Shadow
Qualities we struggle to recognise as our own. The shadow can hold anger and fear alongside neglected creativity, courage or strength.
AkashicLIBRARY · Depth Psychology
Carl Jung The Modern Shaman
What happens when we turn towards the images, fears and possibilities that surface in dreams and in the parts of ourselves we overlook?
01 · Analytical Psychology
A Vocabulary For Inner Life
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung founded analytical psychology. AkashicNET uses the modern shaman as an editorial metaphor for his attention to dreams, symbols and encounters with the unconscious. The metaphor belongs to this reading. Living Indigenous ceremonial roles belong to their own communities and traditions.
Archetypes
In Jung’s theory, recurring patterns that can take particular forms in myths, stories and dreams. Their expression varies with the person and the culture.
Individuation
The ongoing work of bringing conscious and unconscious aspects of life into a fuller relationship. Jung’s Self refers to that wider whole.
Synchronicity
A meaningful coincidence for which Jung proposed an acausal connection. The meaning someone finds in a coincidence and the evidence for its cause are separate questions.
Society of Analytical Psychology on the shadow ↗APA Dictionary on Jungian psychology ↗Jung’s Synchronicity ↗
02 · ConnectIONS Live
Can A Dream Seem To Answer Back?
Lucid dreaming author Robert Waggoner asks whether the responsiveness people encounter in dreams resembles a second psychological system in Jung’s account. One dreamer describes approaching a figure of death and embracing it after weeks of reflecting on mortality. Waggoner offers such accounts as examples for interpretation. Whether dream responses arise from a distinct psychological system remains an open question.
IONS hosted the live webinar on and posted this excerpt on .
The player connects to YouTube only after you select Load Video. You can also watch directly.
Watch on YouTube ↗03 · Film, Art & Conversation
When An Image Stays With Us
Nouel Riel’s experimental short Carpet Blue uses movement and Jungian archetypes to explore transformation. Its Los Angeles premiere on followed the IONS clip by four days.
Otto Dix’s Skull offers another encounter with mortality. A Death Café gives people a different way to meet the subject, through open conversation over tea and cake. Each offers space to ask what happens when fear becomes something we can look at together.
LACMA’s Frog in Cave-Shaped Vessel opens a separate cultural reading. The museum relates the four-lobed shape to a cave entrance and describes the vessel in the context of Maya cosmology.
When a series of coincidences feels more frequent, compare like periods. Decide what counts beforehand and log the occasions when it could have happened as well as the occasions when it did. A diary can preserve the meaning of an encounter and give its frequency a denominator.
Watch the Carpet Blue trailer ↗LACMA collection record for Skull ↗LACMA collection record for the Maya vessel ↗About Death Café ↗
04 · Historical Accounts & Experimental Evidence
From Jung’s Early Case Study To Mediumship Research
Jung’s medical dissertation examined the experiences of a young person who described herself as a medium. The Philosophical Research Society’s library offers a place to explore the history of occult and metaphysical literature, including books on mediumship.
Modern blinded studies ask how accurately readers identify information associated with a specific person under controlled conditions. The choice of comparison readings, scoring rules and access to information matters. Even a positive result leaves the source of any information open.
Jung’s early psychiatric studies ↗Visit the PRS Library ↗An example of blinded mediumship research ↗
