Jae Botávn is a middle-aged man with short, dark hair and black glasses, wearing a black suit jacket and black shirt, standing indoors with an antique brick wall and window in the background.

Jae Botávn

I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.

— Terence (Publius Terentius Afer)

I am a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of Maine at Presque Isle, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, specializing in Jungian and Archetypal Psychology. I am the author of Unlearning Love: Reclaiming Desire from Diagnosis — a book that challenges the pathologized language of love addiction, codependency, narcissism, and trauma bonding that recovery culture has used to colonize intimate life — and the publisher of Liber Rebis, a depth psychology newsletter described as scholarly medicine for love, logic, and soul.

For me, all roads — religious, spiritual, or self-developmental — lead back to one central current. The enormous body of work the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung synthesized, and later refined by scholars over the last century, into a finely tuned language that captures the totality of the psyche, its movement, and meaning, distilled into empirical principles narrow enough to be precise, but broad enough to be unique to every soul.

My library is a fingerprint of my soul: literature (Blake to Didion), cultural witness (Baldwin to Sontag), philosophy (Nietzsche, Spinoza, Kant, Heidegger, the Greeks), myth and esoterica (Crowley, Levi, Watts, McKenna), and a deep spine of clinical, developmental, integral, transpersonal, and depth psychology — nearly a thousand volumes in the ongoing conversation.

I grew up on a horse farm in what was once the rural outskirts of Leipers Fork, Tennessee — dawn chores, hay, silence and wooded forests, the slow education of animals and seasons. Hunting was not sport in my family. It was a rite of passage: patience, stillness, the weight of consequence held in your hands, the circle of life. Those early mornings built a work ethic that outlasted every career that followed.

I rehabbed my first house at twenty-two into a two-story Southern Greek Revival. I raced motorcycles, mountain bikes, and road bikes at a regional level — the kind of pursuit where the body teaches the mind things the mind cannot learn sitting down. I was married for fifteen years. What I learned about love in that time, and what I failed to learn, became the raw material of Unlearning Love.

Once upon a time, I built and owned a boutique cannabis farm on a mountainside out west — vineyard-threaded hills falling away below, a corridor of redwoods opening toward the Pacific. I spent years there working with cultivars, soil, and soul under the big sun and evenings between the pages of books that held my mind and heart, while the chapter of my marriage came to a torturous close.

Like many humans, I have suffered and caused suffering. Existential curiosities and emotional turmoil, juxtaposed with small victories and fleeting joys, light a checkerboard path through the labyrinth of mortality. Holding the tension between the opposites is the Rebis, the 'great work' and an even greater mystery. I am what I am not, and I am not what I am.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51

By refusing to identify, I am free to shape myself beyond the confines of duality. I accept myself as I am now and as I am becoming. This is the inner alchemy of my life, and my living contemplation of these words: Gnōthi seauton.

I am a dog dad, a Ducati enthusiast, a book collector, an outdoorsman, and an entrepreneur.

Jae and his sister are riding double on his sister's chestnut-colored horse "Dusty." Jae Botávn is sitting behind his sister, holding the reins with his arms around her in Franklin, Tennessee.

Jae with his sister on her horse Dusty (1994).