What the Sweater Remembers

A sweater arrives in the post, secondhand, and with it a small unease: whose was this before it was yours? Most of us would file that away as a passing fancy and move on. Jung refused to. He gave the feeling a name — participation mystique, the unbargained sense that a thing can still carry something of the person who held it — and treated it as information rather than superstition.

Issue #3 of The Liminal follows that thread through the objects we live with: a resale sweater, a gifted paperback, a worn violin, and the part of the shadow we would rather not inherit. Read together, the pieces circle one quiet question. What does an object actually transmit — and what becomes truly ours only once we choose it with open eyes?

A few pieces worth reading slowly.

Tracey Cleantis-Dwyer, a Jungian-trained psychotherapist, follows a resale sweater through Poshmark, family superstition, and Mary Douglas's anthropology of pollution and taboo. Her real subject is participation mystique — the felt sense that a garment still holds its former owner — which she treats not as neurosis but as data. What she recovers is old and practical: that we dress in other people's psychology, and that deciding what to keep is itself a kind of shadow work. Read More→

Writing in Applied Jungian Studies, Andrew Lavin refuses the comfortable half of shadow work. Yes, there is gold in the buried self — vitality and unlived life waiting to be reclaimed — but there is also, he insists, material that stays dangerous no matter how tenderly we meet it. Moving from Robert Bly's bag to Jung's own warnings about evil, he redraws the line most popular shadow talk quietly erases: recovery is not the same as absolution. Read more→

Every relationship in today’s issue is one between a person and an object. The Academy's July module turns the same attention to the figures we meet as inner and outer figures — the anima and animus, Jung's names for the contrasexual other we each carry and often project onto our other. As Jung famously said, the shadow is the apprentice-piece, the work on Anima and Animus is the masterwork.

The Academy runs as guided self-study: eight film-led video lessons, a live reading of Jung's Collected Works on the second Wednesday of the month, a Dream Circle on the fourth, and a private forum of fellow students. Thirty dollars for the month; stay for the year if the work takes hold.

In Big Think, Jasna Hodžić follows a single gifted paperback into the research on what the body does when it reads. Weight, margins, the shelf, the act of lending — Naomi Baron's work suggests these are not sentimental extras but part of how attention and memory take hold. The piece quietly reframes a tired format war as a question of intention: not whether we read, but what kind of act reading is allowed to become. Read more→

For Tricycle, Carolyn Gregoire profiles the artist and teacher Chris Kelley, who crosses New York's bridges in full prostration and stages chöd — a Tibetan rite of cutting attachment — to heavy metal. Beneath the spectacle sits a serious proposition: that liberation is disciplined experiment rather than attainment, and that psychedelics are aids, not guarantees. The interview's edge is its honest question — whether counterculture can loosen a habit without hardening freedom into one more performance. Read more→

The channel Eternalised traces Rudolf Steiner across an almost implausible range — philosophy, education, farming, medicine, architecture — all of it an attempt to build bridges between the visible world and an invisible one. Read generously, this is less hagiography than a portrait of a mind working at the threshold, where discipline and vision strain against each other. Steiner arrives here as a limit case: how far can one person carry an inner conviction into outer institutions before something gives? Watch→

A few more threads for those who want to follow the theme deeper.