Blogs

To say that Donald Trump has “stirred a lot of emotions” is perhaps an understatement, so it makes sense that many of us would welcome a better understanding of why that is the case.

The American Psychiatric Association declares that it’s unethical for a psychiatrist or psychologist to diagnose a public figure without evaluating them, so contributors to the new book, A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump, focus instead on narcissism itself and the underlying and uncons

I naively thought that I’d covered the entire range of issues related to the subject of cultural appropriation in the first four parts. I dealt with common themes of authenticity, ownership, privilege, gatekeeping (who gets to decide?), reconstruction, permission, appreciation, calling and community. And: complexity. Here, I have few new concepts to introduce, mainly my own further marveling at how bloody complex this whole issue is, and in no particular order.

As I mentioned in Part Four, the Me

In Texas, where I grew up, we had an expression—“all hat and no cattle”—that summed up a certain kind person. The expression came from seeing people wearing fancy western outfits who had no idea the hard work or long hours required to run, or work in, a cattle ranch. And, they would not have been able to rope a steer to save their lives. This expression could be said about anyone who was all image and no substance, not just a faux cowboy or cowgirl. Often it also would refer to someone who bragg

Boredom from a Gay Perspective

By

Payam Ghassemlou Ph.D.

Gay people are naturally creative and industrious. They are often a small percentage of any population and yet their societal contribution is enormous. I take a great deal of pride knowing not only gays, but also our courageous lesbians, transgenders, bisexuals, and queer members of our community have always stood up for causes that make this world a better place. This short article mostly focuses on gay men and the issue of boredom. Many poi

How we fuss and fret when we are stuck! We try ever so hard and seem to get nowhere. Then, we finally decide, if we have the proper sense to, to look within. Deep layers of feeling and instinct, especially dreams, can speak to us. But, above all, before we get to the point of the unconscious delivering its wisdom we must have lived with all our might, without reservation.

C.G. Jung wrote, "This is how you must live - without reservation, whether in giving or withholding, according to what the cir

You may have donated that Times of Your Life Paul Anka 8-track to charity when it didn’t sell at the last neighborhood rummage sale, but the words to “Good Morning Yesterday” live on. Sometimes it is hard to find the “memories you left behind” as Anka sang in 1976. Sometimes, as Freud argued, those memories sink below the level of our consciousness, but continue to work on us in various ways even decades later. Sigmund Freud even formulated a term “return of the repressed” to explain where neuro

"Beneath our scientific preoccupations, we remain in the stage of psychological awareness reflected in our religious heritage. Behind the curtain of moral judgment lurk the split figures of good and evil: a model of how we relate to our unconscious natures. Jung has described how those ideas reflect the positive and negative poles necessary to produce psychic energy: the sliding scale along which consciousness fluctuates in its on-going efforts to define itself. Just as it forms the path of coll

 “In general, it [individuation] is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology.”

Dr. Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 6, ¶757

Florence Foster Jenkins teaches us why wealthy families must put their children through the school of hard knocks.  The individuation process requires “stops”  (roadblocks) alo

Dwight Eisenhower Asks Computer: "Is There a God?" - Joseph Campbell - 1986

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf222ok1YTo

I have stated that facticity is ... (to partially appropriate from a famous U. S. profession football coach) ...not everything thing, it is the ONLY THING.

Issue

Given that the human male primate, Joseph Campbell is a scholar of renown, what facts can be derived from the above clip?

If it is fact, and let us assume it is, it happened after UNIVAC predicted an Eisenhower landside vic

The True First World War was the European Invasion (... colonization, appropriation, theft) perpetrated on non Europeans.

I stated in a previous blog post that FACTICITY IS PARAMOUNT in regard to Existential Philosophy. Existentialism is in agreement with C. G. Jung's writings and conclusions concerning the fundamental importance of INDIVIDUATION. The process of Individuation leads to the singularity of personality (exclusivity... no one else can be me, as no one else can be you) which is Jean Pa

C.G. Jung wrote, "The artist's relative lack of adaption turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path" (CW 15, 131). So seemingly easy it is to tell someone to walk their own walk, to follow their own path or to casually expect it of ourselves. A person came in for depth therapy and said, "I have to bust loose out of this family of mine. They're killing me, my soul. Whenever I'm around them I feel horrible." Little did he know what "busting loos

Turing Machine Intelligence Analysis

Carl Jung

Artist or Scientist

I consider C. G. Jung to be a Humanistic Genius of greater significant status than Leonardo Da Vinci or Michelangelo Buonarroti. This is not a just comparison. Jung appears in Human Historicity at a later period in Human Psychology Evolution.

What intrigues me the most concerning Jung is two things.

1. Why did he title his work the Liber Norus... The Red Book?

2. Why did he choose to publish it posthumous?

According to Jung's own theory

Preamble

I am firmly committed to the philosophy of Existentialism and I believe that Carl Jung contributed significantly to: A - Identifying the nature at the soul of existential philosophy; namely the inescapability of choice (J. P. Sartre "Humans are condemned to be free..." by concluding that individuation is the function and direction of human personal psychology, and B - extending the realm of the psychological by the emphasis on the notion of archetype.

Ramble

In my first blog post, I relate

As a child, James Newell, who has played music with some of the great names in the blues world, suffered a life-changing injury after falling through a pane of glass. Both the trauma of a hospital stay where his parents were not allowed to visit him, and the physical damage he suffered to his arm, inspired him to turn to music for healing—and especially to playing drums—at a very young age.

As he grew older, James also found solace in studying topics that were spiritual in nature, and in learning

Every once in a while, a term emerges on the horizon of my awareness which I find strikingly beautiful. In this case, it is the “image-making capacity of soul.” The language of soul is symbol, and symbol shows itself in image—including dream images, fairy tales and myth, or even art, Mary Harrell, Ph.D., explains in her recent book, Imaginal Figures in Everyday Life: Stories from the World Between Matter and Mind. Ultimately, this language of images is soul manifesting in a way people can unders

In the Places of Thinking and Writing, Conversations in the Gap between Mind and Soul, Eavesdropping on the Edge, Writing in the Margins, Lingering at the Lip of the Abyss, all possible titles-containers for experiments in writing down the language of soul, experiments in the gap between psychology as a natural science and a distinct and specialized profession, and psychology as a vocation and an art and a practice that colors and shades and qualifies all of our actions.

To be a psychologist is n

What is the nature of the beings that live in the space between matters of the natural world, and ideas of the reasonable mind? These are multivalent, multi-vocal figures that come in reverie, grief, or the moments of shipwreck that deconstruct and transform individual and cultural soul. How do these figures cause us to live a life imbued with wonder and mystery?

These questions compelled me to begin exploring what French philosopher Henry Corbin calls the imaginal realm, the mundus imaginalis. E

 For many years now I have been intrigued with Mary Shelley’s story, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. In many ways her story is a prophecy of themes that characterize our technological world-view. In the book that I am now writing, The Frankenstein Prophecies: The Untold Story, I explore seven of those prophecies. The triumph over death, which is the dream of Victor Frankenstein, is the central theme.

That theme lingers today in films that are our collective dreams. Jurassic Park is a goo