Imprisoned by the sea with his son Icarus, mythological craftsman Daedalus constructed wings to escape. Beeswax held feathers in place, so Daedalus told Icarus not to fly too high or too low: the sun’s heat would melt the wax and sea spray would weigh the wings down. Elated, Icarus flew too high--and fell. Like Icarus, the moods of people with bipolar disorder swing from soaring into mania to sinking into depression. This disorder affects at least 2% of the population worldwide, with genetics by...
Jan 19, 2023•1 hr 18 min
Conned, swindled, or bilked, about 50 million Americans were ripped off by scammers in 2020. What deadens a person to preying on another? Tricksters commit crudely constructed fraud. Jung said they are “not really evil [but do] the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness.” Cheaters may have behaved decently until tempted by need and opportunity and then become caught in a web of deception. Narcissists exploit others due to an inflated need for admiration and status tha...
Jan 12, 2023•1 hr 8 min
New Year is a global time of celebration and self-reflection. We let go of what’s worn out and cheer on what’s new and emergent. Here at TJL, we raised our glasses in gratitude. We crested 8 million downloads, implemented major enhancements to your Dream School experience, started crafting our first book, The Key Dreams, and expanded our creative team. It’s been a year of dynamic growth, and we couldn’t have done it without you! Our mission to share Jung’s life-enhancing wisdom is advancing thro...
Jan 05, 2023•1 hr 23 min
Sex fascinates us. Whether we turn toward it, flushed and excited or away from it, tense and disquieted. Archetypal images of sex adorn the thresholds of ancient temples and inform most mythological systems. Shiva and Shakti, in their union, create the universe – she’s providing all forms for his undifferentiated light. The gods beget gods as they mate, giving rise to infinite imagistic permutations of cosmic and personal qualities. These religious images of creation and pleasure inform our indi...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr 28 min
Holiday homecomings kindle hopes of achieving a domestic ideal, though family gatherings are also likely to evoke old roles and emotions. Families open a portal into the patterns of the past, and unfinished business can cause repetition of disappointing dynamics as if one more replay will yield a different outcome. John Gottman, renowned interactive researcher, states that authentic relationships have more positive than negative interactions, creating an emotional bank account to draw on when di...
Dec 22, 2022•56 min
In psychoanalysis, a screen memory covers up a deeper, more emotionally charged issue. Similarly, movie and television screens both shield and open us to human complexity through fiction. The opportunity to peer into shadow and secrets from a safe distance is irresistible. Depictions of psychotherapists and therapy can range from the malevolent Nurse Ratched ( One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ) to psychic empath Deanna Troi ( Star Trek) . Most on-screen therapists, however, like their real-world ...
Dec 15, 2022•1 hr 9 min
We tend to think of revolution as a people’s push-back against perceived oppression—a reaction to rulership that has rejected fairness, change, and accessibility. When a rigid power structure reigns supreme—often presenting as idealism, spirituality, or cultural integrity—it can generate opposing force as an effort to restore rightness and realize renewal. For Jung, revolution “is not conversion into the opposite but conservation of previous values together with recognition of their opposites.” ...
Dec 08, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Melancholy evokes images of poets and artists for whom suffering and giftedness go hand in hand. Creative ability as compensation for affliction is depicted in Greek myth by the god Hephaestus. Rejected by his goddess mother and cast out of Olympus, alienated Hephaestus forged magnificent, magical objects for the gods. Such archetypal imagery can inform our understanding of the kind of depression that seems intrinsic but may have roots in early, adverse childhood experiences of emotional depriva...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Humans have played games since prehistoric times. Games bring us together and pit us against each other. We agree to rules, take turns, develop tolerance for frustration, and learn to win and lose. We develop skills and submit to chance. Games range from luck to skill, from a throw of the dice to acing it at tennis. Games regulate aggression: only one can win, whether on a gameboard or the court. Shadow is sanctioned within the rules, creating monikers like The Black Death of chess and Boss of t...
Nov 24, 2022•1 hr 14 min
As our bonds to historic roles loosen, fathers are finding new ways to express themselves within the family dynamic. In 2014 Pew Research Center identified two million stay-at-home-dads in the United States. Those men tell us that tending their children is more rewarding than chasing a paycheck. Being liberated from the hunter-gatherer role has allowed more men to incarnate aspects of the Father archetype infrequently seen since the industrial revolution. Being caregiver and homecreator does not...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Humans moved from stitching animal hides to sewing cloth, from necessity to fashion, and from handwork to factory. To sew is to repair, alter, and create. If a rip or tear is sewn unthinkingly, the garment will be too tight or unsightly. Alterations have limitations, and uncut cloth is the prima materia for the alchemy of construction. Sewing requires dexterity, knowledge, and judgment. Sewing transforms parts into wholes— meticulous stitches render possibility into product, and scraps store mem...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Matthew Quick, author of The Silver Linings Playbook , shares himself and his new book, We Are the Light. Writer’s block led Quick to This Jungian Life podcast, analysis, and letter writing as a literary device. Letters free us even as the privacy of the page dares us to reveal ourselves, risk intimacy, and express our longing to be received. Lucas, the main character, rediscovers himself through faithful letters to his former Jungian analyst after a movie theater shooting takes 18 lives, includ...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 44 min
Zombies have recently risen from mythological depths to menace modern-day culture. Zombies image the horror of vulnerability to dehumanized existence. They exist in a meaningless void marked only by insatiable appetite; they are our collective’s pathological shadow. The undead alarm us--and can also awaken us. We are summoned to contend with dark and deadening powers through vigilance, consciousness, and action. Jung says, “If you will contemplate your lack of…inspiration and inner aliveness, wh...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Problems can pester, persist and plague. They range from short-lived to chronic, bothersome to heart-wrenching, resolvable to unalterable. Problems cause what Jungian analyst and author James Hollis refers to as the three As: ambiguity, ambivalence, and anxiety. Ambiguity arises when a problem is complex and confusing, demanding action without certainty. Ambivalence is a state of conflicted feelings, often related to immediate versus long-term gratification. Anxiety is worry and doubt about whet...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 13 min
Obsessions are unwanted, intrusive thoughts; compulsions are unwarranted, involuntary behaviors. Though different, they often go together, for compulsions pose as protection from the imagined bad consequences of obsessions. They tend to escalate, demanding more time and attention: spontaneity is sacrificed to schedule, desire surrenders to compliance, and aliveness is stifled by stiffness. OCD’s insistence on “rightness” attempts to deny feelings, especially anger, neediness, and desire, displac...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 15 min
There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in. LEONARD COHEN Jung’s system of typology—our characteristic way of orienting to the world—led to the creation of the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Jung observed four essential ego functions. Thinking and feeling are rational functions of assigning value and making decisions, and intuition and sensation are non-rational modes of perception and attention. Ordered hierarchically from most to least developed, our inferior funct...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Could the antidote to racism be enchantment? Chloe Valdary thinks so. Theory of Enchantment is a radical approach to anti-racism rooted in understanding that celebrates the complexity of the human spirit. Since racism derives from deep insecurities projected onto others, the work of enchantment includes shadow, acknowledges personal complexity, and affirms right relationship with self. Diversity need not be division, and inclusion does not discount differences. Empathy does not ‘fix’ but accompa...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Queen Elizabeth II is mourned around the world. The world saw stages of life live in and through her: from maiden to mate, mother to matriarch, elder to aged. She inherited her title but grew into her role, becoming a unifying image of virtue, service, stateliness, and constancy--wrapped in dedication and devotion. Above the skirmishes of ego-driven politics, the Queen balanced the mystique of majesty with human presence. She bore difficulties and disappointment with dignity, and in the 70 years...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 5 min
The open road beckons: bigger, better, boundless. To see and to seek is a mythological theme with an American stamp, from wagon trains to memoirs and movies. Progress and mobility have long been associated with forging ahead and hitting the trail. Cars are personal capsules of autonomy and freedom: load, stop, and go according to wish or whim. Passing through and possibility are part of the road trip’s drift and direction. The traveler may hope for treasure, pleasure, or revelation—or be in flig...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Hatred is a universal human emotion related to distancing and destroying. Hatred is anger, disgust, judgment, and contempt cemented into implacable permanence. Obsessive and inflating, hatred dupes us into feeling righteous and wrathful instead of small and wounded. Hating tricks us into projecting our disowned qualities onto an outer other, making the object of our hatred into an avatar for our own split-off instincts and desires. Our fixation fuses us in a darkly intimate way with “other,” the...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Dr. Donald Kalsched, Jungian analyst, teacher, and author, discusses his acclaimed work on childhood trauma; (see www.donaldkalsched.com for upcoming programs). When there is unbearable emotional pain in childhood, archetypal defenses dismember such experience and banish parts of it to the unconscious, where it remains as unconscious suffering. Such suffering is manifested as pathological symptoms, i.e., dysfunctional relationships, addictions, narcissism, and more. The defensive system that tak...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 33 min
Compartmentalization is like a home electrical panel that separates power into different zones. It allows us to separate the charge carried by ideas, feelings, and actions without risking system overload. Compartmentalization lets us express concern about climate change yet fly overseas for a family vacation or care about animal rights and ignore factory farming. Such incompatible values and incongruent reasoning usually bypass the zone wired for emotional activation, allowing many daily activit...
Aug 18, 2022•55 min
Karl Kerenyi collaborated with Jung in demonstrating the psychological meaning of Greek mythology. Kerenyi found in Hermes a representation of “a third way of living life, besides the Apollonian rational and the Dionysian irrational. God of jokes and journeys, thieves and magicians, the tricky Guide of Souls” arrives as a surprise. Like the quicksilver that is his Roman name, Mercury/Hermes appears on winged sandals, heralding the new. Hermes disdains regulation and law to deliver new ideas, dis...
Aug 11, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Images of earth’s perpetual restlessness waves gently rock us, lift us up for an exhilarating ride – or inundate us in the terrifying phenomenon of a tsunami. Surfers surrender to the rhythm of waves, an embodied metaphor of attuning to the rising and falling of unconscious forces. Poseidon, Greek god of the ocean, was also the deity of destructive tidal waves, which can sweep us away and show up often in dreams. In physics, a wave is a disturbance that travels through space and matter, transfer...
Aug 04, 2022•51 min
Kabbalah is an ancient Jewish mystical tradition that has captured the imaginations of people from widely diverse backgrounds, including Jung himself. Three weeks after his heart attack in 1944, Jung had an ecstatic vision, “…Everything around me also seemed enchanted…I myself was in Pardes-Rimonim, in the pomegranate garden where Tiferet and Malchut married. I also imagined myself as Rabi Shimon ben Yochai, whose mystical marriage was celebrated now. It looked exactly as the Kabbalists portraye...
Jul 28, 2022•1 hr 12 min
A fiendish inner spirit can prompt behavior that defies self-interest and even common sense. In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, the protagonist acts on his diabolical urge to commit murder, followed by a self-destructive urge to confess it. Jung says, “If he has done it secretly, without moral consciousness of it, and remains undiscovered, the punishment can nevertheless be visited upon him…” The impulse to take irrational and even immoral risks can cause inner torment and lead to damaging actions. The...
Jul 21, 2022•54 min
Fairy tales are fierce narratives of human shadow and its transformation. Hansel and Gretel depicts raw childhood trauma: parents abandon their children in the forest in order to feed themselves. Then the children discover a magical, edible cottage, only to be entrapped by a cannibalistic witch. Everyone is starving, a metaphor for psychic insufficiency. The children’s loyalty to one another gives rise to strategy and bravery, yielding riches and redemption—the reward for engaging danger with va...
Jul 14, 2022•1 hr 5 min
The daimon, a guiding spirit of individual destiny, was discussed by ancient Greek philosophers and still surfaces in books and movies like The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. Daimons were particularly linked to creativity and life force and described as lesser deities, divine messengers, and determinative fates. For Jung, “daimon” was a synonym for that part of the unconscious concerned with life purpose, and it spoke through intuition and dreams. Ego’s task is transforming the autonomous pow...
Jul 07, 2022•1 hr 7 min
The word consider derives from Latin considerare , “to look at closely, observe.” Con means “with, together,” and sidus refers to “heavenly body, star constellation.” Observing the marvel of the stars with another is very different from engaging in conflict , “to contend, fight, or struggle.” Conflict summons rigid polarities: for or against, right or wrong , and winning or losing . Significant issues like abortion test our ability to tolerate ambiguity and anxiety without activating the polariz...
Jun 30, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Schools have existed across cultures and throughout time; the knowledge they transmit leads us out of childhood, shapes our values and world view, and grooms us for citizenship. Schools help us build ego strength and adapt to cultural norms, the goal of the first half of life and the first stage of individuation. School experiences also wound us, as Jung recalled in his memoir. Collective schooling instills the uniformity needed for a cohesive culture, but individual uniqueness may be lost. Indi...
Jun 23, 2022•1 hr 7 min
