DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Although neurosis is no longer a clinical diagnosis, it is often used to describe anxious attitudes and behaviors that are maladaptive to life situations. Neurosis often entails a capacity to function well despite feeling bad; emotional suffering leeches ease and pleasure from life. A neurotic symptom—a phobia, compulsion, or addictive tendency—is no different from a dream. It is important to hear the unconscious story ego has ...
Oct 08, 2020•1 hr 7 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! We celebrate curiosity’s role in discovery, and regret its potential for damage. Mature curiosity demands that we embrace the confusion, doubt and anxiety inherent in engaging new ideas and complex problems. Social curiosity requires discernment: are we genuinely and empathically interested in others, or simply indulging voyeurism via social media? Curiosity can lead us into thrill seeking, but lack of it dulls our libido for life...
Oct 01, 2020•1 hr 17 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Jung states “the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis but rather with the approach to the numinous…the real therapy. In as much as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology.” Jung defines numinous as “a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will” that conveys a mysterious yet deeply meaningful message. Numinous experiences happen to ...
Sep 24, 2020•1 hr 14 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Jung teaches that soul and spirit have a home in a living body, the font of psyche’s images and means of their incarnation in the world. Embodiment is the ground of being, and engaging the tension between instinct and archetype shapes consciousness and character. Jung identified five instincts: creativity, movement, sexuality/ eros , hunger in its many manifestations, and the ability to reflect and make meaning. If Pinocchio’s tas...
Sep 17, 2020•1 hr 19 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! We all have intuitive experiences, from an occasional hunch to powerful gut feelings. Unconscious intelligence is a storehouse of instincts and wisdoms humankind has accumulated over millennia. We would be lost without intuition and give importance to warnings and inspirations that saved or made the day. We are also skeptical of intuition, which tends to become infused with emotion, superstition, and cultural bias. Altogether, int...
Sep 10, 2020•1 hr 14 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! In times of uncertainty truth is hard to discern, collective cohesion frays, and social factions become embattled. Unmediated shadow then seeks expression through the archetypal realm and takes on extra-ordinary attributes. Persecutory mythologies arise, for big psychic situations need big stories to compensate for big feelings of anxiety, powerlessness, and marginalization. Insecurities are projected onto the outer-world as cland...
Sep 03, 2020•1 hr 4 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Money reflects our shadows and strengths as much as our bank accounts. Like Hermes, money traverses the realms from Hades to Heaven--money can be a matter of survival, and money can turn dreams into realities. Because money represents value we can acquire, exchange, and store, it can become conflated with our value as persons. Material wealth can become equated with status and self worth—and the lack of it with inadequacy and an...
Aug 27, 2020•1 hr 14 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The provisional life might be defined as a vague malaise: current relationships, work, and lifestyle feel like placeholders until the ‘real thing’ arrives—someday. If early life circumstances made over-conforming to others’ needs and expectations necessary, persona can be over-developed and shadow denied. The person may orient to external sources for self-definition, acceptance and direction, because deep roots in shadow’s dark, f...
Aug 20, 2020•1 hr 5 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! When far from life in the wild, relationships with animals are often through pets. We find kinship and difference in our friends of very foreign origin. Pets let us be tender, elicit nurturing, and help heal trauma through secure attachment. Our creatures keep our secrets. They accept our lapses and shadows. They invite us to play and appear in our dreams--and when they are gone, we mourn. Henry Beston said, “In a world older and m...
Aug 13, 2020•1 hr 12 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The hero’s journey has been the stuff of story from earliest times. Today’s popular heroes include Harry Potter, Frodo, Spiderman, Neo, and Luke Skywalker. They are all ordinary guys who suddenly receive the Call to Adventure, mythologist Joseph Campbell’s term for the beginning of the journey. The would-be hero first declines, then answers the call; he suffers tests and trials, succeeds with help from unexpected sources, and retur...
Aug 06, 2020•1 hr 32 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Masks are the symbol of COVID life, and they have archetypal roots as old as humankind. We ward off evil microbial forces with bandanas, neck gaiters, patterned fabrics, and high filtration medical masks. Masks provide access to our shape-shifting potential, connect us to our instinctual depths, mediate our relationship to the spirits, and open a portal to the mythic realm of story and drama. Masks waft us into new identities: child...
Jul 30, 2020•59 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! When you’re down, and in trouble, and you need some loving care... You just call out my name, and you know wherever I am, I’ll come running to see you again…you’ve got a friend. Carole King song The companion has a beloved place in our hearts. Famed modern-day teammates include Captain Kirk and Spock, Frodo and Samwise, Batman and Robin, and Sherlock Holmes and Watson. The companion serves and supports the hero, contributing quieter...
Jul 23, 2020•1 hr 2 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The root of create , “to bring something into being out of nothing,” echoes divine creation. Ideas arise from mysterious sources, yet creativity is such an intrinsically human function that Jung considered it one of five human instincts, together with hunger, sexuality, activity, and reflection (a function of consciousness). Positive circumstances foster creativity: the ability to engage imagination, seek novelty, hone competency, a...
Jul 16, 2020•1 hr 10 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The religious instinct is as basic as the need for food or shelter. Psyche seeks and selects a central, organizing life principle whether consciously or unconsciously chosen. Secular deities range from food, money, or even science, to the gods of addiction; false gods lie behind neuroses and pathology. Traditional religions and cosmologies offer connection to large, well-ordered frameworks of myth and meaning. Realizing one’s place ...
Jul 09, 2020•54 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Jung discovered the psyche’s dissociative nature through his Word Association Test. Subjects would delay or make nonsensical responses to ordinary words associated with troublesome personal memories or traumas. Dissociation, our autonomous psychic “circuit breaker,” exists on a spectrum from ”spacing out” to disorders that interfere with life functioning. Psychotherapy could be considered the practice of healing dissociations, as tr...
Jul 02, 2020•53 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The transcendent function comes in all sizes, from “aha” moments to epiphanies. A new orientation to a dilemma arrives unthought, recognized, and right. Perhaps there is a moment where loneliness gives way to solitude, or heartbreak yields to a larger sense of self. Apprehension of a new attitude--sunlight breaking through clouds--has overcome the impasse, bringing freshness, spaciousness and possibility. Engaging the tension of an ...
Jun 25, 2020•1 hr 4 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! James Hollis, noted Jungian scholar, teacher and author, joined us to discuss resilience. His new book, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times, will be available on Amazon in mid-June. When life rhythms and habits are suspended or upended, we may find ourselves adrift. What supports us then? For most of history institutional religion, tradition, and tribal mythology unified communities and connected mem...
Jun 18, 2020•56 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Racial injustice takes one’s breath away. It reaches back to the psychic asphyxiations of the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow—cut-offs from home, family, freedom and justice. Racism persists in systemic inequities and ongoing instances of police violence. The death of George Floyd, handcuffed, pleading, and unable to breathe, has inspired a collective rising in protest against current brutality and historic inhumanity. Breath ...
Jun 11, 2020•1 hr 12 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Many listeners have expressed interest in Jungian analytic training. We welcome those inquiries and outline the prerequisites, practicalities and processes which lead up to and constitute Jungian analytic training--a life path of ongoing growth, challenge and satisfaction. We encourage all who are interested in becoming a Jungian analyst to consult the major Jungian organizational and training resources below, and to research additi...
Jun 08, 2020•45 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! How can we understand the psychological wild fire of rioting? Jung, who lived through two world wars, understood that mass movements had the power to manifest archetypal energy. The urge to unleash destructive chaos is depicted in mythologies around the world. Early Norse warriors attained battle-crazed states as "berserkers," and Cu Chulainn, a mythological Irish warrior, killed both friends and foe. Eris, the Greek goddess of disc...
Jun 04, 2020•1 hr 2 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Oppressed, repressed and regressed, the forced restrictions of the Covid Complex have us in its grip. We may see friends and family more often than ever, but only on a screen. Work, school, home, weekdays, weekends—time and tasks slide around like Jello on a hot plate. Loss of structure, variety, movement and touch are destabilizing. Confined to tight physical and emotional spaces, we may collapse into ourselves or lash out at loved...
May 28, 2020•1 hr 2 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Jung was particularly interested in the second half of life, perhaps because after his own midlife crisis he found himself so surprisingly generative. We tend to spend the first half of life oriented to familial values and cultural norms for success. Education, work, partnering and child rearing are some of the mile markers for speed and distance on the road of life—until midlife strikes. We may then discover that worldly successes ...
May 21, 2020•1 hr 4 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The Pentagon recently released a film of a UFO made by Navy pilots. Although such credible documentation is new, UFO sightings go back to ancient times and surged after World War II. . Interstellar travel then seized the collective imagination, and the ongoing abundance of books, television shows and films signals the emergence of a new mythology. In his treatise “Flying Saucers,” Jung took a phenomenological stance, acknowledging e...
May 14, 2020•1 hr 9 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! We have moved our lives online. But can we experience authentic human connection through virtual technology? Can we date, mourn, or have psychoanalysis on a screen? If screens offer some surprising intimacies—close-ups of wedding vows and eulogies—they also deprive us of embodied participation. Staying at home has made us newly eager to socialize—separately. Dating means conversation, not cuddling. We enter the homes of colleagues, ...
May 07, 2020•1 hr 5 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Astrology is a 4000-year-old discipline rooted in the mystery of man’s relationship to the universe. It is an archetypal frame for human experience that influenced Jung, depicts our connection to the heavens, and anticipates future trends. We are now beginning an approximately 38-year Pluto-Saturn cycle—and Covid-19 has appeared at its outset. Pluto is associated with the underworld; Saturn is a stern taskmaster and enforcer of boun...
Apr 30, 2020•1 hr 32 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The dictionary defines authority as the power to “influence or command thought, opinion or behavior.” Authority’s Latin roots are master, leader, author —thus it lives next to its tough cousin, power. Families, organizations, and governing bodies influence and command us, whether slightly or mightily. Authority has legitimacy, from a traffic officer’s directives to a mentor’s wisdom. An authority may reward desired behavior or provi...
Apr 23, 2020•1 hr 7 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The alchemical term nigredo means black or blackening, and is associated with decomposition and putrefaction. As a psychological state, nigredo is “the great suffering and grief” which the detached forces of nature inflict on the soul. We realize in sorrow that what we thought were truths were illusory. Individuals may have taken pride in their virtues, talents or good fortune; societies may have touted their cultural superiority, m...
Apr 16, 2020•1 hr 5 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! In the Chinese language, the two characters representing crisis are danger and opportunity . Can that possibly be true of these days of pandemic crisis, with physical, economic, and psychological destabilization? Voices of experience and wisdom speak to us about finding potential in desperate situations. Victor Frankl, imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, discovered he had the power to choose his attitude toward brutal circumsta...
Apr 09, 2020•1 hr 6 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! The archetype of origins is in resurgence since the advent of ancestry-mapping programs. What are the psychological and symbolic meanings of ancestry? Identity is often strongly linked to ancestry in its ethnic and cultural aspects, and as the carrier of personal traits. Genealogy gives rise to meaning-making narratives such as: I get my talent for storytelling from my Irish forebears. Jung knew that family complexes are handed down...
Apr 02, 2020•1 hr 4 min
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them! Should an analyst share personal information with clients? Freud believed that the analyst should be devoid of personal presence, so he sat unseen behind his famous couch. Jung realized that regardless of theory, psychotherapy entailed two people in a room interacting. He likened two personalities to chemical substances: as they combined both would be altered. Jung and his patients interacted face to face, for Jung welcomed the comp...
Mar 26, 2020•1 hr 11 min
