28 OCTOBER 2016
The Symposium officially opened Friday afternoon with welcoming remarks given by Executive Director Dr. Larry Allums and Director of Publications and Founding Fellow Dr. Joanne Stroud; a talk and demonstration by the Director of Alchemy, Inc., Dr. Kwame Scruggs, who uses myth to “find gold” in his young audience via storytelling and drumming.
Session I: Dennis Slattery (Alchemical Meltdown: Ishmael’s Transformation in the Vessel of Affection), Joanne Stroud (In the Fire All is Transformed and Made Imperishable), Rodney Teague
Session Leader: Larry Allums
Session II: Bob Kugelmann (The Pain and Suffering of Salt), Natasha Stroud (Chinese Alchemy), Scott Churchill (On the Alchemy of Male Desire: Femininity as Totem and Taboo)
Session Leader: Jean Lall
Friday evening conference attendees dined al fresco on Tex-Mex at the Stroud House and then watched a magic show performed by distinguished guest, Tom Verner, founder of Magicians without Borders and longtime friend of James Hillman.
19 OCTOBER 2016
Session III: Pat Berry (The Impure Salt), Stan Marlan (The Azure Vault: Alchemy and the Cosmological Imagination), Safron Rossi (Cosmologies of Soul: Astrology and Alchemy)
Session Leader: Robert Sardello
Saturday morning also included an inspiring hour-long talk on alchemy and archetypal psychology by Tom Moore, conversations over lunch with presenters, and a presentation by celebrity chef Chad Houser, who uses food, community, and job training to create alchemical change at local restaurant, Café Momentum.
Session IV: Gail Thomas (City as Stone), Gustavo Barcellos (The Alchemy of Sugar), Robert Sardello (Romancing the Stone)
Session Leader: Jean Lall
Session V: Michael Sipiora (The Question Concerning JH & Technology); Scott Becker (Caveat Lector: The Alchemical Perils of Reading Hillman); Glen Slater (The Ascensionism of Fire in Artificial Intelligence)
Session Leader: Larry Allums
Closing – celebration reception at the Main House
Dear Attendees,
WELCOME to the 5th Annual James Hillman Symposium held here in Dallas. We are so glad that you will join us as we celebrate the works of renowned archetypal psychologist and Founding Fellow of the Dallas Institute, James Hillman. We, Drs. Gail Thomas, Robert Sardello, and I, assisted by Dr. Larry Allums as Director of the Institute, are engaged in keeping James Hillman’s valuable words alive in the world. By hosting these annual symposiums and by producing a publication each year in the series Conversing with James Hillman, we seek to share Hillman’s wit and wisdom with longtime friends as well as new ones, making our way, year-by-year, through his multivolume Uniform Edition that the Dallas Institute co-publishes with Spring Publications.
Our subject this weekend is Alchemical Psychology, volume 5 of the Uniform Edition. In this original volume, Hillman makes a study of the transformative processes suggested by the arcane alchemical processes that were adapted in late life by Jung as a basis of understanding depth psychology. Hillman carries this idea forward, arguing that the images and language of alchemy provide a much more valid, less abstract picture of human nature: instead of cold concepts, sensate images. By incorporating the aesthetic approach, alchemy teaches, in Hillman’s words, “with its colors, and minerals, its paraphernalia and enigmatic imagistic instructions . . . an aesthetic psychology.”
Following the symposium, we will again publish a compilation of written papers from this weekend in the third installment of Conversing with James Hillman. If you have not yet read the first two volumes in the series, City & Soul and Senex & Puer, I urge you to do so. They will enrich your understanding not only of Hillman’s psychology but also of our culture, its archetypes, and its myths.
Best regards,
Dr. Joanne Stroud
Director, James Hillman Symposium and Publications Division