Centre of Applied Jungian Studies

11/09/2026

“A moment of clarity” is when you get to see yourself, your life, and the situation you find yourself in with a degree of objectivity typically absent.

For a brief moment, your perspective is altered and you are able to reflect on your situation — or how you’re situated (to paraphrase Henry Miller) — in such a fashion that what was previously hidden from view comes into full awareness.

The first time I heard the phrase was in the characterisation of this experience by alcoholics. A brief moment of clarity when the subject emerges from their drunken haze to see things “as they are.”

Jarring as this moment of illumination may well be, it offers an opportunity.

This is the moment you get to make a choice that was not previously available to you. It is, it must be conceded, usually a painful choice. The choice to change something, to change direction. Typically, this involves giving up on something that has anaesthetised the soul or psyche.

A lifestyle, a relationship, a crutch of some sort. Something that has insidiously provided comfort through one or other form of enchantment. The moment of clarity is the spell being briefly broken.

If you choose to make a change, you can almost certainly anticipate resistance and a degree of discomfort, even pain. The road and ride out of something pleasantly numbing is rarely pleasant.

Or you can choose not to act on the insight and to be lulled very shortly back into a state of myopic inattention and unconsciousness. That means the status quo abides. Usually not indefinitely, but at least until the next jarring exit point.

This experience and phenomenon is analogous to what is meant by consciousness or, more precisely, conscious insight in depth psychology.

Question: Have you ever had such an experience? And, if so, did you act on it?

Caveat: I don’t think we should infer from answers in the affirmative an absence of negative answers — i.e., having the insight and not acting on it. Naturally, the way we deal with a negative response to such an insight is to rapidly repress the insight.

Stephen Anthony Farah
Head of Learning
Applied Jung

05/09/2026

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

— Andre Malraux

Art: Tango Dancer, Bruno Vekemans

03/09/2026

Jungian Psychology as a Living Practice.

A guided learning journey designed to deepen your understanding of Jung's core insights and their application to your inner life. Each month brings a new theme, curated materials, live discussion, a dream circle, and access to a private community forum.

https://appliedjung.com/program/the-applied-jungian-academy-full-subscription

02/09/2026

"A map is not the territory."

In the following article, Andrew Lavin explores how post-Jungian thinkers have come to reimagine the roles of Logos and Eros, the anima and the animus, across all individuals. By uncoupling gender assumptions from archetypal truths, Lavin highlights the risks of rigid classical interpretations, the role of the inner masculine as a living reality in every psyche, acting as an inner authority that can either tyrannize us or legitimize our creative space in the world, and reveals the profound potential of a psyche that consciously integrates both its masculine and feminine principles.

Read the full article below:

By Andrew Lavin

01/09/2026

"For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need... Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul. In ancient times, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life."

– Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Art: Edward Hopper, Rooms by the Sea

01/09/2026

“I am not caused by my history—my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image.”
— James Hillman

"Mother, do you think she's good enough for me?
Mother, do you think she’s dangerous to me?
Mother, will she tear your little boy apart?
`Ooh ah, Mother, will she break my heart?"
-- Pink Floyd

For almost a century and a half, psychoanalysis has taught us to look back: to childhood, to mother and father, to the original wound.

Freud was right about something fundamental — we live through, by, and as mythology. But when myth is reduced to biography, Mother becomes my mother, Father becomes my father, and the whole of psychic life risks being explained through the family romance.

What’s the Matter with Mother? asks what happens when we give Mother back her mythological weight.

Following Patricia Berry, Mother is not only the personal mother. She is mater: matter, matrix, body, earth. Nourishment and deprivation. Form and absence. The ground on which we stake our sense of reality — and the terrifying lack we meet when that ground gives way.

Perhaps the more interesting question is not simply what our mothers did to us, but what we have made Mother mean.
And whether, in endlessly returning to the scene of the original wound, we remain caught in the fantasy that life might finally begin once the past has been sufficiently explained.

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH MOTHER?
A six-week online programme of live lectures, seminars, movement workshops and pre-recorded sessions.

Programme includes:

Professor Andrew Samuels
“Mothers: Idealization, Denigration, Speculation — Past, Present and Future”

Stephen Anthony Farah
“Mother — A Complicated Relationship” Parts 1 & 2

Nico Athene
“Building the Psychic Body” — four Embodiment and Movement workshops

Professor Giovanna Colombetti
“The Feeling Body”

Siobhan Brodie
“The Foul Soil: Learning to Rot in Mother’s House”

Elizabeth Nelson
“Death Desires of Virgins — Escaping Neurotic Consciousness”

Nan McAughey
“The Matters of Mother: Three Mythologies”

Begins Saturday 12 September 2026.

Live sessions take place on Zoom and all presentations are recorded for those unable to attend live.

The first course in PSYCHE & EROS — a three-part programme revisioning the parenting myths and the idea of the original wound that have shaped psychoanalytic practice.

Registration is open.

https://appliedjung.com/course/mother-course

“Mother, did it need to be so high?” - Pink Floyd

Starting Saturday 12 September, join us for a 6-week exploration of the Mother archetype through lectures, somatic workshops, and seminars.This course attempts to understand how the imaginal image of mother impacts, affects and effects our interactions with ourselves, others and the world.

30/08/2026

THE LOVING AND THE TERRIBLE MOTHER

Mother is not psychologically exhausted by tenderness. The archetypal image contains shelter and engulfment, nourishment and possession, fertility and destruction. Jung condensed this polarity into a disturbing phrase: ‘the loving and the terrible mother.

C. G. Jung, Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, CW 9.1 par.158

Can the same image/idea/person both protect and terrify?

Artowrk:Garland of Fruit surrounding a Depiction of Cybele Receiving Gifts from Personifications of the Four Seasons, a collaborative work by Flemish artists Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrik van Balen. (circa 1615-1622)

https://appliedjung.com/course/mother-course

28/08/2026

What if you are more than what happened to you?

For almost 150 years, psychology has returned us again and again to the same origin story: mother, father, childhood and the wounds they left behind.

But what if these are not merely personal histories to be explained — but myths asking to be reimagined?

PSYCHE & EROS is a new three-course series from Applied Jung exploring Mother, Father, the Wound, desire, embodiment and the deeper mythologies that shape a human life.

Beginning 12 September with:

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH MOTHER?
Psyche, Matter and the Maternal Imagination

Three courses. One unfolding journey from personal history towards a larger imagination of psyche.

https://appliedjung.com/program/psyche-and-eros

27/08/2026

WHO OR WHAT IS “MOTHER”?

The personal mother may be our first encounter with Mother, but she does not exhaust the image. Across cultures Mother becomes goddess, earth, sea, vessel, womb, protection and origin. Jung’s question is larger than biography: what psychic reality is constellated through the figure of Mother?

C. G. Jung, Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, CW 9.1

When you hear the word “Mother”, what image (other than that of your own mother) comes to mind?

Image: Isis nursing Horus (Ancient Egypt, circa. 1080-34 BCE)

Starting Saturday 12 September, join us for a 6-week exploration of the Mother archetype through lectures, somatic workshops, and seminars.This course attempts to understand how the imaginal image of mother impacts, affects and effects our interactions with ourselves, others and the world.

26/08/2026

In preparation for our upcoming course, 'What's the Matter with Mother?' Nico Athene provides a thoughtful re-examination of how we hold the image of the mother in the therapeutic imagination. Moving beyond traditional Freudian and developmental models that isolate the personal mother as the sole cause of our adult suffering, Athene draws on archetypal psychology, Gaia mythology, and embodied ritual practice to return Mother to her mythic, ritual register - inviting us to move past the fantasy of linear perfection and grow downwards into our true destiny.

Read the full article on Substack:
https://appliedjung.substack.com/p/whats-the-matter-with-mother?

By Nico Athene