How can love heal the mouth shut this way? Say something worth the breath. (Komunyakaa) Between, beneath and behind each word is silence. The silence is the wilderness, the place where the soul is “an archaic language, a pre-alphabetic reality” (Romanyshyn 25). This thought, that the soul was pre-alphabetic, hurtled itself at me when I first read it. It changed everything. Never had I imagined that the depth of my…

  It has always interested me that the term ‘talking cure’ was coined not by a theorist but by the patient herself. ‘Anna O.’, an intelligent and poetic woman, working with Josef Breuer, observed the ways in which her memories, and symptoms, when told to another, released tension and created narrative. Today there is neurological evidence that being heard and mirrored on a deep level can effect changes in patterning,…

“The Necessity of Sacrifice for Consciousness: Attitude and Meaning.” Here is the abstract for the article, which you can find in Psychological Perspectives, Volume 56, issue 3. Sacrifice is more than the act of giving, it is the forgoing of any claim on reciprocation or result and most often entails an experience of profound loss. Jung said “Nobody can give away what he has not got,” meaning that to be…

My full article is in Psychological Perspectives, Volume 54, Issue 1. This article re-imagines the archetype of Hekate, ancient Greek deity, through the framework of memoir writing. Situated at the threshold, crossroads, and her cave, Hekate’s triune form presides over the liminal, holding the tension between past, present, and future, visually suggesting the polycentric perspective needed when entering the underworld. So, too, the memoir writer approaches the underworld as participant…

The C.G. Jung Study Center of Southern California www.jungstudycenter.com Viridis Graduate Institute: International School of Ecopsychology www.viridisinstitute.org Rachael Feather, Jungian Analyst and archetypal astrologer http://rachaelfeather.vpweb.co.nz/?prefix=www

When I lost my home in a California wildfire, shock scorched my soul. Arriving the morning after the flames swept through I found the beautiful wilderness blackened and charred, stretching into the distance like a felled elephant, gray and unmoving. The air was thick with the smoke of dismembered cells rising from last embers. Around me every detail of our lives, dissolved by the hot storm, drifted in a floating…