OAJA and the Jung Foundation
Illuminating the depths since 1970
The Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts (OAJA) and the CG Jung Foundation of Ontario are related but separate organizations. OAJA trains Jungian Analysts and provides resources for analysts and clients. The Jung Foundation presents programming that explores the psychology and philosophy of CG Jung.
Jung Foundation courses, workshops, and seminars are open to anyone interested in learning more about Jung’s wide-ranging theories about the psyche and its immersion in myth and culture.
Upcoming events are listed here
Jung in Canada & beyond
Memberships and affiliations
The Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts Training Program is a registered private career college under the Ontario Private Career Colleges Act.
The OAJA Analyst Training Program is recognized by the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO) as a psychotherapy training program. It is also recognized by the IRCC (Canadian Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada), which means international students accepted into the OAJA Analyst Training Program are eligible for Canadian student visas. The OAJA Analyst Training Program is the sole training organization of Jungian Analysts in Canada.
At the international level, OAJA is a group member of the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP), the international accrediting and regulatory body for all Jungian societies and groups of analytical psychology practitioners, trainees, and affiliates The OAJA Analyst Training Program is recognized and accredited by the IAAP.
OAJA has been training candidates to become Jungian Analysts since 2000.
History
The roots of Jungian psychology in Ontario
The foundations of OAJA and the CG Jung Foundation of Ontario began in 1970. To start, it was a collective of local people for whom CG Jung's work was vital. Some had met or known Jung personally. From this group, the Analytical Psychology Society of Ontario was formed following years of effort and collaboration spearheaded by James M Shaw (the President of Noxzema and an analysand of Dr Esther Harding in New York City). The society provided resources and community for Jungian Analysts and the public alike. On Shaw’s nomination, the first president of the fledging society was Professor Paul Seligman of Waterloo University.
In 1979, out of gratitude and respect, Shaw contacted Jung’s heirs to convey the organization’s strong desire to incorporate the Jungian name into their organization. In these exchanges, Jung's successors preferred “that these societies are in the hands of trained, competent analysts, who practice in the spirit of Jung." Consequently, the society established an executive committee with majority analyst membership, “to ensure that the voice of analysts would always have predominant weight.” So, in 1982, the Analytical Psychology Society of Ontario legally became the CG Jung Foundation of Ontario.
Concurrently, for practical and legal, analysts Fraser Boa, Marion Woodman, and Daryl Sharp formed a collaborative, yet separate group solely for fellow Jungian Analysts: the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts. The two organizations operated separately for nearly a decade.
However, in 1991, James Shaw proposed a re-merger of the two organizations. Approved by members and analysts, the reformation echoed Shaw’s words that, “the aims and purposes of the Foundation will be best served by this
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responsibility resting in the hands of the professional members.” The two sibling associations have been operating under one guardianship ever since. OAJA providing resources and fostering community between Jungian Analysts and the Jung Foundation presenting public programming and maintaining a Jungian library.
Over the years an impressive roster of notable Jungian-influenced intellectuals has been hosted by the Jung Foundation. International luminaries have included Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph Campbell, Kathrin Asper, Edward F Edinger, John Hill, James Hollis, Mario Jacoby, and others. Inspirational local scholars have included Robertson Davies, Northrup Frye, Marion Woodman, and Daryl Sharp, to name a few. Diverse and stimulating topics such as mythology, dream and fairy tale interpretation, typology, bodywork, femininity and masculinity, relationships, and Jungian foundational principles are commonplace.
Tens of thousands of people have attended these sessions, all of whom have received novel psychological perspectives exploring individual and collective thought.
Finally, constituting a monumental but natural evolution from its humble beginnings—after much reflection, effort, and experimentation—in September 2000, the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts began training future Jungian Analysts via the OAJA Analyst Training Program.
From a single Jungian Analyst in Canada in 1977, there are now over eighty practising across the country. Many of them were trained by OAJA, and many now train the next generation of analysts.
More than fifty years since its modest origins, OAJA and the Jung Foundation continue to protect and share Jung’s insights so future generations may also benefit from them.
CRPO accreditation
OAJA’s regulatory history with CRPO in Ontario
The practice of psychotherapy in Ontario is defined as a “controlled act,” which an individual may not carry out unless legally authorized to do so. Therefore, Jungian analysts who work in Ontario must be registered with one of the regulating Colleges that provide this necessary authorization. When the Ontario provincial legislature passed the Psychotherapy Act in 2007, OAJA participated in the discussions on regulation and was a founding member of the Alliance of Psychotherapy Training Institutes. This organisation engaged with government in the development of CRPO, with the result that a large number of psychotherapists have positions on its governing council. Of note, one of its early presidents was an OAJA Jungian Analyst.
A significant milestone for OAJA was the recognition of the Analyst Training Program by CRPO in 2019. This affirmed that graduates meet the educational requirements for CRPO accreditation. This ensures that OAJA can train people from a wide range of backgrounds, including those without prior license to practice psychotherapy. And, that OAJA’s commitment to a Jungian psychodynamic depth approach to psychotherapy, in which the unconscious plays a central role, is upheld.
Remembrances
In Memorium and gratitude
Remembering OAJA founders and pioneers.
Daryl Sharp
1936-2019
OAJA co-founder and member, president and member; CG Jung Society, Zurich, Diplomate; Jungian Analyst; BSc; BA Journalism; Author; Inner City Books founder & editor.
An auto-obituary written by Daryl Sharp:
This morning, a Sunday, alone in my turret and with nothing much in the works, an inner voice prompted me to have a try at writing my obituary. Just the bare facts:
Daryl Leonard Merle Sharp (code name Daemon) was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on Jan. 2, 1936. It was a caesarian birth; he was born a Capricorn. As a child he tended to pout, earning him the nickname of “Louie the Lip,” and to this day some relatives still call him Lou. His maternal grandparents had emigrated to Canada from Odessa in Ukraine.
Daryl’s mother Marion was a chorus girl, a “flapper” in the “roaring twenties,” his father Emery initially a brakeman on the Canadian National Railway (CNR) and later an accountant in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). Daryl had one brother, two years older, who bullied him from time to time, though with affection. Daryl’s mother took Eros into the kitchen, where she held the family together. She always claimed Daryl was named after the movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, but she couldn’t account for the difference in spelling. One of Daryl’s middle names came from his uncle Len, a feckless prairies boozer; the other from his father’s brother Merle, a sober accountant with the Royal Bank of Canada in Regina.
The Sharp family moved frequently from one air-force base to another across Canada, spending a year or so in each province, ending up in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, where Daryl completed his high school years at Middleton Regional High School at the head of his class.
He excelled at badminton, basketball, snooker, table tennis, and had a rep as a ladies man. He read only science-fiction, publishing and distributing his own fan-zine at the age of sixteen. His only ambition was to emulate Hugo Gernsbach, publisher of Amazing Stories and a multitude of other sci-fi magazines.
Daryl, obsessed with European writers like Kafka, Rilke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky,
Daryl, obsessed with European writers like Kafka, Rilke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky, applied to the new University of Sussex in Brighton for the post-graduate M.A. degree in literature and philosophy, code-named “The Modern European Mind.” He was accepted and excelled, and the next year he was recommended to an exchange position at the University of Dijon in France. Daryl and B. jumped at the chance. To finance their impending cross-channel adventure, Daryl took a job as a common laborer rebuilding the Waterloo Bridge; his wage was 2 and 6 — two shillings and six pence—an hour. Not much, but it added up over a few weeks, eight hours a day plus overtime.
In Dijon Daryl planned to do a Ph.D. thesis called In Search of the Self, drawing on the work of Soren Kierkegaard (The Religious Self), D.H. Lawrence (The Vital Self), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Natural Self). Rousseau’s papers were archived in the University of Dijon, and Daryl’s French was adequate to the task. In exchange, Daryl would teach a few weekly classes in English, and once a month would partake of the 6-course all-male dinner with wines from the Route du Grand Cru. B. did not relish being left out, but that was the protocol.
Daryl Sharp was no idiot savant, though some claim he was an idiot, if not wise, to found a publishing house in 1980 catering exclusively to a niche Jungian market. However, over time this modest enterprise (never more than two people) earned him almost a million dollars.
Sharp (or “Razr,” as he was sometimes known) led a rather shadowy life alongside his meagre practice as a Jungian analyst. He smoked (rolling his own) and drank Scotch, both to excess.
He leaves behind his two sons, Dave and Ben, two daughters, Tanya Claire and Jessy Kate, and his many friends.
And above his ashes in the Rose Garden of Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, a bronze plaque reads, at his request: “He was kind and generous; he loved women.”
That was hard to write, but better me than a rookie on the Canadian Press obit desk. They’ll cut it anyway.
Listen to lectures given by Daryl at UofT during the 1980s here.
Marion Jean Woodman
1928-2018
OAJA co-founder and member; Jungian Analyst; CG Jung Society, Zurich, Diplomate; author;English teacher; poet.
Marion Jean Woodman was born in August 1928 in London, Ontario, Canada. She died on the 9th of July 2018, a few weeks short of her 90th birthday.
Marion had a first career as a legendary and beloved high school English teacher. Through poetry, she helped to transform “terminal” students into kids that went on to university.
While accompanying her husband Ross Woodman on a sabbatical in London, England in the early 70’s, she began analysis with Dr EA Bennett, which later led her to begin her training at the CG Jung Institute in Zürich.
After receiving her Diploma in 1979, Marion opened a practice in Toronto. She began writing books, publishing them with Daryl Sharp at Inner City, and they became bestsellers in the 1980s.
Her work on the feminine and on addictions helped to transform the lives of many. Marion also developed workshops based on the complementarity of body and soul, as espoused by Jung himself. Marion was also one of the founders, along with Daryl Sharp and Fraser Boa, of The Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts, and the recipient of three honorary Doctorates.
Marion was the older sister of Bruce and Fraser Boa. Their mother was very sickly when they were young and Marion looked after them. Her brothers meant the world to her.
Marion and Ross enjoyed a fruitful life together over many decades. Ross died in 2014 at the age of 91.
For the last several years of her life, Marion suffered from dementia and lived in a long-term care facility very close to her home in London, Ontario. Two weeks before her passing Marion sustained a bad fall and was never able to recover.
She passed away peacefully, with Fraser’s daughters, Marion and Shelley Boa, at her side.
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John Dourley
1936-2018
OAJA co-founder and member; Jungian Analyst; CG Jung Society, Zurich, Diplomate; Catholic priest; author; professor of religious studies, Carleton University.
John Dourley is someone I remember often. Whenever I do, he inevitably leaves behind a feeling of warmth and kindness. All those who knew him will have experienced this in his presence. John knew something about being a friend.
One of the original and talented group of four analysts who trained in Zurich during the 1970s, John returned in 1980 to open a practice in Ottawa, alongside his work as a lecturer in Religious Studies at Carleton University. Prior to his training in Zurich, he had earned a doctorate in theology at Fordham University in New York where his doctoral thesis was on the thought and writings of Paul Tillich.
John left us with the gift of many books. His thesis in Zurich soon became one of the early titles in the library of Inner City Books, established by his good friend Daryl Sharp. The title was Psyche as Sacrament: A Comparative Study of the Ideas of C.G. Jung and Paul Tillich. Many others followed. Among them were The Illness We Are: A Jungian Critique of Christianity and Strategy for a Loss of Faith: Jung’s Proposal.
At the heart of them all was an exploration of the implications of Jung’s rediscovery that the realm of religious experience lay within the depths of the psyche, and that the symbols that surfaced in our dreams, for example, would propel us towards an encounter and struggle with the powers or divinities within us.
For as long as he was a member of OAJA, John rarely missed a meeting of the analysts, making the drive of five hours each way to be with us. He had a wonderful sense of humour and was always up to celebrate over a glass or two. An avid Sports fan, John would often take in a couple of Jays games with Bob in the summer, where he would always score the game. Nothing about him sat on the sidelines.
Towards the end of his life, when he was no longer able to make the drive to Toronto, he resigned, saying “but I shall remain ever present to OAJA in spirit.” John’s legacy of warmth, humour, sound scholarship and regard for an experiential approach to the problems of the psyche continues to inspire us to this day.
— Dorothy Gardner
Edward Fraser Boa
1932-1992
OAJA co-founder, president and member; Jungian Analyst; CG Jung Society, Zurich, Diplomate; Documentary Filmmaker; Author.
I first met Fraser at a lecture he gave in 1977. He had just returned from Zurich and as the first Jungian Analyst to arrive in Canada, he initiated a series of dramatic changes to the way Jung’s ideas and work would become known in Toronto.
One of his creative projects in the early 80’s was to produce a series of videos called The Way of the Dream. They featured his Zurich analyst Marie Louise von Franz interpreting and commenting on many common motifs in dreams. The series and its accompanying book are still popular and often provide a basic introduction to the value of dreams as well as some concepts in Jungian psychology. This was followed by another series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, This Business of the Gods. Although the videos are no longer in circulation, the book is still available. Fraser could also often be heard talking on the CBC radio programme Ideas.
Fraser Boa was the embodiment of an intuitive. He was a charismatic leader, with an ability to inspire others to get involved and bring his ideas to fruition. His confidence was contagious and under his leadership, the Jungian community witnessed the formation of OAJA in 1982. Next, was a development where the International Association of Analytical Psychologists (IAAP) was to grant OAJA Group Membership in 1989 and with this, the right to train analysts. As the only training program in Canada to date in 2023, OAJA has graduated some forty Jungian Analysts with currently over twenty candidates still in training. It is probably fair to say that there might not have been a training program as early as 2000 without Fraser’s initial leadership. In 1991 while Fraser was still president, OAJA took over the public programme previously run by the Analytical Psychology Society of Ontario (APSO) under the devoted leadership of Jim Shaw.
Fraser lived for possibilities and was always receptive to talking about creative projects. Two weeks before he died, extremely ill but still with an irrepressible measure of resolve, he told me: “If I get over this, I have this series I would like to do.”
The day before his funeral I had a dream in which I was standing in front of a large piece of stone that belonged to me. All the tools for sculpting it were there. Fraser then appeared and said, with his hand on my shoulder: “There’s your task from here on in. It’s big but make sure you take it on…and keep working it.” A timely reminder about how one must take responsibility for carving out one’s life. It also seemed to echo an observation made by Jung about how important it is to keep the spirit engaged no matter what stage of life you are in.
Fraser died in 1992 at the age of fifty-nine. I knew him for fifteen short years and, even now, still run a few things by him.
— Robert Gardner