Shows / This Jungian Life Podcast
This Jungian Life Podcast
Join us—Lisa, Deb, and Joseph—for sometimes irreverent but potentially life-changing conversations. Every Thursday, we explore culture, relationships, and depth psychology through the lens of Carl Jung. We devote a segment of each episode to analyzing a listener’s dream.
Episodes
- This Jungian Life Podcast
HOMESICKNESS: Longing & Belonging
From Homer’s Odyssey to the Wizard of Oz our native soil draws us home, whether home is a small Greek island or a simple Kansas farm. The soul has a natural…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
VOCATION: Answering the Call
Vocation, once associated with serving God through service to others, is now most strongly associated with a career having personal worth. Vocation spans a…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
THE PRODIGAL SON as Shadow, Ego & the Self
Jung interpreted religious traditions from the viewpoint of their psychological significance. The allegorical tale of the Prodigal Son illustrates Jung’s basic…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
SHADOWLAND: DETRANSITION – THE STORY OF BETH
Beth underwent gender transition from natal female to trans male and has since de-transitioned. In her early teens, Beth felt she was not like other women and…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Causal or Creative: Is History Destiny?
The Roman god Janus had two faces. They looked in opposite directions, representing dualities, especially beginnings and endings, past and future…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
THE GETHSEMANE ENCOUNTER
The Garden of Gethsemane is the place of life crisis; it permits no escape or compromise. There, we suffer the agony of choosing between personal will or…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
MORAL INJURY: Violation of Meaning
Moral injury violates our sense of justice, loyalty, and meaning—and creates a storm in the soul. Those who directly affect others’ lives are most at risk of…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Jung & Freud: From “Bro” to Broken
We welcome Jungian colleague, psychiatrist, and historian Dr. Bert Price, whose research in Vienna during a 2019 international conference led to the discovery…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Hunting: An Archetypal Perspective
To hunt is to engage the opposites: the hunter must attune and align with nature in order to kill part of it. According to mythographer Joseph Campbell, “the…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
FAILURE as TEACHER
We first encounter failure in learning to walk—we fall down, the root definition of failure. Coming up short is a lifelong experience that stretches from…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
CAUGHT IN THE CONFLICT: The Tension of Opposites
Holding the tension between opposites was one of Jung’s foundational precepts. Although contradictory views are often a better witness to truth than one-sided…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Amor Fati: Love of One's Fate
In Greek mythology, three Fates represented life forces beyond our control. One spun the thread of life, another determined its length, and the third cut it…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Trust: The Bedrock of Relationship
Intimate attachments, workplace effectiveness, and stable social systems depend on our ability to rely on one another. Trust is the foundation of social…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Special Re-release: The Archetype of War
Recent events in Ukraine have again put war at the forefront of collective consciousness. War’s destruction belongs to the mythic realm. Mars, the Roman god of…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Forgiveness or Fury: Finding a Way Forward
Forgiveness has long been the province of morality, virtue, and religious values. Psychologically, forgiveness requires the capacity to hold both the magnitude…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
DUPED: What Makes Us Gullible?
Jung says, “The more one turns to the light, the greater the shadow behind one’s back.” Unacknowledged shadow can increase vulnerability to coercive dealings…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Reality as Medicine
The nature of reality may be a complex philosophical question, but from a psychological viewpoint, reality is largely a question of adaptation to the truths of…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Contagion: Pollution, Protection & Purity
When the archetype of purity is activated, science and psychology intersect. Fear of contamination has deep instinctual roots, evidenced in universal facial…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
PORN: Technology, Consumerism & Soul
Nearly every civilization since ancient times has portrayed explicit sexual acts. Sexuality’s numinous aspect has long brought it into close association with…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
he Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul
Dr. Connie Zweig, Ph.D., retired Jungian-psychotherapist and author, joins us to discuss her new book, The Inner Work of Age. She extends her well-known work…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
LEGACY: Living Toward the Long Future
Is the future relevant? Can we suspend immediate satisfaction in favor of our descendants’ quality of life? Legacy comes from the Latin root legatia: one who…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Jonah & the Whale: a dream for our time
The Bible as sacred text serves as a source of revelation and wisdom about the divine. As mythology, the Bible establishes norms for daily life and organizes…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Mr. Grinch on the Couch
Dr. Seuss’ case history of the Grinch presents him as “uncheerful, unhealthy, unclean.” We hope that adding an analytic perspective will be helpful in…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Libido: Tracking Inner Energy
Jung understood libido as psychic energy: desire, will, interest, and passion. Libido includes instincts for fulfilling bodily appetites and engaging…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Archetype of the Crocodile
The crocodile and its alligator cousin appear regularly in the dreams of people far from warm, wet habitats. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the divine…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Archetypes and the Creative Process: A Discussion with Third Coast Percussion
The creator, the hero, the explorer: these are just some of the archetypes made famous by Carl Jung that inspired the latest album from Chicago’s Grammy…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Falling in Love: Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered
Jung says, “Love is a power of destiny, whose force reaches from heaven to hell.” Falling in love is an initiation into the divine—light, and dark—as personal…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
A Well-Aligned Mind: How to Be Alive
Guest Iain McGilchrist is a renowned psychiatrist, researcher, and author. His 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary gained worldwide fame for showing how…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Humanizing the Hero
Mythological heroes defend, protect and quest. They range from warriors, adventurers, and saviors to magicians, loners, and rebels, but one way or another…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Fiery Furnace of Ambition
Ambition is a fire whose flames first rise in the first half of life when hopes and dreams are fueled by possibilities in the external world. It takes creative…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Archetype of the Witch: Dangerous, Denied & Dishonored
It’s witching season, the time when women of all ages embrace a mythical image of unfettered feminine power. The witch may cast spells, seek vengeance, or…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Assessing Our Psychic Inheritance
Jung said of the parent-child relationship: “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Does Analysis Work? A Conversation with Jonathan Shedler, PhD
“Talk is powerful medicine.” Renowned researcher and clinician Jonathan Shedler, Ph.D., joins us to discuss the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
JUSTICE: The Struggle for Balance
Principles of fairness and justice have deep roots in the human psyche: we want to receive our fair share and a fair shake. When man injures man, we may…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Confronting Shadow: The Work of Self-Discovery
Psychotherapy is essentially the work of making shadow conscious—all that we have not discerned then disowned, or projected onto others. We seldom welcome…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Self-Reflection: What Was I Thinking?
Jung says, “There is another instinct, different from the drive to activity and so far as we know specifically human, which might be called the reflective…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
INFLUENCE: Connection or Contagion?
We have always been subject to the influence of others—it’s how we learn language, become socialized, cooperate and collaborate. It’s also how we exclude…
This Jungian Life PodcastSHADOWLAND: Prostitution - the story of Kay
This is Shadowland, a new podcast experience from This Jungian Life that explores the lives of people who work and take refuge in the hidden places of our…
This Jungian Life PodcastSHADOWLAND: a new podcast experience – September 9 on TJL
On September 9th, This Jungian Life will launch a new podcast experience - SHADOWLAND. In this series, we meet soulfully with people who live and work in the…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Archetype of WAR
Recent events in Afghanistan have again put war at the forefront of collective consciousness. War’s destruction belongs to the mythic realm. Mars, the Roman…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Music of Metaphor: Healing in Therapy & Life
Guest Mark Winborn is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst who teaches in the U.S. and internationally. Author of three books and numerous articles…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Splitting: Understanding What Divides Us
We seem hard-wired to split the world into polarities: right/wrong, either/or, victory/defeat, Democrat/Republican. Infants and toddlers have not yet achieved…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Wounded Healer
There are three major models of healing: medical, shamanic, and psychoanalytic. In the first, the doctor does it to you; in the second, the intermediary does…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Tarot, Divination & the Symbolic Life
Guest T. Susan Chang is a writer, podcaster, and teacher of tarot, the most commonly recognized modern form of divination. The archetypal symbols in the…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Time & Truth About Its Use
Guest Oliver Burkeman states in his new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, that “outrageous brevity is life’s defining problem.” At age…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Cosmic Meaning of Consciousness
In Answer to Job, Jung states, “Whoever knows God has an effect on him.” If, as Jung claims, individual human consciousness affects God, what we are matters…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Archetypes
Although the concept of archetypes has philosophical ancestors, Jung’s theory was developed over time and rested on a foundation that was scientific and…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Paying Attention: What Are You Spending It On?
We plainly pay attention, using the finite currency of time and energy issued in the 24-hour increments that add up to a life - well spent? We have choices and…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Letting Go: When Is It Time?
In the first half of life, we strive to develop ego strength and achieve our dreams. To want, will, and work is worthwhile and adaptive--until a life dream…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Threshold: Moving Between the Realms
In medieval times, the threshold was a plank that kept barnyard “threshings” outside the house. In the sciences a threshold is the limit of magnitude or…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Unspoken Wounding of Men
Jung’s earliest dream, at age three or four, preoccupied him all his life, “in an underground chamber, a giant phallus stood erect on a golden throne.”…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Extroversion
Although Jung’s theory of typology is the foundation of various personality assessments, it is important to appreciate its profundity as Jung’s theory of…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Power of NO
Toddlers have ready access to no as they discover the power of me—the start of a lifelong process of differentiating self from all that is other. When are…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Risk & Reality: When Fear Traps Us
We can’t help knowing that something bad could happen if we do X…or Y…or maybe Z. Like Odysseus steering his ship between sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, we…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Assessing Your Values: Meaning & Motivation
There is value in examining your values, the powerful emotional and cognitive attitudes that underlie large and small life choices. Although values are…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
INTROVERSION
The terms introversion and extraversion, now cultural staples, originated with Jung and describe the overall direction of life energy. The widely used…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
Tending the Ego-Self Axis: Reconnecting with Source
Erich Neumann publicly proposed the concept of the ego-Self (or Self-ego) axis and began to sketch its implications in his 1952 Eranos lecture, "The Psyche and…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
When Words Lose Their Meaning
In 1543, Andreas Vesalius dissected a corpse, thereby inaugurating a scientific attitude toward the human body. This new attitude taught us to stand aside from…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Dark Side of Mothering
Our colleague Puddi Kullberg, author of The Bad Mother, joins us to acknowledge motherhood’s shadow. A link to her paper is below. Our culture idealizes…
- This Jungian Life Podcast
The Alchemy of Writing
The wellspring of consciousness has long been located in word. Once words were etched on clay or inked on papyrus, a new way of knowing was born. Writing…