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Lecture: How Does Jungian Psychology Help Us
Understand Our Children's Struggles?

LAUREN CUNNINGHAM, M.S.W.

Jung highlighted the fullness of the child's psyche that moves from the inherent unfolding
and ordering principle that he called the Self. Children need to discover their own personal
meaning, a sense of the future and a spiritual connection. A child's symbolic life helps
the child ground their identity and the mystery and contradictions of growing up in a fast
moving and complicated world. Too often the child's creative imagination and connection to
the mystery of the natural and magical worlds seem incompatible with the demands of every
day life. How can we help a child mature without sacrificing his or her creative spirit and
connection to archetypal and transpersonal realities of the natural and magical worlds as they
engage with demands of the outer world?

Clips from Pan's Labyrinth directed by Guillermo Del Toro will illustrate Jungian concepts
including the living reality of the psyche, a child's heroic journey and how the symbolic
world can help mediate difficult outward realities. Ofelia is a ten year old girl whose
connection to her symbolic life and to the transpersonal helps her mature and give birth to
herself in a time of suffering and loss.

Workshop: A Jungian Approach into the Child's Creative Imagination:
Doorway to Healing, Growth and Mysteries

At times children's fantasies and dreams seem "childish," too baffling or inconsequential to
dwell upon. Images that children create in dramatic play, dreams, drawings and fantasies may give glimpses into the past that linger in the child's present as well as intimations of their future
unfolding and spiritual life.

During this workshop we will reflect on some images that school age children have produced in
sandplay. Participants are invited to bring and offer to the group a latency age child's drawing, painting, dream, or vignette that gripped your curiosity. The hope is to have a deepening conversation about the nature of children's symbolic life.