Shadow and Self in Adolescence: Navigating Rage, Love, and Individuation
This Jungian Life
Think of adolescence as life’s built‑in boot camp: your body hits the gas, your mind scrambles to keep up, and suddenly you’re wrestling with raw impulses, big feelings, and the question “Who am I, really?” That surge of anger toward parents often hides an intense love that feels too risky to show, so teens push back while secretly measuring whether adults—and the wider world—can handle their storm. Without clear rites of passage, they test limits through friends, online thrills, and daring choices, all in service of hammering out a story that’s theirs, not just a...
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From Worry to Insight: making sense of uncertainty
This Jungian Life
Worry arises because we can imagine countless possibilities, yet it often traps us in unproductive loops. Recognizing when worry prompts useful action—and when it spirals into paralysis—can be transformative. By holding uncertainty with patience, rather than trying to eliminate it, we engage a deeper capacity to reflect, adapt, and discover hidden strength. Read along with our dream interpretation . LOOK & GROW If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of from the hosts of This Jungian Life...
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Detective Archetype Decoded: Tracking Symbolic Clues
This Jungian Life
Ever felt that irresistible urge to poke around for answers? That’s the detective archetype calling. It taps into our natural drive to uncover hidden truths and bridges the gap between what’s out in the open and what’s hidden in shadow. Whether we’re looking at Sherlock Holmes’s logical wizardry or Miss Marple’s understated brilliance, detective stories grab our attention by setting things right when wrongdoing has thrown everyday life off-balance. But these tales aren’t just about catching a culprit; they mirror an inner process. It’s the part of us that wants to piece...
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Analytical Patisserie: When Pastry Sparked Genius
This Jungian Life
In 1906, during Carl Jung’s formative visit to Vienna to confer with Sigmund Freud, a seemingly incidental stop at the renowned Café Sacher catalyzed his enduring fascination with pastry-making. At the time, Freud was actively refining his drive-based theories—including the pleasure principle—and while Jung had not yet formulated his later concepts, his curiosity was piqued by the Sachertorte’s complex interplay of technique and sensory allure. Authentically prepared Sachertorte requires an aerated chocolate batter produced via partial egg-white separation and a precise bain-marie...
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Unlocking the Power of Your Shadow
This Jungian Life
Connie Zweig, author and Jungian therapist, joins us to explore the next level of shadow-work. This transformative practice identifies and integrates the repressed or disowned parts of ourselves, fostering deeper self-awareness, authenticity, and personal growth. These hidden dimensions often emerge in our relationships, politics, and cultural conflicts as unconscious projections and behaviors. By examining them—through dialogue, myth, and active imagination—we can move beyond shame, denial, and blame, transforming painful patterns into sources of emotional richness and empathy....
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The Boundary Paradox: How Limits Create Freedom
This Jungian Life
Boundaries define limits in relationships, work, and the psyche, balancing autonomy and connection. In relationships, they prevent enmeshment and detachment, fostering respect. Professionally, they maintain ethics and prevent burnout. Intrapsychically, they regulate self-cohesion and unconscious influences. Cultures shape boundary norms, with individualistic societies valuing personal space and collectivist ones emphasizing connection. Myths depict boundaries as transformative thresholds, like Janus symbolizing transition. The key dialectic is between rigidity and permeability—too rigid...
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VISIONS: When the Mystery Breaks Through
This Jungian Life
Carl Jung considered visions extraordinary intrusions of the unconscious into waking life, moments when hidden psychic contents press forward with striking intensity. These phenomena do not represent mere hallucinations or idle fantasies. They reflect purposeful eruptions from Psyche’s deeper strata, often evoked by personal crisis or cultural upheaval. Visions stand apart from normal mental processes because they carry a sense of autonomy; they appear spontaneously and feel real despite an absence of tangible external stimuli. Unlike psychotic hallucinations, which generally lack insight,...
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DREAM TELEPATHY: Is it real?
This Jungian Life
Jung took dream telepathy seriously and struggled to understand the underlying principles that made them possible. Archetypal activation increased their frequency. The unified field that links us all to the collective unconscious might act like a bridge between individuals. We decided to conduct our own experiment. Joseph focused on a secret image at specific times, and a large group of volunteer dreamers tried to identify it. Here’s what happened! LOOK & GROW If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy...
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SHADOWLAND: Self-Harm Cults – The Story of Sarah
This Jungian Life
*Content warning: contains references to sexual abuse, animal cruelty, self-harm, and cult exploitation* This is Shadowland, a new podcast experience from This Jungian Life that explores the lives of people who work and take refuge in the hidden places of our culture. We hope our work will bring insight, compassion, and understanding to the darker side of human experience. In that spirit, we meet Sarah, a mother whose daughter was rescued from the self-harm cult called "764." This dangerous group has been identified by the FBI, who continue to prosecute their leaders. Despite those efforts,...
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The Symbolism of Travel Inner and Outer
This Jungian Life
Travel speaks to something far deeper in us than simply going from one place to another; it’s a powerful metaphor for inner change. In our dreams or daydreams, the drive to “hit the road” or venture overseas often signals Psyche’s desire for growth and transformation. Instead of just showing us new sights, these journeys hint at unexplored parts of ourselves—regions of the unconscious that hold insight, energy, or aspects of our own personality we’ve yet to embrace. When you find yourself repeatedly dreaming about traveling or caught up in fantasies of far-off adventures, it...
info_outlineThe archetype of the father is associated with gods, kingship, and other images of authority and order. As the image of a “personified affect” fueled by an archetypal core, the father complex is powerful. In its negative aspect it may arise from a father who was experienced as absent, emotionally unavailable, passive, critical or abusive. Jung’s father complex influenced his adult relationship with Freud, to whom he wrote, "Let me enjoy your friendship not as that of equals but as that of father and son." Although the eventual break with Freud caused Jung years of inner turmoil, he later realized that they were also the deep source of all his subsequent work. Similarly, Charlotte Bronte and her sisters were able to use their father wounds for their literary creativity. Although healing the father complex can be difficult, taking on this inner task can provide energy for living more fully, freely, and individually.
Dream
I woke up in a large, 3 story wooden house that was inhabited by 3 or 4 other people. One was a film director who was coaching a rather unwilling, melancholy actress. I explored the different areas of the home and came to the conclusion that this building was too old, and was being deconstructed for something new. The floorboards creaked, and the walls were peeling off the way tree bark does. After coming downstairs, back to the first floor, and walking down the main hallway, a knock sounded at the front door. First, I looked through the peephole. A grungy looking middle-aged man with short, grey hair and a week old beard stood, impatiently waiting. I opened the door, and he abrasively brushed past me, he was wearing a long, worn, dark gingerbread colored raincoat. At this moment, the importance of the decaying house vanished behind me, along with the strange director and actress. I was led down a short set of stairs to a jungle sized backyard wet with snow. I stood alone now, gazing at the canopies. In the distance, something caught his eye. An animal, alone amidst the fog & snow. A black panther stood, staring at me. I was afraid, and buried myself in the snow as the black panther came running full speed towards me. As this situation began to fade, I woke up in a hospital where I was being shown that his hip had been injured.
References
Lisa's article "Marrying Mr. Rochester: Redeeming the Negative Father Complex" For a PDF copy, please email [email protected]
William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn, Scottish psychoanalyst
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Cat
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre and other works.