In every culture and every religion, we find the concept of the underworld: sometimes located underground, and usually understood as a final destination after death.

This week, Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart circumambulate the notion of the underworld and what it means for us psychologically. James Hillman’s Dreams and the Underworld offers a guide, linking our dreaming life to myths of the underworld.

We discuss versions of the underworld in Etruscan, Mayan, Christian, Egyptian and Greek mythology, and explore how each culture envisions the threshold between the worlds of the living and the dead, and the extent to which it is possible to enter an underworld and return.

Psychologically, the underworld can represent a descent into the world of the unconscious, where completely different values apply. Awake, we may feel concerned about our job or our house, but if we listen to our dreams, we’ll often find the unconscious pointing us elsewhere, towards neglected truths or hidden desires.

A visit to the underworld can also be understood as a transformational loss of innocence, just as Kore is raped and abducted by Hades, and transforms into Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. In life, we will all experience a painful loss of innocence or an experience that feels like a descent into hell. Such descents may become important points of initiation on our life’s journey.

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

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

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A father who is unavailable - whether due to untimely death, a demanding job, family breakup, or simply an inability to step up and meet his children’s needs - may deprive his children of the emotional bedrock they require. They can struggle to access their capacity for aggression and creativity, or to build the self-esteem necessary for successful adult relationships.

As many fairy tales show us, an absent father is sometimes experienced alongside an abusive mother, leaving a complicated legacy of emotional wounding to be worked through. First of all, the abuse must be confronted, and then the failure of the absent parent to witness or protect.

Jung’s life offers us fascinating material with which to explore the impact of the absent father. His father’s powerlessness as an uninspired, struggling pastor planted the seed of Jung’s lifelong quest for the numinous. As a father himself, Jung paid little attention to his children as he developed his life’s work and maintained a relationship with his collaborator Toni Wolff alongside his marriage to Emma Jung.

Join Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart this week as they explore what it means to be an absent father, and how we might both survive and transcend the legacy of such a parent.

Visit our website to read today’s dream, get more detail on the absent father, and follow up on the resources we mention.

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Download our free ⁠⁠⁠Dream Recall Meditation Guide⁠⁠⁠.

Check out our ⁠⁠Dream School⁠⁠.

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our ⁠⁠Patreon channel.⁠⁠

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Merlin, the mythical prophet, magician, and kingmaker of medieval legend, has lived in the Western imagination for centuries. Arthurian legend gives us more than the idealized government of the Round Table and the hero’s valiant quest for the Holy Grail—it also gives us Merlin’s darkness and power: sorcery, communion with nature, and the prospect of achieving our aims through shadowy transgression.

This week, our special guest is Jungian analyst and friend DOUG TYLER. Doug guides us through Merlin’s role in Western culture, sharing some of his favorite stories and explaining the profound influence of Merlin on his analytic work and psycho-spiritual landscape.

Considered through a psychological lens, Merlin models the necessity of journeying downward and confronting our darker aspects. He prefigures Gandalf and Dumbledore, embodying the archetype of the mature masculine in a strong and shadowed relationship with the feminine. Merlin can also be understood as a counterpoint to Christ: although his father was a demon, he was born to a virgin mother and twice offered himself as sacrifice.

Read the dream we analyze in full on our website.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Download our free ⁠⁠Dream Recall Meditation Guide⁠⁠.

Check out our ⁠Dream School⁠.

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our ⁠Patreon channel.⁠

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

This week, to mark the publication in paperback of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart interpret a selection of short dreams sent in by listeners.

Many of us dismiss short dreams or fragments of dreams as unworthy of our time. We await the arrival of epic, cinematic dreams, while perhaps overlooking the gold that can be found in more “ordinary” dreams.

Honoring short dreams by writing them down and spending time with them can yield powerful insights. It can also work as an incentive to your unconscious, helping you remember more dreams, and more of your dreams. The time you spend on fragments and snippets strengthens connection with the unconscious.

We hope you enjoy today’s discussion of dreams: an overfed fish raising big relationship questions, a meeting with Greek mythology’s star-crossed lover Thisbe, a harsh landscape of volcanic rocks and blood, a bleached Christ figure, and a biting spider at a crossroads in the dreamer’s life.

Buy the paperback version of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams

Read the dreams we analyze on our website.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Download our free ⁠Dream Recall Meditation Guide⁠.

Check out our Dream School.

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel.

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Every archetype has a dual aspect: light and dark, and ‘mother’ as devouring and destructive is the dark side of this ever-present, over-arching archetype. The mother’s life-giving, bright aspect is counterbalanced by her engulfing, attacking aspect. The devouring mother is present across cultures in myth, fairy tale, religion, and literature, and most of us have at least had glimpses of her in our experiences as children or later, as parents.

In this episode Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart explore Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother and his and Jung’s concept of the unconscious as devouring mother.

Drawing on myths of the Aztec goddess Tlaltecuhtli, the Hindu goddess Kali, the tale of Snow White, and the film Black Swan, we examine the archetypal image of the mother who nourishes and devours, protects and possesses.

We also look at how the devouring mother shows up in ourselves and in our own parents. This dynamic can present as enmeshment, helicopter parenting, fear-based control, or an inability to allow our children to separate and become fully themselves.

Read the dream we analyze in full on our website.

Connect With This Jungian Life

We’re analyzing your short dreams or dream fragments to celebrate the publication of the paperback of our book, Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams: ⁠⁠send your short dream here⁠⁠.

Pre-order the paperback edition of ⁠⁠Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams.⁠⁠

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

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠⁠Instagram.

In this final episode of our series on Jungian alchemy, we explore coniunctio, the union of opposites that gives rise to new wholeness.

There are many ways in which we might encounter coniunctio in outer life. We might fall in love, form a partnership, or undertake transformative work with a psychotherapist. In some meaningful, mysterious way, two become one, giving us incremental tastes of transformation.

At the psychological level, work with one’s shadow represents the first stage of coniunctio. When we recognize and reclaim aspects of ourselves that have been split off or rejected, we begin to heal inner division and move toward wholeness.

We also discuss the sacred union, the second layer of coniunctio, in which we strive to achieve an inner marriage, creating new vitality, creativity, and psychic spaciousness.

Ultimately, coniunctio parallels Jung’s concept of individuation, the lifelong process of becoming whole by integrating the hidden, conflicting, and unrealized dimensions of the self and achieving a relationship with the greater Self.

Read the dream we analyze in full on our website.

Connect With This Jungian Life

We’re collecting your short dreams (under 3 sentences): ⁠send your short dream here⁠.

Pre-order the paperback edition of ⁠Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams.⁠

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

Follow This Jungian Life on ⁠Instagram.

Erotic dreams are extremely common. We may experience them as pleasurable, exciting and moving, or as disturbing and upsetting. It can be hard to talk about erotic dreams, even in therapy, as they insist on attending to secret satisfactions and shames.

There is relatively little written on the subject from a Jungian perspective, so this week we dive in and discuss how to work with your erotic dreams. We also analyze some of the many dreams our listeners sent in.

Erotic dreams may be about connection, union and intimacy, or confront us with shadow figures and situations that show us what we deny or disobey. They may also offer us potent images of unexplored desires.

Join us as we interpret four erotic dreams: a hedonistic experience in a hotel pool, an unsettling meeting with a repellent music teacher, a ritualistic sauna experience, and an unwanted kitchen encounter that invites the dreamer to reclaim her own desires.

Read the dreams we analyze in full on our website.

Connect With This Jungian Life

We’re collecting your short dreams or dream fragments to celebrate the publication of the paperback of Dream Wise: send your short dream here.

Pre-order the paperback edition of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams.

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

Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram.

In his new book, The End of the World, author and psychoanalyst JON MILLS considers the question of why humanity seems bent on self-destruction.

We face famine, climate change, obscene wealth disparities, and threats of global war and nuclear annihilation. Yet the majority of us seem to prefer living either in denial, or in irrational, active opposition to reading the writing on the wall.

This week Jungian analyst and co-host Lisa Marchiano interviews Jon about how we face up to impending catastrophe. Is there a viable alternative to the current situation in which we seem to be indulging a collective death wish, careening unconsciously toward a dangerous precipice?

Lisa and Jon discuss Jung’s emphasis on doing individual shadow work and how myth and fairy tale - a distillation of human nature and wisdom - might offer a spark of hope. If we can recognize and confront evil and hold the tension of opposites we can start a conversation with our shadow.

Follow Up for This Episode

Read Jon Mills’ new book, End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate.

Visit Jon Mills’ website.

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel.

Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide.