“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 […]
“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 the first part of this series on the Wisdom of the Dream conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston, I presented Jungian Analyst William Ventimiglia’s talk, “Dreams: The Unconscious Has A Voice.” In part two, I looked at Robert Stickgold’s talk titled, “Sleep, Memory, and Dreams: What Does It All Mean?” […]
A Serpentine Journey Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston and held at Brandeis University called The Wisdom of the Dream. This conference brought together a diverse group of presenters to examine dreams from a variety of perspectives with the stated goal to “enrich […]
Recently, a client with whom I have been working for quite some time, asked me why she was having such trouble understanding the meaning of dreams that she attempted to work on by herself. In our sessions together, we often worked with her dreams and she found the experience illuminating and helpful. She had a […]
The Undiscovered Self In 1957, Carl Jung wrote an essay titled The Undiscovered Self which addresses “the plight of the individual in modern society.” It is a powerful and important work that, in many ways, incorporates and outlines many of the main insights of his whole life’s work. The heart of Jung’s thesis is that the […]