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When life feels like a drag and events are depressing, it is a good time to lighten up. For that, we can call on the Jester. You may know this archetype best in the comedian, the entertainer, the party planner, the cruise director, the satirist, the practical joker, or the friends or colleagues who always crack you up.

The Art of Lightening Up

I’m serious by nature, perhaps intensified by working in the field of depth psychology (where I feel as if I should show up like Freud or Jung, looking wis

Jungian analyst, Ann Belford Ulanov’s most recent book, The Psychoid, Soul and Psyche: Piercing Space-Time Barriers, explores Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of the “psychoid.”

“Psychoid refers to unconscious processes that are unrepresentable in word or image,” Ulanov says. “We live them, but we don’t know about them. And they can make us feel mad, not angry, but crazy, and I believe they can also be a third source of healing.”

Jung described the unus mundus, or “one world,” as more than psychological

Is schizophrenia a “severe mental disorder,” as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO)? How might changing the perspective of the traditional western medical model, which labels certain symptoms as strictly pathological, ultimately transform those who are suffering? The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) which originated in Europe teaches people with schizophrenia to respect their voices and to treat their voices as persons, says Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, whose research seeks to understand th

The third archetype we need to discuss is that of the Apocalypse. 

It is critical to this enquiry about rage in American life to remember that the myth of American innocence began to take form while Puritanism was still dominating all intellectual discourse and most politics in both Britain and North America. Then, the idea of “America” – and along with it, the narrative of regeneration through violence – was gestating even as religion appeared to be losing its grip on the modern mind, to be repl

Part Four

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand…Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. – F. Scott Fitzgerald

We’ve tried to understand what motivates working-class hat

Part One

Who are the angry white males?

Sociologists tell us that the populations from which most reactionary activism arises are those who think they may be overtaken economically by groups below them in social class. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan have always been comprised mainly of lower-middle class men, not the poor. Similarly, most anti-abortion activists have been baby boomers who make less money than their parents.

But economics is only part of the picture. Myth – the narratives we tell our

"Schama"

By Tom Stevens All Rights Reserved

Synopsis

Rating
PG-15
Genre
Fantasy, Adventure
Run-Time
90 minutes
Tag Line
Love, Can Conquer Death!

One-Liner
An artist discovers the true meaning of life in a battle against Death itself.

Plot Synopsis
Schama, a bereaved artist, living in solitary retreat, deep in an East European forest, is visited by a group of hunters intent on tracking down a wolf-pack responsible for the death of their leader.

Story Synopsis
Schama, is a dramatic allegory portraying the univers

The Archetypal Roots of Multi-Generational

Trauma in the Americas

In the face of cultural crisis, modern people tend to seek material, social, and political solutions. Depth psychology approaches cultural issues from a different perspective. Depth psychologists tend to look beneath the surface. On an individual level, we look for complexes, networks of ideas and emotions that may have been forgotten, or simply were too complicated to fully process at earlier stages of development. Yet the ener

At age six, Elizabeth Wisniewski was diagnosed with a rare eye disease, and when her retina detached at 14, she lost vision in her right eye. At age 21, while undergoing her 30^th eye surgery, everything went terribly wrong, and she lost almost all her vision in her left eye as well.

Though she was devastated by her future without sight, Elizabeth’s natural curiosity and passion for learning led her to pursue a degree in political science and environmental studies and then, in a significant shift,

In her research, Ann Taves, Ph.D., professor of Religious Studies at The University of California at Santa Barbara, explores non-ordinary experiences and the way different disciplines might diagnose the same experience, such as hallucinating, from different perspectives—including psychology, psychiatry, religion, or spirituality. For example, while psychiatrists largely look at hallucinations as symptoms of pathology, many religious and spiritual movements are based on those exact same kinds of

Warriors generally are associated with two kinds of courage: (1) the ability to fight to protect themselves and (2) setting goals and developing the strength and skills to accomplish them. If we do not have enough access to the Warrior archetype, we may let other people push us around, lack direction, or fail to achieve our goals because we do not persist. Too much Warrior and every interaction becomes a contest—we want what we want and insist on getting it whatever the cost to others or to our

In her forthcoming book, Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path, Jungian analyst, Polly Young-Eisendrath, expresses hope about love in the 21st century, but she also feels significant concern due to the enormity of the challenge we are facing.

Personal love—that is, love that we feel within—has changed over time, according to Polly. In this day and age, we seek some very specific outcomes in our relationships that have not always been sought in “traditional” relationships. 

Unfortun

Part Four

Some very fine people on both sides. – D. Trump

The Parkland, Florida shootings have kindled a long-awaited national movement for gun control. USA Today asked: “What has been so different from all the other mass shootings over the years?” That phrase – all the other mass shootings – indicates another kind of normalization. But many Black, Red and Brown Americans have asked whether it took a massacre of primarily white students to promote the issue to permanent awareness. Violence perpetr

Part Three

A Partial Timeline of Normalization

I really did have the feeling that the sense of gravity, and how big the problems are — it was sinking in, washing over him…I think he wanted the public to know that he understood that he had to shift gears and pay attention to the responsibilities now. – Leslie Stahl, 11/13/16

– 9/23/15: Trump appeared on Stephen Colbert’s very first CBS show. Colbert had cruelly satirized Trump long before the interview and has made a living doing so five nights a we

Part One

At some point I’m gonna be so presidential that you people will be so bored…I’ll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people, I’ll have about 150 people. And they’ll say: ‘But, boy, he really looks presidential!’ – Donald Trump, spring 2016.

“I’m very excited to come here and ruin your evening in person.” On March 3rd, 2018, over a year after assuming the Presidency – a year, which by any standards was one of the most bizarre in American history – Donald Trump donned

As a Latina and a self-made media mogul who has produced hundreds of television shows, headed a TV network, and generated a significant amount of income, Nely Galán ironically felt an odd sense of relief when the economy crashed in 2008, bringing many of her projects to a halt. In hindsight, Galán believes she had been feeling incongruent in her career because she was in a field where much of the focus was on achieving success, and where individuals were not valued for being their authentic selv

C. G. Jung viewed mid-life, the time midway between entering adulthood and the end of life, as a critical time of transition. Dr. Brad Chabin, a depth psychotherapist with a practice in West Hollywood, California, had his own experience of a spontaneous and powerful mid-life transition. It involved a devastating diagnosis and challenging times, during which, Chabin now recognizes, much of his social identity slipped away. 

After going back to school and getting licensed in Counseling, as well as

“When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.” Rilke
“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” Isak Dinesen
The Pisces new moon of March 17, 2018, is a healing moon, revealing much that needs to be completed and released.This healing and completing new moon closely conjuncts Chiron, the wounded healer,

According to Jung, myths arise so we might experience the reality of our own psyches. This story, Your Grandmother's Magic Jawbone, is a personal exploration of that: 

https://medium.com/lit-up/your-grandmothers-magic-jawbone-4d1134c9c898 ;

The Myth of Israeli Innocence

Part One

There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population – Moshe Dayan

This essay is not really about politics; it’s about how politics reflects mythology, and together they create history.

When 15th-Century European explorers “discovered” (a phrase used until only a few years ago) the “new world,” the power of myth enveloped their images of its indigenous inhabitants.  Christopher Columbus initially wavered between the “nobl