The spider is a symbol of generative and destructive capabilities. As creator, spider spins the sustaining web of life. As predator, spider’s sticky web is an inescapable trap. Parents weave webs of familial ties, cultural norms, and generational patterns that contain—or restrain–their children. Emotional strings of attachment or enmeshment affect how—or if—a young adult child is released into the world.
We need to be curious about curiosity: what are we enacting–and why? In the unrestrained theater of our dreams even the most disallowed outer-world scenarios are played out.
Pets let us be tender, elicit nurturing, and help heal trauma through secure attachment. Our creatures keep our secrets.
Every companion is an image of the inner Other, and is present whenever gifts of wisdom, care and guidance are received.
Polyamory, a current phenomenon, endorses open relationships with multiple lovers. The term means many loves, and polyamory strives to legitimize the benefits of non-monogamous romance and sexuality among adults.
Siblings are embedded in the human psyche as they are in life. Even if one lacks siblings, there is ready access to them through friends, fairy tales, myths, and scripture.
Partings connote a finality of farewell that signifies completion of a relationship. We may part from a stage of life, depart from home or college, or say farewell to a person, process or project. Partings signify the end of a story that has been told and reached conclusion. The Japanese tale of Princess Moonbeam illustrates the importance of accepting a necessary ending: those who could not do so were turned into statues, fixed in eternal stasis.
It happens all the time: people and problems split into opposing camps, whether the conflict is internal, between partners, in a family or—as we know all too well—between political parties.
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Anima and animus function as autonomous contrasexual archetypes that guide ego into the depths of Psyche, unlocking creativity, feeling, empathy, and spiritual insight when integrated, yet triggering seduction, aggression, or control when projected or repressed. These figures emerge in dreams and active imagination as evolving personae—primal sprites, erotic goddesses or heroes, mature partners, ultimately spiritual guides—yet they need not appear as literal men or women, but as any radically other image. Their role lies in carrying undeveloped qualities across the threshold of consciousness, demanding precise, phenomenological attention to their symbolic form and affect. Through that attention, therapy enacts an alchemical conjunction of opposites—culminating in an inner Androgyne that restores psychic balance and advances individuation.
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