Working with Dreams: Depth Psychology Techniques of Carl Gustav Jung and James Hillman Dream work is ancient, it’s long tradition evidenced in the temples of Asclepius in Greece where individuals went to be healed through their dreams. Dreams have been an important aspect of many spiritual traditions, and even Freud considered the study of dreams to be his most important work. There are many methods of dream analysis. When working with dreams, it can be helpful to intentionally assess them from various aspects, including mythical, archetypal, alchemical, and collective, and to pay attention to which resonate most strongly emotionally and […]
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Ensoulment and Synchronicity: Concepts from “Cosmos and Psyche” by Richard Tarnas
Ensoulment and Synchronicity: Concepts from Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas In his 2006 book Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, Rick Tarnas suggests that the western mind has catapulted us away from a fundamental cosmos where everything was ensouled, alive, and animated by meaning and archetype. Our modern mindset is, instead, to attempt to control and manipulate our environment, making us the active subject in any interaction, and the things we see around us the passive object. Tarnas suggests “disenchantment” refers to the way the world is objectified, thereby denying subjectivity. “Objectification,” he contends, “denies to the world a subject’s […]
Continue reading »Engendering Innovation in Business, Organizations, and Individual LIfe: A Depth Psychological Approach
Everyone who’s interested in depth psychology knows that personal growth—what C.G. Jung called “individuation”—is a keystone of our existence in life. Learning to identify our shortcomings and places where we get “stuck” in patterns and processes that are not generative is a critical aspect. I switched career tracks when I “discovered” depth psychology several years ago, but I spent nearly 15 years of my life in the corporate world, observing how organizations can also “individuate” under the right leadership, especially when there is reflection on the archetypal (universal) patterns at play and understanding how to work with them. I […]
Continue reading »Rediscovering the Authentic Self: Jung’s Concept of Individuation in Depth Psychology
In his fascinating book, Coming to our Senses, historian and social critic Morris Berman introduces the terms alienation or confiscation as a “rupture in the continuum of life.” Alienation is experienced as the feeling of an abyss where a sense of self or self-identity is missing or where the self does not feel safe. Many psychologists have speculated that this abyss or gap in the experience of the self may be increased or intensified by a lack of positive mirroring in the infancy stage. Mirroring, which Berman defines as “the growth of self-recognition through the medium of other people” includes […]
Continue reading »On Magic, Shamanism, and Listening: The Collective Unconscious of C.G. Jung
“If we open our eyes, if we open our minds, if we open our hearts, will find that this world is a magical place. It is magical not because it tricks us or changes unexpectedly into something else, but because it can be so vividly and brilliantly.”–Chogyam Trungpa When I was a child, I longed for magic: actively, forcefully, wistfully. I spent thousands of hours reading books about witches and wizards and fairies and everyday objects endowed with supernatural powers, I read about kids who time-traveled or fell into other dimensions or discovered secret portals to other lives. I always […]
Continue reading »Are We Implicated?–A Depth Psychological and Cultural Take on the Fall of Lance Armstrong
I was out of town for a conference the weekend the two-part Lance Armstrong interview with Oprah broke and missed it entirely, but the fall-out is hard to miss. Normally I am a bit of a media addict, fascinated and equally reactive to what I consider to be a culture in decline, symptomatic even, of impending collapse. Our priorities seem so out of whack; our values in tatters, our goals absurd. I’m speaking for myself as well as the collective of course. Each of us is quite embedded in our values, beliefs, and behaviors–a result of our upbringing, education, […]
Continue reading »Jung, Individuation, and Shamanism
According to historian philosopher Mircea Eliade, has been around for millennia, practically as long as humans have existed. In recent decades, the archetype of has experienced a rebirth. With growing consciousness, more more individuals are recognizing spontaneously consistently what our indigenous ancestors knew: that there is a divine intelligence at work in the universe, a life force of love light, of which, by nature birthright, we are an integral part. Anne Baring (2007), psychologist author, notes that C.G. himself commented on the capacity of humans to respond to this greater force, saying: The archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, lies buried dormant in man’s unconscious […]
Continue reading »Our Modern Cultural Mindset and the Forward Thinking of Carl Jung
One of my favorite quotes is this from Carl Jung, which addresses the reality of nature and our loss of contact with it. It also identifies a deep and burgeoning issue for humankind: “Man feels isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree makes a man’s life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom and no mountain still harbours […]
Continue reading »When Culture Battles Spirit: An Archetypal and Depth Psychological Look at the Nature of Addiction
Addiction (of all kinds) has been described as everything from frustrating to “hell” to “possession,” and worse. The pattern of addiction is an archetype that has been around for millennia, but it certainly seems like our current culture is more and more conducive to the iron grip of addiction in a multitude of ways–including everything from the more traditional issues with alcohol, drugs, gambling, cigarettes, sex, food, or work, to new and emerging culturally supported issues like television, shopping, Internet, email, texting, social media, mobile gadgets, video gaming, and more. Often, particularly in the case of the latter group, we […]
Continue reading »The Shadow of Society and its Role in Mass Shootings
With the gradual development of our corresponding capacity for logical thinking in humans (that is, to “think about our ability to think”), we have both increased opportunities for consciousness but also increased challenges in the sense that we categorically seek to analyze, label, and put into buckets the things we don’t understand–sometimes becoming reductive and trapped in limited thinking. In order for us to transcend our current mythology and come to new creative awareness, we need to be able to look beyond established boundaries and facades to see what newand emergent concepts await. One good example of this is the […]
Continue reading »Carl Jung’s Process of Individuation and the Archetype of Renewal
In describing the process of individuation as an alchemical process, Jung maintained that the point of individuation was not to become perfect or attempt to overcome or master our personal psychology, but to become familiar with it, thereby coming into relationship with the parts of ourselves that have become repressed, numbed, split off, or disowned (Sharp, 1991). A lack of relationship between the individual and the Self can lead to pathology when the Self is not realized (in the body), often erupting in symptoms (Edinger, 1995). Likewise, contemporary psychologist, John Weir Perry (1976) attributes the psychotic break of schizophrenic patients […]
Continue reading »In the Face of Trauma: A Depth Psychological Approach
In the aftermath of the terrible tragedy of the Sandy Hook Newtown Connecticut mass school shooting, many of us are experiencing some degree of trauma–whether we knew the victims firsthand or not. In fact, there are many reasons we may feel increasingly traumatized in a culture where chaos seems to be the norm, rather than the unusual. Psychologist and trauma expert, Robert Stolorow (2010) designates the contemporary era an “Age of Trauma” because, according to him, the “tranquilizing illusions of our everyday world seem in our time to be severely threatened from all sides” (para. 2). He refers to ongoing and increasing global issues like […]
Continue reading »In the Face of Trauma: A Depth Psychological Approach
In the aftermath of the terrible tragedy of the Sandy Hook Newtown Connecticut mass school shooting, many of us are experiencing some degree of trauma–whether we knew the victims firsthand or not. In fact, there are many reasons we may feel increasingly traumatized in a culture where chaos seems to be the norm, rather than the unusual. Psychologist and trauma expert, Robert Stolorow (2010) designates the contemporary era an “Age of Trauma” because, according to him, the “tranquilizing illusions of our everyday world seem in our time to be severely threatened from all sides” (para. 2). He refers to ongoing and increasing global issues like […]
Continue reading »The Importance of Witnessing and Feeling in the Face of Tragedy
More than ever, many of us are looking for meaning in a culture where we are moving faster connecting with each other less less. The more things feel out of our control, the more we tend to tamp down emotions not allow ourselves to witness or feel the devastating effects of our environments the things going on around us. After all, feeling the impact of the horrors of genocide, war, disaster, famine, or senseless acts of violence such as the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut Clackamas, Oregon this week would be virtually impossible for us to humanly bear if we […]
Continue reading »An Archetypal Perspective on Clinical Practice: A Summary of a Lecture by Jungian Analyst Michael Conforti
Recently I attended a teleseminar wich I found valuable and provocative and which inspired me to summarize it here. Please note that that this synopsis is based on my own understanding and interpretation of what was said on the call, and has not been reviewed by the presenter, Dr. Michael Conforti. ### Whether you are a clinical psychologist or psychotherapist, or simply an individual who had experienced therapy, the capacity to use an archetypal perspective is critical and greatly enriches the treatment, stated Dr. Michael Conforti in his introductory teleseminar in the Master Lecture series, “An Archetypal Perspective on Clinical […]
Continue reading »Nature, Psyche, Climate Change, and the Psychology of Place
A pioneer of depth psychology, C.G. Jung carved the following enigmatic quote in a stone at his home in Bollingen. I am an orphan, alone, nevertheless I am found everywhere, I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for every one, […]
Continue reading »Enter the World of Soul and You are Like a Madman: Learnings from Carl Jung’s Red Book
Originally Posted by Bonnie Bright on November 29, 2010 at 7:00pm “If you enter into the world of soul, you are like a madman” – Carl Jung, The Red Book, p. 238. In his recently released Red Book, a body of work Carl Jung immersed himself in for nearly 17 years, Jung reveals the deep introspective nature of what he ultimately considered an archetypal “descent.” He documented this journey to the Underworld in tremendous detail and accompanied many of the entries and topics with beautifully detailed drawings. If you haven’t had a chance to view the Red Book, I highly recommend you […]
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