Episode 55 - Identifying & Integrating the Personal Shadow
Release Date: 04/18/2019
Episode 191 - Archetypes and the Creative Process: A Discussion with Third Coast Percussion
This Jungian Life
The creator, the hero, the explorer: these are just some of the archetypes made famous by Carl Jung that inspired the latest album from Chicago’s Grammy award-winning Third Coast Percussion. Taped live at the 2021 Chicago Humanities Festival, our conversation with musicians Clarice Assad and David Skidmore features an exploration of the creative process and an interactive discussion on David’s dream.
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Episode 190 - Falling in Love: Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered
This Jungian Life
Jung says, “Love is a power of destiny, whose force reaches from heaven to hell.” Falling in love in an initiation into the divine—light and dark—as personal and archetypal forces combine and combust. In thrall to the magical other through whom we experience newfound parts of ourselves, we fall into a reality that transcends and possesses us.
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Episode 189 - A Well-Aligned Mind: How to Be Alive
This Jungian Life
Guest Iain McGilchrist is a renowned psychiatrist, researcher and author. His 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary, gained worldwide fame for showing how differences between brain hemispheres affect our perceptions--and guide our lives. Each hemisphere has a radically different ‘take’ on the world: the left sees what is in the theater spotlight, whereas the right hemisphere understands the whole play.
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Episode 188 - Humanizing the Hero
This Jungian Life
Mythological heroes defend, protect and quest. They range from warriors, adventurers, and saviors to magicians, loners, and rebels, but one way or another, they battle bad for the sake of good. They have courage, skill and strength, but never a troubling moment. Although we still delight in heroes with might and shine, modern times have given rise to a new ideal: the everyday hero.
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Episode 187 - The Fiery Furnace of Ambition
This Jungian Life
Ambition is a fire whose flames first rise in the first half of life, when hopes and dreams are fueled by possibilities in the external world. It takes creative audacity to seize a dream, develop a talent, or commit to a calling. Ambition can also be fueled by narcissism, power seeking, or striving to overcome inadequacy.
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Episode 186 - The Archetype of the Witch: Dangerous, Denied & Dishonored
This Jungian Life
It’s witching season, the time when women of all ages embrace a mythical image of unfettered feminine power. The witch may cast spells, seek vengeance, or wreak creative havoc—as she pleases. Flying the night skies of psyche, the witch brings primordial realities into culture’s brittle convictions.
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Episode 185 - Assessing Our Psychic Inheritance
This Jungian Life
Jung said of the parent-child relationship: “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.” Jung understood that parents can unconsciously compel children to fulfill parental dreams or compensate for disappointments.
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Episode 184 - Does Analysis Work? A Conversation with Jonathan Shedler, PhD
This Jungian Life
“Talk is powerful medicine.” Renowned researcher and clinician Jonathan Shedler, PhD joins us to discuss the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy. While so-called evidence-based therapies—brief treatments conducted by instruction manuals—offer benefit for some, their status as the “gold standard” of treatment for mental distress is undeserved.
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Episode 183 - JUSTICE: The Struggle for Balance
This Jungian Life
Principles of fairness and justice have deep roots in the human psyche: we want to receive our fair share and a fair shake. When man injures man we may protest, strive for redress, and measure wrong with morality—but what about godly misfortunes? Life, myth and religion are rich with issues of injustice. Whether individual injury, social inequality, or divine mystery, over-insistence on fairness can lead to depression, resentment, and fixation.
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Episode 182 - Confronting Shadow: The Work of Self-Discovery
This Jungian Life
Psychotherapy is essentially the work making shadow conscious—all that we have not discerned, disown, or project onto others. We seldom welcome shadow, for it is marked by emotions and motivations that deflate, disturb, and dethrone ego. From family scuffles to political hostilities and outright war, we most often meet our shadow in others. Its presence is signaled by a strong urge to take action, with feelings ranging from judgment to antagonism, from pity to self-sacrifice, and from obsession to disgust
info_outlineThe personal shadow is created as a normal part of development, as we learn what behaviors, values and feelings are not acceptable in our family, school, or religious tradition. In order to be accepted by needed significant others, parts of ourselves have to be split off from consciousness and are therefore relegated to the unconscious as shadow. A major part of becoming more whole is discovering these exiled parts of ourselves and integrating the feelings they carry. Deb, Lisa and Joseph discuss some of the ways that shadow can be confronted and given a place at the table of consciousness.
The Dream:
I’m in my Dad’s wood shop, in the basement of the home where I grew up. I need to unscrew a panel on a metal box, and I’m finding the right screwdriver. The first one I pick up is too small, Mom hands me a better-sized one, a Phillips head with four fins. Somehow it is a very large size, and I notice the fins on the head are rusty. I sand away some of the rust on one of the fins, but when I come to the second, it is covered in masking tape. Instead of peeling off the tape, I try to sand away the masking tape, but the sandpaper continues to sand into the screwdriver fin itself, which is somehow made of corrugated cardboard. I am puzzled. I feel a pit in my stomach, like I’ve made a mistake. I find that only the first of the four fins is made of metal, the rest are cardboard. I “undo” (like you would on a computer) to get back to where I was after sanding the metal fin. The cardboard fins are intact again and I’m relieved. I then unscrew and open the panel of the box.