About Us
The Analytical Psychology Club of San Francisco (APC-SF) is an independent Jungian organization with many informal and personal links to the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
Founded January 9, 1940 under the inspiration of Jane Wheelwright, Dr. Joseph Wheelwright, Dr. Lucile Elliott and Dr. Elizabeth Whitney, APC-SF continues to:
* Promote the study and discussion of analytical psychology and related subjects
* Provide opportunity for fellowship among those who have experienced Jungian analysis,
Depth Psychology or have an interest in Jung.
* To promote the study of consciousness, past, present and future
* To promote the study of consciousness, past, present and future
* To share the alchemical process of working with dreams and images.
* To learn awareness and relationship to archetypes.
In his introduction to Psychology and Alchemy, Jung includes this characterization of the analysis process in which the patient and the doctor engage:
". . . one could say that while the patient is unconsciously and unswervingly seeking the solution to some ultimately insoluble problem, the art and technique of the doctor are doing their best to help him towards it."“Ars totum requirit hominem!” [“The art requires the whole person.”] exclaims an old alchemist. It is just this homo totus [whole person] whom we seek. The labors of the doctor as well as the quest of the patient are directed towards that hidden and as yet unmanifest “whole” man, who is at once the greater and the future man. But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is the longissima via [longest path], not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors. It is on this longissima via that we meet with those experiences which are said to be “inaccessible.” Their inaccessibility really consists in the fact that they cost us an enormous amount of effort: they demand the very thing we most fear, namely the “wholeness” which we talk about so glibly and which lends itself to endless theorizing, though in actual life we give it the widest possible berth."
- Jung, C. G., “Part I: Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works, Vol. 12, Second edition, completely revised, Princeton University Press, 1968, par. 6, p. 6.