I want to share a story with you about The Secret of the Golden Flower.[1] How I came across it, the journey it took me on and something of what I learnt along the way. The story begins Lü Yán, also known as Lü Dongbin (796 CE-1016 CE) was a Tang Dynasty Chinese scholar and poet who has been elevated to the status of an immortal in the Chinese cultural sphere, worshipped especially by the Taoists. Lü is one of...
Reflections and confessions in the aftermath of the year 2020This will be the third in a sequence of annual confessions I began in 2018. The motivation for these is to connect and form common cause with the students entering the Nigredo Stage of the Magnum Opus Programme that commences each year in January, to conduct my own psychic housekeeping, and to take a moment to pause and reflect on the virtue and vices of the year I have lived through....
A Summary and Review by Shane Eynon, PhDAuthor: Carl Gustav JungOriginal title: The Black Books 1913-1932. Notebooks of TransformationTranslator: Martin Liebscher, John Peck, Sonu ShamdasaniPublisher: Philemon Foundation and W. W. Norton & Co.Publication date: 2020Pages 1648ISBN 9780393088649The Black Books (Jung, 2020) have been promoted primarily as the source material for the Red Book (Jung, 2009) in the material used by the publisher (Philemon Foundation, 2020). The text of The Red Book draws on material from The Black Books between 1913 and 1916. Approximately fifty percent...
The Jungian concept of the anima and animus is one of Jung’s most engaging and potent contributions to psychoanalysis. Of all the articles we have published on this site the posts on the anima and animus consistently get the most views and rank highest on Google’s search engines. It is one of those ideas that has come to be definitive of Jungian psychology.Simultaneously, of all the concepts we have taught at the Centre none has proved more difficult than the...
Hardcover, 848 pagesPublished November 1st 2018 by Catafalque PressISBN1999638409 (ISBN13: 9781999638405)Edition Language: EnglishAuthor: Peter Kingsley Synopsis written by Dr. Shane EynonCatafalque offers a revolutionary new reading of the great psychologist Carl Jung as mystic, gnostic and prophet for our time. This book is the first major re-imagining of both Jung and his work since the publication of the Red Book in 2009--and is the only serious assessment of them written by a classical scholar who understands the ancient Gnostic, Hermetic and alchemical foundations of his thought...
As explained in my last post The Psychological Practice of Confession I have committed to an annual public confession. My first such confession was made at the end of last year (2018)[1]. This is my second annual confession. I won’t restate the reasoning behind these confessions here, which would be redundant given my prior post. However, there are a few issues I want to emphasise prior to the confession. This is done both for the purposes of providing an example of confession to students commencing...
This post deals with the topic of confession, its psychological and spiritual value, how to understand the idea and purpose of confession in the psychotherapeutic context and the importance of collective or objective context in the act of the confession. In addition to offering some background and theory on the act of confession, I will offer you some ways of thinking about why you might consider adopting it as a personal practice and a structure within which you can frame...
modern (wo)man in search of soul in the wasteland of meaningEpigraph: In 2006 I had occasion to spend Diwali in Mauritius with my then sister-in-law, Joanne Farah. One of the celebrants at the hotel where we were staying was offering Henna tattoos to the guests. I asked for the word ‘spirit’ to be tattooed on my arm. When my sister-in-law, seemingly bemused, inquired as to what exactly I considered ‘spirit’ to be, I was unable or possibly unwilling to answer....
Michael Eblen Farah my brother, died on the 4th of June this year, 2019.[1] Whilst a shock, his death was not entirely unexpected. He had a high risk of mortality at the time of his death and in the two or three years preceding it. He battled his entire adult life with depression and generalised anxiety disorder; and, few years ago, was also diagnosed with adult ADHD, which was certainly consistent with his behaviour and lifestyle. These issues,...
Projection is one of the classic psychological defence mechanisms described by Sigmund Freud in psychoanalysis.[1] According to Freud, a defence mechanism, such as projection, is used for two primary reasons. Firstly, to defend anxiety. The subject at risk of experiencing overwhelming anxiety uses a psychological defence mechanism to establish an internal (intrapsychic) firewall that prevents her conscious ego being flooded by the anxiety inducing content. The second is to maintain the subject’s self-schema or sense of identity. Anything...
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