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 —…
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…
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…
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…
Culture The Error of Omission In Kerényi’s (1951) The Gods of the Greeks, Herakles is not given his own myth cycle, yet his presence ripples through the text appearing as a feature in…
Culture Intelectual Inheritance vs Systematic Ontology Tarnas and Shamdasani do not disagree about Jung’s concept of archetypes. They differ in approach, literary style, and objective focus. Tarnas maps the…
Culture The Dark Side of Domination: Machiavellian Complex Erisichthon’s myth enacts the anatomy of a shadowy complex with startling precision. When he desecrates Ceres’ sacred grove, he severs the ego from the…
Culture The Ancient Mythic Worldview: The Foundation for Archetypes The ancient mythic worldview did not treat the gods as metaphors. They were living presences embedded in the fabric of the cosmos. The visible world was…
Culture Big Dreams: Central Images as a Symbolic Talisman In Ernest Hartmann's work on the Central Image, I am impressed by how naturally his concept fits into my own dream life. Hartmann argues that what makes a…
Culture Existential Introspection: Contemplation in Context My decision to attend Pacifica was made many years before I arrived. Now that I am here, studying Jung in context under Susan’s guidance, I find myself in…
What C.G. Jung's Blind Spots can Reveal About Our Own How Subtle Prejudice or Racism Can Sneak In the Door
Culture Dreams: Between the Living & the Dead Today I attended the funeral for three people—a father, his son, and his nephew. I had known the father since we were fourteen. They passed after crashing…
