PARENTAL COMPLEXES: How They Shape Your Child’s Future
This Jungian Life
Our parent's complexes influence their behavior toward us, causing unintended consequences. It's as if we were raised by their unresolved emotional issues. Parental complexes shape our emotional and psychological development, influencing how we relate to others and perceive ourselves, often in ways we aren’t fully aware of. These feeling-toned webs of unresolved emotional struggles unconsciously shape our parent’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors. To some degree, we are raised by our parent’s complexes rooted in generational trauma, cultural pressures, and societal expectations. As...
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SHADOWLAND: Relentless Pain - the story of Jean Campbell
This Jungian Life
JEAN CAMPBELL is a supermodel who from the outside looks to be living a fairy tale life. Stunningly beautiful, she has modeled on the international stage for brands including Alexander McQueen, Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton and Burberry. Of course, nothing is ever so simple (especially in fairy tales). After experiencing a traumatic injury at a young age, Jean had to learn how to live with chronic pain. She underwent multiple surgeries, and confronted despair induced by the extreme physical and emotional challenges she faced. Shadowland is our This Jungian Life forum for exploring...
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Demure Social Media Trend: Elegant or Oppressive?
This Jungian Life
Does the Demure social media trend offer a path to true elegance or reinforce restrictive norms in an extroverted world? The Demure social media trend has become a countercultural movement that seems to promote elegance, modesty, and introspection in stark contrast to the flamboyant exhibitionistic behaviors often seen online. It forces us to question whether its rise signifies a return to refined values or a subtle form of oppression, as it compensates the extroverted behaviors that dominate modern society. By prioritizing simplicity, restraint, and authenticity, the demure trend resonates...
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Loyalty to Self and the Death of Illusion
This Jungian Life
Loyalty is deeply tied to our identity and evolves unconsciously, shaping our relationships and expectations. This evolution is influenced by attachment styles and can be manipulated in political contexts, distorting our sense of fairness. Disillusionment occurs when our loyalty to people, institutions, or ideas meets harsh reality, leading to the painful but necessary process of individuation. Mourning the loss of illusions requires taking responsibility for our lives and listening to the wisdom of the unconscious. Choosing Self over the system—whether through personal decisions like coming...
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VOLCANO: ARCHETYPE OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION
This Jungian Life
Volcanoes appear in our myths, movies, and dreams. Their awesome destructive power fascinates us and serves as a reminder that we are not in control of nature’s primordial forces. Offering access to the earth’s molten core, volcanoes have been believed to be the entryway to the underworld or Hell. The Greeks believed that the fiery bursts from volcanoes were the sparks flying from Hephaestus’ forge, thus underscoring the creative aspect of volcanoes – Hephaestus created items of incredible beauty and power in his underground workshop. Volcanoes create new rocks and new land mass. Their...
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The Secret Life of a Woman's Soul
This Jungian Life
What is unique about the evolution of consciousness in the female psyche? Hilary Morgan, filmmaker and granddaughter of Christiana Morgan, created the documentary "Tower of Dreams" to lift up her grandmother's significant contributions to analytical psychology and her exploration of the feminine psyche. Christiana's visionary art and collaboration with Carl Jung, particularly her influence on the Vision Seminars, were pivotal in clarifying how archetypal forces emerge in the psyche and eventually adopt human forms. Her tower embodied her individuation process and created sacred space to...
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UNLOCK THE POWER OF SYMBOLS
This Jungian Life
Author, teacher, and Jungian analyst Murray Stein helps us unlock the power of symbols. Symbols, as the keys to unlocking psychological forces, have the transformative potential to heal our suffering and restore our relationship to the center of our being. These images connect our waking minds to the unconscious reservoirs of creativity and emerging potential. From historical religious practices to modern everyday life, symbols evoke powerful emotional and psychological responses that can guide or manipulate us. Whether through dreams, visions, or cultural contexts, symbols bridge the...
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LUXURY BELIEFS: Has social class shaped your mind?
This Jungian Life
What unconscious beliefs alienate us from those who are less privileged and what can we do about it? Rob Henderson, author of the best-selling book "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class," explores the concept of "Luxury Beliefs." Raised in poverty by a drug-addicted mother and navigating a series of painful foster care homes, Henderson found outward success through the military, Yale, and Cambridge but never resolved his inner suffering. His self-reflection led him to identify "Luxury Beliefs," attitudes prevalent among his affluent peers that serve as social status...
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Is it Love or Abuse of Power? Shadow and Archetype in TELL THEM YOU LOVE ME
This Jungian Life
Can we protect ourselves and others from powerful projections that confuse reality and make us vulnerable in ways we cannot imagine? In honest and open discussion, we meet with director Nick August-Perna, whose controversial documentary, "Tell Them You Love Me," has set off a firestorm. Rutgers professor Anna Stubblefield claimed to unlock Derrick Johnson through facilitated communication. Debate erupted about whether Johnson, a nonverbal Black man with cerebral palsy, could give consent. Was this true love, or an abuse of power? Race, informed consent, the personal autonomy of people with...
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ARE YOU TRACKING TWISTERS? The reckless charm of creating tornados in our lives.
This Jungian Life
How can understanding the symbolic power of twisters help us navigate and transform the chaotic forces in our lives with resilience and wisdom? Twisters symbolize the spontaneous upheaval in the ordinary affairs of life that can be annihilating or transformative. These swirling vortexes are manifestations of the sacred, expressions of celestial and generative power that were communicated to the terrestrial realm. From Kiowa legends to Jungian analysis, tornados personify an aspect of the unconscious capable of volatility and violent acts of destruction, yet the same forces provided...
info_outlinePiping through mountains and glens, the great god Pan carries the relentless procreative power of nature. He symbolizes the archaic level of psyche from which all wild instinct rises; feared during war as his panic could undo even the Titans and attacked in the Common Era as the image of the devil.
Half man and half goat, Pan’s untamed sexuality evoked rapture and impulsivity. As the god of shepherds, he ushered young men into puberty, introducing them to the spring rut in their flocks and their own bodies.
In the first 30 years of the Christian era, Plutarch wrote that a sailor heard a divine proclamation, “The great god Pan is dead!” This foreshadowed the fate of natural sexuality as it encountered the ascetic demands of Christianity. The anthesis of Christ’s innocence and virtue, the lustful goat-foot-god, was recast as the prime cosmic offender.
And so, Pan-ic was slowly redirected from fear-driven flocks racing from danger to the human conscience fleeing from the evils of the flesh. The triumph of ego control over instinct was the goal of many religions and philosophies. Civilization itself rose from repression and redirection of primal instincts. The great god Pan was yoked to the engine of art and industry, providing seemingly endless energy.
Freud named the cost of strangling Pan’s lust as he developed his concept of the pleasure principle and psychosexual theory. Neurosis was the strange revenge of cut-off sexuality creating symptoms from hysterical blindness to intolerable moods. Jung understood that banishing images and rituals representing archetypal forces left humans vulnerable to dangerous affects both individually and collectively.
Today, mass Pan-ic dances through social media setting off one frenzy or another. The renewed demonization of sexuality and the deification of malignant innocence is an old tactic made new again. Panic disorder has its roots in the same inner conflict. Jung warned that cutting off conscious access to archetypal forces leads to the rise of fascism and other rage-driven mass movements.
If we can welcome the renewing powers of nature and restore the medicine of healthy instincts, we may yet avert the worst repercussions of killing Pan. It is not enough to champion ecological causes in the outer world; we must extend that to our inner landscape. The divine beasts that graze in our imaginal meadows and the strange gods that beckon in our dream forests also require careful tending. The way we treat Pan inside us is mirrored in the way we treat nature around us. Then we might join the poet Eleanor Farjeon and say,
“Arcadia! it is the very music
Of the first spring-tide rippling its first wave
Over the naked, laughing baby world ...
Come again, thou sparkling spring-tide, come again,
Rush in and flood this autumn from my soul!”
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