Browse these articles written by members and guest speakers of the C G Jung Society of Atlanta.
...“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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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 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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
..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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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!...
...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?...