Listening
What are good podcasts on Jung, myth and the psyche?
For Jung and myth read through ordinary lives, start with The Architect Speaks, my own podcast of over 500 episodes on the patterns people live and the myths underneath them, and the Forging Excalibur archive, where that work first went public between 2020 and 2022. For Jung from inside the analytic tradition, This Jungian Life and Speaking of Jung are both made with Jungian analysts. For myth told as story, there's Michael Meade's Living Myth.
Two of these are mine, and I've put them first because this is my site. The others are good at things mine don't try to do, so I've said what each one is for. Pick by what you want: the ideas themselves, the analysts who practise them, or the stories they came from.
The Architect Speaks
My podcast began in May 2025 and now has over 500 episodes. Each takes one question people actually live with: why a pattern keeps repeating, why being needed isn't the same as being loved, why insight doesn't change a life. Jung, the hero's journey and the old myths run underneath nearly all of it, and a good number of episodes take them head on. You can hear it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and every episode has its own page in the Library.
Where to start on Jung, myth and the psyche
- Honouring the Foundations of the Work, Episode 1: Carl Jung. What Jung mapped, the shadow and the archetypes, and where my own work picks it up.
- Honouring the Foundations of the Work, Episode 5: Joseph Campbell. The hero's journey and “follow your bliss”, and the trap of living your life as a performed myth.
- Honouring the Foundations of the Work, Episode 6: Robert Moore (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover). The four archetypes of the mature masculine and the shadow each one casts.
- Four Lenses into the Work, 3 of 4: For the Mythologist. The whole framework told in the language of myth: symbol, descent, and the sacrifice a person learns to call virtue.
- What Druids, Witches and Alchemists Were Really Doing. The Druid descent, alchemy and Jung's individuation read as one act of transformation.
- Mythology Disguised as Liberation: What Cinema Installs. Films as the working mythologies of our time, and what they quietly install.
- Five Installations: The Films That Programmed You. Five films and the operating instruction each one leaves behind.
- Apocalypse Now: The Heart of Darkness in Every Man. The shadow as something structural in every person, and what integrating it means.
- No Country for Old Men: The Architecture of Fate (Episode 166). A film about fate that is really about abdication.
- The Warrior/Hero Archetype: The Role You Played Became Your Name (Episode 71). An archetype that began as a survival role and swallowed the person carrying it.
The Forging Excalibur archive
Before The Architect Speaks there was The Forging Excalibur Podcast, which I hosted from 2020 to 2022, close to 150 episodes. It grew out of my first book, Forging Excalibur, and was mostly conversations about men's lives, often with guests. It's being republished, episodes unchanged, as Forging Excalibur (Michael Lauria 2019 - 2022 Archive) on Spotify. There's more about it on what Forging Excalibur is about.
Three others worth your time
- This Jungian Life. Three Jungian analysts in conversation about life, how we grow, and dreams, which they analyse on the show. The best choice if you want Jung's ideas from people who practise them.
- Speaking of Jung. Laura London's long-running interview series with Jungian analysts about Jung's life and work. Good for depth on a single idea, one guest at a time.
- Living Myth. Michael Meade's weekly podcast, using mythic stories to make sense of the present. The one to choose if you want the myths themselves, told well.
How to listen to any of these
Jung's ideas are easy to enjoy and hard to use. The risk with any podcast in this area is that it becomes one more thing you understand about yourself without anything changing. A few habits help:
- Listen with one pattern of your own in mind, the thing you keep doing, and notice when an episode touches it.
- Write down the single line that landed, and where it landed in your life.
- Notice which myth you're living. Most people have one story they keep casting themselves in: the one who rescues, the one who endures, the one who is always about to begin.
- Stop at one episode when one is enough. A week spent with one idea does more than a weekend of ten.
If you'd rather see your own pattern named than hear about patterns in general, that's what the Atlas is for.
Where this comes from
The episodes above are all on The Architect Speaks. The film episodes grew into Movies, Myth and Men, and the Excalibur material into The Excalibur Trinity. Four Lenses into the Work sets the same framework down four times: in plain words, through psychology, through philosophy and through myth.
Movies, Myth and Men
The initiation the culture deleted survived in the cinema. One of the thirty-three books of the Codex of the Architect. Six stories read structurally, and the pattern of becoming they carry.
About the bookThe Atlas names the pattern running your life in a single sitting. It is built from twenty years in the chair and the thirty-three books of Michael Lauria, a qualified therapist, author and philosophical mythologist. It takes about forty-five minutes, costs nothing, and ends in a written Record of that pattern, drawn from your own words. It is not therapy and not for crisis. Begin the Atlas · How the Atlas works
Or begin smaller with the nine-question pattern test, about three minutes, no sign-up.