Forging the Upward Thread: Why Do We Create Religions?
This Jungian Life
The religious function is part of who we are — as natural as needing food or love. It’s the inner drive that pushes us to find meaning, to touch something larger than ourselves. Jung saw that if we don’t tend it, it doesn’t go away; it twists itself into addictions, compulsions, or a kind of soul-sickness. Religion, in the deepest sense, isn’t about belief systems. It’s about real encounters with the Self — the larger reality inside us that humbles, heals, and reshapes us. Dreams, symbols, and moments of awe are how Psyche keeps that connection alive. Without them,...
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Trauma Can Be Rewritten: The Use of Art to Reimagine our Past and Grant Us New Life
This Jungian Life
Viviane Silvera animated 30,000 of her hand-painted images to explore how traumatic memories are formed, stored, and ultimately transformed. Her animated documentary, SEE MEMORY, traces the intimate story of a young woman caught between past and present; her film captures the fragmented texture of trauma and the healing that becomes possible when painful memories are witnessed. In our conversation with Viviane, we explore her process of recovering lost memories and how opposing perspectives can constellate new attitudes toward trauma. We discuss cutting-edge findings on the way the brain...
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How to Develop Your Inner Guidance: Charting a Path Through the Current Chaos with Jung’s Insights
This Jungian Life
Today you'll learn about inner guidance--the quiet, built-in compass that surfaces when we pause the outer noise long enough to feel what rings true inside. It is less a mystical oracle than a subtle convergence of bodily signals, emotional undertones, and intuitive "hunches" distilled from our lived experience. When we meet a decision with open attention—neither forcing a rational verdict nor surrendering to raw impulse—this inner faculty sorts, weighs, and hints at the direction that aligns with our deepest values. Acting on it demands two skills: discerning authentic signals from fear...
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[SUBSCRIBER-BONUS] How to work with Shadow Material
This Jungian Life
In this free edition of Jung Love, our -bonus content, a Patron asks: "What do you do with shadow material? Is it enough to just become aware of your shadows? Or does it require a fixing of oneself? What is the process of processing it? I'm still trying to wrap my head around the shadow. What if I'm aware, but still don't like the shadow? Robert Johnson talked about rituals for the shadow. Can you speak about that in more depth and perhaps provide some examples?" BECOME a TJL Patron and enjoy exclusive content like interpreting your dreams, explaining Jung's ideas, and more: LOOK &...
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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...
info_outlineSex fascinates us. Whether we turn toward it, flushed and excited or away from it, tense and disquieted. Archetypal images of sex adorn the thresholds of ancient temples and inform most mythological systems. Shiva and Shakti, in their union, create the universe – she’s providing all forms for his undifferentiated light. The gods beget gods as they mate, giving rise to infinite imagistic permutations of cosmic and personal qualities. These religious images of creation and pleasure inform our individual psyche granting sexuality a numinous intensity.
Human culture shapes our initial attitudes toward sex. When infused with monotheistic religious feeling, sex is held as a sacrament subject to the rites and rituals believed to protect the couple from its overwhelming power and god’s jealous monitoring of the behavior. Polytheistic religions generated a multiplicity of god-forms and related myths to reflect a wide variety of possible relationships to sex and its outcomes. Pan, the lusty fertility god of the rut, Aphrodite the mistress of beauty and refined passion, Anteros the god of love returned, and Pothos, the god of sexual yearning – the infinite diversities of sexual expression, were held by related images and protectively tended by their devotees.
With the age of enlightenment that inevitably led to the current juggernaut of science and empirical attitude, we disposed of the archetypal images of sex, driving them into our personal and collective shadow. Defenses like shame and resentment keep the gods of sex at bay. At war within our bodies, they cause genital tissue to ossify and choke off requisite blood flow.
Freud was foremost in the battle to understand and liberate trapped sexual forces. As a neurologist, odd cases of functional disorders came to his attention – a patient who mysteriously could not feel a limb or a loss of sight without organic cause. His rigorous exploration of symptoms and personal narrative led him to a theory of psychosexual development which clarified how sexual energy, when thwarted, could lead to a host of mental and physical suffering or neurosis. Jung expanded the theory, suggesting there were many kinds of psychic energy, in addition to sex, that produced symptoms when trapped by unnatural attitudes or traumatic interference. He accepted the creative reality of sexuality and was an early champion of sexual diversity and self-determination.
As moderns, we have tried to liberate sex by reducing it to a transaction, making it subordinary and thus non-threatening. Kinsey championed the natural fluidity of sexuality by surveying and analyzing personal erotic experiences and publishing them – he tried to restore consciousness to the diversity of sexual themes, hoping it would broaden modern attitudes and cultivate acceptance. The chorus of explainers now spans widely from biopsychosocial researchers to evolutionary psychologists, gender role theorists, to social constructionists. Add to that list theologists, talk show hosts, and podcasters, and we can all agree – we can’t seem to take our eyes off sex.
Here’s the Dream We Analyze:
“I was running a marathon in the desert. First, I saw pueblos, familiar from an old dream. Then I saw a sleeping dragon, then a stack of rainbow-colored rocks. Finally, I entered a taqueria, and the man behind the stand gave me a sugar-covered tortilla. Then a woman with a veil came in.”
REFERENCES:
From Freud to Jung: A Comparative Study of the Psychology of the Unconscious by Liliane Frey-Rohn. https://a.co/d/63atnIv
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex Paperback by John Gray. https://a.co/d/4ZWjSmW
The Kinsey Institute, https://kinseyinstitute.org/
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