Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales: a new online program at Pacifica Graduate Institute

An eight-month training in personal narrative work

Dear everyone

I hope you’ll all forgive me for bothering your inboxes in between monthly newsletters, but I wanted to give proper space to this announcement about a new program I’m teaching as online faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. I’m very excited about this one, because it brings together work and research on myth, fairy tales and personal narrative that I’ve been doing for well over two decades now. But I’ve only ever taught it in this kind of depth to clinical psychologists and other mental health professionals, and then not for over ten years.

For those of you who’ve already taken my short online course by the same name, there will be a little overlap but this will be a much wider, deeper and longer experience covering a great deal of new material. It will only be offered live (online), not as an on-demand program, so if this kind of work is your thing, do read on for more information. Please note that the program will be suitable both for clinicians/therapists and for individuals who are interested in deepening their own personal work with fairy tales and the many forms of storytelling. You don’t need any prior knowledge or experience. And for those of you who find Continuing Education Credits useful, this course provides eight hours.

Like Inge in the image above by John Bauer, over the course of eight months we will stare into the dark lake of the unconscious – personal, collective, world – as we work with ideas from Jungian depth psychology, archetypal psychology and my own particular brand of narrative psychology to shed light on the stories of our lives and the images which illuminate them. In his book The Soul’s Code, psychologist James Hillman asked, ‘How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?’ – and that’s exactly what we’ll be exploring in this intensive program.

In her 1970 book, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise von Franz describes fairy tales as ‘the purest and simplest expression of the collective unconscious psychic process … representing the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form.’ We’ll use my conceptualisation of the Fairy-tale Heroine’s Journey as a framework for exploring the archetypal feminine in fairy tales and the ways in which these stories can illuminate the process of individuation.

We’ll excavate fairy tales to interrogate our self-narratives, identify problem-saturated stories and externalize them, and then learn to rewrite them so that we can more fully participate in the process of our own becoming. There are many therapeutic applications for this kind of narrative work, and so we’ll work with fairy tales which illuminate sexual abuse, domestic violence, addiction, terminal illness and bereavement. We’ll also identify stories which can illuminate specific stages of life, such as menarche, motherhood, midlife, menopause and elderhood. And we’ll look at several practices for continuing to work with fairy tales in our personal and working lives.

Each month, you’ll be given a one-hour recorded lecture, and then we’ll discuss that lecture and the ideas in it in a ninety-minute live Zoom call. There’ll be a monthly resource list: articles, books and films, PDFs of key course material and text of fairy tales, and creative prompts/reflective questions as we go along. My intention is that this will be an interactive course, with plenty of room for questioning, exploring and conversing in each Module.

You can find a full program outline and the registration link at this web page. Please do share this email with others who you think might be interested.

Costs vary from US$695 to US$1095. If you have any questions about the content or my approach I’d be happy to answer them below, but all questions about payment, logistics, CECs etc will need to be asked of Pacifica (contact details at the link).

(A list of my qualifications to teach on this subject – something you should always question when looking at any offerings! – can be found at this page, under ‘academic & professional qualifications’.)

Sharon