This Jungian Life Podcast

⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Something's going on in Scrooges soul...and it's tired of waiting for an invitation. Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol , vividly portrays the journey to healing and transcendence. It was written in a fever, released on December 19, 1843, and sold out before Christmas. Ebenezer Scrooge’s visitations by the spirits...

⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Siblings are embedded in the human psyche as they are in life. Even if one lacks siblings, there is ready access to them through friends, fairy tales, myths, and scripture. All feature multiple experiences and examples of sibling solidarity and siblings as shadow carriers. Birth order, sex, temperament, and the quality of parental...

⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Partings connote a finality of farewell that signifies completion of a relationship. We may part from a stage of life, depart from home or college, or say farewell to a person, process or project. Partings signify the end of a story that has been told and reached conclusion. The Japanese tale of Princess Moonbeam illustrates the im...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Dr. Fanny Brewster, Jungian Analyst, colleague and friend, joins This Jungian Life to discuss her forthcoming book, The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race. Complexes tend to operate autonomously and unconsciously, have strong feeling-tones, and contain archetypal fuel. The racial complex, a complicated mix of c...

⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ It happens all the time: people and problems split into opposing camps, whether the conflict is internal, between partners, in a family or—as we know all too well—between political parties. When positions become polarized conflict ensues, whether between mind and body, partners and families, or value systems and religious affiliati...

⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ The archetype of the father is associated with gods, kingship, and other images of authority and order. As the image of a “personified affect” fueled by an archetypal core, the father complex is powerful. In its negative aspect it may arise from a father who was experienced as absent, emotionally unavailable, passive, critical or a...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Anger is a core human emotion. Newborns express instinctual cries of protest, and many a mythological god has wreaked archetypal havoc. Cultural norms around anger range from keeping a stiff upper lip to highly extraverted forms of expression. There are overall differences in how men and women tend to express anger; differences in te...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ People have reported experiences with ghosts from antiquity; Jung documented his encounters with mysterious sensed presences. How do we make meaning of such experiences? Are they visitations from external beings? Could they be related to unconscious reactions to toxic substances, auditory subtleties, or erratic electromagnetic fields...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ The question of whether, when, and what psychoactive medications may be helpful is both big and ambiguous. Mental distress has always been strongly influenced by cultural filters and subjective perceptions. Whereas a person might once have sought to placate a god, sufferers today may turn to medical management rather than mining thei...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Empathy, the ability to feel into the suffering of another, is an intrinsic part of being human. We have such a capacity to imagine others’ experience that we react physiologically and emotionally to painful situations even in film. We are surprised, sometimes shocked, when the empathy we expect in a given situation is not forthcomin...

⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ A planned, collaborative termination is the ideal way to bring a depth-oriented therapeutic process to a close. The client may have resolved a problematic life issue and/or have achieved an abiding sense of wholeness. When both partners feel the client’s sense of completion and readiness for a new phase of life, this kind of termin...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ The death of a loved one is a loss that is part of the human condition and is universal. The Stranger -- mortality -- confronts us with a new need to accept the reality of our loss and pain, a process that can include ambivalent feelings. Relief and anger can be mixed with love and grief. Altogether, we must adjust to an absence wher...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Medical technology has given the problem of fertility a scientific veneer. Our Promethean ability to manipulate gestational mysteries has wrested power from what was once the domain of the gods. Fulfillment of the promise of pregnancy seems to lie within reach, although it may entail incurring financial debt and enduring intense emoti...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Complaining is universal, perhaps, like gossiping, one of the first uses to which developed language was put. Overall, a complaint can refer to a perceived legal injustice, medical symptom, or other personally painful matter. The chronic complainer feels a lack of agency, and implicitly pleads for emotional support and/or effective ac...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Although these Jungian concepts have become familiar psychological terminology, they remain difficult to understand. According to Jung, animus and anima are innate psychic structures shaped significantly by the archetypal world, whereas the shadow is predominantly shaped by personal experiences of ego formation. Whereas shadow tends t...

⁠⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ As the mother is the generator of life and usual primary attachment figure, the mother complex is universal. As the image of a “personified affect” fueled by an archetypal core, the mother complex is especially powerful. In its negative aspect, it may arise from a mother who was experienced as uncaring, attacking, possessive, withh...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ While psychiatric diagnostic labels often reify the complexities of psychological dynamics, they can also orient us to the essential qualities of a particular emotional and behavioral field. BPD is characterized by difficulty with affect regulation, intense and unstable interpersonal relationships, impulsive behavior, and a tendency t...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ We all procrastinate. Tasks from making a doctor’s appointment to preparing taxes to doing the laundry invite us to put off until tomorrow what we can postpone today. We may distract ourselves by going online, doing errands, or minimizing the time a job will take. Although procrastination signals that a given task is hard and emotiona...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ If the passage into fullsome adulthood is avoided, a person can be trapped in the world of childhood. This protected realm is a nexus of potential, defined by avoiding the rigors of the real for the pleasures of possibility. Peter Pan, who chose to remain in never-never-land, is a well-known image for the flighty ingenuousness of the...

⁠⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Although only some of us talk aloud to ourselves, all of us have inner voices, even if we are not aware of them. These autonomous parts of ourselves provide running commentary on how and what we are doing. Are our inner commentators friendly and supportive, or critical and attacking? We turn to fairy tales, stories that arise from...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ We define dating as the quest for serious partnership or ongoing companionship. Today’s dating world is radically different from that of even a generation ago, and is light years away from previous generations. Dating apps and social media expedite and expand the range the search for a suitable other - and often turns dating into an e...

⁠⁠ DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ The life transition we call retirement mandates a major readjustment in how time, energy and money are spent, whether retirement means becoming a “snowbird” or having a stepped-down lifestyle. Work has structured the rhythm of life and time; most have found aspects of identity, status, and socialization at work, regardless of how f...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Chronic illnesses affect many, creating diminishment of physical ability and energy for life activities. There can be loss of agency, loss of one’s expected future, and a sharpened awareness of loss of life. There is a new need for conscious intention and reality-based decisions in order to avoid denial while adjusting to limitations...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Experiences of physical abandonment are depicted in stories old and new as ways of out-picturing traumas of early relational abandonment. Jung articulated the archetypal foundation of what later psychologists came to call attachment theory. In an infant’s primal state of identification with a mothering other, lack of caregiver availab...

DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Although cults occasionally make the headlines through tragedy or scandal, the defining features of cults are inherently human and manifest on spectrums of both severity and size. The word  cult  is derived from  culture.  While culture refers to the overarching characteristics of a society, cult refers negatively to a marginalized su...