Beginning on January 1, 2006, the C.G. Jung Page will be delivered as a gift to the Jung Educational Center of Houston. I will relinquish my role as manager and developer of the site while staying on as a member of the editorial board.
After 10 years of working at the C.G. Jung Page, I am ready to turn the site over to others who will care for it as I have and who also have more resources to develop its potential. James Hollis, the Director of the Jung Center, has agreed to guide the Jung Page into new territory while the day-to-day growth and development of the site is handed over to Sean Fitzpatrick, the webmaster for www.junghouston.org and the Director of the Center's community outreach program. Jim and Sean will make their own announcements in the next few days; in the meantime I'd like to introduce them and then to reflect on the history of the Jung Page.
Jung Page History
Before taking this opportunity to talk about the C.G. Jung Page, I first want to introduce the people who will be caring for it now.
Many of you know James Hollis from his books and lectures, from his work as an analyst in Philadelphia and Houston, and as the Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center of Houston. I've known Jim Hollis for many years as a colleague in the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and was excited to have him courageously inaugurate the online Jung-Seminars series at the Jung Page with an intense, challenging, over-stimulating 4 day discussion of one of his books. I am also grateful to Jim for pointing me to funding sources at 2 crucial times in the development of the Jung Page--the major changes we made then could not have happened without his help. For this and other reasons I naturally thought first of Jim Hollis when I began looking for a new home for the Jung Page. There's no one I know who is better prepared to carry this online Jungian experiment further.
The Founder of the Jung Center is Carolyn Grant Fay, a pioneering dance therapist and an Honorary Member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology. In 1991 she also endowed the Fay Lecture & Book Series in Analytical Psychology held annually at Texas A&M University. The Carolyn Grant Fay building housing the Jung Center is located in the heart of the museum district in Houston. The building was originally an art gallery and the Jung Center continues to display exhibits featuring of artists (local, national, and international) throughout the year. Because of Carolyn Grant Fay's vision and generousity, the Jung Center is uniquely poised to introduce audio files, gallery exhibits, streaming video, online courses, and other features that are beyond my reach.
Sean Fitzpatrick will be the Jung Page webmaster and is currently the Director of Community Services at the Jung Center. Their outreach efforts are unique and important to mention here: after-school classes for underprivileged children; programs for cancer patients and their families; on-site courses that support nurses and other allied health professionals; programs to train the volunteer trainers for AIDS Foundation Houston; an initiative to train therapists who work with prisoners at Huntsville State Prison; and support groups for professional caregivers. I mention the above details to give you a feeling for Sean's history and for the boldness of the Center's work. Sean picked up webdesign on his own as I did and I know he has many natural talents and gifts that you will discover in the coming months.
For a short while, though, let me take you back 10 years. In the fall of 1995, I introduced "CG Jung, Analytical Psychology, and Culture"--cgjung.com--to my colleagues in the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts at our fall conference (Tucson AZ). The website contained the first online Jungian papers by several IRSJA analysts.
These words expressed the mission as I understood it then and still today:
"The Jung Page was founded in 1995 to encourage new psychological ideas and conversations about what it means to be human in our time and place..."
Eventually, I borrowed these words from C.G. Jung for emphasis: "Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times" (XVI: The Practice of Psychotherapy. Para. 396). I personally prefer "changing truths" to "eternal truth" but Jung, nonetheless, called it right--we need a new language (words, insights, stories, practices) for the new world we have created.
[some of you may remember this graphic]
Why did I take on this work? I'm not sure. Partly I decided to do it because I knew a website should be done, I knew no one else would do it (I didn't yet know Matthew Clapp), and I knew I could figure out how to do it. Plus, feeling perpetually an outsider, this project seemed respectably marginal...or marginally respectable.
I've always been drawn to unusual ideas and people--if not, I never would have found my way to Zurich in the 1970s. In the 1980s e-mail was new and I soon got my hands on a modem and began exchanging e-mail with my computerized friends. The World Wide Web was brand spanking new in the early 1990s. In 1995 I caught the growing internet wave when it was swelling--growing from 600 websites in 1993 to 100,000 websites 2 years later. The internet had already given me access to other "virtual" folks and unexpected friends. I was ready to try something risky--with an internet domain, web graphics, HTML, hypertext links, metatags, unix commands, file transfers, and other technical challenges. I purchased cgjung.com and found a webhost in Boulder.
Over the past 10 years the Jung Page became the primary "portal" to Jungian psychology on the internet, and at the same time, it has maintained a uniquely open quality, remained non-partisan, stretched to include articles in other languages, provided international Jungian news, and built relationships with journals, institutes, gifted authors, gifted webmasters, and international analysts.
There are people I want to thank for their participation and companionship along the way. In addition to the remarkable group of authors who have given this site its substance, I want to thank some people who at times have been most active in the background. First of all, David Sedgwick (Virginia) signed on as an editor and editorial writer and he has been a creative presence and solid companion over the years.
I am immensely fortunate to have met Dolores Brien online, the editor of the Round Table Review--the most adventurous and original Jungian review being published at the time. Dolores and I collaborated by e-mail and phone to organize and moderate the Jung-Seminars with the likes of Wolfgang Giegerich (Germany), Andrew Samuels and Ann Casement (UK), Sue Austin (Australia), and John Beebe, Thomas Kirsch and Tom Singer (San Francisco). Dolores worked together with me to plan the seminars and to pave the way for a deeper, more creative website. She single-handedly created a rich collection of articles and interviews on the theme of psychology and technology, and most recently has published her reflections at the Jung Page on Wolfgang Giegerich's controversial essay, "The End of Meaning."
Daryl Sharp, editor of Inner City Books, has always been supportive and generously donated his text, The Jung Lexicon, to go online for the benefit of the visitors who are unfamiliar with Jung's terminology. In a similar spirit, I made some texts available to the general public with unrestricted access--most notably, the Abstracts of the Collected Works created by NIMH (the National Institute of Mental Health). Through Dolores Brien's efforts, we were able to scan the text and offer Cross-Currents of Jungian Thought: An Annotated Bibliography by Donald R. Dyer online (the text will soon to be restored to the Jung Page after a temporary loss).
I soon learned of Matthew Clapp's work. He founded JungIndex.net (also in 1995), a remarkably innovative and energetic site--egalitarian, creative, open to dispute, and always personal, always embracing a great range. Matthew and I have enjoyed collaboration and friendship from the early days forward (online, of course, with the exception of one evening of conversation in Atlanta). He is responsible for moving the Jung Page from the laborious HTML format over to the "content management system" that you now see. He taught me to reach far beyond my imagined technical limits.
Don Roper, a University of Colorado economics professor and the founder of Communications for a Sustainable Future, gave us access to his resources for hosting the Jung-Seminars. He was always available to help out when we got into a jam. I remember Don saying that he realized back in the days of the 300 (slower than slow) baud modem that the "information highway" wasn't about information but about communication--how right he was!
Jung Talk, another Jung Page feature, is a forum that runs on software separate from the Jung Page and has attracted a different community, certainly one more accustomed to active online conversations, Matthew again got me started with "bulletin board" software and the first setup. The Jung Talk forum has only had a moderator once since its inception--Jerome Aery took on the overwhelming task just last summer. Historically, the forum has hosted everything from intellectual discussions to "wild west" brawls, and I'm thankful to Jerome for keeping an eye on things. The forum will be closed at the end of the year while Jim and Sean evaluate how they want to use the forum and coordinate it with their vision for the Jung Page.
Some years back I met Henning Weyerstrass (Germany) online. He was independently digitizing Jung's Collected Works in German in order to produce a CD with the permission of the publisher (Walter Verlag) and the Jung family. At the same time I was making proposals to do the same with the Collected Works in English. I gave up after two attempts but I think that the Gesammelte Werke CD is virtually complete but still on hold. When I let the domain, cgjung.com, lapse in favor of cgjungpage.org, Henning by chance discovered that the domain was free and purchased it for his work, including photographic exhibits which you can see at www.cgjung.com.
Recently Doris Norrgard (Sweden) has translated a number of my Jung Page essays for the Swedish journal, Coniunctio, and with a keen eye has chosen the ones I value most. She has contributed some of her own work to the Jung Page and I trust will continue to do so.
I am deeply grateful for the unexpected and engaging relationships that have developed over years--as I have partially documented through the personal narrative above. These collaborations and conversations have helped to create a "new language for new times" and to fulfill part of the Jung Page's mission.
Technically I have been fortunate to be able to count on Joe LeBlanc (Maryland), to create, for example, the list of the 200+ authors published at the Jung Page with links to their individual works--all generated automatically with each newly published article or review. And through a request posted at the Jung Page, I found other exceptional people to work with on Jungian interests--Edwardson Tan from Manila, The Philippines, who helped move the Jung Page from HTML to its current form and Lucian Apostol, from Iasi in the Moldova region of Romania. Lucian became the database manager for the International Association (www.iaap.org), and he has also helped when needed with the Jung Page. I am happy to connect him with Sean Fitzpatrick for an ongoing collaboration.
The "hard knocks" of learning HTML, webdesign, and a little database management enabled me to develop the website for the International Association and the site for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts (www.irsja.org). With some extra time available after January 1, I will concentrate on my analytic practice, hopefully travel more, write, and respond to the e-mail that has waited, flagged, for months and months in my InBox.
Thanks to you all and best wishes for 2006 !
As always,
Don
webmaster, international association for analytical psychology
vice-president, inter-regional society of jungian analysts
e-mail : This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
address : don williams, 2332 20th street, boulder, colorado 80304 usa
