I have just spent half a year re-reading much of Jung’s work, in order to gain a more integrated perspective on his principal ideas. There is a reason why this is a sensible thing to do. Of course, I take it that Jung’s work has enough substance and relevance to be still of value today. (Anyone who doesn’t agree with that would simply ignore Jung entirely, or relegate him to a footnote in history...
Changes for the better, changes for the worse
Hillman is one of the most original and interesting writers in the tradition following Jung, and I have spent quite a few pages on this blog discussing his work already. Naturally, this means I have to combine several of his ideas and theories, which are distributed over multiple books, in order to gain a consolidated understanding. But there is a danger in this, too: Hillman’s work, as...
A theory of ghosts: hauntings
When I was in my late teens, I became haunted by a ghost. The experience was sudden and hit me unexpectedly. After a while, it faded away. But then it popped up again irregularly over the course of several years: whenever that happened, it was suddenly entirely present in bright, nuanced images and invariably gave me shudders of a peculiar and very intense quality. To this day, I’m not entirely...
Admiration and critical engagement
This post has a more personal character than most of the others. I hope it will clarify how I approach Jung’s work on synchronicities, which is at the center of this blog: my strategy in reading and interpreting it, as well as my attitude towards it, an attitude that is deeply admiring, but critical at the same time (as is probably evident from my postings already). 1. I admire, to begin with...