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_outlineThe archetype of origins is in resurgence since the advent of ancestry-mapping programs. What are the psychological and symbolic meanings of ancestry? Identity is often strongly linked to ancestry in its ethnic and cultural aspects, and as the carrier of personal traits.
Genealogy gives rise to meaning-making narratives such as: I get my talent for storytelling from my Irish forebears. Jung knew that family complexes are handed down when he said, “Psychologically, the central point of a human personality is the place where the ancestors are reincarnated.” Genograms, another mapping technique, allow us to trace those intellectual and emotional family patterns.
Every individual rests on a historical foundation of family, tribe, clan, and nation—and, at levels below consciousness, we are also affected by our common roots in the primeval past and the mysterious central fire of life. In order to differentiate from this multi-layered context, it can help to know it.
Dream
I was in a quaint English village. Next to the village ran a river, and on the other side of this river were fields. A traditional Cotswold stone bridge joined both sides of this river. Suddenly, I seemed to be competing in some sort of local race. I was competing in this race against 2 friends/girls (unknown to me). I remember pushing myself past one of the girls to place first in this race.
I remember feeling a little self-conscious of the fact that I had not let this friend of mine win, and hoped that she didn't think I was being a "dick". The race centered and finished around the bridge joining both sides of the river. As I stood on this bridge and looked down at the river, I noticed a dog (possibly a Springer Spaniel) was drowning. I felt a strong urge to save this dog, and felt sad that it was in such distress.
As I looked on in horror I noticed some netting was beginning to cover the surface of the river (a bit like when you cover a pond or swimming pool). I knew at that point the dog was going to die, as it could no longer come up for air. I could hear sirens in the distance, which seemed to indicate both the possibility of help and danger in the form of police sirens (something/someone coming to reprimand me). It was forbidden to jump in the river but I did it anyway. I pulled the dog out of the river, at which point I noticed it had morphed into a Seal.
I began to care for this Seal, and in doing so, it again morphed in to a small, podgy young boy. I held the young boy in my arms, and I told myself, "I'd do it all again despite the potential danger". I was relieved I had saved the dog - seal - young boy. There was a sense of heroic accomplishment.
References:
Monica McGoldrick: source of multiple books on genograms (Amazon).