Love is not a cozy feeling or a picnic in the park. It is a spiritual path that requires dedication to finding the truth about ourselves, our contradictions, and about polarities in life.

In my work as a Jungian analyst, psychologist, and couple therapist over several decades, I have found it useful to apply Carl Jung’s psychology of contra-sexuality, or Anima and Animus, his theory of a complex of unconscious otherness. We may begin our lives believing in an idealized Other (opposite sex or different gender) who would complete us or make us whole. This is the underlying force of attraction in falling in love that inevitably transforms into disillusionment and anxiety, or even enemy-making. The other person cannot fulfill our dreams. We may even feel incapable of accepting or loving that person whom we once idealized and now feel rejected or betrayed by.

When we fall in love with our babies, our partners, our siblings or our parents, if we believe that person is “the one who completes us,” we create longings, anxieties, and defenses that arise from our own needs and fantasies. In this retreat, we will learn to wrestle and reconcile with our own contra-sexual complexes, and in so doing, give emotional space to another and otherness. We will come to know and appreciate our own subjectivity, and develop kindness and compassion for what looks like otherness. Our time together will include didactic presentations, open-minded conversations, dyadic activities, and mindfulness exercises.

Whether you want to enhance your clinical work or learn about yourself or your relationships, you will find that applying Jung’s ideas of anima and animus brings insight into how the “Other” can imbue your relational life with mystery and archetypal energies. Doing so, we find the potential to reach beyond fixed identities and to welcome true differences experienced in relationships with partners, family members, colleagues and society at large. We will also come to see into the nature of projection, projective-identification, opposites, identification, separation anxiety, and grief to be found on the human path of love and wholeness.