(From left): Drs. Nancy Furlotti and Peter Whybrow, presenters Margaret Wilkinson, Dr. Morten Kringelbach and Dr. Ruth Lanius. Photo: Denny Wong
Visitors, scholars and the local community of analytical psychology practitioners affiliated with the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and the Pacifica Graduate Institute, along with UCLA faculty, came together on January 27, 2018, for the inaugural C.G. Jung Endowed Symposium, “Jung, Trauma and Neuroscience: Pathways to Healing.” Held at the UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, the event featured guest speakers and an open discussion on research and analytical psychology.
Dr. Nancy Furlotti, past president of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and the Philemon Foundation, serves as the co-chair — with Dr. Peter Whybrow, Judson Braun Chair in Biological Psychiatry and director of the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA — of the Carl Jung Professorial Endowment in Analytical Psychology board (in the Semel Institute), which she established through the Pettit Foundation in 2013 to celebrate and advance the analytical psychology work of Dr. Jung. Through Dr. Furlotti’s philanthropy, the endowment supports scholarship and research and expands Dr. Jung’s teachings at the interface of neuroscience, the mind, the body and society.
Dr. Whybrow and Dr. Furlotti welcomed guests and introduced the speakers, who were selected as a tribute to Dr. Jung’s lifelong curiosity and wide-ranging scholarship. In the first presentation, Margaret Wilkinson, from the Society of Analytical Psychology in London, asked the question: “How Do People Change? A Whole-Person Approach to Psychotherapy,” which focused on the relevance of contemporary neuroscience, trauma theory and attachment theory in daily treatment sessions and outlined how psychoanalytic therapists can help distressed clients achieve a more confident approach to living.
Dr. Ruth Lanius, director of the post-traumatic stress research unit at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, presented on, “Challenging Moments in the Treatment of Trauma: Towards a Recovered Self.” She explored strategies on how to predict and recognize trauma-related alterations in consciousness and how to effectively overcome them, while considering how those changes are represented in the patient’s mind, brain and body.
Dr. Morten Kringelbach, director of the Hedonia: Transnational Research Group, based at the universities of Oxford, England, and Aarhus in Denmark, presented, “The Tragic Miracle of Consciousness: Impact of Trauma and Stress on Unbalancing the Brain, Mind and Body,” which examined how recent access to whole-brain activity in health and disease can be described using physics-based modeling and allows an understanding of how the brain is making up the mind.
For several decades, the Semel Institute, together with the UCLA Brain Research Institute, has been building a broadly based neuroscience history archive. It houses several collections, including the professional papers of distinguished analyst Dr. Leo Rangell, who served twice as the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association and American Psychoanalytic Association. Through the UCLA Neuroscience History Archives, led by Dr. Joel T. Braslow (FEL ’92), psychiatrist, historian and Frances M. O’Malley Administrative Chair in Neuroscience History, the goal is to embrace the history and development of neuropsychiatry, psychological theory and psychoanalytic practice, which has been defined over the past century, and weave it together with the accelerating understanding of neuroscience. The pioneering work of Carl Jung in analytical psychology will play an essential role in this effort, which led to the Jung Endowment being established at UCLA.
For more information, contact Alan Han at: 310-825-1546
