by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 26, 2025 | Psychotherapy Biographies: Historical Figures in the History of Psychology
The body knows things the mind has not yet learned. This insight, articulated by Carl Jung nearly a century ago through his concepts of the psychoid unconscious and somatic intuition, found its empirical validation in the laboratories of a Portuguese neuroscientist...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 26, 2025 | Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology
In the lexicon of Depth Psychology, few concepts are as heavy or as misunderstood as the “Mother Wound.” It is often dismissed as a grievance against one’s actual mother—a list of complaints about her being too critical, too distant, or too intrusive. But...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 20, 2025 | Christian Mysticism in Therapy, Comparative Religion for Therapy, Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology, Psychology of Mystics, Gurus, and Spiritual Philosophers
There is a particular kind of book that seems to find you rather than the other way around. For many who have wandered into the territory where psychology meets spirituality, that book is often The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly Palmer Hall. Published in 1928...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 8, 2025 | Alabama Local History, Birmingham
Trauma, Memory, and the Spectral Geography of a Wounded Land The Land That Refuses to Forget Alabama is haunted. This is not a metaphor, or rather, it is not only a metaphor. Drive the back roads of the Black Belt at dusk and you will pass antebellum mansions where...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 7, 2025 | Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology
A Philosopher-King Writing to Himself in the Dark In the final decade of his life, along the frozen banks of the Danube River, surrounded by the chaos of military campaigns against Germanic tribes, the most powerful man in the ancient world sat alone in his tent and...
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 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 | Oct 19, 2025 | Psychology of Fiction / Flash Fiction / Screenwriting, Psychology of Film and TV, Psychology of Media and Culture
A Review of Into the Abyss by Werner Herzog Trigger Warning: This essay discusses capital punishment, murder, violence, death, and contains descriptions of violent acts including attempted murder. The film and essay examine traumatic events and their psychological...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Oct 16, 2025 | Jungian Therapy and Depth Psychology
The Moment Reality Refuses to Cooperate We’ve all been there. That moment when our carefully constructed understanding of how things should work collides head-on with how they actually work. The project that should have succeeded fails spectacularly. The person...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Oct 4, 2025 | Christian Mysticism in Therapy, Mythology and Therapy, Symbolism and Meaning in Psychotherapy
The Sacred Species and Their Archetypal Meanings In the depths of the human psyche, trees stand as primordial witnesses to our spiritual evolution. They are the axis mundi, the world pillars that connect heaven, earth, and the underworld in virtually every...
