The tone of collective discourse has rapidly degenerated, damaging the forms and rituals that give coherence to our lives, cultures and professional disciplines contributing to a sense of communal and global unrest. In this intimate Saturday morning seminar, our desire is to nourish a spirit of reflection rather than repeating the sounds of panic and alarm, or pretend hopes. Stepping back from the present situation, we will reflect on the current moment through trans-disciplinary lenses including philosophy, theology, history, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and anthropology. Together we will seek new perspectives that may help us move into an open future.
While award-winning speculative and science fiction author, Octavia E. Butler, passed away nearly fifteen years ago, 2020 has been a big year in her career. Her novel Parable of the Sower, written in 1993, just hit the New York Times Best Seller’s list for the first time in September 2020, while Ava Duverney, Viola Davis, and others continue to work to bring her works to the small screen, adapting her novels Dawn, Wild Seed and Kindred for television. Over the last several decades, Butler’s prescience in Parable of the Sower has not gone unnoticed. Set in the 2020s in Los Angeles, this novel references a nation beset by climate change, widespread illness, economic collapse, scarcity of necessities, and yes, a zealot politician running on the platform to “Make America Great Again.”
In this session with Depth Psychologist and founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson, we’ll explore the mythology and meaning of Octavia E. Butler’s empathetic and remarkable science fiction. In addition to her role as founder of the Legacy Network, Ayana is also an expert on Butler’s life and work, the Butler archives at the Butler’s life and work serve as a case study for moving toward psychological wholeness, surviving trauma and developing resilient narratives in unprecedented times.
