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Trauma Can Be Rewritten: The Use of Art to Reimagine our Past and Grant Us New Life · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:28
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. Today,
• 0:44
  Speaker 4: we are going to talk about memory, and we are
• 0:49
  Speaker 4: delighted and honored to have Vivian Silvera with us. as
• 0:54
  Speaker 4: a guest. She has made an incredible film called See Memory,
• 1:01
  Speaker 4: in which you get to see her animation and memories
• 1:07
  Speaker 4: being mutable, malleable, growing and changing, in combination with a
• 1:14
  Speaker 4: series of leading neuroscientists from all kinds of leading organizations
• 1:21
  Speaker 4: who talk about the neuroscience of memory. So the film
• 1:27
  Speaker 4: and Vivian's work, the narration, really sets up all kinds
• 1:32
  Speaker 4: of bridges. There's a bridge between art and science, the
• 1:36
  Speaker 4: past and the present, what is fact and what is meaning,
• 1:43
  Speaker 4: what is what we remember, and how is it fueled
• 1:46
  Speaker 4: by imagination. And all of it is a guided tour,
• 1:53
  Speaker 4: to healing. Vivian has done all kinds of work of
• 1:58
  Speaker 4: note and been part of Basel Miami and the Berlin
• 2:03
  Speaker 4: Art Week and Imagine Science Film Festival and much, much more.
• 2:09
  Speaker 4: So with all that said, let's launch into exactly what
• 2:16
  Speaker 4: is memory. We think we know what it.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Is, Can I bring in one more thing? Because I
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: think this is really relevant. Vivian, your film is going
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: to be shown on PBS. Is that correct? Can you
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: just give us that date and tell us a little
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: bit about that? And then we can go into the content.
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 2:32
  Speaker 5: So Sea Memory will launch on the PBS streaming apps,
• 2:37
  Speaker 5: PBS Passport, PBS.org, starting this April 28th. And then it
• 2:43
  Speaker 5: will have its broadcast premiere in New York. on May 19th,
• 2:48
  Speaker 5: Channel 13, May 22nd, Los Angeles, all over the country
• 2:54
  Speaker 5: throughout May, essentially, and we'll link to that, to those
• 2:57
  Speaker 5: broadcast dates.
• 2:59
  Speaker 4: And you will want to see this film. And so
• 3:03
  Speaker 4: all those dates and places will be in the show
• 3:07
  Speaker 4: notes so that you can take a look and see
• 3:11
  Speaker 4: the film.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: So Vivian, if you would start us off, For listeners
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: who may not be yet familiar with this film, tell
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: us a little bit about the story of the film.
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: What prompted you to make it? What is the metacommunication
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: from it?
• 3:29
  Speaker 5: Well, what prompted me to make Sea Memory was that,
• 3:33
  Speaker 5: you know, you'll watch a little bit about my background
• 3:37
  Speaker 5: in the film. You know, I had been investigating my
• 3:40
  Speaker 5: own memory.
• 3:41
  Speaker 6: I was.
• 3:44
  Speaker 5: born and raised in Hong Kong and Brazil before coming
• 3:48
  Speaker 5: to New York and had a sort of strange relationship
• 3:52
  Speaker 5: with my own memory that I don't think I really
• 3:54
  Speaker 5: began to try and clarify or relate to someone else
• 3:59
  Speaker 5: till I had my first child. And I had read
• 4:04
  Speaker 5: in a parenting book that it was really important to
• 4:07
  Speaker 5: give your child a sense of where you come from
• 4:10
  Speaker 5: because it makes them feel grounded. and to share stories
• 4:13
  Speaker 5: with them. And I saw my husband who's from Chicago
• 4:16
  Speaker 5: and who, you know, can still go back to the
• 4:19
  Speaker 5: house he was born in and that he grew up in,
• 4:22
  Speaker 5: have so many vivid memories and that eventually both my
• 4:25
  Speaker 5: children loved hearing those stories. And I had a really
• 4:29
  Speaker 5: hard time accessing my own childhood memories in Hong Kong.
• 4:34
  Speaker 5: And they would ask me lots of questions and I.
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: Could feel them.
• 4:41
  Speaker 5: They almost felt like looking at a foggy dream, but
• 4:44
  Speaker 5: I really had a hard time conveying explicit stories. You know,
• 4:49
  Speaker 5: so I would have sort of, it was a very impressionistic.
• 4:52
  Speaker 5: And then when I looked at my memories, when I
• 4:55
  Speaker 5: moved at the age of 10 to Brazil, they sort
• 4:57
  Speaker 5: of snap into focus and into color.
• 5:01
  Speaker 7: And I.
• 5:03
  Speaker 5: Became really driven to try and understand, you know, why
• 5:08
  Speaker 5: there were different qualities to my memories, why I had
• 5:11
  Speaker 5: access to some and not to others. And, you know,
• 5:17
  Speaker 5: I was very, very, honestly, very frustrated with myself and
• 5:23
  Speaker 5: with that access to memory. I had been looking at
• 5:26
  Speaker 5: memory as a painter before I made the film and
• 5:31
  Speaker 5: actually did a series called Borrowed Memory. where I borrowed
• 5:35
  Speaker 5: other people's childhood photographs from their childhood in Hong Kong
• 5:40
  Speaker 5: in the 70s and 80s and used some of my
• 5:44
  Speaker 5: own and used white to sort of symbolize the color
• 5:47
  Speaker 5: of memory. So just drew these essentially white images on
• 5:53
  Speaker 5: colored papers so that they would feel almost ghostly. And
• 5:58
  Speaker 5: it was an experiment to see if by creating all
• 6:01
  Speaker 5: these images, If I borrowed other people's memories, if I
• 6:05
  Speaker 5: rendered them, could I absorb them as my own? And
• 6:09
  Speaker 5: I have to report that I felt quite satisfied afterwards,
• 6:13
  Speaker 5: like I had filled up an empty image bank.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
• 6:19
  Speaker 5: And so I knew when I started that project that
• 6:22
  Speaker 5: I would spend the rest of my life as an
• 6:24
  Speaker 5: artist exploring memory because it's so mysterious and it's endless
• 6:30
  Speaker 5: and it is the fabric of our identity, and that
• 6:35
  Speaker 5: there would only be more and more and more questions.
• 6:38
  Speaker 5: So I actually felt so excited that I found the
• 6:43
  Speaker 5: thing that I could explore for the rest of my life.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: On Saturday, May 17th, join me and Deb for a
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: Shadow and Dreams seminar, a sneak preview of how we
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: work with Shadow and Dreams in this Jungian Life Dream School.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: Every night our dreams confront us with Shadow, what the
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: waking mind doesn't want to know. Our dreams bring shadow
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: close in order to compensate, compliment, or contradict the conscious attitude.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: During the one-hour session, we'll dive deeper into Carl Jung's
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: concept of the shadow and see how it fits in
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: with dream work. We'll also conduct a live dream interpretation
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: using a dream submitted by an attendee. There'll be time
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: to ask your questions about union dream analysis, and we'll
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: reveal a special TJL Dream School offering for Spring 2025.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: exclusive to seminar attendees. There will be a recording available
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: if you book a space and then can't make it.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: So if you're curious about shadow and dreams, or would
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: like to know more about our dream school, we hope
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: to see you at 12 PM Eastern time on Saturday,
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: May 17th, follow the link in the show notes to
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: book your free space. And I love the way, you know,
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: the film starts that, that memory is one of our
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: most magical abilities or something like that. And And it's
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: so true. You say in the film that without memory,
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: we don't have any form. We don't have an identity.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: We don't have a stable sense of self. Without memory,
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: there is no meaning. So I was really intrigued by
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: this relationship between memory and meaning. Of course, We make
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: meaning from our memories. And, you know, as you discuss,
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: we kind of tell ourselves different stories. But I'm also
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: thinking about the way that memory is the tissue of meaning.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: And some of those memories, I mean, you know, when
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: you were talking just now about Hong Kong, I was
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: thinking about how maybe our relationship to early childhood memories
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: are different in the age of the photograph that, you know,
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: 200 years ago when people had no photographs of their childhood.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: they may have stories, but, but there is something to
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: be able to look at a picture. And then you
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: think you, you know, there's so many things that you
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: don't know if you remember your third birthday, or if
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: you just remember seeing that picture of it for so
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: long that you've, that it's kind of become a memory. Um, so,
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: so something, something about something about the way that our memories, uh,
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: give us a chance to make meaning of who we
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: are and where we've been.
• 9:24
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, those opening lines are actually from Eric Kandel,
• 9:28
  Speaker 5: you know, the brilliant neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize
• 9:33
  Speaker 5: for his research on memory. And I couldn't think of
• 9:35
  Speaker 5: a more beautiful way to open the film with why memory?
• 9:40
  Speaker 5: Why explore memory? And, you know, he just captured the
• 9:44
  Speaker 5: fact that it's magical, which I definitely feel but also
• 9:47
  Speaker 5: without memory, you know, and I love his words, the
• 9:50
  Speaker 5: glue that binds our mental life together. And that, yes,
• 9:55
  Speaker 5: without memory, life wouldn't have any meaning. And I think...
• 10:00
  Speaker 5: you know when you see films like that film Still
• 10:02
  Speaker 5: Alice the one with Julianne Moore where you see she
• 10:06
  Speaker 5: plays this professor who's gradually losing her memory you feel
• 10:10
  Speaker 5: it on a very visceral level just how lost you
• 10:14
  Speaker 5: just can't get from point A to point B without
• 10:18
  Speaker 5: your memory So interestingly, you know, I recently had a
• 10:22
  Speaker 5: conversation with Dr. Turan Ranganath, who wrote a book that's
• 10:28
  Speaker 5: out now called Why We Remember, and he's a neuroscientist
• 10:32
  Speaker 5: at UC Davis. And he pointed out that we talked
• 10:38
  Speaker 5: about Daniel Kahneman's work. Daniel Kahneman, who is a psychologist
• 10:43
  Speaker 5: who won a Nobel Prize for his work on behavioral economics,
• 10:46
  Speaker 5: but he talked about the remembering self. and the experiencing self.
• 10:51
  Speaker 7: And Dr.
• 10:53
  Speaker 5: Ranganath had studied with him and Kahneman's, you know, whole
• 10:58
  Speaker 5: idea that we're mostly living in service to our remembering self. So,
• 11:04
  Speaker 5: you know, the idea that is the experience in the
• 11:08
  Speaker 5: moment more important or the memories you take away, which,
• 11:12
  Speaker 5: you know, you'll have for the rest of your life
• 11:15
  Speaker 5: and sort of When he asked people when planning a vacation,
• 11:19
  Speaker 5: what's more important, the actual one week you're on vacation
• 11:22
  Speaker 5: or the memories you'll form and you'll have? And everyone
• 11:25
  Speaker 5: says it's for their remembering self. And it's interesting because
• 11:29
  Speaker 5: when you then think about people who have memory loss,
• 11:33
  Speaker 5: who are interacting, let's say, with a loved one who
• 11:36
  Speaker 5: does not have memory loss, one of them is completely
• 11:41
  Speaker 5: in the experiencing self, right?
• 11:43
  Speaker 8: Mm-hmm.
• 11:44
  Speaker 5: And one of them is still in service to the
• 11:47
  Speaker 5: remembering self. And he pointed this out, which I thought
• 11:51
  Speaker 5: was so insightful, is that if we're the people interacting
• 11:55
  Speaker 5: with someone we love who can no longer remember us
• 11:58
  Speaker 5: or our name, or we're having an experience with them
• 12:00
  Speaker 5: that they won't then remember, but we will, we're giving
• 12:04
  Speaker 5: the experience meaning. But they're not. They're in the moment.
• 12:09
  Speaker 5: And maybe they're not suffering the way we are because
• 12:12
  Speaker 5: they're not... trying to give it meaning. They're in the
• 12:16
  Speaker 5: experiencing self. So I just thought that was a really
• 12:19
  Speaker 5: great insight, you know, as we think about the importance
• 12:23
  Speaker 5: of memory. And I have actually seen, you know, my
• 12:27
  Speaker 5: husband's great grandmother who lived till 99, the last few years,
• 12:31
  Speaker 5: she actually had no short-term memory. And we'd go visit
• 12:34
  Speaker 5: her and we'd say, what'd you have for breakfast? And
• 12:37
  Speaker 5: she'd be like, I don't know. But she was so happy-go-lucky.
• 12:41
  Speaker 5: And I think She was, she had always, the world
• 12:45
  Speaker 5: treated her well. She trusted people. So when we walked
• 12:52
  Speaker 5: in to visit her, she wasn't quite sure who we were,
• 12:54
  Speaker 5: but she felt we came in love. And she sort of,
• 12:57
  Speaker 5: even though she couldn't remember her whole disposition, it's sort
• 13:02
  Speaker 5: of what Daniela Schiller talks about in my film, See Memory,
• 13:06
  Speaker 5: your whole behavior is your memory. So while she might
• 13:09
  Speaker 5: not have semantic memory, Her behavior is showing, or it
• 13:16
  Speaker 5: indicated to me, that she had been treated kindly and
• 13:20
  Speaker 5: had no reason to mistrust the world. And so when
• 13:25
  Speaker 5: she had her dementia and memory loss, her behavior reflected
• 13:29
  Speaker 5: that still. And so she was still quite a joyful person.
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: This reminds me of something that Jung also thought of
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: as a primary goal of analysis, which was... the emergence
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: of the new attitude. And what he meant by that
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: is that we are functioning along these kinds of unconscious axioms,
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: maybe not even an awful lot of them, but either
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: we've integrated something that works against us or something has
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: come into us that is no longer serviceable. And the
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: arc of the analysis is the death and transformation of
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: the attitude to the better one. And that's kind of
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: like the mainframe program in the bottom of the personality.
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: And often the attitudes are, when this emerges in an analysis,
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: is just one, two, three words. And it sounds like
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: this is a great example that when all of the
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: adornments leave us, that it is the fundamental attitude that
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: guides our orientation and most importantly, our expectations of the world.
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: And that's such a beautiful example of that.
• 14:41
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 14:43
  Speaker 4: It's the meaning-making function that we have, and it's such
• 14:48
  Speaker 4: a fundamental part of being human. It's kind of a
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: double-edged sword, because just as Joseph was saying, it does
• 14:55
  Speaker 4: fuel our expectations of, you know, every time I have
• 14:59
  Speaker 4: done this, it didn't work out well, and I felt
• 15:03
  Speaker 4: bad afterwards, so now I'm going to do it again,
• 15:05
  Speaker 4: and I expect.
• 15:08
  Speaker 4: That something similar will occur, unlike the grandmother that you
• 15:16
  Speaker 4: visited in Chicago, who had that fundamental, implicit, body-oriented expectation
• 15:26
  Speaker 4: that people mean well and it will be good.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: I just want to say my mother died from vascular dementia,
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: and I watched that happen pretty intimately over the course
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: of more than a decade. And it was not, uh,
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: it wasn't, it, it wasn't joyful. Um, you know, it was,
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: it was, I think there was a period in which, um,
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: she knew this is my, this is my assumption. I
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: think there was a period in which she knew because
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: she seemed like defensive about it and she didn't want
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: to be, she didn't want to have the experience of
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: sort of being, um, of having it revealed that she
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: couldn't remember things, you know? Um, And then there was
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: this period where, and I think this is kind of
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: like what you were saying, Vivian, where there were things
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: she couldn't remember. Like she may not remember my name,
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: but she knew she loved me, that kind of thing,
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: you know, that just the feeling was there. But it
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: was a tragic process. And I do think, and I've
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: had that thought too, because I'm, you know, of course,
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: I'm like, when is it going to be my turn?
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: You know, I've thought a lot about it. With good reason, right?
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: Because what percentage of the population experiences some degree of
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: memory loss? It's significant. And we've all probably had loved
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: ones that we've cared for, or many of us have,
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: or many of us will. But it has occurred to
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: me that there was this maybe period of time where
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: she knew it was happening. And then I think she
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: didn't really know.
• 16:55
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: And that there was probably a time where it was...
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: Where that was just kind of a blessing. But, you know,
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: also the causes of memory loss are so variable. And
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: there was something about her dementia where there was, I think,
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: a diminishment. There was a flattening, too.
• 17:17
  Speaker 8: You know?
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: So it wasn't just that she was not remembering. There
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: was just... there wasn't that ability to just kind of
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: be in the moment and experience joy either. So there
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: are other things that were being lost as well.
• 17:32
  Speaker 4: So memory is a sort of pervasive and somewhat elusive function.
• 17:40
  Speaker 4: It links past, present, future of what we think and
• 17:46
  Speaker 4: make meaning of and our emotions. including what is it
• 17:52
  Speaker 4: that we choose to remember? I have a sister who's
• 17:56
  Speaker 4: very close to me in age, and at times you
• 17:59
  Speaker 4: would think we had been raised in two entirely different
• 18:02
  Speaker 4: households because the things that I really remember that struck
• 18:09
  Speaker 4: me with enough emotional force that I remembered them, like
• 18:14
  Speaker 4: this is important, are very different from the things that
• 18:17
  Speaker 4: resonated with her. So in a way, it's almost as
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: if it is the basis for our humanity. It's the glue.
• 18:29
  Speaker 8: It is.
• 18:30
  Speaker 5: You know, what's interesting about that is since doing all
• 18:32
  Speaker 5: this research and making the film, I've realized, though, that
• 18:37
  Speaker 5: we have more agency than we realize. So one of
• 18:42
  Speaker 5: the people I interviewed who was really foundational for the
• 18:45
  Speaker 5: film is Dr. Silvana Reggio, who's... both a neurologist and
• 18:51
  Speaker 5: a psychiatrist. And so to her, I said, okay, take
• 18:56
  Speaker 5: me to the very beginning. And one of the things
• 18:58
  Speaker 5: she said that still echoes in my head is, before
• 19:01
  Speaker 5: memory is attention, you only remember what you pay attention to.
• 19:08
  Speaker 5: There will no be short-term memory, long-term memory without that.
• 19:12
  Speaker 5: So the example she gave was, you get into an
• 19:15
  Speaker 5: elevator and You have your mind on something, you forget
• 19:18
  Speaker 5: to press a button, and you think, oh my God,
• 19:20
  Speaker 5: I'm losing my memory. You're not losing your memory. You
• 19:22
  Speaker 5: just weren't paying attention. I mean, I think we can
• 19:25
  Speaker 5: talk about what that means now in this whole new
• 19:28
  Speaker 5: social media world where people's attentions, you know, the way
• 19:33
  Speaker 5: we pay attention is changing. I think that's going to have.
• 19:37
  Speaker 5: Just as an artist who's interviewing neuroscientists, I see. I
• 19:40
  Speaker 5: can get a sense of the long-term impact of that.
• 19:42
  Speaker 4: But so....
• 19:45
  Speaker 5: I intervene in my own memory formation now that I've
• 19:48
  Speaker 5: made the film. So what I mean by that is,
• 19:51
  Speaker 5: let's say I'm in a difficult situation or a painful situation.
• 19:55
  Speaker 5: I also know that memory simply is an association between
• 20:00
  Speaker 5: two or more things. So memory is learning. It's you're
• 20:04
  Speaker 5: in an experience, you associate, let's say I'm looking at
• 20:08
  Speaker 5: you and I associate you know, well, you and Joseph
• 20:12
  Speaker 5: are wearing the same color shirt. You know, I'll make
• 20:14
  Speaker 5: some kind of association between that and I'll link that
• 20:17
  Speaker 5: to something else, right? And so we can actually have,
• 20:21
  Speaker 5: if you become conscious of that, that memory is what
• 20:24
  Speaker 5: you pay attention to and associate. You can then choose
• 20:28
  Speaker 5: what to bring in, what to pay attention to on
• 20:31
  Speaker 5: the most basic level. Sometimes when I'm walking, taking a
• 20:35
  Speaker 5: walk in Central Park in the morning with my dog
• 20:37
  Speaker 5: and I'm in a bad mood and I'm really stressed,
• 20:39
  Speaker 5: I'll say, okay, dial in on sounds. And then I'll
• 20:45
  Speaker 5: hear birds sing. I'll just, I'll hear things in the
• 20:48
  Speaker 5: middle of New York City. Yes, you will still hear
• 20:50
  Speaker 5: these things. And I've become aware of my brain as
• 20:53
  Speaker 5: almost like a camera with a lens. And I can
• 20:56
  Speaker 5: choose what to zoom into and what to make fuzzy
• 20:59
  Speaker 5: and zoom out of. And I use this also with
• 21:03
  Speaker 5: my children. Let's say they come home and they're very
• 21:05
  Speaker 5: upset or maybe they feel a victim of a situation.
• 21:09
  Speaker 5: you can in the moment say, was anyone kind to you?
• 21:13
  Speaker 5: You can start to bring in an association so that
• 21:17
  Speaker 5: it's not a purely negative one. And so I think
• 21:21
  Speaker 5: for me, what I've learned about memory is that we
• 21:25
  Speaker 5: have an ongoing relationship with our memories and that both
• 21:31
  Speaker 5: we can intervene in a memory being formed in the present,
• 21:34
  Speaker 5: but you can also intervene in memories that were already formed.
• 21:37
  Speaker 5: And you can highlight things that maybe you didn't put
• 21:40
  Speaker 5: a lot of attention on, but you can make a choice. And,
• 21:44
  Speaker 5: you know, Daniela Schiller, one of the neuroscientists in the film,
• 21:48
  Speaker 5: is the one that really highlighted that to me. She's
• 21:52
  Speaker 5: very interested in our relationship to memory. And whenever I
• 21:57
  Speaker 5: would go interview, you know, a new neuroscientist, I would say,
• 22:00
  Speaker 5: what do you think I should ask them? And she said,
• 22:02
  Speaker 5: ask them what is their relationship to their memory? But,
• 22:06
  Speaker 5: you know, for her, it's this living, breathing, active thing.
• 22:10
  Speaker 5: And I do think it is very optimistic because I
• 22:15
  Speaker 5: did feel a victim to my memory. I only have
• 22:18
  Speaker 5: access to what it wants to give me. I don't have,
• 22:20
  Speaker 5: you know, I just sort of I'm either run over
• 22:23
  Speaker 5: it or it's out of reach or, you know. I
• 22:25
  Speaker 5: just have to take what it gives me. And if
• 22:29
  Speaker 5: it's a negative memory, it will stay negative. And, you know,
• 22:32
  Speaker 5: I don't mean to dilute that. Painful memories are still
• 22:37
  Speaker 5: very painful. But one of the most painful things, I
• 22:42
  Speaker 5: think you all know, you know, as therapists is feeling helpless.
• 22:47
  Speaker 5: And when you start to realize you do have some agency,
• 22:51
  Speaker 5: it can be really quite transformative.
• 22:53
  Speaker 8: Yeah. You know.
• 22:55
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking along the lines of Gestalt therapy, which talks
• 23:01
  Speaker 4: about things that are figural, that they're in the forefront,
• 23:05
  Speaker 4: and things that are in the ground, in the background.
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: And I'm also wanting to lift up that it's not,
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: I think you're not talking only about a cognitive process,
• 23:18
  Speaker 4: but about the ability to play. with your own memories
• 23:25
  Speaker 4: and mental processes and meaning making, that you can move
• 23:30
  Speaker 4: some of the pieces around on the set and feel
• 23:34
  Speaker 4: into them. You know, just as you said, you might
• 23:38
  Speaker 4: ask one of your children was in that distressing situation,
• 23:42
  Speaker 4: was anybody looking at you compassionately? And then just try
• 23:48
  Speaker 4: moving that one up to the foreground and making it figural.
• 23:52
  Speaker 4: you know that my friend so-and-so was looking at me
• 23:55
  Speaker 4: very sympathetically. Exactly, yes. So that we just practice entering
• 24:01
  Speaker 4: that scene, and that's what's so vivid and wonderful in
• 24:06
  Speaker 4: your film, is there's scene after scene after scene, and
• 24:09
  Speaker 4: how it keeps changing. Just enter it and move things
• 24:14
  Speaker 4: around a little bit and see what happens. It's not forcing...
• 24:20
  Speaker 4: a change or, you know, this time I'm going to
• 24:22
  Speaker 4: think about it differently. It's just going into it and
• 24:26
  Speaker 4: having access and, as you said, agency. It's hugely optimistic
• 24:33
  Speaker 4: and it's kind of fun and nothing like playing with yourself.
• 24:39
  Speaker 4: Pardon the usual connotation.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: I want to just bring us briefly to this discussion
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: about the malleability of memory. And I know that the
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: film title was kind of inspired by this essay by
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: Oliver Sacks that I recently read, which is pretty well
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: known called Speak Memory. And in that essay, Sacks talks
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: about these two different experiences of growing up during World
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: War II in London. And there were these two times
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: when A bomb hit close to the house and he
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: had very vivid memories of both of them. And I
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: think as an adult, he was talking about the second one.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: And his brother said, you weren't there. You were at school.
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: And he wrote you about it or you were maybe
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: you were out in the country. I can't remember.
• 25:28
  Speaker 7: He was away.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: And he received a letter about that second bomb and
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: how they responded to it. That was very vivid. It
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: was highly emotional. And he also could picture everything because
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: it happened in a place that he was very familiar with.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: But he could not reconcile himself to the fact that
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: that wasn't actually his memory. So I think he's interested
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: in sort of looking at, you know, what is memory?
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: And you say in the film, memory is not a
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: recording device. And this is so infuriating when you're in
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: an argument with your spouse, right? Sometimes don't you wish
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: that you could just.
• 26:08
  Speaker 5: Go back, rewind, and say, no, see, you really did say.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: But unfortunately, it's not. So we all kind of have
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: our own version. And it is a little bit of
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: a fiction. I'm also thinking of the work of Elizabeth Loftus.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: who did that sort of famous, maybe infamous experiment about
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: lost in the mall. So she took some subjects and
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: kind of implanted a memory. Do you remember the time
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: that you were lost in the mall as a little kid?
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: And at first they'd be like, no, no, no. It's like, well,
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: but then this happened. And eventually the person's like, yeah,
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: I got lost in the mall as a kid. It
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: was really upsetting. You know, so I think the point
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: of her research was it has implications for for law
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: enforcement and it has implications for us, too, as individuals.
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Like some of the things that we think happened to
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: us may not have happened to us. So and that
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: doesn't mean that in some sense, it's not a real experience.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: I mean, even the people that then had this experience
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: of being lost in the mall, even though that never
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: factually happened, it became part of their experience, right?
• 27:22
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, that Oliver Sacks article really blew my
• 27:26
  Speaker 5: mind when I first read it. And I read it
• 27:28
  Speaker 5: when I had already started making the film, but it
• 27:30
  Speaker 5: is why I decided to call it Sea Memory. He
• 27:33
  Speaker 5: titles articles Speak Memory, which he was actually titling after
• 27:37
  Speaker 5: Nabokov's book, Speak Memory.
• 27:39
  Speaker 7: Yes.
• 27:40
  Speaker 5: But, you know, one of the things that struck me is, yes,
• 27:45
  Speaker 5: he had actually written about that experience of experiencing the bomb.
• 27:50
  Speaker 5: And then and then his brother wrote to him and said, no.
• 27:53
  Speaker 5: And he put it in a memoir.
• 27:55
  Speaker 4: Yes, that's right.
• 27:56
  Speaker 5: And what I found so fascinating is Sacks saying that
• 28:00
  Speaker 5: essentially there's no way to decipher between an experienced memory
• 28:04
  Speaker 5: and neurologically, there's no way to decipher between an experienced
• 28:09
  Speaker 5: memory and an imagined memory. It looks the same in
• 28:11
  Speaker 5: the brain. And that really just blew my mind. And
• 28:16
  Speaker 5: this also came up in my interview with Dr. Silvana Reggio,
• 28:20
  Speaker 5: who I mentioned before, where she was talking to me
• 28:23
  Speaker 5: about the power of the mind. And she said, okay,
• 28:26
  Speaker 5: close your eyes. Imagine slicing open a lemon and biting
• 28:32
  Speaker 5: into the lemon.
• 28:33
  Speaker 7: And I did.
• 28:33
  Speaker 5: And she said, can you taste it? And I said,
• 28:35
  Speaker 5: I absolutely can. And she said, there you go. That's
• 28:39
  Speaker 5: how powerful the mind is. And so, you know, at
• 28:44
  Speaker 5: first I sort of, I came at it with saying
• 28:48
  Speaker 5: the things you just said, Lisa, was I went to
• 28:49
  Speaker 5: Daniela Schill and I was like, this is terrible. There's
• 28:52
  Speaker 5: no way to decipher between experience. What does this mean
• 28:55
  Speaker 5: for our courts, for for our for police, for all
• 28:58
  Speaker 5: of these things, you know, but also for ourselves. What
• 29:01
  Speaker 5: does it mean if our memories are the story we
• 29:04
  Speaker 5: tell of how we became who we are? And we
• 29:06
  Speaker 5: may have just they we might not have even experienced
• 29:09
  Speaker 5: those things.
• 29:10
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 29:11
  Speaker 5: And she had the more optimistic view, which is fine.
• 29:15
  Speaker 5: You know, let's have a more relaxed relationship with our memory.
• 29:19
  Speaker 5: Let's not be. you know, so strident. Let's very much
• 29:24
  Speaker 5: be here now in a way, listen to who you
• 29:27
  Speaker 5: are now, those words in the film. You know, she said,
• 29:30
  Speaker 5: in a way it can be liberating, right? Because then
• 29:33
  Speaker 5: you're left with listening to who you are now. And,
• 29:36
  Speaker 5: you know, one of the reasons that was so fascinating
• 29:38
  Speaker 5: to me is because and it was also one of
• 29:41
  Speaker 5: the motivations for making the film after I had already
• 29:43
  Speaker 5: done a few bodies of work in painting and drawing
• 29:46
  Speaker 5: about memory, was my daughter at the time was three
• 29:51
  Speaker 5: years old and she noticed I have a bump on
• 29:54
  Speaker 5: my collarbone. And I remember very vividly we were in
• 29:58
  Speaker 5: the kitchen and she said, Mommy, why do you have
• 30:00
  Speaker 5: a bump on your collarbone? And I told her the
• 30:02
  Speaker 5: story and I told it as a story of how,
• 30:05
  Speaker 5: you know, I went to Greece when I was 19
• 30:07
  Speaker 5: years old and I rented a moped and I was
• 30:11
  Speaker 5: on the moped and I was on this very bumpy
• 30:13
  Speaker 5: road and I was following my friends. And instead of
• 30:16
  Speaker 5: doing what you're supposed to do, when the moped started
• 30:19
  Speaker 5: to to wobble, I sped up like I just unconsciously
• 30:24
  Speaker 5: I sped up, fell down. broke my collarbone, and I
• 30:27
  Speaker 5: described in detail getting picked up by this truck and
• 30:30
  Speaker 5: bumping along the road, and I could feel the bone moving. Anyway,
• 30:35
  Speaker 5: so she started crying.
• 30:36
  Speaker 4: She said, Mommy.
• 30:38
  Speaker 5: She burst into tears, and she was very angry, and
• 30:41
  Speaker 5: she said, I wish you hadn't told me. Now I
• 30:43
  Speaker 5: feel like I broke my collarbone. And I was dumbstruck, dumbfounded, because...
• 30:52
  Speaker 5: I had had that experience many times where I would
• 30:55
  Speaker 5: go to a movie and let's say the movie would
• 30:57
  Speaker 5: be about a boxer. I would walk out of the
• 31:00
  Speaker 5: movie and literally these thoughts would float through my head.
• 31:04
  Speaker 5: I feel really beat up. And then I'd have to say, Vivian,
• 31:07
  Speaker 5: you are not a boxer. This didn't happen to you.
• 31:11
  Speaker 5: And I thought, why am I like this? Why do
• 31:13
  Speaker 5: I absorb this?
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: It's mirror neurons.
• 31:16
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 31:16
  Speaker 5: So I thought maybe it's me. Maybe it's that I
• 31:19
  Speaker 5: grew up in Hong Kong. Maybe it's my relationship to memory.
• 31:21
  Speaker 5: Maybe it's all part of this puzzle. And then when
• 31:23
  Speaker 5: she did it, having had none of those experiences, having
• 31:26
  Speaker 5: a very ordinary childhood in a place where everyone speaks English,
• 31:32
  Speaker 5: you know, none of the things that I thought maybe
• 31:34
  Speaker 5: confused me. And she did the very same thing. I said, OK,
• 31:37
  Speaker 5: I've got to I've got to get into this. I've
• 31:40
  Speaker 5: got to figure this out. So that was one of
• 31:43
  Speaker 5: the big motivations when she said, I feel like that
• 31:46
  Speaker 5: happened to me. And she was able to verbalize it.
• 31:49
  Speaker 6: Wow.
• 31:50
  Speaker 5: You know, she didn't absorb it the way Saks did.
• 31:53
  Speaker 5: And then it came out years later. In the moment,
• 31:55
  Speaker 5: she said, now I feel like it's my memory.
• 31:59
  Speaker 6: That's brilliant.
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: But it just opens up so much, you know, what
• 32:06
  Speaker 4: we might talk about as psyche. And that we're open
• 32:11
  Speaker 4: to all kinds of experiences. Experiences like, you know, vicariously,
• 32:17
  Speaker 4: like your daughter did. She knew what it was like
• 32:21
  Speaker 4: to have a broken collarbone. And of course, you know,
• 32:24
  Speaker 4: we're always talking about dreams. And we experience things in dreams.
• 32:34
  Speaker 4: We're wide open to all kinds of experiences. We read
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: books and we go to movies and we interact with people.
• 32:43
  Speaker 4: And then we construct meaning from that. And we think
• 32:50
  Speaker 4: it's sort of fact and it's concrete and it's objective.
• 32:54
  Speaker 4: But most of the time, it's really not. Yeah.
• 32:57
  Speaker 5: It's, you know, the whole reason why I think I
• 32:59
  Speaker 5: felt like I found the thing I can explore forever
• 33:02
  Speaker 5: with memory because it mingles with almost every part of it.
• 33:07
  Speaker 5: First of all, when you're learning, when you're in school, well,
• 33:10
  Speaker 5: even when you're a young child before you go to
• 33:12
  Speaker 5: school and you're learning, that's memory, right? Learning is memory. And,
• 33:18
  Speaker 5: you know, there's almost intellectually, it's a huge part of it.
• 33:22
  Speaker 5: It is our life. Emotionally, it is our life, you know?
• 33:26
  Speaker 5: And so- It just seems like when I visually, when
• 33:30
  Speaker 5: I say memory, you know what I imagine? The picture
• 33:33
  Speaker 5: that comes is the ocean. Because it feels like this
• 33:36
  Speaker 5: powerful thing. You know, I feel the same way about
• 33:41
  Speaker 5: the ocean. That we're so small and the ocean is
• 33:44
  Speaker 5: so powerful. And it's like a giant tidal wave that
• 33:47
  Speaker 5: you just get swept up in. And I sort of
• 33:50
  Speaker 5: see memory as vast and endless and powerful things. as
• 33:55
  Speaker 5: the ocean with a lot of wonderful qualities, but then
• 33:58
  Speaker 5: also a lot of dark qualities. And, you know, when you,
• 34:03
  Speaker 5: you know, the film very much goes into traumatic memory,
• 34:05
  Speaker 5: but when you suffer from a traumatic memory, it can
• 34:09
  Speaker 5: really take over your life. And to me, that's the
• 34:13
  Speaker 5: dark nature of what is memory. And, you know, it
• 34:18
  Speaker 5: can be magical. You can have nostalgia. You can, you know,
• 34:23
  Speaker 5: I know for my children, there's nothing they like more
• 34:26
  Speaker 5: than hearing about stories of when they were little. And
• 34:28
  Speaker 5: I think we all see that, like we all love that, right?
• 34:31
  Speaker 5: So like memory can be so entertaining. You know, it's
• 34:34
  Speaker 5: sort of like sitting by the campfire telling stories. A
• 34:36
  Speaker 5: lot of that is just memories, right? But then when
• 34:40
  Speaker 5: you don't know what it is, when it's unconscious and
• 34:45
  Speaker 5: traumatic and it runs your life fast, without you being
• 34:50
  Speaker 5: able to intervene with it, which is what happens when
• 34:53
  Speaker 5: people have traumatic memories, then it's powerful in a very
• 34:57
  Speaker 5: dark and I think dangerous way.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: You know, I want to dip into some more of
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: what you say in the film about traumatic memories. But
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: before we go there, just, you know, you were talking
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: about this kind of very optimistic view, you know, that
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: we can intervene, that we can, we don't have to
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: be kind of anchored to a negative memory, say. And
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: That does bring up something that Jung talked about, or
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: at least it feels related. So Jung had this idea
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: that you could either look at the psyche reductively or prospectively.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: And Freud's view of looking at the psyche was very reductive.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: So that you come in with a problem to therapy
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: and immediately the assumption is the problem's in the past
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: and we have to find that memory. And then you
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: become like a detective to search for the memory that
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: created the problem. And it's not that Jung didn't think
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: that that was worthwhile. He just didn't think it was
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: the only thing. He was also interested in where the
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: psyche was going. So a symptom, I don't know, let's
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: say you're depressed. A reductive approach would have you looking
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: for a kind of causal factor in the past, a memory,
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: or maybe something that you could have a memory of.
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: A prospective function would say, what is the purpose of
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: you becoming depressed now? What is the psyche trying to accomplish?
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: And he was interested in both of those things. And
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: he says at some point, if we only focus on
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: a reductive approach to problems, sometimes there isn't one or
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: there isn't one that we can remember. And then you
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: could actually send a patient on a kind of wild
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: goose chase, just spending all of his time ferreting through
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: his past, trying to find the cause of it. And
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: there might not be one or it might not be
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: helpful to remember it. So I think that the way
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: you've described it about being able to kind of intervene
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: with memories and be playful with memories and recognize that
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: they're kind of loosened up, you know, in some ways
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: it goes against the grain of what I think is
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: often has become a kind of like pop psychology way
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: of understanding difficulties, which is, oh, there must be something
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: in the past and I've got to go find it.
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: But I think that, of course, it's worth looking at
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: the past. And that is a lot of what I
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: do when I'm sitting with somebody. But we can also
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: really cut off possibilities if that's the only thing, right?
• 37:31
  Speaker 5: I couldn't agree with you more. And in fact, this
• 37:33
  Speaker 5: came up in my interview with Daniela Schiller, where, you know,
• 37:39
  Speaker 5: sometimes when you're looking for that thing in the past,
• 37:41
  Speaker 5: you might give the thing more importance than it actually
• 37:45
  Speaker 5: had because you're trying to solve the puzzle. And I
• 37:48
  Speaker 5: remember her saying to me, look, your brain will naturally
• 37:52
  Speaker 5: try and do that. It will try and find a
• 37:54
  Speaker 5: reason why you feel lousy. So she's like, if you're
• 37:58
  Speaker 5: feeling depressed and it's the end of the day and
• 38:01
  Speaker 5: you're tired, don't try and figure out why you're depressed.
• 38:04
  Speaker 5: She said, go to sleep.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: Just go to sleep.
• 38:08
  Speaker 5: You might wake up and you might just feel rested
• 38:11
  Speaker 5: and your brain is not going to look for, it's
• 38:13
  Speaker 5: not going to find the same answers that it would
• 38:15
  Speaker 5: have the night before. And I think about that all
• 38:18
  Speaker 5: the time because I'm always constantly naturally trying to find meaning.
• 38:23
  Speaker 5: Why do I feel like this? Why do I feel
• 38:24
  Speaker 5: like that? And sometimes, and it's been a real gift
• 38:28
  Speaker 5: to me to say, don't answer that. It might, the
• 38:31
  Speaker 5: feeling might go away. Let it come and go. You
• 38:35
  Speaker 5: don't need a reason.
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: The stories that we come up with can be limiting.
• 38:40
  Speaker 7: Yes.
• 38:41
  Speaker 6: Yes.
• 38:43
  Speaker 4: And causality is tricky. And people, we do this all
• 38:47
  Speaker 4: the time because we want things to make sense. You know,
• 38:51
  Speaker 4: that the reason I'm going to make this up here,
• 38:56
  Speaker 4: the reason that I have short hair is that when
• 38:58
  Speaker 4: I was little, my mother really wanted me to have
• 39:02
  Speaker 4: long hair. And I hated having to sit still while
• 39:06
  Speaker 4: she combed it and braided it and fussed with it.
• 39:09
  Speaker 4: And I hated that. So once I got old enough,
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: I made sure my hair stayed short. But in therapy,
• 39:18
  Speaker 4: we might examine that for how did that get constructed?
• 39:24
  Speaker 4: What is its symbolic value? What might it have to
• 39:30
  Speaker 4: do with feeling how one felt when one was small
• 39:36
  Speaker 4: and at the mercy in many, many ways of people
• 39:39
  Speaker 4: who were big, called adults, rather than taking it as
• 39:44
  Speaker 4: a concrete fact? So we're exploring things symbolically, metaphorically, and
• 39:49
  Speaker 4: emotionally rather than just as events, frozen, concrete events. Because
• 39:59
  Speaker 4: those aren't really changeable, but how we relate to them
• 40:03
  Speaker 4: is very changeable.
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: And that to me is a very important distinction, Vivian,
• 40:07
  Speaker 3: that you do bring up indirectly throughout your entire film.
• 40:11
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: Is that we can search for the cause of something
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: that may be fruitless, but the work is really searching
• 40:22
  Speaker 3: for the meaning and expanding the internal images.
• 40:28
  Speaker 6: To make them metaphors.
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: And that's the work of the artist, taking images and
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: allowing them to mean more than simply words.
• 40:40
  Speaker 6: Our solitary experience.
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: I found it interesting that your movie uses this image
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: of snow very much in the beginning, but on and off.
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: Because snow is such a marvelous carpet of forgetting. I
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: used to love it when I'd wake up in the
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: morning and it would have snowed. Of course, that meant
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: there was no school, so that made it kind of euphoric,
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: a snow day. But also, the kind of beauty of
• 41:08
  Speaker 3: hiding everything under this glittering coolness and that dance between
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: loving forgetting in one regard and also the cost of
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: forgetting because everything is still there. It's just under the
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: beautiful snow.
• 41:27
  Speaker 4: I love that.
• 41:28
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I definitely, I mean, you know, the film goes
• 41:34
  Speaker 5: from winter to snow to spring. So, you know, The
• 41:39
  Speaker 5: young woman is walking through Central Park and it's blanketed
• 41:41
  Speaker 5: in snow. And then, you know, she walks back out
• 41:45
  Speaker 5: into it. And at first I thought, oh, that's so cliche.
• 41:47
  Speaker 5: But my mind did it. Like I didn't consciously say
• 41:51
  Speaker 5: I'm doing winter.
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: Cliches are cliches for a reason.
• 41:53
  Speaker 6: Right, exactly.
• 41:54
  Speaker 5: It just works. And I do think that you're absolutely right.
• 41:59
  Speaker 5: There's something wonderful about forgetting. And then there's something wonderful.
• 42:04
  Speaker 5: There's something painful about forgetting.
• 42:07
  Speaker 6: Absolutely.
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: There's a cost because everything is still alive under the snow.
• 42:12
  Speaker 7: Exactly.
• 42:13
  Speaker 5: And because you haven't completely forgotten. It's sort of, it's
• 42:17
  Speaker 5: poking up. And maybe you need a break from it.
• 42:20
  Speaker 5: So maybe it's good to forget, to take breaks from remembering. So,
• 42:26
  Speaker 5: you know, I'm very fascinated by the idea that our
• 42:31
  Speaker 5: subconscious or unconscious is so much wiser than our conscious is.
• 42:37
  Speaker 5: And I certainly found that when I was making the film,
• 42:41
  Speaker 5: that the more times I could let my unconscious take charge,
• 42:48
  Speaker 5: the better those pieces of the film were.
• 42:51
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 42:52
  Speaker 5: Then when my conscious was just making decisions, but they
• 42:55
  Speaker 5: were limited, they weren't super imaginative. They were limited to
• 42:59
  Speaker 5: what I could consciously think of. But within that unconscious,
• 43:03
  Speaker 5: it's sort of like the whole idea of memory as
• 43:05
  Speaker 5: something beautiful, but also something potentially dark. I think the
• 43:09
  Speaker 5: unconscious is that, right? The unconscious is beautiful, but it's also,
• 43:15
  Speaker 5: it can feel quite dangerous.
• 43:17
  Speaker 6: It can feel dangerous.
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: And this goes to that experience of nightmares, where the
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: unconscious is presenting either literal or symbolic information that the
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: ego may believe is overwhelming or frightening to its perception
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: of itself. And yet, central to Jungian work, at least,
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: is that when the unconscious decides what missing information must
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: be returned to the personality, although it's frightening, it is
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: painful medicine that's necessary, which is different than the ego
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: or even someone's therapist saying, oh, we've decided you need
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: to revisit and remember this, which may not be as
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: wise as the dream.
• 44:08
  Speaker 5: I like to think when you do get those pieces
• 44:11
  Speaker 5: that are painful, that your mind knows, you know, it
• 44:15
  Speaker 5: gives you the little bits that you can digest, you know,
• 44:18
  Speaker 5: the little bite-sized pieces that you can digest. And, you know,
• 44:23
  Speaker 5: our minds, I mean, just learning about our minds and MRIs,
• 44:27
  Speaker 5: and instead of it it being less mysterious to me,
• 44:31
  Speaker 5: it's only more mysterious.
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: It doesn't give us mastery over who we are just
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: to know what parts of the brain are lighting up.
• 44:40
  Speaker 8: Right.
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: But it, but it is somehow gratifying, which brings us
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: back to this idea of causality, making us feel it
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: like we somehow have power over a thing.
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: So let's, let's show a little clip from the film.
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: And Vivian, I'm wondering if you can set this clip
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: up for us. This is, um, Daniela Schiller talking about
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: a really important discovery. So maybe just tell us a
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: little bit about it and we'll go to the clip.
• 45:04
  Speaker 5: So this came in the second part of the film
• 45:07
  Speaker 5: where I invited the scientists into my studio to talk
• 45:11
  Speaker 5: about working together and to ask them if since we
• 45:15
  Speaker 5: had made the film together, anything exciting or new had
• 45:19
  Speaker 5: come up. And little did I know that she had
• 45:23
  Speaker 5: just recently completed and published this study that shows that
• 45:29
  Speaker 5: traumatic memories actually live in a different part of the
• 45:32
  Speaker 5: brain than what she calls regular sad memories. And so,
• 45:38
  Speaker 5: you know, it's pretty widespread knowledge that long-term memories, you know,
• 45:43
  Speaker 5: are processed in the hippocampus and that's where they live.
• 45:48
  Speaker 5: And so what she did in this study, and a
• 45:51
  Speaker 5: lot of her work, that we can go into perhaps
• 45:55
  Speaker 5: later about memory reconsolidation was the basis for the film.
• 45:59
  Speaker 8: So one of the most exciting thing that happened in
• 46:02
  Speaker 8: research from my perspective is a discovery that we had
• 46:06
  Speaker 8: just recently that traumatic memories and regular sad memories are
• 46:11
  Speaker 8: actually represented differently in the brain. We didn't know if
• 46:15
  Speaker 8: traumatic memories are just an exaggeration of a regular memory
• 46:19
  Speaker 8: or a different beast altogether. So we invited the people
• 46:23
  Speaker 8: who has PTSD and they told the clinician about a
• 46:27
  Speaker 8: traumatic memory and a regular sort of standard sad memory.
• 46:32
  Speaker 8: We created a recording of that and we played it
• 46:36
  Speaker 8: to the PTSD patients in the fMRI scanner. And we
• 46:40
  Speaker 8: found that actually traumatic memories differ substantially in how the
• 46:44
  Speaker 8: brain is representing them. The state of the brain while
• 46:48
  Speaker 8: they listen to the sad memories I was engaging a
• 46:51
  Speaker 8: brain region that is called the hippocampus. And this is
• 46:54
  Speaker 8: a brain region that is critical for memory. Without it,
• 46:57
  Speaker 8: you cannot form new memories. So it's involved in the
• 47:01
  Speaker 8: consolidation and retrieval of the memories. But in the traumatic memories,
• 47:07
  Speaker 8: the brain was in a different state. If you look
• 47:09
  Speaker 8: at the brain, it doesn't look like it's in a
• 47:11
  Speaker 8: state of memory. Where we found it was in a
• 47:14
  Speaker 8: different place. That place is called posterior cingulate cortex. It's
• 47:19
  Speaker 8: part of a network that is not for memory per se,
• 47:24
  Speaker 8: it's actually for internal experience. Whenever you have some sort
• 47:29
  Speaker 8: of introspection, you think about things, you're daydreaming, it is
• 47:34
  Speaker 8: more that you're in the present moment. When we undergo
• 47:37
  Speaker 8: a traumatic memory, it is likely that it's encoded in
• 47:41
  Speaker 8: a way that will influence how it is being retrieved later,
• 47:45
  Speaker 8: whether it's coherent, whether it's accessible, whether it's resistant to change.
• 47:52
  Speaker 8: All of these are likely to be determined during the
• 47:55
  Speaker 8: experience itself. It's very intense. Sometimes it's hard to verbalize it.
• 47:59
  Speaker 8: Sometimes you're dissociated from it. So all of these conditions
• 48:03
  Speaker 8: lend to the case that the memory wouldn't be the
• 48:06
  Speaker 8: same as a regular memory. and the fMRI scanner. It
• 48:10
  Speaker 8: could maybe provide a sort of a marker that you
• 48:14
  Speaker 8: look at the brain activation before treatment and then afterward
• 48:18
  Speaker 8: to see if that representation has changed. Or I can
• 48:23
  Speaker 8: envision treatment with specific drugs. Maybe this is what psychedelics do.
• 48:28
  Speaker 8: They kind of put the brain in a certain plasticity
• 48:31
  Speaker 8: level that could help making that experience in the moment
• 48:36
  Speaker 8: into a memory.
• 48:38
  Speaker 5: So what's so interesting about this, and maybe this particular
• 48:43
  Speaker 5: dialogue that she said in the interview didn't make it
• 48:45
  Speaker 5: into the film, but she says traumatic memories are actually
• 48:49
  Speaker 5: not even memories yet. We call them memories, but they're
• 48:53
  Speaker 5: not memories. And so the goal of therapy is to
• 48:56
  Speaker 5: actually turn them into memories. Because what she showed in
• 49:01
  Speaker 5: this study is that they live in the posterior cingulate cortex.
• 49:07
  Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah.
• 49:10
  Speaker 5: Anything to do with memory. It's where you have present
• 49:13
  Speaker 5: day experiences. And what was so validating about that is
• 49:18
  Speaker 5: when you talk to people who have PTSD, one of
• 49:22
  Speaker 5: the things that's most confusing is that the past interrupts
• 49:27
  Speaker 5: the present. And so people will say it feels like
• 49:30
  Speaker 5: it's happening right now.
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: In the DSM, those are called re-experiencing symptoms. That's what
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: they're called.
• 49:37
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 49:37
  Speaker 5: But what she showed is it's experiencing. It's never been
• 49:41
  Speaker 5: processed as a memory. So it's not a memory that's
• 49:44
  Speaker 5: being recalled. It's stuck for however many years. And so now,
• 49:50
  Speaker 5: you know, what she talked about with me is that
• 49:53
  Speaker 5: this is something that therapists have known intuitively for a
• 49:57
  Speaker 5: long time. And in a way, what the neuroscience is
• 49:59
  Speaker 5: doing is it's kind of corroborating what a lot of
• 50:03
  Speaker 5: therapists have already been putting into practice. That this idea
• 50:08
  Speaker 5: that traumatic memories need to be stored as regular sad memories.
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: Which is why talking about them helps because that's kind
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: of what you're doing.
• 50:19
  Speaker 7: Yes.
• 50:20
  Speaker 5: And then sometimes when it doesn't help, it's because the
• 50:24
  Speaker 5: person is having this physiological response, right? Every time they're
• 50:29
  Speaker 5: having the traumatic memory, they go into fight or flight mode.
• 50:33
  Speaker 5: So maybe their heart rate increases or they freeze. And
• 50:37
  Speaker 5: so one of the goals of different kinds of therapy,
• 50:41
  Speaker 5: and I know there are many different ways of approaching this,
• 50:45
  Speaker 5: is to allow the patient or the client to witness
• 50:51
  Speaker 5: the memory without having that physiological response. And it's only
• 50:57
  Speaker 5: in them being able to witness it without the response
• 51:00
  Speaker 5: that the memory can get stored as a regular memory.
• 51:04
  Speaker 5: And in the film, they postulate, different therapists and neuroscientists suggest, well,
• 51:10
  Speaker 5: maybe this is what psychedelics can do in that I
• 51:14
  Speaker 5: know some therapists I've spoken to say it's the first
• 51:17
  Speaker 5: time for many people when they, let's say, have MDMA-assisted psychotherapy,
• 51:22
  Speaker 5: that they're able to witness the memory without the pain
• 51:26
  Speaker 5: and the fear and the panic associated with that memory.
• 51:30
  Speaker 5: But Perhaps you as therapists can speak to, I know
• 51:34
  Speaker 5: there are many different approaches for trying to have the
• 51:38
  Speaker 5: experience of the memory without the traumatic physiological response, which
• 51:43
  Speaker 5: is what's keeping that memory stuck.
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: Yes, that's quite exactly how I explain EMDR, eye movement
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: desensitization and reprocessing. And one of the tools that they've
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: created or realized is that if we introduce bilateral stimulus,
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: as somebody is revisiting these reawakened physical states, it activates
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: that self-soothing part of the brain, just as you said,
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: so that people can actually talk about, recall the images
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: of what was a traumatic memory and suppress the hyperarousal
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: so that the brain can learn. oh, I can think
• 52:26
  Speaker 3: about that car crash and feel relaxed. And once the
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: brain figures out that's an option, often it jumps at
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: it because it's very costly to be in a state
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: of distress without any actual clear and present danger. So
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: that is one of the tools that I love using
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: with clients if they're amenable to that. And I agree
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: with you. And how I often describe it is we
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: want to take that traumatic memory and return it to
• 52:54
  Speaker 3: the library, much like a book that you can choose
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: to take out or leave in the stacks.
• 52:59
  Speaker 7: Yes.
• 53:00
  Speaker 5: And Dr. Paul Brody says it perfectly in the film,
• 53:03
  Speaker 5: exactly what you said. The brain hasn't laid down that
• 53:07
  Speaker 5: experience yet as being in the past. So a sad memory,
• 53:12
  Speaker 5: you know it's in the past, it's over. But tools
• 53:17
  Speaker 5: like EMDR are incredible. I wish we had had more
• 53:20
  Speaker 5: time in the film to explore all of these different modalities,
• 53:23
  Speaker 5: but I know that that's a very, very effective one
• 53:27
  Speaker 5: for teaching the brain exactly, as you said, that it's
• 53:30
  Speaker 5: happened already, you can put it away. It's not a
• 53:34
  Speaker 5: threat anymore.
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: In Jungian work, we often are interested in archetypes and mythology.
• 53:41
  Speaker 3: And so what I'd like to do is turn our
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: attention for just a moment to.
• 53:46
  Speaker 6: The goddess of memory, Mnemosyne.
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: Who became, she was a titan, so she was there
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: before the Olympians, and she and Zeus lay together, and
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: the two of them birthed all of the muses. So
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: one interesting piece of that is that all of the arts,
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: all of the arts that we enjoy, that we celebrate,
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: are products of memory. So in the Orphic Rites, which
• 54:18
  Speaker 3: was a particular cult in the ancient world that was
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: very powerful, that the initiate was instructed, do not drink
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: from lethe. Instead, drink from the pool of mnemosyne. And
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: what that meant is that when the soul sojourns down
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: into the unconscious, we could drink from the waters of forgetfulness,
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: but if we can remember to drink from the waters
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: of minosony, that we will remember the eternal truths that
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: are encoded in our memories. And that is another way
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: of saying what Jung was talking about, is that if
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: we can find the archetypal components of our memory, that
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: we can then re-imagine contexts and possibilities which were not
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: visible in the lived experience, but are encoded somewhere inside
• 55:21
  Speaker 3: of our soul. So, for instance, if we had a
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: very limited mother or a very dangerous mother, if we
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: can encounter the archetype of the mother, we can come
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: into experience of dimensions of the mother that we did
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: not personally experience but enhances the possibilities of those impulses
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: inside of us and many examples of that. And I
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: think that your film and your work with art and
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: what the neuroscientists are saying corroborates that ancient intuition that
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: if we can find the thread that is beyond the memory,
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: we can make it more than the lived experience and
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: that liberates us. And that is a kind of art,
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: much like one of the muses coming in and writing
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: the play.
• 56:13
  Speaker 4: Vivian, you did that in the film. You were working
• 56:18
  Speaker 4: with all these people that you interviewed in neuroscience and
• 56:23
  Speaker 4: other areas. And of course, you did something like 30,000
• 56:31
  Speaker 4: images and paintings for the animation, which is just a
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: staggering number. What was it like for you to do
• 56:40
  Speaker 4: just exactly what Joseph is talking about of just going
• 56:44
  Speaker 4: right back in there, going into it and re-experiencing or
• 56:51
  Speaker 4: experiencing perhaps for the first time?
• 56:54
  Speaker 5: That's a good question. So one of the things I
• 56:58
  Speaker 5: love about film and why I decided to branch out
• 57:02
  Speaker 5: from sculpture and painting and go into film is that film...
• 57:09
  Speaker 5: is the most similar thing we have to dreaming. Because
• 57:15
  Speaker 5: in dreams, we suspend disbelief, right? It's only in dreams.
• 57:20
  Speaker 5: And Walter Murch, this legendary editor, he edited Apocalypse Now,
• 57:25
  Speaker 5: has a wonderful book about editing that speaks to this.
• 57:30
  Speaker 5: In dreams, we accept the jump cut. So in dreams,
• 57:34
  Speaker 5: I can be here, and then a second later, I
• 57:36
  Speaker 5: can be in another part of the world. And in films,
• 57:40
  Speaker 5: we accept that as well. And it's only in those
• 57:43
  Speaker 5: two worlds that we actually, as an audience and as
• 57:49
  Speaker 5: a viewer of our own dreams, will accept that. So
• 57:52
  Speaker 5: I knew that I had to go into film because
• 57:57
  Speaker 5: it was really the only medium that could explore this
• 58:02
  Speaker 5: kind of thing, the movement of memory, the strange, surreal
• 58:07
  Speaker 5: nature of a lot of dream imagery. And what it
• 58:11
  Speaker 5: was like for me was a constant, it was hard
• 58:16
  Speaker 5: actually to tap into the unconscious. It would take me
• 58:22
  Speaker 5: quite a bit of work because I think it's much
• 58:24
  Speaker 5: more comfortable in a way and safer to stay in
• 58:28
  Speaker 5: the conscious mind. And of course, there's a part of
• 58:30
  Speaker 5: me that has to be reading the transcripts of the
• 58:33
  Speaker 5: interviews and organizing and creating a structure. So that has
• 58:37
  Speaker 5: to be in the conscious. But when I would try
• 58:40
  Speaker 5: and tap into some kind of greater wisdom that I
• 58:45
  Speaker 5: didn't have access to in my conscious mind was in
• 58:48
  Speaker 5: the act of painting itself. And you can paint in
• 58:52
  Speaker 5: your conscious mind. So, and it's a little bit boring.
• 58:56
  Speaker 5: So what would that look like? It would be sort
• 58:58
  Speaker 5: of me having shot the film. And so then I
• 59:01
  Speaker 5: print out an image of one of the scenes and
• 59:04
  Speaker 5: I just start painting the image. So let's say it's
• 59:07
  Speaker 5: the girl at the door going to meet the therapist.
• 59:09
  Speaker 5: So I'm looking at the picture and I'm painting it
• 59:12
  Speaker 5: and I'm rendering it and it's keeping to the same
• 59:15
  Speaker 5: kind of colors. I'm just trying to build the scene.
• 59:18
  Speaker 5: And then at a certain point, I started to really
• 59:20
  Speaker 5: listen to how I felt and I would start to
• 59:24
  Speaker 5: get sleepy.
• 59:25
  Speaker 6: And I.
• 59:28
  Speaker 5: Or I would start to get kind of depressed. Like
• 59:30
  Speaker 5: I would get this heavy feeling like, I don't want
• 59:32
  Speaker 5: to do this anymore. And then I could have done
• 59:36
  Speaker 5: what we just said we shouldn't do. Like, why am
• 59:38
  Speaker 5: I depressed? And start to search for meaning. And instead
• 59:42
  Speaker 5: of doing that, what I would say is change what
• 59:45
  Speaker 5: you're doing.
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 59:47
  Speaker 5: And so instead of painting literally, I would say, allow
• 59:53
  Speaker 5: things to come up. So what I would do is the,
• 59:57
  Speaker 5: So the film is made out of 30,000 stills, not 30,000 paintings, okay?
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 5: So that means that I'm walking, the canvas is on
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 5: the wall, I'm walking up to the canvas, I'm painting
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 5: one or two brushstrokes, then I'm walking maybe seven feet
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 5: back to my camera, taking a picture and walking back.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 5: And the way I decided to approach this was actually
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 5: listening to this wonderful artist, William Kentridge, who does these
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 5: drawings in a similar way. And I remember him in
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 5: an interview discussing the fact that in between that walk
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 5: from the camera to making the next stroke, he'd have
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 5: no plan. And I said, okay, I'm going to have
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 5: no plan. And it was sort of, you're like, you're walking,
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 5: you're like, you make a line. And it's very hard
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 5: not to plan because I'd make a line and my
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 5: brain would say, it's a balloon. It's like, you want
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 5: to name it. And I'm like, no, no, just see
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 5: what the next line does. And then gradually, That's where
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 5: things became more interesting. And I will tell you that
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 5: when people watch the film, people tell me those are
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 5: their favorite parts because it's just deeper. It's richer than anything,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 5: just than just rendering something.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 6: Yes.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 5: But it was very hard to get into that state
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 5: of mind. It really requires sort of letting go of,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 5: I guess you would call it ego, right? You know,
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 5: trying to control what am I going to make? What
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 5: is it going to look like? What am I going
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 5: to do?
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 6: You have to dim the ego.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly. And so I think that's how I engaged
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 5: with it. And I wouldn't say it was sporadic. It's
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 5: almost like a spice. Like I tap into it and
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 5: then I jump out of it. And I tap into
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 5: it and I jump out of it. There would be
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 5: periods of maybe two or three weeks when I'd go
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 5: to my studio and I sort of train my brain.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 5: So let's say that I could flip a switch. So
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 5: I'd be in my conscious mind. I get to the studio,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 5: set up. I put on my headphones. I start listening
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 5: to something and my brain was cued to just, okay,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 5: that means we go into this frame of mind. And
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 5: so there were amazing, beautiful periods where I could go
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 5: into that frequently and often.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 5: I would say now I'm really in a period where
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 5: I'm struggling to access that. So it's kind of like
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 5: not that once you do it once and you get
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 5: into a groove, you have automatic access. I find each
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 5: time I have a new project, it's the same struggle
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 5: to try and access it. It's like a whole new
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 5: thing each time. But I think that that speaks to
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 5: what you're talking about. And I think that those are
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 5: the pieces that found me most, I guess, most people
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 5: find most relatable. Like it becomes sort of this common,
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 5: universal themes that come out of that.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 4: Because we know that place. You know, earlier we said
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 4: it's film and dreams where we experience, you know, this
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 4: weird flow of you're sitting in a kitchen somewhere and
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 4: then all of a sudden a horse appears. Or there's
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 4: that jump cut from sitting in one location and being
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 4: on the opposite side of the world. There is something
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 4: in us recognizes it, recognizes it. It's familiar to us.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 4: We know about that. And what the film does with
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 4: the images is it's so beautifully and recognizably demonstrates and
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 4: depicts the going back and forth, dipping into the unconscious
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 4: and coming back up and rendering it with a paintbrush,
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 4: that there's a dialogue and a companioning between those two
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 4: parts of ourselves, which is why we always do a
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 4: dream at the end of every podcast, that you can
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 4: have this, you can find it in yourself, and it
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 4: is creative and enriching and surprising and And there's a
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 4: dark side to it, but it is the rest of
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 4: who we are.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 5: Yeah, beautifully put, it is the rest of who we are.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: I also think that the tone of the film captures
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 3: your process. I find myself thinking that, oh, this is
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: a meditation.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 7: It's a 26-minute meditation, and Vivian is allowing us to
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 7: see this meditative process in her, your tone of voice,
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 7: the gentleness of the flow from idea to idea.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it really wraps you in a kind of mood,
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 2: the film. So I hope that our viewers get to
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: see your film and we will include information in the
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: show notes about where and how to do that. And
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: I just want to say I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: And it's such an important conversation. I think we've put
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 4: out something today through your work, Vivian, which is accessible
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 4: to everybody that will help people have more access to themselves.
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 5: I love this conversation. I love the opportunity to hear
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 5: a little bit more about the Jungian lens. And actually
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 5: realize how much of that resonates with me, whether I
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 5: was aware of it or not.
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: Because it's awesome.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 7: Yes. Yeah.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 5: And so I love this opportunity to hear from you
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 5: and your thoughts and just shed more light, you know,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 5: on what is a process that I can speak about,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 5: but I'm still kind of unknown to me, even though
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 5: I did it.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 4: Yes, tis ever thus.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: And I think in these times where despair is so seductive,
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: your movie is a testament to hope.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 6: And that is well-timed.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 5: Thank you so much.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 4: Thank you, Vivian.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: And so in keeping with our theme of the power
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: of memory, let's jump into a dream. Today's dreamer is
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 3: a 28-year-old female who works as a piano teacher. And
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: she has titled her dream, A Wave of Suicides. In
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: the beginning of the dream, my task is to make
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: a woman kill herself by directing her steps, almost as
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 3: in a video game. I make her jump off a
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: high cliff, A wave of suicides follows everywhere I go.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: The people I encounter commit suicide in the same manner.
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 3: It's always slow and inevitable. I know exactly when it's
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: going to happen and I can't escape witnessing it. The
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: cliff they all jump off seems to be underground because
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 3: it's a dark, closed space. At some point I enter
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 3: a family house to pick up my little sister and
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: we share a beautiful moment of love and joy. However,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: I know that the family that was babysitting her is
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 3: now going to kill themselves and there's nothing I can
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 3: do to stop them. When the cycle ends, it starts
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: again the same way. I wake up in the middle
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: of it. For context, she writes, I'm realizing that I'm
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: not fulfilled with the career I ended up with, but
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: I still lack the drive, clarity, and courage to make
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 3: steps towards changing it. Sometimes I feel like my potential
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: was wasted and it's almost impossible to change the situation
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: now because of all the negative thinking and passivity deep
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: inside me that stems from my upbringing. I am distant
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 3: from my family, but often feel worried and sad about them.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 3: She says the feelings in the dream were horror, feeling trapped, scared,
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 3: and hopeless. And she offers these associations. The sister from
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: the dream is now 17 years old and identifying as
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 3: a male, but in my dreams often appears as a
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 3: young child with whom I had a special and loving relationship.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 2: The first thing that I notice about this dream is
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: the dreamer's age. She's 28, which in astrology is associated
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 2: with the Saturn return. Mm-hmm. And if you don't like
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 2: to think astrologically, you can think about it as what
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 2: I like to think of as the age 30 transition.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 2: And it is a point, I think, it certainly was
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: for me, as I've talked about numerous times on the podcast,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: it was an important, 28 was a really important age.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: But I see this in people I work with, they
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: might be 28, maybe they're 29, 30, it's around there
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: where there's often a crisis. And I think the crisis
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: comes because maybe it's the number 30. I'm not sure.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: Maybe it's, maybe it's something to do with the stars,
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 2: but we sort of realize that we're at this point
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 2: in life where we should be living our lives and
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 2: And whatever, in whatever way we're not doing that, there
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: can be deep unhappiness. Maybe we're not in a relationship
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 2: or we don't have the career that we want or,
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: but it's sort of, it's sort of the beginning intimation
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 2: of the end of endless possibility that we should, you know,
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: we should, we should be on our way. I mean,
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 2: I think that's one way to think about it. I'm
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 2: sure there's more profound ways to imagine it as well.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 2: But I, I think that, um, It's actually a gift
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: to have a crisis around this time as this dreamer
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: seems to be doing because it often is what gives
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: you a little kick in the butt to make any
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: changes that need to be made. So sometimes when I'm
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 2: working with someone who's around this age and who's really
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: suffering and struggling, I'll say, I've seen what it looks
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: like when you don't go through this and you come
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: into my office and you're 55 and it's not pretty.
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 2: So you should be grateful. that you're kind of having
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: this experience. So I suspect that's what this young person's
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: going through. I think it's interesting that she says that
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 2: she feels like her talent's wasted and there's nothing that
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: can do about it. I mean, and she talks about,
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 2: so I think the suicides in the dream are kind
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 2: of two things. She says, there's nothing I can do
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: because of all the negativity and passivity and the negative
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 2: thinking deep down, which is almost like that scene where
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: they're kind of underground and they're jumping off a cliff
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: in a dark space, right? So in some sense, the
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 2: suicides are an image of her tendency to think negatively
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 2: and her passivity and to just go along and kind
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: of be self-destructive. But I also think more prospectively that
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: the suicides could be a metaphor, a symbol, for the
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: parts of her that need to die so that she
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 2: can begin to live the life that she was meant
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: to live, whatever that is.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 3: I think along those lines, I found myself thinking of
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 3: a quote from the Gospel of Thomas. If you bring
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 3: forth that which is within you, what you bring forth
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 3: will save you. If you do not bring forth what
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: is within you, what you do not bring forth will
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 3: destroy you. So we could take this as a kind
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 3: of fable. almost about the danger of not bringing forth
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 3: what is in you. And it turns into this dark,
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 3: self-destructive force that not only prompts her in the dream
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 3: world to encourage injury to other people, but the energy
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 3: rolling off of her has a thanatos quality, who's the
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: god of death, this kind of dying and death-oriented attitude.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: And of course, the dream maker will often exaggerate a
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 3: trait to make sure that we don't miss it. So,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: I mean, she is this dangerously negative creature in the
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 3: dream just to make sure that she doesn't skip over it.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking a couple of things. If I could talk
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 4: with this dreamer, I'd be like, wow, you're 28 years old.
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 4: And the comments of that She's not fulfilled with the career,
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 4: but she lacks drive and clarity and courage to make changes. Wow.
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 4: You know, I would think that might be more, I
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 4: would accept it more if it were somebody who was
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 4: 88 instead of 28 with so much of life ahead.
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 4: And that that's a conscious position of a kind of hopelessness.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 4: If I go to the dream, I think about a
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 4: couple of things. And she says, my task at the
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 4: beginning of the dream is to make a woman kill herself.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 4: So our dream ego is, in fact, quite active here.
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point.
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 4: She is the agent behind getting someone to kill herself.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 4: And that leads to a wave of suicides. Everywhere I go,
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 4: people I encounter commit suicide in the same manner. It's
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 4: slow and inevitable. But in fact, our dream ego has
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 4: been the causal agent of that, as if she sort
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 4: of got a ball rolling. And after getting the first
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 4: person to commit suicide, things just sort of rolled on
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 4: out from there. Then we have in the middle of
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 4: this dream, as almost sort of a casual aside, I
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 4: enter a family house to pick up my little sister
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 4: and we share a beautiful moment of love and joy.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 4: But something else comes in to kill that off. And
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 4: our dream ego says, I know the family that was
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 4: babysitting her is now going to kill themselves and there's
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 4: nothing I could do to stop them. So there is
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 4: something that I would be curious about in our dreamer
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 4: and in this dream about how does this happen? That
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 4: at the beginning, the dream ego is the causal agent
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 4: of suicides. And when, in the midst of this wave
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 4: of suicides, a wonderful, loving moment of reunion happens, something
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 4: else comes right in to quash that. So I think
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 4: it's in the dream and in the dreamer's associations of
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 4: You know, like, what is going on here? What is
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 4: this dynamic in the dream? And it would appear from
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 4: her comments, and in your life.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 2: Right, where your tendency to maybe see things negatively kind
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: of destroys potential.
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 4: Where is the life-destroying part of you?
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: But I want to say to counterbalance that, there is
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 2: this image of this joy and beauty with the sister.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 8: Yes.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 2: And of course, that would be, you know, an image
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: maybe of, I mean, it takes us back to the
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 2: past because her sister is younger. I'd be curious about
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 2: who the sister was at that time, who she was
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: at that time, at that age. I'm curious about the
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: sister as a potential shadow figure that carries a lot
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: of positive qualities. But I also want to point out
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 2: that this dreamer wrote her dream down and sent it
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: to the podcast. So she may find herself in a
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 2: bit of a tendency to be negative and passive.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 4: Look what happened.
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 2: She's tuning in and she's taking action.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 3: The other thing that's important is at the end, she
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 3: talks to her little sister, but it's the caregivers of
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 3: the sister that are going to suicide, not the sister.
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 3: Her theory in the middle of the dream that wherever
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 3: I go, my mere presence causes this death-dealing despair. But
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 3: towards the end, it's as if the sister is immune
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 3: to the curse, so to speak.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 4: And I also want to just touch on the dreamer
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 4: as a piano teacher. So what I'm wondering about is,
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 4: What is it like when you just play the piano
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 4: for your own enjoyment? Is there a part of you
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 4: that loves the music and loves music making versus teaching music?
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 4: And is that a doorway that you can access to
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 4: more active and participatory and maybe even some transcendent kinds
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 4: of lived experiences?
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 3: I want to cycle back to a bit that I
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 3: brought up, but is present in a couple of ways
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 3: in the dream, which is a tension that Freud brought up,
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 3: particularly in his later work, between eros and thanatos. Thanatos
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 3: being the anti-life libido, eros being the pro-life libido. And
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 3: those two things are explicitly present in this dream.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 3: That we have all of this death-dealing, And then we
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 3: have love and joy, which is an exact description of Eros.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 3: So she is in this tension between creating and destroying,
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 3: between life and death in her inner world. And both
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 3: characters are present. She is identifying, it seems, at the
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 3: beginning of the dream with Thanatos, which also sometimes Jung
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 3: would call is a negative inflation.
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 6: It's as if.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 3: I have this supernatural power, and death happens in.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 6: My trail wherever I go.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 3: And it may be an exaggeration, but also she may
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 3: think of herself as more death-dealing than perhaps is warranted,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 3: but that would have to be explored. In the beginning
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 3: of the dream, she has a task to misdirect a
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 3: woman to injure herself. This is also about shadow. that
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: people will unconsciously encourage people around them to do negative things,
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 3: dangerous things sometimes, and not realize that they are in
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 3: service to something quite dark inside themselves. I think this
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 3: happens all the time in corporate America. You have someone
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 3: you want to get rid of, and so you give
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 3: them advice that will end their career. And then they
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 3: go and do it, and you step back as if
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 3: you're innocent. These kinds of machinations, these Machiavellian machinations, are
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 3: things that happen. They're in the shadow of humanity, sometimes
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: not in the shadow, and it's right out front. But
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 3: these are forces, destructive forces that are real. And the
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: dream is also providing these metaphorical moments for her to
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 3: have language around that impulse in herself so that she
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: can also confront those impulses when they rise up in her.
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, I'm seeing the kind of death dealing impulses
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 2: as more kind of an internal phenomenon directed at herself.
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 2: But Joseph, I take your point and I want to
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 2: kind of build on it a little bit. She makes
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 2: the point that it's kind of like a video game.
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 2: And it seems like she instructs, she makes this woman
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 2: kill herself. It's kind of casual. It's like a game.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 2: it's like a video game. And I, and I would,
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 2: would want the dreamer to think about where am I
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 2: casually killing off parts of myself, maybe without thinking about it,
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 2: just the way that we might kill a lot of
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 2: time playing a video game. Uh, and, and, and, you know,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 2: which I think really builds on your point, Joseph is
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 2: where is this impulse in me and how am I
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 2: letting it How am I enacting it without bringing a
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: lot of consciousness to it?
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 3: And I have to say that people that are teachers
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 3: in the arts, sometimes they have to give some bad news,
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 3: which can be dream killing, but it could be the
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 3: right information. And sometimes out of envy or some other
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 3: darker impulse that they can throttle the talent of another person.
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 3: So I'm imagining having done a lot of work in, uh,
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 3: music programs when I was an Alexander Technique teacher. It's
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: a very delicate thing for a music teacher to watch
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: a student and to manage their own creative enthusiasm or
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 3: creative audacity. It only takes a word or two to
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 3: injure someone's confidence around their creativity or to just steer
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 3: them totally away from the entire venture. There was a
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 3: style of working with artists my BFA was enacting And
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 3: there was kind of a cruel ruthlessness that came out
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 3: of HB Studios, you know, in the 50s and 60s.
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 3: That was a kind of death-dealing feedback process that was
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 3: so cruel and so ferocious. It was really, it was startling.
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 3: You know, and I went into the program at 18,
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 3: so I was not prepared for that. But that is
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 3: a shadow aspect of teaching in the arts.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 7: The other.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 3: Reality is about being a teacher in the arts is,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 3: you know, somebody who thinks they're going to make a
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 3: career out of it. Is it a mercy to tell
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 3: someone you have no talent? Like you're setting yourself up
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 3: for a life of frustration and misery by pursuing something
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 3: that you don't seem to evidence skill in. And might
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 3: this be better as a hobby? And then you can
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: go and work with your strengths to make a living.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 3: That is a really awful thing to tell someone. And yet,
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 3: it can be a mercy if it's accurate and not
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 3: driven by something like envy. It's life and death in
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 3: the arts, dancing back and forth with each other all
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 3: the time, and despair regarding one's art is not uncommon
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 3: because artists depend upon the approval of the collective, and
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 3: yet often their creation stands against the collective. What do
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 3: we do with that tension?
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 4: And there's such a difference between, you know, if I
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 4: am imagining this into the dreamer of, you know, perhaps
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 4: there was a real hope of dedicating herself to the
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 4: piano and practicing. And, you know, it starts somewhere. And
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 4: then coming to a place where, well, you know, I'm
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 4: not going to be playing a Carnegie Hall to pull
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 4: out an old trope. But you still have access to
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 4: the music. Wasn't it a joy once? Wasn't it special?
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 4: And that you have that as you go on to
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 4: some other career, some other pursuit. I once worked for
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 4: a wonderful person who had been a highly competitive tennis player.
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 4: but then did not make it into the professional circuit
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 4: and embarked on another career altogether that was certainly very
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 4: rewarding for this person. And she still had tennis. And
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 4: she went off to play tennis and she practiced and
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 4: she worked with a coach and she had doubles partners
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 4: and all kinds of things. It was a joy for
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 4: her for a lifetime. into her late 50s, and I'm
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 4: sure beyond, but that's when I knew her. So I
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 4: think I'm just wanting to kind of pull apart into
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 4: a couple of different categories. The difference between your love
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 4: for piano and music, you know, versus whether it affords
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 4: you a career.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 2: Well, and something might have to die. Like that's the
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 2: medicine in the suicide image.
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 6: Absolutely. Absolutely. Life and death are all at play here.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 3: The other thing I think the dream is showing, which
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 3: I think is a cautionary truth that Jung talked a
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 3: lot about, which is that what's happening inside of us
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 3: secretly emanates from us, and it influences people around us,
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 3: it influences perhaps even events and circumstances. So When people
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 3: are in any kind of a career and they really
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 3: don't want to be there, a kind of bitterness can
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 3: build up inside of them. A kind of resentment builds
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 3: up inside of them. And it is felt by other people,
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 3: whether or not they can find the exact language for it.
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: And so this feeling that there is a darkness in
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 3: her that is then influencing other people and maybe even
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 3: convincing her music students that they should abandon. their interest
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 3: in music because of her own bitterness. It's a very
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 3: salty medicine to have to take in, but there is
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 3: something universal about the way that our tensions influence other people.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 3: And I think the dream maker is saying that your
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 3: unhappiness with your career is not only influencing you.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 6: Now, the good news and.
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 3: Where this might be medicinal is that she might not
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 3: be able to mobilize herself to do something different on
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 3: her own behalf. But if she were to consider the
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 3: negative effect she might be having on other people for
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 3: not doing what she loves, that might move her along
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 3: because she is capable of loving other people. So it
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 3: could be a gift to the people around you to
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 3: do what you love.
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 2: And we want to wish the streamer all the best
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 2: and love. Thank you for sending us your dream. Thanks
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 2: for listening to submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 2: or join our mailing list. Visit our website, this union life.com.
• 1:27:04
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• 1:27:07
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