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Jung Southern Africa - SAAJA, C. G. Jung Centre, 87 Main Road, Rondebosch, Cape Town (2026)

13/08/2026

Medusa remains a provocative and evocative symbol, myth, image and Goddess in the Western archetypal consciousness. As in the myth, the image of her is petrifying. Frequently, she is depicted as a decapitated head, a female face frozen in horror, fury and death, with snakes where one might expect hair.

Medusa was born as the mortal daughter of Porcys and Ceto, one in three daughters, but the only one who is mortal. She is described as possessing an extraordinary beauty, with particular focus on her hair. However, she is r***d by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Athena, instead of punishing Poseidon, instead punishes Medusa, by turning her hair into a tangle of serpents. She is marked forever as monstrous after her violation. To look upon her serpentine image is to be turned to stone. It is this, and her mortality, that marks her for death by Perseus. He decapitates her, and uses her head to wreak a horrible success in battle.

Both Jungian and Freudian traditions of analyses have explored Medusa, with interpretations ranging in a wide circumambulation. Early Freudian traditions saw Medusa as a manifestation of castration anxiety, while Gaston Bachelard highlighted his interpretation of the Medusa Complex as the fear of petrifaction by the parental gaze. In Jungian traditions, Medusa has been explored as symbolic of the repressed feminine, traumatic fragmentation, shadow projection, and patriarchal dissociation. Medusa’s shadowy story, as well as her consistent invocation of dark goddess material, is not easy to set aside or take on lightly.

Feminist theorist Hélène Cixous, in her famous essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), urges women to reclaim their identity, to explore and integrate a distinctly anima-esque way of being, and reject patriarchal notions of polarities, dissociation, and disintegration.

Developing these themes much further, Heather Hines (2025) argues passionately through the symbolic lens of the Medusa myth, that our climate crisis can be understood as rooted in the patriarchal repression of the feminine principle, resulting in a collective dissociation and fragmentation, from nature and the body.

Hines (2025) invites us to become witnesses, of Medusa, of her terrifying trauma, her stony visage; and in so doing acting as psychic witnesses to the conflagration of climate change, and in the courage of embodied witnessing, a possible route to the integration of the feminine principle, and restored connection to Mother Earth.

~ Written by Stephanie Terre Blanche (Clinical Psychologist, )

Image: Head of Medusa, Godfried Maes, 1680 (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

References:
Bachelard, G. (2002). Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (K. Haltman, Trans.). Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture.

Cixous, H. (1976). The laugh of the Medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1(4), 875–893.

Freud, S. (1955). Medusa's head. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 273–274). Hogarth Press. (Original work written 1922; published 1940)

Hines, H. (2025). Medusa's gaze: Trauma, transformation, and environmental resonance. Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, 20(1), 58–83.

Ovid. (2004). Metamorphoses (D. Raeburn, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1st century BCE–CE

11/08/2026

She is older than the theory. She was in the forest long before we wrote about her. She was in the cave before the temple, at the crossroads before the road. The Dark Feminine is the ground the story stands on, and she returns at her own will.

Jung understood that the psyche carries what the culture will not. What we cannot hold consciously sinks, and what sinks gathers force in the depths, waiting for the moment the surface can no longer refuse it. She is what has been waiting.

Stanton Marlan, in ‘The Black Sun’, traced the sol niger through alchemy and analysis and found a darkness that shines. Modern psychology has treated blackness as an enemy to be moved through, a symptom to be dissolved. Marlan refuted this. The blackness of mortificatio carries a light of its own, terrible and revealing. He showed that the Self itself has a black face, and that Kali stands at the entrance to it. The darkness is not what obscures the divine. It is one of the ways the divine appears.

This is the first movement of the Dark Feminine's transformative capacity. She destroys the false light. She dismantles the psyche's insistence on brightness, positivity, and control. She insists that the descent is not a detour on the way to wholeness. It is wholeness beginning to speak.

Janet Dallett, in ‘Saturday's Child’, wrote of encounters with the dark gods and opposed the sentimental view. She wrote that evil is not elsewhere. It is in the dream, in the marriage, in the analyst, in the century. Her feminine voice does not soften the descent. It insists on it. Only by facing what we would rather deny, she wrote, can we carry the darkness consciously rather than being possessed by it.

This is the second movement. She makes the unbearable personal. She strips away the comforting distance between self and shadow, and asks whether the evil we locate in others is not, in some measure, already within.

Together, Marlan and Dallett describe a capacity, not a mood. The Dark Feminine is the psyche's power to destroy what has outlived its truth and to bring forth what has not yet been named. In our collective moment she is returning. Something must descend. Something must be devoured. Something must be reborn.

To meet her is to be remade.

~ Written by Konrad van Staden, Clinical Psychologist & Jungian Analyst

Image credit: ‘The Black Sun’, Odilon Redon (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

References:
Dallett, J. O. (1991). Saturday's child: Encounters with the dark gods. Inner City Books.

Marlan, S. (2005). The black sun: The alchemy and art of darkness. Texas A&M University Press.

10/08/2026

Our Quote of the Week.

“While those who are initiated are unafraid of Lady Death, [our] culture often encourages that we throw Skeleton Woman over the cliffs, for not only is she fearsome, it takes too long to learn her ways. A soul-less world encourages faster, quicker, thrashing about to find the one filament that seems to be the one that will burn forever and right now. However, the miracle we are seeking takes time: time to find it, time to bring it to life.”

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés, 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘳𝘶𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴: 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘥 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯 (p. 134)

08/08/2026

𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝘁? 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝗔𝗔𝗝𝗔'𝘀 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟳 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝘁 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗺𝗲.

The Southern African Association of Jungian Analysts (SAAJA) invites applications for its 2027 Analyst Training Programme. Our four-year, part-time training programme integrates in-depth personal analysis, clinical practice, ongoing supervision and rigorous theoretical study in Analytical Psychology.

Rooted in the diverse cultural and psychological realities of Southern Africa, it prepares candidates for professional analytic practice while fostering a deeper engagement with the symbolic life of the psyche and the process of individuation.

SAAJA is a Member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), and is certified with Training Status to conduct training of candidates in Jungian analysis. Successful graduates of SAAJA's Analyst Training Programme also qualify for membership of the IAAP, providing international professional affiliation.

We welcome applications from individuals across a range of personal, professional and academic backgrounds. Applicants should reside and practise within South Africa or the Southern African region, hold an active psychotherapy practice, and be currently registered with the HPCSA (or an equivalent licensing authority), among a number of other eligibility requirements.

- Applications close: 4pm SAST, Friday 18 September 2026
- Training commences: 2027

With intake only once every four years, this is a rare opportunity to begin.

If you feel called to train with us as a Jungian Analyst, follow this link to check your eligibility and start your application journey: https://www.jungsouthernafrica.co.za/applications-2027-analyst-training-programme/?et_fb=1&PageSpeed=off

06/08/2026

There is an Inuit folktale retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés called ‘Skeleton Woman’ (1). It tells of a woman cast off a cliff by her father for reasons no one knows. She sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where fish eat away her flesh and her bones are washed by the currents. The place is then avoided because of rumours that it is haunted.

One day, a fisherman, unaware of what lies beneath, drifts in his boat and catches his line on her ribs. He is terrified to see what he pulls out the water and paddles furiously for the shore to escape. As soon as his boat touches the shore, he grabs his rod and runs across the icy tundra.

The Skeleton Woman, however, is still attached to his line. Seeing that she is right on his heels, he continues to run and dives into his snow house, crawling to safety. Once he has recovered his breath, he looks behind him and, for reasons he cannot explain, feels a kindness towards her, lying there tangled in his fishing line, with all her bones askew. He begins to carefully untangle the line and put her bones back in their rightful place. He then falls asleep.

While dreaming, a tear appears in the corner of his eye. The Skeleton Woman sees this and crawls over to drink it, quenching her thirst. She then takes his heart and, beating it like a drum, sings herself back to life, and lies down next to him. They awake intertwined, and although no one knows what came of them, they were forever nourished by the bounty she knew from beneath the ocean.

There comes a time when the dark feminine asks to be reckoned with, when out of death new life can appear. In turning towards what frightens us, we may begin to carefully disentangle the lines of projection and gather the scattered bones of previous woundings. We may encounter tears from the depths, and with them the potential for something new to emerge.

~ Written by Austin Smith, Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Analyst

Image: The Mermaid by Howard Pyle (1910)

Reference:
1. Estés, C. P. (1998). Women who run with the wolves: Contacting the power of the Wild Woman. Rider Books.

04/08/2026

“To prepare for her journey, Inanna gathers together the seven ‘me’. Just as a hero takes certain talismanic weapons to ensure his success, Inanna takes the seven me, transformed into such feminine allure as a crown, jewelry, and a gown, to serve as her protections.” [1]

In ‘Inanna and Enki’, she acquires the ‘me’: powers, capacities and roles necessary for the fullness of manifested human existence. Yet it is these very powers, embodied in her garments and regalia, that she must relinquish at each of the seven gates into the underworld.

By the time she reaches Ereshkigal, she is naked. She can no longer approach the underworld as Queen of Heaven, priestess, lover or sovereign. What established her identity and authority in one realm cannot carry her through this one.

Something similar happens in psychological descent. The structures through which we have known ourselves – our identities, relationships, beliefs, accomplishments, roles, values, even our spiritual understanding – may cease to protect or orient us.

This may come through loss, divorce, illness, ageing, failure or disillusionment, or simply the disturbing recognition that the life we have built no longer fits who we are becoming.

Importantly, the ‘me’ are not false. The crown is not an illusion. Inanna really is Queen of Heaven.

Likewise, what we are called to relinquish may once have been meaningful and necessary. A relationship may have been deeply loved. A belief may have sustained us. A role may have given our life purpose. A way of being may once have helped us survive.

Descent does not necessarily reveal that our former life was a lie. It may reveal that what was true and necessary at one stage of becoming cannot accompany us unchanged into the next.

Unlike Inanna, we are not necessarily stripped of everything, although it may feel that way. At certain thresholds, something that has carried us this far must be laid down. Not because it was worthless, but because we cannot enter the next chamber while holding it in quite the same way.

~ Written by Nici Partridge (), Jungian Analyst and Psychologist

Image credit: Inanna Blue, painting by artist and author Pam England ()

References:
[1] Wolkstein, D, & Kramer, S. N. (1983). Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth – Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. Harper & Row, New York.

03/08/2026

𝘼𝙣𝙖𝙡𝙮𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙋𝙨𝙮𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙜𝙮 𝙇𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙨 | 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗙𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗲: 𝗡𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲, 𝗣𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗱

✨Presented by Nici Partridge
✨Format: Online via Zoom
✨Date: Tuesday, 18 August 2026
✨Time: 7.30pm - 9pm SAST (UTC +2)
✨Participation fee: ZAR175
✨Registered participants receive recordings

Across myth and folklore we encounter powerful and unsettling feminine figures: goddesses of night, guardians of thresholds, devouring witches, grieving mothers, and queens of the underworld. They appear in forests, caves, crossroads, and night skies – places where the familiar begins to dissolve and something older, deeper, and more instinctual emerges.

Though separated by culture and time, these figures share striking symbolic qualities. From a Jungian perspective, they may be understood as expressions of an archetypal pattern within the psyche – the Dark Feminine.

These images constellate aspects of life that are difficult to assimilate: instinct, sexuality, grief, destruction, and transformation. Myth is only one place we encounter them. They also appear in dreams, projections, emotional intensities, and those moments when life draws us into territories we would rather avoid.

In this online seminar, the Dark Feminine is explored through three interwoven lenses: the psyche’s encounter with the forces of nature, the emergence of symbolic imagery in myth and story, and the psychological consequences of repression.

Drawing on Jungian thought, mythology, and the symbolic life of the natural world, the presentation traces how these figures arise at moments of tension, transition, and change – and considers how neglected dimensions of the Dark Feminine may be re-emerging in contemporary life, both collectively and within the individual psyche.

For more details and to book online, follow this link: https://www.jungsouthernafrica.co.za/event/the-dark-feminine-nature-psyche-and-the-return-of-the-repressed/

Image: Queen of the Night (Burney Relief), depicting a Mesopotamian goddess, Old Babylonian period. British Museum, London.

03/08/2026

Our Quote of the Week.

“For until the demonic powers of the Dark goddess are claimed, there is no strength in the woman to grow from daughter to an adult who can stand against the patriarchy in its inhuman form.”

~ Sylvia Brinton Perera, 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘰𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘴: 𝘈 𝘞𝘢𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯

30/07/2026

“It is time for the invocation:
Kali, be with us.
Violence, destruction, receive our homage.
Help us bring darkness into light,
To lift out the pain, the anger,
Where it can be seen for what it is –
The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.”
- Mary Sarton

The figure of Kali dances between the worlds, between consciousness and the unconscious, between darkness and light, between destruction and creation; as flames are both responsible for conflagration, and the home of new growth. Ean Begg (1996) in ‘The Cult of the Black Virgin’ notes how Kali is often associated with the dark goddesses Inanna, Lilith and Sekhmet, all of whom also challenge the perceiver to remain present in their contradictions: they are both bringers of death, and life, and these goddesses initiate us into understanding and living the interdependence of the acts of creation and destruction.

Marion Woodman (1996) invites us to look at Kali more closely in her depictions. Often in depictions, we are at first assaulted by her fierceness, her rage, the devouring mouth, the image of violence. However, when invited to look more closely, we also see a halo around her head, we see that her dark skin and hair invoke the place of creation. She is the devourer, but also the transformer, she is called the “black sapphire” – she radiates in her darkness. “The mystery of Kali is that she is perpetually destroying and, at the same time, creating-destroying in order to create, creating in order to destroy, death in service of life, life is the service of death. Kali is time, immanence, ceaseless becoming, nature as process.” (p. 16).

Encountered in analysis, active imagination, art, dreams and sandplay, Kali might offer powerful, earthquake-like shifts in our psyches.

Her presence feels like a wake-up call, like a good shake, like a kick in the behind, especially if we have gotten stuck and a bit sluggish. Stuck in ego, stuck in being “the good girl”, stuck in a cycle of avoiding pain, stuck in chasing light, becoming too thick in our routines and structures, becoming a little bit too comfortable in our ways of being. Kali offers a loving, but fierce, awakening, reminding us that a full life is one that embraces movement and the cycles of nature.

~ Written by Stephanie Terre Blanche (), Clinical Psychologist

Image Credit:
‘Dakshinakali’ by an unidentified artist (Early Bengal School), from the exhibition ‘Kali: Reverence & Rebellion’, by DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery).

References:
- Begg, E. (1996) The Cult of the Black Virgin. Arkana, Penguin Books.
- Sarton, M. (1971). The invocation to Kali. In A grain of mustard seed: New poems. W. W. Norton.
- Woodman, M. & Dickson, E. (1996) Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness. Shambala.

28/07/2026

𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 | Frederick Gustafson has put together fifteen essays in The Moonlit Path that introduce figures and aspects of the dark feminine. His own piece speaks to the western culture of North America that has eschewed matter for the past five hundred years. The pain of the earth and indigenous people is plain to see but remains unaddressed.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ modern incantation is entitled Guadalupe is a Girl Gang Leader in Heaven. It warns outsiders against toying with the holy figure.

Cedrus N Monte tells of sites of trauma and eruption that bring forth change.
- New life forms emerge from hydrothermal vents that exist in complete darkness at deathly high temperatures.
- After a demonic experience, the hermit St Meinrad started constructing what has become a site of pilgrimage to a Black Madonna.
- The unique movement form of butoh, or the Dance of Darkness, explores the unconscious as it attempts to communicate meaning after the mass annihilation by the atomic bombs over Japan.

Several contributors refer to a Black Madonna. Meinrad Craighead pays homage to the Black Madonna in Einsiedeln and the Black Virgin of Montserrat (La Morenita) in Catalonia, Spain.

In longer essays Sylvia Brinton Perera describes the Morrigan as a “Celtic goddess of Life and Death”[1]; Ashok Bedi says Kali “amputates the darkness of our soul and makes room for the light”[2]; Jane Kamerling writes that “Lilith consciousness transforms the demon into a goddess.”[3] Annette M Hulefeld restores Magdalene as the dark bride of God.

Father Bede Griffiths describes being struck by a force, then experiencing advaita or non-duality. This led him to say “Creation is chaos… God is in the darkness, in the womb, in the mother, in the chaos from which the order comes… that is why discovering the darkness is so important.”[4]

Barbara Koltuv and Siegmund Hurwitz each wrote highly readable books on the history and meaning of the Lilith figure.

“[Ana] Mozol takes us on a personal journey through the three levels of experience, delving into the underworld and the trauma of r**e, the middle world and the illusions of romantic love, and the upper world and the masculine spiritual ideals that fracture the feminine soul.”[5]

~ Written by Debra West, Librarian, Jean Albert Library, CG Jung Centre

1. Gustafson, Frederick, p.112
2. [Ibid] p.157
3. [Ibid] p.109
4. [Ibid] p.247
5. Mozol, Ana p.i

Bibliography
- Gustafson, Frederick (2003) The Moonlit Path: Reflections on the Dark Feminine. Berwick: Nicholas-Hays.
- Hurwitz, Siegmund (1992) Lilith, the First Eve: Historical and Psychological Aspects of the Dark Feminine. Einsiedeln, Daimon.
- Koltuv, Barbara Black (1986) The Book of Lilith. York Beach: Nicholas-Hays.
- Mozol, Ana (2019) A Re-visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising. London: Routledge.
______________________
Jean Albert Library – Visitors are welcome
The Jean Albert Library at the Jung Centre in Cape Town has an impressive collection of books on a wide variety of Jungian topics. It’s open on Tuesdays 10am – 2pm, and on Thursdays from 2pm - 7pm. Becoming a member allows one to borrow books and audio-visual materials. Explore at https://jungsouthernafrica.co.za/jean-albert-library/

Jung Southern Africa - SAAJA

13/08/2026

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06/08/2026

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