The Trickster – The Unexpected Guide to the Self

On Thursday, February 29, 2024, Dr. Judith Cooper will be presenting BY ZOOM a program on the Trickster. CEUs are available. Please scroll below to tickets (for both program registration and for CEUs). The zoom link will be sent a few days prior to the 29th.

The Trickster has many names such as the collective shadow (Jung), the Self (Doty), the personification of the Self-Care System (Kalsched), a metaphor for the Psyche (Samuels), the spirit of the transcendent function (McNeely), and the image of the individuation process itself.

“He is the god of the unexpected, of luck, of coincidences, of synchronicity…Whenever things seem fixed, rigid, stuck, Hermes introduces fluidity, motion, new beginnings and the confusion that almost inevitably precedes new beginnings.”  Stassinopoulos, Gods of Greece.

It has been noted that the archetype of the Trickster defies and resists easy classification and unified definition due to a capricious and tricky ambiguous nature   containing all conceivable opposites. Trickster has variously been named as the collective shadow (Jung), the Self (Doty), the personification of the Self-Care System (Kalsched), a metaphor for the psyche (Samuels), the spirit of the transcendent function (McNeely) and the image of the individuation process itself.  We will attempt to capture this elusive, mercurial energy in all its paradoxical complexity and numinosity.  Trickster appears in the field of liminality, bringing chaotic instability in its drive to subvert the social order, as a shape-shifter, thus carrying gender fluidity, crossing and violating boundaries, confusing and blurring distinctions between right and wrong, sacred and profane, male and female, living and dead.  Trickster as an agent of a differentiation of morality, holds the potential for humanizing marginality, forcing us to question our ideas of order and morality, and, therefore, is a potent force for healing and revitalizing culture.

As archetypal amplifications we will identify “trickster works of art” (Beebe) connected to Jung’s concept of the “visionary,” that allows numinous images from the collective unconscious to emerge.

Film clips will be shown. Film is a formidable, potent psychological medium whose transformative spaces  possess tricksterish qualities that dissolve the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious, a cinematic liminality.

Dr. Cooper is a clinical psychologist and diplomate Jungian Analyst. She has lectured widely on the anima/animus and the use of film in clinical treatment. She presented “Hail, Aphrodite!: Re-sacralization of the Goddess of Love & Sex in David Ives’ Venus in Fur” at the IAAP Congress in Vienna.

She and a colleague have also aired a 7-part podcast series called Healing Cinema, which was posted on the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago’s website. The series analyses classical and contemporary films from a Jungian viewpoint including Hitchcock’s Rear Window, The Lost Daughter, and Tar.