C.G. Jung Public Lectures, Bristol

C.G. Jung Public Lectures,
Bristol

Next Film - Jan

31st January 2026 monument valley i

Mark and Susan Kidel with James Hillman

Two Films: The Architecture of the Imagination: The Door and The Staircase

1. The Architecture of the Imagination: The Door (1994)

This is poetics of the doorway – with detours through thresholds, hinges, locks and keys. A designer bolts herself up in a ground-floor London apartment that becomes a kind of prison. A heavily-built doorman incarnates the image of Janus as he stands guard outside a Piccadilly nightclub and looks right and left, two-faced like the Roman God. The guide to the Masonic Hall in London speaks of the way in which aspiring members of the Society knock on a massive brass door in order to be admitted. Others evoke the essential nature of the edge between “in“ and “out”, the sacred and the profane, the comfort of home and the dangers of the outside world. Hillman concludes by commenting on a world in which the doorway has given way to open-plan, and our need for secrecy, intimacy and containment is ignored, with a price - a loss of soul. With quotations from classics by Hitchcock, David Lean, Murnau’s Nosferatu and Cocteau’s La belle et la bête.

2. The Architecture of the Imagination: The Staircase (1994)

The staircase can evoke ascent and descent in life, whether it’s Jacob’s Ladder reaching up to Paradise or the stage on which a beautiful lady can make a graceful entrance - an image of Aphrodite descending from Heaven. It’s also a place of drama, chases, bone-shattering falls or encounters with Fate. The film follows Shell’s CEO as he climbs up over twenty floors to his office overlooking London, a daily test of his fitness as man and executive. The architect Eva Jiřičná describes a transparent steel and glass stairway she designed for a Chelsea clothes shop. Including clips from The Fallen Idol and a Chaplin slapstick classic, moments of suspense as Peter Lorre is chased down the stairs in a Fritz Lang film noir and a class in which young ladies are taught deportment and the correct way to negotiate the stairway of a country house, the film brings to life a multi-faceted image of life’s journey, seen as a matter of reaching for glorious heights or being catapulted down to failure, as in the classic game of Snakes and Ladders.

At: The Cube [off top-left of King Square], Dove Street South, Kingsdown Bristol BS2 8JD and Online, Saturday 10.30am-12.45pm

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Next Lecture - Feb

February 14th 2026 10.30 am - 12.45 pm

Dwight Turner

Dreams of the Racial Construct

When Martin Buber challenged Carl Jung on his supposed avoidance of the outer world, his retort, that ‘the shadow is the other,’ clearly acknowledged the importance of our relationships with friends, family, and those we do not like. Yet, it was Marie Louise von Franz who explored the role of projection in her wonderful book ‘Projection and Recollection,’ citing that whole groups can project their individual and collective shadows onto other groups and thereby act quite violently as we destroy that self-created other.

Dreamwork, which is a cornerstone of Jungian Psychotherapy, is a core means of understanding the internalised objects which we may have projected out onto the racialised other. This workshop, which offers a presentation based around the racial construct, together with an exploration of race in dreams explores how we might as activists be led by the wisdom of our inner unconscious as we try to bring sanity to an often-insane world.

Dr Dwight Turner is Course Leader on the Humanistic Psychotherapy Course at the University of Brighton, and a psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice. Dr Turner is the author of Decolonising Counselling and Psychotherapy: Depoliticised pathways towards intersectional practice (2025), The Psychology of Supremacy (2023), and Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2021). All are published by Routledge.

An Intersectional Psychotherapist, Dr Turner is an experienced conference speaker. He can be contacted via his website www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk or on social media on LinkedIn, Threads, or on BlueSky at @dturner300.

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General information

Since the early eighties, the C.G. Jung Public Lectures have played an important part in establishing and maintaining Bristol's reputation as an acknowledged centre of interest in Depth Psychology.

The monthly lectures are on current issues and topics broadly related to the field of analytical psychology and are given by a variety of professional and established speakers. They are open to everybody with an interest in depth psychology, the therapies, philosophy, religion, mythology, life and the arts.

The aim is to provide a friendly, informal space for Jung's ideas and philosophy to reach a wider public. There is time for refreshment, socialising, and networking after the lecture followed by participative discussion with the speaker in the round.

A reduced-price bookstall is sometimes provided by Bookmark, Bristol. Their website includes a good selection
of Jungian and Analytical Psychology titles (also at reduced prices)!
Tel: (0117) 9672928 www.psychologicaltherapybooks.co.uk

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