Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol, vividly portrays the journey to healing and transcendence. It was written in a fever, released on December 19, 1843, and sold out before Christmas. Ebenezer Scrooge’s visitations by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come are vivid depictions of the path from trauma to transformation. As in psychotherapy, Scrooge revisits his past; by reclaiming the feelings he exiled as a child, Scrooge discovers compassion and connection.
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.
Dr. Fanny Brewster, Jungian Analyst, colleague and friend, joins This Jungian Life to discuss her forthcoming book, The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race.
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.
The archetype of the father is associated with gods, kingship, and other images of authority and order. As the image of a “personified affect” fueled by an archetypal core, the father complex is powerful.
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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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“Although the word voyage connotes a sea journey, this episode considers a voyage to be an intentional trip of any kind. “
Individuation is the empirical process by which personality orders itself around the Self, the inner center that embraces conscious and unconscious. It proceeds through images, affects, and decisions that gather a scattered life into pattern. Energy (libido) concentrates at real conflicts and releases through symbol, which gives a new attitude. The work advances in sequences—recognition, image, ethical deed—so that insight takes form. A person emerges who carries their singular pattern with greater fidelity and steadiness.
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