The Paradox of Pursuing Happiness: Insights from Depth Psychology

Most of us get better at living as we go. There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self. They were usually moments when you were working with others in service of some ideal. That

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We can think of individuation in a sense perhaps closer to that intended by Jung, as the striving of the human organism toward wholeness, toward completion—an internal thrust toward self-realization or self-actualization reminiscent of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy. During the process of individuation, we become more and more completely that whi

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Inevitably, there is much about ourselves we don’t like and want to change. There are also broad areas of our mental and emotional life we don’t want to examine at all and whose existence we would prefer to deny entirely. These are the areas where we feel most vulnerable, most fragile—perhaps most damaged—or those things we are most ashamed of. But

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In the course of our growth into a separate adult human being, we erect more and more barriers to our knowing of ourselves. We have labeled many experiences of our physical, emotional, and mental reality, and many aspects of our relationship with others, as undesirable, even intolerable. By the time we are adults, these rejected aspects of ourselve

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