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PARENTAL COMPLEXES: How They Shape Your Child’s Future · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hello, I wanted to let you know about a special
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  Speaker 1: opportunity to join me and an amazing group of women
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  Speaker 1: for brunch on September 22nd at 1230 in Wayne, Pennsylvania.
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  Speaker 1: in the Philly area. For more information or to register,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: contact jill at happywomendinners.com. That's jill at happywomendinners.com.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Thanks.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 1:09
  Speaker 3: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 1:25
  Speaker 4: I'm Joseph Lee. And I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. Today,
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: at listener request, many listeners, we are going to engage
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: in the question of how parental complexes work. affect children.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: And interestingly, each of us went in a somewhat different direction. Lisa, unsurprisingly,
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: has a really good fairy tale for us. And Joseph
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: and I have looked more at childhood and various implications
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: and impacts of parental and other impressions on children. So
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: with all that, here we go.
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  Speaker 1: So I just want to actually start by saying that
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: this was a topic that was voted on by supporters
• 2:32
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• 2:36
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• 2:38
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• 2:44
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• 2:47
  Speaker 1: that page to our Patreon.
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's wonderful to have the votes and the suggestions.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: They help us and give you something that you're interested
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: in listening to.
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: Who wants to jump into the pool first?
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Well, all right, I will. I'll jump in a little
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: bit that. You know, what I started with was, you know,
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: the very earliest beginnings of a child as an infant.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: And in myth, how the child is strong enough, the
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: baby is strong enough to survive, but is also very
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: weak and very vulnerable. We want children to grow up.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: They are the future. their potential. And the theme of abandonment,
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: which today we might really frame as emotional abandonment, is
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: all over the place with fairy tales and in mythology.
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  Speaker 2: So this topic of parental complexes on children is as
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: old as we are as homo sapiens.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess maybe my sort of,
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: so we could maybe, maybe the first place to start
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: is to talk about what a complex is.
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  Speaker 2: Okay.
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  Speaker 1: So Jung said that complexes were feeling tone webs of
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: associations and memories around an archetypal core, which probably doesn't
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: mean that much. So let me try again. You know,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: we each come into the world with innate expectations for
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: certain experiences. Those innate expectations get shaped in our psyche
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  Speaker 1: by experiences in childhood, often with our caregivers, with our teachers.
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  Speaker 1: So for example, you might have a complex around authority.
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  Speaker 1: You know, maybe your father was a real authoritarian who
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: made you feel very small whenever you did anything wrong
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: or didn't do something you were supposed to do. And
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: then we could say that that might result in a
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  Speaker 1: kind of authority complex. So there are places in the
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: psyche often that are a little bit of a disturbance.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: I think about it as a disturbance of consciousness. You know,
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  Speaker 1: Jung discovered the idea of complexes through the word association test. So,
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: you know, he might say table and a person without
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: a table complex would say chair. But someone with a
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  Speaker 1: complex in that area, maybe that person came from a
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: family who didn't usually eat meals together and there was
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: a lot of chaos around mealtime. That person might come
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: up with something really odd at table. They might come
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  Speaker 1: up with, you know, something like sad. or something, and
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: it would be an unusual response. Maybe it took the
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: person a few extra seconds to come up with the response,
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  Speaker 1: or the person laughed inappropriately, or made a funny face.
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  Speaker 1: And then Jung would say, okay, there is a disturbance
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  Speaker 1: in consciousness that we can actually measure, and we can
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  Speaker 1: wonder what that is. So that's the idea behind complexes,
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  Speaker 1: is that there are sort of disturbances. So if you
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  Speaker 1: think about where are my complexes, Where are the places
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  Speaker 1: in your life where you have a kind of habitual difficulty,
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  Speaker 1: where you know that every time this certain kind of
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: person always is hard for you, or that when someone
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: changes plans at the last minute that you tend to
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: really get thrown for a loop, or you always have
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: a hard time at holidays? I mean, you can sort
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: of think about that. Okay, where are my complexes? But
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  Speaker 1: complexes are normal. hopefully we can become conscious of them.
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  Speaker 1: And then we, we can have, you know, as Jung said,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: you can have a complex instead of the complex having you,
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: but we all have complexes and we never fully resolve them. So,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: so I think, you know, Deb, one of the differences
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: in the ways that you and I came at this
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  Speaker 1: is I'm kind of thinking of like, Hey, parents have complexes.
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  Speaker 1: It's normal. It's kind of like a normal level of,
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  Speaker 1: of psychic disturbance. And, And so how do those complexes
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  Speaker 1: affect our child? And does it make a difference if
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  Speaker 1: we're aware of them? Does it help if we are
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  Speaker 1: that child who was affected by a parental complex to
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: become conscious of that? But obviously, there can be greater disturbances.
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  Speaker 1: There can be kind of profound... lapses in attunement that
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  Speaker 1: are the result of very serious complexes that really affect functioning.
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  Speaker 1: And those can really be kind of result in the
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: kind of abandonment that you're talking about.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: And I think in a way that that might be
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: the core of this whole dynamic is that there are
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: places where, as children, of course, we're affected by our
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: parents in all kinds of ways. And no one's parents
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: are perfect. But that's the complex. And it sets off
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  Speaker 2: a complex in a child. Right.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: So I'm wondering if we have some examples. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: I'm thinking in my sort of ordinary version. I'm thinking
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  Speaker 1: of an example maybe where maybe someone really has kind
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: of an outsider complex. Maybe someone... let's say grew up poor,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: because there's a whole psychology around that. And let's say
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: grew up poor, but sort of made good and was
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  Speaker 1: kind of living and moving in very different circles, but
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  Speaker 1: still has that kind of raised poor complex. You feel
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: like an outsider, you feel like you don't quite know
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  Speaker 1: how to keep up with the conversation, or you feel
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: maybe on tenterhooks, like waiting for a slight or you know,
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: someone to express that you really aren't good enough to
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: be there. So if you're a child of that person
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  Speaker 1: with that complex, say, what might that look like? And
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  Speaker 1: my hypothesis, or I've seen things like this, I guess,
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  Speaker 1: is that the child who herself perhaps wasn't growing up poor,
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: wasn't in any way different from the peers in the neighborhood,
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  Speaker 1: But because of that unconscious patterning, because of, let's say,
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: the mother's complex, might find for a reason that seems
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: kind of mysterious, that she too feels like an outsider,
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  Speaker 1: that she feels like she doesn't belong. So she's kind
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: of carrying the mother's complex. And And that could affect
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: many aspects of her life going forward. It's not traumatogenic.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: It's just how are we influenced by our parents' I
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: want to say there are struggles, there are psychological struggles,
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  Speaker 1: both conscious and unconscious.
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  Speaker 2: I also want to widen the frame for parental complex
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  Speaker 2: to all the kinds of parenting that children have by
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  Speaker 2: religious institutions, schools, a particular culture, holidays, all of these
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  Speaker 2: are parental in the sense that they are bigger than
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  Speaker 2: the child and they exert an influence that the child
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  Speaker 2: is incapable of reflecting on as a three-year-old or an
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  Speaker 2: eight-year-old or even a 15-year-old. So there are lots of
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  Speaker 2: ways that we absorb parental complexes beyond the personal parents.
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  Speaker 4: And what's, I think, most important is that the parental
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  Speaker 4: complex is unconscious. that if the parents were fully conscious
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  Speaker 4: of these attitudes, behaviors, memories, that that would depotentiate some
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  Speaker 4: of the energy. And this goes into the kind of
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  Speaker 4: uncanny dynamic that Jung was interested in, is that these
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  Speaker 4: things may never be spoken explicitly in the home. For instance,
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  Speaker 4: a fear of loss or deprivation or a fear of authority.
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  Speaker 4: But it's demonstrated in all the thousands of tiny ways
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  Speaker 4: that a parent behaves and the child absorbs indirectly. There's
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  Speaker 4: also a communication between the unconscious of the child and
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  Speaker 4: the unconscious of the parent. There is a kind of
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  Speaker 4: merging that naturally happens between parents and children. So it's
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  Speaker 4: a lack of awareness particularly. that makes the parent's unconscious
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  Speaker 4: so hot and dynamic and creates such a significant impression
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  Speaker 4: on the child. And if it's unconscious, then we know
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  Speaker 4: for the parent, there is something disturbing in the parent's
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  Speaker 4: ego structure such that it's defending against knowing it. So
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  Speaker 4: the parent doesn't want to know the material, but is
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  Speaker 4: powerfully influenced by it. And the child's psyche, as we
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  Speaker 4: all were, is staring at the parent, drinking in every
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  Speaker 4: tiny little impression. And so the parent's complex or the
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  Speaker 4: unconscious subroutine that the computer in the parent's personality is
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  Speaker 4: running absolutely influences the child and not necessarily by infecting
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  Speaker 4: it exactly, sometimes it affects the child. And what we
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  Speaker 4: see symptomatically is the child's resistance to the complex causes
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  Speaker 4: them to act in ways that don't make sense outwardly,
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  Speaker 4: that they are in an inner war.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. There's a quote by Jung that I think builds
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  Speaker 2: on what you just said, Joseph, and here it is.
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  Speaker 2: All the life which the parents could have lived, but
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  Speaker 2: of which they thwarted themselves for artificial motives, is passed
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  Speaker 2: on to the children in substitute form. The children are
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  Speaker 2: driven unconsciously in a direction that is intended to compensate
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  Speaker 2: for for everything that was left unfulfilled in the lives
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  Speaker 2: of the parents. Hence, it is that excessively moral-minded parents
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  Speaker 2: have what are called unmoral children, or an irresponsible wastrel
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  Speaker 2: of a father has a son with a positively morbid
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  Speaker 2: amount of ambition, and so on. And so Jung is
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  Speaker 2: talking about how unconsciously the child picks up a parental complex,
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: and tends to go in the opposite direction as a
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  Speaker 2: means of balancing the family psyche or the parent-child psyche.
• 14:35
  Speaker 4: Well, there's that. I also tend to imagine people's psyches
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  Speaker 4: as landscapes because I have a very visual imagination. So
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  Speaker 4: if we think of, let's say dad has a money
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  Speaker 4: complex and there's a great atmosphere of fear and deprivation,
• 14:51
  Speaker 4: and so there's a kind of hoarding energy. He doesn't
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: even know it. It just, to him, seems like that's
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  Speaker 4: how you do it. I mean, that's just the normal
• 14:59
  Speaker 4: formula for getting through the world. So it's as if
• 15:04
  Speaker 4: that agenda, that kind of starving inner figure who's grasping
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: for whatever stuff that he can find, goes into the
• 15:14
  Speaker 4: child's landscape. Now, that figure is standing there in the
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  Speaker 4: child's soul, The child could take that as an advisor
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  Speaker 4: and say, oh, okay, that seems like good advice to me.
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  Speaker 4: But sometimes there is an archetypal response in the child's
• 15:32
  Speaker 4: psyche that says no and stands up and fights against
• 15:39
  Speaker 4: this grasping figure. And because it's an archetypal reaction, often
• 15:45
  Speaker 4: the child will go far to the opposite side and
• 15:49
  Speaker 4: might be a spendthrift. or fantasize that this kind of
• 15:54
  Speaker 4: possession of Jupiter, which is the god of bounty in
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: all ways. So the child begins behaving, and this can
• 16:02
  Speaker 4: be evidenced in first, second grade, behaves in a way
• 16:06
  Speaker 4: as if they have endless resources. So you'll have stories
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  Speaker 4: of mom or dad save up and they give the
• 16:13
  Speaker 4: child a gift, and then they find out that the
• 16:16
  Speaker 4: child gave it to someone else in the neighborhood. Just
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: gave it away. And the parents are distraught about that.
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: It's like, oh my gosh, what did you do? And
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: the child, in a sense of kind of benevolent, fulsome generosity,
• 16:33
  Speaker 4: is like, of course. And it's not so much that
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: they're being Christ-like in the generosity. It's this Jupiter inside
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  Speaker 4: of them tells them that this generous bounty is in
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: all places at all times, which of course it isn't.
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  Speaker 4: So neither the deprivation of the parents is accurate, and
• 16:56
  Speaker 4: neither is the endless generosity that the archetype tells the
• 16:59
  Speaker 4: child is in there. And again, both of it is
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: totally unconscious.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Right. So I have this example from Jung's life, which
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: I think is kind of ridiculous. But I do think
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: there's something here that's interesting. So this is in Barbara
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Hanna's biography, and she's talking about his long-term affair with
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Tony Wolfe. And, you know, she's basically trying to justify
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: the fact that he had this affair with Tony Wolfe.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: And she says, he once told Marie-Louise von Franz and
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: me that, curiously enough, it was his family that had
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: given him the final impetus to seek a modus vivendi,
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: whatever it might cost. In other words, that it was
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: his family that impelled him to live out his feelings
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: for Tony Wolfe and consummate that relationship. He knew from
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: his practice how necessary this was, for he had already
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: seen all too often the untold damage that fathers can
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: do to their daughters by not living the whole of
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: their erotic life, which is seldom completely contained in the
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: marriage and the father's unlived life is then unconsciously displaced
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: onto the daughters. He told us that this fear had
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: kept him awake a whole night, a night during which
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: he slowly realized that if he refused to live the
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: outside attraction that had come to him entirely from the
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: unconscious against his will, he would inevitably ruin his daughter's Eros.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: Does that sound like a rationalization to anybody except me?
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: It does.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, I remember the first time I read that,
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: I was like, really? And yet I, you know, I
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: think there's something there. There's a nugget of something there,
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: you know, that to feel so pulled in any direction
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: and not somehow take responsibility for it, whether or not
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: you actually have to live it out is maybe the question.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: But that that can sometimes really affect kind of, you know,
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: affect people. affect the kids in the way that you
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: were talking about, Joseph?
• 19:20
  Speaker 4: So looking back at that moment, I think what's important
• 19:24
  Speaker 4: is that in the beginning of that affair with Tony Wolfe,
• 19:27
  Speaker 4: Jung had not discovered alchemy yet. And it was his
• 19:31
  Speaker 4: discoveries in alchemy that taught him how to contain instinctive
• 19:38
  Speaker 4: affect and facilitated transformation into other things. And so prior
• 19:44
  Speaker 4: to that, still being influenced by Freud in many ways,
• 19:47
  Speaker 4: there's a sense that repression makes you sick. It makes
• 19:51
  Speaker 4: the family sick. It makes you neurotic and makes you
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: a mess. So part of the justification is, yes, I
• 20:01
  Speaker 4: don't want to make my kids messed up. There is some,
• 20:05
  Speaker 4: at that point, theoretically, a sense that if I just
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: damn all of this up, I'm going to get sick
• 20:11
  Speaker 4: in myself. And the other thing we have to also
• 20:15
  Speaker 4: understand is that Tony Wolfe was very interested in this,
• 20:20
  Speaker 4: that Tony Wolfe was also beckoning to this process. So
• 20:25
  Speaker 4: people turn a jawless eye to Jung in those moments
• 20:30
  Speaker 4: because we don't have enough of Tony Wolfe's voice, and
• 20:33
  Speaker 4: she was, frankly, more discreet. than Jung was because Jung's
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: clearly talking about all of this with his colleagues and
• 20:39
  Speaker 4: we don't have an account of Tony Wolfe. So we
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: have two adults making a decision based upon a certain
• 20:46
  Speaker 4: theoretical standard and also caught in a passionate web of
• 20:51
  Speaker 4: energy in that regard. But it was later in life,
• 20:55
  Speaker 4: and this is where we get this very importantly, is
• 20:58
  Speaker 4: how containing things without repressing them sets in motion a
• 21:02
  Speaker 4: creative change. And that was later. And interestingly, Tony left
• 21:07
  Speaker 4: him because he wanted to study that.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: No, I appreciate that, Joseph. And I wasn't trying to necessarily,
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: you know, kind of bash Jung there. I mean, I
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: will say that, yeah, Tony and Jung were consenting adults, whatever,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: but there was Emma in the picture, too. So I
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: don't want to, you know, there were harms. But I
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: think you raise such a good point that he was
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: operating under the framework of repression. And so that this
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: would become a kind of, you know, that there is
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: a complex at work here. And if he didn't deal
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: with it correctly, his concern was that he would sort
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: of pass that along in some unconscious process to his daughters.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: And I do think that when we, you know, I mean,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: so for example... My mother, I think, and I don't
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: really know this for sure, but she was a very intelligent,
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: creative person, and she had ambitions at times. She had
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: real ambitions, but she never, I think it's fair to
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: say she never really fully gave herself permission or permission.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: even maybe was not given permission to fully invest in them.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: And so, you know, how did that affect me when
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: it came to my own creative impulses or my own
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: kind of ambitions? And I think there is a kind
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: of complex thing there that I had to work through
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: because there was this sort of undertow of the way
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: that she maybe felt constrained and had to hold herself back.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: And that was bequeathed to me through an unconscious process. And,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: and I, and I had to kind of work that out,
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: you know? I mean, I think these complexes do travel
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: through generational lines. And one of the sort of exciting
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: ideas is that when you are able to kind of
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: effectively overcome the complex or let's, I don't, I don't
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: want to say overcome, say find a definitive response to it.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: There's a way where you sort of heal the previous
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: generations back through time.
• 23:22
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: You know, I want to loop back, because our topic
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: is the effect on children, to Jung defending his freedom
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: of erotic expression, let us say. And Tony Wolfe was
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: his collaborator and partner and intellectual companion. And also a
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: friend of Emma's. Well, but the children were very defensive
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: of their mother. And so it wasn't just sort of
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: freeing his daughters to full expression of their feminine selves.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: They were expected to conform to cultural norms, which are
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: fairly strict at that time, specific, I should say, in Switzerland.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: And they were aware of the negative impact of this
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: relationship on their mother, Emma, and whatever they carried from
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: that for themselves. So it's complicated. It doesn't just parse
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: down into right and wrong, but it What we are
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: lifting up here is how incredibly important it is to
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: be conscious, to know, oh, this is what I'm doing,
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: or I have a complex about that. I have a
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: real complex about getting out there and speaking my mind,
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: or I have a complex about money, or I have
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: a complex about a hundred things. At least then it's
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: out there and can be spoken and then is not
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: so insidious and deleterious.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: So I think it's also really helpful if you're doing
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: your own psychological work to be aware of what your
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: parents' complexes were and the surprising ways that you might
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: have taken that on board. So, for example, I'm thinking of...
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: of a man whose mother had been like just terribly, um,
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: who'd been, who'd been very, uh, um, who had slept
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: around a lot, who cheated on his dad a lot.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: She'd had all kinds of affairs and it created a
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: lot of chaos in the family. Um, the, the husband
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: never left her, but he was always kind of heartbroken
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: and bereft. And, you know, this, this man felt like
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: his mother was often kind of not really available because
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: she was pursuing these other uh, liaisons. And so, you know, that,
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: that's really where her energetic focus was. So it was,
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: it was a real wound. It was something, you know,
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: that we, we discussed a lot. And then, um, you know,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: he was, he was a very kind of, um, loving,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: sentimental person, very loyal, uh, fell in love, got married. Uh,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: we didn't, we didn't see each other for a while.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: And then some point he came back into treatment and
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: he was cheating. He was cheating on his wife and
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: felt really, you know, it was difficult for him to
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: make the connection with the wound that he had carried
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: into adulthood about his mother's infidelity and how that had
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: affected the family. You know, it's like it was a
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: whole thing. And he thought he had sort of renounced it, like, oh,
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: I would never do that. He'd really identified with his father.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: But then there he was, and he was in some
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: sense living out this inherited complex.
• 27:05
  Speaker 4: And I think one of the things that's very hard
• 27:08
  Speaker 4: to describe as analysts, but also for those who are
• 27:13
  Speaker 4: coming to talk with us, is how that experience with
• 27:19
  Speaker 4: his mother changed the structure of his psyche. Because the
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: outer behavior... let's say of his mom having multiple affairs,
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: the father knowing this, it's difficult to know how she
• 27:33
  Speaker 4: was structured such that that was either normalized or perhaps
• 27:39
  Speaker 4: it was highly compulsive. Was this related to bipolar mania?
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: Because sometimes that can happen, or alcoholism. So many different
• 27:48
  Speaker 4: factors that lay in, all of which then color the
• 27:53
  Speaker 4: way in which it could, but not always, but could
• 27:57
  Speaker 4: slide into the child's psyche. Not the least of which
• 28:03
  Speaker 4: is the kind of attachment disorder which is being demonstrated
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: in the situation and lack of empathy and all kinds
• 28:11
  Speaker 4: of other things. So I'm curious with that person, Lisa,
• 28:17
  Speaker 4: did you have a sense of how the mother was
• 28:21
  Speaker 4: structured such that that made sense to her? And what
• 28:26
  Speaker 4: part of that structure was kind of tucked in to
• 28:29
  Speaker 4: that person? And I know I'm just asking this off
• 28:32
  Speaker 4: the cuff, but I'm wondering if you have a sense
• 28:34
  Speaker 4: of it.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, and of course I'm sort of making it
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: up because this is really a composite case anyway. I
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: wouldn't share someone's material like this, so it's somewhat fictionalized.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: But what I would say is there was real narcissism. Okay.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: There was real, there was real, pretty narcissism. There was
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: a lot of narcissism in the mother. So, you know,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: and this man that I worked with did not have
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: that at all, except I think he did in this
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: one little corner tucked away. But it wasn't his, I mean,
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: it was a very likable person. It wasn't his predominant
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: way of moving through the world.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: You know, I'm thinking about how in, you know, today's world,
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: much of the wounding And the kind of abandonment is emotional,
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: rather than the physical abandonment of children, which was pretty
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: much universal and frequent of huge numbers of physically abandoned children.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: And that abandonment, when the wound is unspoken and unacknowledged,
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: creates a hurt that then results in the self-abandonment or self-estrangement,
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: which is what you were talking about, Lisa, with this
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: somewhat fictionalized man, that because his mother's wound had never
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: really been processed, spoken, acknowledged, explored, he acted it out
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: unconsciously when he became an adult and had affairs. And
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: that that is where the real wounding from a parent
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: to a child takes place is it's not known. It's
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: not spoken. It's not verbalized. It's not even cognitively recognized.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: It's just there.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: Our Patreon has had a makeover. There's lots of new
• 30:40
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• 30:50
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• 31:12
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• 31:14
  Speaker 1: it without you.
• 31:15
  Speaker 4: So one of the ways that I, again, like to
• 31:18
  Speaker 4: put this on a landscape, I know this is a
• 31:22
  Speaker 4: somewhat fictional story, but we have a mother who's kind
• 31:25
  Speaker 4: of an Aphrodite figure, who's not going to be contained
• 31:29
  Speaker 4: in one relationship. She's going to follow a kind of
• 31:32
  Speaker 4: erotic impulse. And then she has a child whose image
• 31:38
  Speaker 4: of the mother is a kind of Aphrodite energy. Father,
• 31:43
  Speaker 4: perhaps the wounded, angry, earthy Hephaestus. And so inside of
• 31:50
  Speaker 4: the psyche, There's a mother-child dyad that constellates inside his landscape.
• 31:57
  Speaker 4: There's an image of the inner child who is coupled
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: with Aphrodite. So now we have Cupid and Venus or
• 32:05
  Speaker 4: Aphrodite moving along. When he continues to identify as the
• 32:12
  Speaker 4: child of Aphrodite, he's kind of a cherub, sweet. little
• 32:18
  Speaker 4: arrows of love into the analyst and into other people,
• 32:21
  Speaker 4: and he's adorable. But one of the strange things that
• 32:26
  Speaker 4: happens to all of us in those situations is sometimes
• 32:29
  Speaker 4: he's Cupid, but sometimes he's also Aphrodite, and he doesn't
• 32:33
  Speaker 4: know it. So the ego can switch its identification, and
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: when the spirit of Aphrodite, the spirit of the mother,
• 32:42
  Speaker 4: takes him over, then all of a sudden, Attitudes change,
• 32:48
  Speaker 4: feelings change, and a number of things seems possible that
• 32:52
  Speaker 4: would not otherwise be. So another kind of archetypal way
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: of thinking of how things get activated in the child.
• 33:04
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking of another story which I think is really
• 33:07
  Speaker 4: important is that thinking of a client whose mother was
• 33:15
  Speaker 4: kind of very beautiful and really remarkably narcissistic in a
• 33:22
  Speaker 4: way that was very hostile. And so she had a
• 33:25
  Speaker 4: fantasy that her very successful husband was limiting her potential
• 33:32
  Speaker 4: and that the entire world of men was always keeping
• 33:39
  Speaker 4: her under its thumb and she couldn't possibly actualize and
• 33:44
  Speaker 4: she has a son. And The sun is my analysis.
• 33:48
  Speaker 4: And so she's constantly monitoring the sun for any signs
• 33:52
  Speaker 4: of masculinity because that's the dastardly thing that was keeping
• 33:57
  Speaker 4: her under its thumb. She also treated him like an
• 34:03
  Speaker 4: art project. So anytime she was with him, the child
• 34:06
  Speaker 4: would express an interest in something and the mother would say, oh,
• 34:10
  Speaker 4: you're not interested in that. Let's go over here and
• 34:13
  Speaker 4: do this. And the thing that she would suggest wasn't bad.
• 34:16
  Speaker 4: It might be a different kind of project. But the
• 34:21
  Speaker 4: Inala Sand grew up constantly not sure where to look
• 34:26
  Speaker 4: for what he actually wanted and does what he wants.
• 34:31
  Speaker 4: Is that wrong? Is that crazy? So this tremendous alienation
• 34:38
  Speaker 4: from himself and that narcissistic mother becomes the self. The
• 34:45
  Speaker 4: mother eventually decides that she's oppressed, leaves, and then finds
• 34:51
  Speaker 4: another woman to take care of her in a platonic
• 34:55
  Speaker 4: relationship and never works, never produces anything of significance, but
• 35:02
  Speaker 4: lives somewhat parasitically and yet free of what she fantasizes
• 35:08
  Speaker 4: is limiting her. So the fantasy that she is oppressed
• 35:13
  Speaker 4: externally was actually an illusion. And that what was actually
• 35:18
  Speaker 4: happening is her own father complex, which was very, very
• 35:22
  Speaker 4: harsh and very, very negative, was actually oppressing her internally.
• 35:28
  Speaker 4: And that what she was seeing, or she thought she
• 35:32
  Speaker 4: saw both in her son and in the men around her,
• 35:35
  Speaker 4: was a ghost. She undoubtedly thought she was protecting her
• 35:41
  Speaker 4: son from being infested by these terrible qualities that her
• 35:45
  Speaker 4: father had, but in the same way left him castrated
• 35:51
  Speaker 4: and frightened and confused and unsure. So he didn't become
• 35:58
  Speaker 4: the mother. He didn't rise up in some grand, queenly way,
• 36:05
  Speaker 4: but left him small and anxious and unsure and captured
• 36:11
  Speaker 4: in this quality of looking for people to shine upon
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: him the way the mother would when he pleased her.
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: So again, another kind of Cupid story where the small
• 36:25
  Speaker 4: one thinks his job is to constantly satellite around the mother.
• 36:32
  Speaker 4: And part of the transformation was for him to finally
• 36:36
  Speaker 4: connect to that rage inside of him, to push that
• 36:41
  Speaker 4: image of the mother out of him to dethrone her
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: as the self so that he could create a kind
• 36:47
  Speaker 4: of privacy in himself and then ask the real simple
• 36:51
  Speaker 4: question of, what do I like? And just that simple question,
• 36:56
  Speaker 4: what do I like? So these structural things get passed
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: back and forth. Again, it's totally unconscious. There's no nefarious
• 37:06
  Speaker 4: plan that's being plotted. Nobody wakes up One morning it says, ooh,
• 37:11
  Speaker 4: I'll be a narcissist. How wonderful. These structures are inflicted
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: on people, often because of trauma. And yet those structures
• 37:23
  Speaker 4: create very unpredictable effects in children. And discovering or analyzing
• 37:35
  Speaker 4: the parents is not to blame the parent, Because as
• 37:39
  Speaker 4: I said, nobody wakes up one morning and says, I'm
• 37:42
  Speaker 4: going to become so symptomatic that I'm going to make
• 37:44
  Speaker 4: my kid's life miserable. That is not how it happens.
• 37:50
  Speaker 4: But by analyzing the parent, in retrospect, of course, one
• 37:56
  Speaker 4: is also analyzing the effect inside of the psyche. And
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: that affords sometimes the opportunity for the ego to say,
• 38:05
  Speaker 4: I'm over here. The parental complex is over there. And
• 38:11
  Speaker 4: can something freeing, unique, open up inside of me with
• 38:16
  Speaker 4: that space?
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: So one of the things I think you're talking about, Joseph,
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: is one of the things that Eric Erickson mentioned, and
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: he has... famously articulated something like eight stages of development
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: along the life trajectory from infancy to old age. But
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: this one seems to be the story of initiative versus guilt,
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: of can I do what I like? Do I know
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: what I like? My parents like to do this, but
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: I like to do that. And is that okay versus
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: feeling constrained and guilty if you differ from your parents,
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: if you have other urges, longings, desires, and interests. And that,
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: in turn, leads to the ability to sort of be self-observing.
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: You know, if you can take initiative, then you see
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: that when I try to play the xylophone, what happens? Oh,
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: this doesn't sound very good. I've just reflected on my
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: xylophone playing ability versus having to sort of don a
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: false identity in order to please the parent.
• 39:44
  Speaker 4: Yes. And I think the Ericksonian insights are assuming that
• 39:48
  Speaker 4: a normal family. So there's normal families and a normal
• 39:53
  Speaker 4: developmental stages that a child goes through. What we're talking about,
• 39:59
  Speaker 4: which does not apply to all of the listeners, of
• 40:01
  Speaker 4: course it doesn't, is when the parents are carrying an
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: unconscious burden that is unusual. And then it creates unusual effects.
• 40:11
  Speaker 4: And the child has this labor that fate has assigned
• 40:16
  Speaker 4: to them later in life.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: I feel like all of us have, I mean, I
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: do think it's like normal to be carrying some of
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: your parents' complexes or that they, your parents' complexes affected
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: you somehow like it, but, but there's like the normal level,
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: which is some of the examples that I've given. And
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: then there's like these kind of more substantial disturbances. You know,
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: just as something about your story, I was thinking about,
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: you know, cause she was, she was sort of trying to,
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: she was taking her past and, And kind of letting
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: it affect how she parented, right? And I was thinking
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: of that phrase, something like, you know, the generals are
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: always fighting the last war. And I think that's kind
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: of true for all of us psychologically, right? We had
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: our own wounds, whatever they were in childhood. And then
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: often as parents, we're like, well, I'm not going to
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: do that. And so, but then you realize that, you know,
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: maybe you kind of, you do something else or, you know,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: in an interesting way, the psyche of the child is
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: influenced by these patterns that are really old. So I'm
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: thinking of, you know, so I'm sort of, you know,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: Gen X, you know, and, you know, in my generation,
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: most of us had parents who, or like grandparents maybe
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: more so, who really were alive during the depression. And
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: so no matter what the professional trajectory of our parents,
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: our grandparents often had that depression mentality where you like,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: I don't know, you like wash out your plastic bags
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: or whatever, you know, there's this kind of scarcity mentality
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: that then our parents had to deal with And, you know,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: I know what that looked like in my family. It
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: looked like just confusion because they came from nothing financially.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: My parents did, but then, you know, kind of entered
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: into this different sphere as my dad achieved some financial
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: and professional success. And so the messages around money, for example,
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: were just very confusing in my household. They were very mixed.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: And then I brought that into my life with my kids.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, well, I'm not going to do that.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: I'm going to do this. So this is like tumbled
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: down through the generations in some way.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: So one of the things that this brings up for
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: me is that when you mentioned confusion, is that, well,
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: that that's what happens to a kid. I'm confused. I
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: don't get it. You know, why can't we go here?
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: Why can't we go? Why can't we ever go out
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: to eat? Or why can't I just have all the
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: other kids have new shoes and I don't? And I
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: want the special kind of sneaker. But, you know, whatever
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: my mother says, no, this is good enough. It is
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: the arbitrariness versus the sense that a child has is
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: that what the parent does has reason and meaning and
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: predictability to it. Versus just this arbitrary thing of, no,
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: you can't. Right.
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: And if the parent is acting from a complex place,
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: and by the way, we all have huge money complexes. Like,
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know anyone that doesn't. Then, like you're saying, Deb,
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense because it maybe doesn't match with
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: reality because that's the thing about complexes is that they
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: distort your experience of reality. It distorts how you see things.
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: It also distorts one's own sense of being able to
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: trust oneself that I talked about a little bit before,
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: that I don't see why I can't have these sneakers
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: like everybody else has. We don't look like we're really,
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: really poor or really having to watch every penny. Our
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: house is a lot like the other kids where I
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: go over and play. And so who do I trust?
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: Can I trust my own perception? You know, if I'm
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: seven or nine or 12, or do I have to
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: trust my parents and something about that doesn't fit? So
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: that's where the sort of the self-doubt versus self-confidence starts
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: to work its way in. And I do agree, you know,
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: to some extent, we all, have to survive our childhoods.
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: Childhood has never been easy. Everybody's parents have complexes. There
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: are all kinds of arbitrary black swan events that happen.
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: And our job is to do that work ourselves, in ourselves,
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: of what were the parental complexes we inherited and what
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: are the parental complexes we have and are hopefully not
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: passing on to our children.
• 45:31
  Speaker 4: Yes, that's really the whole point of the conversation is
• 45:34
  Speaker 4: not for people to rise up and storm their parents'
• 45:38
  Speaker 4: homes with accusations, but really to be able to map
• 45:45
  Speaker 4: our own psyches and ask ourselves, what's going on in there?
• 45:50
  Speaker 4: There's a certain forensic attitude that we take in the
• 45:54
  Speaker 4: analytic world, trying to investigate ourselves because long after our
• 46:02
  Speaker 4: parents passed away, both of my parents are deceased, I'm
• 46:06
  Speaker 4: just left with my own psyche and what am I
• 46:10
  Speaker 4: going to do with my self? And that's the work.
• 46:18
  Speaker 4: So at some point, yes, we can tell our narrative
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: of my mother did this and my father did that
• 46:24
  Speaker 4: and et cetera, et cetera. We need to get the
• 46:28
  Speaker 4: suffering a little bit, cooled down by just telling the narratives,
• 46:32
  Speaker 4: of course. And where people often fail to do the
• 46:37
  Speaker 4: next stage, which is then to look into the mirror
• 46:41
  Speaker 4: and say, how have I been distorted, warped, malformed by
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: that experience? And I've got to put my hands in
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: that clay and begin slowly, slowly to shape this in
• 46:56
  Speaker 4: a way that I feel better and more functional and safer, happier, creative,
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: all the good stuff that you really want. But it's
• 47:05
  Speaker 4: only your hands that are going to reach in there
• 47:07
  Speaker 4: and start moving that around.
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: And we have that chance to recapitulate some of the
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: childhood stages that Erickson defines that we may have missed
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: of how do we become more autonomous, more self-trusting, more self-reflective,
• 47:25
  Speaker 2: How do we know, begin to know how to take initiative,
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: what I want, what I like? And that's the job
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: of working with ourselves and whatever was unfinished or damaged
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: in childhood. But that's right. It's our hands, metaphorically speaking,
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: that have to do the work with ourselves.
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: I wanted to say one thing. Deb, you said hopefully
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: we don't pass these on to our kids, but we
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: can't not. And in some sense, the stuff that we
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: get passed on from our parents, it kind of is
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: the prima materia, the clay that you're both talking about.
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: And so in a way, it's sort of, I'm really
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: wanting to just sort of make it value neutral. Like
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: we're gonna pass stuff on to our kids. Some of
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: it will be good, by the way. And we're gonna
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: have shit from our parents. And that's kind of where
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: the alchemy is. But I want to maybe just talk
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: about this fairy tale. I'm so excited because I've long
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: thought about this fairy tale, that it's kind of an
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: example of this. And so I want to, I'm going
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: to read it. Deb and Joseph have suggested that it's
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: important to read it. It's a fairy tale from the
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: American South called Wiley and the Hairy Man. And I'll
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: set it up so that you can sort of follow along.
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: I think this is about a boy who, a hero who,
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: whose father had a trauma or a failure or a
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: pretty big complex that enveloped him and kind of ate
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: him alive. And now the young man on stepping out
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: into the world finds himself meeting the same complex. But
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: this time with his mother's help, he's able to kind
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: of find a different ending. So a boy named Wiley
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: lived in a cabin with his mama down by the
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: edge of the swamp. One cold night. Wiley's daddy fell
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: off the ferry boat, and no one could find hide
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: nor hair of him afterward. Folks whispered that the hairy
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: man must have carried him off. Then they heard someone
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: laughing way back in the trees. That's the hairy man
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: for sure, folks agreed. and they stopped looking for Wiley's daddy.
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: You be careful, Wiley, said Wiley's mama. The hairy man
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: got your daddy, and he'll get you too if you
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: don't watch out. Don't worry, mama, Wiley said. I'll take
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: my hound dogs everywhere I go. That hairy man can't
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: stand hound dogs. Wiley's mama smiled because she knew that
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: was true. Wiley's mama knew lots of things, like conjure magic.
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: One day, Wiley went out to gather kindling wood, and
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: he left his hound dogs tied up on the porch.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: He couldn't find much wood, so he kept walking deeper
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: and deeper into the swamp. Everything was still and quiet,
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: and Wiley felt a chill climb up the back of
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: his neck. He turned around real quick and saw a
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: man coming toward him through the trees, grinning. The man
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: sure was ugly, and that grin didn't help much. He
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: was hairy all over and his eyes glowed red. Hello, Wiley,
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: the man said. Don't you look at me that way, Mr.
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: Hairy Man, said Wiley. He glanced down and saw that
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: the hairy man didn't have feet like a person. He
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: had feet like a cow. Now, Wiley reckoned he had
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: never seen a cow up a tree. So straight away,
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: he shimmied up the nearest bay tree. You come down here, Wiley,
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: shouted the hairy man. You come up and get me,
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: Wiley shouted back. The hairy man just grinned and drool
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: rolled off his long yellow teeth. No, thank you, Wiley.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: I'll just wait right here till you get tired or hungry.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: Wiley thought about that hairy man down there on the ground,
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: and he thought about his hound dogs back at home,
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: and he came up with a plan.
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: Mr.
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: Hairy Man, I hear you know conjure magic. Why, I'm
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: the best conjure man in the county, the hairy man boasted.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: I'll bet you can't make something just disappear, said Wiley.
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: Something like that bird's nest sitting on the end of
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: the branch, the hairy man asked. Now it's disappeared. Wiley
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: looked at the empty branch. Well, how do I know
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: that bird's nest was there in the first place? I'll
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: bet you can't make something disappear that I know is there. Ha, ha,
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: chuckled the hairy man. Where's your shirt? Wiley looked down
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: and his shirt was gone. Ah, that's just a plain, ordinary,
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: everyday shirt, Wiley said. But I'll bet you can't make
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: this disappear. And he pointed to the rope that was
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: holding up his britches. This rope is special because my
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: mama used conjure on it. No one can make my
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: mama's conjure rope disappear. Shucks. I can make every single
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: piece of rope in this whole county disappear. Then the
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: hairy man roared out, Every rope in this here county
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: has done disappeared. Wiley held tight to his britches to
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: keep them from falling down and he laughed because the
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: hairy man had done just what he wanted him to do. Yes, sir,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: you're a mighty good conjure man, said Wiley. He took
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: a big deep breath and called out, here dogs, here dogs,
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: here dogs. There was a sound of hound dogs yelping
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: and barking coming closer and closer. That old hairy man
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: took off into the swamp, lickety split. Wiley ran on
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: home and told his mama what had happened. Wiley, she said,
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: you fooled the hairy man one time, and that's good.
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: If you can fool him twice more, he'll be bound
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: to stay away from you for good and forever. I
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: hope I never see him again with that ugly hair
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: and slobbering grin. Tell me, Wiley, was he carrying a sack?
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: Wiley's mom asked. Yes, ma'am, a big croaker sack. Wiley's
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: mom smiled. I just thought of a way for you
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: to put the hairy man in the dirt. If I
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: put him in the dirt, he'll put me in his
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: croaker sack. Listen to me, said his mama. Go into
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: the swamp tomorrow and leave your dogs here at home.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: When you see the hairy man, tell him he can't
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: change himself into some great big animal. If you say
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: he can't do something, he'll do it for sure. Then
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: tell him he can't turn himself into some small, slow animal,
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: and he'll do that too. And when he does, shove
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: that hairy man slam bang into the croaker sack. Then
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: I can toss him into the river with the croaker fish,
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: laughed Wiley. The next morning, Wiley shut his dogs in
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: the cabin and walked off toward the swamp, whistling all
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: the while to keep up his courage. He hadn't gone
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: far when he got that same creepy feeling on the
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: back of his neck. The next instant, the hairy man
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: stepped from behind a tree and stood right in front
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: of him. Hello there, Wiley. Hello, hairy man, said Wiley.
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: What have you got in that croaker sack? I ain't
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: got nothing yet, Wiley. The hairy man grunted and he
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: laid the sack down on the ground next to him. Mr.
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: Hairy Man, said Wiley. tell you can change yourself into
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: any animal you want. You heard right, said the hairy man,
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: and he was grinning real big and drooling something fierce.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: You can't change into a great big animal like a bear,
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: said Wiley. The hairy man spun around and there stood
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: a huge hairy bear and that bear was just smiling
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: and drooling and looking straight at Wiley. That's pretty good,
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: said Wiley, but you can't change into an alligator. The
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: bear whirled around and two seconds later, Wiley was staring
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: straight down into an alligator's mouth full of slobbery yellow teeth.
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: You sure are a good conjure man, said Wiley, but
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: you can't change yourself into a little bitty baby possum.
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: The alligator twisted and turned and when the dust settled,
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: there was a tiny possum crawling in the dirt. Wiley
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: grabbed the possum and slammed it into the croaker sack.
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: He tied it up real tight and went and threw
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: it into the river. Wiley started off home feeling mighty
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: proud of himself, but then he heard the hairy man's
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: voice rising up out of the swamp. Wiley, Wiley, I'm
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: coming to get you tonight. Wiley ran as fast as
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: his legs could carry him. I did exactly what you said,
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: he told his mama, but the hairy man got out
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: of the sack and he says he's coming here to
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: get me tonight. Why, that hairy man must have conjured
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: up the wind to blow him out of that sack,
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: said Wiley's mama. But still, you did fool him a
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: second time. And she sat in her rocking chair and
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: rocked and studied how they could play that hairy man
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: one more trick. In the meantime, Wiley ran around and
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: did everything he could think of to keep the hairy
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: man from coming inside the cabin. He tied up one
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: of his hound dogs on the front porch and one
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: out back. He closed the shutters and set up a
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: broom handle across the window because no evil thing can
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: step over a broom handle. He built a big fire
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: in the fireplace in case the hairy man had a
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: mind to come down the chimney. Finally, his mama stopped
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: rocking and said, run out to the barn, Wiley, and
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: bring me back one of those newborn baby pigs. As
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: Wiley was going to the barn, a peculiar animal, sort
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: of like a boar, only twice as big, ran by.
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: One of Wiley's hounds dogs broke loose and chased after it.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: Then when Wiley was coming back from the barn with
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: the baby pig in his arms, another animal big as
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: a horse with a long horn growing from its nose,
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: ran by. Wiley's other dog broke away and tore after
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: it and it disappeared. Wiley slammed the door of the
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: cabin behind him and shut the latch tight. Put the
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: pig in your bed, Wiley, and heap up all the
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: covers on top of it, said his mama. So Wiley
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: did that and as he was pulling the covers over
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: the pig, he got a creepy feeling up around the
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: back of his neck. There was a scraping against the
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: wall of the cabin and Then the noise of footsteps
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: on the roof, only it didn't sound quite like a
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: person's footsteps. Ooh, that's hot, the hairy man hollered. He
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: started cursing and swearing something fierce and the whole cabin
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: shook so hard that Wiley thought it would fall down
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: around him. Soon there was a knock on the door. Quick,
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: scoot up into the loft where he can't see you,
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: Wiley's mama whispered. And when he was out of sight,
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: she opened the door. Mama, the hairy man hollered out.
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: I done come to get your youngin'. Well, you can't
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: have him, said Wiley's mama. Then I'll bite you and
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: poison you, he shouted. I'll bite you and poison you
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: right back, she said. Give him here or I'll set
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: your house on fire with lightning. I got plenty of
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: sweet milk to put out that fire, said Wiley's mama.
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: Give him over or I'll dry up your spring, make
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: your cow go dry and send a million bull weevils
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: out of the ground to eat up your cotton. Hairy man,
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't do all of that, would you? That's mighty mean.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: I'm a mighty mean man. If I give you my baby,
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: will you go on away from here and leave everything
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: else alone and never come back? Wiley's mom asked. I
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: swear that's just what I'll do if you give me
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: your baby. She opened the door wide and let the
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: hairy man into the cabin. He's over there in that bed,
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: she said. The hairy man crossed over to the bed
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: and snatched off the covers. Hey, he hollered. There ain't
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: nothing here but a little baby pig. Did I say
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: what kind of baby I was giving you? asked Wiley's mama.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: That pig sure is a baby, and he belonged to
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: me before I gave him to you. The hairy man yelled,
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: gnashed his teeth, and stomped all over the cabin. He
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: grabbed that baby pig and stormed out the door into
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: the swamp, knocking down a tree as he ran.
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: What?
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: Came down from the loft and looked out the cabin door.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: It seemed as if a tornado had just passed by.
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: He called and called till his hound dogs were home safe,
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: and he went inside and grabbed his mama. They sashayed
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: around the cabin and whooped and hollered,' We did it, Mama!'
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: said Wiley.' We fooled him three times!' As long as
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: they lived, and that was a long, long time, the
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: hairy man never did bother Wiley or his mama ever again.
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: So we have this enormous unconscious force that has carried
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: off Wiley's father. And, you know, if our parent has
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: been through a trauma... that trauma will haunt us. It
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: will kind of, you know, stomp around the edges of
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: our lives, you know, and it'll be something that we'll
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: have to come to terms with. And that might be
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: that we have a parent, you know, God forbid, who
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: committed suicide or experienced a tremendous failure or whatever it is,
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: that this will be something that will influence us. But
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: while he is faced with it, I mean, he goes
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: out into the world and there is the hairy man
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: waiting for him. So oftentimes what got our parents, we're afraid,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: will be the same thing that gets us. And he
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: has these protective instincts in the form of the dogs.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: But he leaves them at home one day.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: And he has the support. from his mother or what
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: we might call the mother part of his own psyche.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: The feminine wiliness comes to his aid. So it's a
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: wonderful story with a lot of sass and vigor and
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: feeling tone about the sins of the father, so to speak,
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: or the fate of the father. does not have to
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: be permanently visited upon the sun.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: But it probably is something we're going to have to
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: wrestle with.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 2: Yep. We will have to wrestle with it. And that
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: is the human story. If it isn't, you know, it's
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 2: going to be one thing after another. Challenges, defeats, complexes, circumstances.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: the whole host of this thing we call life. And
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: how do we bring ourselves to it?
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 4: This reminds me of some research that came out years ago,
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 4: I'm sure we're all aware of it, when they were
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 4: doing research on why some children are resilient to trauma.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 4: And one of the findings was, if the child has
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 4: at least one adult that has a kind of sincere,
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 4: loving interest in the child, even if it's not somebody
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 4: in the family per se, that they become substantially more
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 4: resilient to the trauma that they are or have endured
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 4: in childhood. So it's wonderful that the mother's abiding love
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 4: for Wiley acts as a kind of protective medicine. We
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 4: also see that archetype in the Harry Potter films, that
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 4: the mother in her dying moment Imparts an ancient magic
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 4: to the infant Harry Potter so that Voldemort, who is
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 4: a kind of demonic creature, affects him, leaves a mark
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 4: on him, but cannot kill him. So this idea of
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: the protective love of at least one person is essential
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 4: for all of us and sometimes can be enough. We
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 4: don't have to have a perfect life, but Someone needs
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 4: to love us.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: You know, Wiley's story is a lot of fun, but
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: it does bring up a more kind of serious research
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: that captures the same reality of how parental complexes kind
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: of affect the child. And that is the research, again,
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: that I'm sure a lot of us are familiar with
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: about the children of Vietnam veterans, the children of Holocaust survivors.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: And what was discovered when they looked at the kind
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: of psychosocial functioning of these children, of survivors of great trauma,
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: is that there was kind of an intergenerational transmission that
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: is somewhat mysterious, that there were higher cortisol levels and
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: other kinds of sequelae. So what our parents lived through
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: affects us even though we didn't live through it and
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: and just like wiley we're probably going to meet the
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: same hairy man that got our dad but hopefully we
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: can uh craft a kind of creative response to it.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 4: In an older version of the tale that's a little
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 4: more frightening the father in the beginning of the story
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 4: is characterized as a criminal as a ne'er-do-well as somebody
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 4: who's kind of dangerous and that the idea is that
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 4: when he passes away, the hairy man will be waiting
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 4: for him, which then becomes a metaphor for the devil.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 4: And just as we were saying that even though the
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 4: boy hasn't passed away, but that devilishness is around him.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 4: We could almost imagine that maybe Wiley is going through puberty.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: So there's an awakening of his own hairiness.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 4: And And if he didn't have a model for somebody
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 4: who had an instinctive energy but also could shape that
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 4: in appropriate and pro-social ways, then the boy's going to
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 4: have to wrestle through that without the benefit of having
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 4: been modeled.
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: And I think that that's exactly true, right? If you
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: do have a father who is kind of living the
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: life of a criminal, the boy does need a way
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: to understand how to shape his instincts and his impulses
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: in a way that's, as you said, Joseph, more pro-social.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: So that's a really great addition.
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 4: Our dreamer today is a 23-year-old female, who works as
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 4: a hospice, administration, and psychotherapy intern. And her title for
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 4: her dream is The Man in the Junkyard. I had
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: a dream the other night that I was at work.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 4: I work in hospice and was in the elevator. I
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 4: was told I needed to go down to the basement
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 4: for some reason, so I begrudgingly got in the elevator.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 4: The elevator went down many levels, until I got to
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 4: an abandoned warehouse. The warehouse had numerous cats jumping around
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 4: in tires that were laid on the ground. It was
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 4: a giant basement that appeared to be a junkyard. I
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 4: saw a man in this junkyard. He was the only
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 4: person there. And he approached me. I immediately got anxious
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 4: and backed away. He spoke to me and said, I
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 4: want you to come down here at least once a
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 4: day His presence frightened me less over time and eventually,
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 4: I got back on the elevator feeling a sense of
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 4: love for this man. Defying all logic and not remembering
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 4: why I needed to go down in the first place,
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 4: my dream self-planned to visit him again the next day.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 4: As for significant context, she writes, I'm going to start
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 4: my clinical therapy internship soon. I've been working in hospice,
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 4: which has helped me to be less fearful about death,
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 4: which has always been a main focus area of worry
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 4: for me. I'm also getting married in a month to
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 4: my partner of six years. Her main feelings in the
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 4: dream were fear at the beginning and confusion, but love
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 4: and peace at the end. And as for associations, she writes,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 4: I was scared of the man, but became less fearful
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 4: the longer I stayed with him. There was a sense
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 4: of abandonment in the dreamlike junkyard, with garbage all over
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 4: and mainly tires. The cats were living in these tires.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 4: There was still a lot of life in this junkyard,
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 4: but no one ever appeared to come down here. The
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 4: man was very patient and kind, but he appeared scary
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 4: at first.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: This is a great dream about overcoming a complex. Isn't it?
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: And I love the, you know, right at the outset,
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: I was told I needed to go down to the basement, quote,
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: for some reason. We don't know why. But she follows directions. Right. Well,
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: wait a minute, our waking ego would say, why? do
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 2: you want me to go down there? What am I
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: supposed to do? No, she follows directions. And again, that's
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: von Frahn's feeling and thought that when the dream ego
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 2: is told to do something, The dream ego should probably
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 2: do it. And of course, basements, the forest, the ocean,
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 2: one of the great symbols for the unconscious. So she
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 2: had to go down into the unconscious for some reason,
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 2: obviously to retrieve something she had left behind as a
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: person in her own life. something that's down there that
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: needs to be encountered. I just love this scene of
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 2: the cats jumping around in tires and a basement that
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 2: appears to.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 4: Be a junkyard.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: And that is a great symbol for shadow. This is
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: a junk I don't like. I don't want it. I
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: just have to throw it in the junkyard. And all
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: these cats, often symbols of feminine instinct and life, Are
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: living down there. And then the scary man who, when befriended,
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: is befriending.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: So I just want to say, I'm usually the dream picker.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: And this morning I went into our pile of dreams.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: And this was just on the top of the pile,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: which is what I often do. I just start with
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: the one at the top of the pile. And unless
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: there's a real reason not to take it, I usually
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: take it. But this dream is just such a beautiful
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: little dream. Well, and it's actually not so little, but
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: it's sort of short and spare. Right. But just, you know,
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: it's actually very profound, I think. And I just was
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: marveling as I went about my morning, like, dreams are
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: so amazing. Like, how could you read this dream? This
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: is just one dream. This is just the one that
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: was on the top of the pile. And it's so
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: eloquent and so full of wisdom. So I just sort
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: of bow to the majesty of dreams. I think it's
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: the first thing I want to start with. But, you know,
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: if we look at the setting, she's at work. And
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: I do wonder if the dream does relate to her
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: professional sphere. She's about to start her internship. But of course,
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: Her work has a broader scope to it because she
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: works in hospice. So she actually works in the land
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: between the living and the dead. So it could have
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: the more narrow sense of, you know, what's going on
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: in her professional life, but it could also be speaking
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: to this kind of larger realm that her work points toward. And,
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: you know, to go down, as you said, Deb, into
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: the unconscious to visit the realm of shadow and to
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: find there a very, you know, unusual animus figure. The
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: animus figure who understands the ways of the underworld and
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: wants her to be connected. I mean, I'm thinking she
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: intimates to us that she had a fear of death,
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: which is something people have. And then she's done this
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: wonderful thing to get over it, which is to work
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: in hospice, which is exactly the right thing to do
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: is to really look death in the face. And in
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: some sense, being so in touch with death is really
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: vivifying and enlivening. And I wonder if her visit to
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: the underground junkyard is in part something similar to what
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: happens at work, when she can is sort of daily,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: like once a day probably, reminded of the reality of
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: death that we all want to push away and not
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: think about and how kind of grounding and empowering it
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: is actually to be in that space. So to have
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: access to the unconscious, she has an elevator that takes
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: her right there She can meet with him every day.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: And the one thing I think I'd say to this
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: dreamer is, you might want to talk to this man
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: in an act of imagination regularly. He might have something
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: to say every day.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 4: I'm on board with all of the insights that you
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 4: had brought forward. One thing that I also imagine in
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 4: a very concrete way is that most of the morgues
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 4: in hospitals are in the basement. And so the bodies, which,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 4: like worn-out tires that have been put in the junk
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 4: pile or put in the landfill or put in the grave,
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 4: are often, but not always, but often in the basement.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 4: And so I think there is some relationship to the dead,
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 4: and particularly I'm curious about Something in the unconscious, I think,
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 4: is interested in the bodies of the deceased. And we
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 4: as humans have an enormous interest in the bodies of
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 4: the deceased, which is why we have, since the beginning
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 4: of time, had these very specific funerary rituals of all
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 4: different kinds. And so I think there's a part of
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 4: her that not so much worries, but is curious about
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 4: where does the worn-out body go and what attitude might
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 4: she have or could she discover towards the body that
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 4: her work doesn't end when the person is deceased. Sometimes
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 4: in hospice work, that might be true depending on if
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 4: you're doing case management, but often in hospice work, The
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 4: counselor is also doing grief counseling for several weeks or
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 4: months with the family. And so there is a whole
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 4: other area of life after the soul departs the body
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 4: that requires tending and loving tending, as the man is demonstrating.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 4: I also could imagine this man perhaps being a version
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 4: of Hermes. Hermes was the god that could go into
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 4: the underworld, could lead the souls down into the underworld
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 4: and be relatively unaffected. The difficulty in Hades is that
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 4: everybody had to drink the water of the river Lethe,
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 4: which made them forget everything about their previous lives. And
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 4: in a way, it turned them into cats indirectly. Just
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 4: kind of carefree people. instinctive creatures that are really not
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 4: aware of the life that they had before, which is
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 4: a very specific kind of mythology around that. But there's
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 4: a secret archetypal life in her that she is beginning
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 4: to sense, that there is an ongoing life after someone
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 4: has passed away. Now, we could think about that mystically,
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 4: but we don't even need to do that. Because the
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 4: ongoing life of the deceased is alive in the family
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 4: members and also to a degree forever alive in her.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 4: Because as a hospice worker, as you're taking care of
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 4: the family and the deceased, it is an extremely intense environment.
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 4: And my friends that have done hospice work, they will
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 4: think about the people they have cared for for decades
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 4: after that. At least in the unconscious of this dreamer,
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 4: there is life. Even if the world has forgotten some
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 4: of these people, she has not forgotten them. And there
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 4: is something in her psyche that is caring for those
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 4: memories and those images.
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: That's lovely. Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest
• 1:17:37
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• 1:17:43
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• 1:17:46
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