The Soul of a Man Who . Faced Archetypal Evil
(and Lived to Tell About It)
Presented by
Michael Gellert, MA, LCSW
Sunday, 4 PM – 6 PM, February 22nd, 2015
In his wisdom, my father, a Holocaust survivor whose camp experiences included torture, knew that everyone has the capacity deep down to be a Nazi. He didn’t “take in” his trauma as a personal attack, as so many survivors did. Yet, naturally, he struggled with this eruption of evil and its devastating effects on his life. This talk is about his story—a story of the nobility of the human soul in the face of profound depravity and evil. Our aim will be to gain an appreciation of the attitude the ego must take in its confrontation with archetypal evil.
Michael Gellert, MA, LCSW, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Los Angeles and Pasadena, and former Director of Training of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. Born and raised in Montreal, he was educated in rabbinic Judaism, traveled overland from Europe to India at age 19, studied theology at Loyola College in Montreal, and trained with the renowned Zen master Koun Yamada in Japan for two years. He has master’s degrees in religious studies and social work, and studied with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto. The author of Modern Mysticism, The Fate of America, and The Way of the Small, he lectures widely on psychology, religion, and contemporary culture. His forthcoming book is titled A Pregnant Emptiness.