Colette Colfer

writer, lecturer in religious studies, journalist-commentator, national radio-award winner. Poems in places. Fan of Jung.

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

…’Yes,
I’m a difficult person
to endure, I hardly manage.’

- Leila Chatti

[Jim O'Shaughnessy @jposhaughnessy]

Two thoughts from Simone Weil

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

"Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny."

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

@Spartacus20203 What lies do you think I’m telling? I do try not to engage with anonymous trolls but if you could clarify what exactly I’ve written that you consider to be lie I can address that

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

On a cold dark November evening, the autumn trees bright as flames, hundreds of people lined up outside Dublin’s Mansion House to go through strict security protocols in order to remember the remarkable man that was Tomi Reichental. It was a poignant and inspiring evening, held intentionally on what was the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht when Nazi persecution of Jews pushed to new extremes with Jewish shops and synagogues looted, destroyed, set ablaze, and thousands imprisoned in concentration camps. Tomi, who survived the Holocaust, was imprisoned at Bergen Belsen concentration camp aged just 9. Over the last decades of his life he dedicated himself to ensuring Irish schoolchildren and adults would remember and visited hundreds of schools to tell his story - so that it would be a never again.

It was a beautiful memorial of Tomi who I was lucky enough to know a little. One of the most striking things of the evening was the enormous level of security that had to be put in place just to remember a man who survived the Holocaust. How tragic is that? We heard from speakers who told us that Jewish children are once again being called names, Jewish teenagers in Ireland are being called baby killers. Jewish people in Ireland are being persecuted and many are living in fear. There should be no place for anti-semitism in Ireland. This should go without saying yet it needs to be said.
Thank you to the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland for inviting me to this special night. @Holocaust_Irl

[FEAR GOD @FEARGODMINDSET]

Marie-Louise von Franz on what unused creativity turns into

[The Four Faced Liar @the4facedliar]

We’re delighted to reveal our cover art for Issue 5 by David McLoughlin as well as our list of contributors. We’re grateful to @artscouncil_ie for funding this issue. Launch details coming soon … @IrishWritersCtr
@MunLitCentre @writing_ie @poetryireland

[RobertAllenPoet @RobertAllenPoet]

W.H. Auden

[Béa Gonzalez (sophiacycles) @SophiaCycles]

Words of wisdom from James Hollis on "The Summons of the Soul" podcast.

[Faika El-Nagashi @el_nagashi]

Believe me, we’re only getting started. Please follow @AthenaForumEU and support us if you can: https://t.co/6w8oIpawbI

[Dermot Keyes @DermotKeyes]

The best of luck to @WaterfordFCie in today's #FAICupFinal! #Blues

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

C’mon the Blues

[Waterford FC @WaterfordFCie]

There will be 12,000 Blues in the Aviva Stadium tomorrow, in the heart of the 35,000 spectators at this years Club Orange Men's FAI Cup Final 🤩

Not long to go now, Blues ⏳

#WaterfordFC

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

C’mon Waterford. My adopted home. Tomorrow is a big day. The city and county could do with this win. The FAI cup final. C’mon the #WaterfordFC

[Róisín Murphy @roisinmurphy]

It's always the creative ones, those who never fit in, and those brave enough not to try that they experiment on. Now it's the children.

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

@modonnellDL Former head of BeLong To is involved in organisation responsible for distributing Late Late Toy Show funds

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

‘I sit down to write and tell you what I know:
a child learns the world by putting it in her mouth’
- the masterful Ilya Kaminsky

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

@AnMailleach @Dawson40M @CNaM_ie Hilarious. I mean, it gets to the point where laughter is the sensible option

[Laura London @jungianLaura]

“It is almost an absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical. As a matter of fact, the only form of existence of which we have immediate knowledge is psychic.” ~C.G. Jung, “The Autonomy of the Unconscious,” CW 11, para. 16

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

@RoisinMichaux A ‘self-affirmative’ model? With implications for all single-sex spaces and sports as well as for public funding, surgical interventions, education.

[Laura London @jungianLaura]

“We can be possessed not only by ‘spirits’ but by contagious ideas, fads, fashions, and fears compelling enough to launch persecutions, pogroms, and mass enthusiasms. In fact the word enthusiasm was once derogatory, meaning that one was intoxicated by an alien, often heretical god (theos). As I write, a large number of teenage girls at one school are manifesting strange twitching behaviors, and no organic cause seems identifiable or probable. We could accuse them of being insecure and wanting attention, but the costs to them of this behavior have piled up in painful ways, suggesting their #unconscious has connected with the unconscious of others and collectively they, like the maiden in Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Red Shoes,’ cannot stop this unending twitching dance. Such phenomena have occurred throughout history, even sweeping up entire villages and sometimes entire nations, in a psychic Saint Vitus’s dance, a mazurka of contagion. Group hysteria demonstrates the contagious character of psychic states and the power of an invisible form to occupy and possess #consciousness and render it in service to infectious beliefs. These phenomena range variously from France’s dancing plague in 1518 to today’s popular fads and fashions, stock market panics, and political enthusiasms. As Nietzsche once observed, how intoxicating bad reasons and bad music can be when one is mobilizing against the identified enemy!

The human psyche is so vast, and the #ego frame so small, that we can never know ourselves fully. Safe to say, insofar as we are human, we carry the full range of human possibilities, traits, tendencies, self-delusions, and wholly unknown continents within each of us. Much of this dissociated material constitutes what #Jung called the #shadow, those parts of our personality that are unknown to us, but which play out in the world surreptitiously, or those parts that when brought into consciousness are disappointing, contrary to our professed values, or stretch our self-concepts beyond the comfortable. Other shadow fragments of energy represent our unlived possibilities, often passing unknown and unlived by us into the collective sea of history.

Dissociation is one of the ways in which we protect the ego’s fragility by reflexively moving the disturbing affect outside the range of the known; thus it operates all the more autonomously in our lives. (In addition to dissociation, we might also cite avoidance, denial, procrastination, #projection onto others, and distraction as ego-protective mechanisms.) How many of our behaviors can be tracked back to serving our insecurities, parental imagoes, narcissism, or other unsettling agendas? We all have multiple personality disorders as these splinter selves contend, collude, and conspire to effect their fractal programs.”

~James Hollis, Ph.D., Jungian psychoanalyst, Chapter 7, “Ghosts and Things That Go Bump in the Night,” Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives

👻 Longer excerpt in yesterday’s Patreon post. Join for just $5 per month to access to our weekly posts!

Speaking of Jung: Interviews with Jungian Analysts

[Derek Hollingsworth @DerekHolly7]

English words of Irish language origin: Banshee.
The Banshee is a foreboding female spirit-often the harbinger of a death in old Gaelic clans. This comes from the Irish, bean sí, & the Old Irish, ben síde 'woman of the fairy mound'.
❤️#Gaeilge #LearnIrish #FoghlaimGaeilge #Irish

[Colette Colfer @ColetteColfer]

@K02568 This is unbelievable. Believable but unbelievable. I’m shocked. Maths!!! Great work finding this.