drove back down the hill to meet my friends. On the drive south to the campus, I found myself in increasing pain, shock, and bewilderment, and in spite of my close friends, feeling incredibly isolated and horrified at my choices—at the very limited choices available, and the one I had made. 

In the spirit of live-and-learn, I went on in the next year to have a miscarriage; and then, when pregnant for a third time in two years, it was so clear that motherhood was my future and not a Junior year of college that I set off. Absent assistance from the father, but surrounded by the goodwill and support of a community of women, I gave birth to a very healthy baby boy, now 56 years old, whom I love dearly, and am loved in return.”

Carol returned to finish her BA when her son was three-years-old, despite extreme difficulty for a twenty-year-old mother, then rapidly disowned by her own mother for her choice to have a child. Carol later earned her MA as well.

These are the stories of the individual women who are forced to find alternate ways to receive abortion care when abortions are not protected by law and when, in fact, women are criminalized for their choices. They are stories of women who were able to receive illegal abortions, and who survived. We know that many, many throughout the world have not been so lucky, so supported, or so privileged.

Remarkably, this is where we seem to be headed again in America, to a time when women must, on their own, secretly and fearfully, find ways to terminate unwanted pregnancies and risk their lives.

Although four of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, we may well be poised to see a future again without the protections of Roe v. Wade. All while the majority of Americans support reproductive rights.

For now, Roe v. Wade is still law. We must continue to believe in a world in which women are never questioned for their healthcare decisions, choices about their futures or bodies, and whose sexual lives are not viewed under a microscope for social intrigue, ridicule, or judgment. And we must take actions and make noise on behalf of that vision.

It must be said too, and emphasized, that we need not return to a time in which women were attempting various, dangerous methods to abort their own pregnancies. Today, we have the abortion pill, and the abortion pill is extremely safe and effective. While itself in danger of regulation, the abortion pill is a safe alternative for many pregnant people who need abortions and it’s an alternative about which everyone should be informed. Share this information. Even without Roe v. Wade, abortion access is possible without subjecting pregnant people to the trauma of unsafe abortions.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies

Donate to support access to safe abortions for pregnant people. Help to guarantee protections for everyone, regardless of geography or income level.