Mary Antonia Wood
The Seer and the Saboteur: Desire, Denial, and Reawakening at the Crossroads of Immanence and Transcendence
August 16, 2026 — 10 AM PT/ 1 PM ET/ 6 PM GMT
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves. ~ Adam Phillips
That’s how it is sometimes / God comes to your window / all bright light and black wings / and you’re just too tired to open it. ~ Dorianne Laux
Human life is a miracle, yet dominant Western cultures have all but forgotten this fact as we sleepwalk towards global catastrophe. While we may experience moments of revelatory clarity, awe, interconnectedness, and deep empathy, we are most often distracted, self-absorbed, driven to relentless achievement, or simply numb. Why is it so difficult (as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has stated) to “bear our aliveness”– to bear, and to live, the miracle of our existence? What is it about human nature that has led us to create economic, political, and religious structures that aim to keep us anesthetized, dependent, and ignorant of our shared origins, wisdom, and responsibilities?
This talk will address these questions by exploring two opposing, yet complimentary–and necessary–human impulses: desire and denial. While all humans share these impulses, they are seen most clearly in the lives of artists, mystics, and medicine people/shamans; those humans whose callings entail daily navigation, negotiation, and cooperation with desire and denial as they traverse temporal and eternal realities. Their insights are invaluable for this exploration.
Writing from a prison cell, the poet, playwright, and statesman, Vaclav Havel observed that, “the tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life but that it bothers him less and less.” This is indeed a tragedy with consequences that are being felt not only by the individual, but by the whole of human and non-human nature on this precious planet. At this critical moment in time, we must reawaken in numbers large enough to counter the forces that seek to keep us overwhelmed and undereducated, distracted and lethargic, as they eagerly plunder both our outer and inner worlds. We do not need to be mystics, shamans, or artists, but we can learn from their devotion to their destinies and from their relationship with desire and denial as we strive to be truly alive in the present while shaping our collective future.
Mary Antonia Wood, PhD, is a visual artist, mythologist, and educator whose work stands at the fertile intersection of depth psychology, creativity, and the imaginal life. She serves as Chair and Professor of the MA program in Depth Psychology and Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she has played a significant role in stewarding a distinctive form of graduate education devoted to soul, symbol, and the transformative vocation of art.
Dr. Wood holds both an MA and a PhD in Mythological Studies and Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is the author of The Archetypal Artist: Reimagining Creativity and the Call to Create (Routledge, 2022), a work that brings scholarly rigor and psychological depth to the question of what it means to create in conscious relation to the archetypal dimensions of imagination. Across her teaching, writing, and mentorship, she has become an important voice in articulating a vision of creativity as both a psychological practice and a mode of soul-making.
With more than twenty-five years of experience as a visual artist, Dr. Wood has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, and her work is held in both public and private collections. She is also the founder of Talisman Creative Mentoring, through which she supports artists and creators in cultivating a more authentic relationship to the deeper sources of their work. Her approach integrates mythology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative traditions in service of a richly textured understanding of artistic vocation, one that joins erudition, imagination, and lived transformation.