by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Feb 25, 2026 | Psychology of History
I’ve been a trauma therapist for over a decade, and I’ve noticed something strange happening in the last few years. My patients aren’t just coming in with anxiety or depression or PTSD. They’re coming in with something harder to name—a...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Feb 23, 2026 | Mythology and Therapy, Psychology Book Reviews and Non Fiction, Psychology of Media and Culture, Uncategorized
Who was John Gardner? John Gardner’s “Grendel” is a postmodern retelling of the Old English epic poem “Beowulf,” which explores themes of existentialism, nihilism, and the nature of evil through the eyes of the titular monster. Published...
by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Jan 2, 2026 | Psychology
In the lexicon of modern trauma, we are well-versed in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). We understand the biology of fear: the hyper-arousal, the flashbacks, the fight-or-flight response triggered by a life threat. But there is another kind of wound, one that is...
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...
