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Stanton Marlan (born 1943) is an American clinical psychologist, Jungian psychoanalyst, author, and educator. Marlan has authored or edited scores of publications in Analytical Psychology (Jungian Psychology) and Archetypal Psychology. Three of his more well-known publications are The Black Sun. The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, [1] C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, [2] and Jung's Alchemical Philosophy. [3] Marlan is also known for his polemics with German Jungian psychoanalyst Wolfgang Giegerich. Marlan co-founded the Pittsburgh Society of Jungian Analysts and was the first director and training coordinator of the C. G. Jung Institute Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh. Currently, Marlan is in private practice and serves as adjunct professor of Clinical Psychology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He also currently
Marlan obtained a B.A. from Bard College and master's degrees in both Asian philosophy (University of Hawaii, 1968) and in psychology (New School for Social Research, now New School University, 1970). He later attended Duquesne University, obtaining a doctorate in clinical psychology in 1980 and a further doctorate in philosophy from Duquesne in 2014. Marlan's interests in philosophy include mainstream academic Continental European philosophy as well as various religious and spiritual traditions (both Eastern and Western). Esotericism, alchemy, and dreams are among Marlan's special interests.
Marlan began his training in Jungian psychoanalysis at the C. G. Jung Institute of New York, where he studied with well-known Jungian analysts and authors Edward Edinger and Edward Whitmont, among others. He later moved to Pittsburgh and became an early graduate of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts (IRSJA), graduating as a Jungian analyst in 1980. Throughout these years of psychological and psychoanalytic training, Marlan held a number of clinical and academic positions.
After his graduation as a Jungian psychoanalyst in 1980, Marlan founded the C. G. Jung Institute Analytic Training Program of Pittsburgh, a training program in Jungian psychoanalysis associated with the IRSJA. A number of Jungian psychoanalysts who work in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere have attended the Pittsburgh Institute Analytic Training Program and have graduated from the IRSJA. Marlan has continued to teach and periodically direct the training program he founded. In 2004, Marlan co-founded the Pittsburgh Society of Jungian Analysts, comprising a number of Jungian analysts residing mostly in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Western New York.
Marlan holds a number of academic and professional positions, among them Teaching and Training Analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology and Clinical Supervisor at the Psychology Clinic at Duquesne University. He was formerly a Member of the board of directors and Past President of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAP), a Representative for Psychoanalysis and Member on the board of trustees for Psychoanalysis for the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP), a Fellow of the American Board of Psychoanalysis (ABP), co-chair of the Psychoanalysis Synarchy Group for Council of Specialties in Professional Psychology, and a Member of the board of trustees of the Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education (ACPE Inc.). Marlan is also active on a number of editorial boards for Jungian and psychoanalytic journals, including the editorial board of Spring Publications. He is a recent recipient of a Distinguished Service Award from American Board of Professional Psychology and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (2019). He was also a cofounder and the first president of the "Psychology-Psychoanalyst Forum," which has since become the “Psychoanalytic Clinicians,” Section 5 of the American Psychological Association’s Division 39.
Marlan’s interests in the human psyche extend beyond the typical limits of psychology and psychoanalysis, into areas of religion, spirituality, and the study of experimentation with psychedelics. Marlan is co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. [4]
Marlan has written and edited a number of books and articles, mostly within the disciplines of Jungian and Archetypal Psychologies. Two of the more well-known are the following.
Marlan’s book The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness [5] explores darkness as a metaphor for negative psychological experiences, such as despair and depression. As a rule, Marlan maintains, Western psychology treats such “dark” experiences as purely negative, i.e. as experiences to be avoided or, at best, “gotten through,” rather than experienced and potentially valued on their own terms. In contrast, Marlan develops an understanding of these experiences of darkness which insists on their having psychological significance of their own and not only the relative value of being a step toward some other, more positive psychological stage. His analysis in some measure deconstructs the views of both standard Western psychology and standard Jungian psychological theory, by treating the darkness as a complement to Jung's notion of the “Self.” His investigation draws on a large variety of sources, including Jungian and Archetypal theory, clinical examples, literature, poetry, art, philosophy, and religious mysticism in order to highlight the value these experiences of “darkness” can have and how they can in principle serve the purposes of psychological growth and individuation. The text includes extended clinical examples illustrating the significance Marlan attributes to the darkness. The founder of Archetypal Psychology, James Hillman, wrote of The Black Sun that “Since Jung first opened the obscurities of alchemy to psychological insight, no one has done a book as thorough, as rich, and as significant as this astounding work by Stanton Marlan.” [6]
The book Archetypal Psychologies: Reflections in Honor of James Hillman, [7] edited by Marlan, was inspired by a conference in honor of James Hillman’s eightieth birthday. The volume is simultaneously an example of the broad interests and applications associated with Archetypal Psychology and a retrospective, offering a view of the historical events and achievements, particularly by Hillman and a number of those responsive to his new approach to psychology, which later developed into the tradition of Archetypal Psychology. The volume includes contributions from well-known Jungian and Archetypal psychologists and represents perhaps the broadest published application of Archetypal Psychology to date.
Marlan's more recent work has focused on what he calls the "alchemical imagination," especially found in his two books, C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination [8] and Jung's Alchemical Philosophy. [9] Marlan's approach to alchemy in part takes up the alchemical studies of both Carl Jung and of James Hillman but especially underlines the value of alchemy for understanding and re-imagining the nature of depth psychology as a whole, counteracting certain tendencies toward literalism and essentialism in contemporary depth psychology. Marlan's interpretations both of the history of laboratory alchemy and of depth psychology elucidate aspects of each, highlighting the transformative character of the alchemists' pursuit of the philosophers' stone.
Marlan is also known for his polemics with Wolfgang Giegerich. Giegerich is an influential German psychologist and psychoanalyst. Like Marlan, Giegerich was a collaborator with James Hillman. At a later point in time, Giegerich developed his own psychological approach, partially borrowing from traditional depth psychology, Jung, and Hillman's Archetypal Psychology, but also from philosophers G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. Giegerich's approach has become known as “psychology as the discipline of interiority.” Marlan, while appreciating Giegerich's approach, has also criticized Giegerich, in several cases provoking respectful responses from Giegerich. In particular, Marlan has argued that there is a certain range of phenomena which are relegated to a lower status by Giegerich's dialectical and logical approach to psychological life, which are nonetheless central to psychological life and to the work of analytical psychotherapy, such as images, dreams, and fantasy. [10]
Marlan's publications suggest that his own clinical approach includes classical Jungian psychoanalysis and Archetypal psychology. However, Marlan's clinical writings also display distinctive nuances regarding clinical practice and technique.
Among the most important of these nuances is Marlan's recovery of the value of hesitation and slowness in analytic process. In his essay “Hesitation and Slowness: Gateway to Psyche’s Depth,” [11] he highlights how classical psychoanalytical thinkers, including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, recognized the importance of allowing the psyche of one's patient to unfold in its own time, without pressure from the side of the analyst. For Marlan, the terms “hesitation” and “slowness” encompass a number of related ideas, including slow and careful (not active) listening on the part of the analyst, avoiding influencing the patient, allowing for the psyche of the patient to develop at its own pace and rhythm, and a certain amount of conscious reserve on the part of the analyst over and against the tendency to formulate material either too glibly or to reduce material to general theoretical precepts. Though he admits that there are times when spontaneous formulations are appropriate, Marlan suggests there is a tendency in the age of “industrialized” psychotherapy and under the pressures of managed care to move more quickly than the psyche's own tempo demands.
The Black Sun, summarized above, also includes specific clinical emphases related to the issue of hesitation and slowness. In particular, Marlan underlines a tendency both clinicians and patients can have to try to get through periods of darkness, depression, and despair as quickly as possible, rather than engaging with the darkness and drawing from those experiences their potential value for psychological growth and individuation. Even seemingly unbearable affects, Marlan maintains, can have important and profound meanings, which can be lost through attempting to speed through the difficult and uncomfortable feelings associated with the darkness.
Marlan's reading of Jung and of alchemy amplifies these points. In his essay “Jung and Alchemy: A Daimonic Reading,” Marlan differentiates his own study of Jung and of Jung's alchemical work from other approaches, especially those concerned with the historical and factual underpinnings of Jung's work and the historical and factual interpretation of alchemy. He states that "I do not read Jung for history, but for his-story… For me, reading Jung daimonically has meant a bracketing of my academic ego and letting myself be carried by fictions and gripped by an archetypal passion, a kind of madness that opens onto the scene of a magical adventure requiring an engagement not only with Jung and alchemy, but also my own psychic depths." [12] This suggests that, just as his reading of Jung's alchemical studies is an act of imagination engendered by archetypal passion, so similarly such a passionate opening and expansion of imagination is a key element of individuation and thus essential to the practice of Jungian psychoanalysis. Such opening and expansion also require the patient to allow the seeds of psychic life to unfold at their own rate.
Marlan was an early graduate from the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, an organization that was originally founded (1) to pool analytic resources of smaller Jungian training seminars, in order to aid each other in the work of analytic training and (2) to help smaller seminars grow into larger and, ultimately, independent training programs. Marlan founded the C. G. Jung Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh in 1981 as a participating seminar of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and has both directed and taught in that program ever since. He was a Fay lecturer at Texas A&M University and has lectured widely at Jungian and Archetypal conferences in the United States and abroad, including the first International Conference on Jungian Analysis and Chinese Culture in Guangzhou, China, the IAAP International Congresses in Cambridge and Barcelona, and the first international conference of the Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority in Berlin. He was a keynote speaker for the Guild of Pastoral Psychology held at Oxford University, for the Jung Society at the University of Toronto, and for the ARS Alchemica at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA. He has taught at the C. G. Jung Institut-Zürich and at other at other training institutes and universities. Marlan is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University as well as Clinical Supervisor at Duquesne's Psychology Clinic, positions he has held for many years.
Among Marlan's current projects are the completion of two books, the first entitled, The Philosophers' Stone. Alchemy and the Art of Illumination and the second Revisioning Alchemy. James Hillman and the Colors of the Soul, the latter to be published by Spring Publications.
Award from American Psychological Association, Division 39, Section V, in honor of being the Section's first President.
Nomination for the Gradiva Award (2006), issued by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, for creative contributions that advance psychoanalysis [13] for The Black Sun. The Alchemy and Art of Darkness.
Distinguished Service Awards from American Board of Professional Psychology and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (2019).
Annual Book Prize awarded by the American Board of Professional Psychology and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) for best theoretical book in Psychoanalysis in 2021, C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination: Passages into the Mysteries of Psyche and Soul, Routledge.
Award for the Best Theoretical Book of 2022 from the International Association of Jungian Studies (IAJS) for Jung's Alchemical Philosophy. Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea, Routledge.
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Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He was a prolific author, illustrator, and correspondent, and a complex and controversial character, perhaps best known through his "autobiography" Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Analytical psychology is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science" of the psyche. It was designed to distinguish it from Freud's psychoanalytic theories as their seven-year collaboration on psychoanalysis was drawing to an end between 1912 and 1913. The evolution of his science is contained in his monumental opus, the Collected Works, written over sixty years of his lifetime.
In analytical psychology, the shadow is an unconscious aspect of the personality that does not correspond with the ego ideal, leading the ego to resist and project the shadow, leading to a conflict with it. In short, the shadow is the self's emotional blind spot - the part the ego does not want to acknowledge - projected as archetypes—or, in a metaphorical sense-image complexes, personified within the collective unconscious; e.g., trickster.
Marie-Louise von Franz was a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar, known for her psychological interpretations of fairy tales and of alchemical manuscripts.
James Hillman was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich. He founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut.
The anima and animus are a syzygy of dualistic, Jungian archetypes among the array of other animistic parts within the Self in Jungian psychology, described in analytical psychology and archetypal psychology, under the umbrella of transpersonal psychology. The Jungian parts of the Self are a priori part of the infinite set of archetypes within the collective unconscious. Modern Jungian clinical theory under the analytical/archetypal-psych framework considers a syzygy-without-its-partner to be like yin without yang: countertransference reveals that logos and/or eros are in need of repair through a psychopomp, mediating the identified patient's Self; this theoretical model is similar to positive psychology's understanding of a well-tuned personality through something like a Goldilocks principle.
Archetypal psychology was initiated as a distinct movement in the early 1970s by James Hillman, a psychologist who trained in analytical psychology and became the first Director of the Jung Institute in Zürich. Hillman reports that archetypal psychology emerged partly from the Jungian tradition whilst drawing also from other traditions and authorities such as Henry Corbin, Giambattista Vico, and Plotinus.
John Beebe is an American psychiatrist and Jungian analyst in practice in San Francisco.
The Jungian interpretation of religion, pioneered by Carl Jung and advanced by his followers, is an attempt to interpret religion in the light of Jungian psychology. Unlike Sigmund Freud and his followers, Jungians tend to treat religious beliefs and behaviors in a positive light, while offering psychological referents to traditional religious terms such as "soul", "evil", "transcendence", "the sacred", and "God". Because beliefs do not have to be facts in order for people to hold them, the Jungian interpretation of religion has been, and continues to be, of interest to psychologists and theists.
Andrew Samuels is a British psychotherapist and writer on political and social themes from a psychological viewpoint. He has worked with politicians, political organisations, activist groups and members of the public in Europe, US, Brazil, Israel, Japan, Russia and South Africa as a political and organisational consultant. Clinically, Samuels has developed a blend of Jungian and post-Jungian, relational psychoanalytic and humanistic approaches.
Embodied imagination is a therapeutic and creative form of working with dreams and memories pioneered by Dutch Jungian psychoanalyst Robert Bosnak and based on principles first developed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, especially in his work on alchemy, and on the work of American archetypal psychologist James Hillman, who focused on soul as a simultaneous multiplicity of autonomous states.
The idea of polytheistic myth as having psychological value is one theorem of archetypal psychology as defined by James Hillman, and explored in current Jungian mythology literature. According to proponents of this theory, polytheistic myths can provide psychological insight.
Jungian archetypes are a concept from psychology that refers to a universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings. The psychic counterpart of instinct, archetypes are thought to be the basis of many of the common themes and symbols that appear in stories, myths, and dreams across different cultures and societies. Some examples of archetypes include those of the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood, among others. The concept of the collective unconscious was first proposed by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Michael Scott Montague Fordham was an English child psychiatrist and Jungian analyst. He was a co-editor of the English translation of C.G. Jung's Collected Works. His clinical and theoretical collaboration with psychoanalysts of the object relations school led him to make significant theoretical contributions to what has become known as 'The London School' of analytical psychology in marked contrast to the approach of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich. His pioneering research into infancy and childhood led to a new understanding of the self and its relations with the ego. Part of Fordham's legacy is to have shown that the self in its unifying characteristics can transcend the apparently opposing forces that congregate in it and that while engaged in the struggle, it can be exceedingly disruptive both destructively and creatively.
Wolfgang Giegerich is a German psychologist, trained as a Jungian analyst. He was a practicing clinician for many years and has published books and articles on depth psychology since the mid-1970s.
Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. His principle theoretical contributions have been in the philosophy of the unconscious, a critique of psychoanalysis, philosophical psychology, value inquiry, and the philosophy of culture. His clinical contributions are in the areas of attachment pathology, trauma, psychosis, and psychic structure.
David Holt was a British psychotherapist based in London and then Oxford who trained in the tradition of Analytical psychology developed by Carl Jung. As an analyst he broadened his approach to include theatre, time, history, politics and economics, psychosis, metaphysics, alchemy and the relationship between Analytical psychology and religion.
Robin S. Brown is a psychoanalyst and academic. His work has been associated with a “philosophical turn” in psychoanalysis, and has received interdisciplinary attention in the fields of psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, and transpersonal psychology. He is the recipient of an award from the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis for his book, Psychoanalysis Beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking Towards the Post-Relational (Routledge). Joseph Cambray, president of the International Association of Analytical Psychology, described the book as: "A powerful, incisive critical analysis of the state of contemporary psychoanalysis"; while Lewis Aron referred to the book as "a penetrating and sophisticated critique"
The Society of Analytical Psychology, known also as the SAP, incorporated in London, England, in 1945 is the oldest training organisation for Jungian analysts in the United Kingdom. Its first Honorary President in 1946 was Carl Jung. The society was established to professionalise and develop Analytical psychology in the UK by providing training to candidates, offering psychotherapy to the public through the C.G. Jung Clinic and conducting research. By the mid 1970s the society had established a child-focused service and training. The SAP is a member society of the International Association for Analytical Psychology and is regulated by the British Psychoanalytic Council.
Volodymyr Walter Odajnyk, known professionally as V. Walter Odajnyk, was a Jungian analyst, author and university professor.
