Birth of the Self

“Every act of birth requires the courage to let go of something…and to rely on one thing: one’s own power to be aware and respond; that is, one’s creativity. To be creative means to consider the whole process of life as a process of birth, and not to take any stage of life as a final stage.”—Erich Fromm

Dr. Marlo explores this question by illuminating archetypal and developmental dimensions of birth. These ideas come to life through her presentation of over fifteen years of analysis with a woman who began treatment dissociated from her self/Self. The treatment chronicles an emergent process of birth, development, and transformation, and demonstrates the patient’s developing relationship with her self/Self. The labor of the work is revealed through session dialogue, process comments, and Dr. Marlo’s inner experience, an evocative format that captures the nonlinear, emergent, and dynamic qualities of the analytical process and relational field. The clinical implications of “the birth story” are explored. The panel of three diverse, seasoned analysts, will respond to this work. 

HELEN MARLO, PHD, clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst, practices in San Mateo, CA. She is Professor and Chair of the Clinical Psychology Department at Notre Dame de Namur University. She has published and presented on trauma, spirituality, synchronicity, and reproductive mental health. She founded “Mentoring Mothers,” which addresses perinatal issues. She is Reviews Editor for Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche. 

JOHN BEEBE, MD, a Jungian analyst in practice in San Francisco, is the author of Integrity in Depth and “Primary Ambivalence toward the Self” and editor of Jung’s Aspects of the Masculine and co-editor of The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C. G. Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan (1915-1916). A past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, he lectures on topics related to the emergence of the self/Self.

KAREN PEOPLES, PHD, is a psychoanalyst in San Francisco and Marin. She is a Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She has published and presented on incest trauma, transcendent and traumatic forms of emptiness in the self, mass dissociation in the problem of “evil,” social trauma and fundamentalist psychic states, the uncanny and the relational unconscious, and myths of sacrifice in clinic and culture. 

BEVERLY ZABRISKIE, LCSW, is a Jungian analyst in New York City, a founding member, former President, and faculty member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (JPA). Ms Zabriskie gave the 2007 Fay Lectures on “Emotion and Transformation: From Myth to Neuroscience.” Her fifty publications include “A Meeting of Rare Minds,” the preface to Atom and Archetype: The Pauli-Jung Correspondence. She is on the board of the Philemon Foundation.

The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco is accredited by the Institute of Medical Quality/California Medical Association (IMQ/CMA) to provide continuing medical education for physicians. The Jung Institute of San Francisco takes responsibility for the content, quality and scientific integrity of this CME activity. 6 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ are offered for this event.