Gratitude and Reverence: How to Lead a Sacred, Soulful Life
This Jungian Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with ten percent off from now until the 31st of December. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. ----------------------------------------------------- A Jungian Look at Gratitude (and Why It Usually Arrives Late) Have you ever suddenly realized, “I never really thanked them for that,” a parent, teacher, mentor, or community that quietly carried you through a hard stretch? Gratitude is a psychological turning point: the moment you grasp that your life rests on the real, sometimes...
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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...
info_outlineThe essence of friendship is visible in its linguistic root: ‘to love.’ Cicero wrote, “Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief." In modern times the art of friending seems lost. We have replaced shared experiences with Facebook posts and quell our loneliness by scrolling.
With high spirits, we three revisit our first meeting and reflect on the discovery of kinship between us. Our experiences of trust, reciprocity, and shared hardship marked by endless conversations and abundant laughter forged our bond during analytic training. Yet it reflects more than our shared life; friendship is archetypal.
Vigorous bonding is mysterious. It emerges unexpectedly and carries aspects of positive and negative shadow. This tension seemed evident in Jung and Freud’s famous friendship. Their instantaneous bond led to thirteen hours of conversation at their first meeting. It would end six years later, leaving Jung devastated and struggling with overwhelming inner states. The story of Rumi first meeting Shams, which led to thirty days of deep conversation, carries a similar passion. Rumi lost Shams to death, and Jung lost Freud to his struggle for autonomy. Both found solace in the inner world where the memories of their friend merged with its archetype – Shams’ image carried Rumi’s love of the divine, and Philemon’s image carried Jung’s love of wisdom.
For us three, the essence of lasting friendship lies in tending mutual creative purposes. Aligning with common goals allows most friendships to flourish and impact the world positively. It’s not enough to recognize we like someone; that’s just the beginning. We must learn to nurture the bonds that make us more than we were alone.
HERE’S THE DREAM WE ANALYZE:
“There is a vast plane with a deep, wide, and steep hole. From the center of this deep pit, a high tower stands. A figure physically throws me across the expanse to the tower, where I am suspended against the building. The perspective stays with the figure who is wearing a black cloak that covers their form. Their arms, legs, face, and skin are under the black cloak. There are two white marks on the fabric denoting eyes, but they aren't actual eye holes like a mask. They slowly turn and walk off after I've been thrown. The dream repeats the throwing, but the perspective follows me across the expanse. The thread I am suspended from is a single piece of spider silk. Where I am hanging, I am face to face with a guardian of the tower. It is an anthropomorphic lizard, light green, wearing golden armor. It raises its sword, and instead of attacking me, it cuts the silk thread, and I fall quickly but safely. I notice open windows one could sneak into on my way down. Safely reaching the base of the tower, facing underneath where the cloaked figure and I were, I see a large tunnel and know I need to enter. I begin to walk towards it when I awake.”
REFERENCES: Jamie Krems, Ph.D. The evolutionary psychology of friendship research project. CLICK HERE
RESOURCES:
Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts, ADVANCED CLINICAL PRACTICE PROGRAM: A case seminar for experienced clinicians to read, explore and apply Jung's concepts to clinical practice: CLICK HERE
ARE YOU INTERESTED IN A SERIOUS STUDY OF JUNG? Enroll in the Philadelphia Jungian Seminar 2023 Fall Semester and start your journey: CLICK HERE
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