I'm not a psychologist, and I'm not a Jungian analyst. What I have is a business that's spent this year quietly circling ideas — the subconscious, the shadow, dreamwork — without me ever sitting down and reading where they actually came from.
So today I did. And I found something I wasn't expecting: this brand almost had a different name.
Where It Started
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, a contemporary and eventually a breakaway collaborator of Freud's, working in the early 1900s. Where Freud focused heavily on repressed sexuality, Jung pushed toward something broader — the idea that the psyche has depths most of us never look at, and that becoming a whole person means actually going down there instead of pretending those depths aren't running the show.
That's the simplified version. I'm sure the historians and the practicing analysts would want more nuance than I'm giving it here.
The Part I Keep Coming Back To
The concept that stopped me was the shadow — the parts of yourself you've pushed out of view because they didn't fit the person you wanted to be seen as. Not "evil," necessarily. Just disowned. Jung's argument was that what you refuse to look at doesn't disappear — it runs quietly in the background and leaks out sideways, in reactions that feel bigger than the moment deserves, or in the things about other people that irritate you far more than they should.
Alongside that: individuation, which is Jung's word for the lifelong process of integrating those disowned parts instead of just managing them from a distance.
What's landed for me: Looking into this is what surfaced something I'd genuinely forgotten — before this brand was called Living the AI Life, my working name for it was "Living a Subconscious Life." I moved away from that name, but apparently not from the idea. It was there the entire time, underneath the one I actually picked.
Where This Actually Fits
I already knew Jung's fingerprints were on things I use casually — MBTI-style personality typing traces straight back to his work on psychological types, and I've written about that connection before. What I hadn't connected until today is how much of what I already wanted to build here — self-hypnosis content, shadow work, dreamwork — sits directly inside this same tradition. It's not a random assortment of "mind stuff." It's one throughline I hadn't named yet.
What I'm Still Unsure About
Being honest about the gaps:
- I don't yet know how much of Jung's specific framework (archetypes, the collective unconscious) is still taken seriously in clinical psychology versus treated as historically interesting but scientifically shaky.
- I'm not sure where the line is between "shadow work" as a genuinely useful self-reflection practice and the more performative, self-help version of it that's all over social media right now.
- I don't know enough yet to responsibly build content around dreamwork specifically — that's next on my reading list, not something I'm ready to teach.
Why I'm Doing This At All
This is part three of a series where I'm working through different traditions — Buddhism, Taoism, Jungian psychology, Stoicism, Ayurveda — the same way: learning in public, admitting what I don't know, and using AI as a research partner rather than pretending I arrived at this with a psychology degree. Given what today surfaced, don't be surprised if the subconscious side of this site gets a lot more attention going forward.
Over to you. If you know more about Jung than I do — correct me. If shadow work has actually changed something for you, or if it's always struck you as more marketing than substance, I want to hear both. No account or real name needed to say hi below, though you'll need one to comment.