Follow the Bouncing Ball:
Sports and The Psyche
with
Bernard Michals, LCSW
Sunday, 4 PM – 6 PM, September 27th, 2009
(this program was not recorded)
Game and sports (particularly sports that include a ball) have been a human leisure activity for thousands of years. For example the Mayan Ball Game was played 3,000 years ago. The Egyptians played a form of Bocce with polished rocks. Contemporary sports and ball games are intimately woven into the daily life of popular culture.
Game and sport can bring ecstasy and self-fulfillment or can catapult us into darkness and depression. Why are we so drawn to the experience of game? Where is the boundary between the outer game and our inner life? How does the process of projection and experience of the witness relate to game and ball? Can we understand the experience of ball and game as what Jung calls “the religious instinct”? Why is the ball so compelling?
This lecture will examine the fact that game is in the objective psyche. Using individual dreams, active imagination and pictures we will circumambulate the inner reality and symbolism of ball and game.
Bernard Michals, LCSW is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Solana Beach. He is the former president and a founding member of the C.G. Jung Study Center of Southern California. Currently he is Coordinator of Analyst Training at the Study Center. He has lectured in the past on “The Learning Disabled Psyche”, on dreams, and active imagination.