by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 26, 2025 | Uncategorized
“Shadow Work” has exploded on TikTok and Instagram, becoming a buzzword for everything from journaling prompts to intense trauma processing. But before it was a hashtag, the Shadow was the central pillar of Carl Jung’s psychology. Jung defined the Shadow...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 25, 2025 | Uncategorized
The Architecture of Desire: Rethinking Libido from Freud to Friston The history of depth psychology is, at its core, a history of a single argument: What fuels the human machine? For Sigmund Freud, the answer was singular, biological, and relentless. He believed the...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 20, 2025 | Comparative Religion for Therapy, Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology
I. The Architecture of Magnificent Error In the intellectual history of the human sciences, there exists a rare and distinctive category of scholarship which might be termed the “magnificent failure.” These are works of sweeping ambition, immense...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 7, 2025 | Philosophy for Therapists
A Sixteenth Century Mystic Speaks to the Modern Consulting Room In the annals of Western spirituality, few figures have captured the imagination of depth psychologists and existential therapists quite like the sixteenth century Spanish mystic Juan de Yepes y Álvarez,...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Oct 26, 2025 | History of Psychotherapy, Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology, Phenomenology and Existential Psychology, Philosophy for Therapists
How Friston’s Mathematics and Gendlin’s Philosophy Validate Jung’s Architecture of Mind A remarkable theoretical convergence is occurring in contemporary cognitive science, yet it remains largely unrecognized even by those working within these...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Oct 21, 2025 | Depth Psychology Approaches and Techniques, Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology
The Paradox of the Egoless Egoist James Hillman spent decades railing against the ego and the ego-Self axis, calling it a “monotheistic ideal” that stifled psychic life. Yet as many Jungians have pointed out, by throwing away this fundamental structural...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Oct 21, 2025 | Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology
When Andrew Samuels published “Jung and the Post-Jungians” in 1985, he gave the Jungian world something it desperately needed: a map of its own territory. Like many fields that emerge from a singular founding figure, analytical psychology had fractured...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Aug 8, 2025 | Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology, Metamodernism and Deconstruction, Symbolism and Meaning in Psychotherapy
“There is a very strong and very ancient emotion that is rarely mentioned or recognized: it is the anguish we feel for the absence of idols. If the eye has no image on which to rest, if there is nothing to mediate between the mental phantasm and that...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Jul 23, 2025 | Psychology of Fiction / Flash Fiction / Screenwriting, Psychology of Media and Culture
The Dream of Mathematical Prophecy In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the mathematician Hari Seldon develops psychohistory—a mathematical sociology capable of predicting the future of large populations with statistical certainty. This fictional science,...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Jun 19, 2025 | Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology, Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
Carl Jung remains an enduring subject of fascination, his life and ideas sparking impassioned debate over 60 years after his death. As the founder of analytical psychology, Jung pioneered the exploration of the unconscious mind, dream interpretation, archetypes, and...
