Abstract: Like the body, the drum, with its immense somatic power, is colonized in Western culture, the complex cause of which is directly tied to colonialist and missionary efforts to save African slaves from the perils of their so-called demonic religious practices, which involved cultivating possession states through drum and dance rituals. Yet, there is a much better view of drummers, one...
This paper explores the Slavic Rozhanitsy as archetypal figures who symbolically mediate feminine temporality, embodied cycles, and the individuation process within a Jungian and post-Jungian framework. Drawing on comparative mythology, cultural anthropology, and feminist depth psychology, it situates menstruation, fertility, and menopause as not merely biological phenomena but as thresholds...
This article builds on the work of Peter Levine to argue for an embodied approach to trauma that has no single causal event or definitive ongoing cause of harm. These “estranged sorrows” emerge based in blocks to learning that occur throughout one’s life, either through a lack of meaningful relation in early development or through being raised in an environment anchored in a cultural complex....
In Soul's body, Tina Stromsted offers a deeply informed and beautifully written integration of Jungian depth psychology, somatic practice, and creative movement.At a time when trauma, dissociation, and disconnection from the body are recognized as central clinical concerns, this book feels timely and important.It speaks to clinicians across modalities, somatic and arts psychotherapists,...
Encounters with spirits are inherently numinous since they fill us with awe and a sense of connecting with something greater or other. The term spirits can refer to a wide variety of typically unseen beings including deities, spirit animals, nature spirits, and deceased persons. Jung thought that spirits were autonomous complexes separate from the ego, writing “Spirits, therefore, viewed from...
In this paper, the archetype of the Child is considered as a psychological presence that fosters creativity and relationality for individuals and groups. The capacity for integrating the shadow aspect of human nature is a crucial psychological solution for reducing harmful biases and projections that negatively impact the subtle and emergent potential of the archetypal presence of the Child,...
The essay uses transpersonal and Jungian psychologies to describe a profound encounter with an aging lioness in the South African bush. It explains somatic dreaming as a practice of intentionally dwelling with exceptional experience by focusing on the bodily responses of the dreamer and the vivid somatic aspects of the dream images, or figures, as embodied others. The autonomous figures of what...
The authors review the history of and recent research on the psychotherapeutic efficacy of psychedelic drugs. Psychedelic drugs appear to provide access to unconscious material and, when used in a therapeutic context, may cause deep and longstanding psychological change. The psychological effects of psychedelic drugs are reviewed from the perspective of Jungian theory. A series of clinical...
For complex reasons, Carl Jung was apprehensive of ecstatic rites in which participants dance to hypnotic drumming and transcend normal states of ego. He was also strongly opposed to the use of LSD, mescaline, and other psychotropic agents often used in such rites, cautioning that psychedelics facilitate access to unconscious energies one is ill-equipped to absorb. This paper represents a...
This paper explores the renewed emphasis of care for the Earth in the Christian tradition as an emerging archetypal shift toward Earth-centered psyche. Jung proposed that the Christian psyche would continue to evolve toward greater psychic wholeness. The current trends toward environmental awareness in religious communities offer compelling parallels to Jung’s ideas about the evolution of...
When C. G. Jung partnered with Sigmund Freud, he already had a broad knowledge of world mythology and an understanding of the unconscious formed largely from Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s Dionysian energy of nature, or physis. Unwilling to reduce this unconscious—matrix of dreams, myth, and literature—to Freud’s infantile sexual libido, Jung’s break with Freud was inevitable. His long...
This exploration considers the question: What healing and transformation might these image-makers bring to education? Through hermeneutic tracking, a telling of the Greek myth of Hermaphrodite’s birth lays the background. Upon this scene, the alchemical process of psychological development is described wherein a bridge is made to the education and the ways that it might come to be informed...
Jung claims that visionary imaginative literature, because its source is the collective unconscious, helps the collective psyche self-regulate. Proving Jung’s claim is difficult since shifts in collective consciousness have many causes, but an instance of literature’s playing a part in such a shift is Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book which contributed to collective realization of the...