“The Chosen Few:” Analysis as the Hero’s Journey “To develop one’s own personality is indeed an unpopular undertaking, a deviation that is highly uncongenial to the herd, an eccentricity smelling of the cenobite, as it seems to the outsider. Small wonder, then, that from earliest times only the chosen few have embarked upon this […]
Jung and Buridan’s Ass: A Jungian Approach to Choosing Those readers of this blog who are on the mailing list of The Jungian Center[1] were informed of the voiceover dream I had on September 22, 2009. The voice said: October 2010 will be an especially important month, when key choices are made that […]
Components of Individuation: Part III—Internalizing a Locus of Authority A few years ago my sister took to wearing a button on her shirt as she went through her days on the University of Vermont campus. The button said “Question Authority.” She didn’t wear the button for long, because she found people’s reaction to […]
Components of Individuation: Part IV—Internalizing a Locus of Security In the previous parts of this four-part essay we noted how we hold others responsible when we externalize a locus of control and how we expect others to take over responsibility for decision-making when we externalize a locus of authority. How might we expect […]
Components of Individuation: Part II—Internalizing a Locus of Control In Part I of this four-part essay we noted that a pre-requisite for achieving individuation was internalizing a locus of control. What does this mean? Defining “Locus of Control” I encountered the term “locus on control” in the works of Jungian […]
Components of Individuation: Part I—What is Individuation? “Individuation” is a term often associated with Jung and his psychology. In this four-part essay we are going to define “individuation” and discuss some of the benefits, elements and requirements for achieving individuation (Part I). Then we’ll examine several components of it, specifically the locus of control […]
The Apocatastasis of Global Civilization: Seizing the Opportunity in the Archetype of the Apocalypse “Apocatastasis.”[1] It’s a five-dollar Greek word that Jung used repeatedly in his writings,[2] drawing on earlier usage in the New Testament[3] and the Gnostic gospels.[4] It means a “re-establishment,” “restoration” or “reconstitution,” and, as we noted in the previous […]
Jung and the Archetype of the Apocalypse As we have noted in earlier essays,[1] Jung was very intuitive. Thanks to his keen intuition he was able to sense shifts in the collective consciousness long before outer changes made these shifts obvious to others. One of the shifts he noted was the approach of […]
Jung’s Challenge to Us: “Holding the Tension of the Opposites” The last fifteen years of Carl Jung’s life[1] were lived against the backdrop of the Cold War—that time in our global history when most of the nations of the world were aligned either with the “West” or with the “Communist bloc.” Intermittently throughout […]
Jung’s Timeliness and Thoughts on Our Current Reality Sometimes, in reading Jung, I encounter a passage that makes me think Jung wrote it just yesterday. Recently, while preparing a presentation for the Jung Society for Scholarly Studies symposium at Cornell University, I came across the following quote from “Civilization in Transition:” Thanks to […]