This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
Eavesdrop on three Jungian analysts as they engage in lively, sometimes irreverent conversations about a wide range of topics as they share what it’s like to see the world through the depth psychological lens provided by Carl Jung. Half of each episode is spent discussing a dream submitted by a listener.
- 1 hour 8 minutesCOAGULATIO: The Alchemy of Settling Down
COAGULATIO marks the psychological moment when possibility takes shape. Uncertainty recedes as we commit to our choices, and life slows and “thickens” into stable commitments and a predictable path.
Join Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Joseph Lee as we continue our exploration of Jung’s alchemical stages. This week, we discuss the concept of coagulatio, or the solidifying of what was once liquid.
Coagulatio involves settling into a path, a vocation, a relationship, or an identity. Yet these stages of solidification also carry with them loss. Incarnating something in the real world, whether in our creative life, marriage or career, means letting go of infinite possibility. Coagulatio can be seen as an antidote to puer psychology; signifying the demanding task of growing up and settling down.
We also investigate the process of coagulatio in the consulting room, where finding language or images with an analyst can shape our distress into something we can work with. Similarly, dream work offers the chance to condense our psychic turmoil into tangible, relatable images that can be used in a process of growth or transformation.
Coagulatio is not a permanent state: the alchemical phrase “solve et coagula” indicates a dynamic rhythm between dissolution and solidification. In the course of our life, we may find our stable path starts to feel joyless and rigid, at which point we may return to solutio, when structures loosen again and must be re-formed.
Read the dream we analyze and find this episode’s resource list on our website: https://thisjungianlife.com/coagulatio/
Connect With This Jungian Life
Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide
Send a dream for us to analyze on the show
Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.
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5 March 2026, 8:00 am - 1 hour 1 minuteWhy You Dream of Intruders: The Hidden Meaning of Break-In Dreams
Intruder dreams stage a boundary crisis: something arrives without the ego’s consent, and the dreamer wakes with fear, shame, or outrage.
Join Jungian analysts Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, and Lisa Marchiano as we analyze a selection of vivid listener-submitted dreams about intruders.
We begin with the word itself, “intrusion,” asking how a visitor can feel deeply unwelcome, but at the same time carry something with the potential to protect, repair or even save us.
We cover:
- How the mind negotiates trauma, dissociated affects, and developmental change.
- How meaning changes depending on whether we read the intruder as a threat vs as a messenger.
- How intruder dreams can point to weak boundaries, often disguised in waking life as “being nice” or “keeping the peace.”
- Intruder dreams as communications of unexpressed anger.
- Detailed guidance on working with your own intruder dream
The listener dreams we discuss feature a camel that shatters windows and becomes a man when welcomed; an animus-like husband as mediator between ego and unconscious; blank eyes and the golem as images of unfinished consciousness; and the “friendly threat” of unexpected roommates with bolognese.
Read the dreams in full on our website.
Connect With This Jungian Life
Download our free Dream Recall Meditation Guide
Send a dream for us to analyze on the show
Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.
Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram
26 February 2026, 8:00 am - 1 hour 5 minutesDissociation as Design: Why the Mind Sometimes Lets Go
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
Pierre Janet’s term abaissement du niveau mental describes an experience so common we barely notice it: fatigue, highway hypnosis, shock, wool-gathering, or monotony lowers the threshold of consciousness, and then images, memories, and impulses press forward. Jung found this idea useful for understanding threshold conditions that interfere with our normal skills, yet make symbolic material available, with the caveat that it’s only useful when it’s committed to memory and reflected on.
What separates a generative reverie from a dissociative collapse?
How can we make use of this dip into the unconscious to access imaginal material and return by choice?
How can we evaluate “doors that do not close” from trauma reverie and substance-induced hallucinations?
Jungian analysts Joseph Lee, Lisa Marchiano, and Deborah Stewart trace how dissociation, affect, and imagination shape what becomes thinkable, and why technique matters less than containment.
We discuss Janet’s early psychiatric discoveries and Jung’s ground breaking 1902 word-association experiments, why consciousness is so hard to maintain, how trauma stores feelings in places we cannot find, what fairytales offer archetypal examples of links between worlds, Jung’s frightening 1913 flood visions, the value of reality-testing and when it’s a violation of Psyche, Anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl’s observations of participation mystique and Ogden’s “analytic third” as models of a shared field phenomenon, and why active imagination and psychedelics must address not only how to open the inner door but how to close it!
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
19 February 2026, 8:35 am - 1 hour 1 minuteThe Outsider at the Gate: Are We Lovable When Persona Washes Away?
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea” is a parable about seeing beneath the surface. It shows us that our authentic nature can be detected, whether we’re swathed in status or rags, if we’re offered the opportunity. A prince’s search for happiness fails when it’s driven by lordly criteria. A wild storm heralds change and delivers a drenched possibility. A king and queen choose subtlety to coax what is hidden into sight, raising stakes about vulnerability, discernment, and the body as witness.
- What counts as evidence of realness, and why does the tale treat pain as the strongest credential?
- When ego choice collapses, what higher ordering functions intervene, and how do they design tests?
- What does sensitivity reveal that competence, status, and prettiness conceal?
We ask how a seed-sized irritant becomes a criterion of truth. We discuss the prince’s idealized bride, the storm as solutio and unconscious intervention, the gate as psychic defense and moral threshold, the queen’s ordeal as initiation, the pea as a metaphor for latent potential, bruises as involuntary testimony, sensitivity, and the fourth function as an unexpected route to wholeness.
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
12 February 2026, 8:00 am - 1 hour 21 minutes"What Do I Owe My Hurtful Parents?" Is The Wrong Question! Do This Instead!
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
In the aftermath of the holidays, many people find themselves facing an old question in a new stage of life: what does an adult child owe aging parents, especially when the relationship was full of criticism, absence, harm, or disappointment? The pressure to visit, to host, to reconcile, or to perform affection can feel like a moral demand, and a trap.
In this episode, three Jungian analysts question the idea of filial duty that feels like debt and lift up new aspects of discernment. They explore the mythic elements of the parent-child bond, the power of the internalized parent, and the inner figures that govern Psyche through guilt, rage, duty, love, and refusal. They consider the power of cultural scripts, the tension between fleeing painful demands on the one hand and familial duty on the other, and the pressure to abandon one's inner life. They offer practical and safe ways to release parental wounds without collapsing back into obedience, define boundaries to protect your autonomy, and clarify care vs. intimacy. You'll discover there is a psychic cost to remembering in the wrong way.
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
5 February 2026, 9:39 am - 1 hour 12 minutesCorruption Starts Inside You: Why Malignant Certainty Makes You Dangerous!
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
In this episode, Joseph, Lisa, and Deb explain why Corruption is not only a political problem, but a human one, why Power breaks trust long before it breaks laws, and why the most dangerous people are often the most certain. They reveal the core mechanism behind Corruption and Inflation: when unconscious drives flood the ego, making someone feel exceptional, entitled, and above ordinary rules. They unpack how Corruption escalates quietly, from small rationalisations and moral distortions to full-blown abuse of entrusted Power that destroys relationships, organisations, and communities. Joseph brings decades of clinical experience, including high-stakes psychiatric hospital work, where he has seen how quickly people can become less reflective while feeling more “right.” Lisa and Deborah add decades of analytic practice and teaching, connecting leadership research, brain science, mythology, and Jung’s warnings about the will to Power, certainty, and the loss of love and conscience.
We explain how:
• Power amplifies certainty, and certainty is the earliest warning sign that something is going wrong
• Fear narrows perception, creates straw-enemies, and locks groups into “us vs them.”
• The fantasy of purity forces splitting, supercharges the shadow, and drives scapegoating
• The real antidotes are conscious constructive Power, humility, feedback, and systems of checks and balances
If you think Corruption belongs only to bad people, this conversation is a wake-up call. Corruption grows through small compromises, it spreads through groups, and it accelerates when leaders cannot tolerate doubt, accountability, or the lived experience of the people beneath them.
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
29 January 2026, 10:01 am - 1 hour 13 minutesHow Did I Become a Statistic?
Jung wrote “The Undiscovered Self” in 1957, opening with “What will the future bring?”, as the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and nuclear weapons gained enough momentum to threaten survival. He argued that mass-mindedness, amplified by state power, corporate bureaucracy, and scientific rationalism, reduces people to statistics, numbs conscience, and makes evil all the easier to project.
When institutions promise safety and efficiency, what happens to individual responsibility?
If religion is an instinct, what strange substitutes will it flow into when it’s suppressed?
What can we do to strengthen our Ego-Self axis to resist groupthink?
Late in his life, Jung sought to restore the value of religion by freeing it from specific dogma and defining it as a conscientious regard for the irrational facts of experience. As he watched various nations lose their footing and careen into extremes that swept the populace into unthinking obedience, he quietly stated over and again, a vital connection to the transpersonal was the only stable alternative to the deification of the State.
We discuss how crowds crush self-reflection, why turning individuals into units of human resource makes people feel replaceable, how projection turns rivals into demons and justifies violence, why psychologies that seek to make us fit in are agents of compliance, how shadow integration grants inner authority, how secular isms capture our religious hunger by harnessing their agenda to archetypal rituals of purity, heresy and sacrifice, how art might save us and why dreams will always offer a refuge that the collective cannot steal from you.
Mentioned:
The Undiscovered Self
Present and Future
God, the Devil, and the Human Soul
Jung, His Life and Work
The Apotheosis of Washington
Nuremberg
The Wall
Infinite Jest
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
22 January 2026, 10:10 am - 1 hour 12 minutesHow to Stop Hiding After Trauma (Starting Today)
You're invited to our free Dreams for Change seminar on Sunday January 18th. Sign up here.
*****
If you have been through betrayal or loss, you may still be living by a terrible rule you made when in pain.
It can look like hiding, overworking, numbing out, or letting people cross lines because being unseen feels safer. This episode uses the fairy tale “All-Kinds-of-Fur” to help you identify your survival pattern and take the next step out of it. When you update the rule you made when in trauma, you get your choices back.
What you’ll learn
- Identify the “impossible promise” that keeps you stuck, and where it began.
- Notice your “fur cloak,” the mask of busyness, perfectionism, people pleasing, or disappearing.
- Stop confusing coping with identity, and start practicing safer honesty.
- Practice the “30-minute return,” small windows to feel, speak, and be seen.
- Build endurance through gentle reveal-retreat-return, until you can stay safely present.
Joseph Lee and Deborah Stewart, Jungian analysts, turn this tale into a guide to show how your inner world can heal after trauma.
In the tale, the princess survives by covering herself in fur and soot, and you may have built a costume too. That costume once protected you; now it may block love, work opportunities, and genuine intimacy. You might scroll at night, over function in relationships, or stay “fine” so nobody asks.Healing is repeated practice; you show up, you pull back, you show up again. The “gold” in the story is what stays intact in you, even after the worst day.
This week, choose one safe moment to let that gold show, one honest sentence, one boundary, one small ask, then note the result.
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
15 January 2026, 11:44 am - 1 hour 11 minutesPurpose as Service to a Self-Led Future
You're invited to our free Dreams for Change seminar on Sunday January 18th. Sign up here.
*****
Modernity promotes endless techniques to optimize goal-setting and productivity. Yet most of us race from one task to the next, telling our friends how busy we are, secretly knowing we lack direction. This conversation defines Self-led purpose as an orientation to a future beyond our ego needs. This can align our tasks with Individuation even as we face seductive collective agendas. When we look outside for purpose institutions and communities are all too ready to supply meaning, but at what cost to our inner life.
You might ask yourself:
What distinguishes a vocation aligned with Psyche from a purpose imposed by status, ideology, or fear?
Why does the loss of futurity feel like nihilism, and when does purpose become a path to fanaticism?
What does Individuation require when collective belonging offers meaning at the price of autonomy?
You’ll learn:
- How repetitive commitments can still carry meaning.
- Why purpose as futurity is a defense against nihilism.
- When initiation and suffering act as engines of aliveness.
- The difference between Eros-driven devotion and power-driven crusades.
- Jung’s warning about mass movements and false gods.
Mentioned:
Divine Madness
The Deptford Trilogy
The Undiscovered Self
The Red Book
The Three Feathers
Forrest Gump
The Ceremony of the Weighing of the Heart
Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
8 January 2026, 9:30 am - 1 hour 9 minutesCan Angels Survive in a Disenchanted World?
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
Angels persist in dreams, scripture, and art, while modern institutions psychologize them into coincidences or flatten them into greeting cards. In this episode, we explore angels as autonomous psychic facts, reimagined from age to age but always carrying meaning across the unconscious threshold to the ego’s surprise and benefit. When we learn to welcome the sacred messengers and “…fear not, for behold…” they bring tidings that can right the course of our conscious life.
What is gained, and what is lost, when angels are interpreted as natural law rather than moral ideals?
How does discernment work when a message arrives with certainty and sweeps us into obedience?
When the angel archetype constellates images of UFOs, aliens, or AI, what is it announcing about accountability and authority?
Deb, Lisa, and Joe approach angels as symbolic forms, clarifying how Psyche can engage awe, fear, and meaning.
They discuss:
- Angels as mediating symbols bridging the ego and Self
- Why angelic figures must be morally ambiguous rather than purely benevolent
- Guardian angels and the daimon as images of destiny
- The difference between dreams and incursions, like premonitions
- The wisdom in Jacob wrestling the angel
- Archetypal inflation and its political analogs
- The archetype’s modern costume changes from winged angel to technological evangelist
Mentioned:
It’s a Wonderful Life
Genesis
The Book of Jonah
Exodus
The Book of Psalms
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
The Man Watching
Hemi-Sync Gateway tapes
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
1 January 2026, 8:00 am - 1 hour 12 minutesSanta and Krampus: Why the “Nice List” Needs a Shadow
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with 10% off from now until December 31st. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. Learn more and enroll.
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Santa Claus persists as a central figure who teaches children that their desires can be understood and met, on the condition of good behavior. The Christmas morning ritual is staged to delight and mystify: Santa crosses thresholds unseen, cookies are eaten, milk is gone, gifts appear. His all-seeing mind takes a moral accounting, drafts the nice-naughty lists, poses the threat of disappointment and the promise of reward, which makes Santa a temporary stand-in for conscience and, in Jungian terms, for the Self that can both nourish and demand.
In modern life, the figure is domesticated and commercialized, making disillusionment feel like psychological collapse rather than a developmental step into adult sensibilities. The question becomes whether society can offer a path back to symbolic reality after childhood literal belief ends. What happens to trust and authority when adults manufacture proof, then later reveal it was staged? Which cultural institutions now carry the work of tending belief, and what incentives do they create? How can Santa be understood as both giver and judge, without sentimentality or cynicism?
We discuss Santa’s mixed lineage, from St. Nicholas to Odin’s Wild Hunt; why Krampus keeps the punitive shadow alive when the modern Santa edits it out; Jung on the Self’s benevolence and threat; *Miracle on 34th Street* as a courtroom argument about psychic reality and the cane as a symbol of hope; *Santa Claus Conquers the Martians* as a comic attempt to restore enchantment and power to Santa; and the Grinch as an cynical indictment of holiday consumption.
Read along with the dream HERE.
Mentioned:
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
25 December 2025, 9:45 am - More Episodes? Get the App