“Noise protects us from painful reflection, it scatters our anxious dreams, it assures us that we are all in the same boat and creating such a racket that nobody will dare to attack us. Noise is so insistent, so overwhelmingly real, that everything else becomes a pale phantom. It relieves us of the effort to […]
Now, we have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, […]
The Soul of Work One of the fundamental problems with our experience of work today is that we do not have sufficient complexity in the way we imagine this central human activity. Too often, when we ask questions of our work, they touch on issues of security, stability, and predictability, but not at all on […]
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud declared that dream analysis was the royal road to the unconscious. Over a hundred years later, despite extensive research into the process of sleep and dreams, as well as the experience of countless thousands of people who have been helped by engaging in the process of […]
Behind the Curtain One of the hardest things to truly grasp about C.G. Jung’s understanding of the human psyche is the notion that there are aspects of psychological functioning that take place outside the control of the conscious mind. To be sure, most people understand on a cognitive level what is meant by the unconscious. […]
It is said that there was a story that C.G. Jung was fond of telling quite often. He even encouraged his early followers to repeat this story whenever they gave a talk on his psychology, as it expressed for him the importance of being in harmony with one’s deepest self. This story, about an old […]
“We do not see things as they are,” goes a saying attributed to Anaïs Nin, “we see them as we are.” The origin of this saying is in doubt — some, including Nin herself, attribute it to the Talmud — but it expresses an important truth. Psychological Fantasy and the Creation of the World The world does […]
The Inner World One of the fundamental ideas that C.G. Jung introduced into psychology is the notion of the reality of the psyche. The inner world, taught Jung, is not just a reflection of our experiences in the outer world, but a dimension of experience with at least as much claim on us as concrete, […]
This is the final part in the series of postings examining the Wisdom of the Dream conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston this past fall. The discussions of the other speakers and presenters in this series can be found by clicking these links: William Ventimiglia, Robert Stickgold, Erik Goodwyn, Jill Fischer, […]
In this post I continue my look at the Wisdom of the Dream conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston. To read the previous posts in this series just click on the following links: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. In this fourth part I will discuss the experiential dream group […]