This lecture brings Jungian analytical psychology to a subject almost exclusively colonised by medical, behavioural, and nutritional discourses. The presenter, Konrad van Staden, draws on the works of Carl Jung, Marion Woodman, James Hillman, Edward Edinger, and Donald Kalsched, to examine how excess weight may function as a communication from the unconscious: simultaneously protecting the vulnerable self, and imprisoning it.
Konrad traces the alchemical journey from the suffering body (nigredo) to embodied integration (rubedo), challenging the heroic model of weight loss and offering in its place a vision of the body as sacred ground, not an object to be conquered. He sees fat not as a failure. Instead, bodies that carry excess weight are engaged in sacred acts of meaning-making: they protect, protest, and contain what consciousness cannot hold. They preserve the conditions for a transformation that the ego has not yet consented to.
When approached through a Jungian lens, fat reveals itself as shadow material made incarnate, as alchemical prima materia awaiting the opus, and as a sacred threshold between the life that is being lived and the life that is waiting to be born.
Few Jungian papers have systematically explored obesity through the range of post-Jungian theory: from classical Jungian shadow and individuation, through Woodman’s somatic feminism, incorporating Hillman’s archetypal re-imagining, Edinger’s alchemical symbolism, Kalsched’s trauma theory and, finally, contemporary Jungian neuroscience. Rather than pathologising fat, this understanding honours
