C.G. Jung Public Lectures, Bristol
THE 2026-27 LECTURE PROGRAMME
Cost (including refreshments): £15 online and in the room; low-waged/unwaged attendees can pay £10 on the door, or buy a full-price ticket online and be reimbursed on the door. (We cannot reimburse you online). If you would like to attend but cannot afford it, please contact cgjunglecturesbristol@gmail.com
Tickets can be bought on Ticket Tailor until 9.30am on the morning of the lecture. You will need to buy a ticket if you want to watch a recording of the lecture at a later date. Most of the talks this year will be blended: simultaneously in-house and online. We will email out the Zoom link for the lecture and full instructions on how to join. Attendance entitles people to 2½ hrs CPD.
Lectures are on the morning of the second Saturday of the month from 10.30am-12.45pm including a tea/coffee/cake break. Most lectures take place at Friends Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road, Redland, Bristol BS6 6JE. Lily Dunn's workshop on November 14th will take place at Quaker Meeting House, Beckspool Road, Frenchay, Bristol BS16 1NT (opposite Village Hall).
Following the success of last year's films, this year we will show a further two films by Mark and Susan Kidel. They will be screened on Saturday mornings January 23rd and February 27th at the Cube cinema. This is a unique opportunity to revisit these cult classics, with James Hillman as his provocative best in The Heart has Reasons, and Cary Grant's psychedelic experiences in Becoming Cary Grant. See the lecture program for information on the films.
All films are showing at The Cube [off top-left of King Square], Dove Street South, Kingsdown, Bristol BS2 8JD and Online, 10.30am-12.45pm
October 10 2026 10.30am-12.45pm
Chris Bucklow
They Call it Art Afterwards
I tend to think of my paintings as data, rather than as art. Like dreams, they provide information about the psyche. It’s only later that they get called ‘art’.
This talk will be about my use of daydreaming, or Active Imagination, to produce images. I start each canvas without a plan, and the painting becomes a story that grows in the telling. After many years of working in this way, patterns and themes emerge, such as the recovery of a primordial, non-verbal language; a language of things rather than words. As in dreams, internal entities are personified as characters, places and objects.
I have recorded my dreams since 1986. The whole sequence of 688 dreams were published in the book ‘Nantucket Sleighride’ in 2017, along with an interpretive essay exploring the major themes. I will talk about how the nightdreams and the daydreamed paintings speak of similar things, and appear to have the same teleological aim, but that each uses a different lexicon of symbolic objects.
Chris Bucklow started to make art when he was thirty-two, after a significant dream. Prior to that he was an art historian and curator at the V&A Museum in London, where he specialised in Romantic Period prints and drawings, including William Blake. Bucklow’s artworks can be seen in many museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, all located in New York. Chris’s long conversations about his paintings with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in 2003 were published in the book ‘If This Be Not I’ (British Museum, 2004). Copies will be available at the talk.
Chris has also written several books exploring the underlying metaphorical languages of artists including Philip Guston (Wordsworth Trust, 2007) and Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 2019). He has been awarded residences at The Banff Centre, Alberta; The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere and the British Museum, London.
November 14 2026 10.30am-12.45pm
This workshop will take place at Quaker Meeting House, Beckspool Road, Frenchay, Bristol BS16 1NT (opposite Village Hall).
We can gather at the White Lion on the common afterwards. There is a bus service from the Centre.
Lily Dunn
Join Dr Lily Dunn for a workshop and discussion on the transformative power of writing and crafting memoir
Drawing from her two most recent books, Sins of My Father: A Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling, and Into Being: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform Lily Dunn will talk about how the process of writing Sins of My Father helped her transcend the original experience that had motivated it: her experience of an emotionally unavailable and solipsistic father.
She realised the process of writing memoir could be both artful and therapeutic. What followed was a craft book about the transformative experience of writing and publishing memoir, Into Being.
In this workshop, Lily Dunn will introduce us to the concept of ‘moments of being’ borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s essay and personal writing: A Sketch of the Past. She will guide us through the difference between a memory and a moment. Identifying and then writing into ‘moments’ – resonant of something greater than the memory itself – which are the perfect antidote to the blank page. This workshop will not only help us find our way into writing, but also help us identify why certain memories stay with us more than others. So much about writing is learning to pay attention, and to listen to the messages and meaning that are revealed to us through our persistent memories.
There will be texts to analyse, writing exercises and lots of discussion. Everyone is welcome, whether an experienced or aspiring writer.
Dr Lily Dunn grew up in Islington, London, in the 1970-80s to publisher and writer parents. When she was six years old her father abruptly left the family to travel to India to meet the notorious guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. When he returned 6 months later, dressed in the colours of the sunrise, he told them he had been reborn. So started a daughter’s pilgrimage to better understand her father, and a life that was driven by selfish impulses and ended prematurely in addiction. Lily learned early that writing was a salve for her confused feelings, and she grew up to be a novelist and then to love everything about memoir. She teaches and mentors privately and through The Arvon Foundation, and is a teaching fellow at Bath Spa University.
Books by Dr Lily Dunn:
Shadowing the Sun (2008 Portobello Books)
‘A heart-rending account of a young girl’s loss of innocence… told in limpid prose, seeped in the prickly heat of a Tuscan summer.’ Time Out magazine
‘The sins of the father are mercilessly explored in Lily Dunn’s impressive and confident first novel.’ The Sunday Times
Sins of My Father: A Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling (2022 Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
One of the Guardian and the New Statesman nonfiction books of the year.
‘as vivid an account of addiction as I can remember reading.’ The Guardian: Book of the Day
‘An astonishing and valuable memoir.’ The Spectator
‘A superb memoir.’ The Daily Mail: Book of the Week.
Into Being: The radical craft of memoir and its power to transform (2025 Manchester University Press)
‘Lily Dunn is one of our best teachers and theorists of autobiographical writing and Into being is an inspiring, philosophical and helpful guide.‘ Amy Liptrot, The Outrun
‘Into Being is a startlingly beautiful book that unpacks the craft of memoir with compassion and vast wisdom.’ Elissa Altman, author of Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create
December 12th 2026 10.30am-12.45pm
Heba Zaphirion-Zafiri
In Place of Words, Memories
"Word, the paltriest and mightiest” (Jung, 2009) can forge profound connection or enact epistemic violence. The silencing of words has shaped both our personal and collective experience of the on-going Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). Shrouded in duplicity, words have shattered Palestinian life on the hard rock of indifference. When they are foreclosed or splintered, words fail to express the overwhelming distress.
Silencing words silence memory. Memory is not merely a storage system of past events; it is an active process of bringing the hidden into light, a process of unveiling reality itself, truth is disclosure. In the story I am telling, the amputation of memory is met with another type of memory, one that defies amnesia. Memory, like imagination, can open a cosmic sea which saves the spirit from collapsing into nothingness.
In this talk, we will think about how Palestinian history, culture and identity are being silenced and erased. I will tell the story of how memory can prevail in astonishing ways even amidst incredible hardship and extinction of words and people.
Heba Zaphiriou-Zarifi GAP, UKCP, IAAP is a training Jungian analyst, supervisor and seminar leader. She has delivered talks at IAAP-sponsored conferences, including the Jungian Odyssey, and at the C.G. Jung Club–London, where she recently played ‘Soul’ in Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead. Leadership Trained in BodySoul Rhythms© at the Marion Woodman Foundation, she integrates depth psychology with embodied active imagination, voice and dream work as well as energy-based therapies. Heba founded the Central London Authentic Movement Group. She is a published author in many academic journals and recently conceived and developed the Stand By The Mother lecture series.
January 9 2027 10.30am-12.45pm
Rob Porteous
Sensing the body’s wisdom in an ensouled world
What is the role of therapy in a world where we face significant political, social and environmental challenges? How can we learn to live more sustainably on earth? What does it mean to bring mind, heart and body into alignment? And how can we be with these questions rather than rushing to find answers that seek in part to avoid them?
Stories and symbols that once held meaning have for many people lost their capacity to set our everyday lives in a deeper context. We need a new narrative of our relationship to each other, and to the world around us, if we are to deal effectively with the problems we create. We need to change the nature of our conversation with Earth.
Instead of setting ourselves, apart from nature, we could imagine being a part of it. Instead of a world of inanimate resources that we can exploit for our own ends, we could imagine a living earth, filled with interdependent beings with whom our lives are intertwined. Such a story has its roots in mystical traditions that describe the relationship between body and spirit.
A central symbol of this story is the tree of life. Its Judaic version, the kabalah, describes both the vertical and the horizontal axes of our lives; our experience of life’s passage through time, and our relationship to the eternal. Holding such an image in mind can help us find meaning in the ordinary physicality of our lives. It can re-frame the conversation between mind and body, and help us re-imagine trauma, bringing us home to ourselves in a more grounded way.
Rob Porteous worked for 30 years as a secondary school teacher, of English and slow learners, with whom he sometimes felt an affinity. At the age of 50 he retrained as a therapist, and has been in private practice in south Bristol since graduating in 1999. During the same period, he has studied the shamanic dance, Movement Medicine’ which has greatly deepened his awareness of his embodied response to life.
Next Film - Jan
January 23 2027 10.30am-12.45pm
Film by Mark and Susan Kidel with James HIllman
The Heart has Reasons
The Heart Has Reasons (1993) explores different ways of imagining the human heart: contrasting science and medicine’s idea of this essential but fragile organ as a pump or a piece of machinery that can be fixed, with the image of the heart common to all cultures, as the seat of courage, love and the soul. The film’s main contributor is James Hillman whose essay The Thought of the Heart inspired Mark and Susan Kidel to make a documentary that was included in a Channel Four (UK) series about cardiac disease, a film that would take viewers on an less conventional journey, bringing together artists, musicians, writers with a heart surgeon who acknowledges that medical students are taught from the outset to put their “hearts” or their emotions to one side.
The film is thought-provoking, at times very moving and often funny, as humour nourishes the heart as much as beauty in its various forms. The film is a rare and enchanting example of a take on the human body that embraces poetry alongside science, and opens up different pathways to healing, an approach that makes the person well through the work of the imagination, not just the skill of the heart surgeon with his scalpel and his technology. Contributors include the Brazilian musician Nana Vasconcelos, the lutenist Anthony Rooley, the jeweller Slim Barrett and the artist Robert Mason. Others include psychologist and writer Ginette Paris, Liz McCormick- a psychotherapist who specialises in clients with heart disease- a tattooist and a heart specialist.
Mark Kidel is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer and critic working in France and the UK, and specialising - not exclusively - in music and the arts. He has written a great deal about music and visual art, participated in the creation of the WOMAD world music festival, and run conferences, seminars and lecture series at Dartington Hall.
In 1976, frustrated by what he saw as television's increasing superficiality and the professional pressure to make formulaic films to please as wide an audience as possible, Mark left the industry to work for the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon. Mark was director of the "New Themes for Education" international and cross-disciplinary conference held at Dartington Hall from 1984 to 1986. The conference included the exploration of the experience of illness and brought together people from the worlds of medicine, psychology and the arts, and led to Mark and Susan Kidel co-editing The Meaning of Illness (Routledge, London, 1986).
In 1984 Mark invited the post-Jungian writer and psychologist James Hillman and therapist and writer Pat Berry to Dartington to run a weekend seminar on animals in myths, dreams and fairy tales. Following this, Mark, James and Susan collaborated on seven films based on Hillman's ideas. In The Architecture of the Imagination (1994) Hillman explores the rich and archetypal ambiguities of such images as The Door, The Staircase, The Window, the Tower and the Bridge. The first four films were shown last year at the Cube. The other two films are Kind of Blue: an essay (Winner of a Royal Television Society Award in 1995, also shown last year) and The Heart Has Reasons.
Becoming Cary Grant explores the actor’s LSD therapy in the late 1950s. Recent films explore the French artist Fabienne Verdier, the English sculptor Bridget McCrum, and Elvis Costello.
Susan Kidel, formerly Susan Rowe-Leete, collaborated with Mark Kidel and James Hillman on all the films being screened at the Cube. She was also the co-editor of the collection of essays The Meaning of Illness (RKP 1995). She is a psychotherapist, psychospiritual coach and artist.
February 13 2027 10:30am-12:45pm
Miltos Hadjiosif
De-colonisation and Re-enchantment
In this talk, I will try to destabilise the idea that decolonisation is a measurable process, or that it can have an agreed upon end point. I will do so by invoking meraki and post-qualitative epistemologies in order to communicate (and perhaps demonstrate) how colonised and colonising subjects are constituted through discourse, embodiment, but also spirit. I will also share some lived experiences of enacting and sharing a de-colonisation agenda in my scholarship, teaching, and learning.
Related to de-colonisation, for me, is the concept of re-enchantment, which has been taken up by prominent post-Jungian scholars as one direction that Jungian ideas can take in order to connect with neglected aspects of psychoanalytic thinking: social inequalities, epistemic homelessness, and community building.
You might have your own (re)actions to this material, as we lean on ideas drawn from critical and indigenous scholarship and play with notions and facets of de-colonisation and re-enchantment. I hope to conclude this talk by making way for audience responses and the nurturing of a radical affect: togetherness in the face of potential discomfort and confusion.
Dr Miltos Hadjiosif is a Senior Lecturer in Counselling & Community Psychology. His work centres critical reflexivity, a quality that is systematically assaulted by mainstream Psychology and the neo-liberal university. He is the co-founder of the Community Psychology Festival and the leader of UWE’s Critical Autoethnography Network. Miltos won the BPS Best Supervisor/Mentor Award (2019) and has been nominated several times for the outstanding teaching award at UWE. He works very closely with his doctoral students to forge soul connections and communities of practice. Together, they challenge counselling psychology’s complacency and advocate for decolonisation, re-enchantment, and a soul perspective. Miltos believes that these processes/orientations can start with the self of the scholar-practitioner.
Next Film - Feb
February 27 2027
Film by Mark and Susan Kidel
Becoming Cary Grant
Mark Kidel is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer and critic working in France and the UK, and specialising - not exclusively - in music and the arts. He has written a great deal about music and visual art, participated in the creation of the WOMAD world music festival, and run conferences, seminars and lecture series at Dartington Hall.
In 1976, frustrated by what he saw as television's increasing superficiality and the professional pressure to make formulaic films to please as wide an audience as possible, Mark left the industry to work for the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon. Mark was director of the "New Themes for Education" international and cross-disciplinary conference held at Dartington Hall from 1984 to 1986. The conference included the exploration of the experience of illness and brought together people from the worlds of medicine, psychology and the arts, and led to Mark and Susan Kidel co-editing The Meaning of Illness (Routledge, London, 1986).
In 1984 Mark invited the post-Jungian writer and psychologist James Hillman and therapist and writer Pat Berry to Dartington to run a weekend seminar on animals in myths, dreams and fairy tales. Following this, Mark, James and Susan collaborated on seven films based on Hillman's ideas. In The Architecture of the Imagination (1994) Hillman explores the rich and archetypal ambiguities of such images as The Door, The Staircase, The Window, the Tower and the Bridge. The first four films were shown last year at the Cube. The other two films are Kind of Blue: an essay (Winner of a Royal Television Society Award in 1995, shown last year) and The Heart Has Reasons.
Becoming Cary Grant explores the actor’s LSD therapy in the late 1950s. Recent films explore the French artist Fabienne Verdier, the English sculptor Bridget McCrum, and Elvis Costello.
Susan Kidel, formerly Susan Rowe-Leete, collaborated with Mark Kidel and James Hillman on all the films being screened at the Cube. She was also the co-editor of the collection of essays The Meaning of Illness (RKP 1995). She is a psychotherapist, psychospiritual coach and artist.
March 13 2027 10.30am-12.45pm
Eloise Kane
Wilderlands
Wilderlands is the story of our relationship to nature and the wild told over 12,000 years. The past is so often held up as something we need to return to, the idea that, left alone, nature could heal itself back to a time when we lived in harmony with the environment. But when was Britain last wild, and does anything still remain? Our landscape is the product of thousands of years of interaction between people and the environment, and the result of millions of lives lived within it. While nothing is untouched, it still has value: wildness persists even if wilderness does not.
I argue that our current crisis stems from a separation from nature that has been growing since the end of the last ice age, and that the term wild has become so loaded we no longer really understand what it means. Rather than trying to rewild everything, it is better to understand the backstory of how we got here so that we can unpick centuries of seeing ‘the wild’ as something without people. If we can let go of what we wish we had inherited from the past, we can make better-informed decisions about the land we actually have.
Eloise Kane is a historical archaeologist specialising in the relationship between landscape, people and animals. Her professional background is in heritage funding, community archaeology, and heritage data, and her PhD examined the role of hunting in British landscapes in the post-medieval period. She is Visiting Fellow at the Royal Agricultural University and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Wilderlands is her first book and was published by Faber & Faber in April 2026.
April 10 2027 10.30am-12.45pm 
Richard Jenkins
The Power of Symbols and the Poetics of Peace
The talk explores the significance of Jung’s notion of the ‘uniting symbol’ in relation to the healing the body politic. Drawing on The Red Book, it examines the conditions necessary for such symbols to emerge not just in the clinic but in communities, emphasizing the vital role of imagination.
The talk invites parallels between the historical conflict in Northern Ireland and today's society where competing truth claims undermine social trust, limit our capacity to think and fuel cycles of violence.
Jung warned “not to be indifferent to the poets,” as they “create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream” (CW VI, §323). The talk highlights what analytical psychology today can learn from the struggles of poets from the North of Ireland to articulate this symbolic depth.
The talk offers a personal reflection on the making of a Jungian Analyst born and raised in Belfast at the height of ‘The Troubles’.
Richard Jenkins is a Jungian Analyst, Supervisor, Psychodynamic Psychotherapist, and Training Analyst for the Association of Jungian Analysts (AJA). Following his initial training at WPF Therapy, he now teaches at the Bowlby Centre, the SAP, the WMIP, and on AJA’s Analytic training. Holding degrees in Law and Theology, a Master’s in Contemporary Theology, and postgraduate diplomas in Pastoral Counselling and Psychodynamic Theory, his practice is deeply informed by a lifelong interest in the intersection of psyche, culture, and meaning.
May 8 2027 10.30am-12.45pm 
Jay Barlow
Maman
This paper traces a decade-long analytic treatment with Alma, who entered intensive analysis in late adolescence following the death of her father and the intensification of a mother complex. Central to the clinical narrative is the emergence of a recurrent hallucinatory figure, the “She”-spider, evolving from dreams and fragmentary sensations into an embodied presence within the consulting room. The spider becomes not merely a symptom, but a psychic structure through which trauma, dissociation, and an ambivalent maternal object are communicated and lived.
Drawing on Jung, Bion, Winnicott, Bick, Meltzer, Laplanche, and Ferenczi, the paper explores how hallucination, unconscious communication, and participation mystique may emerge when affect regulation is fragile and symbolic function compromised by early relational trauma. Particular attention is given to the analyst’s embodied countertransference and the role of patience, witnessing, and carefully paced containment in facilitating psychological development. Louise Bourgeois’ spider imagery and Maman sculptures are interwoven as symbolic companions to the clinical material, expressing maternal themes of protection, predation, entrapment, and repair. The paper culminates in a significant frame rupture that enables movement from malignant dread toward mourning, separation, and the beginnings of greater psychic agency.
Jay Barlow is Director of Training at the Society of Analytical Psychology where he is a training and supervising analyst. Jay holds an MA in Jungian and post Jungian studies and has worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He supervises and teaches on various analytic trainings. His private practice is in Clapham, London.
June 12 2027 10.30am-12.45pm 
Christina Shewell
Sticks and Stones: Voice and Words
We know that the old saying ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ is not true. Words and voices can indeed have a powerful effect, both psychologically and physically, through their impact on the brain and body. In this talk, Christina will talk about the effect of different voice qualities on the body, and the way that actual words themselves can affect a reader, speaker or listener. The talk will include research and references from psychology, neuroscience, literature and poetry. A short (optional!) practical workshop, linked to these themes, offers the opportunity for those interested to explore some of the ideas in practice.
C hristina Shewell, MA, FRCSLT ADVS, is a spoken voice teacher, speech and language therapist, and communication skills coach with extensive experience in voice development, therapy, and training. She has been senior lecturer in voice and counselling skills at University College London, voice teacher at major acting schools, and continues to work in a range of settings, including as a coach for RADA Business. Christina has a particular interest in the links between voice, words, emotion, and the physical body, including voice as a form of healing. As an international lecturer and course leader, her writing, presentations, and workshops are eclectic and exploratory, and combine science-based fact with experiential body and voice work. This is exemplified in her book, Voice Work: Art and Science in Changing Voices (2009/2025), and in her journal article, Poetry, Voice, Brain and Body (2020). She was recently given a lifetime achievement award by VASTA (the International Voice and Speech Trainers Association).