Fielding graduate Joan Conger presents lecture at the Jung Society of Atlanta

Archetype and the New Sciences. Lecture presented at the Jung Society of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA (June, 2011) -- Joan Conger is a rising PhD candidate in Human Development and Organizational Systems at Fielding University. She studies the transformation of human consciousness from responsible adulthood to a more complex and subtle mature wisdom, especially the relational and organizational environments most nourishing of this shift. Certified by a Masters in Human and Organization Development, she is a wisdom mentor/coach, a facilitator of appreciative organizational change, and an aspiring writer and teacher.

What Jung called archetypes can seem to the rational mind to be interesting, if merely metaphorical, descriptions of inner processes for the personal psyche and collective experience. In this lecture Joan will briefly present her current understanding of several theoretical approaches to the new sciences and new philosophies and use them to affirm the presence of archetypes as manifest realities. Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy describes the world as in continual flow toward a higher aim, quite different from the mechanical forces of Newton’s universe. Complex Adaptive Systems Theory explains nature as a community where no actor is ever a separate individual but in which dynamic points of stability within webs of relationship mean chaos almost never seems to take over. Physicist David Bohm reveals the holographic nature of existence, in which the all is reflected in the singular, each point is a perspective on the whole not an independent being, and all patterns throughout the cosmos exist within the singular moment.

These thinkers aren’t the only examples. There are others: William James’ pragmatic mysticism, Henri Bergson’s creative intuition, Teilhard de Chardin’s milieu divine, Edmund Husserl’s existential phenomenology, the poetics of Emerson, Wordsworth, Whitman, Blake and the insights of the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching. Come, explore with Joan what she has learned of these new sciences in her study of human development and you may leave with vastly different questions about the role of archetypes in your own world.

http://www.jungatlanta.com/schedule-conger.html