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Prolific Jungian analyst James Hillman says: “The unconscious cannot be conscious; the moon has its dark side, the sun goes down and cannot shine everywhere at once, and even God has two hands. Attention and focus require some things to be out of the field of vision, to remain in the dark. One cannot look both ways.” For this reason, we see the sha

There’s a romance to focusing on a single pursuit, but this level of simplicity is typically accessible only to the most purely creative fields—Hemingway at Key West, banging out his morning pages on his Corona typewriter. Two or three missions are more tractable and still quite minimalist.

Both Batman and (according to The Killing Joke) the Joker were born out of the pain of the absurd. As a result, it is what keeps both of them busy: the Joker by trying to cause unjust deaths, and Batman by trying to stop them.

Having studied myths, symbols, and religious material, Jung posited a collective unconscious, a deep layer of psychic experience common to humankind. This concept is unique to Jungian psychology. The repository of prototypical, instinctual human experience over millennia, the collective unconscious is a wellspring of inherent, universal patterns an

“I have my eye on the central fire, and I’m trying to put some mirrors around it to show to others. Sometimes the edges of those mirrors leave gaps and don’t fit together exactly. I can’t help that. Look at what I’m trying to point to!”

The center of our conscious life is called ego. It has two concurrent characteristics: It is functional in that it is the strong grounded activating principle by which we make intellectual assessments and judgments, show feelings appropriately, and relate skillfully to other people. It can also be neurotic when it becomes attached, addicted, dualis

Parents, children, teachers, clergy, and friends add to the mix, helping to determine what is allowed to be expressed and what is not. For some families, emotional vulnerability and crying are encouraged; for others, they are banished into shadow. For some families, anger and conflict are tolerated; for others, they are the worst taboo. For some fa

In the classical and developmental psychologies, the unity of the healthy ego is the essential structure of the psyche. The question of the dissolution of the ego or Self is almost always seen as regressive and detrimental, a fusion, or a return to the mother. Some analysts, however, have raised a different perspective, one that has challenged ego