Dr. Seuss’ case history of the Grinch presents him as “uncheerful, unhealthy, unclean.” We hope that adding an analytic perspective will be helpful in understanding this clinical condition. Alfred Adler would note the inferiority complex underlying the Grinch’s defensive attempt at superiority and power, and Melanie Klein would detect infantile rage and envy. Freud might diagnose the Grinch with Thanatos, the death drive, evidenced in his sadistic attack on Who -ville. Additional obsessive-compu...
Dec 23, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Jung understood libido as psychic energy: desire, will, interest, and passion. Libido includes instincts for fulfilling bodily appetites and engaging developmental tasks. Although energy infuses all human activity, it is not a function of ego alone; for many, a worthy goal has lacked the libido to achieve it. Feelings and actions can veer into symptoms, such as neurosis or addiction. Low libido is often a form of depression, and libido that is too high can be mania. Most often, a problem with li...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 5 min
The crocodile and its alligator cousin appear regularly in the dreams of people far from warm, wet habitats. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the divine crocodile Sobek was honored, especially at riverbanks, the threshold of land and water. The Egyptian earth god Geb was depicted as a crocodile guarding the gateway to the underworld. Thresholds mark the entry to the unknown, a realm where usual rules do not apply—an apt parallel to the boundary between the ego and the unconscious. Primordial force...
Dec 09, 2021•57 min
The creator, the hero, the explorer: these are just some of the archetypes made famous by Carl Jung that inspired the latest album from Chicago’s Grammy award-winning Third Coast Percussion. Created in collaboration with classical guitarist Sérgio Assad and composer-performer Clarice Assad, Archetypes is a sonic exploration of the human experience. Taped live at the 2021 Chicago Humanities Festival, our conversation with musicians Clarice Assad and David Skidmore features an exploration of the c...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr
Jung says, “Love is a power of destiny, whose force reaches from heaven to hell.” Falling in love is an initiation into the divine—light, and dark—as personal and archetypal forces combine and combust. In thrall to the magical other through whom we experience newfound parts of ourselves, we fall into a reality that transcends and possesses us. Ardor takes us by surprise and opens us fiercely and intimately to our inner world, exposing us to ourselves. Passion must pass, whether it leads to commi...
Nov 25, 2021•58 min
Guest Iain McGilchrist is a renowned psychiatrist, researcher, and author. His 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary gained worldwide fame for showing how differences between brain hemispheres affect our perceptions - and guide our lives. Each hemisphere has a radically different ‘take’ on the world: the left sees what is in the theater spotlight, whereas the right hemisphere understands the whole play. Both are part of the theater of our lives, but the narrowly focused left hemisphere has incr...
Nov 18, 2021•56 min
Mythological heroes defend, protect and quest. They range from warriors, adventurers, and saviors to magicians, loners, and rebels, but one way or another, they battle bad for the sake of good. They have courage, skill, and strength, but never a troubling moment. Although we still delight in heroes with might and shine, modern times have given rise to a new ideal: the everyday hero. From Harriet Tubman to Anne Frank and Frodo Baggins to Huckleberry Finn, these are heroes of happenstance. Circums...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Ambition is a fire whose flames first rise in the first half of life when hopes and dreams are fueled by possibilities in the external world. It takes creative audacity to seize a dream, develop a talent, or commit to a calling. Ambition can also be fueled by narcissism, power-seeking, or striving to overcome inadequacy. Too much fire can consume and corrupt us; insufficient heat forsakes potential for flickering fantasies. Jungian scholar and author James Hillman writes that each of us has an i...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 9 min
It’s witching season, the time when women of all ages embrace a mythical image of unfettered feminine power. The witch may cast spells, seek vengeance, or wreak creative havoc—as she pleases. Flying the night skies of psyche, the witch brings primordial realities into culture’s brittle convictions. Like all aspects of the collective unconscious, the witch lays low when times are fine but rises when times are tense. Her archetypal power then infects humankind, inciting mass hysteria and the horro...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 26 min
Jung said of the parent-child relationship: “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.” Jung understood that parents could unconsciously compel children to fulfill parental dreams or compensate for disappointments. Parental shadow creates an urgency to purge, perfect, or prolong a psychic legacy. It may manifest by taking on a parental aspiration, making up for a parental deficit, rebelling a...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 4 min
“Talk is powerful medicine.” Renowned researcher and clinician Jonathan Shedler, Ph.D., joins us to discuss the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy. While so-called evidence-based therapies—brief treatments conducted by instruction manuals—offer benefits for some, their status as the “gold standard” of treatment for mental distress is undeserved. Dr. Shedler’s 2010 paper, “The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy,” is the most widely read psychoanalytic paper of our time. It’s been d...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 42 min
Principles of fairness and justice have deep roots in the human psyche: we want to receive our fair share and a fair shake. When man injures man, we may protest, strive for redress, and measure wrong with morality—but what about godly misfortunes? Life, myth, and religion are rich with issues of injustice. Whether personal injury, social inequality, or divine mystery, over-insistence on fairness can lead to depression, resentment, and fixation. Instead, we must distinguish injustice from loss, r...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Psychotherapy is essentially the work of making shadow conscious—all that we have not discerned then disowned, or projected onto others. We seldom welcome shadow, for it is marked by emotions and motivations that deflate, disturb, and dethrone ego. From family scuffles to political hostilities and outright war, we most often meet our shadow in others. Its presence is signaled by a strong urge to take action, with feelings ranging from judgment to antagonism, from pity to self-sacrifice, and from...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Jung says, “There is another instinct, different from the drive to activity and so far as we know specifically human, which might be called the reflective instinct .” Self-reflection is correlated with consciousness and is arguably humankind’s unique and essential competency: a meta-cognitive capacity that is aware of its own awareness. If this is lacking, we may share the fate of Narcissus, who fell in love with his image, mirrored in silvery water--but every time he sought an embrace, his love...
Sep 23, 2021•58 min
We have always been subject to the influence of others—it’s how we learn language, become socialized, cooperate and collaborate. It’s also how we exclude, denigrate, and assault others. Today, we are subject to unprecedented social influences. Multiplicities of media shape our ideas, identities, beliefs, and values--and foster connections and communities around the world. If tulip mania took hold in 17th century Holland—perhaps the original speculative bubble--today we have non-fungible tokens a...
Sep 16, 2021•1 hr 2 min
This is Shadowland, a new podcast experience from This Jungian Life that explores the lives of people who work and take refuge in the hidden places of our culture. Lisa, Deb, and Joseph collaborate with songwriter Wells Hanley, creator of I Wrote This Song For You podcast, to bring insight, compassion, and understanding to the darker side of human experience. Nietzsche wrote, “I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under m...
Sep 09, 2021•1 hr 36 min
On September 9th, This Jungian Life will launch a new podcast experience - SHADOWLAND . In this series, we meet soulfully with people who live and work in the hidden places of our culture. Walk with us and discover the voice of psyche on unexpected paths. LOOK & GROW Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL Do you have a topic you want us to cover? WE NEED YOUR HELP! Become a patron to keep TJL running. Lisa’s leading a retreat in ITALY! We've got totally NEW MERC...
Sep 02, 2021•39 sec
Recent events in Afghanistan have again put war at the forefront of collective consciousness. War’s destruction belongs to the mythic realm. Mars, the Roman god of war, was a primordial force whose altars were placed outside city gates. Although acknowledged, he was not accepted. His paramour, Venus, is warfare’s seductress, offering spectacle, pageantry, and glory. Like all the gods of Mt. Olympus, Mars and Venus live in us as opposing forces of aggression and eros. We are charged with holding ...
Sep 02, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Guest Mark Winborn is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst who teaches in the U.S. and internationally. Author of three books and numerous articles, Mark is an active member of the IRSJA and the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich/Kusnacht. Psychotherapy is talk therapy—but what kind of talk are we talking about? The most fundamental medium of our knowing is language, and metaphor imbues language with music. To understand and engage another’s internal world requires language which speaks in har...
Aug 26, 2021•1 hr 27 min
We seem hard-wired to split the world into polarities: right/wrong, either/or, victory/defeat, Democrat/Republican. Infants and toddlers have not yet achieved the developmental capacity for complexity; they are believed to split their feelings toward caretakers into “good” and “bad,” depending on whether their needs are being met in the moment. Although it distorts reality, splitting reduces anxiety by locating the problem “out there,” allowing us to reject what we find aversive and affirm our o...
Aug 19, 2021•1 hr 3 min
There are three major models of healing: medical, shamanic, and psychoanalytic. In the first, the doctor does it to you; in the second, the intermediary does it for you; and in the third, Jung’s dialectical process, we work together to discover “the curative powers in the patient’s own nature.” Just as every wounded patient has inner health, every healer has an inner wound. If consciously known and borne, the analyst’s wound serves the healing process. In Greek myth, Chiron symbolizes the wounde...
Aug 12, 2021•54 min
Guest T. Susan Chang is a writer, podcaster, and teacher of tarot, the most commonly recognized modern form of divination. The archetypal symbols in the tarot’s 78 card deck offer gateways to meaning and mystery. Jung says symbols act as transformers—life energy is converted from a lower to higher form by the amplification that consciousness provides. Tarot divination is intended to break from the mundane and court the numinous. It asks that we set logic aside, surrender doubt, and step unafraid...
Aug 05, 2021•1 hr 27 min
Guest Oliver Burkeman states in his new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals , that “outrageous brevity is life’s defining problem.” At age 80, you’ll have had a paltry 4,000 weeks. Such brevity is breathtaking, so we create defenses against the reality of finitude. We distract ourselves with the belief that fulfillment lies in the future, that plans and goals prove purpose, and that we can achieve almost any number of things by being more efficient/motivated/healthy—or just ov...
Jul 29, 2021•1 hr 30 min
In Answer to Job , Jung states, “Whoever knows God has an effect on him.” If, as Jung claims, individual human consciousness affects God, what we are matters monumentally. When we serve our neuroses, the gulf between ego and Self widens. Pursuing individuation not only sets our personality in right order, it permits our personal experiences to enrich the collective unconscious – who we are is added to God. When Jung visited the Navajo, they told him they helped the sun, their father, cross the s...
Jul 22, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Although the concept of archetypes has philosophical ancestors, Jung’s theory was developed over time and rested on a foundation that was scientific and empirical. Research and experiment enabled Jung to establish the autonomous activity of the unconscious. He was then able to posit archetypes as a predisposition to form representations of universal human experiences and mythological motifs , such as marriage, the hero’s journey, and death/rebirth. For Jung, archetypes are innate psychic organs ...
Jul 15, 2021•1 hr 10 min
We plainly pay attention, using the finite currency of time and energy issued in the 24-hour increments that add up to a life - well spent? We have choices and constraints about how we allocate our attention, and today’s world competes fiercely for it in unprecedented ways. No wonder, for power is the ability to command or hijack attention, even if it warps reality with untruths. Jung particularly valued the attentional dimension of “dreaming, or fantasy-thinking” experienced in reverie, dreams,...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 1 min
In the first half of life, we strive to develop ego strength and achieve our dreams. To want, will, and work is worthwhile and adaptive--until a life dream, relationship, or identity fades or fails. Should we hang in and hang on - or let go? When does perseverance become pointless, or hope turn rancid in refusal to accept disappointment, defeat, or depression? In letting go, we relinquish our hard-won, heroic “I” and yield to an encounter with the unconscious. Jung says that although “I was afra...
Jul 01, 2021•1 hr 16 min
In medieval times, the threshold was a plank that kept barnyard “threshings” outside the house. In the sciences a threshold is the limit of magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a definitive change to occur. In human development life stage thresholds are marked and recognized through ritual. In psychoanalytic work the symbol is the threshold—a visible but not literal representation that calls consciousness to apprehend a larger, unseen reality. Science fiction, mythology’s modern desc...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Jung’s earliest dream, at age three or four, preoccupied him all his life, “in an underground chamber, a giant phallus stood erect on a golden throne.” Majestic and luminous, it struck him with terror that intensified as his mother’s voice cried out in warning. Phallos, the central archetype of a man's psyche, was once worshipped as sacred. Its urgent, dynamic, and fertilizing power was split off with the rise of ascetic monotheism and banished to the unconscious. Misplaced and maligned, it surf...
Jun 17, 2021•1 hr 21 min
Although Jung’s theory of typology is the foundation of various personality assessments, it is important to appreciate its profundity as Jung’s theory of consciousness. The four functions of consciousness - sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling--are governed by two attitudes, extraversion, and introversion. Jung defines extraversion as “an attitude type characterized by concentration of interest on the external object.” Since the movement of psychic energy is outward, extroverts find grati...
Jun 10, 2021•1 hr 10 min
