In America’s fevered, paranoid imagination the “internal other” as drug dealer tempts the good citizens and leads them from the clear air of the palace roof down into the basements of sin. But the terrorist, the “external other,” wants to tunnel under the walls and destroy the palace itself. Since long before 9/11/2001, the fear mongers have been in the lucrative business of reducing rational human beings to quivering children, willing to trade their celebrated freedoms for a thin promise of…

Lately, perhaps more than at any other time in recent history, Americans find themselves in a full-blown epidemic of “othering.” We are obsessed with cataloging the qualities of those individuals and groups who appear to embody everything that we cannot accept about ourselves.

Pick one or more: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un,…

 I continue my reflections on my spiritual pilgrimage to Peru in July 2018 in this latest blog post -  200 Steps to the Principle of Gratitude 

http://ow.ly/GT1J30mbnQ

Part Four

Myth is conveyed – and consumed – in narratives and images. So it is important to understand our most fundamental mythic image. The American obsession with individualism has been built up and buttressed by three centuries of stories, repeated in thousands of variations, of the lone, violent hero.

All societies evolved versions of Joseph Campbell’s classic…

Part One

An earlier version of this essay was published in 2013 as the introductory chapter in Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism, published by the Praxis Peace Institute.

You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself. – Ivan Boesky

This is America. If…

In this interview, scholar and professor, Les Lancaster, discusses the origins and aims of Transpersonal Psychology and compares and contrasts it to Depth Psychology, both of which have been highly influenced by the work of Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung.

He also delves into the connection between science…

Part Five

Whether they are uttered by Trump or by respectable media pundits, false equivalencies typically come into use in order to marginalize progressive alternatives when actual counter-arguments to them would be unconvincing. Here’s the logic:

A is the moderate opinion acceptable to those in power.

B is a progressive alternative, which gatekeepers ignore.

C is a loony, right wing conspiracy theory.

Eventually, public…

August 27, 2018 Culpepper Blog: War, Loss, and a Self-Directed Life: An Archetypal Study

In an earlier post on this site, “Projective…

Part One

In January 2013, Chuck Todd, chief White House correspondent for NBC, addressed a conference of professional vote-counters. His audience included sales reps for voting machine and software companies, as well as several state secretaries of state. Todd ridiculed critics of electronic election machines, saying that they must…

Rituals of Sacrifice: The Archetypal Roots of

Multi-Generational Trauma in the Americas, Part II

In our previous blog on the…

By Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson[i]

Many of us in our…

Just Published by Fisher King Press



Jungian Child Analysis…

11:00 A.M. – I leave Sebastopol in a good mood, after a wonderful poetry salon and a great breakfast with close friends. I have plenty of time to attend to today’s projects: get home, check the chickens, clean up, review the poems I might want to recite this evening during my KPFA interview about Rumi’s Caravan (www.rumiscaravan.com), meet another friend for coffee at 3:00, go to the Finnish Hall in Berkeley,…

We are really proud to offer this FREE PREVIEW to this brand new online course with John Lee author of The Flying Boy, The Anger Solution and many others.

Let us know what you think.

Enjoy,

Steve Stein

https://courses.wisdomfeed.com/p/the-anger-solution1

When life feels like a drag and events are depressing, it is a good time to lighten up. For that, we can call on the Jester. You may know this archetype best in the comedian, the entertainer, the party planner, the cruise director, the satirist, the practical joker, or the friends or colleagues who always…

When life feels like a drag and events are depressing, it is a good time to lighten up. For that, we can call on the Jester. You may know this archetype best in the comedian, the entertainer, the party planner, the cruise director, the satirist, the practical joker, or the friends or colleagues who…

Is schizophrenia a “severe mental disorder,” as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO)? How might changing the perspective of the traditional western medical model, which labels certain symptoms as strictly pathological, ultimately transform those who are suffering? The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) which originated in Europe teaches people with schizophrenia…

The third archetype we need to discuss is that of the Apocalypse. 

It is critical to this enquiry about rage in American life to remember that the myth of American innocence began to take form while Puritanism was still dominating all intellectual discourse and most politics in both Britain and North America. Then, the idea of “America” – and along with it, the…

Part Four

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand…Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. – F. Scott…