The purpose of marriage is a journey of individuation, a chance for each partner to grow and flourish within the embrace of a supportive union – it is a crucible of transformation. Tempered by our shadow, it can forge us into our best selves.
Relationships
THE SCHIZOPHRENIA COMPLEX: How Do We Love Those in Chaos?
The submergence in the unconscious that defines schizophrenia generates negative emotions in others. Yet when we look at Jung on psychosis, he shows us that we are different from those diagnosed with it only in degree. Jung’s Word Association Test proved that the unconscious influences our daily lives, and his work with psychotic patients led to his discovery of the collective unconscious, the mythopoetic substrate of humanity.
SEX and its undeniable power to fascinate.
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 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 individual psyche granting sexuality a numinous intensity.
Holiday Hauntings or Who are these people?!?!
Image Credit: Joseph Lee...
STAY AT HOME DADS: emerging potentials in the father archetype
As our bonds to historic roles loosen, fathers are finding new ways to express themselves within the family dynamic. Being caregiver and homecreator does not diminish their experience of masculinity but rallies inner resources that had been set aside.
TRUST: The Bedrock of Relationship
Intimate attachments, workplace effectiveness, and stable social systems depend on our ability to rely on one another. Trust is the foundation of social exchanges and benefits, from affection to achievements. Erik Erikson mapped stages of human psychosocial development and found that establishing basic trust in the first 18 months of life was formative for later life.
FORGIVENESS OR FURY: Finding a Way Forward
Forgiveness has long been the province of morality, virtue, and religious values. Psychologically, forgiveness requires the capacity to hold both the magnitude of the injury and the humanity of the injurer. There are doable steps toward this goal, beginning with acknowledging and mourning the wrong yet forgoing retaliation. Righteousness and anger provide only illusory power and can be chronic and corrosive.
FALLING IN LOVE: Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered
Jung says, “Love is a power of destiny, whose force reaches from heaven to hell.” Falling in love is an initiation into the divine—light, and dark—as personal and archetypal forces combine and combust. In thrall to the magical other through whom we experience newfound parts of ourselves, we fall into a reality that transcends and possesses us.
Assessing Our Psychic Inheritance: Jung and Parenting
Jung said of the parent-child relationship: “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.” Jung understood that parents could unconsciously compel children to fulfill parental dreams or compensate for disappointments.
SPLITTING: Understanding What Divides Us
We seem hard-wired to split the world into polarities: right/wrong, either/or, victory/defeat, Democrat/Republican. Infants and toddlers have not yet achieved the developmental capacity for complexity; they are believed to split their feelings toward caretakers into “good” and “bad,” depending on whether their needs are being met in the moment.
BELONGING: the eternal search for home
The need to belong is as intrinsic to human nature as the need for food, touch, clothing, and shelter. We belong to families, communities, ideas, and ideals, yet must also separate from them in service to our own individuation.
CHRONIC ANGER: trapped in resentment
Like fire in a wood-burning stove, resentment burns long and hot: bitterness, frustration, and hostility. The fires of resentment are lit when we feel needy and vulnerable and feel wronged and rejected. This old human story is told in the biblical tale of brothers Cain and Abel.