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_outlineWe all procrastinate. Tasks from making a doctor’s appointment to preparing taxes to doing the laundry invite us to put off until tomorrow what we can postpone today. We may distract ourselves by going online, doing errands, or minimizing the time a job will take. Although procrastination signals that a given task is hard and emotionally charged, it buys only temporary escape from anxiety. Furthermore, procrastination can lead to disappointment in oneself that can undermine the self-confidence needed to face subsequent challenges. We are called to the hero’s journey in confronting the dragon of deficiency that inhabits our inner world as procrastination. If we dare to begin, we can find the help we need, and may discover that the task itself is not as onerous as we imagined--and that we are more.
Dream
I'm in what looks like a large garage. There is a band playing for maybe 15 people. A man with the mic asked me who I wanted to hear play. I automatically said “Anthony Green” who is an artist I haven't listened to since college. He happened to be in the audience and he got up on stage. The band started playing “Dear Child.” It's a joyous-sounding song with a lot of energy. A line that repeats is “I've been trying to reach you, but my extension cord wouldn't reach that far." As the band was playing, a bunch of little fires started on the floor and the walls. Everyone including me was running around putting out the fires with our bare hands and by stomping. The band kept playing this whole time. The mood was still light and joyous despite the "emergency." Most of the fires were out. I saw through a vent in the wall that there was a raging fire in the basement. I looked back up and the entire room had transformed into a much more industrial and bigger building. It was some kind of modern factory. A woman who worked in this building took me to the stairs to get into the basement so we could put out the fire. She was around my age. We started going down the stairs and at the bottom of the stairs was a big dark tunnel. I started flipping random switches to try and turn the lights on so I could get to the fire. After maybe 10 seconds of failing, the woman ran into the dark toward the fire without saying anything. I woke up. While awake I listened to the song again and read along with the lyrics. I was in shock when I heard "Dear sleeper, you could have had the better bed. I loved to watch the way you grew." I felt like my psyche was saying that directly to me.
References
Prochasa, James. Changing for Good: A Revolutionary Six-Stage Program for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Life Positively Forward.