Psyche in the Age of AI
This Jungian Life
Our lives have already been altered by rapidly expanding access to artificial intelligence (AI). In this week’s episode, we consider how this latest technological revolution might be reshaping the human psyche. Hosts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart are joined by a special guest, the author and Jungian analyst Christina Becker, to explore the psychological impact of AI’s incursion into our work, home and relationships. One of the major AI use cases has been for advice, self-reflection and companionship. Some users are even referring to this as “therapy”. This raises thorny questions:...
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The Labyrinth: Soul’s Winding Journey
This Jungian Life
The labyrinth is a powerful metaphor for psychological development and the path of individuation. This week Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart consider how twists and turns in the path of life (especially in early adulthood), ask us to confront uncertainty, anxiety, and the unknown. Ego may crave a straight, well-planned path, but life inevitably offers something else: a fiendishly difficult labyrinth. If we want to get the most out of the journey, we’ve no choice other than to give it all we’ve got. Through the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, we...
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LOW ENERGY: Where Can We Source the Drive to Take Action? (Re-Publish)
This Jungian Life
Many people just can’t rally to do what’s necessary and improve their lives. Is it possible they just don’t carry much vitality, or is some inner conflict blocking their access? We share personal stories of ‘energy loss’ and offer insights into purposelessness. Carl Jung tells us inner energy flows according to its own laws, but if we can’t harness it? Expect to learn why some people are naturally low-energy, which aspects of your psyche might be leaking energy, how over-aligning with cultural norms can cut off access to instinctive vitality, where we can look for solutions,...
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A Jungian Sense of Place: Bollingen and The Tower on the Marsh
This Jungian Life
Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz and Christiana Morgan all dedicated time, soul and imagination to a peculiarly Jungian form of architecture: the stone tower. This week host Deborah Stewart is joined by Dr. Martin Gledhill, an architect, author and Jungian scholar, and filmmaker Hilary Morgan, the granddaughter of Christiana Morgan, an eminent American psychologist who collaborated with Jung on some of his most important work. Deb, Martin and Hilary explore Jung’s Bollingen Tower and Christiana Morgan’s Tower on the Marsh, discussing the profound expressions of psyche through place. Both...
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The Age of Aquarius: A Jungian View of a Changing World
This Jungian Life
Jung suggested in Aion that humanity is moving from the great symbolic Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. Join Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, as we ask what it means to live through the turbulence and vitality of this period of transition. Jung pioneered the idea that human consciousness unfolds in great symbolic ages. The shift from one to the next is not a smooth or pleasant experience. As Jung saw it, each new age emerges through a process of decline, breakdown, and renewal, a process that can bring with it frightening levels of...
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Cassandra: A Jungian Interpretation
This Jungian Life
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a Trojan princess and priestess of Apollo who was given the gift of true prophecy, along with the curse that no one would ever believe her. She warned the Trojans not to bring the famous wooden horse inside their city walls, but her prophecy was ignored and the city fell. In this episode, we discuss the psychological meaning of the Cassandra story from a Jungian perspective, exploring the painful experience of recognizing a deep truth but finding that others cannot or will not hear it. We examine how the Cassandra archetype can intrude into a person’s life,...
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Chance Encounters: When Life Calls Us to a New Path
This Jungian Life
Chance encounters can change the whole direction of our lives. A casual chat with a stranger at the bank, a book that beckons to you from the shelf, or a last-minute lunch invitation might lead to transformative consequences. This week, join Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano, Joseph Lee and Deborah Stewart as we circumambulate the phenomenon of the chance encounter. For Jungians, these moments are more than happy accidents. They may be understood as encounters with the deeper ordering principle Jung called the Self, which disrupts the ego’s plans and invites us toward something...
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COAGULATIO: The Alchemy of Settling Down
This Jungian Life
COAGULATIO marks the psychological moment when possibility takes shape. Uncertainty recedes as we commit to our choices, and life slows and “thickens” into stable commitments and a predictable path. Join Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Joseph Lee as we continue our exploration of Jung’s alchemical stages. This week, we discuss the concept of coagulatio, or the solidifying of what was once liquid. Coagulatio involves settling into a path, a vocation, a relationship, or an identity. Yet these stages of solidification also carry with them loss. Incarnating something in the real...
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Why You Dream of Intruders: The Hidden Meaning of Break-In Dreams
This Jungian Life
Intruder dreams stage a boundary crisis: something arrives without the ego’s consent, and the dreamer wakes with fear, shame, or outrage. Join Jungian analysts Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, and Lisa Marchiano as we analyze a selection of vivid listener-submitted dreams about intruders. We begin with the word itself, “intrusion,” asking how a visitor can feel deeply unwelcome, but at the same time carry something with the potential to protect, repair or even save us. We cover: How the mind negotiates trauma, dissociated affects, and developmental change. How meaning...
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Dissociation as Design: Why the Mind Sometimes Lets Go
This Jungian Life
Pierre Janet’s term abaissement du niveau mental describes an experience so common we barely notice it: fatigue, highway hypnosis, shock, wool-gathering, or monotony lowers the threshold of consciousness, and then images, memories, and impulses press forward. Jung found this idea useful for understanding threshold conditions that interfere with our normal skills, yet make symbolic material available, with the caveat that it’s only useful when it’s committed to memory and reflected on. What separates a generative reverie from a dissociative collapse? How can we make use of this dip into...
info_outlineThe Pied Piper story holds a dark secret that has repelled and fascinated us for over 500 years. It asks, "What does it cost to banish our shadow?"
At its surface, it looks like a simple morality tale cautioning us to be prudent and fair. Rats overrun a town, and the locals are beside themselves. A magical piper vibrantly dressed offers a solution too good to be true. His pipe weaves a tune that leads rats to their doom – and they drown in the ocean so neatly. Thrilled at first, then cunning and foolish, the town leaders refuse to pay the piper for his service. In turn, he entrances all but three children and takes them away forever.
Historians wonder if the account is an artifact of a devastating plague. The Lueneburg manuscript from about 1440 CE records the following event: “In the year of 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul on June 26, by a piper, clothed in many kinds of colours, 130 children born in Hamelin were seduced, and lost at the place of execution near the koppen.” But tragedy was common in the middle ages, and death a constant companion, so why has this account remained vital?
The enduring interest in the Pied piper lies in its symbolic resonance with psyche. When we place the events in our imaginal world, our curiosity is liberated, and our questions become more interesting. What are the pestilential rats inside us? What happens when we ask another person to solve our inner problems? How does the unconscious react when we trick and devalue the inner and outer figures who help us along our way?
Rats populate our inner and outer world. We use them as pharmacological proxies and share about 69% of the same DNA. We keep them as pets even as others work tirelessly to exterminate them from our buildings. In some cultures, they represent prosperity and are tended to as the reincarnation of family members. But foremost, they are survivors and adaptors living side by side in every human endeavor.
We project much shadow on rats accusing them of spreading disease and taking our food without permission – those ratfinks. They hold our unsavory instincts; like all shadow-invested objects, we want them gone! But why are we thankless when someone helps us achieve that? Freud’s Taboo insights suggest anyone associated with our ‘filth’ becomes impure, so degrading them engenders relief.
Complications with money play another part. We’re quick to promise payment when our need is aroused but grim when it’s time to write the check – our mounting credit card debt bears witness to that. Paying the piper evokes dread when we fail to imagine the complete cycle of exchange, and our inner infant is indignant being charged for restoring comfort. Shouldn’t it be free?!? We project our psyches into money and use similar terms for its fluctuations – inflation, depression, and devaluation. Handing over our cash feels like we’re sacrificing an inner potential, surrendering it to our creditors.
This may be a key that unlocks the fairytale.
Perhaps it’s warning us that there’s a cost to banishing our shadow. Strangely, rats, money, and children carry a similar symbolic valence. They all suggest unrealized potential. The vitality in our rat-shadow could have fueled a midlife renewal. Money could have turned our desires into realities. And our children could have carried our hopes into the future.
Perhaps demonizing any aspect of our potential puts all of it at risk, and banishing it to the unconscious may trigger strange, irresistible compulsions that can lead us astray.
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