The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. (From Christ, A Symbol…
The problem with Greek Mythology is that the Greeks didn’t have glaciers to use as a metaphor: this was not a problem in Scandinavia. In this northern mythology, slow waves of glaciers flow out of the cold, seething cauldron of Hvegelmir. What a great metaphor for the strength of the life force; as Dylan Thomas…
The most comprehensive information I could find about Jung’s mother is from Frank McLynn’s 1999 biography, Carl Gustav Jung. He doesn’t hesitate to do a kind of psychoanalysis of her effect on Jung: CHAPTER ONE Carl Gustav Jung By FRANK McLYNN St. Martin’s Press Jung imbibed superstition almost literally with his mother’s milk, for Emilie…
Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left…
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…
Cheryl Fuller, the blogger and Jungian psychotherapist behind Jung-at-Heart, has been posting blogs since February 2007. The posts are often thoughtful writings on the process of psychotherapy, with (obviously) a Jungian orientation. Most blogs in this fast-food-world lack depth of presentation or inquiry; Ms. Fuller’s articles are well-thought through and well-written. Psychoanalysis cannot be considered…
The 1983 album Synchronicity was inspired by Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence , which has substantial material about Jung’s idea of synchronicity.Koestler (1905-1983) wrote numerous essays, novels, and autobiographies. In this later years, he developed Parkinsons disease; he and his wife eventually deliberately overdosed on barbituates and alcohol. The passage below is part of…
Many folks interested in Jung think that this is the best of the books about him; when I read it in my twenties — knowing nothing about Jung — I found it a bit strange and hard to follow. I don’t think it is necessarily the best book to start reading about Jung (which is…
Excerpt from the essay Time, Synchronicity and Evolution F. David Peat Yet there are also moments in the life of each one of us when we touch what the Irish writer, James Joyce, termed an epiphany, so that “the soul of the commonest object…. seems to us radiant”. Epiphanies are occasions of benediction when meaning…