M.A. Lecture: "Haunting the Self"

Event Title: "Haunting the Self: Ghosts, Grief, and the Second Half of Life" with Scott Bryson, PhD

Event Date: Monday, Mar. 9, 2026 at 7:00 PM EST

Ticketing Info: FREE - but you must still register at: https://www.morbidanatomy.org/events-tickets/p/free-online-talk-haunting-the-self-ghosts-grief-and-the-second-half-of-life-with-scott-bryson-phd

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 [info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com](mailto:info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com). (Video playback of this event is only available to Morbid Anatomy's Patreon members.)

Event Description:
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 will reframe ghosts as psychological companions—messengers from the margins of the self. Together we will explore the “ghosts” of the unlived life: the paths we did not take, the talents we abandoned, and the versions of ourselves that hover just outside who we became, asking why these specters grow louder in the second half of life.

We will consider ancestral hauntings in the form of generational patterns and emotional legacies carried unconsciously, tracing how family stories become folklore and how folklore hardens into identity. We will meet 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,” suggesting that phantoms rarely seek revenge so much as recognition. We will look at Jung’s shadow as a kind of “personal ghost,” made of the disowned pieces of ourselves that trail us like a cold spot in an old house, before turning to narrative itself as a form of exorcism—or invitation—asking why telling a story can sometimes lay a ghost to rest and at other times call it closer so we can finally hear what it has been trying to say.

Throughout this 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 will leave with a deeper sense of how to listen to their ghosts—personal, familial, and mythic—and how to transform haunting into insight.

About the Speaker:

• 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. For more info, check out his bio page on the Mount Saint Mary's University website - https://www.msmu.edu/directory/scott-bryson/

About the Event Host:
This event is hosted by the Morbid Anatomy Blog & Library, a website dedicated to interstices of art and medicine, death and culture. Morbid Anatomy was created in 2007 as a blog by Joanna Ebenstein, a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, writer, lecturer and graphic designer. It later expanded to include a library of lectures, exhibitions, classes, spectacles, symposia, field trips, books, parties, and films. It is best known for its brief incarnation as the critically acclaimed Morbid Anatomy Museum (2013-2016) in Brooklyn, New York.

........................................................................................................................................................................................................