Professor David Peimer
Perspectives on Jung Today: His Life and Ideas, Part 1
Summary
Carl Jung was a giant of the 20th Century. This lecture will focus on his life and key ideas, answering the question: how does Jung speak to us today?
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Great question. I’m going to talk more next week about Jung’s sense and understanding of spirituality, which is not just this sort of, you know, I don’t think, just the tabloid version of what spirituality means. I think it is in this sense of history and collective unconscious and collective memory through the archetype. That is where the spirituality is located. It’s not just suddenly putting on the mask of, hello, I’ve read a few books on spiritualism and now, you know, I’m a spiritual person. I think it goes there. If one wants a bit of depth to understanding Jung and spirituality, really. It’s not just looking at the Zulu chief or the chief of the Navajo and you know, putting the label of spiritual. Projecting it, to use Klein, you know, onto these people. But understanding it from this point of view that I’ve been mentioning. The collective unconscious in the archetypes.