All Posts (1310)

Sort by

I just watched a 3-minute video that made me very uncomfortable. It discusses how neuroscience doctors are working to develop drug treatments that could erase traumatic memories form people's minds. In a country where 1 in 5 veterens come home suffering PTSD or depression--or perhaps in the wake of a massive natural disaster like the Japan quake and tsunami (not to mention Chile, Haiti, Hurricane Katrina and so many others)--revolutionary drug treatment like this could ease pain and suffering on

Read more…

Living the Symbolic Life

It is Sigmund Freud who is credited for the discovery of the unconscious and is often called the “father of psychology”. Psychiatrist and medical historian Henri Ellenberger, in Discovery of the Unconscious, describes Depth Psychology as the key to exploring the unconscious mind. Understanding what lies in the unconscious--whether repressed, forgotten, or simply never known--can help us bring meaning to our conscious lives. The unconscious makes itself known to us through symbols, that is, image

Read more…

When therapy is all about the money

Is talk therapy going silent?

Not entirely, but the Saturday edition of the New York Times featured an article entitled “Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy.” This is very old news to anyone in the mental health field — as a patient or practitioner. But it’s good to see that The Times has noticed.

9142438658?profile=originalHere’s the heart of the story:

Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, but fewer than half of depressed pa

Read more…

Blog-1-231x300.jpg?width=174Where others had been too timid to travel, where many had been too short sighted to envision, where few had been resourcefulness to return: Jung was there. His impulse to discovery lead him to territories of taboo that where and have been too extreme for a great deal of our mainstream psychologists. He was interested in Tarot, astrology, physics, magic, the occult, UFOs, alchemy, mysticism, dreams, spirituality, channeling, ghosts, and mythology. However, he also had a keen understanding of our

Read more…

In the heart of the jungle in Columbia, the U’wa people live a simple existence mostly beyond the reaches of modern society, having had little contact at all with the outside world until a few decades ago. Their indigenous relationship to the earth sustains them in a collective role as caretakers of the earth and an equal facet of nature. Thus, when the prospect of international firms making plans to drill into their ancestral lands for oil in the late 1990s arose, they perceived the concept to

Read more…

Greetings


Thank you for the warm welcome.

Here are some of the papers I have written that are relevant to discussions here.

Looking forward to learning more about Depth Psychology.

Kent


A draft paper on Nietzsche's Madness: thinking through darkness and light is available. 

A draft paper on Idea, Essence, Existence and Archetype (On Nietzsche, Jung and others) is available. 
A working paper on Intratextuality is available with a separate appendix.

A working paper on The Anamorphic Cycle is available.

An unfinish

Read more…

Beauty and the moral sense

9142438281?profile=originalKrista Tippett has made a wonderful video about compassion for TED. She is host of the NPR show “On Being.” I especially like the way she compares tolerance and compassion. Many people inappropriately conflate the two.

 

Followers of James Hillman’s work will be interested to hear that Krista associates compassion with beauty and notes that her Muslim radio guests often describe beauty as a moral value. That’s quite consistent with Sufism in particular. (Check out Henry Corbin's Alone with the Alo
Read more…

How lawyers propitiate the gods

9142438271?profile=originalThere's a fascinating front-page article in the NY Times today about lawyers and "lucky" totems and rituals they employ. At one point in the story, the habit is even described as propitiation of the gods.

Several things come to mind reading this. One is Jung's notion of compensation, with the dominant super-rational style constellating its opposite. Another, of course, is the way a totem or ritual focuses energy or serves as an object for the displacement of anxiety. The extreme example of the la

Read more…

Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames

The evolution of Jungian psychology owes a great deal to the work of Marion Woodman, a renowned analyst and author who is a pioneer in the understanding of the role of feminine principles in the healing of the human psyche. Her life and work are chronicled in Adam Greydon Reid's striking documentary Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames (Capri Films, 2010), which I highly recommend to anyone with an interest in depth psychology and to Woodman fans especially.

Through dynamic conversations with my

Read more…

Depth versus Deep

Hi everyone,

 

I'm at work on an anthology with the working title Writings in Deep Psychology, and I thought I'd post a brief piece of it having to do with what constitutes "depth psychology." My anthology will include work from a number of pioneers, including Wundt (yes, Wundt: he did something for depth but most textbooks ignore it), Fechner (a tremendous nature mystic), William James, Pierre Janet, Freud and the Freudians, Jung and the Jungians, and work from Psychosynthesis, Humanistic-Existen

Read more…

Autism as Shadow

I was reading into Edward Whitmont (The Symbolic Quest) this afternoon, inspired to go there after listening to Bonnie Bright’s evocative conversation with Craig Chalquist. (http://bit.ly/h2nVh5). And I was fascinated by his discussion, in the first chapter, about autism.

 

After describing autism, as Jung did before him, as subjective, image-directed and associatively logical (as opposed to causally logical), he points out the strong cultural bias against this order of thinking. It’s a judgment,

Read more…

Some Notes on Dreaming

Though we seem to be Sleeping,

There is an Inner Wakefulness

That directs the Dream,

And that will eventually startle Us back

To the Truth of who we are.

                           ––>Rumi

 

Dreams educate us about the nature and workings of the psyche, how the soul speaks in a symbolic language of images and stories, and how we assemble our individual version of reality through a narration of our story.  

   Our ego mind experiences life by telling us into this story and that story, into many stories.

Read more…

Understanding Creative People

Hello all,

I have a new blog post, "Understanding Creative People," that may interest you and hopefully be useful in your practice as well.

Best wishes,
Juliet

 

More than ever before, our world needs people who are alive and inspired, who have new visions, new ideas for implementing them, and new energy. However, as much as corporations, classrooms, and clinical centers say they want to support creativity, they usually end up stifling it.

For one thing, creative people are often misunderstood as un

Read more…
Organization
Beyond the Mask: The Rising Sign - Part I: Aries - VirgoPress Releaseir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=bil&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981393934

Fisher King Press & Genoa House are pleased to present:

Beyond the Mask: The Rising Sign Volumes I & II

Well known and respected internationally for her ground breaking work in Archetypes of the Zodiac, Kathleen Burt now offers us a phenomenal distillation of her life work in: Beyond the Mask: The Rising Sign - Volume I: Aries - Virgoir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981393934 (ISBN 978-0981393933) and Volume II: Libra - Piscesir?t=wwwmalcolmclc-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0981393993 (ISBN 978-0981393995).

Antiquated identities and roles must die, old 'masks' must be pealed away befo
Read more…

Anxiety is emotion that is oriented to the Future.

...anticipating events and undesirable consequences.

 

 

Anxiety is excitement with too little breath.

––Fritz Perls

 

 

Depression is oriented to the Past.

...remembering with remorse, regret, un-forgiveness.

 

 

Your Depression is caused by an inability to praise.

You are a thief and steal from God every moment.

 ––Rumi

 

Of course, we want to be be free of these states

as much as possible,

so as to be in the Present,

for only in the Present

are we empowered to c

Read more…

Michael Meade on Fate & Destiny

I wasn’t expecting to get blissed out at a lecture on mythology, but since Michael Meade was the one speaking, I should have known better. A thoroughly engrossing storyteller, Meade made his presentation in part to promote his new book, Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul (GreenFire Press, 2010). He began the evening by using stirring stories from his own boyhood to illustrate the compelling nature of the topics of his book. Here’s an example: When Meade was on the verge of adolesce
Read more…
Organization

Animus Aeternus

9781926715377.jpg
Animus Aeternus cover image  Lovers’ Promenade © 2009
Iris Sonnenschein 
www.irisquilts.com
With Great Pleasure Fisher King Press Announced Today:

Now Available from Fisher King Press
Animus Aeternus: Exploring the Inner Masculine
by Deldon Anne McNeely
Shipping Feb 15th, 2011
List Price $25.00
Introductory offer $19.95

“The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman’s ancestral experiences of man—and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being.”
—C.G. Jung

Inextricably enmes
Read more…