therapy

Listening is fundamental to all good therapy. Really, it's the key thing in meaningful human interaction of all kinds. Listening represents the power of someone else taking our story seriously.

From a Jungian symbolic perspective, animals, and dogs in particular, often symbolize the bodily and instinctual dimensions of human life. When they appear in our dreams, for instance, dogs can often symbolize our instinctual side. This may relate to the sexual side of our nature,…

In this open space of time, you have the opportunity to learn something about yourself, about relationship, and about your feelings about your own real life. This day, seeming empty, may prove to be a doorway, if you take the opportunity it provides to look…

I thought that I would try and say a little bit in this post about how a Jungian approach to dream interpretation might look like "in action". Here's a dream motif that appears sometimes in case studies, in one form or another, the motif of…

Work-life issues are not properly analyzed in terms of financial cost-benefit or markets. They are only properly analyzed in terms of individual decisions, and in terms of what the individual values in his or her life. Individuals can't offload their responsibility to find a personal…

In this post, I would like to try and say something about the places in which I believe I really found some sources of resilience. If I had to point to one single characteristic of this small group of therapists that helped me more than…

I'd like to share a personal experience of mine through which I became changed, and, I believe, much more resilient. It's not that I'm trying to suggest that I've "got it all figured out", or that this set of experiences gave me "the key to…

The story of rescue of the miners trapped at the bottom of the mine at Copiapo, Chile embodies resilience,to a remarkable degree. The world's media have been following the fortunes of the miners with tremendous verve and intensity. From a psychological point of view, why…

Here is a video which I re-tweeted recently on Twitter. I decided to post it on my blog because I think that it gives a particularly revealing portrait of the psychiatrist CG Jung in his latter years.  The video is taken from “Face to Face”,…

What is your attitude towards doing therapy?  Is it something that you would ever consider?  Is it something only for severely damaged people, or “sick” people?  Or is it something that may be of importance for ordinary, everyday people?  In recent years, many peoples’ attitudes…