Childhood, Trauma, Personality: How our Coping Mechanisms Affect Us Unconsciously

November 15, 2022 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.Leave a comment

How and why do our personalities develop the way they do, and what do they have to do with our wounding? Dr. Gabor Mate’ was born in Hungary in 1942 during the Nazi occupation. His grandparents were both killed at Auschwitz and his father was carted off to a forced labor camp, leaving his mother alone with her newborn son. To hear Dr. Mate’, now a medical doctor based in Canada, tell the story, his mother called the doctor at one point and asked him to come because her baby (Gabor) just wouldn’t stop crying and she didn’t know what […]

Seeking Personal Transformation? Soul-Centered Coaching Psychology Offers Powerful Possibilities

November 9, 2022 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.Leave a comment

Try soul-centered coaching free of charge - Jungian, Transpersonal, Archetypal and Depth Psychology - Learn to overcome obstacles and tap into more freedom, creativity, and joy

Feeling called to experience soul-centered coaching and to create more meaning and joy in your life? Contact us today to see if free sessions are available through Advanced Student Practitioners pursuing certification through the Institute for Soul-Centered Psychology and Coaching The word “psyche” actually means “soul” in Greek (Hillman, 1989), and the Greek philosopher Heraclitus posited the importance of the soul as long as 2500 years ago (Hillman, 1995). C. G. Jung, widely acknowledged alongside well-known pioneers like William James and Sigmund Freud as one of the founders of the field of psychology, emphasized the importance of soul in his […]

Trauma, Transcendence, and Jung’s Notion of the Psychoid—Interview with Ann Belford Ulanov

June 11, 2018 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Jungian analyst, Ann Belford Ulanov’s most recent book, The Psychoid, Soul and Psyche: Piercing Space-Time Barriers, explores Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of the “psychoid.” “Psychoid refers to unconscious processes that are unrepresentable in word or image,” Ulanov says. “We live them, but we don’t know about them. And they can make us feel mad, not angry, but crazy, and I believe they can also be a third source of healing.” Jung described the unus mundus, or “one world,” as more than psychological. It also has social, international, environmental, chemical, and cosmological properties. Ulanov is interested in the effects of experiencing the unus mundus, […]

Spiritual Implications of Psychosis: How a Spiritual Perspective Can Provide Health Benefits to Mind and Body—Interview with Dr. Tanya Luhrmann

May 30, 2018 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Is schizophrenia a “severe mental disorder,” as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO)? How might changing the perspective of the traditional western medical model, which labels certain symptoms as strictly pathological, ultimately transform those who are suffering? The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) which originated in Europe teaches people with schizophrenia to respect their voices and to treat their voices as persons, says Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, whose research seeks to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences often linked with schizophrenia. C.G. Jung used the imagination to work at the borderlines between dissociation and psychosis… Sharing some ideas that […]

Normalizing Non-Ordinary Experiences: An Interdisciplinary Approach

May 7, 2018 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

In her research, Ann Taves, Ph.D., professor of Religious Studies at The University of California at Santa Barbara, explores non-ordinary experiences and the way different disciplines might diagnose the same experience, such as hallucinating, from different perspectives—including psychology, psychiatry, religion, or spirituality. For example, while psychiatrists largely look at hallucinations as symptoms of pathology, many religious and spiritual movements are based on those exact same kinds of unusual experiences, which could potentially be more common or less problematic than psychology or psychiatry tends to view them. Taves believes that depth psychology, influenced so deeply by Jung, is in a unique position […]

How Memory Tending Can Transform You: An Interview with Dr. Daphne Dodson

September 20, 2016 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

You may have donated that Times of Your Life Paul Anka 8-track to charity when it didn’t sell at the last neighborhood rummage sale, but the words to “Good Morning Yesterday” live on. Sometimes it is hard to find the “memories you left behind” as Anka sang in 1976. Sometimes, as Freud argued, those memories sink below the level of our consciousness, but continue to work on us in various ways even decades later. Sigmund Freud even formulated a term “return of the repressed” to explain where neurotic symptoms originate, writing that illness is …characterized by the return of the repressed memories […]

Depth Psychological Approaches to Suffering—Audio Interview & Blog post with Dr. Lionel Corbett

February 9, 2016 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Listen to the full audio interview with Dr. Lionel Corbett here (27:12 mins) “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ― Kahlil Gibran We are all intimately familiar with suffering. And, while we might wish it away when it is painfully present, it is a normal part of human life, Dr. Lionel Corbett, M.D., Jungian analyst and professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute reminded me when I recently sat down for a depth discussion with him on the topic. Etymologically, the word “suffering” comes from two Latin roots: sub—meaning “under”—and ferre, meaning “to carry or […]

Holding the Opposites, Grounding in Earth to Cope with Difficult Times

May 31, 2013 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

When we are not grounded, not connected to our roots, terrible psychic issues occur, which lead to feelings of intense fear and anxiety, suggests Jungian analyst Judith Harris, in her book Jung and Yoga: The Psyche Body Connection. She quotes C. G. Jung, who, in his complex work, Mysterium Coniunctionus, establishes that the element of earth holds the exact central point between the tensions of two opposites. Grounding oneself in the earth results in feeling held by the archetypal Great Mother, rendering one nourished, nurtured, and whole. The center is the eternal, Harris states, and all that is contained within it is […]

When Culture Battles Spirit: An Archetypal and Depth Psychological Look at the Nature of Addiction

January 9, 2013 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

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 […]

The Shadow of Society and its Role in Mass Shootings

December 26, 2012 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Concept of the Shadow in Jungian Psychology

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 […]

In the Face of Trauma: A Depth Psychological Approach

December 20, 2012 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

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 […]

In the Face of Trauma: A Depth Psychological Approach

December 20, 2012 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

The Importance of Witnessing and Feeling in the Face of Tragedy

December 16, 2012 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

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 […]

An Archetypal Perspective on Clinical Practice: A Summary of a Lecture by Jungian Analyst Michael Conforti

November 8, 2012 Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

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 […]