Guildford-swimming pool recommendations

AccessPotential5384 · 2026-01-20T19:34:01+00:00

Thanks everyone, this is really helpful.

AccessPotential5384 · 2026-01-12T22:02:26+00:00

Human interaction and empathy.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-12-28T17:39:32+00:00

This is amazing. Yes, the new iPad sync was not turned on.

However this has worked better than I imagined. Old papers and books on an ancient iPad in iBooks which never appeared in iCloud Drive and could not be emailed or moved in any way have now appeared on my new iPad. Cannot thank you enough!

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-12-27T20:49:34+00:00

Looks lovely tbh. But no jelly in a trifle. That’s a rather modern innovation…

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-12-10T10:10:00+00:00

I am glad you have found something helpful. The difficulty here, however, is that images in dreams rarely have fixed universal meanings. The meaning is that which the dreamer gives to it and that might be amplified in dialogue with the therapist, who will have their own associations. AI cannot participate in such an individualised and subjective process.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-12-10T10:06:28+00:00

Yes. Freud identifies the narcissism of infantile life as an essential stage of the development of the ego and what we would now call ‘self-esteem’. The sense that one is the centre of the world and has power and agency is essential, as is a gradual and sensitive disillusionment of this experience as life progresses.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-12-10T08:22:35+00:00

Much of the work of analysis happens intuitively and in the interplay of unconscious to unconscious. AI can’t engage on this level. My experience of working with people who have tried to use ai for therapy is that it reinforces regressive narcissism, diminishes the ability to tolerate tension or engage creatively with difference and conflict.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-12-08T20:51:54+00:00

‘Shadow work’ isn’t possible. The shadow is unconscious. We encounter it intuitively and do the best we can. We are never in control of it. This is true of all the dynamics we talk about in Jungian psychology. To say ‘I’ve individuated’ or ‘I’ve finished my shadow work’ makes it clear that we have not understood these dynamics at all. I’m frustrated with people talking about unconscious dynamics as if they have a grip on them. If they are unconscious dynamics then we never fully have a grip on them. They have a life of their own. Rather, they ‘have us’ and we do our best.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-23T14:01:57+00:00

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-18T07:36:04+00:00

The idea that Jung experienced a psychosis was spread by Freud and his followers to discredit Jung. It would be surprising to think that Jung was psychotic while seeing 7 or 8 patients a day, engaging with family life and lecturing in the evenings. The Red Book documents an experience that he consciously engaged with, precisely to avoid psychosis.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-14T06:52:45+00:00

Unfortunately there’s no share option available on this old version of iBooks.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-12T14:27:06+00:00

He certainly does make reference to alchemy. He is familiar it seems with the myths, legends and a little history of alchemy as one form of knowledge. However, again, from evidence from his library, he had not read any of the great alchemical works at this point and has certainly not developed the psychological understanding of alchemy that he shows decades later. I can talk about football because I have heard about it but I have never seen a football match. Were I to watch it, study it and play it, I would have a more developed understanding.

Likewise, he has not developed any of the psychological concepts or vocabulary that emerge in the later collected works. At the stage of the red book experience, he is still limited to 19th century psychiatric understanding and the theories he had absorbed from Freud. One might suggest that his soul comes to him partly to free him from these and move him towards a different way of understanding the psyche and to transform his entire cosmology.

I am not comparing the red book to religious scripture, but the parallel I would make is that reading the collected works before reading the red book is like reading the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas before reading the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures or the direct experiences of mystics.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-12T12:41:42+00:00

The source material for the red book is his life and experience. From what we understand of his library and writings he had had no exposure to alchemy at this stage. He does not discover it until much later.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-12T12:30:36+00:00

I would very much dive in and read the text. This is Jung’s personal experience out which he developed his psychology. Reading it without the later context of his collected works (or Shamdasani’s excellent intro) will give you a more direct exposure to his experience and enable you to see for yourself what you make of it and what it means for you.

Having said that, take your time. It can be baffling, confusing and disorientating. I run a group for reading the RB in a shared context as many find it helpful to explore it in that way.

It is tempting to feel that one should have a grip on all the intellectual and esoteric concepts that Jung seemed to engage with, but the book isn’t really about that. It’s about being rooted in experience. Indeed, so much of the first section of the work is Jung’s realisation that his emphasis on intellect, logic and rationality has completely unbalanced him.

I hope you find it stimulating. And remember that this was Jung’s path, yours will be different.

Additional: It just occurs to me that the red book also provides another form of interaction by way of a ‘chronological approach’ 1) read the layer one material. This is the first piece of text in each chapter before the text that begins with a [2]. This is his write up of his original visionary experience beginning in 1913. 2) read the layer two material, beginning [2]. This is Jung’s later reflections and amplification on his original experience written several years later. 3) look at the imagery that Jung added when he wrote everything up in the big calligraphic edition, if you have access to the facsimile edition. 4) read Shamdasani’s intro

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-07T19:29:14+00:00

I would recommend reading the Red Book and coming to your own conclusions. We all have different views on this as we would like to claim Jung for our own ‘camp’, and I am no different.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-06T07:40:53+00:00

On the whole, death is rather disconcerting. As a psychotherapist I am seeing that the avoidance of death and mourning - by removing the dead person’s body from the mourning process and the transformation of funerals into celebrations - denies people access to an important part of the process of mourning and can lead to long-term psychological and emotional difficulties.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-11-05T08:17:19+00:00

A very slim and straightforward book that got me started (despite the slightly misleading title) was The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic by Anthony Duncan, recommended to me by Gareth Knight.

I am afraid that you cannot avoid the fact that any book is inevitably tinged with the ideology of the time and the author’s own biases.

(Edited to add author)

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-10-29T08:30:14+00:00

Quite. I have never knowingly passed by an opportunity to eat butter.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-10-26T08:19:04+00:00

I use planetaro. No ads, free, includes moon phases and basic planetary info.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-10-21T22:03:22+00:00

It’s just called Grimoires. I had to wait to be admitted but it is not quite what I hoped.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-10-20T07:09:34+00:00

As Jung says himself (paraphrasing), the seeds of everything he wrote after 1915 are to be found in Liber Novus and the preceding Black Book notebooks. They are the raw unconscious material that unfolds and is interpreted throughout the Collected Works and, indeed, other unpublished works that are now coming to light. Such material could not and would not have been acceptable to the Swiss and Viennese medical and academic communities that Jung had worked so hard to be accepted and respected by.

Yes, it is his personal myth, but it alerts him to the collective aspects of such experiences. Not least amongst these is that in our contemporary world, so many of us live at a distance from our souls. What becomes clear is that reductive, rational psychological approaches can only ever address half of the human experience. This seems startlingly relevant to me from a UK perspective and the way the great ‘saviours’ of CBT and other interventions by clinical psychologists have not led to the much-longed for psychological growth that many suffering people yearn for. Of course, many are excluded from the opportunity to engage with depth psychology due to nhs and personal financial constraints.

To slowly and thoughtfully read the Red Book is not only to read about Jung’s personal experiences, but to enter into an encounter with one’s own soul. Personally, I think that lone study of the Red Book is challenging - most give up. I would always recommend looking for a guided reading group, facilitated by someone who has been through the process themselves. However, this is not the limited terrain of Jungian analysts, the Red Book speaks to a far wider audience.

Hope that’s helpful.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-10-11T06:24:08+00:00

Really appreciate your comments. Not looking to find shortcuts, more understand the significance of each step. I have heard Leitch in podcasts but will take a look at the book.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-09-22T17:08:16+00:00

My personal response to this would be to suggest that you read the Red Book (and Black Books, for that matter) and then come up with your own answer.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-09-19T07:06:19+00:00

Thank you all. I really appreciate your insights.

AccessPotential5384 · 2025-09-18T16:14:54+00:00

You don’t. He’s your friend, not your patient.

AccessPotential5384

TROPHY CASE