The Black Sun has belonged to a deeper current in my life and artwork for many years. Taking Stanton Marlan’s The Black Sun as a point of departure, this essay explores alchemy, lumen naturae, darkness, imagination and the changing presence of these ideas within my landscape paintings.

One of the book's most compelling themes is that meaning cannot simply be adopted from someone else's life. Advice, traditions, and beliefs may all be valuable, but eventually each of us must discover what genuinely carries significance within our own experience.

Finding the right therapist involves more than choosing a particular approach or finding someone with similar experiences. This guide explores qualifications, trust, practical compatibility, initial consultations, and how a therapeutic relationship may develop.

Why might making an image have a place in psychotherapy? This article explores images as forms of psychological life, their ancient human history, and their role within therapeutic work.

Art Psychotherapy brings conversation and image-making together, but using art in sessions with me is always optional. This article explores what happens during a session, how images are approached, and why no artistic skill is required.

Depth psychotherapy explores the deeper and often unconscious dimensions of experience. This article considers how it works, what sessions may involve, and who might be drawn to this reflective approach.

What does it mean to play in psychotherapy? And what does it mean to become, especially in adolescence? Two books that have shaped my clinical thinking in profound ways are D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality and Richard Frankel’s The Adolescent Psyche. Though written in different contexts, both works invite us to reconsider how we understand psychological growth, creativity, and transformation. At their heart is a shared concern with something alive in the psyche: the space

Fifty years after James Hillman published Re Visioning Psychology, his work remains vivid, challenging, and creatively alive. This article explores Hillman’s life, ideas, and contributions to archetypal psychology, with reflections on image, soul, dreams, imagination, and the deep ecological and cultural themes that shaped his vision.

Art can become inseparable from identity, vocation, and the shape of a life. This article explores psychotherapy for artists navigating blocks, exposure, recognition, livelihood, and change.

Beginning therapy can bring uncertainty alongside hope, curiosity, or apprehension. This article considers familiar concerns such as not knowing what to say, fearing judgement, and wondering what therapy may offer.

A personal reflection on how astrology and depth psychology meet within the shared language of symbolism, offering new ways to understand psyche, relationship, and meaning.

What struck me most during the workshop, and what I have since revisited in reading his work, is Romanyshyn’s ability to remain faithful to both scholarship and soul. He does not reduce myth to symbol, or psychology to a set of tools or techniques. Instead, he invites us into a relationship with psyche, with image, with story.

What does it mean to listen to the Earth? Not as a metaphor, but as an act of reverent attention. For those whose work engages with psyche and image (particularly psychotherapists and artists in this instance) the question can evoke something ancestral, a realignment of the senses with our most natural way of being in the world. We are accustomed to listening deeply: to silences, the symbolic, to psyche speaking through image and metaphor. So what happens when we turn this sa

There are certain books that feel less like something we simply read, and more like something we return to when a particular kind of understanding is needed. Martín Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust is one of those books. Its central insight is both simple and deeply challenging. That grief, in its fullest sense, cannot be separated from praise. If there is ever to be any real peace on earth, all people need to relearn and reestablish the now diminished and hidden arts of

There are certain ideas that seem to sit just beneath the surface of modern life, recognised in fragments, but rarely given their full significance. Imagination is one of them. In Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, Gary Lachman explores how imagination has been misunderstood, marginalised, and often reduced to something trivial or unreal within Western culture. What emerges instead is a very different picture. One in which imagination is not a secondary function of the mind,

An exploration of material becoming living presence in the art object. Jungian analyst Warren Colman explores the formation of archetypes as derived from human engagement with their social and material environment. This is a phenomenological approach which sees psychic life as emergent from embodied action in the world, in contrast to a classical Jungian perspective which would view archetypes as pre-existent, either “inborn” biologically, or metaphysically a priori. As I und

If explanation is the self-cure for curiosity, we have a lot of explaining to stop doing; if desire is the refuge from wide-angled attention, we have a lot of wanting to relinquish. In Attention Seeking, Adam Phillips offers a way of thinking about attention that moves beyond the obvious. Attention is something we give and receive, and is in turns needed, wanted, and feared in its various forms. In psychotherapy, we notice that a symptom, or a state of mind, is something that

The work of James Hillman can feel both compelling and difficult to approach. His writing does not sit easily within conventional ideas of psychology, and often asks something different of the reader. Less a system to be understood, and more a way of seeing to be entered into. This copy of A Blue Fire has been with me for the best part of twenty years. It was one of the first ‘psychology’ books I owned, and it has lived a life. The cover is worn, the pages marked by time and

Carl Jung’s reflections from Bollingen reveal a psyche that is not confined to the individual but flows through nature, ancestry, and the deep roots of life. This expanded post explores Jung’s vision of the interconnectedness of self, soul, and the living world.

The First Encounter I discovered the work of Carl Jung during my mid-to-late teens, when I plucked this text from a shelf in a local bookshop. Having no idea at the time who this man was, or about psychoanalysis, I imagine I was attracted by the title. A Timely Passage in a Culture of Speed I find the following passage especially fascinating today, in a world where we are so often required to ‘know’ quickly. Alluding to a way of working that seeks not to impinge upon the...