What exactly was it that did the haunting in "Vertigo"? Who was the ghost?
March 26, 2022
A theory of ghosts: not persons
26March
February 5, 2022
The inner world: adaptation and self-reflective awareness
05February
Jung frequently insists in his writings that the inner world has reality, and that as a person, we have to adapt to those inner realities just as we have to those of the external world. But adaptation as such is only one step on the path to individual self-development.
August 7, 2021
Archetypal stages on the path of individuation: a note on method
07August
Jung presents the process of engaging with the unconscious, aka the “individuation process”, often as a series of stages; where at each stage the focus is on a specific archetype. But if that route is somehow the typical one (or maybe even the only one), are there any particular reasons for this?
June 5, 2021
The ambiguous shadow
05June
In everyday parlance, when we refer to a person’s “shadow”, we often simply mean some grim, dark streak of their personality, perhaps even a violent or evil element. But what Jung meant by the “shadow” is a little more complex than this habit of our everyday talk suggests.
May 8, 2021
The dead backwaters of life
08May
There is a particular kind of life situation, in which a person may find themselves, and which fits the pattern I have discussed in my earlier post: it is one of those situations where archetypes are triggered. Let's call it the "dead backwater" type of life situations.
March 20, 2021
Mirrors: reflecting the Other Side
20March
People are complex: every human being has a dark side — a demonic aspect — in addition to the more acceptable mask they display towards their social surroundings.
December 26, 2020
The hypocritical mirror-critic
26December
Returning from his year-long stay on a Greek island, the protagonist of The Magus makes an intermediate stop in Rome. But he compares his impressions unfavorably with those he had in that other Mediterranean world: The sun shone as certainly, the people were far more elegant, the architecture and the art much richer, but it was as if the Italians, like their Roman ancestors, wore a great mask of...
October 10, 2020
The mirror and the mask
10October
What we see, when looking into the symbolic mirror, are those parts of ourselves which we would normally avoid to look at, and which we carefully also hide from others. These are part of the personal unconscious and make up, in Jungian terminology, our “shadow”. The false face that we show ourselves and the outside worlds (as long as we ignore the shadow), is called the “persona” (in the ancient...
