Sea, Spirit, Sanctuary:
Nantucket and Herman Melville’s Epic,
Moby-Dick, as Spiritual Quest

DENNIS PATRICK SLATTERY AND WILLOW YOUNG

October 5-10, 2021
Nantucket Island

In the tradition of C.G. Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, we will sojourn to the “far off isle” of Nantucket, 30 miles into the wild North Atlantic Sea. During this time together, we will explore the mythopoetic depths of Melville’s Moby-Dick as we deepen our relationship with nature and seek to align with our constant companion, the wise soul within. This voyage will also include how there was “almost a biblical fervor with which the Nantucketers viewed their whaling destiny”, which Melville develops in what can be called his spiritual epic journey of one’s soul that is Moby-Dick. Once the whaling capital of the world, Nantucket is now a place of refuge for those seeking inner renewal and restoration.

Drawing on Herman Melville’s classic epic of America and his book, Our Daily Breach: Exploring Your Personal Myth Through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, professor and author, Dennis Patrick Slattery will guide us to a deeper understanding of place as well as to help us discover new levels of meaning in the tale of the white whale. There exists an intimate relationship between the industry of whaling and the spiritual quest of the soul offered through Quakerism as a spiritual path to one’s destiny, a path that Ishmael travels on board the Pequod. Together, we will pay close attention to the content of the readings as well as the context in which we will live while reading it.

Jungian analyst and professor, Willow Young will draw us into Jung’s life-long engagement with the natural world, his study of natural sciences, and the emergence of late 19th century scientific thinking. She will share her Nantucket, which has had a deep impact on her since her childhood on the island.

This retreat will nurture our capacities to listen to nature within as she speaks to us in our dreams, imaginings, and musings, and without, as we listen to the nature of place, landscape, and experiences of synchronicity. We come with an intention to nurture ourselves, with story, the nature of our imaginations, and inner promptings. The treasures of the natural world will be highlighted in the afternoon excursions on Nantucket Island. Melville’s epic will find resonances in the natural order of the island to create a rich experience for all participants. Exploring the island invites a metaphor for exploring oneself, with the ever-present unconscious prompting us to wholeness. Here, amidst the island solitude and quiet, we can discern our responses to the inner resonances of both body and soul.

Join us on this special journey to explore and experience Nantucket’s historical significance, its connection to Melville’s classic tale, our relationship with the natural world, and insights that arise in us from fathoms deep regarding our personal and mythic spiritual journeys.

C.G. Jung club of orange county PRESENTS

Eros and the Value of Relatedness:
Jung and Ochwiay Biano and the Lineage of an Enduring Friendship

WILLOW YOUNG

Sunday, December 13, 2020
4:00-6:00 pm PT on Zoom

Jung’s journey in December 1923-January 1924 to the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, and his meeting of Ochwiay Biano (also known as Mountain Lake and Antonio Mirabal), member of the Taos Pueblo Tribal Council, demonstrated a characteristic relational capacity for which Jung and Analytical Psychology is noted. This initial encounter began a lineage of engagement, which has endured beyond Jung’s death. The ethical thread of authentic friendship carried by Jungian Analysts Dr. James Kirsch of Los Angeles, and Dr. William and Katie Sanford of Del Mar, California, continued beyond the death of Ochwiay Biano. In the spring of 1928, H. G. (Peter) Baynes and Cary De Angulo visited Mountain Lake on their way to California.  As well, Analyst Dieter Baumann, visited Taos Pueblo in 1963, meeting with Biano’s granddaughter, carried on the lineage.  

This presentation explores the experience of encounter and the necessary fundamental respect for and interest in an Other, in this case a person whose being and culture differ greatly from one’s own. Through the lens of the Jung/Ochwiay encounter and ensuing friendship, which greatly impacted Jung’s consideration of the Psyche and the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, I will expand upon the ethical response demonstrated by Jung to the reality of cultural and philosophical difference. In contemporary experience we are engaged in encounters with the other on a global scale and are asked to become conscious of the lived experience of others who are personally very different from ourselves and from each other. The tension of the opposites is pulled tight and the center point, at times, seems unable to endure the tension. 

The tradition and practice of Analytical Psychology may offer a way to host an experience and encounter with the Other. The foundational practice of dream work and Active Imagination (with engaged attention to and relationship with dream figures, themselves often quite different from our outer world lived reality) may serve to support encounters of difference experienced in the outer world and make possible ensuing dialog, deep understanding, and reparation, holding as they do the seeds of potential mutual transformation and deep relatedness. 

The presentation examines the relationship between Jung and Biano as a paradigm for experiencing ‘The other’; the paper also tells the story, based on letters from Dr. James Kirsch, Jungian Analyst to analysts Dr. William “Sandy” Sanford, and his wife Katie, of Kirsch’s request that the Sanfords ‘look after” Ochwiay Biano following Jung’s death in 1961. I will show a clip from a 2011 interview with Katie Sanford, in which she talks about her experience of Ochwiay Biano. Years of subsequent visits by the Sanfords to Taos Pueblo and correspondence between Biano and the Sanfords, are documented in the material collection of the Opus Archive, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpentaria, California.