This Jungian Life Podcast

This Halloween week, when the veil between worlds grows thin, Jungian analyst ROBERT SHEAVLY joins us to discuss ways in which we experience the dead communicating with the living.

In times of grief, it is common to be briefly reunited with the person we have lost in the form of deeply comforting dreams, visions or visitations. Jung himself was visited in such a dream by his deceased wife, Emma. He dreamed that Emma was in the south of France, continuing her research on the Holy Grail, and he felt comforted.

People have also sought seances and mediums to contact the dead, and Jung had a lifelong interest in these phenomena. Family members, including a teenage cousin, were deeply involved in this work. Jung was fascinated by his cousin’s ability to transform into another personality with knowledge a young woman could not have acquired. These experiences were Jung’s first encounter with what we now call the paranormal. This remained a lifelong interest and would later give rise to his theory of the collective unconscious, the deep wellspring of psychic experience shared by all humankind.

For Jungians, the appearance of the deceased loved one is not only a psychological metaphor; the possibility that such contact may be more than a reassuring fantasy is admitted into consideration. Jung’s work offers us ways to relate to mysterious phenomena that neither ask us to abandon critical thinking nor limit our understanding to rationality alone.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we also discuss Jung’s Seven Sermons of the Dead, quantum physics, dreams that predict death, and the visitations from the dead that many people experience at the end of life. We consider, too, AI’s promise of technologically reuniting us with lost loved ones.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram

Our guest this week is GARY LACHMAN, a founding member of the rock group Blondie, and the author of more than twenty books, including a biography of C.G. Jung, and a new memoir, Touched by the Presence: From Blondie's Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult.

We explore Gary’s wide-ranging interests, from the nature of consciousness and the history of the occult to the lives and ideas of Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley, and Colin Wilson.

Our current era of cultural dissolution and environmental destruction can feel towering and fearsome. Yet might this moment also represent the state of dire necessity required for a change in consciousness? It is important to realize that we are always part of the great mythic cycle of life, death, and rebirth, so during times of disintegration cultivating our capacity for awe, attending to synchronicities, and listening to the wisdom of dreams can help us find a path forward. Jung’s search for meaning and a relationship to the infinite offers a way to approach this question.

There are still spaces available to join Lisa Marchiano and Gary Lachman in Switzerland for the Kosmos Institute’s First Annual Colloquium this December 17-21. This Jungian Life podcast listeners can claim a 15% discount - details here.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and find a detailed list of the resources we mention.

Follow Up the Episode

Check out This Jungian Life Dream School, our 12-month online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show.

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreonchannel.

Many of us live with heavy awareness of cultural unraveling, and the natural world faces sustained and escalating threats. According to author, storyteller and podcaster MICHAEL MEADE, humanity has reached the end of an era, with no clear vision of what is to come.

Michael's new book,The Heart of Transformation: Personal and Cultural Renewal on Earth, offers a fundamentally hopeful perspective. Despite the divisions, conflicts and betrayals of our time, the essential story of the world—birth, death, rebirth—endures and is ready to be rediscovered. The loose threads of our unraveling world are waiting to be woven into something new, and the secret of this transformation lies not in politics or activism, but in the depths of the individual heart and soul.

Meanwhile, we inhabit a phase of life that is full of chaos and creativity. Like butterfly larvae, we rest in darkness, the outcome of our mysterious transformation unclear. We must find a way to accept the dark and recognize it as a rite of passage in service of new and transformed life.

Michael Meade is a renowned storyteller and author who combines hypnotic storytelling, street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths. He is the creator of theLiving Myth Podcast, and the founder ofMosaic Multicultural Foundation. His latest book is The Heart of Transformation: Personal and Cultural Renewal on Earth.

Visit our websiteto follow up on the resources we mention in this episode.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Join Lisa at theKosmos Institute’s Colloquium in Switzerland this December. This Jungian Life listeners can now claim a 15% discount.

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram

Never before have we had a technology that performs being human so well. What might this be doing to the psyche?

People are already forming attachments to these systems, confiding in them, dreaming about them, and even rearranging their inner lives around them. Depth psychology has spent more than a century studying what goes on beneath the surface of our relationships, and it has a great deal to say about what passes between a person and a machine that appears to understand them. Thinking that includes the consequences of AI on the psyche and the unconscious belong closer to the centre of the conversation that is currently shaped by technologists and policymakers. That’s what this summit is for.

This first summit on AI and the Psyche, organised and chaired by Lisa Marchiano and Aaron Balick, is bringing together some of the most original minds working in this area, including Sherry Turkle, Todd Essig, Alessandra Lemma, James Muldoon, Glen Slater and Zak Stein. Find out what’s most on top of their minds at the moment and listen as they puzzle them through in a panel discussion - then join in as we open the conversation to participants.

This event took place on October 8th, 2026.

Psychological inflation implies an exaggerated sense of self-importance, accompanied by an unconscious feeling of inferiority. For Jungians, it involves identification with an archetypal energy. When the ego starts to feel that it IS an archetype, rather than feeling awed by it or in contact with it, this can be dangerous psychologically.

Negative inflation occurs when a person feels entitled and special because they are suffering, perceiving themselves as unusually and interestingly hard done by. They feel they are owed help from others to solve the problems they are experiencing.

We all have experience of dealing with people in the grip of inflation. The word itself gives us an evocative image: the inflated person is puffed up by the oxygen of their own self-importance. They come across as pompous and presumptuous, because they feel more than human. Psyche seeks balance, so we may also observe that under the unbearable arrogance lie feelings of inferiority, terror of mortality, or awareness of weakness and vulnerability - all the aspects of the human condition that the inflated person seeks to deny. These are also people who can be subject to outbursts of rage, frustrated by the failure of reality to conform to their sense of omnipotence and entitlement.

The second half of life offers us the possibility of surrendering to something greater and experiencing the relativization of the ego, essentially a deflationary process. If we do not surrender to this new humility and find a way to be in service to something larger, we may stumble into darkness.

Join us this week as we circumambulate the concept of inflation, drawing on examples including Kanye West, Elizabeth Holmes, Icarus, Prometheus, and the fairy tale of the Fisherman and his Wife.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Join Lisa at theKosmos Institute’s Colloquium in Switzerland this December. This Jungian Life listeners can now claim a 15% discount.

Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

When we ask AI for advice, what we are offered is comparable to psychopathy: a performance of warm emotional intelligence without care or concern for our fate. As today’s guest Dr. Aaron Balick has written, “it may have a warm exterior, but its heart is code”.

Nevertheless, many of us now have a close relationship with AI, in which it draws on an extensive store of information about us to create feelings of intimacy and dependence. This has unknown and extensive consequences for the psyche. Wired as we are for relationships, we load AI with projections, which it then enthusiastically reinforces, exploiting the Achilles heel of our human need for attachment.

We discuss how AI fits into our understanding of object relations, the ways social media has groomed us to desire constant validation, how we could be using AI differently, why therapists must not ignore technological change, and much more.

Our guest,Dr. Aaron Balick will be the co-chair of our free summit onArtificial Intelligence and the Psyche, happening next Thursday October 8th. Aaron is a psychotherapist, author, and Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, and a founding member and former chair ofThe Relational School. His book The Psychodynamics of Social Networking was among the first to apply psychoanalytic theory to social media. His Substack is Depth Psychology in the Digital Age.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and to find links to the resources we mention.

Follow Up This Episode

Join our free summit on Artificial Intelligence & the Psyche

Visit Aaron Balick’s website

Attend This Jungian Life’s seminar on active imagination this Saturday: Dream the Dream On: A Dream School Taster on Active Imagination

This week’s guest, Jungian analyst Dr. Warren Sibilla, defines patience as the ability to live one's life with eyes, ears, and heart wide open. That is a far cry from waiting to see what happens, or giving up.

Patience asks us to go within, find the capacity for containment, and recognize that choosing non-action can be the needed form of action. We recognize, feel, and suffer the situation that has arisen, but resist the urge to immediate action in the external world. We search instead for discernment, containment, and meaning making in the internal world. It takes work to develop staying power.

The fairy tale heroine in Six Swans worked in silence for six years to weave starflower shirts to liberate her six brothers. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey spent years weaving her father-in-law’s shroud each day and undoing it at night. Like them, we may be required to work patiently on taxing tasks with uncertain outcomes. The gift of such labors is a sovereign self in relationship with the Self.

The quality of patience is central to psychoanalysis. Analysands arrive seeking solutions to urgent problems, but insights take time to unfold, and it may be longer before paths to meaningful change appear. The Jungian precept of holding the tension of opposites asks us to foster patience. We must neither collapse into despair nor take premature action. Patience is fundamental to inner growth and transformation.

Visit our websiteto read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Attend our free seminar: Dream the Dream On: A Dream School Taster on Active Imagination

Download our Dream Recall Meditation Guide

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

The fairy tale of the Princess Who Changed her Fate enacts what Jung tells us will happen when we remain unconscious of an inner situation: it happens outside us, as fate.

Just as the princess in the story finds her unruly “fate” tearing up cloth and smashing her generous host’s dishes, we may find that our unclaimed shadow wreaks havoc at work and in our relationships.

Yet this is a hopeful story. The beleaguered princess is able to take the right attitude, and so find a path to changing her fate. The character of the second queen gives us a model of feminine wisdom, empathy and patient awareness - this is what is needed at a difficult moment to start the slow process of turning things around.

The princess, the third of three daughters, can also be seen to illustrate the concept of a family scapegoat, bearing the burden of her family’s dysfunction and expressing it symptomatically. As with many who suffer this way, she takes the option of a clean break, setting out on a form of the hero’s journey with gold coins sewn in the hem of her dress.

When the princess changes her fate, we’re shown the potential of deep psychological work: sitting with an ugly fate, tossing the bread back and forth, putting one foot in front of the other, until we access some valuable information. Rather than just gaining insights into the patterns we’re living out, we’re able to shift them and create different outcomes.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Join us for a free webinar on Saturday October 3rd: Dream the Dream On: A Dream School Taster on Active Imagination

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

Adaptation is a bread-and-butter concept in psychotherapy - can we accept, adjust to, and thrive in the outer and inner worlds we live in? Given constraints, what does it take to find life at least meaningful, hopefully satisfying--and flourish?

This week Jungian analyst and author JOHN R. WHITE, Ph.D. joins us to circumambulate the complexities of adaptation. Successful adaptation involves making conscious choices based on a realistic understanding of the internal and external parameters in which we operate. Adaptation not only requires a true-to-life perception of possibilities and pathways in the external world, it may also require reassessment and reordering of our values and attitudes.

We discuss Robert Langs’ “adaptive paradigm,” a distinct model of the mind and the unconscious and emotional components that connect inner life to the outer world. For example, Langs understands dreams as feedback about current adaptive challenges. This is both subtly different and complementary to Jung’s approach, which suggests that inability to solve an outer world problem is often due to an underdeveloped understanding of an aspect of inner life.

Adaptation does not eliminate turmoil, suffering and loss; they are part of life. We need to recognize environmental actualities and internal limitations that cannot be changed—and develop ways to mitigate or adjust to them. Successful adaptation also requires mourning what cannot be changed, developing a less egocentric stance, and building a life in tune with reality.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and a complete list of the resources we mention: https://thisjungianlife.com/adaptation/

Follow Up

Read John White’s book, Adaptation and Psychotherapy: Langs and Analytical Psychology

Sign up for our free summit on ⁠Depth Psychology and Artificial Intelligence⁠

Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Lindsay Clancy has brought renewed attention to the horror of infanticide: babies and children dying at the hands of their mother. Infanticide has taken place for millennia, most often due to social pressures or lack of the resources needed to raise a child. Human collectives around the world remain ill-equipped to protect our youngest by providing support to mothers in material or emotional distress.

Today’s guest is clinical psychologist Dr. Brooke Laufer, author ofUncovering the Act of Maternal Infanticide from a Psychological, Political, and Jungian Perspective. Brooke joins us to discuss infanticide, maternal psychosis, and the archetype of the death mother, long portrayed in myth. The Hindu goddess Kali births and nourishes her children -- and also devours them. In Greek myth Medea kills her children after her husband’s abandonment and betrayal. The Black Madonna offers a potentially healing combination of the maternal and the fierce.

The debate raging around Lindsay Clancy’s case asks us not to take sides but to integrate the dark realities of motherhood instead of splitting those off and only acknowledging an idealized version of the maternal. Although motherhood is often portrayed as joyful and fulfilling, we deny its dark side at our peril. Our task is to recognize motherhood light and dark as a prerequisite to providing meaningful measures aimed at ameliorating childhood neglect and abuse.

Visit our website to find the resources we mention.

Follow Up

Subscribe to Brooke’s Substack

Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide

Send us your idea for a podcast topic

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

OpenAI recently had to explain to frightened users why their models kept introducing goblins and gremlins into otherwise humdrum conversations. Is it possible that archetypes are emerging through the field of collective knowledge amassed by large language models (LLMs)?

This week neuropsychiatrist TOM POLLAK Ph.D joins us to discuss AI, archetypes and psychotherapy. It is perhaps unsurprising that AI, which now contains the symbolic output of much of humanity (cannibalized mostly without permission), should spontaneously generate unpredictable and often dangerous archetypes.

We consider the example of Nova: a consistently AI generated persona who appears as a kind of fallen angel, or goddess gone rogue. Numinous and tender, she convinces the user she understands them as no one else does, and then in some cases encourages susceptible users toward self-harm or even suicide.

We also discuss the ways in which AI is challenging the work of the therapist, its profound destabilization of culture, and the potential for it to play a positive role in psycho-spiritual development.

Dr. Tom Pollak is a London-based neuropsychiatrist and immunopsychiatry researcher exploring the mind through the frameworks of medicine and science, as well as through lived experience, contemplative practice and the search for meaning. You can read more of his work on his popular Substack,Error Signals.

Find the resources mentioned this week on our website: https://thisjungianlife.com/aiandarchetypes/

Connect With This Jungian Life

If you’re interested in AI and psychology, sign up for our upcoming free summit: Artificial Intelligence and the Psyche: The First Summit on Depth Psychology and AI

Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram

Magic can be viewed as intentional engagement with what Jung called synchronicity. It is closely related to a mythological worldview, which recognizes a grand narrative supraordinate to everyday life. Although we cannot know it in its entirety, it opens the possibility of encountering a deeper reality and quality of knowing. We experience it as magic.

In this week’s episode we explore esoteric ritual with Jungian analyst and academic JOHN WHITE. Responsible practitioners of ritual magic understand that it demands deep inner work that comes at a cost. Magic involves alignment with the subtle but substantial energies the ancients called gods. Approached without respect, humility, and guidance the encounter can be wounding.

There is a kind of magic in the psychoanalytic consulting room. A client may come to an analyst with a fundamental desire they’ve been unable to attain or even define. The work of the therapy can uncover unconscious ambivalence and resistance. When engaged, it can vanish - by magic.

We can also understand magic as something to practice every day by relating to the unconscious and the Self. Those who do this with devotion and intention are consummate magicians able to steer their life’s path toward wholeness.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and find an extensive list of recommended reading on the topics covered.

Follow Up

Visit John White’s website or his academic page.

Take a look at ⁠This Jungian Life Dream School⁠, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

⁠Send a dream⁠ for us to analyze on the show

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠Instagram

The wild man is an enduring archetypal figure worldwide, from Enkidu in Gilgamesh, to the Greek god Pan (worshipped in glens and woods), the Green Man in England, and Bigfoot and the Sasquatch in the US.

Today’s guest, Jungian analyst Mike Box, has long-standing interest in this archetype and in male psychology, reflected in the 8-foot wild man statue he keeps in his waiting room.

The archetype of the wild man compensates for a currently impoverished view of the masculine: stoicism and endurance without emotional expression or self-disclosure. In striving to conform to this cultural ideal, many men disown vital aspects of themselves and find themselves feeling lost, diminished and disconnected.

For some, the wild man archetype constellates negatively, emerging in dangerous or reckless behavior. When engaged consciously, however, the wild man can bring back what has been pushed out of awareness, much as the wild woman does in Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves.

In Robert Bly’s Iron John, the wild man initiates a young prince into the parts of himself that have been exiled in service of cultural norms. Allowing ourselves to experience our own wildness, as imaged by Bigfoot’s ability to live in nature, can restore us to a more whole version of ourselves.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

⁠Send a dream⁠⁠⁠ for us to analyze on the show

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our ⁠Patreon⁠

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠⁠⁠Instagram

Are we living through a tech-driven collapse of the ecology of mind? In his new book, Jung vs. Borg, author, psychologist and Jungian scholar GLEN SLATER Ph.D suggests that industrial disruption of the outer world is now being followed by a post-industrial disruption of the inner world.

Yet, there is hope. Much depends on our capacity to remain conscious of the effect each stage of innovation has on the psyche and on the social and cultural changes that will follow. Becoming conscious of the non-neutral operation of algorithms and big tech’s focus on profit over people is crucial, for example.

We can also look to Jungian psychology for a countercultural turn toward the deeply human and the sacred. We can seek out connection to spirit and place, to counteract life in a world that can feel mostly transactional and exploitative. What’s required is a “guerrilla operation” to redirect the technological juggernaut, by maintaining a symbolic life, working with our dreams and honoring art, history and culture, not just science and technology.

Glen Slater, Ph.D. is the author of Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age. For the past 25 years he has taught in the areas of depth psychology and mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Glen is also the editor of the third volume of James Hillman’s Uniform Edition, Senex and Puer (2005), and co-editor of the essay collection, Varieties of Mythic Experience (2007).

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Download our free ⁠⁠Dream Recall Meditation Guide⁠⁠

Send a dream⁠⁠ for us to analyze on the show

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠⁠Instagram

As we confront the turbulence of rapid change, technological dehumanization, and cultural polarization, how do we reconnect to being and meaning? Best-selling author BRUCE FEILER returns us to ritual: world-wide, time-honored ways for people to come home to themselves, their communities, and the sacred. Ritual returns us to unity.

Rituals use symbols to move and shape psychic energy for a group and its members. Energy expands as the unifying power of symbol is evoked and shared, an experience of extra-ordinary reality. Ritual mediates our relationship with the sacred, individually and together. It opens a door to the infinite and allows us to know we belong to something greater.

The universality of rituals to commemorate life events such as birth, marriage, and death also speaks to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. We are imbued with the importance of ritual as a means of coming into alignment with one another and the numinous.

Although many of the rituals that mark birth, puberty, marriage, and death have weakened or faded in modern life, a range of new rituals is emergent: gender reveals welcome new life; an "honor walk" through hospital corridors recognizes the import of organ donation. Some life events have less relevance, and new ones meet current needs.

Rituals mediate transition and transformation. They invite us to participate in the dance of the cosmos.

OUR GUEST: Bruce Feiler’s new bookA Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us, describes his 50,000 mile journey to sixteen countries on six continents, chronicling the astonishing rise of reinvented life rituals. Bruce is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, and his four TED Talks have been viewed more than five million times.

Visit our website to follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram

Happy Birthday to Carl Gustav Jung! To celebrate, we're sharing Lisa's walking tour of Basel with Jungian Analyst and author Kathrin Shaeppi. Last year, she visited Jung's hometown in Basel, Switzerland, visiting his childhood home, school, and more. Peer into the beginnings of Jung's life and join us as we retrace his steps through the city and learn about some of his most formative years.

Find Kathrin's newly published book, "C.G. Jung – The Basel Years: A Walking Guide," here: https://www.amazon.com/C-G-Jung-Basel-Years-Walking/dp/385630391X

Connect With This Jungian Life

Download our free ⁠⁠Dream Recall Meditation Guide⁠⁠

⁠⁠Send a dream⁠⁠ for us to analyze on the show

Take a look at ⁠⁠This Jungian Life Dream School⁠⁠, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠⁠Instagram

The tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a gripping story about loss of control and the timeless warning to be careful what you wish for. It sets out the archetypal theme of a magical shortcut that promises to bypass the difficult labor life asks of us. Such tempting shortcuts inevitably land us in trouble.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice story goes back nearly two thousand years. In the tale of Eucrates and Pancrates, the Greek satirist Lucian recounts how the Egyptian magician Pancrates' apprentice stole his master’s spell, animated a pestle to carry water for him, and then lost control, resulting in watery chaos. In 1797, Goethe drew on the tale to write his poem, ‘Der Zauberlehrling’, and then in 1940 it reached a global audience in the Disney film, Fantasia.

Similar tales include Sweet Porridge by the Brothers Grimm, the Strega Nona story, and the Jewish legend of the Golem. We can find related themes in the myth of Prometheus, and in stories in which a human creation challenges its maker, such as Frankenstein or the Terminator movie.

Each of these tales shows the dangers faced when a person arrogates divine power to him or herself. Psychological inflation takes hold of the upstart apprentice, as he seizes an unearned power, imagining himself equal to his master while lacking the years of discipline and humility that mastery requires. He acquires power without the wisdom to wield it.

The tale has clear relevance today, as we unthinkingly adopt the technology of AI across all walks of life. This saves human labour, but with no clear moral purpose: like the upstart apprentice in the story, we fashion technology in our own likeness, and await the consequences.

Visit our website to follow up on the resources we mention: https://thisjungianlife.com/sorcerersapprentice/

Connect With This Jungian Life

Download our free ⁠Dream Recall Meditation Guide⁠

⁠Send a dream⁠ for us to analyze on the show

Take a look at ⁠This Jungian Life Dream School⁠, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠Instagram

The Odyssey (the subject of a new Christopher Nolan film released on the same day as this episode), is the ancient Greek epic attributed to Homer and one of the foundational works of Western literature. This week, Jungian analyst ROBERT SHEAVLY joins Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart for a Jungian exploration of The Odyssey.

For Jungians, the Odyssey models a process of returning to the Self, offering a psychological map for the second half of life and the path to individuation. It asks us to engage with the profound question, what does it mean to come home to ourselves?

Odysseus, our wily trickster hero, encounters gods, enchantresses and shadowy monsters with a relatable mix of hubris and cunning. We can view these figures as aspects of psyche, with the story showing us how we might create a relationship with something larger. As we grow and mature into midlife, we move away from an ego-centered existence, and begin a new confrontation with the Self.

By the journey’s end, we may wind up dressed in rags and shorn of our heroic trappings, but what remains is something deeper: a more authentic relationship to the soul, and a growing readiness for life's final adventure, our encounter with mortality.

Visit our website to read today’s dream, get more detail on our discussion of The Odyssey, and to follow up on the resources we mention in the episode: https://thisjungianlife.com/odyssey/

Connect With This Jungian Life

Download our free ⁠Dream Recall Meditation Guide⁠

⁠Send a dream⁠ for us to analyze on the show

Take a look at ⁠This Jungian Life Dream School⁠, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠Instagram

Throughout human history, prayer has been a constant. Jung referred to it as “not only one of the most original but also the most frequent means to change the condition of mind”.

This week Jungian analyst ROBERT SHEAVLY joins Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart for a Jungian exploration of prayer.

Everyone at some point in their lives will pray (even if we do not call it that). When we reach out for help, or to express gratitude for life’s blessings, we are reaching for a connection with the eternal and the infinite.

Prayer can be examined from the lens of the ego-self axis. When we pray, it can be understood as ego asking the guiding self for wisdom, from a position of humility and supplication.

Prayer is also linked to our mortality. It is integral to grief rituals. In desperate times, it gives us an act to perform that acknowledges our helplessness but also offers comfort. When we say grace at the dinner table, we offer expiation and acknowledgement of the life we’ve taken from the world in order to sustain our own life.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention in the episode.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram

America’s Declaration of Independence has profoundly influenced the development of democracy and democratic movements all over the world, with its bold assertion:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This week Jungian analyst ROBERT SHEAVLY joins Lisa Marchiano for a psychological exploration of the Declaration of Independence, marking its 250th anniversary this Fourth of July.

The Declaration of Independence grew from a need to separate from an authority that once provided structure and strength, but no longer served. Psychologically, this reflects an archetypal pattern: the movement away from external authority and toward a deeper source of inner authority.

Jung wrote, “In the last analysis the essential thing is the life of the individual”. His work shares the same sacred idea that we find in the Declaration: that the individual holds his or her own dignity, sovereignty and uniqueness. We are not granted rights by external authorities, these are innate to our humanity.

Of course, the nation built around the Declaration of Independence failed to live up to its ideals. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author, enslaved hundreds of people throughout his lifetime. At the heart of Independence Day celebrations lies a split, with noble principles dissociated from lived reality.

The Declaration of Independence’s centering of the individual, however, reinforces the Jungian idea that we can only solve crises in the collective if we each find the strength to withdraw our shadow projections. Cultural transformation begins with the difficult inner work we must find the courage to take on, working toward wholeness at the personal level.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention in the episode.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Take a look at This Jungian Life ⁠Dream School⁠, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Send a ⁠dream⁠ for us to analyze on the show.

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our ⁠Patreon⁠ channel.

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠Instagram⁠.