DO WE INHERIT OUR PARENT’S FEARS?
This Jungian Life
What wisdom do fairy tales hold about childrearing in our modern world? Briar Rose is the foundation for the familiar fairytale Sleeping Beauty. It addresses the complicated consequences of unconscious parenting. While it is understandable we wish to protect our children from harsh realities, too much shielding can hobble them later in life. We may hide our shadow from ourselves and our children, but it will irrupt uninvited one day, casting the family into chaos. Instinctive reactions often hold us in suspended animation, but they may also offer a way toward healing. “Parents...
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DUMBO'S FEATHER: Are there hidden messages in Disney cartoons?
This Jungian Life
What hidden messages make Disney cartoons so impactful and enduring? Disney cartoons were groundbreaking. They introduced synchronized soundtracks in 1928, and today, they create extravaganzas that sweep audiences into tears and laughter, offering role models of virtue. Archetypal themes, often drawn from fairytales, thrum through the storylines appealing to the archaic levels of our psyche. Prepare to discover where Hermes is hidden in one of the characters, how childhood trauma activates archetypal helpers, whether Dumbo is a symbol of hope or a defense against maturation, how separation of...
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Aaron Balick – Why does social media weaponize our reactions?
This Jungian Life
Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, speaker, consultant, educator, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. Social media invites snap emotional reactions, muddling clear thinking and escalating global tensions. It feeds on our anger, oversimplifying complex problems which blocks our ability to empathize. Nuanced explanations are demonized as if seeking to understand was an affront. If we learn to pause and reflect, we can overcome social media's divisive influence and discover middle-ground solutions in both personal and world affairs. Prepare to discover where emotional...
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FAME: Why Do We Create Icons Then Destroy Them?
This Jungian Life
Today's technology allows us to be seduced by the possibility of fame and celebrity tempting the ego to claim what does not belong to it. In earlier times, fame was garnered slowly through work in the arts, scholarship, religion, and the military. Today, unprecedented, almost instantaneous communication has made fame a commodity in itself. Novelty performers, entertainers, influencers, and sports stars—especially if young and glamorous—can become the victim of "audience capture." Fame tempts the ego to claim what does not belong to it, and the person may become identified with...
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JUNG'S PARANORMAL ENCOUNTERS: Why did strange events follow him?
This Jungian Life
If we lean into strange experiences with gentle curiosity, we may discover a level of psyche that acts directly on objects. Many of us have uncanny coincidences like thinking of a friend at the exact moment they ring us on the phone, but what about physical things breaking apart for no reason or luminous apparitions at our bedside? We often explain them away to reduce our anxiety, but Jung found them fascinating. He maintained a scientific attitude while accepting strange phenomena he could not explain. Eventually, he created a psychology of radical acceptance that creates space for the...
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LOW ENERGY: Where can we source the drive to take action?
This Jungian Life
Lisa, Deb, and Joe, Jungian analysts and co-creators of This Jungian Life podcast, have introduced thousands of clients to an inner world with unexpected resources. 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. Jung tells us inner energy flows according to its own laws, but if we can’t harness it? Prepare to discover why some people are naturally low-energy,...
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REUNIONS: Is there value in remembering our younger selves?
This Jungian Life
Deb and Joe are Jungian Analysts, authors, training analysts, and co-creators of This Jungian Life Podcast. [Lisa was away lecturing this week.] Most of us feel anxious at the thought of reliving the complicated and often painful experiences of our youth. When we receive a school reunion notice, we might be tempted to ignore it. Yet, on an archetypal level, we are drawn to re-unifying our current and past identities. If we accept the invitation, we may find unexpected joy and forgotten memories that restore something inside us. Prepare to discover why we plan and attend reunions, whether...
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Donald Kalsched – Can running our minds like a democracy save us?
This Jungian Life
Don Kalsched is a Jungian Analyst, an expert on treating trauma, author of two books, The Inner World of Trauma and Trauma and the Soul. Jung discovered our inner world is populated by various imaginal figures representing powerful psychological forces. If we treat our minds as democratic spaces, it can safeguard us from internal and external authoritarian influences. Prepare to discover the parallels between a balanced mind and a healthy society, whether viewing internal conflicts through a democratic lens is healing, which insights foster harmony, why democratic philosophy is transformative,...
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Why Do We Push People Away? Understanding our Defenses
This Jungian Life
Defense mechanisms function as unconscious psychological strategies we deploy to navigate reality and sustain a consistent self-image. They act as a shield, guarding against feelings of anxiety, shame, and vulnerability. They are feeling states that prompt us to avoid contact and trick us into thinking they protect us against emotional harm. Ancient philosophers recognized the human tendency to evade uncomfortable truths. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, he vividly depicts individuals shackled in a cave, seeing only shadows and illusions. Upon being freed and confronted with the light...
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SELKIE FOLKLORE: Should we force soul to serve us?
This Jungian Life
The Selkie swims ashore at night, sheds her seal skin, hides it, and delights in her human form. In Celtic lore, she is the wild feminine soul, a creature of land and sea, innocent and beautiful, who cannot thrive in domesticity. In folklore, the seal-folk are discovered by humans. Their natural, joyous spirit, grace, and affection invite contact. Humans are drawn to them, but if they touch, parting is unbearable. Many a young man, desperate to maintain the life-giving embrace of nature, steals a Selkie’s seal skin, locking her into a human form. Helpless, she is led into domesticity and...
info_outlineAs Jung’s anthropological studies expanded and his international travel exposed him to new cultures and ideas, he was taken by the concept of ‘loss of soul.’
A collapse of energy, a strange sudden alteration of personality, or episodes of blinding rage could signify a loss of soul from a shamanic perspective. The soul carries the animating and regulating forces as well as memory. In most traditions, it was expected to fly away upon death, much like the Egyptian Ba, depicted as a bird with a human head. Because the soul had an independent life, it might flee suddenly, leaving a listless body behind. The shaman’s task was to retrieve and escort the wandering soul into the body again.
In Michael Harner’s book The Way of the Shaman, he cataloged various ancient practices and distilled a small set of universal techniques. Soul retrieval involves tying a red string on the patient’s wrist and, with the help of one’s spiritual power animal, traveling to the inner worlds, identifying the lost soul by the red string also on its wrist, bringing it back to the waking world and blow it into the patient’s body. Loss of soul in this contemporary system is often associated with trauma, and the imagery is congruent with modern conceptualizations of dissociation.
Jung linked shamanic descriptions with the work of psychiatrist Janet and called “abaissement du niveau mental.” Jung described this as “a slackening of the tensity of consciousness, which might be compared to a low barometric reading, presaging bad weather. The tonus has given way, and this is felt subjectively as listlessness, moroseness, and depression. One no longer has any wish or courage to face the tasks of the day. One feels like lead because no part of one’s body seems willing to move, and this is due to the fact that one no longer has any disposable energy.”
In modern psychiatry, several clinical descriptions might be assigned to such despair and collapse, but those may not capture the psychospiritual depth of ‘loss of soul.’ For Jung, the soul carries creativity and grants meaning; it links us to the divine and represents all we could be if wholeness were possible. Whatever the cause, to be abandoned by one’s soul is devastating, and to be reunited, the greatest gift.
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