Online through Zoom
Saturday April 10, 2021 from 9:30am - 12pm MST
The drama of King Pentheus, ritual adversary and victim of the god Dionysos in Euripides’s Bacchae, bears striking resemblance to the drama of the alcoholic-addict in the progression of his or her disease. The chorus of the Bacchae sings of the holy rites and ancient wisdom that could cure the “madness” of Pentheus, in which resonances with the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous can be found.
In this presentation and discussion, we will explore the archetypal conflict and crisis expressed by Euripides in his last great work. The conflict still exists today, and can be seen in the hostility AA still arouses in many, which Ernest Kurtz believed was due to its Existentialist roots, at odds with positivist, Enlightenment ideals.
Like the ancient mysteries of Dionysos of which the Bacchic chorus sings, AA offers a template for the acceptance of essential limitation and personal suffering as initiation into experience of the embodied divine in and through community as well as in individual relationship with a greater reality. Such initiatory practices constitute rebirth in a divine self and world, described by Jung as the inauguration of the Age of the Holy Spirit.
Cost:
$35 Members / $45 Non-Members
Tickets available starting March 6, 2021
Presenter’s Biography
FRANCES HATFIELD, PhD, LMFT, is a poet and senior Jungian analyst in private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and California. She is also the poetry editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. She teaches in the analytic training and public programs at the C. G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe and the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where she was certified. Her book of poems Rudiments of Flight (Wings Press, 2013) won the 2013 Gradiva Award for poetry from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She is currently writing a book based on her doctoral work on the archetype of Dionysos.