Latest Articles
Finding the Way Home to the Body
Karishma Sharma
September 1, 2024
Intuitives must engage with and deepen into the body’s knowing, enter into conversation with the body and be open to its revelations. Coming into relationship with the body has opened channels to the depths of my being, making me conscious of the guidance within, informing me of my innermost needs, and allowing me to accept the paradoxes of the inner world.
Trading the American Dream for Real Life
Sofia Taboada
June 11, 2024
The competent, professional, independent persona that I had painstakingly crafted over my entire adolescence and adulthood was taken from me. The woman who had climbed the ranks to become a successful executive at the pinnacle of the corporate world, with her glamorous jet-setting lifestyle, was gone. I had experienced an enormous personal defeat and, having no recourse left, I realized I had reached rock bottom.
The Rhetoric of Paranoia in an ESTJ Culture
Erika Raney
March 6, 2024
In this patriarchal and heavily capitalistic culture that privileges the thinking functions, feeling seems to dominate the unconscious collective psyche. In the rise of cults of personality in their contemporary manifestation, the inflated extraverted thinking function establishes a goal; then anything that does not adhere to that universal aim is excised. In this crusade-like paradigm, connection to the genuine feelings and needs of a diverse community is lost as unhealthy extraverted thinking tightens its grip on power.
From the Archives
Jung’s Third Dimension
Philippe De Sainte Maresville
February 5, 2014
Jung’s approach is based on pairs of polarities. Getting eight functions with such a ‘binary approach’ requires three levels of dichotomy. Jung clearly explained his split of the rational functions into two opposite functions and the same for the irrational functions; but he never provided a theoretical context for a third “dimension” of psychological type.
Mixing Right and Left
Philippe De Sainte Maresville
November 15, 2010
Do you know people who tend to confuse left and right? –Not that they don’t know where their left and right is, but they mix up the words. Generally, if you ask them for directions you will notice that their hands point the correct way but their words don’t. The words right and left come out incorrectly, with no logic.
Getting Beyond ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’
Adam Frey
December 11, 2012
Introverted thinking is more concerned with satisfying a subtle, personally perceived standard of truth—like Barack Obama in his first debate with Mitt Romney. People saw Obama hesitating and looking away from his opponent. I read that as him double-checking to make sure that what he was about to say would meet a benchmark of critical thinking.
Marriage as a “Hotbed of Individuation”
Jonathan Elias
April 25, 2021
Couples often wonder whether they are “ready” for such a commitment. I look for situations when each person’s “sore spot” is activated. When a couple is able to hold the tension of the activated inferior function and find a way to make their relationship a vehicle for the development of personality, then they are “ready” for marriage in one of the most crucial ways.
Something’s Trickster in Denmark
Steve Whiteford
January 5, 2011
Was Shakespeare ultimately cautioning us about the potentially disastrous effects of unbridling the Trickster in psyche or society? …“To be, or not to be.” To trust one’s Self, or not. Therein lies the dilemma of the modern man. With a cacophony of internal archetypal, spiritual, and societal voices, to whom do we listen?
Anxiety and the Energy Attitude
Sophia Dunn
September 5, 2012
I went back to the thing that seemed to make no sense. I asked Matt why he thought he became anxious coming home from work but did not experience this fear on his way into work? I had spent the hour prior to my session with Matt going through notes of other therapies with other ENTJs, but nothing in this other work had seemed particularly germane.
Marriage Through Peace and War
Van Bui
July 11, 2018
Igniting the spark of opposites produced during conflict can provide an opportunity for holding the tensions between the one-sided attitudes. The process requires confronting and embracing the forces of unconscious qualities, along with holding the tension and uniting of opposing forces, in order for the full expression of an individual’s potential to be revealed.
Type, Psychoanalysis & Meditation
Polly Young-Eisendrath
November 15, 2010
…how do we get a “spaciousness” in our own responses so that we can experience our feelings, our thoughts, our motivations without acting on them directly—but without denying them either. This is not a matter of suppressing, dissociating, trying to override one’s negative experience; it’s not a matter of controlling; it’s not a matter of pushing anything aside. It’s a matter of being able to watch what is going on in our own experience…