Right at the beginning you meet the dragon, the chthonic spirit, the devil or, as the alchemists called it, the blackness, the nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering… Carl Jung Emblem 6 Book of Lambspring Source of Quotation: C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, ed. W. Mcguire and R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J….
(This is from a sister website, www.heartcurrents.com) As mentioned in yesterday’s post about the adaptive strategy of depression, the Jungian metaphor for the journey is that of the “nigredo”, the first stage of alchemy. Although the excerpt below is primarily about the encounter with the psychological shadow that needs to be dealt with, it is…
It is good to see articles with a Jungian interpretation of a film… Excerpt from a www.mindhacks.com post: When you have a hammer, everything can look like a nail and people have been banging the shit out of Inception. The sci-fi movie of the year has attracted numerous ‘neuroscience of Inception’ reviews despite the…
This is a video of Stephan Hoeller talking to the C.G. Jung Club of Orange County, California in 2009, when he was 78. The sound and the picture are a bit off, but listening to it works just as well. (In this age of Power Point, lectures are rather old fashioned and missing visual information.)…
In an earlier post, I reviewed Amy Hardie’s brilliant film documentary, The Edge of Dreaming. One of the comments Ms. Hardie made about the process was that she needed to go back in re-enter the dream, to transform it. Three psychotherapists had been unsuccessful in working with her, and she proceeded to find the help…
In my opinion, many Jungians take the writings of Jung as gospel, and do not take into account the cultural context from which he wrote. His view, for instance, of the anima and the feminine is a bit chauvanistic and confining. This article by Dr. Austin is an excellent review of the cultural context in…
From the website of Maria Taveras, a Jungian analyst and artist Jung also discusses a case in which a snake emerged from the mouth of a woman. After World War I, a 28-year-old woman consulted Jung. She wanted “to be cured within ten hours” – that is, within only ten analytic sessions. The woman told…
Continuing in the amplification of the healing snake in Amy Hardie’s The Edge of Dreaming… (… Snakes on a plane, snakes on a woman, snakes on a stick — snakes everywhere….) The woman with the snake coiled around her looks particularly unhappy; I suspect this picture was not her idea…. More on men’s projection about…
In Amy Hardie’s recent documentary film,The Edge of Dreaming, (reviewed yesterday) she encounters a huge snake that devours her during a shamanic healing. Out of this experience, she recovered from what appeared to be a fatal lung disease. Why the snake? Perhaps the commonest dream symbol of transcendence is the snake, as represented by the…