FROM THE PRESIDENT

In Memories Dreams Reflections, Jung recounts a dream he had as a student in which he found, half submerged in a marshy woods, a radiolarian—a single-celled creature that was magnified millions of times so that it revealed a complex and hitherto unsuspected interior structure. Jung welcomed the dream as an affirmation that the study of natural science could be a suitable project for a mind like his. In rereading the account, I’m impressed by the way the creature “shimmered in opalescent hues” radiating with a glow that the mature Jung would call the light of nature.

This issue of At the Institute takes up this theme of luminosity and places it at the heart of things we do when we follow Jung in this regard. I find it important to see the beauty as well as the science in that.

Jung resisted being called primarily an artist, but when we include what is lovely about the radiance that emerges when we listen to each other, then we see that anything that deeply matters to people has a way of generating its own light.

That’s the feeling I get when I walk into our new building. The walls seem to have just the right tones to catch the light that streams in to illumine them, as if to remind us that the problems we try to analyze and understand illuminate themselves when we show interest in them. What I love about the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco is that it knows that it is possible to watch and learn something emanating back from this natural process of engaged reflection. I invite you to read in the same light these pages about the way the Institute lives its mission.

Alex Peer, PhD
President, 2022-2024