Goethe's Faust Meets Faust Woman:  Our Changing Myth

Presented by
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, PhD

Sunday,  4 PM - 6 PM,  April 17th,  2016 

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link to audio file

 

Faust is Jung's essential myth, the key to his entire psychology.  Faust is also a prophesy for our own dangerous times, dramatizing the greed, hubris, and environmental desecration that threaten our world.  When a compelling dream gave her the name "Faust Woman" Naomi Ruth Lowinsky saw the myth in a new light.  Thus began The Faust Woman Poems.

In the 1960s and '70s, the long forgotten and forbidden Great Goddess roused herself from millennia of slumber and took possession of young women's imaginations.  That cast out She offered a Faustian bargain—she'd free you from your narrow domesticated self-image, thrust you into the wilds of sex, power and creativity, but you would owe her your soul.  As oceans rise and species die She demands her due.  In this talk Lowinsky will weave together themes from Goethe’s Faust and The Faust Woman Poems to reveal our changing myth.

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Course objectives:

• Identify ways that the themes of Faust relate to the present time.

• Compare the bargains made by Goethe’s Faust (male) and Lowinsky's Faust Woman.

 

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, PhD is a member of the San Francisco Jung Institute, and the Poetry Editor for Psychological Perspectives.  She is a widely published poet and essayist.  The Faust Woman Poems is her fourth full-length poetry collection.  Her chapbook The Little House On Stilts Remembers, won the Blue Light Poetry Prize.  She is also the author of The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, which tells stories of her pushy muse, and co-editor, with Patricia Damery, of Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way.  She blogs about poetry and life at www.SisterFromBelow.com