The Quest: Vision in an Age of Crisis. Jungian Psychotherapy

The extreme right and left wing unite at their extremes in totalitarianism and a god complex. The battle between autocracies and democracies continues like some externalized projection of an internal split in the human psyche; as if the ancient archetypes of good and evil, light and dark, creation and destruction, hubris and nemesis are fighting out a cosmic battle on an earthly and human plane.

If we are possessed by archetypes so...

From 1789 onward, French history became a breathtaking cycle of hubris and nemesis. Nowhere was this more striking than in the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Rising rapidly through the revolutionary ranks to govern and pacify France, he ultimately crowned himself Emperor and crushed coalition after coalition in legendary battles.

By 1812, his self-belief was god-like, his army worshipped him, and his hubris reached its absolu...

"Remember that you are only a man."

From the victory chariots of Ancient Rome to the underground bunkers of Berlin, absolute power has a habit of shattering a leader's connection to reality. But is hubris simply arrogance—or is it a clinical condition?

In this episode:

• The Anatomy of a Dictator: How Ian Kershaw’s "working towards the Führer" thesis explains the collective surrender of a civilized nation.

• The 14 Symp...

What were the social, political, and psychological conditions for the rise of Nazism and the emergence of Adolph Hitler, a misfit, so as to have total control of one of most powerful industrial states in the world and to lead it to destruction? What is it in such a disturbed psyche – a borderline malignant narcissist - that is capable of leading a country, almost a civilization, to the apocalypse? 

The National Socialist movement functioned not only as a political party and military machine but also  as a "dark religion" that sought to possess the German psyche.  Its apocalyptic vision was rooted in the esoteric mysticism. When the promised victory failed, the regime’s narcissistic core pivoted to a final, nihilistic sacrifice. Hitler’s Nero Decree and the ritualistic suicides in the Führerbunker re...

This episode covers the apocalyptic traditions of some of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Siberia, and also the Celts, including their influence on medieval Christianity and even modern poetry. It finishes with more information on the two comets approaching earth vision this month, the best times for viewing, and some further reflections upon their significance.

The view of the comets:

This episode and the following are a tour of some of the world’s apocalyptic traditions outside of the Judaic, Gnostic, Christian, and Millenarian which have been explored already. This episode includes those of Islam, Norse, Egypt, Aztec, Maya, Inca, China, and Japan. By this means we can appreciate one of the features of the archetype – its widespread occurrence across the world’s civilization...

The last five chapters of Answer to Job clearly show that Jung believed that the shadow in our psyche and the technological means at our disposal leave us in a most precarious apocalyptic situation ....

“For the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his [humanity’s] hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures.”

Jung was by no means clear ...

The book Answer to Job was the one work Jung said he would never change. In it he “psychoanalyses” Yahweh, challenges the Christian God, insists that God, across our evolution, has been entering into humanity as a unconscious complex of opposites requiring integration through the human psyche. This is the purpose of human consciousness and this book was Jung’s bible. Like the Christian bible it ends with an apocal...

This episode explores the Gnostic worldview, flourishing in the first centuries of the Common Era, which offers one of religious history's most radical apocalyptic visions. It is founded on a profoundly dualistic  understanding of reality: the material cosmos is a prison, and humanity is a tragic hybrid—a divine spark of light trapped in corrupt flesh and matter. The influence...

The apocalypse isn't just an ancient myth, but an archetype, a pattern that still shapes our world.  The same emotional and psychological forces that drove medieval peasants to embark on doomed crusades or to whip themselves in public, are the very forces driving political movements today. The archetypal forces that drove these millenarian movements  are very much present in the politics of the Western ...

The Christian apocalyptic tradition is explored, focusing on the prophecies and warnings of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. These texts contain a dramatic narrative of cataclysmic events: the end days, the Second Coming, the Rapture, the chosen few, the final judgment, Armageddon, the defeat of Satan, and the reign of Christ’s kingdom. This tradition has provided a reference point for Western civilization across the m...

The deepest archetypes are symbolic narratives, like dreams, that reveal the nature of the psyche itself—its origins, for instance, or even its potential ending. The Book of Genesis serves as an example of the former, while this episode explores the latter—the theme of the apocalypse—through various writings in the Jewish tradition, including the Books of Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Isaiah, and ...

The archetype of the Self is Jung's answer to the crisis of civilization in our age. In a world grappling with the relativism and indeterminacy of post-modernism, where grand narratives have collapsed and meaning seems fluid, with a host of other modern philosophical ailments that breed anxiety and nihilism, the Self offers an inner, inherent source of meaning and direction. It suggests that beyond the shifting sands of external op...

The earliest archetypal images with an implicit mythological narrative are presented: The Venus of Laussel – the earliest great mother archetype with an age of around 24,000 years; and the Fallen Shaman in the Paleolithic Cave of Lascaux at 16,000 years ago. The former is feminine-coded (nurture, nature, reproduction, love) and the latter is male-coded (gnosis or higher knowledge obtained through the individual quest, sacrifi...

An account of a healing séance ceremony from a Siberian tribe opens the episode. Evidence of the shamans on the cave walls is given especially for the French caves of Lascaux, Trois Fréres, Gabillou, and Chauvet. The images in the “shaft” at the end of the Lascaux cave are highly enigmatic but a mythological interpretation is hinted at as it is one of the earliest archetypal representations of humanit...

The Upper Paleolithic, that is the period  dated from around 50-11 thousand years ago, reflects a period of cultural, behavioral and technological change that distinguishes modern humans from earlier homo species.

Four examples of the earliest archetypal images, beliefs, and practices are given and for which we have hard evidence taking us back many tens of thousands years deep into the last ice age. These a...

This episode explores:

The first archetypal images of humanity for which we have evidence.

The areas of the world where this evidence is found: South Africa, Indonesia, India, Australia, the Americas, Siberia. We leave the famous cave paintings of France and Spain until next episode.

The dates of the cave painting and rock art that have survived and recentl...