JUNG on the HUDSON
SUMMER 2025 SERIES
Welcome.
We invite you to join us at our 34th annual Jung on the Hudson summer seminar series — a unique opportunity to step back from the challenges of every day life and explore what lies within us. Designed for the general public as well as mental health professionals, during the course of our program, an outstanding faculty of Jungian analysts and authors will help shed light on the relevance of Jung’s psychology and ideas to our personal and/or professional lives as we examine some of the psychology and ideas of Carl Jung.
Our seminars offer the opportunity to stretch ourselves psychologically — an in-home vacation from the demands of everyday life and an opportunity to better balance spirit and matter and find meaning in our lives.
From the start, we have taken great pride in offering meaningful, in-depth content. What began as a small, in person program held in Rhinebeck, New York, thanks to the wonders of technology, the program has become internationally attended with participants last summer joining us from 29 different states and nine countries.
We hope you will join us for what promises to be another thought-provoking and stimulating time with like-minded colleagues from all over the world.
Save
Participate in both the weeklong and weekend programs and save $50.
CE Credits
Find detailed information about continuing education credits and certificates of attendance here.
July 20–24, 2025
Weeklong Live Online Seminar
The Pitfalls of Perfection
Jung pointed out that “perfection belongs to the gods and that the best we could hope for is excellence.” Life calls on us to strive for wholeness, not perfection. In fact, seeking perfection can only lead to disappointment and failure. Does one ever have the perfect body, the perfect relationship, or be a perfect parent, teacher, or therapist? During the course of our week, with our notable faculty, including James Hollis, Ann Belford Ulanov, Dennis Patrick Slattery, Morgan Stebbins, and Tina Stromsted, we will explore this important theme.
July 25–26, 2025
The Importance of Synchronicity in Life, in Therapy, and in Our Postmodern Age
Weekend Live Online Workshop
With Richard Tarnas as our guide, deepen your awareness of meaningful coincidences and their potential significance. In psychology and in life, synchronistic events often play a subtle role in guiding our choices. Although synchronicity has been widely embraced in popular culture, entering into common experience and language, it is also a powerful phenomenon to be understood psychologically and assessed with care.
Can we help?
If you have questions feel free to email us anytime or call the office between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday: 845-256-0191.
Life calls not for perfection, but for completeness.
— C.G.Jung
The Pitfalls of Perfection
July 20-24, 2025 | Weeklong Live Online Seminar
There is an old adage that the perfect is the enemy of the good, meaning that striving for perfection is striving for the impossible — a sure path to disappointment or even failure. In this regard, one could say that it is grandiose to want to be perfect. This is hubris on a grand scale. In the Hebrew Bible, even God is not perfect, with examples in Genesis ranging from God destroying the world and starting over again — as in the legend of Noah — to regretting that mankind spoke one common language as evidenced in the myth of the Tower of Babel. In any case, perfection is always relative. For most of us, when is something being “good enough” is a better question to ask of ourselves than why am I not perfect?
There are multiple dangers in the focus on perfection. Setting unrealistic goals and striving to be perfect is a surefire strategy to foster guilt, shame, self-hatred and a sense of personal inadequacy, which can lead to addiction among other maladaptive issues. We may see this manifested as an eating disorder, excessive exercise, or compulsive shopping, gambling, drinking, smoking, and even internet use. Additionally, striving for perfection can block creativity and warp our imagination. It blunts compassion by first inducing self-hatred when we cannot meet our own aims and then turns outward to become callousness toward others. It is important to understand that striving for perfection is also a form of wanting to control our lives, our environment, and those around us. To accept our imperfection means we are human and therefore accept that there is a certain amount of uncertainty in life.
According to Jung, perfection is not considered a desirable goal as it can hinder the true aim of achieving wholeness, which embraces both positive and negative aspects of the self. In striving for perfection, we split off the shadow, fostering either optimism or inferiority and inadequacy. As Jung pointed out, “perfection belongs to the Gods; the best we can hope for is excellence.” He emphasizes that life calls on us to strive for wholeness, not perfection.
These are questions we must grapple with on our path to what Jung calls Individuation. It is a tricky path to walk, and we must all find our way in order to achieve the balance necessary to achieve this wholeness. We hope you will join us to explore these ideas with leading analysts and authors as you find your footing on this path of individuation.
PRESENTATIONS
Those who have attended our programs know how carefully we prepare the daily schedules and itineraries to provide a valuable and enriching experience. This summer, our live online format via Zoom will provide the opportunity to hear from a notable and outstanding faculty. We are confident that participants will find the material meaningful and personally enriching.
Sunday Evening, July 20 | 6:00–8:00 p.m. ET
James Hollis
Putting God on the Couch
In this keynote presentation, participants will examine the “imperfection” not of Divinity — which by definition is so wholly other as to defy understanding and description — but our efforts to approach the recondite mysteries in which we swim. James Hollis will examine how images of Divinity reveal more of their human authorship than the mystery itself. The deeper implication of this presentation is to remind each of us, no matter what intentions we bring, how imperfect our images and practices of relating to the other are. This recognition also obliges us to bring more modesty to our descriptions and expectations, and to factor in the psychological processes that operate within all of us.
James Hollis, PhD, is a Jungian analyst with a practice in Washington DC. He is the author of 20 books that have been translated into 22 languages. Dr. Hollis is former executive director of the Jung Educational Center of Houston; former Director of The Washington D.C. Jung Society and Philadelphia Jung Society; professor of Jungian Studies at Saybrook University, and vice president emeritus of the Philemon Foundation. Among his many publications are The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other; Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life; What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life; The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Mid-Life; Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives; Living Between Worlds: Finding Resilience in Changing Times. In addition, together with Enrique Martinez Celaya, Dr. Hollis is co-author of Tending the Fire: Creativity, Purpose, and the Unfolding Self and the forthcoming Ancestral Days. His most recent book is Living with Borrowed Dust: Reflections on Life, Love, and Other Grievances.
Monday, July 21 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Morgan Stebbins
The Archetypal Urge for Perfection – And What to do About It
Jung indicates that perfection is not the goal of individuation. If so, then why do many of us suffer under the weight of trying to become some ideal version of ourselves? It is because the underlying archetype of our ‘age’ is that of sinless, spotless, perfection. This shows up in everything from the desire for fame to the fascination with news, from social media to politics. It shows up also as shame and guilt. In this presentation, Morgan Stebbins will offer a brief overview of how Jung traces the 2,000-year history of this archetype. Participants will discuss its current manifestations in our lives and society, as well as Jung’s understanding of the difficult and paradoxical psychological solution.
Morgan Stebbins, MDiv, LMSW, DMin, LP, is a supervising analyst, faculty member, and former President and Director of Training at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association in New York, where he also maintains a private practice. Holding a doctorate in Religious Studies and Hermeneutics, he began his Zen training at the San Francisco Zen Center where he was also a monastic resident. He has written on symbol formation, dreams, the role of mindfulness in analysis, the meaning of compulsion, and the archetypal psychology of Buddhist sutras and precepts. He is now writing a book on a symbolic approach to obsession and compulsion.
Tuesday, July 22 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Ann Belford Ulanov
If We Wait for It to Be Perfect There Will Be Nothing Left
Perfection lures us with the unsurpassable beauty of many things in this finite life. It extends even to the infinite with God-images of everything we idealize as absolute. We seek to concretize this awesome experience to preserve it and we strive to identify with its faultless nature. That identification makes it dead. We cannot measure up to the perfect standard. Self-rejection ensues and censorious judgment of others prevails. Healing means process and aliveness in us and in our guiding images. In this presentation, participants will explore destructiveness and creativeness with wholeness, not perfection as the goal.
Ann Belford Ulanov, MDiv, PhD, is an internationally known and practicing Jungian analyst in New York City; Professor Emerita of Psychology and Religion at Union Theological Seminary; and lecturer in the U.S. and abroad. She is the author of many books including Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work; The Female Ancestors of Christ; Madness & Creativity; The Psychoid, Soul and Psyche: Piercing Space/Time Barrier; and Back to Basics; as well as with her late husband, Barry Ulanov, Cinderellla and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying; The Healing Imagination; and Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima and Animus.
Wednesday, July 23 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Dennis Patrick Slattery
The Myth of Narcissus and Echo: Irony’s Resistance to Perfection
The power of myths shares the same essential nature as poetry, literature and the arts — knowledge by way of analogy. The myth of Narcissus and Echo, rendered so profoundly by Ovid in Metamorphosis, opens a path to understanding something essential about perfection and imperfection. In this presentation, Dennis Slattery will explore the essential need for irony in our lives to counter the fixity that Narcissus is arrested by after he spurns her presence. Using some of C.G. Jung’s insights that address the psyche’s journey of individuation, participants will explore the pitfalls of fixity vs. the openness of a life of fluidity.
Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California as well as core faculty in the Jung Platform. He has authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited 35 volumes, including 8 volumes of poetry and one co-authored novel. His most recent titles include The Way of Myth: Stories’ Subtle Wisdom (2021); The Fictions in Our Convictions: Essays on the Cultural Imagination (2023); and most recently, Becoming Stories: Essays and Poems on Mythical Moments (2025). He has also taught, via mail correspondence, student inmates in a California prison for two years, using Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Thursday, July 24 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Tina Stromsted
From the Drought of Perfection to the Wellspring of Being: Reclaiming the Juicy Side of Life
Noted Jungian analyst Marion Woodman described her journey through anorexia as an “addiction to perfection.” Through recovery, she discovered the joy of embodied consciousness, realizing, “To love the juicy side of life [is] being a human being who loves being in the body.” In this presentation, participants will reflect on how perfectionism manifests — through eating disorders, body image fixation, overwork, substance & internet misuse, and more — offering a path back to their authentic selves. Through engaging embodied Active Imagination and dreams, participants will explore moving beyond arid perfectionism to rediscover untapped potential, reclaiming vitality, creativity, and a deeper connection with their humanity.
Tina Stromsted, PhD, LMFT, is a Jungian Analyst, Dance/Movement Therapist, Somatics Educator, and author. She is the Director of the Soul’s Body Center® and past co-founder of the Authentic Movement Institute. With 45 years of clinical experience, Dr. Stromsted teaches at universities and healing centers in many parts of the world, including the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, Jung Platform, and the Marion Woodman Foundation. She also maintains a private practice in San Francisco and provides international virtual consultations. Her forthcoming book, Soul’s Body: Active Imagination, Authentic Movement, & Embodiment in Psychotherapy, will be published by Routledge in August 2025.
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence.
— Bob Dylan
July 25–26, 2025
RICHARD TARNAS
The Importance of Synchronicity in Life, in Therapy, and in Our Postmodern Age
Weekend Live Online Workshop
Friday, July 25 | 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. ET and
Saturday, July 26 | 12:00 – 1:30pm & 2:15 – 3:45p.m. ET
Perhaps more than any of Jung’s most influential ideas, the concept of synchronicity has been widely embraced by our popular culture and entered into its common experience and vocabulary. A prominent scholar and professor of religious studies recently said, “I have stopped believing in most things, but I do believe in synchronicity.” Even in the pages of the Scientific American, the publisher of Skeptic magazine shared a powerful synchronicity he and his wife experienced during their wedding that shook his “skepticism to the core.”
In this workshop, participants can deepen their awareness of the varieties of synchronistic experience. Synchronicities are both gifts and challenges. They can be felt as acts of grace or the subtle patternings of a cosmic artist, yet they can also suggest an elusive trickster who demands careful discernment both outer and inner. There seem to be stages that individuals go through in their deepening recognition of the synchronistic dimension of life. Synchronicities can compensate for the one-sidedness of egoic consciousness, and move the individual psyche toward wholeness. They also have, like all things, a shadow side, lending themselves to egocentric inflation or literalist interpretations. But most profoundly, they can give us intimations of the numinous and glimpses into the complex artistry of life. In our postmodern age when all the old metanarratives and spiritual frameworks are contested, awareness of synchronicities has become for many alert individuals a crucial source of psychological orientation and spiritual nourishment.
Richard Tarnas, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he was the founding director of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness department. During his thirty years there he taught courses in the history of ideas, depth psychology, archetypal cosmology, cultural history, and the evolution of consciousness. He has also frequently lectured on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern that is widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network. He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and was a long-time member of the Board of Governors for the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
PRESENTATION: The Fundamental Openness of Archetypes to Our Active Participation
At the heart of archetypes is their intrinsic multivalence, their openness to multiple ways of being expressed while remaining true to their core essence. It is precisely this quality that allows each of us in the course of our maturation to become ever more co-creative participants in our personal embodiment of these archetypes rather than mere puppets of unconscious forces.
Jung on the Hudson Registration
July 20–24, 2025
THE PITFALLS OF PERFECTION
A weeklong seminar with keynote speaker James Hollis and faculty Ann Belford Ulanov, Dennis Patrick Slattery, Morgan Stebbins, and Tina Stromsted
Tuition: $395
July 25-26, 2025
THE IMPORTANCE OF SYNCHRONICITY IN LIFE, IN THERAPY, AND IN OUR POSTMODERN AGE
A weekend workshop with Richard Tarnas
Tuition: $175
Register for both programs and save $50.
All seminar sessions will be recorded. In addition to making each session’s replay video available at the end of each day, all replays will be accessible through August 17.
CE Credits and Certificates of Attendance are available for both programs. Details here.
Participation: Teachings are appropriate for health-care professionals as well as the general public. Health-care professionals will be able to incorporate the tools and practices offered in this program in ways beneficial to clients or patients. No prerequisites are required.
Tax Deductions: Seminars of this type generally meet the requirements for IRS deductions.
Faculty and Changes: All rights are reserved by the program directors to make faculty substitutions and/or modify the program if needed.
Cancellations: All cancellations must be received in writing and subject to the following: For cancellations received by June 13: 50% refund per person. No refunds after this date.
Registration Form
CE & Certificates of Attendance
Certificates of Attendance
For those not requiring CE credits, certificates of attendance are available at a cost of $10 per certificate per program. Make your request on the registration form.
For questions about receiving your Certificate of Attendance, email Sally Smith-Raymond at contact@nyjungcenter.org.
Continuing Education Credits
APA and NAAP credits have been applied for for both Jung on the Hudson programs. CE credits will be issued at a cost of $75 for the weeklong program The Pitfalls of Perfection (14 credits) and $30 for the weekend program: The Importance of Synchronicity in the Postmodern Age (5 credits). NAAP CE credits will be $35 per certificate for both programs. Your choices can be noted on the registration form. Please note: Full attendance is required at each presentation to receive credit. No partial credits will be issued.
Continuing Education Credits for Healthcare Professionals
Teachings are appropriate for healthcare professionals as well as the general public. Healthcare professionals will be able to incorporate the tools and practices offered in this program in ways beneficial to clients or patients.
APA CE credits will be issued at a cost of $75 for the weeklong program: The Pitfalls of Perfection (14 credits) and $30 for the weekend program: The Importance of Synchronicity in the Postmodern Age (5 credits).
- CE credits for psychologists are provided by the Spiritual Competency Academy (SCA) which is co-sponsoring this program. The Spiritual Competency Academy is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Spiritual Competency Academy maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
- The California Board of Behavioral Sciences accepts CE credits for LCSW, LPCC, LEP, and LMFT license renewal for programs offered by approved sponsors of CE by the American Psychological Association.
- LCSW, LPCC, LEP, and LMFTs, and other mental health professionals from states other than California need to check with their state licensing board as to whether or not they accept programs offered by approved sponsors of CE by the American Psychological Association.
- SCA is approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN Provider CEP16887) for licensed nurses in California. RNs must retain their certificate of attendance for 4 years after the course concludes.
For questions about CE, contact Spiritual Competency Academy at info@spiritualcompetencyacademy.com.
NAAP Credits for New York State Social Workers and Licensed Psychoanalysts
NAAP Credits for New York State Social Workers and Licensed PsychoanalystsIn addition, CE credits for New York State Social Workers and Licensed Psychoanalysts have been applied for through the National Association for Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP). NAAP CE credits will be $35 per certificate for both programs. NAAP maintains responsibility for the programs and their content as well.
For questions about receiving NAAP credits, email Sally Smith-Raymond at contact@nyjungcenter.org.
National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an Approved Provider of continuing education for licensed psychoanalysts. #P-0019.
National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0168.
Credit Hours by Program
WEEKLONG WORKSHOP
Sunday, July 20 | 6:00 – 8:00 pm
James Hollis, Putting God on the Couch | didactic lecture 2.0 hours
Monday, July 21 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Morgan Stebbins, The Archetypal Urge for Perfection – And What to do About It | didactic lecture 3.0 hours
Tuesday, July 22 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Ann Belford Ulanov, If We Wait for It to Be Perfect There Will Be Nothing Left | didactic lecture 3.0 hours
Wednesday, July 23 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Dennis Patrick Slattery, The Myth of Narcissus and Echo: Irony’s Resistance to Perfection | didactic lecture – 3.0 hours
Thursday, July 24 | 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Tina Stromsted, From the Drought of Perfection to the Wellspring of Being: Reclaiming the Juicy Side of Life | didactic lecture – 3.0 hours
Weeklong program total credit hours: 14
WEEKEND WORKSHOP
Friday, July 25 | 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. ET
Richard Tarnas, The Importance of Synchronicity in Life, in Therapy, and in Our Postmodern Age
| didactic lecture 2.0 hours
Saturday, July 26 | 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. & 2:15 – 3:45 p.m. ET
Richard Tarnas, The Importance of Synchronicity in Life, in Therapy, and in Our Postmodern Age
| didactic lecture 3.0 hours
Weekend program total credit hours: 5