The Taproot Therapy Podcast - https://www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Corporate Tech Monopolies are Going to Ruin Therapy

Read the article here: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/corporate-tech-monopolies-are-going-tto-ruin-therapy/
 
Last weekend BetterHelp, the online subscription therapy company, settled with the FTC for almost 8 million in fines for selling therapy patients confidential information to Facebook and Snapchat. This isn’t justice, so hold your applause. 
The company, whose name really is the word better and help smashed together with no space between them has had issues before. A quick google search reveals customer reviews claiming the company is as good at therapy as it is at punctuation. The company previously faced controversy for allegedly paying youtube influencers to vlog about invented mental health conditions that they claimed the company's treatment had “cured”. Since these influencers have and audience of children and young adults who look up to them, these potential lies are especially worrisome. Some of these influencers purportedly received thousands of dollars in compensation for the alleged lies. 
Real patients seeking a cure from better help have reported getting hit with recurring subscription fees, therapists that repeatedly no show and charge you anyway, as well as getting slammed with hours of paperwork that takes up all the allotted time. If true, this is a shady practice but not illegal. 
So why is the sale of data such a big deal? Put simply it's a big deal because if I did it to one patient I would lose my license and potentially get sued. The FTC has just set a precedent that big companies can now do this to millions of people with impunity. Fines, like the 7.8 million that BetterHelp is returning to consumers is a cost of doing business for these companies. They take the risk because they make more money breaking the law than they pay in fines. 
Because this would have put anyone else in court. 
When you go to therapy there is more than just an expectation that what you talk about will be kept private. HIPPA laws mean that if your therapist knowingly discloses information about you they are breaking the law. You can sue them, their board can take their license, insurance panels can drop them and you can sue them civilly. This is if one therapist knowingly shares the data of a single patient. 
Here it happened to millions of people. This was not an accident either. BetterHelp intentionally did this WHILE telling customers specifically that they would never do the thing that they were secretly doing. 
BetterHelp removed all of the links I posted to these news articles from their social media in an effort to not have to be associated with their own behavior. That is strange since BetterHelp also claims that they did nothing wrong in their statement about the settlement. 
“This settlement, which is no admission of wrongdoing, allows us to continue to focus on our mission".
You read that right. Either BetterHelp misspelled “I’m sorry” or they really think they did nothing wrong. Let's hope they are as bad at spelling as punctuation. People with antisocial personality disorder have no regard for right and wrong despite getting caught and experiencing consequences. People with this disorder need therapy but here a possible inference is that they appear to be providing it.  
BetterHelp also goes on to say in their statement that all the information sold to Facebook was encrypted and non identifiable despite the fact that they released the emails of users. My email address, JoelBlackstock@GetTherapyBirmingham.com, is pretty effective at letting someone identify who I am. 
Betterhelp released emails of users. If they are using betterhelp, they are seeking mental health treatment. They also released information regarding prior mental health treatment. According to the complaint:
Some of the intake questions that BetterHelp sold to facebook identified whether patients had been in therapy before. Below is from the official complaint:
“For example, though an affirmative response to the question “Have you been in counseling or therapy before?” was coded as “AddToWishlist,” the analyst revealed to Facebook that this event meant that the “user completes questionnaire marking they have been in therapy before, thereby disclosing millions of Visitors’ and Users’ prior therapy to Facebook.”
BetterHelp claims this is not protected information because it didn't come from actual sessions, just the intake to an app that gets you therapy. This is absurd. I am not allowed to tell you who comes into my waiting room or who emails me about therapy because it is readily apparent that those people are trying to receive healthcare. 
While the legal burden of responsibility lies with the seller, the buyer bears some ethical responsibility in my mind. Facebook and Snapchat knew what the data was they were buying. If you knowingly buy stolen goods you are culpable. If you get caught stealing you get a punishment in addition to having to give back what you stole. Here the FTC has merely made BetterHelp return the ill gotten gains but there are no consequences. There is no punishment that any single other therapist would face. 
THEN BetterHelp released a statement saying they didn't do anything wrong. Is that justice?
These corporate monopolies are ruining therapy and it is not talked about enough. The parent company of BetterHelp is another giant monopoly, Teladoc. Even if this gets publicized, even if CNN and Fox News deign to care about potentially criminal invasions of privacy, the parent company can just dissolved the brand and use the same practices under the larger corporate umbrella. This is increasingly worrisome as insurance companies are making moves to make Teladoc the mandatory go between software for patients to receive teletherapy. 
As a patient, as a provider, as a legislator, refuse to participate in these things. They are a bad precedent taking the industry into a bad place.  
Anyone who wants to say that this is wrong and condemn these practices has to make the intellectual leap that the only way to make it stop is to force these companies to face legal consequences. Not fines. Fines are baked into the cost of doing business. If you say you care about this then you have to accept that the only way to stop these companies is to break them up and send people to prison.
Companies like this can make more money breaking the law than they have to pay back. Executives who signed off on this deserve jail time and these companies need to be taken apart. Let's see how frequently this happens when people start looking at prison time. 
Many podcasters pretend to be allies for mental health yet shill for these companies. If you listen to an influencer who shills for BetterHelp it is your responsibility to hold them accountable.
I am not making this post to condemn BetterHelp therapists. I know some who are good people and talented. I do not believe these practices are their fault. Noone becomes a social worker to get rich and finding ethical employment is a luxury that comes secondary to paying your mortgage. Good therapists work there; it drives the better people further away from competitors. Responsibility lies with the people with power not those subject to its whims. Although, you should know if you work for BetterHelp that your contract makes you personally liable for patient outcomes, even outcomes caused by following company policies. 
I’ve been careful to limit my own liability in this article and without going through any more specifics, if you are a patient or a provider I am happy to guide you through how to succeed in this industry. The vast majority of people who contact Taproot Therapy Collective receive a high quality personalized referral to another local provider. 
We genuinely want you to get therapy at the best place for you. We recognize that we are not the right provider for every need. We treat the therapists in our collective well even though we could make more money if we didn’t.  We call every person who contacts us back even when we are full. We don’t do that because it makes us money. We do it because providers of mental health services have a responsibility to ethical behavior even when our legislators have decided there won’t be legal consequences if we don’t. 
Choosing ethical behavior is not something that should be up to the clinician. Our legislators should enforce existing laws even if it means sending their campaign donors to jail. We are in a mental health crisis and practices like these give people valid reasons to be afraid of getting mental health care. 
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J.F. Bierlein on Poetry, Myth, and Metaphor

The author of Parallel Myths and Living Myths, J. F. Bierlein wrote the books that first started my interest in depth psychology when I was in middle school. J.F. teaches in the Washington Semester and World Capitals Program at American University in Washington, and also works for a social sciences consulting firm. Multilingual, he is deeply interested in theology, existentialism, art, opera, and the study of classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew, as well as other languages. 
 
Here we talk about myth, poetry and psychology. Check out J.F's website and poetry here:
https://www.jfbierlein.com/
 
 

Lament for the Dead Psychology After Jung’s The Red Book Review; By James Hillman Sonu Shamdasani

“The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”
 
― C.G. Jung, preface for The Red Book: Liber Novus
 
James Hillman: I was reading about this practice that the ancient Egyptians had of opening the mouth of the dead. It was a ritual and I think we don't do that with our hands. But opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead.
 
Sonu Shamdasani: It takes blood. That's what it takes. The work is Jung's `Book of the Dead.' His descent into the underworld, in which there's an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions.
Lament for the Dead, Psychology after Jung’s Red Book (2013) Pg. 1  
 
Begun in 1914, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s The Red Book lay dormant for almost 100 years before its eventual publication. Opinions are divided on whether Jung would have published the book if he had lived longer. He did send drafts to publishers early in life but seemed in no hurry to publish the book despite his advancing age. Regardless, it was of enormous importance to the psychologist, being shown to only a few confidants and family members. More importantly, the process of writing The Red Book was one of the most formative periods of Jung’s life. In the time that Jung worked on the book he came into direct experience with the forces of the deep mind and collective unconscious. For the remainder of his career he would use the experience to build concepts and theories about the unconscious and repressed parts of the human mind. 
In the broadest sense, Jungian psychology has two goals. 
 
Integrate and understand the deepest and most repressed parts of the the human mind 
 
and 
 
Don’t let them eat you alive in the process. 
 
Jungian psychology is about excavating the most repressed parts of self and learning to hold them so that we can know exactly who and what we are. Jung called this process individuation. Jungian psychology is not, and should not be understood as, an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt to build a psychological container for the forces of the unconscious. While not a religion, it served a similar function as a religion. Jungian psychology serves as both a protective buffer and a lens to understand and clarify the self. Jung described his psychology as a bridge to religion. His hope was that it could help psychology understand the functions of the human need for religion, mythology and the transcendental. Jung hoped that his psychology could make religion occupy a healthier, more mindful place in our culture by making the function of religion within humanity more conscious. 
 
Jung did not dislike religion. He viewed it as problematic when the symbols of religion became concretized and people took them literally. Jungian psychology itself has roots in Hindu religious traditions. Jung often recommended that patients of lapsed faith return to their religions of origin. He has case studies encouraging patients to resume Christian or Muslim religious practices as a source of healing and integration. Jung did have a caveat though. He recommended that patients return to their traditions with an open mind. Instead of viewing the religious traditions and prescriptive lists of rules or literal truths he asked patients to view them as metaphors for self discovery and processes for introspection. Jung saw no reason to make religious patients question their faith. He did see the need for patients who had abandoned religion to re-examine its purpose and function. 
 
The process of writing The Red Book was itself a religious experience for Jung. He realized after his falling out from Freud, that his own religious tradition and the available psychological framework was not enough to help him contain the raw and wuthering forces of his own unconscious that were assailing him at the time. Some scholars believe Jung was partially psychotic while writing The Red Book, others claim he was in a state of partial dissociation or simply use Jung’s term “active imagination”. 
 
The psychotic is drowning while the artist is swimming. The waters both inhabit, however, are the same. Written in a similar voice to the King James Bible, The Red Book has a religious and transcendent quality. It is written on vellum in heavy calligraphy with gorgeous hand illuminated script. Jung took inspiration for mystical and alchemical texts for its full page illustrations.
 
It is easier to define The Red Book by what it is not than by what it is. According to Jung, it is not a work of art. It is not a scholarly psychological endeavor. It is also not an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt for Jung to heal himself in a time of pain and save himself from madness by giving voice to the forces underneath his partial psychotic episode. The Red Book was a kind of container to help Jung witness the forces of the deep unconscious. In the same way, religion and Jungian psychology are containers for the ancient unconscious forces in the vast ocean under the human psyche.  
 
Lament of the Dead, Psychology after Carl Jung’s The Red Book is a dialogue between ex Jungian analyst James Hillman and Jungian scholar Sonu Shamdasani about the implications the Red Book has for Jungian psychology. Like the Red Book it was controversial when it was released. 
 
James Hillman was an early protege of Jung who later became a loud critic of parts of Jung’s psychology. Hillman wanted to create an “archetypal” psychology that would allow patients to directly experience and not merely analyze the psyche. His new psychology never really came together coherently and he never found the technique to validate his instinct. Hillman had been out of the Jungian fold for almost 30 years before he returned as a self appointed expert advisor during the publication of The Red Book. Hillman’s interest in The Red Book was enough to make him swallow his pride, and many previous statements, to join the Jungians once again. It is likely that the archetypal psychology he was trying to create is what The Red Book itself was describing. 
 
Sonu Shamdasani is not a psychologist but a scholar of the history of psychology. His insights have the detachment of the theoretical where Hillman’s are more felt and more intuitive but also more personal. One gets the sense in the book that Hillman is marveling painfully at an experience that he had been hungry for for a long time. The Red Book seems to help him clarify the disorganized blueprints of his stillborn psychological model. While there is a pain in Hillman’s words there is also a peace that was rare to hear from such a flamboyant and unsettled psychologist. 
 
Sonu Shamdasani is the perfect living dialogue partner for Hillman to have in the talks that make up Lament. Shamdasani has one of the best BS detectors of maybe any Jungian save David Tacey. Shamdasani has deftly avoided the fads, misappropriations and superficialization that have plagued the Jungian school for decades. As editor of the Red Book he knows more about the history and assembly of the text than any person save for Jung. Not only is he also one of the foremost living experts on Jung, but as a scholar he does not threaten the famously egotistical Hillman as a competing interpreting psychologist. The skin that Shamdasani has in this game is as an academic while Hillman gets to play the prophet and hero of the new psychology they describe without threat or competition. 
 
Presumedly these talks were recorded as research for a collaborative book to be co authored by the two friends and the death of Hillman in 2011 made the publication as a dialogue in 2013 a necessity. If that is not the case the format of a dialogue makes little sense. If that is the case it gives the book itself an almost mystical quality and elevates the conversation more to the spirit of a philosophical dialogue. 
 
We are only able to hear these men talk to each other and not to us. There is a deep reverberation between the resonant implications these men are seeing The Red Book have for modern psychology. However, they do not explain their insights to the reader and their understandings can only be glimpsed intuitively. Like the briefcase in the film Pulp Fiction the audience sees the object through its indirect effect on the characters. We see the foggy outlines of the ethics that these men hope will guide modern psychology but we are not quite able to see it as they see it. We have only an approximation through the context of their lives and their interpretation of Jung’s private diary. This enriches a text that is ultimately about the limitations of understanding.
 
One of the biggest criticisms of the book when it was published was that the terms the speaker used are never defined and thus the book's thesis is never objectivised or clarified. While this is true if you are an English professor, the mystic and the therapist in me see these limitations as the book’s strengths. The philosophical dialectic turns the conversation into an extended metaphor that indirectly supports the themes of the text. The medium enriches the message. Much like a socratic dialogue or a film script the the authors act more as characters and archetypes than essayists. The prophet and the scholar describe their function and limitations as gatekeepers of the spiritual experience. 
 
Reading the Lament, much like reading The Red Book, one gets the sense that one is witnessing a private but important moment in time. It is a moment that is not our moment and is only partially comprehensible to anyone but the author(s). Normally that would be a weakness but here it becomes a strength. Where normally the reader feels that a book is for them, here we feel that we are eavesdropping through a keyhole or from a phone line downstairs. The effect is superficially frustrating but also gives Lament a subtle quality to its spirituality that The Red Book lacks.  
 
Many of the obvious elements for a discussion of the enormous Red Book are completely ignored in the dialogue. Hillman and Shamdasani’s main takeaway is that The Red Book is about “the dead”. What they mean by “the dead” is never explained directly. This was a major sticking point for other reviewers, but I think their point works better undefined. They talk about the dead as a numinous term. Perhaps they are speaking about the reality of death itself. Perhaps about the dead of history. Perhaps they are describing the impenetrable veil we can see others enter but never see past ourselves. Maybe the concept contains all of these elements. Hillman, who was 82 at the time of having the conversations in Lament, may have been using The Red Book and his dialogue with Shamdasani to come to terms with his feelings about his own impending death. 
 
Perhaps it is undefined because these men are feeling something or intuitively, seeing something that the living lack the intellectual language for. It is not that the authors do not know what they are talking about. They know, but they are not able to completely say it.  Hillman was such an infuriatingly intuitive person that his biggest downfall in his other books is that he often felt truths that he could not articulate. Instead he retreated into arguing the merits of his credentials and background or into intellectual archival of his opinions on philosophers and artists. In other works this led to a didactic and self righteous tone that his writing is largely worse for. In Lament Hillman is forced to talk off the cuff and that limitation puts him at his best as a thinker. 
 
In his review of Lament, David Tacey has made the very good point that Jung abandoned the direction that The Red Book was taking him in. Jung saw it as a dead end for experiential psychology and retreated back into analytical inventorying of “archetypes”. On the publication of The Red Book, Jungians celebrate the book as the “culmination” of Jungian thought when instead it was merely a part of its origins. The Red Book represents a proto-Jungian psychology as Jung attempted to discover techniques for integration. Hillman and Shamdasani probe the psychology’s origins for hints of its future in Lament.
 
HIllman and Shamdasani’s thesis is partially a question about ethics and partially a question about cosmology. Are there any universal directions for living and behaving that Jungian psychology compels us towards (ethics)? Is there an external worldview that the, notoriously phenomenological, nature of Jungian psychology might imply (cosmology)? These are the major questions Hillman and Shamdasani confront in Lament.Their answer is not an answer as much as it is a question for the psychologists of the future. 
 
Their conclusion is that “the dead'' of our families, society, and human history foist their unlived life upon us. It is up to us, and our therapists, to help us deal with the burden of “the dead”. It is not us that live, but the dead that live through us. Hillman quotes W.H. Auden several times:
 
We are lived through powers that we pretend to understand.
 - W.H. Auden
 
A major tenant of Jungian psychology is that adult children struggle under the unlived life of the parent. The Jungian analyst helps the patient acknowledge and integrate all of the forces of the psyche that the parent ran from, so they are not passed down to future generations. A passive implication of the ethics and the cosmology laid out in Lament, is that to have a future we must reckon with not only the unlived life of the parent but also the unlived life of all the dead. 
 
It is our job as the living to answer the questions and face the contradictions our humanity posits in order to discover what we really are. The half truths and outright lies from the past masquerade as tradition for traditions sake, literalized religion, and unconscious tribal identity must be overthrown. The weight of the dead of history can remain immovable if we try to merely discard it but drowns us if we cling to it too tightly. We need to use our history and traditions to give us a container to reckon with the future. The container must remain flexible if we are to grow into our humanity as a society and an aware people. 
 
If you find yourself saying “Yes, but what does “the dead” mean!”  Then this book is not for you. If you find yourself confused but humbled by this thesis then perhaps it is. Instead of a further explanation of the ethical and cosmological future for psychology that his book posits I will give you a tangible example about how its message was liberatory for me. 
 
Hillman introduces the concepts of the book with his explanation of Jung’s reaction to the theologian and missionary Albert Schweitzer. Jung hated Schweitzer.  He hated him because he had descended into Africa and “gone native”. In Jung’s mind Schweitzer had “refused the call”  to do anything  and “brought nothing home”. Surely the Africans that were fed and clothed felt they had been benefited! Was Jung’s ethics informed by racism, cluelessness, arrogance or some other unknown myopism?
A clue might be found in Jung’s reaction to modern art exploring the unconscious or in his relationship with Hinduism. Jung took the broad strokes of his psychology from the fundamentals of the brahman/atman and dharma/moksha dichotomies of Hinduism. Jung also despised the practice of eastern mysticism practices by westerners but admired it in Easterners. Why? His psychology stole something theoretical that his ethics disallowed in direct practice. 
 
Jung’s views on contemporary (modern) artists of his time were similar. He did not want to look at depictions of the raw elements of the unconscious. In his mind discarding all the lessons of classicism was a “cop out”.  He viewed artists that descended into the abstract with no path back or acknowledgement of the history that gave them that path as failures. He wanted artists to make the descent into the subjective world and return with a torch of it’s fire but not be consumed by it blaze. Depicting the direct experience of the unconscious was the mark of a failed artist to Jung. To Jung the destination was the point, not the journey. The only thing that mattered is what you were able to bring back from the world of the dead. He had managed to contain these things in The Red Book, why couldn’t they? The Red Book was Jung’s golden bough. 
 
Jung took steps to keep the art in The Red Book both outside of the modernist tradition and beyond the historical tradition. The Red Book uses a partially medieval format but Jung both celebrates and overcomes the constraints of his chosen style. The Red Book was not modern or historical, it was Jung’s experience of both. In Lament, Hillman describes this as the ethics that should inform modern psychology. Life should become ones own but part of ones self ownership is that we take responsibility for driving a tradition forward not a slave to repeating it.
 
Oddly enough the idea of descent and return will already be familiar to many Americans through the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell took the same ethics of descent and return to the unconscious as the model of his “monomyth” model of storytelling. This briefly influenced psychology and comparative religion in the US and had major impact on screenwriters to this day. Campbells ethics are the same as Jung’s. If one becomes stuck on the monomyth wheel, or the journey of the descent and return, one is no longer the protagonist and becomes an antagonist.  Campbell, and American post jungians in general were not alway great attributing influences and credit where it was due. 
 
Jung was suspicious of the new age theosophists and psychadelic psychonauts that became enamored with the structure of the unconscious for the unconscious sake. Where Lament shines is when Hillman explains the ethics behind Jung’s thinking. Jung lightly implied this ethics but was, as Hillman points out, probably not entirely conscious of it. One of Lament’s biggest strengths and weaknesses is that it sees through the misappropriations of Jungian psychology over the last hundred years. Both of the dialogue’s figures know the man of Jung so well that they do not need to address how he was misperceived by the public. They also know the limitations of the knowable. 
 
This is another lesson that is discussed in Lament. Can modern psychology know what it can’t know? That is my biggest complaint with the profession as it currently exists. Modern psychology seems content to retreat into research and objectivism. The medical, corporate, credentialist and academic restructuring of psychology in the nineteen eighties certainly furthered that problem. Jung did not believe that the descent into the unconscious without any hope of return was a path forward for psychology. This is why he abandoned the path The Red Book led him down. Can psychology let go of the objective and the researchable enough to embrace the limits of the knowable? Can we come to terms with limitations enough to heal an ego inflated world that sees no limits to growth?
 
I don’t know but I sincerely hope so. 
 
I said that I would provide a tangible example of the application of this book in it’s review,  so here it is:
 
I have always been enamored with James Hillman. He was by all accounts a brilliant analyst. He also was an incredibly intelligent person. That intellect did not save him. Hillman ended his career as a crank and a failure in my mind. In this book you see Hillman contemplate that failure. You also see Hillman attempt to redeem himself as he glimpses the unglimpseable. He sees something in the Red Book that he allows to clarify his earlier attempt to revision psychology. 
 
Hillman's attempt to reinvent Jungian psychology as archetypal psychology was wildly derided. Largely, because it never found any language or technique for application and practice. Hillman himself admitted that he did not know how to practice archetypal psychology. It's easy to laugh at somebody who claims to have reinvented psychology and can't even tell you what you do with their revolutionary invention.
 
However, I will admit that I think Hillman was right. He knew that he was but he didnt know how he was right. It is a mark of arrogance to see yourself as correct without evidence. Hillman was often arrogant but I think here he was not. Many Jungian analysts would leave the Jungian institutes through the 70, 80s and 90s to start somatic and experiential psychology that used Jung as a map but the connection between the body and the brain as a technique. These models made room for a direct experience in psychology that Jungian analysis does not often do. It added an element that Jung himself had practiced in the writing of The Red Book. Hillman never found this technique but he was correct about the path he saw forward for psychology. He knew what was missing. 
 
I started Taproot Therapy Collective because I felt a calling to dig up the Jungian techniques of my parent’s generation and reify them. I saw those as the most viable map towards the future of psychology, even though American psychology had largely forgotten them. I also saw them devoid of a practical technique or application for a world where years of analysis cost more than most trauma patients will make in a lifetime. I feel that experiential and brain based medicine techniques like brainspotting are the future of the profession. 
 
Pathways like brainspotting, sensorimotor therapy, somatic experiencing, neurostimulation, ketamine, psilocybin or any technique that allows the direct experience of the subcortical brain is the path forward to treat trauma. These things will be at odds with the medicalized, corporate, and credentialized nature of healthcare. I knew that this would be a poorly understood path that few people, even the well intentioned, could see. I would never have found it if I had refused the call of “the dead”. 
 
Lament is relevant because none of those realizations is somewhere that I ever would have gotten without the tradition that I am standing on top of. I am as, Isaac Newton said, standing on the shoulders of giants. Except Isaac Newton didn't invent that phrase. It was associated with him but he was standing on the tradition of the dead to utter a phrase first recorded in the medieval period. The author of its origin is unknown because they are, well, dead. They have no one to give their eulogy. 
 
The ethics and the cosmology of Lament, is that our lives are meant to be a eulogy for our dead. Lament, makes every honest eulogy in history become an ethics and by extension a cosmology. Read Pericles eulogy from the Peloponesian war in Thucydides. How much of these lessons are still unlearned? I would feel disingenuous in my career unless I tell you who those giants are that I stand on. They are David Tacey, John Beebe, Sonu Shamdasani, Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, Karen Horney, and Hal Stone. Many others also.
 
I would never have heard the voice of James Hillman inside myself unless I had learned to listen to the dead from his voice beyond the grave. It would have been easy for me to merely critize his failures instead of seeing them as incomplete truths. Hillman died with many things incomplete, as we all inevitably will. Lament helped me clarify the voices that I was hearing in the profession. Lament of the Dead is a fascinating read not because it tells us exactly what to do with the dead, or even what they are. Lament is fascinating because it helps us to see a mindful path forward between innovation and tradition. 
 
The contents of the collective unconscious cannot be contained by one individual. Just as Jungian psychology is meant to be a container to help an individual integrate the forces of the collective unconscious, attention to the unlived life of the historical dead can be a kind of container for culture. Similarly to Jungian psychology the container is not meant to be literalized or turned into a prison. It is a lens and a buffer to protect us until we are ready and allow us to see ourselves more clearly once we are. Our project is to go further in the journey of knowing ourselves where our ancestors failed to. Our mindful life is the product of the unlived life of the dead; it is the work of our life that is their lament. 
 

Interview with John Beebe on the MBTI Typology

A popular lecturer in the Jungian world, Beebe has spoken on topics related to the theory and practical applications of Analytical psychology to professional and lay audiences throughout the United States and around the world. He has been especially active in introducing training in Jungian psychology in China. Beebe is the founding editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, now called Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.[2] He was the first American co-editor of the London-based Journal of Analytical Psychology.
Beebe has also published in The Chiron Clinical Series, Fort Da, Harvest, The Inner Edge, Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Psychological Perspectives, The Psychoanalytic Review, Quadrant, Spring, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, Theory and Psychology, and Tikkun among others. He has contributed book chapters to The Anne Rice Reader, The Cambridge Companion to Jung, From Tradition to Innovation, House, Humanizing Evil, Initiation, Jungian Perspectives on Clinical Supervision, New Approaches to Dream Interpretation, Post-Jungians Today, Psyche & City, The Psychology of Mature Spirituality, Same-Sex Love, The Soul of Popular Culture, and Teaching Jung.
With Donald Sandner, Beebe is the author of "Psychopathology and Analysis",[3] an article on Jungian complex theory used in many training programs, and with Thomas Kirsch and Joe Cambray the author of "What Freudians Can Learn from Jung".[4] He is the author of the book Integrity in Depth, a study of the archetype of integrity, and of Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness.

Interview on Bollingen Tower with Martin Gledhill

Mr. Martin Gledhill BSc, BArch MA is working on a book about Carl Jung's Bolingen Tower. Martin is a senior teaching fellow in the Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering, focusing on the symbolism and spirituality of architecture. The Bollingen Tower is a home built by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. In appearance, it is a small castle with four towers. It is located in the village of Bollingen on the shore of Lake Zürich. Jung bought the land in 1922 after the death of his mother. In 1923 he built a two-story round tower on this land. It was a stone structure suitable to be lived in. Additions to this tower were constructed in 1927, 1931, and 1935, resulting in a building that has four connected parts.  A second story was added to the 1927 addition after the death of Jung's wife in 1955, signifying "an extension of consciousness achieved in old age." For much of his life Jung spent several months each year living at Bollingen. The Tower is now owned by a family trust and is not open to the public.
 
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Interview with David Tacey on Carl Jung, Mysticism, and the Politics of Religion

Dr. David Tacey is a professor in literature and depth psychology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author of eight books, including Jung and the New Age (2001), The Spirituality Revolution (2003) and How to Read Jung (2006).He was born in Melbourne and raised in Alice Springs, central Australia. It was here that he was influenced by Aboriginal cultures and their religion and cosmology. After completing a PhD degree at the University of Adelaide, David Tacey was a Harkness Fellow in the United States, where his studies were supervised by James Hillman.He regularly gives lecture courses at the summer school of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich.
I grew up reading David Tacey so it's extremely exciting to get to sit down and talk to him. He was very generous with his time. Many of his books and articles are no longer in print or are behind hefty paywalls. One of the things that he offers in this interview is that any listener can send him an e-mail to request essays that were in academic journals no longer in print and he will send you the PDF. Please take him up on that as he is a fascinating writer.
 
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Dr. David Tacey is a professor in literature and depth psychology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is the author of eight books, including Jung and the New Age (2001), The Spirituality Revolution (2003) and How to Read Jung (2006).He was born in Melbourne and raised in Alice Springs, central Australia. It was here that he was influenced by Aboriginal cultures and their religion and cosmology. After completing a PhD degree at the University of Adelaide, David Tacey was a Harkness Fellow in the United States, where his studies were supervised by James Hillman.He regularly gives lecture courses at the summer school of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich.
I grew up reading David Tacey so it's extremely exciting to get to sit down and talk to him. He was very generous with his time. Many of his books and articles are no longer in print or are behind hefty paywalls. One of the things that he offers in this interview is that any listener can send him an e-mail to request essays that were in academic journals no longer in print and he will send you the PDF. Please take him up on that as he is a fascinating writer.
#mythology #religion #symbolism #allegory #metaphor #Jung #existentialism #depthpsychology #anthropology #sociology #politics #myth #comparativereligion #hinduism #christianity 
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Interview with A. Savage of the Parquet Courts Psychology of Visual Art and Music

Andy Savage is a brilliant visual and musical artist. As front man of the Parquet Courts he has seven ground breaking rock albums. As a visual artist he is makes beautiful impressionist work that has echoes of Wassily Kandinsky, playful modernism of Paul Klee and even the murals of Emil Bisttram. We are so grateful for his time with us and his body of work in the world. Here he talks about his process and personality as it relates to art. 
Check out his other work here:
Music@ https://www.parquet-courts.com/
Visual Art@ https://a-savage.com/
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Does Brainspotting work? What to do when Brainspotting doesn’t work?

Brainspotting is not a scam! It is an incredibly effective evidence based practice. I try to make videos about the most common phone calls we get at Taproot Therapy Collective. One of the calls that I get is that Brainspotting with a clinician in a another state or country just isn't working. There are thousands of BSP techniques. Patient's call because there clinician is not doing what I do in my videos, and that is fine! One of my favorite things about the BSP approach is that it is so open ended. I think that all of that freedom can be little overwhelming to new BSP clinicians. Especially clinicians coming from EMDR backgrounds. If you are a patient or a clinician having trouble processing with BSP these are some suggestions to help the process along. #Brainspotting #trauma #dualatunement #chaostheory #uncertaintyprinciple #EMDR #tailofthecomet #EMDR #therapy #PTSD #psychotherapy #cptsd #mbti #did
 
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