This Jungian Life

The experience of motherhood evokes powerful feelings, ranging from joy and bonding to anger and rejection. If we can develop a conscious relationship with these feelings, we meet both denied aspects of ourselves—our shadows—and experience the pleasures and enrichment of mothering that serve the individuation process.

Many people have difficulty making decisions, whether large or small. Among other factors, the psychology behind fear of making a decision can be related to fear of making a mistake, lack of motivation, suppressed anger and aggression, and difficulty accepting the limitations and ordinariness of adulthood.

The pressure to conform to familial and cultural values provides guidelines for each new generation – and can also stifle the uniqueness necessary not only to the individual but to family and cultural health. How can we discern when differentiation from established norms is in the service of meaningful growth and soul versus avoidance of necessary developmental challenge? This podcast engages this issue as both interpersonal and intrapsychic conflict.

Living with a parent who is seriously impaired can be traumatic and have lasting consequences. Fortunately, resources for healing and resilience are also available, and premature encounters with shadow can be a call to consciousness and yield gifts of effective and creative depth.

The mother-in-law is not only the subject of many a joke but the subject of fairy tale and myth. Conflict between the older and younger woman lies in the archetypal realm, as both struggle to come to terms with differences, age, and the power of both youth and age.

In archery, sin refers to missing the mark, whereas transgression involves violation of a cultural boundary. But missing the mark or crossing a line can have positive effects as well as negative consequences.

Creative depression demands that we suffer a journey into the deep wells of the psyche in quest of new life. It differs from other kinds of depression in how it is imaged in dreams, its antecedents in the person’s life history, and in relationships.

Lying, hiding and sneaking are examples of trickster behavior, discussed as they occur in political and personal spheres. When is this behavior in service to individuation, and when is it in service to regressive, or unconscious, aspects of the psyche? 

Guns play a big role in American mythology from the American Revolution to cowboys and first-person shooter games. Guns are symbols of heroic power—but mythology also sounds a cautionary note about what can happen when humans arrogate super-human power to themselves.

How can we understand the superficial label assigned to masculine behavior in today’s meme-driven style of discourse? The Dream: I am walking on what seems to be mountainous hills. A little ahead of me is what feels like my teenage daughter and a friend. It’s kind of like twilight. Then I see a giant size footprint on the hillside. Huge, like a natural wonder-of-the-world type of site. I point at it like the way one does when one sees something pretty or interesting on holidays. Then I take a phot

Jung was one of the primary theorists who added to our understanding of the psychological significance of dreams, and working with dreams is often a central part of an analytic process. What is the Jungian understanding of why we dream? What does it mean if we don't dream, and what are some ways of learning to work with dreams? We discuss things one can do to help with dream recall, and ponder whether we dream all day long, even when awake.

Jung pioneered the technique of active imagination, a process by which the ego engages with imagery and content generated by the unconscious. Active imagination can help us understand our dreams, and lead us into new psychic situations. On today's episode, we share some personal examples of active imagination, discuss some suggestions of how to engage in it, and explore what active imagination has to do with snorkeling. 

While it can be difficult to differentiate anxiety from healthy fear we all agree that finding an ally to stand with us makes a big difference. We explore the many underlying dynamics that can manifest outwardly as anxiety and consider the value in taking a heroic stance as we face our inner dragons. Inspired by Jung, we can come to appreciate that working with our anxieties rather than running from them gets the best results.

Why do Jungians care about fairy tales? What is their relevance in analysis? How do they differ from myths, and why do they matter to us still? Find out what fairy tales have mattered most to our clients, and why Lisa gets cranky when people criticize fairy tales for being sexist. The dream: I dreamt of a big cockroach. It was standing like a human and it was going to be transformed.

Synchronicity is one of Jung's most intriguing ideas -- and one of the most difficult to understand. Jung coined the term to refer to coincidences that feel charged with emotion and meaning. How did Jung come to speculate on the nature of such events, and what role did theoretical physics play in shaping this theory? How can you be sure a coincidence is, in fact, meaningful? We each share an example of a synchronicity from our own experience.