Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies
Not a member yet
137 research outputs found
Sort by
The Castaway Archetype in Two Tales of an Island Year
Full text linkThe castaway archetype is examined in Lucy Irvine’s Castaway and Gerald Kingsland’s The Islander—dual accounts of a year spent on Tuin Island in the Torres Strait north of Australia. The castaway archetype adds a survivalist theme to C. G. Jung’s interest in living simply and close to nature—as he did at Bollingen—and intersects with his ideas in the essay “Archaic Man.” In general, castaways’ exposure to extreme isolation, survival conditions, and perils both physical and psychological activates an inheritance from ancient humans. However, contrasting markedly with Jung’s positive ideal in “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” Irvine and Kingsland live at cross-purposes because they constellate incompatible archetypes, which results in what Anthony Stevens calls the “frustration of archetypal intent.” Kingsland enacts the husband, but Irvine enacts the castaway; he loves her erotically, but her passion is for the island. Although projection, compensation, and enantiodromia complicate matters, the experience proves psychologically instructive for both, though the lessons are hard won
Patriarchal Trauma and the Virtuous Archetype of the Mansplained Public School Teacher
Full text linkShadow and Society: The Forgotten Child in Collective Contexts
Full text linkIn 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, along with the experience of actual children. A working hypothesis is that attentive listening to the voice of the divine child within each person supports processes of personal growth and spiritual transformation, in so doing mending the woundings of colonization and traumas inflicted by families and cultural systems. A Jungian perspective reveals a wound: the forgetting, through abuse or neglect, of the human relationship with the divine child archetype. The problem, from a Jungian perspective, becomes perilous, psychologically speaking: A person cut off from the child has no access to the bridge back to the Self, which cannot be discovered without the animating presence of the divine child. With the re-membering of the archetypal child in mind, the paper places emphasis on engaging with transpersonal forces that serve what Jung believed to be the religious function of the psyche. Jungian practitioners in community-based endeavors strive through arts-based practices to facilitate the integration of shadow aspects, as well as methods that seek to decolonize minoritized and marginalized frameworks and promote multiple ways of knowing
Review of Alchemy, Jung, and Remedios Varo: Cultural Complexes and the Redemptive Power of the Abjected Feminine by Dennis Pottenger
Full text link
Review of Clash of Cultures: A Psychodynamic Analysis of Homer and the Iliad by Vincenzo Sanguineti, MD
Full text link
Warriors in Liminality: An Alchemical View of the Transition from Military Service to Civilian Life
Full text linkThis paper uses alchemical metaphor to examine the psychological challenges United States military veterans face as they attempt to reintegrate into civilian society. The arc of the research tracks a military member’s progression from Basic Training to the transition back into civilian life. In particular, it pinpoints the psychological harm inflicted by the military’s collective consciousness on the individual psyche. Examining the process of military training from the perspective of a Jungian understanding of the psychological stages of alchemy, the paper illuminates a process that presents each military member with profound difficulties related to identity, the ability to engage in a vibrant relationship with the Self, and the ability to reenter civilian life. In conclusion, it highlights the need for civilians, elected officials, and the mental healthcare community to help military veterans address the psychological pain of their service through practices that support their adjustment to civilian life from a holistic perspective that includes image, soul, and conscious connection fostered between the ego and archetypal forces that animate human life
Ensnare: The Myth of Ambrosia and the Archetypal Project of Creative Womanhood
Full text linkThe present research blends archetypal and feminist perspectives, along with current research into the hemispheres of the brain, to investigate the psychological implications of the pursuit and attempted murder of Ambrosia, a nymph and nursemaid to Dionysus, by King Lycurgus of Thrace in Ancient Greece. A depth psychological story of psychic activism, feminine liberation, and transformation, “Ensnare” builds around a single image from a piece of Greco-Roman artwork—the attack and attempted murder of Ambrosia by Lycurgus, whose deeds evoke the destructive forces of literalism, monotheistic temperaments, intolerance to diversity, exclusively rationalistic attitudes, and patriarchal systems that deaden the imagination and imperil the unfolding of soul. Theoretically, this project of creative womanhood relies upon Hillman’s (1975) four modes of re-visioning psychology: personifying, or imagining things; pathologizing, or falling apart; psychologizing, or seeing through; and dehumanizing, or soul-making. Following Hillman, “Ensnare” invites the reader to find and make soul through a non-literal attitude of fantasying that creatively engages the imagination and images of female empowerment from the myth. The aim of this imaginal engagement with the mythological figures of Ambrosia, Lycurgus, Gaia, and Athene is to discover and partner with the archetypal presences who supported Ambrosia’s liberation as we work to bring the meaning of her initiatory experience to our own ideas and ways of being
