In her 1984 book, Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives, psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen delves into seven feminine archetypes within woman’s psyche, based on the goddesses of ancient Greece, whose names and mythologies have endured for more than three thousand years. Myths are not mere fictitious stories…

The crisis in mature masculinity is very much upon us. Men feel anxious, on the verge of feeling impotent, helpless, frustrated, unloved, unappreciated, and often ashamed of being masculine. Something vital is missing in the many lives of men. For students of mythology and Jungian psychology, there is hope. The external deficiencies we face—absent …

Confusion, wandering, isolation, darkness, disorientation—all evoke the labyrinth, a complex network of paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way out. Or do they? The labyrinth’s original meaning has been entirely distorted, which is only to be expected from such a perplexing symbol. Today, the labyrinth is found everywhere: in architecture,…

Animals have been an integral part of human existence since our earliest origins. They are deeply ingrained within us and play a crucial role in the unconscious. In various religions, animals are revered as gods. Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung frequently remarked that animals embodied the divine aspect of the human psyche. He wrote a…

Strange sightings have been reported in the sky throughout history. After the Second World War, however, the appearance of UFOs became prominent in culture. Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung studied the UFO phenomenon for more than a decade until his death in 1961. He wrote a book entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen i…

Since early childhood, Carl Jung experienced paranormal phenomena, that is, phenomena that are beyond the scope of scientific understanding. They were virtually commonplace in Jung’s family. Jung’s personal experiences with the paranormal would set him on a quest to find an explanation of these events with his theory of analytical psychology, as we…

The villain is the most captivating and intriguing of all archetypes. The hero would not exist without his darker counterpart, which reflects aspects of ourselves that we do not dare to acknowledge or confront, but which are present within all of us. 🛒 ⁠Official merch⁠ ☕ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Donate a coffee⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⭐ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠…

The Magician is the most mysterious and fascinating of all archetypes. He is a person who has gained access to esoteric or occult (hidden) knowledge, bringing the spiritual to the material. Thus, he is an initiate of secret and hidden knowledge of all kinds. As the Emerald Tablet teaches us, “As above, so below, and as below, so above, to accomplis…

The Wise Old Man or Sage is an archetype that is recognised by almost everyone, be it in stories, games, movies, or everyday life. In myth he is often shown as one living in isolation, meditating and living a simple life deep in a forest, in the mountains, or in other uninhabited places. The Wise Old Man is a lover of wisdom, and uses his experienc…

The Quest for the Holy Grail has fascinated the Western consciousness for a long time. It epitomises the true spirit of Western man and is, in many ways, the myth of Western civilisation. It is a perennial and timeless pattern that expresses fundamental concerns of the human condition. The Holy Grail is a mysterious object guarded by a king in a hi…

Fairy tales fascinate us and give us a sense of warmth and home-coming that comes from the mythical realm of the imagination, a necessary complement to our everyday life. We are fundamentally story-telling creatures, and there is much we can learn by reflecting on the fairy tales heard in childhood. They seem almost magical because they connect us …

Nightmares. We all have them. But what exactly do they mean? Why do we have bad dreams? Is there any psychological meaning behind them? Nightmares are the source of much of the horror we see in stories, myths, movies and games. They are an encounter with the dark side of the unconscious, which often includes facing some of the most painful aspects …

Philosophy is a mode of life, an act of living, and a way of being. Modern philosophy has forgotten this tradition, and philosophical discourse has all but overtaken philosophy as a way of life. Philosophy is not just an intellectual discipline, which can get abstract and divorced from the real world, but is most importantly a way of life that teac…

The wounded healer refers to the capacity to be at home in the darkness of suffering and there to find germs of light and recovery. It is the archetype at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures. As long as we feel victimised, bitter and resentful towards our wound, and seek to escape from suffering it, we remain inescapably bound to it. This …

Loneliness, emptiness, and anxiety – these are the main complaints American existential psychologist Rollo May encountered over and over from his patients. In 1953, May published Man’s Search for Himself, in which he explores these problems – that are perhaps more relevant than ever in our modern age. When society can no longer give us a clear pict…

The term puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy. Carl Jung used the term in the exploration of the psychology of eternal youth and creative child within every person. It is an archetype, and like all archetypes, has both a positive and a negative side. It can bring the energy, beauty and creativity of childhood into adult life, or thwart self-reali…

There is perhaps no figure in literature more fascinating than the trickster, appearing in various forms in the folklore of many cultures. Trickster is witty and deceitful. He is the timeless root of all the picaresque creations of world literature, and is not reducible to one single literary entity. Trickster tales have existed since ancient times…

Franz Kafka's dark world deals with existentialist themes such as alienation, anxiety, disorientation and the absurd. His work is so original that the term Kafkaesque was coined to describe the nightmarish and bizarre atmosphere of his work. Throughout his works we see the strange dream-like mixture of perplexity and embarrassment play out, and the…

Alchemy occupies a unique place in the collective psyche of humankind. Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Jung discovered alchemy and devoted the remaining 30 years of his life to studying it, which he practically dug up from the dunghill of the past, for it was considered pseudoscience, a forgotten relic of history and despised field of investiga…

Projection is a psychological fact that can be observed everywhere in the everyday life of human beings. It is an unconscious mechanism where one ascribes one’s own motivations, thoughts, feelings, and desires that are unacceptable to oneself, while attributing them to others. It is a misalignment of the inner and outer world, because what one is i…

Synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Jung which describes a meaningful patterns or meaningful coincidences of outer and inner events that cannot be causally linked. It occurs with an inwardly perceived event (dream, vision, premonition, thought or mood) is seen to have a correspondence in external reality: the inner image has "come true", bringin…

Active imagination is a technique developed by the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung. He considered it the most powerful tool to access the unconscious and for achieving wholeness of personality. Jung discovered this method between the years of 1913 and 1916, a period of disorientation and intense inner turmoil which he called his confr…

In his book Owning Your Own Shadow: The Dark Side of the Psyche, American author and Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson states that to honour and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime. In this podcast, we briefly clear up some misconceptions regard…

William Blake was an English poet and visionary artist whose unique work gives us a glimpse into an entirely different world. His art was ignored and neglected, and few people took his work seriously. He was generally seen as a madman. His vivid imagination, visions and mystical experiences lead him to a spiritual task that was the exploration of h…

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German Philosopher born in 1788 known for his dark pessimistic philosophical reflections. For Schopenhauer, the underlying force of reality is the Will (also called will to live or will to life), which is the essence of existence. It is an unconscious and blind desire that restlessly strives for more activity. The will is …

Nothingness is generally considered to be analogous with death and extinction which every healthy living instinct wants to avoid. Many find the notion of nothingness unfathomable. Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, however, was convinced that the way out of nihilism, that which renders meaningless the meaning of life, could only be reached by ga…

While lecturing on anxiety, Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich noticed that there was an enormous response in the post-war era, especially in the younger people, and he sought to give an answer to the growing anxiety which had developed. The aftereffects of the two World Wars had left the world in a state of disorientation, estrangem…

Lovecraft's dark philosophy is known as Cosmicism, which focuses on the insignificance of humanity and its doings at the cosmos-at-large, in contrast to the anthropocentric philosophies in which many find intellectual reassurance. This form of non-anthropocentrism is crucial to the philosophy of Cosmicism. The question of the meaning of life was be…

Few artists have so powerfully evoked the uncanny otherness of the unconscious like Swiss artist Peter Birkhäuser. His unknown dream paintings were met with blank incomprehension, and were not well-received by the art community of the time, but, viewed today, his vivid paintings bear striking testament to the disruptive and transformative reality o…

The anima and animus are two contrasexual archetypes crucial for individuation and to progress towards the Self in Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, they are the archetype of life and archetype of meaning, respectively. The anima is the personification of all female psychological tendencies in man, while the animus is the personification of all ma…

In Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes the nightmare of total equality, a society in which equality is finally achieved, but at the cost of freedom and individuality. One’s utopia is another’s dystopia. We’ll be exploring the increasing promotion of equality to the point of it being absurd as a consequence of the “unheard cry for meaning…

The Russian existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov is known for his “philosophy of despair” or “philosophy of tragedy”. For Shestov, the sources of philosophy were the human tragedy, the horrors and sufferings of human life and the sense of hopelessness. Tragedies take place in the depth of the human soul, where no eye can reach out to see. Consequ…

The persona is one of Carl Jung's most well-known concepts, representing the social mask that we put on. We all embody different masks in different settings, as it is our way to adapt to the demands of society, playing an important part in shaping our social role and in how we deal with other people. But, it also has its dangers. We will be discuss…

In the 19th century the status of mass society became a philosophical and moral issue in a manner hitherto unseen. It came to be defined as the permanent possibility in all individuals of losing concern for their personal status and worth, and assigning themselves to something outside themselves in an abstract “other”. We’ll be exploring the variou…

Carl Jung’s collective unconscious is one of his most well-known (and controversial) concepts. The collective unconscious is the aspect of the unconscious mind which manifests inherited, universal themes which run through all human life. He came upon the idea in a dream. The collective unconscious does not owe its existence to personal experience a…

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground in 1864 which is considered to be one of the first existentialist works, emphasising the importance of freedom, responsibility and individuality. It is an extraordinary piece of literature, social critique and satire of the Russian nihilist movement as well as a novel with deep psychol…

In his best-known work The Hero with a Thousand Faces published in 1949, Joseph Campbell describes the archetypal Hero’s Journey or “monomyth” shared by the world. The Hero’s Journey occurs in three sequential phases: separation, initiation and the return. In the climax of the myth, the Hero experiences a psychological death and rebirth. The death …

Modern society has seen a massive spike in mental illness. Why could this be? We will be exploring the characteristics of modernity and associate it with the rise of mental illness. Modernity is associated by scientific and technological advancement, individualism and hedonism. The empowerment of the individual self is one of the most ramifying fea…

Friedrich Nietzsche provided the first detailed diagnosis of nihilism as a widespread phenomenon of Western culture and warns the world of its consequences, most famously in the parable of the madman where he proclaims that "God is dead". Nietzsche was concerned primarily with existential nihilism, where life as a whole has no intrinsic meaning or …

The knight of faith is one of Kierkegaard’s most important concepts, which he discusses in Fear and Trembling under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio. He begins explaining the knight of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Although he has never found any knight of faith, he would not deny on that ground that they exist. He looks like any …

Carl Jung warns us against the dangers of the collective shadow (the unknown dark side of society) and urges us to develop our personal shadow (the unknown dark side of our personality) to be consciously aware of the collective shadow and not fall prey to it. We must acknowledge our personal shadow and enter into long and difficult negotiations wit…

Man cannot stand a meaningless life. What is the meaning of life? It is hard to think of a single proposition that can make your life meaningful in an instant. One can, however, orient oneself more meaningfully towards one’s goals. To find meaning is a dynamic process that constantly shapes yourself, immerses yourself in reality and has reality imm…

What is the meaning of death? It is the unequivocal and permanent end of our existence. Most people unconsciously repress the idea of their death, as it is too horrifying a notion to think about. Some are perhaps not so horrified of the idea of death, but rather the pain associated before one’s death, or the death of loved ones. We live entirely un…

Life is a journey of self-realisation, of understanding and discovering who we truly are, and of maximising our potential. While this might be a life long journey, one can be closer or further from one's true self. This video analyses self-realisation from a philosophical and psychological perspective. Starting from the father of existentialism, Sø…

What is the meaning of suffering? One of the problems of life is meaningless suffering. Life is pervaded by suffering, and this suffering must be meaningful. It is hard to deny that to live is to suffer, as long as we do not mean that to live is only to suffer. One who cannot bear suffering and tries to avoid the unavoidable is bound to end up in e…

In Either/Or, Kierkegaard dedicates a chapter on the problem of boredom and the difficulty of maintaining happiness, and proposes his solution for it through the aesthetic sphere of existence. To explain how one avoids boredom, the aesthete’s worst enemy, he proposes “crop rotation” as an attempt at a theory of social prudence. It is a sort of scie…

Nietzsche recommends to spend some of our time in complete solitude. To reflect upon the inner voice that conditions our life which is the product of the common conscience of society. Solitude is but a temporary matter. He also recommends to spend time with people who possess virtues of the love of life, these “higher men” allow for mental elevatio…

Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Overman) is among the most important of his teachings, along with the eternal recurrence and the will to power. The appearance of the overman most famously occurs in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He is declared as “the meaning of the earth”. The overman is the ultimate form of man, he is one who overcomes nihilism by creating his …

The Present Age was published in 1846 by Søren Kierkegaard. He discusses the philosophical implications of a society dominated by mass media, foreseeing the rise of twenty-four hour news and social media, it examines the philosophical implications of a culture of endless, inconsequential commentary and debate – a society eerily similar to our own. …

Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits was published by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1878 and represents a “monument of a crisis” for Nietzsche, a critical turning point in his life and thought. The book marks the beginning of a second period in Nietzsche’s philosophy, his period as an independent philosopher. ☕ Donate a coffee ⭐ Support on Patreo…