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Free Online Talk · Haunting the Self: Ghosts, Grief, and the Second Half of Life with Scott Bryson, PhD
DATE TBD
7pm ET (NYC time)
Free! RSVP with email at checkout
PLEASE NOTE: Video playback of free events is only available to Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanatomy.org.
Hauntings don’t always involve rattling chains or Victorian attics. The ghosts that follow us are often quieter—and far more intimate. For those of us in our 40s, 50s, and 60s, they tend to show up as regrets, old identities we’ve outgrown, versions of ourselves we never inhabited, and the unresolved stories we inherited from the families who shaped us.
Drawing from world mythology, depth psychology, literature, and personal narrative, this lecture reframes ghosts as psychological companions: messengers from the margins of the self. We’ll explore:
• The “ghosts” of the unlived life: the paths we didn’t take, the talents we abandoned, the versions of ourselves that hover just outside who we became. Why do these specters become louder in the second half of life?
• Ancestral hauntings: the generational patterns and emotional legacies we carry without knowing it. How family stories become folklore, and how folklore becomes identity.
• Mythic ghosts and underworld encounters: from Persephone’s seasonal return to Toni Morrison’s grief-haunted Beloved to Johnny Cash’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” These stories hint that phantoms rarely want revenge—they want recognition.
• Jung’s shadow as the “personal ghost”: the disowned pieces of ourselves that trail us like a cold spot in an old house.
• Narrative’s function as exorcism—or invitation: why telling a story can lay a ghost to rest, and why sometimes it calls it closer so we can learn what it’s been trying to say.
Throughout the talk, we’ll consider what ghosts actually want: attention, integration, and (sometimes) release. And we’ll ask a central question of midlife psychology: What if haunting is simply the psyche’s way of refusing to let us live a life that’s smaller than the one we’re meant for?
Participants leave with a deeper sense of how to listen to their ghosts—personal, familial, and mythic—and how to transform haunting into insight.
—
Scott Bryson has been an English professor and literary critic in Los Angeles for two decades, though he grew up in a small Texas farm town—making him “culturally bilingual,” equally at home talking myth and meaning or swapping stories over burritos and beer. His work ranges from ecopoetry to LA literature to how narrative shapes identity, always with an eye toward helping people see themselves inside the stories we tell. His current project—a mythology-based dissertation for a second PhD—uses songwriting to reimagine old myths as guides for modern life.
DATE TBD
7pm ET (NYC time)
Free! RSVP with email at checkout
PLEASE NOTE: Video playback of free events is only available to Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanatomy.org.
Hauntings don’t always involve rattling chains or Victorian attics. The ghosts that follow us are often quieter—and far more intimate. For those of us in our 40s, 50s, and 60s, they tend to show up as regrets, old identities we’ve outgrown, versions of ourselves we never inhabited, and the unresolved stories we inherited from the families who shaped us.
Drawing from world mythology, depth psychology, literature, and personal narrative, this lecture reframes ghosts as psychological companions: messengers from the margins of the self. We’ll explore:
• The “ghosts” of the unlived life: the paths we didn’t take, the talents we abandoned, the versions of ourselves that hover just outside who we became. Why do these specters become louder in the second half of life?
• Ancestral hauntings: the generational patterns and emotional legacies we carry without knowing it. How family stories become folklore, and how folklore becomes identity.
• Mythic ghosts and underworld encounters: from Persephone’s seasonal return to Toni Morrison’s grief-haunted Beloved to Johnny Cash’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” These stories hint that phantoms rarely want revenge—they want recognition.
• Jung’s shadow as the “personal ghost”: the disowned pieces of ourselves that trail us like a cold spot in an old house.
• Narrative’s function as exorcism—or invitation: why telling a story can lay a ghost to rest, and why sometimes it calls it closer so we can learn what it’s been trying to say.
Throughout the talk, we’ll consider what ghosts actually want: attention, integration, and (sometimes) release. And we’ll ask a central question of midlife psychology: What if haunting is simply the psyche’s way of refusing to let us live a life that’s smaller than the one we’re meant for?
Participants leave with a deeper sense of how to listen to their ghosts—personal, familial, and mythic—and how to transform haunting into insight.
—
Scott Bryson has been an English professor and literary critic in Los Angeles for two decades, though he grew up in a small Texas farm town—making him “culturally bilingual,” equally at home talking myth and meaning or swapping stories over burritos and beer. His work ranges from ecopoetry to LA literature to how narrative shapes identity, always with an eye toward helping people see themselves inside the stories we tell. His current project—a mythology-based dissertation for a second PhD—uses songwriting to reimagine old myths as guides for modern life.