Charles Zeltzer, Ph.D. is a former Director of Training of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, and continues as a member of the faculty. He is also a member of the Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts. He served on the editorial board of Psychological Perspectives and guest-edited special issues on Jung and the East, and fairy tales. Charles lectures both nationally and internationally on the relationship between body, psyche, and trauma, and on many aspects of the religious dimension of the psyche. These include Kundalini yoga and alchemy, the Roman Catholic Mass and alchemy, and the role of the alchemical god Mercurius in our everyday lives.  Charles has specialized in leading seminars on Jung’s alchemical writings, including a 13-year, line-by-line discussion of Jung’s magnum opus, Mysterium Coniunctionis. He currently leads a line-by-line reading seminar of The Red Book. Charles practices analysis in Ventura, California.

Charles says the following about his own journey:

I was born into a kind of liminal, intermediate space between my parental opposites of strict Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism.  Reading the Bhagavad Gita at the age of 14 led me to leave Catholic devotion.  Being introduced to Greek mythology at 15, and the study of Freud at 17 furthered my serendipitous inner journey until the age of 21, when I discovered Jung’s approach to the psyche. This has, since then, been the guiding compass of my professional work and inner journey.  In addition, these other interests – Hindu and tantric philosophy, mythology, Jewish mysticism, and alchemy – have evolved and developed, interweaving themselves with the depths that Jung has opened to me.  The thread behind all of it is a passionate love of the psyche, and the thirst to ground complex psychological concepts through personal experience.

[Updated August 2020]