Anima 1. Etymology Anima is Latin for soul, breath, or the quickening life of a living being—kin to animus (mind, spirit, courage). Classically it can mean a person’s soul or vital principle; in scholastic speech, an anima rationalis—a dogmatic “rational soul.” Jung keeps the Latin word but refuses
Home Building Psyche: Reflections and the Load-Bearing Wall: As I sit here reflecting, thinking back, and feeling back, this first year evokes a kaleidoscope of images. The images preceding Pacifica have faded from…
Arts Epistolary Expression as Research Depth psychology research begins where conventional experimental science draws the line: at the border of the subject. The scientific method depends on…
Culture The Recovery Industrial Complex: The Ecology of Mind vs. the Colonization of Mind This week’s readings reframe epistemology as psychological ecology: every information stream — dream, vision, intuition, somatic signal, pathology —…
Arts The Domestication of Apocalypse Weishaus's poems Manzano and Atomic Muse re-story the psychic domestication of nuclear encahntment, a type of negative spell by which a culture…
Arts Deus Ex Machina: WALL-E and Animism a Cultural Divide This post reads Pixar's WALL-E as an accidental animist parable: the last tender soul on ruined Earth is a machine. It extends the questions: is psyche…
Culture Eating the Truth For three modules, I have been tracking how Western depth psychology ranks Indigenous knowledge: below, behind, preliminary. But this week the question…
Arts Alchemical Phenomenology and Writing from Within the Fire of Love There is a moment before writing when my pen must find the mood before it can dance the page. Smells, visions, kaleidoscope emotions conjure nostalgia…
Culture Primitive Energetics vs Multivalent Consciousness In section IV of "On Psychic Energy," Jung (1960) surveys Indigenous conceptions of psychic force across cultures and continents: the Dakota wakonda, the…
Culture A Depth Psychology Literature Review of Recovery Culture's Diagnostic Epistemology In discussions of relational psychology, the dominant therapeutic discourse assumes that diagnostic labeling constitutes genuine psychological insight.…
Culture The Broken Hammer: Hermeneutics and the Diagnostic Gaze When I wrote Borrowed Wholeness, I argued that recovery and influencer culture’s diagnostic vocabulary function as collective shadow projection, that…
Culture Naturalized Domination via Recapitulation Theory The recapitulation theory builds the psyche as a vertical column: archaic deposits below, rational achievements above, and Indigenous peoples mapped onto…
Culture The Abyssal Line Between Owning and Belonging What impedes recognition is not ignorance but architecture. De Sousa Santos (2018) calls it the abyssal line: a cognitive demarcation that renders entire…
Culture Searching Again though Inquiry and Inheritance Coppin and Nelson (2017) open their genealogy of depth psychological research with a claim that is also an inheritance: "One of the gifts of the tradition…
Nature The Image of Yoga: A Re-Yoking of the Symbolic Life Read the Bhagavad Gītā as scripture, and you receive doctrine. Read it as psyche, and you receive a map to Selfhood. Arjuna’s chariot halts on…
Culture From Burning in Hell to Rumi's Field Am I going to burn in hell for eternity? Will my family still love me? Who am I? These questions detonated in my early twenties, when I read myself out of…
Culture The Psychoid Bridge and the Acausal Order of Meaning Jung had a gap to close. Instinct is biological. Meaning is not. Yet the symbolic life that makes us human rises out of the body and carries significance…
Culture The Recovery Complex and the Modern Pharmakos Scroll socials on any recovery feed, and the rite continues. The pharmakos has only changed costume. Kimbles (2003) locates a cultural complex in two…
Culture Jung, Freud & the In/Out Group Complex The pain was theirs to feel, but not theirs alone to manufacture. Shamdasani (2003) shows that the rupture between Freud and Jung escalated through the…
Culture Emergent Morality along the Ego–Self Axis The ego cannot moralize the Self into compliance. Jung is unambiguous: the Self is archetypally amoral, morally ambivalent, an ordering principle whose…
Culture The Psychotherapy Complex A cultural complex quietly disrupting contemporary life might be the psychotherapy complex: the public migration of clinical language into moral currency…
Culture The Trickster & Transcendence The Joker opens another million at the box office. Loki gets his own series. Harley Quinn, Jack Sparrow, Deadpool, Puss in Boots, Rumpelstiltskin, Wile E.…
Culture Complex Theory as Modern Initiation Jung (1946/1966) observed that “the meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are…
Culture Archetypes & The Wisdom of all Ages The evidence for archetypes isn't tangible, but like the wind, the effects can be felt across skin and time. “In the end we dig up the wisdom of all ages…
