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 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.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
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 - 1 hour 15 minutesAlchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life
✨ 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.
-----------------------------------------------------
Mortificatio is an alchemical term for the moment a life-organizing identity collapses. We might call it burnout, divorce, depression, retirement shock, institutional betrayal, or a terrifying medical diagnosis. The alchemists called it “death,” and Jungians understand it as part of the psychology of transformation.
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.
18 December 2025, 8:51 am - 1 hour 15 minutesHow to Work with Denial: A Jungian Guide to Facing Reality
✨ 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.
-----------------------------------------------------
People often mistake denial for stubbornness, self-deception, or moral failure. Denial is actually a primal psychological defense that attempts to regulate which aspects of reality are permitted to reach awareness. Today, we explore how denial operates within Psyche, why it activates powerfully in response to traumatic experiences and addiction, and how it relates to shadow, repression, and dissociation. Denial is a pre-verbal way of titrating overwhelming experiences by making them unthinkable and unsymbolized. The problem is that they are then stored in the subtle body and give rise to a host of symptoms. Programs like AA explicitly confront the denial of consequences by repeatedly sharing painful consequences within the meeting structure. Some psychoanalysts believe denial is the organizing defense in mania and borderline personality disorder. Art, films, analytic metaphors, and dreams can offer representations of the lost experiences, so the unformulated experiences acquire image and language. Denial can be viewed as a benevolent survival strategy, and yet, like most defenses, must be set aside for us to make full contact with ourselves and the world.
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
We've got totally NEW MERCH!
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.
11 December 2025, 8:00 am - 1 hour 10 minutesHave We Ever Really Read Jung? Sonu Shamdasani on the Collected Works Crisis
✨ 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.
-----------------------------------------------------
Jung’s translator and editor for the English edition of his Collected Works took it upon himself to alter more than 60% of Jung’s ideas to make the books more marketable. Finally, this will be corrected. Sonu Shamdasani and his team at the Philemon Foundation are meticulously researching Jung’s original documents, and the results will surprise and perhaps even shock us. There was far more to Jung and his insights than we were permitted to know, and all that’s about to change. So, fellow Jungians, hold onto your hats and get ready to meet the real Carl Gustav Jung.
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
We've got totally NEW MERCH!
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.
4 December 2025, 9:39 am - 10 minutes 6 seconds[SUBSCRIBER BONUS] Is My Wanderlust Related To My Mother Complex?
In this free edition of Jung Love, our subscriber bonus content, a Patron asks:
"I'm wondering if you can talk about the issue of place: the ability to settle down somewhere, and how this could relate to a mother complex."
Support This Jungian Life on Patreon and ask Lisa, Deb, and Joseph your questions for a chance to have them answered on Jung Love.
2 December 2025, 5:01 pm - 1 hour 3 minutesGratitude and Reverence: How to Lead a Sacred, Soulful Life
✨ The Gift of Dreamwork: Join This Jungian Life Dream School with ten percent off from now until the 31st of December. Just use code HOLIDAY2025 when you purchase Dream School for yourself or as a gift. Learn more and enroll.
-----------------------------------------------------
A Jungian Look at Gratitude (and Why It Usually Arrives Late)
Have you ever suddenly realized, “I never really thanked them for that,” a parent, teacher, mentor, or community that quietly carried you through a hard stretch?
Gratitude is a psychological turning point: the moment you grasp that your life rests on the real, sometimes costly efforts of others, and how that realization can shift you out of self-obsession into a larger world of connection and meaning.
Today we’ll explore:
- How genuine gratitude usually arrives late because we don’t understand what motivates other people, and our empathy is shallow.
- The contrast between gratitude and resentment: how resentment can be necessary at times, but becomes toxic when we’re trapped in it.
- Gratitude can shift us from a defensive, shut-down stance to an open-hearted, process-oriented way of living.
- Why some gifts like life, care, education, protection, and initiation can never be paid back, and how a mature form of gratitude is often paying it forward.
- Religious and ritual practices of saying grace, giving thanks, and honoring the dead are ways of recognizing that our lives depend on ongoing acts of generosity and sacrifice.
- How gratitude can be a sign of individuation: moving through the world with a heart that stays open to both joy and suffering, and letting experiences change us.
If you’re curious about how a simple “thank you” can become a doorway into a soulful life, this episode is for you.
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
We've got totally NEW MERCH!
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.
27 November 2025, 10:05 am - 1 hour 14 minutesSigns Contempt Is Ruining Your Relationship & Ways to Cope
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
Contempt feels like a gut punch. It’s a cold, distancing act that devalues a person even as it avoids solving a real problem. The contemptuous are full of shame, fear, or hurt, so they recreate those feelings in others to evade their own issues. Unlike anger (which tries to correct an injustice), disgust (which avoids what feels contaminating), or hatred (which seeks destruction), contempt asserts superiority and cuts off relatedness. It shows up in eye‑rolling, sarcasm, mockery, and a habit of judging others as beneath one’s standards. Whether you’re struggling to survive it thrown at you, or you’ve been told you unconsciously do it, there is a way to transcend it.
Read along with the dream.
LOOK & GROW
Join THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL
We've got totally NEW MERCH!
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.
20 November 2025, 8:13 am - More Episodes? Get the App