LEARNING OBJECTIVES – Attendees will be able to:
1. Explain through the work of Iain McGilchrist why Jungian concepts of active imagination and the role of the embodied psyche are important for psychological functioning.
2. Analyze neuroscientific, historical, and cultural factors that drove the marginalization of embodied experience within Western psychological and cultural traditions.
3. Describe Jung’s method of embodied active imagination, including its application to clinical work with the embodied soul: body, emotion, energy, imagination, the somatic unconscious, and the subtle body.
4. Apply concepts illustrated through case vignettes and film excerpts in relation to Jungian theories of soul, embodiment, transformation, and active imagination.
REFERENCES:
Bosnak, R. (2007). Embodiment: Creative imagination in medicine, art and travel. Routledge.
Dallett, J. O. (2008). Listening to the rhino: Violence and healing in the scientific age. Aequitas Books.
McGilchrist, I. (2019). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world (2nd ed.). Yale University Press.
Leikert, S. (2021). Encapsulated body engrams and somatic narration: Integrating body memory into psychoanalytic technique. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 102(4), 671–688. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2021.1931303
Lorentz, E. (2026). Body as shadow: Jung’s method of embodied healing. Karnac Books.
Taylor, J. B. (2008, February). My stroke of insight [Video]. TED Talks. https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight
Wood, M. A. (2022). The life of the soul: Imagination, individuation, and love in C. G. Jung’s Black Books. Quadrant: Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, 51(1–2), 11–33.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
Erica Lorentz, MEd, LPC, Diplomate Jungian Analyst (IAAP) is a training analyst for the Inter-regional Society of Jungian Analysts and at the C. G. Jung Institute of New England where she has served on the Training Board. Her book Body as Shadow: Jung’s Embodied Individuation Process is published by Karnac London. She has been an adjunct faculty at Antioch New England Graduate School of Professional Psychology. Pacifica Radio and the Jung Platform have featured her work, and her lectures can be found on YouTube. Since 1986 she has given lectures and workshops in the US, Canada, and the UK, and had the honor of teaching in India. Her area of expertise is working with the embodied mythopoetic process in analysis and the inter-active field. Her initiation into Jung’s embodied active imagination started in 1975 when she began studying Authentic Movement (the Jungian form of movement work) with her mentor Janet Adler.