10/08/2025
Coming up in October: The Wisdom of Erich Neumann, a program weekend with Jungian Analyst Nancy Swift Furlotti, Ph.D. This hybrid program will take place both in person at Unity of Portland (4525 SE Stark St.) and live streaming via Zoom. Register at OFJ.org
Friday Talk: The Wisdom of Erich Neumann for our Troubled World. October 24 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PDT
Who was Erich Neumann, one of Jung’s closest friends, though 30 years younger than Jung? How do Neumann’s life experiences spanning the Holocaust and World War II echo much of the chaos and evil we are experiencing today? Neumann escaped Berlin in 1933 for Palestine, where he produced a large body of work focused on Judaism, consciousness, creativity, and evil. After we are introduced to this brilliant Jungian, we will explore his own inner process of transformation as seen through his active imagination watercolor paintings.
Saturday Workshop: Why is Consciousness such a Challenge for Humanity? October 25 @ 10:00 am - 1:30 pm PDT
In this workshop, we explore Erich Neumann’s lifelong endeavor— understanding human psychological development from birth to old age – by focusing on the important questions about why we do what we do, how to change those patterns, and how change impacts humans’ relationship to the greater Self, and to “God”. It was Erich Neumann who came up with the concept of the ego-Self axis. Neumann was personally challenged to try to understand the world during WWII and why the psychology of his time changed so radically, just as it has for us today. He explored the process of normal and changing development through his books, The Origins and History of Consciousness, The Great Mother, Psychology and the New Ethic, and his more recently published books, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness: Revelation and Apocalypse; and Hasidism. Neumann’s seminal ideas provide us food for understanding and discussion. We also discuss what happens when the process goes wrong, as explained in his papers on “Narcissism” and “Mass Man.” Finally, we discuss Neumann’s interest in the uniqueness of the “creative individual” and the “nature of creativity itself” through which potent and transformative images and symbols emerge to impact the individual and the greater collective. These ideas will be grounded through examples of artists and their art in a PowerPoint presentation.
Nancy Swift Furlotti, Ph.D., is a Jungian Analyst living in Aspen, Colorado. She is a past president of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and a founding member and past president of the Philemon Foundation. She is a member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Colorado and the Interregional Association of Jungian Analysts. She is on the boards of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, CA, The Smithsonian National Asian Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Mercurius Prize Committee in Zurich. She has written numerous articles, edited a number of books, including with the late Erel Shalit, The Dream and Its Amplification. Her second book is Eternal Echoes: Erich Neumann’s Timeless Relevance to Consciousness, Creativity, and Evil, and her recent book, The Splendor of the Maya: A Journey into the Shadows at the Dawn of Creation, will be published this fall as part of the Fay Lecture Series. Dr. Furlotti lectures internationally on Jungian topics such as dreams, mythology, consciousness, the feminine, and psychedelics. Her company, Recollections, LLC, edits and publishes first-generation Jungian unpublished writings, for example, Erich Neumann’s two-volume manuscript, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, published in English, Hebrew, and German. She participated in the recent publications, Dedicated to the Soul: The Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, and Jung’s Last Lectures. She has a long history of interest in Erich Neumann’s works beginning in 2004 when at Philemon she and the then president, Steve Martin, succeeded in publishing the correspondence between C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann.
Sharing Our Decades Of Programs We have over 350 audio and video recordings of our past speakers going back 50 years. These recorded lectures, many of them containing original material prepared just for us, make our archive a unique resource of Jungian thought. OFJ members have access to all these r...
