Nature is a Haunted House
Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted. – Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1876 Emily Dickinson first wrote to…
A Grief Ritual
This is the continuation of a story that I related in my talk Transpersonal: Integrative Therapy for Past-Life Trauma. It concerned a tragic accident in which a 17 year old…
The Labyrinth and the Maze
This post forms the second half of a discussion opened in the previous one, ‘The Weird and the Uncanny‘. As a way to approach the psychotherapeutic implications, I want to…
The Weird and the Uncanny
Here, I would like to examine more deeply the question of the weird, and its relationship to the uncanny, a concept allied to psychotherapy since Freud’s 1919 essay ‘Das Unheimliche’….
One Grief
In an earlier post, on ‘Trauma and Thauma’ I related a dream where I glimpsed a vast ancient structure like a dam, or a weir. Water would soon flood over…
The Infernal Medicine: the Madness of William Blake
“Blake … was … mad!” This was Jonathan Wordsworth’s introduction to William Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. A tall, patrician figure, with an air of amusement and a…
- Field Theory
- Psychedelics
- Reincarnation
- Relationship
- Somatic Experiencing
- Spirits
- Synchronicity
- Trauma / Thauma
Transpersonal: Integrative Therapy for Past-Life Trauma
This is a case study I presented at a Symposium on ‘Counselling the Exceptional Experiencer’ on 20th May 2023. The event was hosted by the Parapsychological Association. In the first…
What the mushrooms said
Human beings have always changed their consciousness by ingesting substances. Alcohol, tobacco and caffeine are legal means to do this in our society, while cocaine, heroin, cannabis, ketamine, LSD, MDMA…
Madness and the Spirits
A recent study of people who reported hearing voices in California, Accra and Chennai found that: In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive…
Weirding the Relationship
It’s a commonplace observation within psychotherapy that “the relationship is the therapy”. Efforts to identify any other factor that makes a difference (such as the psychotherapeutic modality used, client expectations,…