James Joyce with Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and John Quinn, ca. 1923. Like every true prophet, the artist is the unwitting mouth-piece of the psychic secrets of his time, and is often as unconscious as a sleep walker. Carl Jung, in his essay on Ulysses James Joyce’s Ulysses is frequently considered one of the…
Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters. Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from…
The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness “I first became aware of the image of the black sun while reading Jung’s alchemical works and later in a more personal way in my analysis of a woman whose encounter with the black sun was dramatic and life changing. What I initially thought was a rare…
For approximately the last three weeks, this blog has been trying to view the Jared Loughner case in a Jungian context. Although there is still much to try to understand, it is also time to move on to other topics. To give equal time to the lighter side of life, for a while this blog…
Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger…
From the Red Book (The Axeman Cometh?) The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. Psychology and Alchemy, 1953 I leave theory aside as much as possible when analyzing dreams-not entirely, of course,…