Published · 2024
The Shadow of a Figure of Light
The Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment. Chiron Publications.
Jung, Bill Wilson, and the Twelve Steps as a modern myth of transformation.
About the bookResearch & publicationsTexts · Feeling · Value
Homer and the
history of feeling.
What inherited language preserves of feeling and the formation of value—and how we can return to the evidence.
The inquiryWhat does language
What does language
preserve of feeling?
My research works at the border of Homeric philology and archetypal psychology. I am interested in the soul as it appears in inherited language: in the organs that feel, the words that name endurance, and the forms through which experience acquires value.
This inquiry grew out of writing about recovery. The Shadow of a Figure of Light follows the relation between Jung and the Twelve Steps. My Homeric work returns to an older vocabulary of feeling and asks what it can contribute to depth psychology now.
The questions extend beyond individual images and archetypes to grammar, translation, and the ways later readers use ancient texts. A translation is already an interpretation. Returning to the language allows us to examine what that interpretation makes visible.
A passage to begin with · Odyssey 20.17–23
Odysseus speaks to his heart.
He recalls the heart’s earlier endurance; the scene then describes it obeying and remaining in endurance. That gives the inquiry something precise to follow: the relation between the person who speaks and the heart he addresses.
When a later translation or philosophical reading retells this scene, who is made to act, obey, or bear what remains? The textual comparison comes first. What it means for a psychology of the soul is the question I bring to it.
Research programme design
Beyond the specialist fortress.
Jung urged psychologists to leave the “thickly walled specialist fortress” of their own discipline. I design AI-assisted research programmes that put that invitation into practice across texts and traditions.
Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” introduction, Collected Works 15.
AI helps with source discovery, research organization, software development, and testing proposed readings. Generated output is provisional working material, never a source. I take responsibility for the judgments, arguments, and final wording.
Return to the passage
Keep the original wording, edition, translation, and citation available beside the interpretation.
Ask of the corpus
Define what has been searched and how forms have been classified. Examine the exceptions as closely as the pattern.
Make the reading answerable
Check machine-assisted results against sources. Preserve counterexamples and distinguish an observed distribution from the psychological argument drawn from it.
What a result can establish
Evidence and interpretation.
My Homeric work joins close reading to reproducible corpus analysis. A count or grammatical pattern establishes something about the texts examined. The psychological interpretation is a further argument: a reader can accept the distribution and disagree with what I make of it.
Named editions, passage references, stated comparison rules, and the limits of each study belong with the argument. The aim is to make the work answerable to other readers, including those who arrive at a different conclusion.
Writing in print and in press.
In press
The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche
A Homeric response to Jung’s Answer to Job, following the relation between endurance, feeling, and the images through which we understand the soul.
Published · 2025
Taming Wild Beasts
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, 19(2), 235–239
Active imagination, dreams, and the anima: a personal inquiry into the archetype of the Alcoholic and the alchemical images of recovery.
Building a way into the sources.
Research tools grow alongside the writing, each with its own object of attention.
Depth psychology
Seba.Health
I founded Seba to help people find the literature, vocabulary, and practitioners of depth psychology. It brings together research resources, study tools, and a practitioner directory, operated on a not-for-profit basis.
Explore SebaPhilological workbench · In development
Logoi
A workbench taking shape alongside my Homeric research: reading, corpus search, word study, comparison, and usage analysis, with editions and passages kept close to the evidence.
Coming soonIn development
The stories are next
A further programme takes up the world’s myths and narrative traditions. It extends the inquiry from the vocabulary of the soul to the stories through which people have imagined it.
Ongoing researchSeba, Sebastian & my scholarship
Distinct kinds of work.
The directory helps people find practitioners. The library and research tools help readers explore a tradition. Sebastian offers AI-assisted conversations about texts, dreams, and images; these are exploratory conversations, not clinical care.
Listed practitioners and contributors speak for themselves. The arguments published under my name are my own; a directory listing does not imply endorsement of those arguments or of Sebastian.
In conversation
For seminars, lectures, research collaboration, or a conversation about these questions, write to cody@seba.health. Recorded talks are collected in Lectures.