Stephanie Terre Blanche Clinical Psychologist and Psychotherapist

12/10/2026

Our Quote of the Week.

“Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.”

~ Muriel Rukeyser (1968). The Speed of Darkness. Random House.

12/10/2026

This weekend was Jung Southern Africa - SAAJA's yearly Mantis weekend. Thank you for an amazing weekend of learning, reflecting, sitting with, exploring and unpacking, as only Jungians can. Can't wait to attend next year, sincere thank you to SAAJA for the incredible work that they do for depth psychology and Jungian psychology in this country. 🫶🕸️🦚🌞🔥

09/10/2026

You do not heal 'from' trauma.
You simply come to know yourself
as Life Itself.
And you turn towards the wounded place.
And you flush it with attention,
which is Love.

And maybe the wound will always be with you.
Maybe you will always walk with the hurt.
But now, you hold it. It doesn't hold you.
You are the container, not the contained.
It doesn't control you any longer, the wound.
Because it is drenched in awareness now.
Drenched in You.
Loved by You.
Even celebrated by You.

You do not heal 'from' trauma.
You find healing 'in' the trauma.
You find yourself at trauma's sacred core.
The One who is always present.
The One who can bear
even the most intense feeling states.
And survive.

The Indestructible One.
The Infinite One.
The Powerful One.
You.
~Jeff Foster~

Image by Mia Okhi

08/10/2026

08/10/2026

The modern mind has learned to dismiss the symbol. It reads a fairy tale as entertainment, a dream as noise, a myth as superstition dressed in older clothes. And then it wonders why it feels unmoored, why its achievements taste thin, why its children are hungry for stories the culture no longer tells.

Jung understood that the psyche speaks in images rather than propositions. The dream, the fairy tale, the myth, the music that moves: these are the pathways by which the unconscious finds its way to us and, in return, returns us back to the unconscious. They form the deep infrastructure beneath the life of reason.

The symbol refuses to sit still. In alchemy, Mercurius appears as the trickster-creator who is metal and liquid, poison and healing, matter and spirit. Jung recognised in him an image of the Self, the inner movement toward wholeness that cannot be grasped by the single-minded ego. The symbol will not be pinned to a single meaning. This is its power, and how it heals.

A life, read closely, often has the shape of a fairy tale. A descent, understood symbolically, mirrors the descent in the story. A wound, attended to, can echo the wound of the hero or heroine who must enter the forest, meet the witch at the threshold, open the forbidden door, and return changed. The feminine finds her inner authority through refusal and the courage to know. The body remembers what the mind forgets. The dream carries the shape of what is coming.

Consider the territory of appetite and the body. The symbol lives in the hunger, the scar, the kitchen at ten o'clock, the mirror that still shows the old face. When we honour the image, the psyche begins to speak. When we flee it, the psyche grows louder in symptom and dream until we stop.

The symbolic imagination is not a luxury of the inner life. It is the life. To attend to it is to begin the long work of becoming oneself.

~ Written by Konrad van Staden (), Clinical Psychologist & Jungian Analyst

Image credit: Photo by Altus Viviers, used with permission.

05/10/2026

Our Quote of the Week.

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”

~ James Baldwin (1961). The discovery of what it means to be an American. In Nobody knows my name: More notes of a native son (pp. 123–142). Dial Press.

04/10/2026

Happy Sunday Folks!

🐾🤍