The Heart of Transformation with Michael Meade
This Jungian Life
Many of us live with heavy awareness of cultural unraveling, and the natural world faces sustained and escalating threats. According to author, storyteller and podcaster MICHAEL MEADE, humanity has reached the end of an era, with no clear vision of what is to come. Michael's new book,, offers a fundamentally hopeful perspective. Despite the divisions, conflicts and betrayals of our time, the essential story of the world—birth, death, rebirth—endures and is ready to be rediscovered. The loose threads of our unraveling world are waiting to be woven into something new, and the secret...
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Inflation, Grandiosity and the Denial of Human Limits
This Jungian Life
Psychological inflation implies an exaggerated sense of self-importance, accompanied by an unconscious feeling of inferiority. For Jungians, it involves identification with an archetypal energy. When the ego starts to feel that it IS an archetype, rather than feeling awed by it or in contact with it, this can be dangerous psychologically. Negative inflation occurs when a person feels entitled and special because they are suffering, perceiving themselves as unusually and interestingly hard done by. They feel they are owed help from others to solve the problems they are...
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Outsourcing Love: AI and Relationships
This Jungian Life
When we ask AI for advice, what we are offered is comparable to psychopathy: a performance of warm emotional intelligence without care or concern for our fate. As today’s guest Dr. Aaron Balick has written, “it may have a warm exterior, but its heart is code”. Nevertheless, many of us now have a close relationship with AI, in which it draws on an extensive store of information about us to create feelings of intimacy and dependence. This has unknown and extensive consequences for the psyche. Wired as we are for relationships, we load AI with projections, which it then...
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Patience is Not Passivity
This Jungian Life
This week’s guest, Jungian analyst Dr. Warren Sibilla, defines patience as the ability to live one's life with eyes, ears, and heart wide open. That is a far cry from waiting to see what happens, or giving up. Patience asks us to go within, find the capacity for containment, and recognize that choosing non-action can be the needed form of action. We recognize, feel, and suffer the situation that has arisen, but resist the urge to immediate action in the external world. We search instead for discernment, containment, and meaning making in the internal world. It takes work to develop...
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The Princess Who Changed Her Fate: How to Negotiate with Destiny
This Jungian Life
The fairy tale of the Princess Who Changed her Fate enacts what Jung tells us will happen when we remain unconscious of an inner situation: it happens outside us, as fate. Just as the princess in the story finds her unruly “fate” tearing up cloth and smashing her generous host’s dishes, we may find that our unclaimed shadow wreaks havoc at work and in our relationships. Yet this is a hopeful story. The beleaguered princess is able to take the right attitude, and so find a path to changing her fate. The character of the second queen gives us a model of feminine wisdom,...
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Inner Life, Outer World: The Psychology of Adaptation
This Jungian Life
Adaptation is a bread-and-butter concept in psychotherapy - can we accept, adjust to, and thrive in the outer and inner worlds we live in? Given constraints, what does it take to find life at least meaningful, hopefully satisfying--and flourish? This week Jungian analyst and author JOHN R. WHITE, Ph.D. joins us to circumambulate the complexities of adaptation. Successful adaptation involves making conscious choices based on a realistic understanding of the internal and external parameters in which we operate. Adaptation not only requires a true-to-life perception of possibilities...
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Lindsay Clancy & Maternal Infanticide: An Archetypal Perspective
This Jungian Life
Lindsay Clancy has brought renewed attention to the horror of infanticide: babies and children dying at the hands of their mother. Infanticide has taken place for millennia, most often due to social pressures or lack of the resources needed to raise a child. Human collectives around the world remain ill-equipped to protect our youngest by providing support to mothers in material or emotional distress. Today’s guest is clinical psychologist Dr. Brooke Laufer, author of Brooke joins us to discuss infanticide, maternal psychosis, and the archetype of the death mother, long portrayed in myth....
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Goblins, Demons and Goddesses: A Conversation at the Edge of AI
This Jungian Life
OpenAI recently had to explain to frightened users why their models kept introducing goblins and gremlins into otherwise humdrum conversations. Is it possible that archetypes are emerging through the field of collective knowledge amassed by large language models (LLMs)? This week neuropsychiatrist TOM POLLAK Ph.D joins us to discuss AI, archetypes and psychotherapy. It is perhaps unsurprising that AI, which now contains the symbolic output of much of humanity (cannibalized mostly without permission), should spontaneously generate unpredictable and often dangerous archetypes. We...
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The Psychology of Magic: A Jungian Exploration
This Jungian Life
Magic can be viewed as intentional engagement with what Jung called synchronicity. It is closely related to a mythological worldview, which recognizes a grand narrative supraordinate to everyday life. Although we cannot know it in its entirety, it opens the possibility of encountering a deeper reality and quality of knowing. We experience it as magic. In this week’s episode we explore esoteric ritual with Jungian analyst and academic JOHN WHITE. Responsible practitioners of ritual magic understand that it demands deep inner work that comes at a cost. Magic involves alignment with the...
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In Search of the Wild Man: Befriending Bigfoot
This Jungian Life
The wild man is an enduring archetypal figure worldwide, from Enkidu in Gilgamesh, to the Greek god Pan (worshipped in glens and woods), the Green Man in England, and Bigfoot and the Sasquatch in the US. Today’s guest, Jungian analyst Mike Box, has long-standing interest in this archetype and in male psychology, reflected in the 8-foot wild man statue he keeps in his waiting room. The archetype of the wild man compensates for a currently impoverished view of the masculine: stoicism and endurance without emotional expression or self-disclosure. In striving to conform to this...
info_outlineIf the passage into fullsome adulthood is avoided, a person can be trapped in the world of childhood. This protected realm is a nexus of potential, defined by avoiding the rigors of the real for the pleasures of possibility. Peter Pan, who chose to remain in never-never-land, is a well-known image for the flighty ingenuousness of the puer or puella. What stops libido from becoming more grounded in order to engage in more purposeful, ego-strengthening commitments? Charles Dickens’ Bleak House portrays a protagonist who felt that dedication and discipline were intolerably confining. Rapunzel, however, broke out of her elevated tower when a prince kindled her desire to bond in a more earthly way. If an initiatory experience does not activate libido, and the protected world of childhood is not sacrificed, entrapment in a marginal life may ensue.
Dream
I was in a dark forest at night with my youngest son (he's 10). We were standing at the top of an exterior staircase attached to a house, which was situated at the edge of a large clearing in the forest. The house had bright spotlights shining onto the clearing, and I could see small animals all wandering through it. I felt like I wanted to go into the forest, but had to wait for something. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. A mountain lion had appeared on the edge of the clearing. As soon as it stepped into the clearing, it changed into a very large snake. It began slowly making it's way through the clearing, killing the small animals. It was killing them, but not eating them. I saw it begin to "devour" a smaller poisonous snake. The large snake had it's head tipped back in such a way that I could see it had a hole in the underside of it's throat. So it was clamping the smaller snake with its teeth, swallowing, and pulling it through its mouth, but the smaller snake was falling out through the hole in it's neck back onto the ground. My son and I began to run down the stairs and skirt around the edges of the clearing. I needed to get into the forest at a certain location and it was on the far side from the house. I stopped briefly when I noticed a dead kitten right at the edge of the forest. It had been ripped in half by the snake. Another kitten was there. It was so young it's eyes were not open. It was trying to crawl into the forest for safety. I felt...like I was rooting for it. Hoping for it to survive. But I had no urge to pick it up and help it. The large snake noticed us running. It changed back into the mountain lion and began after us before we could get to the far end of the clearing. I noticed a hunter's tree stand just inside the forest at the side of the clearing we had made it to. We ran for it. I kept checking to make sure my son was still with me. I began running up the stairs to the tree stand, and when I reached the top, noticed he was no longer with me. I panicked, began looking around. I noticed a black panther was now in the trees below the stand, jumping from branch to branch. The mountain lion was staying back because of it. The panther jumped up into the tree stand beside me, and changed into my son. "I keep forgetting I do not need to be afraid for you" I said to him. And then I woke.