This Jungian Life

Guest Eve Maram, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst in Orange, CA. Her book, The Schizophrenia Complex, presents a clear-eyed and compassionate understanding of our encounters with severe mental illness. The submergence in unconscious chaos that defines schizophrenia triggers negative emotions in others—yet Jung on psychosis showed that we are different from those patients only in degree. Significantly his Word Association Test proved that the unconscious influences everyone’s daily life in multiple ways. Moreover, Jung’s psychiatric work with psychotic convalescents led to his ground-breaking discovery of the collective unconscious, humanity’s mythopoetic substrate. Understandably we shy away from people in psychosis because they are living out our own radical and universal mad parts. But, instead of turning from the schizophrenia complex, we can acknowledge our shared darkness and stretch into connection. Then, as Eve Maram’s story depicts, we may find eros has the power to cons