Brian Falk PhD, LAc Unified Medicine

We are on our guard against contagious diseases of the body, but we are exasperatingly careless when it comes to the even more dangerous collective diseases of the mind. ~~~C.G. Jung

No one can "come to terms with" the shadow problem. That would imply a superhuman. One can firstly only be conscious of the shadow and suffer and bear it. "Come to terms with" would mean as much as being "liberated." Choice, decision, follow only after painful recognition of the inferiority. Only out of this arises the possibility of "processing" the shadow, without its ever being got rid of. ~~~Carl Jung

Of all psychology's sins, the most mortal is its neglect of beauty. There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books. Again, psychology fails what it studies. Neither social psychology, experimental psychology, nor therapeutic psychology find a place for the aesthetic appreciation of a life story. Their tasks are investigation and explanation.... By psychology's "mortal" sin, I mean the sin of deadening, the... dead feeling that comes over us when we read professional psychology, hear its language, the voice with which it drones, the bulk of its textbooks, the serious pretensions and bearded proclamations of new "findings" that could hardly be more banal, its soothing anodynes for self-help, its decor, its fashion, its departmental meetings, and its tranquilizing consulting rooms, those stagnant waters where the soul goes to be restored, a last refuge of white-bread culture, stale, crustless, but ever spongy with rebounding hope.... If helping is the calling, then better to apprentice with Mother Teresa than to expect a psychology without soul, beauty, or pleasure to train you to help the suffering. Psychology has no self-help manual for its own affliction. ~~~James Hillman, The Soul's Code See more

I'll be teaching this 6 week online course starting May 1st. Registration starts....now! https://www.prs.org//The_Psychology_of_the_Five_Elements.h

As things now stand, the tranquillizers may prevent some people from giving enough trouble, not only to their rulers, but even to themselves. Too much tension is a disease; but so is too little. There are certain occasions when we ought to be tense, when an excess of tranquility (and especially of tranquility imposed from the outside, by a chemical) is entirely inappropriate. ~~~Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Dyslexia, chronic lateness, distractability, hyperactivity make up "attention deficit disorder"--and what patience it demands. Yet how else contain and tease out what this "deficit" shows? Children so categorized, and adults too, are often those with above-average intelligence, given to daydreams, and with such widely open sensitive souls that their "ego" behavior is noncompliant and disorganized. Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax--of course, they work. But because they work against th...e deficit does not confirm the cause of it or disclose its meaning. Crutches work, but they can't account for your broken leg. Why is this disorder so prevalent today? What does the soul NOT want to attend to, and what might the daimon be doing when it is NOT reading, NOT speaking, and NOT fulfilling performance expectations? To discover this takes patience, and that imaginative perception that Henry James described as "a prolonged hovering over the case exposed." ~~~James Hillman, The Soul's Code

Suppose that mice, as a species, were to run around with rigidified spinal columns and distorted faces as opposed to all other species. It would pose a problem for every biologist. But it does not pose a problem for them when the human species runs around with the same symptoms. ~~~Wilhelm Reich

The doctor must also be a psychologist, which means that he must have knowledge of the human psyche. The doctor cannot evade this demand... Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to [abandon exact science] put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban p...ubs, in brothel and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul. ~~~C.G. Jung See more

My latest article is now published in the European Journal of Oriental Medicine! "Chinese Medicine and the Splitting of the Doctor-Patient Archetypes" This article explores the dual nature of healer and patient that exists in each person, proposing the idea that a doctor has an ‘inner patient’ just as the patient has an ‘inner doctor’. These basic principles form what are called archetypal patterns. In a clinical setting, these patterns can become "split" through the denial or repression of one side of the archetypal pair, with consequences for both doctor and patient, and the efficacy and outcome of the treatment. This process is discussed, with some suggestions of ways in which the practitioner may minimise its occurence, particularly in the context of TCM treatment. http://www.ejom.co.uk/vol-9-no-3/contents/contents.html

Except in moments of mystical rapture, the experience of totality, wholeness, completeness, is NOT part of our daily psychological experience, and there is no special reason why it should be. Psychic life is not lived exclusively on mountain peaks. The experience of being in confusion, emotional disarray, nowheresville, out of whack, off center, is much closer to our realities, much closer to how it really is with us, and is the sure and certain sign that we are alive. ~~~Lyn Cowan, Tracking the White Rabbit: a subversive view of modern culture