May Meeting w Special Event

The View from Roma: Contemporary Observations on Matriarchal Consciousness

with

John Beebe, MD and Francis Lu, MD
Saturday, May 11, 2019

2:00 – 4:30 p.m. Movie

4:30 – 5:00 p.m. Meal (provided)

5:00 – 7:00 p.m. Presentation and Discussion

RSVP:  outreach@sfapc.org  or 415 469-9832 

or register on Eventbrite.

St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church

101 Gold Mine Drive

San Francisco, CA 94131

Includes a full-length viewing of the film Roma
Suggested donation: $15. Includes hearty refreshments.. 

Parking allowed for church events in Diamond Height’s Safeway parking lot.

#52 Muni bus stops at the corner of Gold Mine Drive and Diamond Heights Boulevard

View from Roma: Contemporary Observations on Matriarchal Consciousness with John Beebe, MD and Francis Lu, MD

Includes a full-length viewing of the film Roma.

From the beginning of his career, Alfonso Cuarón has distinguished himself as a director of cinema by his astonishing ability to place people and telling images of their situations on the canvas of the wide screen. There is probably no filmmaker alive who has a more unerring knack for composing individual shots and then creating movement within them so that the story is told from inside the situation rather than in a logocentric way that privileges cause and effect, motivation and consequence. Cuarón has specialized in letting meaning emerge from image. 

Roma is an autobiographical film. The title refers to the district of Mexico City where Cuaróngrew up in a dysfunctional family struggling to keep its emotional head above water, saved by the steady matriarchal presence of their Mixtecan maid. The watchful eye of Cleo, the domestic worker, becomes the consciousness that informs Cuaron’s camera in this, his masterpiece to date. The film won him three 2018 Academy Awards, for direction and for cinematography, as well as receiving the Oscar for best foreign language film.

Viewed from the standpoint of analytical psychology, Roma give us a chance to see what Erich Neumann first called “matriarchal consciousness” in action. This aspect of the feminine is not the Great Mother of the unconscious, nor the compensatory mother complex of the neurotic adult unconsciously reacting to the abandonment of the psyche by patriarchy. Matriarchal consciousness is, rather, a true alternative to patriarchal consciousness, one equally capable of individuation, that is, of evolving its own insights and learning how to navigate psychological reality with holistic vision. This consciousness has the psychological integrity to consider the needs of the whole and the instinctive agency to act upon what it knows. 

In this daylong presentation, Dr. Beebe and Dr. Lu hope to foster our own mindful viewing of Cuarón’s new classic, so that the shared experience of watching can become a collective meditation on contemporary prospects for the soul in a world increasingly one-sided and abandoned to its fate. To enable us to see Roma as Cuarón intended, we will show the film in its entirety on 4K Blu-ray video projection and 5.1 sound equipment brought by Dr. Lu.

Dr. John Beebe is a Jungian analyst and past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. His books include Integrity in Depth and Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The reservoir of consciousness. He is co-author, with Virginia Apperson, of The Presence of the Feminine in Film.

Dr. Francis Lu is the Luke & Grace Kim Professor in Cultural Psychiatry, Emeritus, at UC Davis. Since 1987 he has led 35 seminars at Esalen exploring film and the transpersonal. 

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Coming in June

Annual APC-SF Picnic 

Sunday, June 9, 2019

Rossmoor Dollar Clubhouse, Walnut Creek

Unexpected Pieces of our Hearts: How Synchronicity Shapes the Stories of our Families

With

Robert H. Hopcke, LMFT

Jung's concept of synchronicity or meaningful chance is one of his most engaging and familiar. In this lecture, Rob Hopcke will be presenting the four aspects of synchronistic events that make up Jung's thoughts on this phenomena in order to place this notion within the overall context of Jung's theories on analytical psychology.  Using his own recent research on synchronistic events within family and love relationships specifically, Rob will be using these stories to show how synchronicity operates through the archetype of "family" unconsciously to create wholeness in our lives through what seems at first to us like random chance.

Robert H. Hopcke has been a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice in Berkeley, California since 1986.  Along with his numerous articles and reviews published throughout the world, he is the author of the national best-seller, There Are No Accidents:  Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives, which has been translated into over a dozen languages, most recently followed by his latest work, There are No Accidents in Love:  Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Families.  He has lectured and run workshops around the country on the concept of meaningful coincidence for the past two decades, has appeared on Strange Universe and The Other Side, along with numerous other TV and radio interviews on the topic, and most recently he was featured in David Strabala's documentary film, What is Synchronicity? released two years ago.

Beyond his work in the field of synchronicity, Rob's other writings include some now standard scholarly reference works within the field of analytical psychology, including Jung, Jungians and Homosexuality; Men's Dreams, Men's Healing; A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung; and The Persona:  Where Sacred Meets Profane, and for a number of years he taught on the faculty of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, now Sofia University, in Palo Alto, California, in the areas of Jungian psychology, human sexuality and spiritual direction.  

Copies of There are No Accidents in Love:  Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Families and Robert's other books will be available for purchase.

Rossmoor Dollar Clubhouse, Walnut Creek

1015 Stanley Dollar Dr

Walnut Creek, CA 94595

11:00 a.m.  - Gather

Noon  - Potluck lunch – bring food to share (Iced tea, coffee, water provided)

1:00 - 2:30 p.m. Presentation and Discussion

3:00 p.m. Departure

RSVP: Shirley Kaiser skaiser806@gmail.com or 925-939-7759

DIRECTIONS: From any location get on Hwy. 24. Exit at Pleasant Hill Road. Take Pleasant Hill Road south. It ends in a roundabout; go half way around going east on Olympic Blvd. Take a right on to Tice Valley Blvd. Then right on to Rossmoor Parkway. Be in one of the left two lanes. At the gate, tell the security staff person you are going to the Shirley Kaiser gathering at the Dollar Club House. Continue on Rossmoor Parkway to Stanley Dollar Drive. Be in the left lane for the first driveway on the left.

Turn left into the driveway; go past the large building (Event Center) on the right. Ahead you will see the Dollar Clubhouse fronted by a large parking lot.

For Those Taking BART: call or email Shirley for coordinated pickup from the Lafayette BART station.