Signs Contempt Is Ruining Your Relationship & Ways to Cope
This Jungian Life
Contempt feels like a gut punch. It’s a cold, distancing act that devalues a person even as it avoids solving a real problem. The contemptuous are full of shame, fear, or hurt, so they recreate those feelings in others to evade their own issues. Unlike anger (which tries to correct an injustice), disgust (which avoids what feels contaminating), or hatred (which seeks destruction), contempt asserts superiority and cuts off relatedness. It shows up in eye‑rolling, sarcasm, mockery, and a habit of judging others as beneath one’s standards. Whether you’re struggling to survive it...
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SEPARATIO: The Alchemical Secret That Ends Confusion
This Jungian Life
Alchemical separatio is the skill of sorting out your mind. You separate what belongs to you—your complexes, habitual triggers, and painful memories--from what is happening in the world around you. In the laboratory of your life, you separate present triggers from older wounds, and literal facts from symbolic meanings. This is part of your essential self-ordering instinct. As you bring more and more of yourself into conscious awareness, a delightful calm will tell you you’re on the right path. Join us and learn how to gain the profound clarity necessary on the path of Individuation. Read...
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LUCID DREAMING: How to Make the Most of a Magical Opportunity
This Jungian Life
Lucid dreaming is an interesting ego state when we are dreaming and regain full self-awareness. Being awake in the dream world can be useful, but imposing a rigid agenda can undermine the Dream Maker’s attempts to educate and help us. Each dream is crafted to incrementally expand our awareness and acceptance of unconscious factors we need in order to grow. When we wake inside a dream, we can lose track of that important attitude and may use the dream as our playground—most people try to fly and miss significant opportunities. If we can achieve a non-grasping clarity, lucidity can deepen...
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Shadow, Evil, and Individuation: Jung’s View of the Devil
This Jungian Life
The devil archetype carries three qualities: it promotes bestial violence of every kind, it tries to convince us that the material world is the only reality, and it fools us into thinking we can spiritually ascend through intellect alone. On a personal level, it gathers our disowned infernal traits—envy, rage, greed, and the wish to dominate —and seduces us into believing those qualities are virtues. Once we face our own devilishness and grant it a symbolic form, we can assume a choiceful stance. Lacking that, we try to evacuate our own evil by projecting it onto others and then...
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Horror as a Mirror: What Netflix’s MONSTER Makes Us See
This Jungian Life
The new controversial Netflix series MONSTER: The Ed Gein Story offers a window into the devouring mother archetype, a transformation fantasy gone horribly wrong, and the human capacity for monstrous behavior. Gein’s crimes inspired the Hitchcock movie Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs. It challenges the audience to confront its fascination with evil and begs the question, where do the monsters hide in our own Psyche? To help us wrestle with these questions, we’re joined by Joey Pollari—actor, musician, director, editor, and the man who plays Anthony Perkins...
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SUBLIMATIO: Jung’s Alchemical Method of Turning Problems into Archetypes
This Jungian Life
Do you get overwhelmed by intense feelings and old patterns, feeling stuck because you can’t make sense of what’s happening, and reacting on impulse instead of pausing to choose a steady, thoughtful response? Jung’s alchemical insights will help. Sublimatio is an old alchemy term for heating a solid so that it turns directly into a gas, rises, and then cools back into a solid higher up. As a psychological metaphor, this happens when we discover an archetypal image or idea that adds a fresh perspective on an old problem. The vapor becomes a solid again when we apply the new attitude to...
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People Pleasing Is Making You Sick!
This Jungian Life
People Pleasing is a compulsive strategy that disavows your needs and surrenders your agency. It begins in family systems that only reward compliance, which produces a false self. If your soul is constantly devalued, you may develop dependent narcissism with a covert contract: “I’ll keep you happy, and you’ll keep me safe.” Healing comes when you identify your true experience—notice whether you feel drained, tense, or obligated versus calm, interested, or genuinely willing. Give yourself permission to pause before agreeing. Say, “I’ll think about it,” step away to check...
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If Looks Could Kill: The Death Mother Archetype
This Jungian Life
Some mothers attack life in their children. They crush appetite, joy, curiosity, and initiative. They call it love or duty. It is not love. It is domination dressed as care. She withholds warmth to make the child obedient. She intrudes when the child needs space and vanishes when the child needs help. She shames tears, punishes play, mocks ambition, and polices the body. She turns boundaries into punishments and favors into chains. The Death Mother archetype is ancient and modern, requiring careful confrontation to free the parent and the child from its destructive grip. Today, we will help...
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Projection and Play: What Dolls Do to Psyche
This Jungian Life
Dolls are human stand-ins that invite projection and play; children use them (including action figures and Barbies) to try on identities and develop imagination, then later withdraw the projection as the figure becomes inert again. Icons and idols differ because their meaning is fixed and not for play, which limits imaginative engagement. The healthiest use of dolls is symbolic—relating to them without collapsing into literal belief—while overly realistic “reborn” dolls, talk-box toys, and similar literalizations can narrow imagination, blur symbol and reality. Across history, dolls...
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MYTHS: Maps of the Collective Unconscious
This Jungian Life
Think of myths as the dreams of an entire culture. Those stories reside in the collective unconscious and influence all of us throughout our lifespan. Mythic patterns shape our attitudes, and when we recognize them, we can link our personal experiences to the universal. When you’re panicking, you’re under the influence of Pan; when you’re sunk in gloom, you’re on a night-sea journey like Odysseus. Jungians’ call linking the personal to the universal, amplification: take a symptom, link it to a myth, and you’ve shifted it from “my private defect” to “a shared force,” which...
info_outlineTo hunt is to engage the opposites: the hunter must attune and align with nature in order to kill part of it. According to mythographer Joseph Campbell, “the basic hunting myth is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world.” Myth and rituals of sympathy, sacrifice, and gratitude honor the age-old bond between man and animal: one dies so the other may live. If the hunter imposes will alone, hunting becomes ego dominance--sport or slaughter. In traversing the realms from human culture to nature’s archaic terrain, the huntsman echoes and honors the relationship between ego-consciousness and the unconscious.
For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear...they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. -Henry Beston
Here’s the dream we analyze:
“My extended family were in the process of relocating to a city named Boreham Wood in Tunisia (I checked, it doesn’t exist). It was a sort of fairytale paradise, blue skies, palm trees, and low-standing terracotta houses. They asked me to help with the move by driving my grandma’s electric scooter from Scotland through the desert. Strapped to the sides were two bags filled only with ice and rum. Once I arrived at the new house, I unloaded the alcohol but immediately felt the urge to leave and explore the area. It was clear my family wanted to celebrate my highly anticipated arrival, but I knew couldn’t stay. Instead, I took the scooter and drove into town, winding through the cobbled streets, past gothic arches and flocks of tropical birds. As I approached the city center, a large, dark castle rose in the skyline. At the gates, a young woman was weaving mushrooms from a hook to sell to tourists. I stopped and watched her but didn’t buy anything. I parked the scooter and entered the castle gates. The courtyard was bustling with young families eating lunch from long tables. I wandered around until I stumbled upon a group of disheveled-looking men dressed in grey robes and animal furs. They didn’t pay me much attention, but I was fascinated and struck up a conversation with what appeared to be the leader. He explained that they were a tour group from America called Warriors of The Soul that had been doing annual trips to Boreham Wood since 1992. I could see they had self-inflicted cuts all over their arms, some openly bleeding onto the table. He (the leader) explained that they were mostly vets, recovering addicts, and environmental protesters who were on a journey of healing together. I asked the leader if I could spend the day with him and was immediately invited back to a tower in the castle to see his studio. We left the group and walked to the base of the tower; from there, we climbed a seemingly endless spiral staircase, dilapidated and strewn with trash bags. I remember taking note of the exit signs. Once at the top, I was ushered into the studio. It was dark, cold, and filled with primitive paintings made from human blood. He drew his knife and explained that the canvases were waxed paper, as that allowed the blood to move more freely across the surface, unlike regular paper, which is far too absorbent. He then asked if I would donate blood for his next painting. At that point, I noticed a dead body under the drawing desk and tried to move the conversation back to the wax paper. I asked if the toxins were harmful if used when baking. This seemed to work, as he began extolling that yes, never use wax paper when baking. At this point, I turned on my heels and ran back down the stairs, bounding three at a time. He sprinted after me, brandishing the knife and laughing. I knew I’d be safe if I got to the exit signs, but they didn’t appear. Instead, the staircase began to climb again, twisting and turning like a rabbit warren. He started gaining on me and nicked my thumb with the knife, but eventually, I came to a window with a Brooklyn-style fire escape. I smashed the glass and shimmied down the ladder, my legs and thumb bleeding. As I descended, he laughed at me continuously. Once on the ground, I ran back to the scooter, only to realize I didn’t know how to get home. I couldn’t call because I didn’t have my phone and I couldn’t buy bandages for my cuts as I didn’t have a wallet. Then I awoke.”
REFERENCES:
Anna Braytenback, Animal Communicator. https://www.animalspirit.org/
The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story (documentary). Craig Foster and Damn Foster. https://www.amazon.com/Great-Dance-Hunters-Story/dp/B074G43NYT
Eleanor Wilner, Hunting Manual (poem): https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42971/hunting-manual
Eric Fromm. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. https://www.amazon.com/dp/080501604X/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_JAETSJ4S52DE4N19XYC5
Yuval Harari. Sapiens. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063051338/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_M4XT8Y4VQWPN43JZ8PEF?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
Henry Beston. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140043152/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_YG8701XC4Q358473D67A
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