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...
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Jung vs. Borg: Staying Human in the Age of AI
This Jungian Life
Are we living through a tech-driven collapse of the ecology of mind? In his new book, Jung vs. Borg, author, psychologist and Jungian scholar GLEN SLATER Ph.D suggests that industrial disruption of the outer world is now being followed by a post-industrial disruption of the inner world. Yet, there is hope. Much depends on our capacity to remain conscious of the effect each stage of innovation has on the psyche and on the social and cultural changes that will follow. Becoming conscious of the non-neutral operation of algorithms and big tech’s focus on profit over people is crucial, for...
info_outlineSiblings are embedded in the human psyche as they are in life. Even if one lacks siblings, there is ready access to them through friends, fairy tales, myths, and scripture. All feature multiple experiences and examples of sibling solidarity and siblings as shadow carriers. Birth order, sex, temperament, and the quality of parental presence play a part in constellating the intense polarities of sibling relationships: competition and cooperation, admiration and envy, hierarchy and partnership, aggression and intimacy. We often carry the dynamics of early sibling relationships into adult life and project them onto individuals, work teams or social groups. Jung used the alchemical image of the soror mystica and the adept to represent a relational ideal, whether externally between self and other or internally between ego and unconscious. Each must have a respectful and equal say, from collaboration to confrontation.
Dream
In my dream, I visited a pet shop to buy a snake. I had my dog with me. I looked around the store and couldn't find any reptiles, so I asked the staff and one of the employees told me they kept them in a separate room. He had no face and reminded me of a jailer as he carried a bunch of keys with him. The old wooden door we approached didn't match the rest of the store, which was very modern, friendly and light. As he unlocked the door, my dog tried to get in with us but I told her to wait outside. The room on the other side seemed to have no ceiling or visible end and was more like a dungeon or cave. On the right hand side from the door there was a wooden outdoor rabbit cage with six compartments. It was too dark to see the animals but I could hear some sizzling and strangely humming noises and saw that all of their skins had different patterns in black and white. The man asked me if I wanted to hold one and before I could say anything he opened one of the boxes and gave me a smaller snake. It felt warm and lively in my hands and I enjoyed holding it. I couldn't see its head, so I tried to get a closer look and as I held it closer to my face it started biting my hand a couple of times though it didn't really hurt and even if it did strike before every bite they felt more like it was just nibbling a bit. The man asked me if I was okay and I laughed and told him that I was not afraid of snakes. I handed it back to him and decided that I didn't really need a snake as a pet. As I opened the door to get back, my dog was excited to see me and I petted her for a while at the threshold. Through the open door some bright light fell on the cage and I looked back and finally got a closer look at the snakes. They were all sleeping and still making humming sounds, rolled up as snakes do but their heads looked like those of rabbits with no ears.
References (books available on Amazon)
Newton, Lara. Brothers and Sisters: Discovering the Psychology of Companionship.
Fairy Tales: The Children of Lir, Six Swans.
Conroy, Pat. The Prince of Tides.
Jahren, Hope. Lab Girl.
Film: Winged Migration.