In Pursuit of the Shadow: Reading Sufi Texts with Jung in Mind
Day Workshop with Prof. Sara Sviri
Saturday 13th June 10.30am – 4pm
at the
Association of Jungian Analysts, 7 Eton Ave, London. NW3 3EL
Jung’s ideas concerning the Shadow, when viewed from a religious-moralistic perspective, may appear provocative if not subversive; in particular his later-life book An Answer to Job. Indeed, one of the major problems of monotheistic religions has always been how to reconcile God’s infinite goodness with the experiential awareness of the negative, not to say evil, aspects of existence. Struggling with the psychological and theological implications of this problem, Jung came by the understanding of the archetypal shadow. “The shadow”, he writes, “is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality” (Aion, CW9ii, p. 8). Ideas concerning the ‘shadow’, the other side of the luminous aspect of God and Man, are prevalent also in the Sufi lore.
Sufism has tirelessly searched for the mysterium conjunctionis, the ultimate union of the opposites within the divine mystery and the hearts of men and women. Union of opposites entails the union of good and evil, light and shadow. “When light moves into manifestation,” write the 13th-century mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi, “its shadow extends and inhabits the place from which light had separated.” In this day workshop, I shall try to pursue the topic of light and shadow in some Sufi texts. Not a Jungian scholar or analyst myself, I hope that this will open up a fertile discussion bringing together Islamic mystical perspectives with Jungian ones.
Prof. Sara Sviri
Since 2002, Sara Sviri has been affiliated as a distinguished visiting professor to the Department of Arabic and the Department of Comparative Religions at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her fields of study are Islamic mysticism (Sufism), mystical philosophy, mystical psychology, Judaeo-Arabic mystical writings, comparative and phenomenological aspects of Islam, the formative period of Islamic mysticism, and related topics. Papers on these topics were published in many academic publications and can be viewed on www.academia.edu. Her book The Taste of Hidden Things: Images on the Sufi Path was published in 1997 in the USA.
In 2008, Tel-Aviv University Press published Sara’s extensive Sufi Anthology in Hebrew. She is currently preparing an Arabic version of this anthology as well as a monograph on Aspects of the Formative Period of Islamic Mysticism. In 2012, Sara retired from academic teaching and has been engaged in lecturing and teaching Sufism in Israel and elsewhere outside of academia. Formerly, while residing in England, she was teaching at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London and at the University of Oxford. She also spoke several times to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology as well as to the Analytical Psychology Club.
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