C. G. Jung Newsletter Articles
Browse these articles written by members and guest speakers of the C G Jung Society of Atlanta.
Beyond the Eclipse of Research on Big Dreams – Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.
…“Big dreams,” as originally conceptualized by C.G. Jung, are rare, extremely vivid, and highly memorable dreams that people experience as being dramatically different from the relatively mundane and forgettable contents of “little dreams.” To appreciate the importance of this distinction between big and little dreams, one has to accept the basic premise that dreams, in general, have some degree of meaning…
“DreamSynergy” A Simplified and Dynamic Approach to Following Your Dreams – Justina Lasley
…The dynamic approach of DreamSynergy revolves around the concept that Dreams + Action = Change, creating personal growth and transformation through a commitment to the process of change. Dreams come to us all every night without our effort, but you must be willing to put the effort into understanding the dream to take advantage and reap the rewards…
“Sometimes The Heart Finds its Own Strange Language” Remembering Bill Willeford (1929-2015) – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D.
…Bill was particular about some things. Haricots verts, in his understanding, needed to have both ends cleared of anything that was not directly a green bean! In an analogous and more significant and profound level, he also thought that if the IRSJA forgot about its European roots, it would be to the organization’s peril…
New Life: Symbolic Meditations on The Holy Bible – Kathleen Wiley
…Jung investigated our psychic Nature to find the embodied expression of the transcendent. He described the transcendent forces as archetypes. In the scriptures, St. Paul refers to these as “powers and principalities.” Jung discovered that archetypes flow into instincts where automatic, reflexive behaviors are prompted. He saw these opposites as different ends of the light spectrum: instinct as the ultra red and archetype as the ultraviolet rays…
Somatic Dreams – Jeanne M. Schul, Ph.D.
…We all dream every night, but some of us have powerful body-based experiences that demand our immediate attention. Somatic dreams involve vivid physical sensations that rush through our bodies and shock us into an awareness of a highly significant psychic process at work within us. Those are the dreams that haunt us long after we awaken. These physical responses of the body in the dream state…
The Goddess and Marija Gimbutas – Maureen Murdock, Ph.D.
…The work of Marija Gimbutas has been crucial to the growth of feminist spirituality, feminist religious scholarship, feminist psychology, and the liberating implications that the existence of a goddess tradition can bring to women everywhere…
Minding the Gap – Jutta von Buchholtz
…Psychotherapists and their clients are interested in gaps. We attend to what may emerge from another reality, from the unconscious. We understand that what lies below holds creative and destructive energies which propel us, seen or not seen, bidden or not, on our individuation journey…
Diving Deeper – Karen Hebert
…Soul to psychology is like wetness to ocean. You cannot separate the two—it’s inherent in its very nature. The word “psychology” comes from the ancient Greek root “psyche,” which means soul. The very nature of psychology is that it has to do with soul, which invites spiritual understanding…
Michael Meade Brings Genius to Life in Atlanta – Charles Knott
…Two topics that preoccupy Meade these days include our culture’s need for actualized elders, those who have achieved wholeness, who have reconciled their conflicts to a great degree and are ready to mentor young people, as well as the willingness of the world village to receive young people who have been shattered by conflict and need to be healed by community…
Is it Possible to Recreate Yourself? – Carol Coronis
…Being open to the possibility of re-creating yourself is the first step to making conscious changes and choices that will grant you the power to do what you never thought possible. It is only natural to resist abandoning your old way of seeing and acting in the world. If you let go of your beliefs…
Revisiting the Left Brain – Right Brain Metaphor – Mark Winborn, PhD
…Contemporary neuroscience research acknowledges that there is localization of certain brain functions and that the two hemispheres do appear predisposed to process different kinds of experience. However, the bigger picture is much more complex than that. Current research has shifted away from a focus on localization towards an emphasis on neural networks and connectivity. These neural networks are often broadly dispersed across the brain structure and across both hemispheres…
The Long Journey To Racial Healing and Reconciliation – Catherine Meeks, Ph.D.
…Perhaps it was living in the midst of my father’s sorrow and anger that helped me to make the decision to work hard to find a way to navigate my way through the maze of being a black person in America. Even though it is not always easy to plot the journey of decisions that lead from one stage of life to another, I am quite certain that I made a clear choice to follow a path that would prevent me from being an immobilized person in this world and that would enable me to be able to take care of my children and myself…
The Journey Towards Home: The Places and Spaces that Shape the Individuation Process – Renée LeStrange, Ph.D.
…What is it about certain places that they become part of who we are? Why do some places become so meaningful to us—certain houses, cafés, neighborhoods, woods, beaches, cities, countries? What makes a place a home, anyway? And what role do homes and other places we experience serve in the process of individuation, living into our true selves, becoming who we know ourselves to be? And finally, what is the relationship between being at home in the world and being at home with ourselves…
The Essential Connection – Jacqueline Wright, Ed.D.
…We are all living at break-neck speed these days and taking time to pause and turn our attention to our own inner voices helps to re-center ourselves and hear the truths that are asking to be acknowledged. The pause is where we’re more apt to find our emotional center of gravity, which helps us be more fully present in our interactions with others. We can do this (pausing) in small ways every day, by disconnecting from our machines, stopping and just being quiet for a few minutes, listening to our own thoughts and feelings…
Night Sky as Alchemical Mirror: Sophia’s Dreaming – Monika Wikman, Ph.D.
…A few hours into the gathering a little face peeked around a post in the kitchen. Yasmin said, “Monika, psst. Be careful of falling into the organic beauty of things!” And then off she went back into the quiet. Even in this brief encounter, I felt profoundly visited by a nature spirit: with her artist’s eye and gardener’s heart and hands, she had spent her life deeply loving the beauty of the particulars in the natural world. When Yasmin died years later she was fittingly buried in a sheet in her own garden among the flowers…
Relationships: Carriers of Life, Growth, and Trouble – Jerry M. Ruhl, Ph.D.
…What would relationship look like considered as a spiritual exercise, a journey of pilgrimage, a container for self-realization and mutual individuation? Here are some preliminary ideas. First, unlike a vacation, a pilgrimage is a journey in which we are in service to something greater than our own egos. We expect challenges and suffering along the way. The participants aim for compassion, affection, and consideration as they go, yet they are prepared to deal with setbacks and suffering…
Foreigners– Friend or Foe– Agents of Change – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D.
…In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, there is the story of “Philemon and Baucis.” The supreme god Zeus and his son Hermes, disguised as disgusting, homeless beggars from foreign parts, came knocking at doors to test the villagers’ adherence to the divine laws of hospitality. Every door in the village was slammed into their faces. Almost at the end of their patience, they came to the edge of the town and to a narrow hut where they were welcomed by an old couple, Philemon and his wife Baucis, who treated them as honorable guests…
Jung and St. EOM in Georgia’s Land of Pasaquan – Sally Q. Gates
…Is it possible that just 38 miles southeast of Columbus, Georgia, stands the highest manifestation of Jung’s advocacy of Individuation? I’m thinking of the visionary art compound of Pasaquan built by Eddie Owens Martin between 1957 and 1986. The brightly painted and embellished walls, temples, pagodas, and shrines at Pasaquan form a complex of six buildings resting on four acres. A ceremonial dance circle completes the compound…
Some Thoughts on Technology as Shadow – Doug Tyler
…As we move at an increasingly faster pace through life, unconsciously worshiping at the altar of productivity, we risk abandoning our relationship with the deeper psyche. C.G. Jung cautioned us regarding the “frightful regressions” we court in both our personal and collective lives when we do not take adequate time and make sufficient effort to soak in the meaningfulness of psyche’s unconscious offerings…
Schizophrenia, Poetry, and the Redemptive Image – Samuel Prestridge
…Taken altogether, of course, my mother’s various emblems, metaphors, accusations formed a very private sort of mythology, one that had to be protected from those who might use it against her. She was private, evasive, and remarkably agile in her evasion and deflections of questions, responses, or requests. Asking What do you mean by that would be met with a suspicious stare, a change of subject, or verbal acrobatics…
The Unmarked Trail – Gail Tyson
…I look up to see a strange, disturbing creature. Tall, erect, his bearing emphasized by his long robe, the man has a face as cold and imperious as his voice. His features seem to be plated with steel, like a knight’s visor, the metal welded to his face as tightly as a skin graft. Tales of the Nunne’hi, or Cherokee immortals, float through my mind, but that race of spirit people were friendly and helpful…
Joy at the Depths of an Ordeal – Guy Corneau
…This was life, pure life reclaiming its ground after Winter. This was the natural flow of things. The almond tree touched me that day because I myself was emerging from my Winter of cancer. Nine months of procedures, needles, examinations and chemotherapy. Nine months of worry and a stubborn threat that was finally dissipating. The results of the latest tests were good. I would survive. But I was still acting like a fox on ice, alert to any sound and the slightest sign of collapse…
Cordial Racism: Race as a Cultural Complex – Walter Boechat
…With his sharp social eye, Guggenbühl-Craig had an intuitive understanding of a crucial problem in Brazilian cultural identity—that is, the close connection between our social prejudice and a very subtle “racial”2 prejudice not always admitted in different groups, amongst scholars and lay people…
Back to the Future: Moving From Hercules to Hermes – Doug Tyler
…In thinking about various ideas for this essay, a persistent theme kept emerging for me—that of consciously shifting more deeply and meaningfully into our lives. This idea may carry little novelty for us since we all share an interest in Jung and in the muddling through of our lives; when we are conscious of and attend to this process we more elegantly call it individuation…
Interview with Donald Kalsched: Trauma and the Soul – Van Waddy
…Yes, “authentic suffering” was Jung’s word for it and he said it often exists “underneath” the “neurotic suffering” on the surface. However, these terms contain strong (pathologizing) value judgments and so we should try for a more sympathetic understanding of what we all suffer when we are wounded psychologically—especially as children. The new trauma paradigm in psychoanalysis stands to help us with this more empathetic understanding…
Coniunctio: Transforming the Wound of the Heart – Carole Darnell
…I feel my relationship with my mother has come full circle: from narrowly escaping the terror of her primitive explosive blasts, to wondering through a motherless/fatherless terrain of the larger world, to finally discovering within myself and Nature a Divine Mother/Father behind it all who has been awaiting my embrace all the while. What a terrible and glorious journey with its dark and Light aspects of both mother and father!…
A Collage of Thoughts and Images on Silence – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D
…At times we have to ask ourselves, when do we do damage to ourselves and to others by speaking out, or when do we do damage by remaining silent? These moral issues arise daily in our lives, especially for those of us who belong to the tribe of professionals around the “talking cure.” When does the therapist need to remain silently respectful of the client’s deepest secrets?…
Poetics of Soul: Revisioning Psychology As Mythical Method – Dennis Slattery
…Pathology is less crafted around literal events, sicknesses, excesses, natural events and more deeply around “mythical figures” which James calls “eternal metaphors of imagination,” and “archetypal resemblances” present in literal events and persons but, more conducive to our concerns, in mythical figures in action that allow one to ask imaginably: which figure am I like “and the patterns I am enacting [that] have their authentic home ground?”…
The Heart’s Desire – Grace Barr
…Words have always drawn me. Words in any form. Spoken, written, sung, shouted. Words of scripture have been the exception. I don’t really know the Bible. Learning catechism lessons rather than memorizing Bible passages was stressed in my Catholic elementary school. What little scripture I know was read from the pulpit on Sunday mornings…
Living in Festival – Sharon Martin
…When Brother Roger was asked to explain what he meant by the word festival, he replied; “In every person lies a zone of solitude that no human intimacy can fill: and there God encounters us. There, in that depth is set the intimate festival of the risen Christ. So henceforth, in the hollow of our being, we discover the risen Christ: he is our festival.” He often prayed that “the spring of jubilation may never dry up in our hearts.”…
Jung and the Case of the Returning Dream – Pete Williams
…To the first point, in realizing that the dreams were “reiterating the conscious standpoint minus the conscious criticism,” I believe Jung is acknowledging the unconscious’s rejection of any interpretation through the lens of the moral perspective. He’s offering, I believe, an important caveat to all of us who work with our dreams—when it comes to matters of the psyche, we have to be careful not to confuse our moral viewpoint with the dreams’ ethical intent…
A Tale of Two Houses: Küsnacht and Bollingen (part 1) – Pamela Cooper-White, PhD
…During Fall and Winter of 2013-14 I had the privilege of receiving a Fulbright grant to do research as the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, Austria. While there, I made several side trips to lecture and meet colleagues. One of those visits was to Bern, Switzerland, where after a full round of lectures, I was treated by my Swiss host Prof. Isabelle Noth of Bern University to a day trip to Lake Zürich to see Jung’s Wohnhaus (home) and famous tower at Bollingen…
How Jung led me away from/to Christianity – Kenneth Kovacs
…it fails to speak to the deep, human desire to connect with the Holy, to something numinous. These direct encounters with Mystery are occurring apart from the ministrations of religious institutions. “Is it not a paradox,” Hollis asks in his recent work, Hauntings, “that the chief practical function of so many religious organizations is to protect people from religious experience? Are they afraid that the faithful might go off the reservation?”…
A Tale of Two Houses: Küsnacht and Bollingen (Part 2) – Pamela Cooper-White
…Jung was greatly moved by finding this snake and fish, as it coincided with the time he was working on the symbols of fish/Christianity and snake/alchemy. This awareness of “synchronicity” helped him to realize how much these symbols had always meant to him, both archetypally and also representing his own struggle to find a way to integrate the alchemical (or perhaps more broadly his desire to discover ancient wisdom of all kinds) and Christian sacraments and symbolism….
On Splitting and Re-finding the Soul: Traumas, Horcruxes, and the Fall of Voldemort – Nyambura Kihato
…In a sense, I think we are all a bit like Voldemort. We split our souls—unconsciously, by not accepting all parts of ourselves—then conceal these “soul pieces” and continue to live our lives with the discarded fragments scattered messily about. Our task then, is to embark on what Jung called “re-finding the soul.” Jungian psychology offers the process of individuation as a way to do this, where all aspects of the soul—the good, the bad, the ugly, the scary—are gathered and embraced into an integrated whole…
Slow Down – Susan Olson
…Throughout his long life, Jung counseled us to listen to what our symptoms are trying to tell us about the state of our souls. He also reminded us that every symptom, no matter how unwelcome and bizarre, contains within itself the seeds of its own healing. So instead of trying to push past my resistance to the “hurry-up” mindset, it may be wiser to listen to what my resistance is trying to tell me. I am not ready to retire, but yes, I am getting older. My body is slowing down…
Meeting at the Edge – by Jacqueline Wright, Ed.D.
…As my mind raced to take in what was happening and to put the moment into context, a stillness and otherworld quality settled in around us. Meeting the gaze of the deer, which never wavered from me, I continued to walk toward them. As we continued to register each other’s presence, their stillness, their alertness became mine as well…
Coniunctio: Transforming the Wound of the Heart – Carole Darnell
…I came into this existence with a seed planted in me at my making. In the beginning I did not know the meaning or purpose of this seed, nor had I discovered a language in which to express its significance for my life. Nevertheless, this seed guided my every thought, word, and deed in ways that even bewildered me, not to mention my own family…
Crying Poem – by Jimmy Santiago Baca
…For the longest time, I haven’t been able to cry. Tears start to come while I’m watching a movie tears starts to come, swelling my whole body a tulip starting to open under moon, then the petals of my eyelids…
Saving Jesus, Freeing Christ: A Jungian Perspective – Jerry R Wright
…Here is the heart of the matter from a psychological perspective and why it matters that we give it our careful attention: when the wisdom teacher, Jesus, was idealized and declared to be God or the Son of God by the projections (see below for discussion of projection) from his early disciples, by the Apostle Paul, and by the early Church Fathers, Jesus was misnamed ‘Jesus Christ’ or the briefer designation ‘Christ.’…
My Three Cars— Or: A Car is not Just a Car – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D.
…My three cars are meaningful images, symbols of three phases of my life. All three were more than just cars—I am grateful for what they incarnated for me and for what I could understand about life because of their presence in it. They were representatives of archetypal energies that are always lurking in the background, in the unconscious, waiting to be known, to become embodied…
A Reflection on Night Terrors – Darby Christopher
…What differentiates the night terror is the experience of these otherwise seemingly routine fears. The person having one “knows” experientially that meaninglessness and hopelessness is the ultimate reality. The usual ways that we construct meaning and hope are stripped away. This reality can also be a part of nightmares, yet it is much more raw and intense in night terrors…
The Cross as a Tree of Life – Masimilla Harris, Ph.D.
…As a symbol, we can see the cross representing, as Edinger proposes, what our ego—our self with a small “s”—must go through in the dynamic journey of transformation that marks the path of its increasing relationship to the Self. Scott Peck is right about life being difficult. Each step in the journey of transformation includes dying to some part of our ego…
Reimagining the Self: The Sage, the Wise Old One, and the Elder – Jack A. Graham, M.Div.
…The Senex and Crone (or collectively, the Sage) in their ultimate development are archetypal personifications of the Higher Self. That is, in their highest reaches, they are images of the woman or man who has realized the Self…
My Mama and the Invention of Herself – Catherine Meeks, Ph.D.
…In the past decades of reflecting on my mother and the expression of archetypal energy that I can see that she engaged, I believe that the virgin goddesses are most representative of her journey. Artemis, Hestia and Athena seemed to represent dominant archetypal energy systems in terms of the way that my mother went about living in the world…
Coniunctio: Transforming the Wound of the Heart – Carole Darnell
…Not unlike I had ventured out onto that frozen lake of my dream, I found myself being lured out into this Mysterious relationship with this exotic dark stranger from another culture. The inner battle ensued, causing self-doubt and contemplation over the terrible consequences with which I might be flirting. Could anything fruitful come of this union?…
Our Split, Jung’s Split, and Tarnas’ Re-enchantment of Our Cosmos – Katie Givens Kime
…How are we to respond and move forward in light of the disenchanted world view? Tarnas sees new vision on our horizon. “The present world situation could hardly be more ripe for a major paradigm shift…a genuinely comprehensive, internally consistent world view: a coherent cosmology.” Here, we encounter Tarnas’ main purpose: to present archetypal astrology as a new light shining on the drama of history, reuniting science and religion, intellect and soul, modern reason and ancient wisdom…
The Autumn of Life – Susan Olson
…Instead of envisioning life in only two stages, as did Jung in his 50‘s, I am beginning to imagine it as a cycle echoing the rhythm of the four seasons. In Spring we are fresh and tender, just budding into the plants we will eventually become. Summer brings full blossoming as we take shape and produce the leaves that nourish us, the flowers that delight our senses, and the seeds that will ripen into fruit or produce new plants. Autumn is the season of harvest, when we flame into glorious color and gather in and store what we have created…
Reflections on the Fear of Consciousness – Bud Harris
…Self-actualization uses what is meant to serve our growth as a defense mechanism. Through it our ego attempts to colonize our unconscious as the European countries colonized Africa rather than to seek transformation through it. Instead, individuation asks us to become grounded in our instincts and to journey into the darkness of our emotions, complexes, and the life that arouses them. It is both a challenge and a plea to explore what we fear, to face inner rage, loneliness, and areas of life we have neglected or refused to live that show up in our dreams, depression, anxiety, illnesses, and in other symptoms crying out for our attention…
Shamanic Perception: The Couch of Two Minds – Gay Wolff
…Similar to Jung’s theories, ayahuasqueros of Peru also understand that each Soul is on a journey toward maturity and wholeness that is often directed by compensatory influences of the divine (those within us and without). Shamans understand this power to be conscious and are masters of techniques in orchestrating safe and appropriate direct encounters with these subtle forces…
Learn to Explore Dreams by Interpreting Myths and Fairy Tales – Elizabeth Bowen
…In An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise von Franz wrote that, according to C.G. Jung, it is in fairy tales that we can best study the comparative anatomy of the psyche. We may interpret fairy tales by circumambulating them with four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. Circumambulate means to walk around something, as in walking in a circular pattern while performing a ritual…
The Wounded Healer: A Jungian Perspective – Kathryn C. Larisey
…Theories and interpretations are not much help in the terrifying depths of the psyche. A psychotherapist’s own experience of being wounded is what helps her face the suffering client in simple relatedness. Jung is suggesting that the therapist’s “mental health” is not presumed “superior.” To sit quietly and hear a client’s pain acknowledges a mutual helplessness to “do” anything to make it go away…
Stuck in the Middle – Pete Williams
…F or Jung, living the symbolic life means living with an openness to an experience of the unknown. It requires maintaining a conscious awareness of a reality that is hidden, nonrational and represents a world that is more than meets the eye,” or is logical and “makes sense”—the mundus imaginalis. It means allowing ourselves to recognize and appreciate the discreet numinousities…
Michael Conforti on the Subject of Angels: An Interview with Paco Mitchell
…I suddenly had a deepened appreciation and understanding of the nature of angels, within the individual and collective psyche. From an archetypal perspective, angels serve to translate the particular aspects of the archetypal fields they preside over. We have angels of birth, of mid-life, of death; and for virtually every auspicious portal that humans have crossed since the beginning of time, we find angels watching over these crossings…
The Feminine and Punctuation May Well Save the World – Terre Spenser
…the origins of the madonna/whore split occurred in an attempt to understand the full circle of all things feminine. A splitting apart to understand the parts; and ultimately the whole, if you will. The origins of this division seem to have been forgotten along with the consciousness that there is a patriarchy at all. Truthfully, some have benefitted so handsomely from the patriarchy, that it perhaps rather behooved them to forget the original purpose and deny its existence…
The Alchemy of Anger – Sharon Martin
…Anger comes straight up from the unconscious, which means we cannot prevent it and we cannot, ultimately, control it. This is why we speak only of “anger management,” because we do not have power over it. In other words, this painful emotion is of God. Dr. Jung wrote these words two years before he died: “God” is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or for worse.”…
Be Quiet, and Join the Conversation – Frank Meaux
…Through cultivating stillness, in its many forms—working with dreams, active imagination, meditation, yoga, tai chi, other types of breath and body work, creative expressions of the soul through mandalas, writing, and other art forms—one begins to develop the capacity for real conversation. In order to engage in true dialogue, we must first be willing to sit with what arises from the dark underworld…
Pursuit of Happiness & Achieving Contentment – Interview with Jerry Ruhl
…Embrace impermanence. Change is constant. Death awaits. It is all around us, in the animals and plants we eat, in the transitions of the seasons, in the crisis that fill the news. Can you live now, be aware of only this moment? To experience more we have to become more: more present, more aware, more connected. At any moment we are here and nowhere else…
The Sounds of Individuation: Joining Body and Psyche – Massimilla Harris
…Sounds that are rich in high-pitched harmonics have the effect of stimulating a vast nervous network called the “reticular formation,” that controls the overall level of cerebral activity. These sounds play and important role in the increase of activity in our cerebral cortex, participating in the efficiency of a high number of important processes involved in memory, concentration, and learning…
My Break with Jung – Virginia Apperson
…As I revisit my initial reading of Translate this Darkness and my subsequent falling out with Jung, I remember how important this disillusionment was, challenging me to consider what mattered most in Jung’s visionary theories. To hold the tension of opposites (one of Jung’s most fundamental concepts) between Jungian theory and the realization that Jung was a flawed, complex-influenced person helped me through this confusing time…
God is in the Egg – Katie Givens Kime
…The egg plays a rich and recurring role in Jung’s Red Book, and here is where I was hooked. At our December lecture, Pamela Cooper-White referred to the “egg sequence” of The Red Book. Jung mortally wounds God—here experienced in the form of paradoxically mortal Izdubar—with Science. In order to heal God again, Jung effortlessly squeezes God into an egg and pockets God! This is both miraculous and awful…
A Dangerous Method: A Tale of New Beginnings – Van Waddy and Cathy Shepherd
…Freud declares himself a new Columbus, just putting his foot on land in a new country. Jung fires back, in youthful enthusiasm, that Freud is rather a Galileo, meant to walk through this new country “and open doors for others to come through.” Gradually, through his own growth and development, Jung comes to see that his desire for his patients to become who they are meant to be rather than to just understand how they got where they are is a finer and more rich prospect…
Visiting The Red Book – Mary Davis
…Hillman says that in 1961 when he was 35 years old, he carried a calla lily to Jung’s home to pay homage to Jung’s body after his death. He mentioned that Jolande Jacobi brought red roses. The meaning, the message he felt he was given then was: “Get out, get on, do my work.” And at the same time, he says, “undoing my work and living the tension between the public and the private.” He asks, “What difference does it really make? We are all scandals.” He cites The Red Book as “deep, deep, intimate privateness,” and “like a revelation for me”…
My Break with Jung – Virginia Apperson
…As I revisit my initial reading of Translate this Darkness and my subsequent falling out with Jung, I remember how important this disillusionment was, challenging me to consider what mattered most in Jung’s visionary theories. To hold the tension of opposites (one of Jung’s most fundamental concepts) between Jungian theory and the realization that Jung was a flawed, complex-influenced person helped me through this confusing time…
Why Explore Jungian Psychology? – Elizabeth L. Bowen
…Reflecting on this single clinical experience, I realized that I had no education or training whatsoever in how to work with dreams. Yet if dream work could be so powerful, I wanted to add it to my repertoire as a versatile physician, and to transform my practice to encompass Jungian approaches. After that encounter, I was determined to learn how to cultivate and to apply Jungian clinical skills professionally, in daily clinical contexts, as well as to continue to explore Jungian psychology for my own personal growth…
Psychoanalytic Pastoral Theology: An Oxymoron? – Pamela Cooper-White
…Jung’s attitude toward the question of God’s existence, then, represents a departure from Freud’s defensive atheism. Jung was agnostic about the question of God’s objective existence, but remained open to the traces of the divine in the subjective experience of psychic life. It was in this sense that Jung said in a radio interview in 1955, “All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take his existence on belief—I know that He exists.”…
The Invisible Child – Jutta von Buchholtz
…Invisibility, hiding our true selves, can happen in many ways. With some of my clients I have the impression that the sound of their silver bells is obscured by the logical, reasonable voice of their titanic intellect. This can result in an identification with only one of our four functions, which leaves the others neglected and falling into the shadow land of the unconscious. We can and do deny our shadow aspects, our natural self is hiding out safely in the shadow. It is a courageous task for any of us to face shadow aspects and bring them up from unconsciousness…
Archetypal Astrology as an Aid to Jungian Practice – Matthew Stelzner
…Archetypal Astrology as a discipline represents a very sophisticated avenue into the unconscious, and as such, can be considered one of the most helpful tools available both to Jungians and to their clients. In this sense it can be considered akin to dreamwork as a kind of “royal road” towards individuation and a balanced life….
Nasty Characters in Fairy Tales – Susan Olson
…I think we relate to the nasty characters—and to the shadow side of our favorite heroes—because we know that our hearts are also full of ambition, envy, greed, and rage. Like them, we have it in us to make bad choices and rationalize them, and to surrender to pride, weakness, cowardice, and lack of compassion for our fellow creatures. But because fictional bad guys are “only make-believe,” we can keep them—and our own dark side—at a safe distance….
It’s Hard to Get Enough of What Almost Works – Terre Spencer
…An imbalance created early in life in one or both reward systems foreshadows our future cravings/compulsions and, perhaps, addictions. Early trauma, abuse, neglect and injury can affect how our brains function for the whole of our lives. Although brains can recover to surprising degrees upon cessation of active addictions, the addicted brain is ever-susceptible to it’s pre-established imbalances….
Our Take on the Movie, “Tree of Life” – Van Waddy with Cathy Shepherd
…If you are not comfortable with Mystery, this is not the film for you. Malik plays with the eternal and finite as if they constitute one reality. The characters move between both with considerable ease, erasing time and space as linear boundaries. Even the music is a connecting, unifying force in this film, spiritual yet embodied, visceral yet ethereal….
Are You a Tree Person? An Interview with Jean Shinoda Bolen – Kris Steinnes
…As with all topics she has incorporated in her work—it’s a call to action—whether to save a tree, save a child, or bring equality to women around the globe. She finds the similarities between the harm done to women, and the harm done to trees. The juxtaposition of what is done to women who are disempowered, vulnerable and are considered property in many parts of the world, and what happens to trees—being cut down for profit, or for views, or other reasons, it is the same thing. This is a politically, spiritually, enlightening experience for Jean that her tree was cut down and to see it in a bigger perspective…
Healing Dreams – Tallulah Lyons
…In the following days before surgery, whenever she felt the beginnings of panic, Sandra re-entered her white stallion dream. Using all her senses, she relived her transformation from a state of panic into a state of support and calm. On the day of surgery, Sandra meditated with the sensations of herself on the horse—becoming calm, centered, supported. She imagined and lived into the experience of coming through the narrow rock passage to the bright meadow on the other side. Sandra feels that the dream and dream meditations have greatly contributed to her healing process…
Quilting Brought Me to the Promised Land – Massimilla M. Harris
…The jolt of leaving Europe and coming to the States taught me that we have to be able to sacrifice our visions of who we are and how we see ourselves in every transformation. Each glimpse of our shadow, anima or animus, will disturb our vision of ourselves. Every major complex we confront will cause us to sacrifice our self-image in order to work it through…
Reading The Red Book – Mary Davis
…Shamdasani said that initially, Jung is working with under-standing a system of meaning for Jung himself and for no one else. He is interested in the concept of religious transformation, the relationship to war, the resolution of conflict in the world. Then, he becomes more interested in the psychology, the process of religious transformation…as a window into mankind?s religious heritage…”and he tries to understand what of this is generic”…
What is Life Trying to Tell Me? The Meaning is not so Hidden – Christopher Bennett
…By considering the news of cancer as not something happening to me but rather an expression of my inner being getting my attention through cancer, the questions I began to ask and the answers I went looking for were very different. My first question was: what does cancer represent symbolically and specifically colon cancer?…
My Own Story – Marjorie Moran
…Note to self: Study Buddhism. Note to all: I have not yet studied Buddhism. Long paragraph written in the middle of the night, which I am unable to decipher. Was it something of great importance? It woke me up. I see the misspelled word? existentialism? and wonder what was so urgent to write. My handwriting, illegible. Brief moments of transcendence are difficult, no, almost impossible to capture with words…
Come Dance with Us and the Black Swan – Cathy Shepherd & Van Waddy
…We sat before that wondrous screen of fantasy and imagination, surrendering ourselves to images and metaphors that sent us immediately to that Jungian treasure-trove of interpretation and insight we both find so irresistible. We share with you our own fascination with Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, ? The Black Swan in hopes it will initiate a dialogue with all those Jungians also intrigued by this film…
Darkness Calls Forth a Helpful Light – Van Waddy
…Sitting in the darkness of that dung hut gave my vision time to clear, to allow in the light that was there all along, initially hidden. I had to sit and wait. I knew I would see what I came to see, but I didn’t know when. I didn’t know how long it would take. I didn’t even know exactly what I would see. I just knew I would see. And then I did see, exactly what I came for…
The Longissima Via – Maureen Murdock
…In the language of alchemy, the King is fed into the furnace to be reduced to ash. The furnace removes the outer form which distinguishes him from all other forms of being. Lear goes mad. His reduction to nothingness is a gestation of a new form, revealing the seed of a new Lear who is concerned about the welfare of both the Fool and Poor Tom in the storm. His madness turns to wisdom as he tells the blind Gloucester he will see better than the seeing: “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fool”…
Lucid Dreaming as a Marker of the Evolution of Consciousness – Jeremy Taylor
…Lucid dreaming itself is a natural, archetypal, symbolic reflection of the evolution of consciousness in every individual dreamer who experiences it. As that evolution continues, the dreamer’s understanding and use of language also evolves. At some point, the word “dream” (because of the multiple ambiguous and even negative associations that carries from earlier states of consciousness) begins to dissolve into a more direct experience of the one world we live in, both consciously and unconsciously, all the time…
Answering the Call of the Inner Child – Jacqueline Wright
…As an adult, answering the call of our inner child to play can help reconnect us with a sense of adventurousness and an aliveness of our senses. It can also bring up the history of the pleasure and pain we experienced as a child. Such memories can help us see more clearly how our lives in the present are a consequence of the experiences and patterns we adopted when we were younger. We can then use these insights to renew our present lives and enlarge the scope of our living…
Sarah Palin, Mama Grizzlies, Carl Jung, and the Power of Archetypes – Arianna Huffington
… It’s not Palin’s positions people respond to—it’s her use of symbols. Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That’s straight out of Jung’s “collective unconscious”—the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung’s words, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times”…
Jerome Bernstein: A Powerhouse of Wisdom and Knowledge – Van Waddy
…He sees this happening in what he calls the Borderland personality – an individual with a heightened sensitivity to and apprehension of nonrational, archetypal reality in such a way he or she has a feeling connection with nature and the natural world as a living, breathing organism and can listen to that nonhuman, archetypal, spiritual reality in an I-Thou relationship…
Driven out of Distraction: Lessons from a Fruitfly – Virginia Apperson
…Who knew I’d get called on the carpet by a neurotic, Jungian gnat, preaching individuation at sundown. And her buzzwords stung. She was right. Of the innumerable tasks at hand, I was not present to a single one. I was plugged into autopilot, acting as if I was engaged…
Love, Heartbreak and Healing: Towards the Inner Marriage – Benig Mauger
…The Inner Marriage is the ultimate archetype of wholeness, and at the core of every love affair is a vision of wholeness. When we love, we feel whole. But this wholeness often evaporates when the one we love leaves us, leaving us heartbroken and not only bereft of him or her, but also of love…
Die Herrin der Tiere and the BP Oil Spill – Jutta von Buchholtz
…If we understand this symbolically, our culture is endangering the very ideas and behaviors these animals embody for us: Dedicated as we are to the concrete and to materialism, our present day culture threatens to force us into ever narrower bell curves of our emotional life. By overvaluing the rational, scientific viewpoint and approach, we humans are becoming an endangered species. Oiled away will be our ability to deeply feel, our ability to believe in the miraculous, and our trust in the invisible energies of love and respect for others…
An Introduction to William Willeford – Mary Davis
…He then found himself in the process of “getting over and out of” a brief early marriage, and he felt at a loss as to where to go next. He considered finding an analyst or returning to Berkeley, and then, he says, “I had the odd idea of writing to Joseph Campbell for advice.” Still in Pakistan, he received a letter from Joseph Campbell, not “easy or diplomatic,” saying, “Why don’t you write to Jolande Jacobi in Zürich?”…
Anger in Animus Development – Sharon Martin
… the idea that what is masculine is in itself more valuable than what is feminine is born in her blood.” This idea should make our blood boil! The feminine principle has been profoundly devalued in our culture, our religion and our world. In our elevation of masculine values, our feminine rhythms have been discarded. Women naturally feel violated by this system, and anger is the healthy response to being violated…
Interview with Jerry Ruhl – Van Waddy
… Hindu thought looks on them as memories which follow us from birth to birth. What is common in the recognition that certain deeply formed patterns come to us in dreams and myths. Whether a god or demon, these characters mirror our conflicting urges. They depict the inner need to heal the splits within us, to attain the excellence which could be at the same time both this and that – the two split forms. We experience with Rama his conflicts, his struggles and his disappointments …
Appointment With the Wise Old Dog – Jutta von Buchholtz
… This film documents the miraculous power of the human spirit and demonstrates movingly how in times of serious crisis, when we question our mortality, we can depend on deep inner resources we all have—to listen to and trust them can bring us comfort and even transcendence …
Mumbai Journey – Marjorie Moran
… Bright colors for the vibrancy of energy. Capture the beauty of the women dressed in multicolored fabric against the backdrop of men in crisp white cotton. Blur the lines of the old buildings. Wash away human fallibility. Lightly soften the hands of the beggars. Abstract the exquisite beauty of this foreign place …
The Hidden Gifts of Books – by Laura Dorsey
… one of my favorite pastimes is wandering around and through used bookstores. I love the environment, the people, the search, the discovery of books I would never have known, and the delight of purchase. Filled with energy, I head home with the anticipation of an afternoon or evening in front of the fire and the potential of new relationships all around me …
Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul through Creativity – David Rosen
… Creativity is essential because when you break up that false self, that negative self-destructive ego dies and it frees up a lot of energy that must be used as fuel for creativity. This patient chose the creative art of ceramics that he had learned at the monastery. Now he is a master ceramicist and has a kiln attached to his house. He talks about clay in spiritual terms When he uses the wheel, which is like a mandala, he can tell if he is in balance, because the symmetry of the bowl or plate informs him …
On Finding a New Home – Jutta von Buchholtz
… Entering the stage of life when the nest is empty and we have amassed a lot of “stuff”–postmenopausal for women, or retirement age for both sexes–libido, vital energy, becomes more precious. It is a time of paring down, sitting still to decide which things to eliminate from our lives in order to make psychological space for what might want to emerge …
How Do You Feel About This? – Van Waddy
… If feeling is our superior function, we may have the tendency to enjoy our first experience and evaluation of a situation so grandly, we avoid any further differentiation of values, thereby missing the opportunity to grow a more open and developed value system. Hillman says feelers tend to adopt societal values and attitudes and not stray too far. … Feelers can become inflexible in the way they assign value to people, ideas, situations, and, once they “pass judgment,” they may not feel the need to revisit or reconsider their evaluation …
Van Waddy interviews Jerry Ruhl
… My wife died last year after a three year battle with brain cancer. There were many “thin” places of great suffering during that time. The ego’s catastrophe can be God’s opportunity if we have ears to hear it and eyes to see it, but we usually can’t stand the pain and want to move out of the suffering …
Pro-position – Amani Dafina Legagneur
… You approach, I wonder, You invite, I back away …
Jung, the Mind-Body Connection, and Charles Raison – Kathy Brown
… Raison pointed out that parallels of this idea can be found in the writings of Aristotle, who urged those who would be wise to follow the Golden Mean, that is, to seek out the balance between extremes. Neuroscience, chaos theory, and the philosophical treatises of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel likewise reflect an awareness of the interplay between polar opposites that …
Unbidden Ideas Compelling Behaviors – James Hollis, Ph.D.
… If ever one is to triumph over an addiction, one is first summoned to feel more consciously what one has already been feeling, suffer what seems insufferable, and live through this experience without the reflexive management system. We never “solve” those unbidden ideas because they are an intimate part of our common human condition …
From the Back Porch of the Church – Jerry R. Wright
… From the back porch I can see the “shadow of the Church,” so to speak, more clearly. Carl Jung reminds us that the individual and collective shadow can be very destructive or, with consciousness, a potential goldmine. When the Church refuses or neglects the work of consciousness, it becomes a “sanctuary for shadow,” a safe haven for intellectual laziness, and unexamined prejudices and fears …
Evolving the Eight-function Model – John Beebe, M.D.
… I became aware that the inferior function was often thought by Jungian analysts to operate in this way because it is “carried” by the Anima or Animus, archetypes of soul that can serve as tutelary figures, representing the otherness of the unconscious psyche, and also its capacity to speak to us to enlarge our conscious perspectives …
Cleaning Clutter… and More – Jacqueline Wright, Ed.D.
… Mental clutter also suffocates us, steals our energy, nags at us and keeps us in the past. Some of the mental clutter that we may carry around are old beliefs that restrict us, past hurts, images of ourselves that are no longer valid or true, a false sense of responsibility, outdated family beliefs and unrealistic expectations of ourselves. Why would we want to hold on to these things if they prevent us from living more fully? …
Pity the Poor Lab Rat – Kathy Brown
… Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., is one scientist who has studied what happens within the meditating brain, as well as within the brains of experienced meditators. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, he has shown that during the practice of compassion meditation, brain activity increases in the areas that support the generation and maintenance of positive emotions and decreases in the circuits related to anxiety and negativity …
The Ins and Outs of Living with Jung – Van Waddy
… Robert and Janis Henderson’s Living With Jung, Volume 1, is a smorgasbord of memories, stories, and personal reflections about Jung by people who actually worked with Jung or knew him personally, as well as younger analysts who worked with people who knew and worked with Jung. Called “enterviews,” each of the twelve chosen analysts fell between the ages of 58 to 96 at the time of their interview, have …
What Matters Most: A Book Report – Van Waddy
… Achieving personhood – to contribute most to others by becoming who we are and standing for values which matter in this world – is to come home to ourselves, says Hollis, to release that more authentic narrative written deeply within our psyche. It is to get in right relationship to “the gods,” those transcendent energies which course through all finite things …
The Gambler: A Book Review – Deb Herberger
… The book explores certain psychological connections to gambling including von Franz’s notion that the archetype of the gambler is play. Play itself is observed from its different points of view. Huizinga’s view of play is described as being voluntary, enjoyable, and expressing freedom with a step out of real life into make-believe …
Father Hunger: Jung’s Dreams of His Father – Susan Olson
… In the next dream, Jung’s father is living in a large house in the country and working as the custodian of the tombs of several famous people. To his son’s great surprise, he is now a distinguished Biblical scholar. In his study he opens a large Bible bound in shiny fishskin and begins a learned exegesis of an Old Testament passage. Then he leads Jung up a narrow staircase to a mandala-shaped room and points to another flight of stairs and a small door leading …
The Odd One – Wilson Elijah McCreary
… We work well together though grasping in opposition and moving things in a way unimaginable to such as horse or unicorn. There’ve been good times and bad my owner with his other crew, the left, pressing strings as we on the right pluck or both crews pressing soft, tender, willing flesh …
Hollis’ New Book Shines a Light on the Shadow – reviewed by Van Waddy
… Willing to share his own background experiences of childhood woundings at the hands of his parents and how he worked through these, Hollis makes it clear for the reader how to identify the messages and stuck places in one’s own personal history. Where we find our Shadow work, he says, is where our fears are found, where we are most ugly to ourselves, and where we make the many daily deals, adaptations and denials that only deepen our darkness …
Esther… Have You Seen Her Recently? – Laura Dorsey, D.Min.
… One Sunday afternoon, however, he came into the kitchen, speechless. He kept pointing to the front hall. There, resting on the chest in the front hall, was a large snake. I grabbed the broom from the kitchen and swept the invader out the front door. My heart was racing …
Archetypal Patterns: Snow White – She Was Quite A Ninny, Wasn’t She?! – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D.
… Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz, who spent her life interpreting fairy tales from around the globe, understood them as expressions and images of archetypal energies. She said that fairy tales are “… the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic forces.” I wondered how do these “expressions of collective unconscious forces” express themselves in our everyday life—where can we find them? …
A Little Talk on Religion and Science – Wilson McCreary
… I became involved in an eclectic collection of people and events called the “Men’s Movement.” The prominent people involved, teachers if you will, were people like Robert Bly, Michael Meade, James Hillman, Coleman Barks, Malidome Somé and others—poets, mythologists, storytellers and psychologists …
Remembering the Dead at Arlington West – Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D.
… Not since 1967 at Kent State University when I protested the Viet Nam war on campus, had I demonstrated against the foolishness of war, its lost promises, its squandered gifts, its end-stopped lives, and its camouflaged motives, yet always with its sincere and loyal victims. The memories were fresh and old at once …
Pan’s Labyrinth: Movie Review – Don Huntley
… Pan’s Labyrinth is an amazingly beautiful movie–though horrific at parts–it is an exquisite package: story, visuals, and music compel the viewer to be entranced and sometimes repelled by this world. It is one of the most unusual movies I have ever seen. It was the recipient of six Oscar nominations …
Panda-mania – Susan Olson
… As an analyst, Jung paid special attention to dream animals and regarded them as symbols of neglected or repressed instincts. When an animal appeared in a dream, he would ask: Is it wild or tame? Wounded or healthy? Friend or foe? Is it dying, or is there hope that it will recover? Does it talk to the dreamer? Tell him what it needs to be healed? Is it leading him into a dark forest? …
Superman Returns – Jo Mariolis
… a burst of pre-pubescent adrenaline; maybe it was the stress of being forced into a clichéd piano duet by a villain who beat his mother with purloined rock samples, as a Kryptonite-laced super-continent mutated on the sea-bed below the luxury yacht …
Living Your Unlived Life: A Book, an Invitation, a Hint of Gold – Van Waddy
… “Everything that conscious human beings experience is brought to us in pairs of opposites.” Such is the underlying melody running through the new book Robert Johnson writes with Jerry Ruhl, Living Your Unlived Life. In our attempt to choose the good, to become the person we want to be, we automatically exclude large portions of experience or potentials—essential aspects of ourselves—that would contribute to our wholeness …
Robert Johnson’s Slender Threads – Van Waddy
… In a delicious new three hour DVD interview by Pittman McGehee called “Slender Threads,” the viewer does indeed feel as if he or she has stepped into the eternal forest and encountered the wise old wizard in suspended time. Robert tells his story—his first encounter with the Golden World
Giving Despair its Due – William Willeford, Ph.D.
… Of course, despair may entail finding your situation meaningless, which may in turn result in your dropping out of the prevailing system of meaning, which authorities invested in it forbid you to do. But if meaning can be lost and found, despair must be part of what it comes from, and so part of its continuing background.
Old Age is a Crown Instead of a Curse in Helen Luke’s Beautiful Hands – Van Waddy
… The beauty of Helen Luke breaks through in language and dialogue in this story of Odysseus’ final journey, for Homer never finished this part of the tale, leaving it to our imagination to trace these final moments. Luke writes poignantly of these final hours in our hero’s life and his struggle to make sense of and to release all that had meant something to him during his full life.
Honoring Both Worlds: Visible and Invisible – Jerry R. Wright, D.Div.
… For the rational mind, the numina (gods or spirits) may have fled from the woods, mountains, animals, and streams, and the gods may have abandoned Mount Olympus, but these Ancient Ones reappear now as manifestations of the unconscious …
Two Zoning Inspectors and the Archetype of the Woman Healer – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D.
… From these myths we learn that physicians and healers originally shared characteristics that belong to the archetype of the healer, such as knowledge of art, music, hunting and prophecy—a connection between healing and a spiritual tradition, between the importance of dreams and the unconscious in healing …
Trust and Betrayal in Love – Jacqueline Wright, Ed.D.
… Psyche comes to know Eros in the dark, which suggests a kind of blindness or unconsciousness. We are told that it is a time of bliss and great joy. We can all relate this part of the story to those times when we have fallen in love and experienced that state of euphoria, when we give ourselves in complete trust to another …
Distinct Yet Inseparable – Cecile Tougas
… Each represents a one-sided attitude toward the world. For Prometheus, objective reality is soul, the stream of living experience, what Jung sometimes calls “the contents of the unconscious.” For Epimetheus, objective reality is spatial things, the flux of changing materials, what Jung sometimes calls “the things of the outside world.” …
Hiking Backwards – Don Huntley
… I slip and slide down the damp, boulder-strewn west side of the mountain, hanging onto to branches and small trees as I descend. I gain momentum and speed with my rising confidence, and just when I think I’ve got this licked, a damp moss-covered boulder proves too much: I slip, and careen to the left while hanging onto a worthless branch …
Small Change – Virginia Apperson
… How many times have I walked this walk and bypassed this irreverent excellence? Brooding over this or that. Rushing to get fit. Nose diligently attentive to the proverbial grindstone. In the midst of my narrow existence, miracles are performing all around me, hardly bothered by their ignorant audience …
The Grail Legend by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz – Report by Van Waddy
… Theirs is a psychological consideration of the Grail legend based on meticulous research – with countless multi-layered side-bars interwoven like an iridescent thread – reaching as far back as Celtic and pre-Christian Eastern sources around the eighth or ninth century, focusing mainly on two main texts from the twelfth century …
James Hollis Interview – Kathy Brown
… sometimes people awaken on their own, and sometimes they’re forced to by circumstances. Sometimes it’s getting a terminal diagnosis or it’s the death of a spouse or divorce or retirement that really causes one to reexamine one’s assumptions about life. And assumptions about oneself as well …
Interview with Georgia’s Poet Laureate David Bottoms – Jack Hayes
… When I think of mysteries, I think of Robert Penn Warren and his wonderful poem “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas: the Natural History of a Vision,” where he talks about the poet trying to find the logic of “the original dream.” We’re not going to find it, of course, because we didn’t dream the original dream …
The I Ching – Kathy Brown
… According to Walker, Hsieh “signals the beginning of a deliverance from danger, tension, and difficulty…The Higher Power uses conflicts and obstacles to teach us lessons that we refuse to learn in an easier way…” What are those lessons? Not surprisingly, forgiveness, the restoration of inner balance, and a reminder “…not to try to force progress, even though the time is beneficial …
A Dangerous New Myth is Emerging: The Return of the Titans – Pete Williams, Ph.D.
… the gods of Olympus that have fled, and it is the cold, hubristic Titanic that threatens to arrive. We are today witnessing an attempt at the triumphant return of the great Titans, a return that heralds the victory of the literal over the imaginal, the rational over the aesthetic, arrogance over eros, fundamentalism over tolerance, isolation over relatedness, pessimism over hopefulness, projection over responsibility, demonization over understanding, and technology over psychology …
Maureen Murdock Interview – Mary Davis
… And the hero’s journey model did not address the deep wounding of the feminine for both men and women. Most women are ‘fathers’ daughters’ if not personally, then culturally. I saw in my therapy practice that women worked hard to make it in a man’s world and then were often experiencing enormous spiritual aridity and deep wounding of their feminine nature …
When the King Turns to his Shadow – William Willeford, Ph.D.
… If one “has ever but slenderly known himself,” as one of his evil daughters says of Lear, then the missing selfknowledge must be somewhere in the shadow as one’s unknowing of what needs to be known. That unknowing is often imagined as a domain, called, for example, Shadowland …
Bittersweet Eros – Jacqueline Wright, Ed.D.
… Eros has a destructive as well as creative power and can be both cruel as well as tender. Sappho, the ancient Greek poet who infused her works with intense emotions, was the first to call Eros “bittersweet”, describing him as charming and very beautiful, yet cruel to his victims. Many lovers might heartily echo and validate such sentiments. The convergence of Eros, which often comes with great intensity, creates contradiction and paradox because it brings both pleasure and pain …
Stories, and Stories…. – James Hollis, Ph.D.
… All of us are living stories, many stories, some of them compatible with each other, and some antagonistic. What story do we live in any given social setting? What story has most compelling power over our lives? Is such a story even conscious? In the idea of individuation, Jung observed that generically we are all living a common story, the story of nature seeking to embody itself more fully through the life …
The Problem of War: Collective or Individual? – Ruth Hepler, Ph.D.
… A review of Jung’s writings on the relationship of the individual and the community reveals the above statement as representative of a consistent message that all societal divisiveness is but an outward projection of the divisiveness within the individual human psyche. Events such as war ensue, Jung contends, when individual responsibility is sacrificed on the altar of mob psychology …
Looking for Meaning in all the Wrong Places: A Shadow of the Individuation Process – Pete Williams, Ph.D.
… Jung devoted a great deal of energy and attention to the concept of meaning in his writings. He viewed it as central and vital to the fullness of the human experience. He recognized the timeless universality of humankind’s longing to find a sense of meaning and meaningfulness. There exists, Jung stated, “an archetype of meaning” that represents one of the primary loci of the psyche and, its relentless longing to manifest is itself an archetypal quest …
Who is The Other? – Bernhard Kempler, Ph.D.
… “the other” is constellated is that of projection of an unacknowledged, undeveloped, or repressed aspect of the self. Jung called this the shadow. He considered the integration of the shadow into our conscious personality a major moral challenge of individuation. The American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan referred to the shadow concept as the “not-me” personification, which together with the “good-me” and “bad-me” make up the self …
Scraping the Staircase – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D.
… After an initial high-spirited, labor intensive first phase, the work in analysis gets into deeper layers of the psyche. Then the client may hesitate, dismayed by the difficult and deflating realization that more issues had been hidden underneath the first layer of psychic material. The persona had covered up something that we would rather have kept out of sight. This “something” may be the first sightings of the personal shadow …
The Sword and the Grail: Restoring the Forgotten Archetype in Arthurian Myth – John Adcox
… Like the Grail, the sword of power is an artifact of supernatural (even Divine) power, surrounded with golden light. In many ways the polar opposite of the Grail, Excalibur is a symbol of power in the world—of victory in battle and ruling a kingdom. The feminine Grail comes from a masculine source, the Fisher King in his Grail castle, but the sword comes from a …
Mandorla Imagery in Psychotherapy – Robert Shaffer, M.D.
… Robert Johnson considers the union of two circles in an elliptical form to represent the clash of opposites within the personality. “Whenever you have a clash of opposites in your personality and neither will give way to the other, you can be sure that God is present.” The unification of this third Presence is represented by the elliptical mandorla shape in the center of the conflict …
The Winter of Our Souls – Virginia Apperson
… Similarly, in the darkest moments of our lives, life appears to be on hold. This is a bewildering time; what could possibly ever emerge from such a barren landscape? Mostly what we know is what we do not know, what we have lost or do not have. We grieve. Or do we? More often than not, that step gets skipped, and the mourning seeps down into our muscles, our bones, buried and locked away from conscious understanding …
Decisions, Decisions …! – John Granrose
… Reading Jung in recent years has helped me understand why this was so. Decisions of all kinds, including moral decisions, require a deep understanding of context. The most obvious factor here is the outer circumstances of the situation, the factor to which typical moral argument calls attention. Jung, however, also stresses the individual’s inner life, that is, “the images of the unconscious” …
The Labyrinth: Archetype of Transformation for Global Healing – Annette Reynolds
… There seems to be many explanations for the healing power of the labyrinth. Geomancers and dowsers say that properly placed labyrinths have strong energy or “ley lines” and where these energy lines cross may be like charkas or energy centers of the earth’s body. Like great standing stones, labyrinths may act as acupuncture meridians, helping to channel and amplify energy …
Haiku and the Healing Spirit of Annual Retreat – Kathy Brown
… Rosen taught us the concepts that haiku works to illustrate, embrace, and embody: egolessness, aloneness, acceptance, universality, humor, silence, awakening, love and death. Haiku honors nature, spirit, and the present moment. It is a sensory, more than an intellectual, exercise …
The Journey – Susan Olson
… are structured around the motif of the heroic quest: the call to adventure, the perilous journey, the accomplishment of an impossible task, and the return home. In the process the hero battles monsters, encounters and overcomes evil forces, wrestles with his own fears, and discovers unknown inner resources. He sustains grave wounds and even descends into the realm of death …
“Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ so Sad” – William Willeford, Ph.D.
… I think now of ways in which the notion of the Oedipus complex, with father as central, has been invoked to explain more than it can. In response to this onesidedness, psychoanalysis has come to grant more attention to mothers and to the crucial psychological importance of the early mother-infant relationship. Despite the great benefits of this development, it has left us with much obscurity about fathers …
Conversation with Artist Debra Fritts – Kathy Brown
… Storyteller Debra Fritts walks me through her studio, speaking in soft southern tones and the language of terra cotta clay. The stories she tells are personal ones, though variations on universal themes, faith, completeness, connection between the earthbound and the divine, between parents and children, between surface and core …
Can Fantasy be Myth? Mythopoeia and The Lord of the Rings – John Adcox
… When creating a myth, a storyteller is engaging in what Tolkien called mythopoeia. Through the act of peopling an imaginary world with bright heroes and terrible monsters, the storyteller is in a way reflecting God’s own act of creation. Human beings are, according to Tolkien, expressing fragments of eternal truth …
Hunger for the Holy – Jerry R. Wright, D.Div.
… When we become attached (‘addicted’) to the external world to the exclusion of the inner, our interiority will haunt us, often manifesting as symptoms of dis-ease. We become hungry with a hunger which no thing or person or deed can satisfy. When this happens it is well to remember the addiction adage: we can never get enough of what we don’t really want …
Being in Analysis – Jacqueline Wright, Ed.D.
… meaning out of meaninglessness, order out of disorder. The analytic process is a way of systematically drawing upon the resources of the unconscious and helping the person progressively integrate these contents into consciousness, while at the same time supporting the release of conscious attitudes and patterns that are no longer desirable. …
Tears: Connection to the Source – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D.
… The healing power of tears is an archetypal theme. In the fairy tale by the same name, Rapunzel’s salty tears wash over her husband’s blinded eyes, curing him, restoring his sight. At times the one shedding the tears is healed, as was Mary Magdalene who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears. Both Rapunzel’s prince and Mary Magdalene were made whole again. Our culture demands that we keep most tears out of sight and with that we forfeit a source of healing in the sense of wholeness …
Why Did Curiosity Kill the Cat? – Virginia Apperson
… The curiosity of Psyche’s sisters was born out of their jealousy and spitefulness. Psyche, on the other hand, proves to embody a more benevolent curiosity, a desire to know her husband and to bring their relationship into a conscious, related place …
The Practice of Dream Healing (Review) – Mary Ellen O’Hare-Lavin
… The chthonic serpent image is an ancient one, utilized even earlier than Asklepios. Our healing ancestors were less interested in a “Higher Power.” The serpent image was used to represent a connection with both the upper world and the underworld. The serpent is a shape shifter and it journeys below the earth’s surface as well as bathes in the sunlight of the upper world. In feminine goddess spirituality, it also represented the shedding of the uterus during menses …
Group Dreamwork Animates Complementary Cancer Care – Tallulah Lyons
… A dream group becomes a special kind of support group where participants get to know one another from the inside out. Clinical studies show that cancer patients who participate in support groups report not only an improved quality of life, but many also live longer. In a dream group, the focus on dreams keeps the group centered and grounded in the inner world where we connect with forces that urge us toward wholeness and toward unity of mind, body, spirit …
Decoding Hillman – Cliff Bostock
… For Hillman it is enough to continually deepen one’s sense of life’s beauty. This is soulmaking. We should not confuse the soul with the Self. The soul seeks and expresses difference. It delights in multiplicity. It confers meaning by processing images and, most important, it is not “inside” us. It is an “other.” …
After the Fall – Geneviève Geer
… I venture to say that there is probably in America no myth more prevalent than the myth of finding the “right” place in which to live, the ideal spot to call one’s home. I do not mean literally an Eden, but a place that suits ME and my needs, that gives me a chance to become established, to grow. Such a place is Eden enough for me! …
Robert Johnson – Kathy Brown
… Yet unlived life goes rancid within us, and we are called to make every effort to express what we can of it, through the use of symbol when the actual living is unacceptable or impossible to achieve. Johnson used what he termed a “silly” example from his own life to illustrate. He spoke of his lanky runner’s frame, indicating that he had an innate talent for running, stolen from him through the loss of his leg. He told his audience how he had compensated for this by performing a symbolic act …
Carl Jung, Plato, and Tiger Woods – Pete Williams, Ph.D.
… according to the Myth of Er, is the place from which all souls enter into this world – we choose our life; we are assigned
a companion, our daimon, whose task it is to help us realize our chosen lot; our choice is ratified; our destiny is determined;
and then, in the final act of the drama, all that we have known is forgotten….
Christ, a Symbol of the Self – Jerry Wright, D.Div.
… He noted that the most important symbolical statements about Christ in the New Testament revealed attributes of the archetypal hero: improbable origin, divine father, hazardous birth, precocious development, conquest of the mother and of death, miraculous deeds, early death, etc. Jung concludes that the archetypal symbolizations of the Christ-figure are similar to the Self which is present in each person as an unconscious imagel…
Motherless Children – Virginia Apperson
… She is the earthy, sensual, messy, emotional, relational, often chaotic element that has been devalued, demonized,
neglected, and raped. More often than not, we know the feminine, including Mother, in her negative form – the jealous
and conniving StepMother, the devouring, witchy Baba Yaga…
On the Resilience of the Human Spirit – Bernhard Kempler, Ph.D.
… How does our psyche withstand such outrageous attacks as war, criminal violation, brutality, and even life threatening illness? What impact do such experiences have on our trust in an orderly and predictable universe, on our security, and our belief in our value as human beings? Why do some individuals, whether adults or children, live through such extreme traumatic…
Significant Others – Geneviève Geer
… We all know how powerfully significant the outer other can be. Most of us have been swept, at one time or another, out of our reasonable stances by the sudden pull of the other on our unprepared psyche. It is an experience that no one would want to have never had. But it is also a truly unconscious experience …
Lilacs in September – Susan Olson
… I am coming to see the third half of life as a distinct season, fraught with its own perils and blessed with its own joys. It is often heralded by the painful experience of physical limitation, as we become aware that our bodies are changing, our energy level is not what it used to be, and our remaining time on earth is limited. Sometimes, like Jung, we suffer a life-threatening illness that haunts us with intimations of our own mortality …
Intimacy – Stephen Howard
… Intimacy can be risked only when the other deserves your trust, when he gives you reason to feel that he sees you as a person, that he values your being, has your best interest in mind and wishes you well. This does not mean that he will never hurt you, for he will be getting on with his life in a close space with you …
Anmals and the Psyche – Jutta von Buchholtz, Ph.D.
…A symbol has at its kernel a breath of life energy, be it instinctual or archetypal, named libido or anima. Someone once said very correctly that a symbol can never be fully interpreted. It can only be experienced. This holds especially true for the images of our relatives in nature, from the animal kingdom as they approach us in dreams, myths, fairy tales and active imagination…
The Serpentine Path – John Granrose, Ph.D.
… It is, of course, clear that snakes follow a snakelike path – a serpentine path. First this way, then that. A zig-zag pattern, not a linear one. My life up to that point had been mostly “straight ahead.” For the most part, I set my goals and worked directly to reach them. And this procedure had more or less worked for me for over 40 years…
Re-visioning Fairy Tales: Taking on Some Stereotypes – John Powell
… Millions know the Disney treatment of the story in Fantasia, but its archetypal roots go deeper than this Mickey Mouse version. I asked Allan Chinen about this tale in a telephone conversation. Allan, our September speaker and workshop presenter, is known for his exploration of the significance of mid-life and elder protagonists in fairy tales….
Traversing the Living Labyrinth – Jeremy Taylor
… Dream and myth always address the deeper realities of our lives below the surface of appearance. Appearances can be measured; it is the immeasurability of the patterns of meaning that lie beyond appearances, beyond the ability to be “objective” and stand separate and quantify, that has tended to make myth and dream seem so foreign and irrelevant …
The Quest for Renewal – Jacqueline Wright, Ed.D.
… It occurs to me that this collective ritual and annual quest for renewal forms a parallel to that larger quest for consciousness, what Jung defines as Individuation. Our desire to leave old patterns and structures and return to a more natural and spontaneous way of responding to life reflects an archetypal pattern that is lived out over and over …
Jung and Religion (Again) – William Willeford, Ph.D.
… how is religion to be distinguished from psychopathology, including out and out craziness? After all, a great many psychotic delusions are religious in character. By speaking of what he called the objective psyche, Jung attempted to overcome the subjectivity that is an essential ingredient of religion …