Blogs

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

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.

Here’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

Where 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

Please check out this featured except from my new book, Embodying Osiris by clicking on the link below.  I introduce it with comments about the uprising in Egypt that shows the relevance myth and history have for radical events still taking place in Tahrir Square today!

Myth and History Clash in Modern Egypt

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

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

Krista 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.

There'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

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

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

Dennis Patrick Slattery, professor of myth at Pacifica has just published a wonderful volume entitled Day to Day Dante: Day to Day Dante: Exploring Personal Myth Through the Divine Comedy

It is up on Amazon and really worth a look for those of us seeking to deepen our personal work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

This beautifully evocative video by a woman with autism reminds me of Jung's writing on typology, and to wonder if a sensory/intuitive axis of personality type would be a way of experiencing the world as this video conveys? If so would it be intuitive dominant and repressed sensation or the other way around?!

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,

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.

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