Latest Articles
Healing the Ancestral Hauntings of the Archetypal Mother
Ellen Robinson
October 18, 2023
My mother is a ghost now. She died the last day of 2016. She was the person nearest and dearest to me for much of my life, yet it seemed we never quite understood and accepted each other unconditionally. She haunts me as an unfulfilled spirit when I have anxious thoughts, or fearful premonitions, or self-admonition, but also in old sayings, endearing quirks, and the names of flowers and trees. And she inhabits my dreams, mostly as an unhappy child.
Trumpism
Aviva Brown
June 9, 2023
A typological analysis of the psychological forces constellated in Trumpism helps explain the situation in the United States today. The co-occurrence of the savior and trickster archetypes represents an awareness that a catastrophe has already happened that must be consciously integrated. A psychological—as opposed to a political—understanding of the forces at work in the collective psyche is necessary.
Philosophical Synchronicity
Todd Speidell and Zachary Kampf
April 20, 2023
Viewing the remarkable coincidence of Jung’s and Polanyi’s ideas as a synchronistic event evokes the feeling of a milestone, as if there were a sudden breakthrough in the collective unconscious after a centuries-long epistemic struggle. Despite this accomplishment, the field of Jungian psychology, especially as it is understood in popular culture, has tended to fall into one-sided subjectivism.
From the Archives
Death and Dying in Taiwan
Hong-Wen Chen
July 1, 2015
Facing death is an event that challenges how the various functions in the psyche work together in everyone—cooperating, compensating, decompensating, or even in integrating with each other. Since most people in their conscious lives are more familiar with the adaptations of life, not of death, facing death often forces us to face our inferior function.
Type and Other Biases, Part II
Stephanie Puentes
May 2, 2012
“What do you want?” asked one of the boys, his crossed arms over his chest authoritatively. “I want a drink of water,” I told him, but as I made a move to go around him, he stepped in front of me again. Before I could say anything or react in any way, he told me, “You can’t drink here. This fountain is for people. No monkeys allowed.”
Resurrecting the Feeling Function
Jane Shaw
January 4, 2017
My Feeling is definitely not a matter of determining whether simply I like or dislike something, as Hillman suggested an undifferentiated Feeling function might do. For example, I feel a hundred different aspects of a rose—smell, vibration, gentleness, tone, harmony, et cetera, and all of these come into play when I evaluate its suitability for a certain spot in the garden.
Arriving at the Eternal Now
Lori Green
January 10, 2018
The film is arguably an example of INFJ art itself, providing a window into the awakening INFJ nature essential to the culture’s efforts to address power imbalances and welcome a new consciousness toward that which is deemed “other.” This paradigm shift ultimately requires humans to become active participants in an awakening consciousness.
Golf: A Game of Individuation
Jeffrey Lauterbach
July 9, 2014
To win in the crucible of national championship golf requires skill, luck, and self-knowledge. A player with the requisite physical skill may be distracted by the emergence of the inferior function or led out of focus on the present by auxiliary or tertiary functions. One must rely on the extraverted sensation function, whether it is dominant or not.
Nietzsche on “Self-Overcoming”
James Kennard
July 1, 2015
Rather than truly being able to move down to embrace the inferior function, to achieve “integrity in depth,” Nietzsche tries to “overcome” the problem of the personality. His fantastic intuitions are not wholly thought through, and so he is not able to deal with the real task of individuation, which asks us to ground consciousness in the reality of body and mind.
Heaven, Earth, and Underworld
Mark Hunziker
April 6, 2016
Within the function-attitude preference hierarchy for each type, there are three natural groupings which seem to reflect a “Me, Spirit, and Other” delineation and describe our areas of “strength, vulnerability and creativity, and defense,” respectively. Is it more than a coincidence that this configuration has parallels in most traditional world views, as “Earth, Heaven, and Underworld?”
Seeing One’s Self
Marta Koonz
January 14, 2016
Just as Hiccup’s superior function, his Hero, has been wounded by his culture and his father, this dragon is wounded as well, a figure we will come to see as Hiccup’s inner truth. This is the story of an individual recognizing the wounding that has occurred, and claiming back his authentic power by developing his Heroic function.