Episode 185 - Assessing Our Psychic Inheritance
This Jungian Life
Jung said of the parent-child relationship: “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.” Jung understood that parents can unconsciously compel children to fulfill parental dreams or compensate for disappointments.
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Episode 184 - Does Analysis Work? A Conversation with Jonathan Shedler, PhD
This Jungian Life
“Talk is powerful medicine.” Renowned researcher and clinician Jonathan Shedler, PhD joins us to discuss the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy. While so-called evidence-based therapies—brief treatments conducted by instruction manuals—offer benefit for some, their status as the “gold standard” of treatment for mental distress is undeserved.
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Episode 183 - JUSTICE: The Struggle for Balance
This Jungian Life
Principles of fairness and justice have deep roots in the human psyche: we want to receive our fair share and a fair shake. When man injures man we may protest, strive for redress, and measure wrong with morality—but what about godly misfortunes? Life, myth and religion are rich with issues of injustice. Whether individual injury, social inequality, or divine mystery, over-insistence on fairness can lead to depression, resentment, and fixation.
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Episode 182 - Confronting Shadow: The Work of Self-Discovery
This Jungian Life
Psychotherapy is essentially the work making shadow conscious—all that we have not discerned, disown, or project onto others. We seldom welcome shadow, for it is marked by emotions and motivations that deflate, disturb, and dethrone ego. From family scuffles to political hostilities and outright war, we most often meet our shadow in others. Its presence is signaled by a strong urge to take action, with feelings ranging from judgment to antagonism, from pity to self-sacrifice, and from obsession to disgust
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Episode 181 - Self-Reflection: What Was I Thinking?
This Jungian Life
Jung says, “There is another instinct, different from the drive to activity and so far as we know specifically human, which might be called the reflective instinct.” Self-reflection is correlated with consciousness, and is arguably humankind’s unique and essential competency: a meta-cognitive capacity that is aware of its own awareness.
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Episode 180 - INFLUENCE: Connection or Contagion?
This Jungian Life
We have always been subject to the influence of others—it’s how we learn language, become socialized, cooperate and collaborate. It’s also how we exclude, denigrate, and assault others. Today, we are subject to unprecedented social influences. Multiplicities of media shape our ideas, identities, beliefs and values--and foster connections and communities around the world.
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SHADOWLAND: Prostitution - the story of Kay
This Jungian Life
Today we walk with Kay, a 21-year-old single mother who works throughout the American southwest as a self-described prostitute. We explore how she found her way to that life, what she aspires to, and how she holds the complicated tensions between herself, her clients, and the current culture. We shared this interview with composer Wells Hanley from I Wrote This Song For You podcast, who was moved to create a song for Kay. We hope you’ll be as touched by her story as we were.
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SHADOWLAND: a new podcast experience – September 9 on TJL
This Jungian Life
On September 9th, This Jungian Life will launch a new podcast experience - SHADOWLAND. In this series, we meet soulfully with people who live and work in the hidden places of our culture.
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Episode 179 - The Archetype of WAR
This Jungian Life
Recent events in Afghanistan have again put war in the forefront of collective consciousness. War’s destruction belongs to the mythic realm. Mars, the Roman god of war, was a primordial force whose altars were placed outside city gates. Although acknowledged, he was not accepted. His paramour, Venus, is warfare’s seductress, offering spectacle, pageantry, and glory.
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Episode 178 - The Music of Metaphor: Healing in Therapy & Life
This Jungian Life
Guest Mark Winborn is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst who teaches in the U.S. and internationally. Author of three books and numerous articles, Mark is an active member of the IRSJA and the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich/Kusnacht. Psychotherapy is talk therapy—but what kind of talk are we talking about? The most fundamental medium of our knowing is language, and metaphor imbues language with music.
info_outlineThe fool in various guises has appeared since ancient times. The court jester seduces through comedy, song, and story. The dummling son of fairy tales wins the treasure with well-meaning ineptitude. Shakespeare featured fools in many of his plays, the Tarot deck begins (or ends) with the fool, and comedians have built careers on playing the fool. The fool punctures the posturings of others’ personas and egos, bests his “betters,” and transgresses social boundaries and conventional morality. The fool flaunts and taunts us with shadow, making truths about cultural norms and human complexity both pointed and palatable. We might well claim that dreams come from the inner fool, and they can shock an ego made lowly by bawdy images of shadow in bathroom dreams and sexual acts. The fool is the unconscious itself, and we recognize if dimly, his close and paradoxical relationship with the Self, light, and dark.
Here's the dream we analyze:
“I'm not even sure what I was studying. I was wandering around a large parking structure looking for my car and I couldn't find it. I kept using my key to lock it and then listened for the chirp, but it seemed very distant. Then I went into an elevator that seemed to move sideways before it finally started going up. I got out of the elevator and wandered into an empty classroom and sat at a table and wrote in a notebook, but it was just odd musings, like random lines of poetry. A young woman sat next to me. She put her hand on my hand and asked me what I was studying. I told her I did not know. I told her I did not know where my car was or what dorm I lived in. She said she would help me and we started to wander through the structure together. It was like an Escher painting. The woman was flirtatious and I told her she was barking up the wrong tree (I am gay) but she did not seem deterred. We went to the lobby of the building, where there were tables with computers on them and packages in a corner. There were several packages for me, wrapped Christmas gifts from my family from earlier years that I had never picked up. No one seemed to know where my room was, but I went alone back into the structure and continued to wander. Finally, I met two young men who led me to my room. Then I gradually realized I was dreaming and woke up.”
RESOURCES:
Learn to Analyze your own Dreams: https://thisjungianlife.com/enroll/