Workshops and Seminars
The C.G. Jung Foundation presents
The Power of the Ancestors
a daylong seminar led by
Susan C. Roberts, MSW
Saturday, February 20, 2010
10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
According to the Old Testament, the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons down to the third and fourth generations. Indeed, it often seems the complexes a person struggles with do not belong exclusively to him but are problems inherited from earlier generations.
On this day, we will consider the idea of the family soul, a layer of the psyche that lies below the personal unconscious but above the collective bedrock where the archetypes reside. We will explore how this ancestral psyche seeks justice and healing through children born in later generations, who may be charged with completing their forebear’s unfinished business and making conscious what was previously left in shadow. In the process, we will draw on Jung’s own writings, traditions of ancestor worship in Africa and elsewhere, and contemporary approaches to intergenerational trauma.
We will also undertake preliminary investigations into our own ancestral karmas and look at ways we might begin redeeming our families unquiet ghosts.
Susan C. Roberts, MSW, is a psychotherapist working with individuals and families in Washington, D.C., and a candidate in training with the Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts. She has also trained in the intergenerational family systems model of German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger.