Spring Time for My Blog!

Well, this is the first new post for me on this blog for a very long time.  Thanks to a tremendous amount of help from the people at Six Apart, my blog is now re-vitalized, with a whole new look, and very many new features.  A warm “thank you” to them for all the many ways in which they’ve helped to make the blog come alive!

In re-vitalizing the blog, I’ve been doing a lot of careful thinking about what it is that I really want to DO with it.  The brief answer is that I hope to use it, as a therapist, both to reflect on life in suburbia and exurbia and to gain insight from the experience of others who live “here”.  According to the statistics, this is where most of us who inhabit North America actually live.  But there has been a lack of reflection on what it really means to live in “edge cities”, as suburbia and exurbia are sometimes called.  At the very least, this is certainly true when it comes to thinking about what is unique to the suburban psyche, and about what it means to connect with soul in these environments, which are so often characterized in the media and academic and popular culture as shallow pre-fab places where people “live on the surface”.

I am interested in these questions from the point of view of Jungian “depth psychology”, with its concern with myth, symbol and image, and also with the Jungian concern with “individuation”.  I hope to explore more in future postings just what I mean by this language, and some of the directions in which this perspective takes us when we look at our suburban lives.

I look forward to your enlivening comments and dialogue!