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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF STRIFE: What Lies Beneath Our Conflicts? · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:13
  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.
• 0:22
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:27
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod. Hello. Today,
• 0:39
  Speaker 4: I say with a big smile on my face, we
• 0:42
  Speaker 4: are going to talk about conflict, a.k.a. fighting. How to
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: fight fear, and is it outside? Is it inside? What
• 0:53
  Speaker 4: exactly are we talking about, and how do we deal
• 0:58
  Speaker 4: with it?
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: You know, sometimes when we broach a topic, what I'll
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: do is I'll go to my Kindle version of the
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Collected Works and just text search the word. And conflict
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: is a word that appears many, many, many, many times
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: in the Collected Works. So we want to talk about
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: outer conflict, which is pretty self-explanatory. We all have conflicts
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: all the time. We have conflicts in our marriages. We
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: have conflicts with our business partners. We have conflicts with
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: our friends. We, of course, never have conflicts with our
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: podcast partners. That just doesn't happen. Of course. Pure peace.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: But we're also interested today in looking at inner conflict.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: And this is usually Jung being such an introvert and
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: his psychology being such an introverted psychology. Most of the
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: time when he's talking about conflict, he's talking about an
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: inner conflict. So before we go sallying forth, Let's just
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: define for a second, what do we mean by an
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: inner conflict?
• 1:59
  Speaker 4: I think that is one of the hardest things we
• 2:03
  Speaker 4: ever have to do. We are hardwired for relationship with others.
• 2:12
  Speaker 4: We start out that way. We grow inside an other
• 2:15
  Speaker 4: person's body. Babies and toddlers need the other person to
• 2:22
  Speaker 4: hold them and feed them and comfort them. So we
• 2:26
  Speaker 4: go out there again and again and again because that's
• 2:30
  Speaker 4: where my conflict is. It's with so-and-so. Let's say it's
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: a boss. And it's true that the boss does this
• 2:38
  Speaker 4: and that and the other thing, and you have all
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: kinds of incidents and evidence, lots and lots of data
• 2:43
  Speaker 4: about what he said, how he looked, how he stomped
• 2:46
  Speaker 4: into your office, and it's all true. And now it's
• 2:50
  Speaker 4: going to be very hard to bring that inside. What
• 2:54
  Speaker 4: does that set off in me? What is it that
• 2:59
  Speaker 4: drives me so crazy? What's getting sparked? And what can
• 3:05
  Speaker 4: I do about engaging this with my boss? And how
• 3:10
  Speaker 4: do I engage it in myself when it seems so
• 3:13
  Speaker 4: obvious That it's about him or her. So you have
• 3:17
  Speaker 4: a tough question of what is inner conflict?
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: Well, I think when we're talking about inner conflict, in
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: a sense, we're talking about ambivalence, right? That maybe part
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: of you wants to stop smoking, for example. But another
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: part of you really doesn't. And I think what can
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: be tricky is that we're not aware that we're at
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: war with ourselves. And so then we kind of project
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: it out. And I'll give you an example. that I
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: think I've probably used before on the podcast. So it's
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: a little bit tried and true, but it's.
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: A good one.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: So when my youngest child was about a year old,
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: it was kind of time to start thinking about trying
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: for a third baby if we were going to do that,
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: because I was not a spring chicken. And so I
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: wanted a third baby. So I said to my husband,
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: I said, you know, come on, let's get going here.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: He's like, I don't know. I don't really know that
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: I want another one. I was like, oh, come on.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: You know, we talked about this and, you know, we
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: want another baby, right? I mean, don't you want another baby?
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: And he's like, I don't know. So we would have
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: it out and I was always on one side of
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: the argument and he was always on the other. And
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: then one day he said, you know, maybe I do
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: want a third baby. And all of a sudden I
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: was like, oh, shit.
• 4:33
  Speaker 4: Do I want a third baby?
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: And it was as long as he was holding one
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  Speaker 2: pole that I didn't have to know about my inner conflict,
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: that I both wanted a third child and didn't want
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: a third child. I didn't have to countenance my inner
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: conflict about that. I didn't have to think about it.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: I didn't have to wrestle with, I know part of
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: me really, really wants this, and another part of me
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: is not so sure at all. Ambivalence is uncomfortable. And
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: so whenever we can project out our inner conflict on
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: someone else and fight the person out there about it,
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: we are relieved of the discomfort of our own ambivalence.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: So when my husband was like, no, no third baby,
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: I was like, I just could revel in the part
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: of me that wanted it. But as soon as he said, well,
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: maybe we should put this on the table, I had
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: to suddenly take back my ambivalence. And I had to
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: sit with him and I had to think, do I
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: really want this? So that's part of how I think
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: about it. I mean, I think inner conflict can mean
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: lots of things. And Jung, again, spoke a lot about
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: inner conflict. He said it was inevitable and that we're
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: always in a state of inner conflict, that that is
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: the kind of normative position of the psyche. And so
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: it's something to become acquainted with.
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: I think it goes to Jung's idea of the multiplicity,
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: that we live in a multiplicity outside, great complex systems
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: that we're embedded in, and we live in a multiplicity
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: inside of ourselves, a great complexity that we reside in,
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: and contending for dominance, really, which drives, which ideas, which
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: even creative impulse will take the lead and and consequently
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: subdue or sublimate other agendas is a vying process that
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: we're in all the time. And sometimes we do that
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: very skillfully and elegantly, and many times less so.
• 6:46
  Speaker 4: So I want to go back to an example that's
• 6:50
  Speaker 4: less clear-cut, an inner conflict. At least you know it's yours. Yes.
• 6:57
  Speaker 4: about should I quit smoking or not. I really know
• 7:00
  Speaker 4: I should, and yet it's I don't, I do, and
• 7:03
  Speaker 4: I don't. The conflict, let's say, with a boss, where
• 7:08
  Speaker 4: it seems so clearly out there, it's like you wanting
• 7:12
  Speaker 4: a third baby. As long as your husband was holding
• 7:17
  Speaker 4: the other pole, then it's out there. You might say,
• 7:21
  Speaker 4: why does this get under my skin so much? You know,
• 7:25
  Speaker 4: maybe the whole department knows that he's temperamental or demanding
• 7:31
  Speaker 4: or any one of a hundred million things. But what
• 7:36
  Speaker 4: is it in me that gets this under my skin?
• 7:40
  Speaker 4: it doesn't seem to affect other people quite as much
• 7:44
  Speaker 4: as it affects me. So what is lighting up inside
• 7:49
  Speaker 4: that is my own conflict, my own ambivalence, my own
• 7:56
  Speaker 4: upset with somebody who's clearly just being himself and is
• 8:01
  Speaker 4: who he is? But it's all going in the direction
• 8:06
  Speaker 4: of we have to bring it inside ourselves. and deal
• 8:11
  Speaker 4: with our multiplicity, deal with our own inner polarities, deal
• 8:15
  Speaker 4: with our own inner ambivalence. And sometimes that means, first
• 8:20
  Speaker 4: of all, we have to identify what it is that's
• 8:23
  Speaker 4: going on inside us. What is it about this that's
• 8:28
  Speaker 4: getting me?
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: So one of the ways that we might lean into
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: that question is perhaps to examine it with a slightly
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: different descriptive word that I find a little bit more useful.
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: which is strife. Conflict and strife are kind of synonyms,
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: but the reason I like the word strife is that, yes,
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: it means discord and quarreling and fighting, but the root
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: of the word is strive. And so when I think
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: about when I'm in conflict or strife, that I am
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: striving for something.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it has a perspective.
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's great. Yes, it has a telos to it.
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  Speaker 3: And in the striving, the other strivings inside of me,
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: the great striving horde, are competing for resources. The part
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: of me that likes smoking, which might be the part
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: of me that's striving for comfort, and somehow smoking is comforting. Well,
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: that's a striving. But there's another part of me that's
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: striving to be healthier and to protect myself from future illness.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: And so these two strivings are looking at each other,
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  Speaker 3: trying to figure out which striving is going to take
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: the lead.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: That is lovely.
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  Speaker 4: And that's Jung saying it's the old story of the
• 9:52
  Speaker 4: hammer and the anvil, of holding the tension, holding the polarities,
• 9:57
  Speaker 4: of hammering it out. between you and you or me
• 10:02
  Speaker 4: and me, of which striving is going to take precedence,
• 10:08
  Speaker 4: the immediate gratification of smoking or future health benefits, longevity,
• 10:16
  Speaker 4: et cetera. Which one?
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: And by asking what is the striving, we also get
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: a chance to drop a little bit below the outer
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: seeming of it. So for instance, not to put you
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: on the spot, Lisa, but in the idea of the
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: third child, to also ask what is the striving? Is
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: the striving to hold on to how beautiful it was
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: to be pregnant, which I remember you telling me years ago,
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: just how much you loved the experience of being pregnant.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: and what that did to your psyche. I do. I
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: remember you saying that. I think that in retrospect, it
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: may seem less so. Oh, goodness, I do. Or the
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: other fantasies kind of around that. So in the conflict,
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: to ask, let's say in mediation, for instance, this is
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: a very common piece. You know, I... I want the
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: living room couches. No, I want the living room couches
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: and the divorce. But is it really about the couches?
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: Is it really about who is going to get the dog?
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: Are we striving to punish the other person? Are we
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: striving for power? Are we striving for any number of
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: different things? And without the striving being revealed, we can
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: spend so much time in the outer seeming of things.
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: And I know, Deb, you've said many times that the
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: thing we're fighting about is not the thing. There's another thing.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: And this is where it is such a psychoanalytic consideration
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: because we waste so much energy fighting around these proxy issues.
• 12:04
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: And it's exhausting. It's exhausting.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: Can I come in with a quote that you referenced
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: a minute ago? Because it's such a good one and
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: you know I love my quotes. So this is Jung.
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  Speaker 2: But since the unconscious factors act as determinants no less
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: than the factors that regulate the life of society and
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: are no less collective, I might just as well learn
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: to distinguish between what I want and what the unconscious
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: thrusts upon me as to see what my office demands
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: of me and what I myself desire. At first, the
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: only thing that is at all clear is the incompatibility
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: of the demands coming from without and from within, with
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: the ego standing between them as between hammer and anvil.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: But over against this ego, tossed like a shuttlecock between
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: outer and inner demands, there stands some scarcely definable arbiter,
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: which I would on no account label with the deceptive
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: name conscience, although taken in its best sense, the word
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: fits that arbiter very aptly indeed. So part of this
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: is that what Jung is saying is that the ego
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: is the one that has to figure out what's to
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: do with the demands of the outer world and the
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: inner world. And so in a sense, the ego is
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: always in conflict.
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: Say more about that. Let's unpack. Yeah.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: Well, and I think, Joseph, back to what you were
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: saying before I read the quote, you know, when you
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: brought up the example of my pregnancy, kind of saying like,
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: what is the unconscious urge to do this? Where is
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: that coming from? So that, you know, if something like,
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, now I guess we'll just run with it. If,
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: you know, it's like, do I want a third child
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: where there might be the impulse coming from within, and
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: it might be any number of things. It might be,
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: I was the third child. I've always known I wanted
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: three kids. It could be, gosh, I loved having little ones.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: I want that to continue. It could be just a
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: vague sense that the family doesn't feel complete. It could
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: be outer demands. You know, like my family, you know,
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: I come from a family where everyone has a lot
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: of kids. And if I stop at two, I'm going
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: to be considered kind of an underachiever. Or, you know,
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: my God, you know, this is, but there could be
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: kind of.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: External your portfolio of babies.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: But it but it, you know, but there could be
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: outer things going on, too.
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: You know, maybe I don't know what I'm going to
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: do when the kids all get old enough to go
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: to back to school. And so this will kind of
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: postpone that decision. You know, it could be any number
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: of things. So to be aware that the ego is
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: standing in between inner forces and outer forces and is
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: trying to be the arbiter of those sometimes often competing demands.
• 15:12
  Speaker 4: And Jung also says, you know, to let each side
• 15:16
  Speaker 4: have its full say.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 15:19
  Speaker 4: Of the part that wants another child and the part
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: that maybe doesn't or what's going on here. Sometimes I
• 15:30
  Speaker 4: find it helpful to sort of reconsider this as a negotiation.
• 15:38
  Speaker 4: It turns the heat down a little bit of like, okay,
• 15:42
  Speaker 4: you know, we're just negotiating. One part wants to go
• 15:45
  Speaker 4: out for Chinese food and the other part You know,
• 15:48
  Speaker 4: wants to order in pizza. Well, that's not so heated.
• 15:52
  Speaker 4: But can you take something that has more heat and
• 15:56
  Speaker 4: turn it into a little bit of a negotiation? Because
• 16:02
  Speaker 4: then it's easier to be curious about it rather than
• 16:05
  Speaker 4: having a lot just intense feelings.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: Well, and I think that goes to Joseph's point. Joseph,
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: I just love that, replacing the word conflict with strife.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: It's really great. Conflict comes from the Latin for to
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: strike together. So it really focuses on the clash. But strife,
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: you're right, really focuses on the kind of the perspective. Well,
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: it legitimizes both sides, doesn't it?
• 16:29
  Speaker 4: Yes, exactly.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: And then that becomes, Deb, what you're talking about. Can
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: we be curious about the other side? Can we give
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: each its due?
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: It does.
• 16:38
  Speaker 4: It's just a negotiation. Now, you know, it is more
• 16:42
  Speaker 4: than that, but all these ways are ways to approach
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: it differently so that it's not like, oh, my God,
• 16:49
  Speaker 4: here we go, what a conflict, but just, huh, let's
• 16:53
  Speaker 4: get interested here. Let's just go ahead and go toe-to-toe
• 16:57
  Speaker 4: and hash it out between me and me or between
• 17:01
  Speaker 4: me and you.
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: And Jung gives us a really extraordinary hint about And
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: it comes from his alchemical writings, but he also says
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: it in other places in the collected works, is that
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: the unconscious is always scripting a fantasy of its own.
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: So that often there is a powerful fantasy that is
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: somewhere in me and somewhere in the other person. And
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: I'm working a lot.
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: Like this in my practice. I didn't use to, but
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: I really understand it now. People will bring up a
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: conflict and I'll start with, um, so, so what would
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: you like to see happen? Well, I just want to
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: go and tell that person that this piece of my mind.
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: And so I just asked him to fantasize and say, okay,
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: so what would you say? And then they'll, they'll start
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: getting very uncomfortable. First of like, what are you doing?
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: I'm like, no, I just want it. Like bring it out.
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: And then I'll say like, well, then what would happen?
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: What do you mean? This script's been written already. Like
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: it's so clear.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: You're thinking about somewhere. It's not a choice. And so
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: what happens is, and then what would happen? And then
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: what would happen? And then what would happen? And there's
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: a whole trajectory, a whole fantasy where this is going
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: to go. And often where it leads is, is a
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: surprise to the ego. There's a relief of tension. But
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: when we see where the fantasy wants to lead, we
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: have a sense to ask, is this the only way
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: to get there?
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: No, that's great.
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: And this goes to what we were saying before. The
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: thing we're fighting about is often not the thing. But
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: getting to the real thing actually takes a lot of
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: trust and a certain relaxation into that light meditation state
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: to follow your fantasy forward. So that's one way of
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: beginning to figure out what the telos is of the
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: tension in the room.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: That's great, yeah.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: It's actually the conflict of fantasies. It's the war of
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: fantasies that is going on. And so even if I
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: think about the pizza that you brought up, there's a
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: part of me that's like, oh, I want to order
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: the large pizza and I want to eat it all myself.
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: There's another part of me that's fantasizing about what I'm
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: going to look like when I put that bathing suit on. on,
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: you know, come June. And both of them have fantasies
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: that are spinning forward and they are leading to other
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: different places at the end of those boxes of pizza
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: that are piling up, you know, in the garage.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: And Joseph, just to pick up on that in a way,
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: to talk about the sort of telos of conflict, Safran
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: Rossi in her book on the core has a lovely line.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: She says, in every symptom, conflict, or problem, there is
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: a God attempting to communicate with us.
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: Yes, yes. Beautiful. Beautiful. Super beautiful.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: When I think of internal conflicts again, sometimes they're insoluble.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: And Jung talked a lot about the insoluble dilemma or
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: the insoluble conflict and kind of said when you reach
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: the point where you can't solve it, that is you
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: can't solve it with the ego, you can't solve it
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: with the conscious mind, you wind up turning it over
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: to the unconscious mind. And that's when you learn your
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: dependence on the unconscious. And that's also when something new
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: can come forward in the form of the transcendent function,
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: which Jung described as this unconscious factor that can resolve
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: a conflict in a surprising way. Something arises organically that
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: the unconscious could not come up with. But the thing
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: about the transcendent function is you have to be able
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: to stay in the conflict. So if you feel, for example,
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: just a terrible suffering in your marriage and you want
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: to leave, but another part of you feels like, I
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: don't know, that you can't possibly do that to your spouse,
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: let's say. And you're really suffering and you don't know
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: the answer and you sort of give it over to
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: the unconscious.
• 21:56
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: Then something new and surprising will eventually arise out of
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: that conflict. But you can't collapse into a kind of
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: neurotic flattening of the conflict. You have to feel the
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: suffering and stay in the conflict.
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: And in the suffering, pay great attention to the images, dreams,
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: body sensations that are coming up. Because Initially, the ego
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: wants to focus the conflict, let's say, on the spouse.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: So we just keep circumambulating on the outer object. But internally,
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: we're having an enormous amount of inner dialogue and fantasies
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: and memories. And it's in dropping into that phantasmagoria that's
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: underneath the conflict that we begin to loosen up some
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: of the energies and become curious about frankly, how complicated
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: our conflicts are. We tend to want to oversimplify them. Well,
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: if only my damn husband would take out the trash
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: or clean up the garage, then everything would be fine.
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: And maybe it would be fine in a certain way,
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: but it'll be better. But there's the fact that we're
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: so stormy about it lets us know that there's a
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: lot of A lot of other critters in the forest,
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: you know, that are moving around underneath all of this.
• 23:27
  Speaker 4: What I'm really noticing that's coming up is there are
• 23:31
  Speaker 4: two things. One is the difference between what I think
• 23:34
  Speaker 4: about as the horizontal axis, which is the part that's
• 23:39
  Speaker 4: between me and somebody else. And that that's where I
• 23:46
  Speaker 4: locate the conflict. But there's not a whole heck of
• 23:49
  Speaker 4: a lot often that I can really do about that
• 23:52
  Speaker 4: because we don't control the other person. We don't even
• 23:56
  Speaker 4: control a baby that's a week old. And that baby
• 24:00
  Speaker 4: is crying, and you have done everything you can think of, feeding,
• 24:04
  Speaker 4: diaper changing, singing, rocking, holding, and the baby is still crying.
• 24:11
  Speaker 4: And the other axis is the vertical axis, which is
• 24:15
  Speaker 4: the one that's between me and me. And when we
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: bring it in to what is going on in me,
• 24:24
  Speaker 4: what does this really mean to me? How does this
• 24:27
  Speaker 4: tap into my memories, experience, values, et cetera? There is
• 24:32
  Speaker 4: empowerment there. And yes, we have to suffer the inner conflict,
• 24:40
  Speaker 4: but we have power to change our attitude, to understand
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: it differently. And what you were saying, Lisa, to have
• 24:50
  Speaker 4: that transcendent function come up, that instead of doing this
• 24:55
  Speaker 4: or that, should we order in Chinese or should we
• 24:58
  Speaker 4: order in pizza? The answer might be something else altogether.
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: You know what?
• 25:04
  Speaker 4: Let's go to a movie. We don't even need food
• 25:07
  Speaker 4: at all. And it's something that you can't just think
• 25:11
  Speaker 4: your way through it. If you could think your way
• 25:13
  Speaker 4: through it, you would do that. Most of the time,
• 25:15
  Speaker 4: that's not so hard. So we have to wait and
• 25:18
  Speaker 4: suffer ourselves and, you know, bring it on in, like
• 25:26
  Speaker 4: the old Sam Cooke song, bring it on home to me.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: So what I'm sensing in our conversation is, as Jungians,
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: we recognize that the outer symptoms of our lives almost
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: always have at the very least an inner correlate, if
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: not an inner cause. And we often talk about how
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: to drop into the fantasy, paying attention to our dreams,
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: which are often commenting. If we have a terrible fight
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: at work, the next one to three days, you're very
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: likely to have a dream that's going to try to
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: illuminate some dimension of the tensions inside of you that
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: you're not aware of. But there are also outer skills
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: that can be developed in terms of navigating interpersonal And
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: I'm sure that we all have some advice for people
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: in terms of how to stand interpersonally with that.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 26:29
  Speaker 4: I like the turning you've just pointed to, Joseph. There
• 26:35
  Speaker 4: are conflicts in the outer world with people, and we
• 26:39
  Speaker 4: do need skills to deal with them. And what are they?
• 26:45
  Speaker 4: There is an outer world, and this is where Gestalt
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: stuff has had a lot of influence over me. There
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: are certain sort of guidelines, rules of the road. Only
• 27:01
  Speaker 4: use I statements as one of them. If you start
• 27:05
  Speaker 4: a sentence with the word you, whoops, why don't you ever,
• 27:11
  Speaker 4: why did you do, how come you, whoops, We're into
• 27:15
  Speaker 4: blaming and shaming, and the other person's going to get defensive.
• 27:19
  Speaker 4: So if you say, I feel upset, I'm angry, you know,
• 27:25
  Speaker 4: we agreed that this would happen, and it hasn't happened.
• 27:30
  Speaker 4: And you can use a use statement only to report objective, behavioral,
• 27:37
  Speaker 4: verifiable data. You know, I'll use your example of cleaning
• 27:41
  Speaker 4: out the garage, you know, We agreed we would work
• 27:45
  Speaker 4: together on the garage this weekend. And you went out
• 27:49
  Speaker 4: to do this, then you had a game of tennis
• 27:52
  Speaker 4: with your friend, then blah, blah, blah.
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: Blah, blah.
• 27:57
  Speaker 4: And so you have been away most of the day,
• 28:01
  Speaker 4: and we haven't gone into the garage. But the tone
• 28:06
  Speaker 4: has to simply be repertorial, objective, here are the facts.
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: And then you can say, I'm upset. I feel dissed.
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: I feel disappointed. And that, by the way, is a
• 28:23
  Speaker 4: very big category of disappointment rather than, you know, yes,
• 28:31
  Speaker 4: I might feel at first that I'm angry and you
• 28:35
  Speaker 4: betrayed me. No, I am disappointed. I had a hope.
• 28:40
  Speaker 4: I had a striving. And it didn't happen. And I
• 28:46
  Speaker 4: am powerless over that. The day is gone now. Disappointment
• 28:50
  Speaker 4: is very, very big, and we avoid it in service
• 28:56
  Speaker 4: to directing feeling at the other person.
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: I love that word because, you know, it starts with
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: the word appointment. Like, we had an appointment to clean
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: the garage.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: Ah, yes.
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: And now all of a sudden there's a disappointment. Like
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: the appointment, the anti-appointment has actually occurred. And I am
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: noticing that you missed your appointment. Yes. Which makes sense.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 29:24
  Speaker 4: And I am upset. That's my own internal reaction. Maybe
• 29:31
  Speaker 4: somebody else wouldn't care quite as much. It wouldn't be
• 29:35
  Speaker 4: such a big deal. I am feeling these feelings.
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: All the garage. of our lives that remained unaddressed, unclean. Yeah.
• 29:47
  Speaker 4: We all have ways of avoiding conflict. And we were
• 29:51
  Speaker 4: going to touch on that of Woo, it's very easy
• 29:54
  Speaker 4: to avoid conflict.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think avoidance is a big issue.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: I think we've actually done a whole podcast on it.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: But avoiding conflict with others, avoiding the conflict with ourselves
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: by projecting it out and displacing it onto other people.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: But yeah, to pick up that word, uh, avoiding conflict, uh,
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: with each other is, uh, uh, you know, may seem
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: like a good choice in the short term, but longterm, it, uh,
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: doesn't work so well, especially if it's something important. I mean,
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: I think my husband once at one point told a
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: friend that, um, The secret to a good marriage is
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: to just let a lot of things slide. But there
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: are more substantive issues that you can't do that with,
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: you know, that you will do damage to yourself and
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: to the relationship if you avoid the conflict.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 30:51
  Speaker 4: You do damage to yourself by not being authentic. You're
• 30:55
  Speaker 4: hiding from yourself.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: Or just capitulating, yeah.
• 30:58
  Speaker 4: Just capitulating of I'm denying something real that is stirring
• 31:04
  Speaker 4: in me, that is the striving, by burying it. And
• 31:10
  Speaker 4: of course, as we all know, I think we all
• 31:13
  Speaker 4: know this, then it leads to frustration and resentment. So
• 31:20
  Speaker 4: there really isn't a successful way to keep avoiding conflict.
• 31:26
  Speaker 4: And some of the ways that we do this, and
• 31:29
  Speaker 4: I will credit Gestalt theory for this, is that's the
• 31:34
  Speaker 4: example of retroflexion, of just silencing myself. All right, I'm
• 31:39
  Speaker 4: just going to let it slide. I'm just going to
• 31:42
  Speaker 4: be the bigger person here, again. Then there's desensitization, which
• 31:47
  Speaker 4: is just numbing, as in just freezing. I'm just not
• 31:52
  Speaker 4: going to feel it. Then this is a very big one,
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: and I'm of confluence. I'll just match you. I'm going
• 32:02
  Speaker 4: to agree with you. I'm going to join you. And
• 32:06
  Speaker 4: I think about the image for this as being a
• 32:08
  Speaker 4: dance partner with someone who's taking the lead. And no
• 32:12
  Speaker 4: matter what that other partner does, whatever kind of crazy
• 32:16
  Speaker 4: steps he or she takes, you are in accord. You
• 32:20
  Speaker 4: match it. You join it. Another is projection. We've talked
• 32:25
  Speaker 4: about that many, many a time on the podcast. It's
• 32:29
  Speaker 4: not me. It's you, whoever the you happens to be.
• 32:34
  Speaker 4: There is deflection. Make a joke. Change the subject. Just
• 32:40
  Speaker 4: sort of like, you know, all of a sudden make
• 32:42
  Speaker 4: a dog leg turn over to the left. Let's get
• 32:47
  Speaker 4: off this. We do this all the time, especially where
• 32:50
  Speaker 4: things really matter. There's no should here, but if the
• 32:55
  Speaker 4: conversation gets heavy about, let's say, politics or religion or
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: sex or money, hey, I got to make a phone call.
• 33:05
  Speaker 4: I've deflected. I got off the hot spot. And then
• 33:09
  Speaker 4: there's interjection where you just swallow it whole. You just
• 33:13
  Speaker 4: gulp it down without chewing it, without integrating it, without
• 33:18
  Speaker 4: really considering it. and put it inside where it stays
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: as a hard, indigestible lump. And we all do all
• 33:30
  Speaker 4: those things. And, of course, we can't go around like
• 33:35
  Speaker 4: knights on horseback battling every little bunny rabbit that crosses
• 33:39
  Speaker 4: the path. But we can be aware of, what am
• 33:43
  Speaker 4: I doing? What did I just do?
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: We have to be curious about ourselves and curious about
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: other people What's driving, or again, what am I striving for?
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: Sometimes it's just, as you were saying, Deb, just striving
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: for harmony. And if that's the most important striving, there
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: may be many times when I set aside my own assertions,
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: my own concerns or needs, because harmony is more important,
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: and other times when that's less so.
• 34:15
  Speaker 4: It depends upon what one's own motivation is. You know,
• 34:21
  Speaker 4: to go back to my insignificant example of should we
• 34:25
  Speaker 4: order in Chinese or pizza, you know, the other person really,
• 34:30
  Speaker 4: really wants Chinese. It's okay, you know, we'll do that.
• 34:35
  Speaker 4: But let's say it happens again next month and it
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: happens again the month after that of then, hey, you know,
• 34:42
  Speaker 4: the last couple times when we ordered in, you really
• 34:46
  Speaker 4: wanted this and we got that. I think it's my
• 34:49
  Speaker 4: turn this time. And here's what I want.
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: Or maybe order both. Right.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: That's the transcendent function. I think we're in the realm
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: of discernment.
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: That it requires discernment to know whether a conflict should
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: be avoided. Because, Deb, when you were talking about politics,
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: I was thinking, well, some conflicts maybe should be avoided.
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, in social situations, there's no need to. to
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: get into a fight about politics in my opinion anyway.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: But we have to ask ourselves, what is in service
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: to growth? What is in service to wholeness? Is it
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: better that I just let this go by the boards?
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: It's not that big a deal, Chinese versus pizza. Or
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: is there something larger at stake here, like my ability
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: to advocate for myself or to occasionally put my needs first? So,
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: you know, some conflicts should be avoided, but not all certainly.
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: So let's bring this over into a different realm. Let's
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: talk about conflict in the consulting room. And part of
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: what made me think about this is that conflict, you know,
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: most therapists are recovering nice people. And most of us
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: appreciate harmony to sometimes a pathologic degree. And, you know,
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: Karen Morota, the psychoanalyst, remarks that empathy can be overused
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: to avoid conflict. So your client comes in and is overused.
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: Very angry because you started the session a few minutes late.
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: And you don't want to have it out. So you empathize. Well,
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: you must have been very disappointed. I wonder if it
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: made you feel that you don't matter to me. Which
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: is fine. But it may not always be in the
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: client's best interest to stop there.
• 36:55
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: Sometimes it's very important to stand your ground and let
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: a conflict happen or let there be strife, Joseph, in
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: your great framing.
• 37:07
  Speaker 4: It more often happens maybe around something that is less concrete.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 37:15
  Speaker 4: You know, I was late and I'm sorry and what
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: was that like for you, etc. But the part where
• 37:20
  Speaker 4: it could get very interesting is how the person really feels.
• 37:26
  Speaker 4: Is there some other resentment? Is this just the tip
• 37:31
  Speaker 4: of the proverbial iceberg for a bigger issue? And to
• 37:35
  Speaker 4: get interested in that and also to be able, as
• 37:41
  Speaker 4: an analyst, for me to hold my ground of we
• 37:46
  Speaker 4: see this differently. And what I often say to people
• 37:50
  Speaker 4: is if there is something that bothers you, that happens
• 37:54
  Speaker 4: between us, something that didn't fit, you didn't like, it
• 37:58
  Speaker 4: felt wrong, bring it back, and I will meet you there.
• 38:04
  Speaker 4: That does not mean that I'm going to agree or
• 38:06
  Speaker 4: that I'm going to exceed, but I will meet you there.
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: And that's the interpersonal version of Jung's hammer and anvil,
• 38:16
  Speaker 4: of we can talk about this. The temperature in the
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: room does not necessarily mean have to rise up to
• 38:24
  Speaker 4: 212 degrees, the boiling point. Let's just sit here with
• 38:29
  Speaker 4: each other. When I said this, you thought I meant that.
• 38:32
  Speaker 4: That's not what I meant. Or what if I really
• 38:35
  Speaker 4: do see it differently? It's getting to the place where
• 38:40
  Speaker 4: it's okay. We can go there. Nobody's going to melt.
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: Well, I'm hearing a couple of different idea streams here.
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: One I'd like to speak to, Lisa, where you were starting,
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: I think, the story of there are often two stages
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: in analysis. Murray Stein languages it this way. And often
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: the work starts in the mother paradigm, and then the
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: work has to evolve into the father paradigm.
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's great.
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: In the mother, because there's often early wounds, there's a
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: lot of compassion, a lot of, nurturing a lot of co-regulation,
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: so a lot of empathic mirroring. And then at a
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: certain point, just as you were saying, Lisa, there gets
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: to this stuck place where the analysis starts to feel
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: like it's primarily a soothing engine. And you can begin
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: to feel it either in the analysand or in the
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: field that's constellated or even in the analyst like, is
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: this Is this all that we're going to do for
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: years down the line? Is there anything more dynamic or
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: challenging to come in? And then often the father archetype
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: begins to come in and then the analyst winds up
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: kind of challenging or encouraging or trying to energize something
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: that's forward moving for the analyst and that is so important.
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: And that can create more of a demand in the analysis.
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: And things can often heat up, particularly if the client
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: really wants to stay in that sleepier, comforting place. So
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: is it Chinese food or pizza? Or going for a jog,
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: a run? Right. Like, are we always... Just sating our hunger?
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: Is there something more dynamic or striving? Or can expectations
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: come into the room? Like an expectation may be, yes,
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: you realize I'm often about five minutes late. So is
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: it possible for you to come prepared for that in
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: the waiting room and actually manage yourself in such a
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: way that we can actually talk about something else other
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: than the five minutes? Because it's so gratifying for you
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: to criticize me. I mean, that's more of a father
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: place of, come on, hey, hey, hey. Yep.
• 41:24
  Speaker 4: And we see that reflected in fairy tales of where
• 41:28
  Speaker 4: Snow White goes to the new mothering place where she's
• 41:33
  Speaker 4: hanging out with the dwarves and they are kind and comforting.
• 41:37
  Speaker 4: Cinderella has a fairy godmother. But then it gets to,
• 41:42
  Speaker 4: come on now, you've got to develop a little agency.
• 41:45
  Speaker 4: You've got to develop some get up and go. The
• 41:48
  Speaker 4: dwarves can't take care of you forever. They tried, but they,
• 41:52
  Speaker 4: as ever, they couldn't do it because that belongs to you.
• 41:58
  Speaker 4: And what, you know, how do we hold that with
• 42:05
  Speaker 4: another person and develop the ability not just to have conflict,
• 42:09
  Speaker 4: but to separate, to become one's, that's what it's in
• 42:14
  Speaker 4: the service of, is to become your own rather than,
• 42:20
  Speaker 4: to use your example, of being five minutes late. This
• 42:26
  Speaker 4: is how things often develop. It is a pattern.
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: Now, the other thing I think that you were talking about, Deb,
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: is the constellation of unfinished business and the unconscious.
• 42:38
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: The client has an awful lot of anger at mom,
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: which is unconscious. And then all of a sudden, the
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: therapist looks like a bad mom. which then, you know,
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: the analysis hand, you know, is really scanning for all
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: of the, you know, the bad stuff that mom did. Again,
• 42:59
  Speaker 3: exploring it at first. And when there's a lot of
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: tension and it feels like strife, you never do this, Lisa.
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: You know, and I, blah, blah, blah, just like mom.
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: So that kind of strife and conflict is expected in
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: the container, as you were saying, Deb. like, yes, it
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: should live here. And at a certain point, as we
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: were saying, it, it really does not have a very little,
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: if anything to do with me, the analyst, although we
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: can create a stage here for it to be made visible.
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: But once it's visible, it still is your work as
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: the analyst and to put your hands in that big
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: steaming pile and figure out, you know, what's going to
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: be done about that? Yeah. Yeah.
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: You know, I remember this really extraordinary moment and I'm,
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: I'm going to try to, I'm not going to share
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: names just because I don't know how this person would
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: feel about it, but it was, it was at our
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: training Institute and there was some question about relationships between
• 44:06
  Speaker 2: the analysts and the trainees and, we were candidates and
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: we were kind of griping about something. I don't remember
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: exactly what it was, but there was some big, very
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: solemn meeting to talk about this. And there were, there
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: was a working group and, you know, we were all
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: kind of grousing a little bit about how unfair something was.
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: And then this elder analyst, this kind of fairly renowned
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: analyst who trained in Zurich stood up And she said,
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: I don't get what's going on. When we were in training,
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: we just understood that we had to hold the analyst's shadows.
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: And I was like, my jaw dropped. And Joseph, it's
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: just like you're saying. I mean, not that if you're
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: the analyst who's always five minutes late, you don't want
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: to see if you can. I mean, that's on you, right?
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: You need to figure out what the heck is going
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: on with you that you can't show up for your
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: sessions on time. But sort of if you're that analysand,
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: it's like, Can you come to terms with that without
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: having mommy sort of spoon feed you perfection? It was
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: a startling, startling moment to hear her say that. And
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: I don't think I will ever forget it because it
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: really typifies this attitude of, Deb, what you've said again
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: and again today, kind of taking it in, not seeing
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: the conflict as only out there, but where is this
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: in me or how can I have agency in dealing
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: with it?
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: So not a very common movement, but a really valuable one.
• 45:39
  Speaker 4: And fairness is very, very big. We are so hardwired
• 45:45
  Speaker 4: for fairness.
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: Yes, we are.
• 45:48
  Speaker 4: And primates know about fairness. You know, when the chimpanzees,
• 45:53
  Speaker 4: for example, are given the task of pressing a lever
• 45:56
  Speaker 4: and getting a reward, some of them get a slice
• 45:59
  Speaker 4: of banana and some of them get a little piece
• 46:01
  Speaker 4: of cucumber or celery. And they kind of go like, Yeah,
• 46:05
  Speaker 4: what's up with that? He gets the banana, I get celery.
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: I like that Reese's monkey face there.
• 46:13
  Speaker 4: You know, that ain't right. And versus that place that
• 46:18
  Speaker 4: you were alluding to, Lisa, of that's right. Analysts are
• 46:24
  Speaker 4: just people.
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 46:26
  Speaker 4: And sometimes we have to know that we know what
• 46:30
  Speaker 4: we know, take it in and deal with it internally because...
• 46:36
  Speaker 4: We're not going to change this person who has authority
• 46:39
  Speaker 4: and power over us or our boss or, you know,
• 46:44
  Speaker 4: a hundred other people. You have the power. I have
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: the power to see what I see and know what
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: I know and not have to work it out with
• 46:55
  Speaker 4: the you, whoever that you is.
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: Right, right.
• 47:00
  Speaker 4: Which goes to my mantra of what do you do
• 47:03
  Speaker 4: when words don't work? Well, my rule is I take
• 47:10
  Speaker 4: it to, not that I obey this rule all the time,
• 47:13
  Speaker 4: but I try. I take it to the other person
• 47:16
  Speaker 4: three times. And I'm really intentional and conscious about it.
• 47:21
  Speaker 4: And then I know that words aren't going to work.
• 47:25
  Speaker 4: And this happened with me years ago. My husband had
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: a very demanding job. And I worked out in the
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: hinterland and he worked in the city. And I would
• 47:35
  Speaker 4: ask him to pick up something on the way home.
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: It might have been to stop at the dry cleaner.
• 47:41
  Speaker 4: It might have been to get some odd grocery item
• 47:45
  Speaker 4: or something. And he would always say yes. And then
• 47:49
  Speaker 4: he didn't do it. And I was so mad. I
• 47:55
  Speaker 4: was so mad. What do I have to do? I
• 47:58
  Speaker 4: called you and you said yes. And I asked you
• 48:01
  Speaker 4: to write it down. And I did all the things
• 48:04
  Speaker 4: that I could think of to do. I called his secretary,
• 48:07
  Speaker 4: all these things. But he got on another track. And
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: what do I do when words don't work? Now what
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: am I going to do with me?
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: Can I drop in another quote from Jung that is relevant,
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: I think? Jung says, you have no alternative but to
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: take the conflicts on yourself by ceasing to identify now
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: with one side, now with the other. You become what
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: happens in the middle.
• 48:41
  Speaker 4: That takes me back to the hammer and the anvil.
• 48:44
  Speaker 4: And me being that horseshoe in the middle getting banged
• 48:49
  Speaker 4: into shape, I really don't like it. And yet, there
• 48:53
  Speaker 4: it is.
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: There's also a piece that I just love in the
• 48:59
  Speaker 3: Serenity Prayer in AA. Grant me the serenity to accept
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: the things I cannot change, the courage to change the
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Yeah.
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: So for you, Deb, I've tried to change this with
• 49:18
  Speaker 3: another person three times.
• 49:20
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 49:21
  Speaker 3: And that has now given me the wisdom that I
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: cannot change this trait.
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: You know, in my husband or my wife. Now I
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: have the courage.
• 49:30
  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: To have to figure out what to do.
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: To do what I can.
• 49:34
  Speaker 4: Yes, to do what I can.
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: What am I going to do?
• 49:36
  Speaker 4: And then, of course, what we do in the consulting room,
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: hopefully with ourselves, is it really wasn't about the dry
• 49:44
  Speaker 4: cleaning or picking up. There was a butcher that I
• 49:48
  Speaker 4: particularly liked. If the dry cleaning doesn't get picked up
• 49:53
  Speaker 4: for another couple of days, it's not going to be
• 49:55
  Speaker 4: the end of the world. But the meaning that I
• 49:58
  Speaker 4: made of it was if you really loved me, even
• 50:03
  Speaker 4: though I'm making a small request, that because you love me,
• 50:08
  Speaker 4: you'll hold on to it and you will do it
• 50:10
  Speaker 4: for me. That it was symbolic.
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: That you were in his thoughts. Right.
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Right.
• 50:17
  Speaker 4: And that goes way back to the very, very beginning
• 50:20
  Speaker 4: of we keep the baby in mind. You know, every
• 50:25
  Speaker 4: new mother has that baby in mind all day, every day.
• 50:28
  Speaker 4: When is he going to wake up? When is he
• 50:30
  Speaker 4: going to be hungry? Et cetera. I want it to
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: be kept in mind. And it wasn't about that. He
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: had a stressful, demanding job. And, of course, his mind
• 50:43
  Speaker 4: went on a hundred other tracks during his working day.
• 50:47
  Speaker 4: And it's only the dry cleaning. It is not symbolic work.
• 50:51
  Speaker 4: of his everlasting eternal love for me.
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: But striving for that evidence of being, you know, eternally
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: considered and loved and in remembrance. Right. How important that
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: is and the underlying fantasy of what that would mean
• 51:08
  Speaker 3: to us if such an experience were to be given. Yeah.
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: It's also, it's powerful that way. The other thing that, um,
• 51:18
  Speaker 3: in this conversation is about complexes, which we've talked about
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: many times, is that we have a complex about something
• 51:27
  Speaker 3: which distorts our ego's ability to be in right relation
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: to the reality. And we've been saying that in many
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: different ways. But more importantly, that when a situation occurs
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: and the intensity of our response seems disproportionate, boy, I'm
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: ready to scream about the garage. I'm ready to divorce
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: somebody because they're not bringing home the groceries that they
• 51:57
  Speaker 3: promised they would. But we also need to become, especially
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: when we stepped away a bit, suspicious. Why am I
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: so hot about that thing? And perhaps much cooler about
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: many other things, which my friends might think, I probably
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: should be a little more activated about. So the disproportionate
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: response should make us suspicious that there's other things that
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: it's not about what the argument is, but there's something underneath.
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: I think conversely, I don't know where Jung wrote about
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: this or where he was interviewed, but he has a
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: vision for the more individuated person who is fundamentally feels
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: quite peaceful most of the time. That these outer dynamics
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: influence them far less and they're able to maintain a
• 52:59
  Speaker 3: kind of internal equanimity. Things go my way, oh, that's fine.
• 53:04
  Speaker 3: Things don't go my way, oh, that's fine. This sense
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: that we can be creative and resilient and complete unto
• 53:13
  Speaker 3: ourselves In many different configurations of circumstance and configurations of relationship. Yes.
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: And that's the promise of the ego finding the self
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: as the primary companion.
• 53:29
  Speaker 4: Hmm.
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: That internal companion.
• 53:32
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: So that when outer circumstances disappoint us, disillusion us, frustrate us,
• 53:41
  Speaker 3: scare us.
• 53:42
  Speaker 4: Hmm.
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: That there's another relationship that is unruffled by the vicissitudes
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: of life. And that's a rather wonderful promise.
• 53:53
  Speaker 4: It's a wonderful, empowering, steadying promise, and in a way
• 54:01
  Speaker 4: that is so much the goal of therapy and psychoanalysis.
• 54:07
  Speaker 4: I often use the image of being on the surface
• 54:09
  Speaker 4: of the ocean, And some days it's beautiful and calm
• 54:13
  Speaker 4: and wonderful. Sometimes it's choppy. Sometimes it's really stormy. But
• 54:21
  Speaker 4: if you go down 50 feet, 100 feet, there are
• 54:25
  Speaker 4: swells that go rolling along. But no matter what happens
• 54:30
  Speaker 4: on the surface of the ocean, there's a place down
• 54:33
  Speaker 4: deep where things are steadier, slower moving, calmer. And if
• 54:39
  Speaker 4: we find that place in ourselves, then things don't have
• 54:45
  Speaker 4: to be externalized so much to what our boss is
• 54:49
  Speaker 4: doing or our partner is doing or what is happening
• 54:53
  Speaker 4: out there. Because something down 100 feet stays okay and
• 55:01
  Speaker 4: can roll with it. Okay, he didn't pick up the
• 55:06
  Speaker 4: dry cleaning.
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: Again.
• 55:07
  Speaker 2: Poor husband.
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: Hey, sirrah, sirrah, you know.
• 55:16
  Speaker 4: But, you know, to take it to a more impactful
• 55:20
  Speaker 4: and important level, let's say that there is a person
• 55:24
  Speaker 4: who is partnered with a Someone who is really perhaps
• 55:30
  Speaker 4: addicted to a substance or terribly irresponsible with money or
• 55:35
  Speaker 4: things that really matter. And it's big. And that's not
• 55:40
  Speaker 4: so easy to say how do you take that in
• 55:43
  Speaker 4: and take it into yourself and find the empowerment to
• 55:48
  Speaker 4: find your own solution to a very big, very real
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: problem with, let's say, your life partner. That's hard work.
• 55:59
  Speaker 4: And if words don't work, that's where we go. We
• 56:04
  Speaker 4: try to work it out with a group, we try
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: to work it out with another person, and eventually we
• 56:10
  Speaker 4: have to find a way sometimes to work it out
• 56:13
  Speaker 4: in ourselves.
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: It reminds me of a moment that was so important
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: to me in our training. The training process, the analytic
• 56:23
  Speaker 3: training process, was very turbulent for me internally, and I
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: found myself fussing and complaining and hissing and spitting a
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: lot as you guys remember we all do but I
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: remember myself for sure and as I was preparing for
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: I think it was probably my final exam my cases
• 56:44
  Speaker 3: exam I had this dramatic shift of tone of emotional
• 56:51
  Speaker 3: tone and I experienced this tremendous calmness and it came
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: upon me, and I said this to the analysts, that
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: everything that I was complaining about in the training was
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: only ever happening inside of me.
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: No, that's exactly right.
• 57:09
  Speaker 3: And I just knew that to be true.
• 57:11
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: And I felt it. And then because of the depth
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: of clarity about that, that the circumstances around me in
• 57:21
  Speaker 3: the training program suddenly seemed rather peaceful and bureaucratic.
• 57:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: Way to go and I'll take a test and maybe
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: I'll pass the test. But I had this sense that
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: I am fundamentally okay regardless of how this blip in
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: my life goes. And that really felt like this descent
• 57:45
  Speaker 3: of grace. But it also was an enormous object lesson
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: for myself and to see how it shifted my personality
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: that The analysts, the training analysts were like squinting at me.
• 57:58
  Speaker 3: They were like, what happened? Because it was such a
• 58:02
  Speaker 3: dramatic shift of how I was relating to them.
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: But it's a great example, Joseph, of how we all
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: do this, right? We take our inner conflicts and we
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: throw them out into the world. We project them out
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: and then we expect people to behave a certain way.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: And because of that, they often do behave a certain way.
• 58:20
  Speaker 2: And then we're off to the races and we're both
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: kind of working off these unconscious scripts. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: wait a second. Again, this is not my story, so
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: I'm going to tell it in this really oblique way.
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: But there was another training candidate who had this kind
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: of epic battle with one of the analysts on his
• 58:38
  Speaker 2: review committee. And then he kind of had the same
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: epiphany you did. I don't know that he would language
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: it the same way, but he He had a dream
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: that this analyst was the Wicked Witch of the West
• 58:49
  Speaker 2: and she just started melting. And then she was standing
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: there and she was just normal, you know, and it's like, so,
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: you know, she'd worn the face of our arch enemy
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: that we almost need to kind of project that out sometimes.
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: But then we can come to this point where like, no, no,
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: this is in me. This is my conflict, for example,
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: about maybe myself. own self-worth or my own fear of
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: failure that I'm somehow putting out there. And since I
• 59:18
  Speaker 2: have the floor, I want to share one last quote.
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: And this is such a great quote, but I think
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: it goes to everything we've been talking about. To meet
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: one's insoluble and eternal conflict is to meet God. And
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: that's Marie-Louise von Franz. So when you meet your conflict,
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: then you're in the right place. But it takes some
• 59:43
  Speaker 2: courage to meet your conflict and not avoid it or
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: project it out.
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really great. And that sense of I am worthy.
• 59:55
  Speaker 4: that you were talking about, Joseph, and it goes to
• 59:58
  Speaker 4: what you're talking about, Lisa, of I'm worthy. I'm fundamentally okay.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 4: I can do this. I have what it takes. And
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 4: that's the promise of analysis and, of course, life. We
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 4: get bigger than our problems. We don't solve a lot
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 4: of these problems. We just get bigger. And so in proportion,
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 4: they get a little smaller of, oh, well, you know,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 4: we can hold the shadow of the analysts. I can
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 4: go get the dry cleaning tomorrow. It's okay. And we
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 4: become our own worthy opponent if we can meet in
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 4: that place and duke it out sometimes with ourselves, if
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 4: that's what it takes.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: And that All of the categories of things that we've
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: talked about can be put into the box of tension. Tension,
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: just as von Franz is saying, the tension between the
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: ego and the self or the individual and God, the
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: dynamic tension is what creates consciousness and growth.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: Conflict creates consciousness.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: Conflict. Conflict as that extra dynamic vibrating Tension makes us
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 3: awake and awaken.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 4: It's where the juice is.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 2: I know, that seems like the summary statement. So maybe
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: it's time to switch.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 3: We'll take the juice to the dream. Absolutely. All right.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: Hello, listeners. I want to take just one minute to
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 2: remind you about my upcoming podcast, Women's Fairy Tale and
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: Yoga Retreat. We have just a few tickets left. It
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: is April 25th through April 28th in central Pennsylvania. It's
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: a beautiful time of year to be there. It's a
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: great group of women. We have a ton of fun.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: We hang out. We do yoga. We talk about fairy tales.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 2: We eat good food. We tell stories and share poems
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: around the campfire. We do some dream incubation. It's a
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: really great time. So if you're interested, pop on over
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: to my website, lisamarchiano.com, where you can read more about
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 2: Women's Wellspring Retreat. Thanks.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: Our dreamer today is a 58-year-old male, and his occupation
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: is a tour operator. He says he's English, but he
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: is currently living in Spain. and he titles his dream
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: The Seven Demons. I've been invited to a party or reunion.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: I'm back in London, and I'm with my friend, T.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: I'm happy to see him. There is the same feeling
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 3: of wild elation in the air that I experienced at
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: times when I was living in London in my twenties,
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 3: a dangerous sensation of almost complete abandon. We are drinking
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: in a bar, and the next day calf of my
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: right leg of three phrases but I can't decipher what
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: they say underneath is the tattoo parlor's name I'm annoyed
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: about the tattoos but think I'll be able to get
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 3: some compensation from the parlor because I must have been
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: unconscious when I got them I talk about this with
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: T who was with me I can't blame him because
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: we were all drunk or high and I think it's
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 3: not a big deal It's the next day. I'm with T,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: and he is cooking up an experiment. It's exciting, but
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 3: there is a sense of danger. We are in an
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: old room with flaking plaster on the walls and old
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: pine benches on either side of the room with high
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: wooden stools under them. On the benches, each of the
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: benches are three or four piles of darkish sand, seven
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: in total. The piles of sand are not big, but
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 3: they are incubating something like eggs. One starts to move.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: I'm nervous. T says, don't worry, and starts scraping away
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: the sand, hurrying the hatching process. Inside, it is a
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 3: red-skinned man. He comes out. Now he's life-size, and I
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: see he has pointed ears. He is a devil, and
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 3: I'm terrified. though T is excited and the fact that
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 3: he isn't scared seems to protect him and perhaps me
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 3: from the risk. The devil is elated to be free.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: He exudes self-assurance and purpose and has an immense charisma.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: He goes around the other piles helping the others out.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: The others are not as red as him. Some are blotchy.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: Some have been asleep for eons. I think the one
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 3: bench diagonally opposite furthest from the main devil, is my father.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: He has slight red blotches like birthmarks and seems less dangerous,
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 3: and not as happy to be reawakened as the main devil,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: though they are of the same mold. It is like
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: the awakening of vampires, and I am afraid. The dreamer
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 3: gives us some context, and he writes, When I was 15,
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: I fell out with my father. I went to London
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 3: at 18 and lived a pretty wild life of experimenting
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: with drugs until I was 27, when I decided that
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: I'd had enough. Tea, in the dream, was one of
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 3: the few friends who I enjoyed a kind of complete
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 3: hedonistic abandon with. It was a time of excess, which
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: was costly in terms of regret of wasted opportunities at
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 3: the time, when I could have been putting more in
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: and getting more out of life. My father died in
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: 2020 after a long illness. We both decided to accept
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 3: that we were different and got on. But we were
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 3: never as close as I think both of us would
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 3: have liked to have been. Listening to Joseph's account of
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: his own father's death in a couple of podcasts brings
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: up a lot of emotion for me, feelings of grief, love,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 3: and regret. And he adds that his feelings in the
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: dream were fear and awe at the devil and his
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 3: huge charisma, annoyance at the tattoo. I don't have tattoos
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 3: and personally don't like them if they are not of
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 3: a tribal community. And then he adds a bit more, saying,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: I associate the tattoo with the unconsciousness of my hedonistic
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: 20s and the mark they left on me. I was
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 3: afraid and in awe of the devil. I felt pity
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 3: at seeing my father awaken when he didn't seem to
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: want to.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 2: Well, I thought when I saw this dream this morning,
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 2: I thought, wow, this is just really kind of a
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 2: blockbuster dream. And it's a difficult dream. There's a lot
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 2: in here. But I'll start, I'll take a first pass
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: at it by saying this. Sometimes when you have dreams
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 2: that have two parts to them that seem pretty different,
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 2: it can be interesting to sort of assume that they
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 2: treat the same subject from two slightly different perspectives. So
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 2: we have, this is a two-part dream. The first part
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 2: is the tattoos. And the second part is, you know,
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 2: this kind of alchemical experiment or something. And what I
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: notice is the same about them, other than the presence
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: of tea, is that they both have to do with awakenings.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: So in the first part, the dreamer wakes up and
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: has this epiphany that he has gotten these tattoos apparently
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: when he was unconscious. The second part, obviously the devils
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 2: are awakening. But the dream ego is also kind of
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: awakening to some realities. So that maybe deepens the meaning.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: For example, he said the tattoos he associates, and I
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: think it's fairly obvious that the tattoos might refer to
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: the way that that experience in his 20s kind of
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: left their mark on him in an unfortunate way. Understanding that,
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: laying it on top of the second half of the
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 2: dream kind of deepens our understanding that a little bit.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 4: I'm going back to just noticing that the age of
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 4: the dreamer He's in his late 50s now, and the
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 4: dream starts by saying, I've been invited to a party
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 4: or a reunion of revisiting this time when he and
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 4: his friend T had their days of what we used
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 4: to call sowing their wild oats. So it's a reunion, and...
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 4: He is marked by the tattoos, and he doesn't like tattoos.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 4: And not only that, he has the tattoo parlor's name.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 4: So it's sort of like he's wearing a brand, sort
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 4: of like the devil wears Prada kind of thing. And
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 4: he has to wake up to this, and then his
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 4: friend is doing this incubation process of And what comes
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 4: out is what we might call shadow and certainly his
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 4: father complex. And here is the time for him to
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 4: see this as dream images, confront it and deal with
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 4: it from a different stage of life. That these are devils,
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 4: he's terrified.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of archetypal power.
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 4: Right. Vampires are very archetypal. They have no feeling, and
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 4: they have to live off others' life source, which is
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 4: the symbolic meaning of blood. And I would be very
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 4: curious as to why now.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an interesting question, Deb. And I think you're right.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 2: I think this is kind of revisiting something. So I
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 2: want to just make one point, which is I'm going
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: to actually pull in the idea of the Freudian slip.
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 2: The dreamer wrote, Joseph didn't read it this way, but
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 2: the dreamer wrote about his 20s being a timeline. of
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: almost complete abandon, I think is what he meant, but
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 2: he wrote almost complete abandonment. And I know that he
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: fell out with his father when he was 15. And
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: then we don't, in my imagination, dad didn't do much
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: to repair that. And I wonder if the dreamer felt
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 2: that or the surrounding of it, even though it may
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 2: have felt like he left, my supposition is that he
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 2: felt tremendously abandoned and that that was a time of
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: having been abandoned. It was an abandonment that he responded
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 2: to with a kind of dangerous abandon, which then marked him.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: And I think you're right, Deb. Something's coming back, and
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 2: it is interesting to ask why now.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 4: What he actually writes is hedonistic abandonment Yeah.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: But he does use the term abandonment.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 4: Both. But he also abandons with his friend T. So
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 4: here's another relationship with a masculine figure. But the masculine
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 4: figure is a peer. You know, they're pretty much the
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 4: same age. There's no real, you know, more life development
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 4: or more maturity.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 3: Oh.
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 2: That's a great point. And T abandons him in the
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 2: dream to the tattoo parlor.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 2: He says, well, I can't blame T, but T was
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: with him and apparently let the tattoos happen. So that's
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: a good point, Deb.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 4: And T also lets all these devilish characters, he's the
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 4: one that is incubating them. So I'm really curious about
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 4: what you're thinking, Joseph, as our resident alchemist here.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 3: Well, I'll tell you what's percolating is that I think
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: the dream is part of the archetype of the book
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: of Revelation. And if we recognize that the word apocalypse,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: which is often misunderstood, actually means revelation. And an apocalyptic
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: revelation suggests a revelation of such magnitude that the old
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 3: world is thrown into discord. So in the book of Revelation,
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 3: there is a time when the great beast reigns supreme
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 3: and those who succumb to that receive the mark of
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: the beast, which is a kind of tattoo on their body.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: Another aspect of the book of Revelation is that there
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: are seven seals that are broken. And when each of
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 3: the seal is broken, a horseman of destruction, but also
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 3: a horseman of change. The first symbol seal is the
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 3: white horse and symbolizes the conqueror. The second is the
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: red horse and is the horse of war and removes
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: peace from the world. And then the black horse is
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 3: famine and the pale horse is death. And so it
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 3: moves on. So each of the seven seals erupts, each
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 3: of the seven piles of sands hatches, and something that
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 3: is frightening is revealed. But one could make a good
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 3: case for an analysis of the book of Revelation as
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 3: a profound and often frightening spiritual awakening, which sounds in
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 3: many ways like a Kundalini rising and the activation of
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 3: the seven chakras. And when these unconscious vortices become suddenly
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 3: super powered and they erupt, there's an enormous amount of
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 3: unconscious material that floods the individual that suddenly has to
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 3: somehow be dealt with. And often there's an enormous amount
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 3: of tension and strife and and shock.
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 2: Conflict.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 3: Conflict, massive conflict. If this proceeds in the right way,
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 3: what there is a new Jerusalem suspended in the heavens,
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 3: which descends like a great cube into the earth or
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 3: onto the earth. And the lamb of God is the
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 3: great illuminating force, which is a symbol of a new
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 3: personality where the self is the, primary vital spark of
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 3: the new personality at the end of it. So I
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 3: would wonder if the beginning process of being dissolute in
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 3: a certain way and enjoying it, as we often do
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 3: in our 20s, just as he said, has left the
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 3: quote-unquote mark of the beast on him. And he's curious
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 3: about that and whether or not that's something that he's
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 3: okay with. Tee, is a kind of psychopomp in the
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 3: dream that companions the ego through this dissolute time, does
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 3: not interfere with his unconscious choice to receive the mark,
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 3: but is present to it. The dream ego at times
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 3: seems like he'd like to put the authority or onus
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 3: on someone else. Oh, it's not me, it's a tattoo parlor,
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 3: you know. Somebody else kind of dragged me along for
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 3: something rather than now I have to suffer. But the
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 3: psychopomp T does this remarkable, like you said, alchemical process
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 3: or apocalyptic process of displaying at least the seven piles
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 3: of sand and what is inside of this fellow that hatches,
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 3: the red devil itself. is part of that libidinal dynamism.
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 3: And if we remember that the devil, at least in Christianity,
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 3: is modeled very explicitly off the pagan pan, who is
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 3: the great libidinal engine of nature, which stood very much
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 3: at odds with the very conscious, restrained process of Christianity.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 3: One is supposed to put all of that primal stuff
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 3: away in order to lead a pure life. So there's
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 3: a different attitude about Pan. That Pan emerges from the
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 3: sand and now is kind of devilish and scary and dangerous.
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 3: That's different from the first half of life when Pan
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 3: was the great shameless companion who was leading us into
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 3: this Arcadian world of drink and excess. But here there's
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 3: a different, or I think the beginning of a certain
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 3: moral stance, which is, I don't know if that stuff
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 3: is really good for me. And that might actually be
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 3: more of a devilish impulse that I have to kind
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 3: of figure out whether or not I stand against that,
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 3: whether or not I go with it. What does that mean?
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 3: And of course, in the moment he's anxious, that fear
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 3: of Pan could also be the beginning of wisdom. When
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 3: we're young, all that libidinal wildness, which I know very well,
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 3: God knows, all of that drunken waking up, like what
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 3: the heck happened stuff. Yes, it is euphoric. And we
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: call it dissolute because it is a great soluteo. You know,
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 3: our ego dissolves into this ecstatic, instinctive pool. So the
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: devil comes out of the sand and the guy's like, oh, Oh,
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 3: what's my relationship to that now that I see it?
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 3: Perhaps in this other way. The progression of figures that
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 3: emerges seems to have less and less of the devilishness
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 3: in it until the final people, including his father, just
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 3: have little red patches on them. There's just a little
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 3: bit of devilishness in it instead of just the full
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 3: possession of the devilishness. And what it suggests to me,
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 3: and perhaps is the beginning of some healing work with
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 3: the father complex, is that the dreamer is like his
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 3: father inasmuch as he too has devilish patches on him.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 3: But it is only a part of him. It is
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 3: not a full possession of the devilish, unbridled instinctiveness, but
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 3: kind of a rash, so to speak. And we can
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 3: imagine the red rash of the father and the way
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 3: that all of us have a devilish rash that rises
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 3: up in us and we become highly instinctive, which could
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 3: be very renewing sometimes, but can also get us into
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 3: a lot of trouble, depending on what our relationship is
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 3: to the impulses.
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 2: I love what you did, Joseph. I think that's just so.
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: You come up with this stuff, I'm like, wow, I
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 2: never in a million years would have gone there. That's
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 2: just great. And I'm going to just walk around it
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 2: in a slightly different way, I think, not in any
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 2: way contradicting anything you said, but maybe just sharpening my
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 2: own sword here. You know, my fantasy is that there
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 2: was this incredibly painful rupture with the father that the
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 2: dreamer never really allowed himself to feel. He says, just
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 2: to go back to it for a minute, he says,
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 2: when I was 15, I fell out with my father.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 2: He's kind of putting it all on himself. I went
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 2: to London at 18 and I lived this pretty wild life.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 2: My father died in 2020 after a long illness. We
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: both decided to accept that we were different and got on.
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 2: But we were never as close as I think we
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: both wanted to be. So somehow there was this really
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 2: remarkable rupture at a young age that it seemed like
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 2: it was like, oh, well, You know, we're just different.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 2: We're just going to agree to disagree. And I imagine
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 2: that there's a lot of unmetabolized pain around that, and
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 2: probably also some unmetabolized anger. And I like what you
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 2: said about T being a psychopomp. I think he's also,
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 2: if we're going to talk about kind of classical Jungian formulation,
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 2: he's a shadow figure. And he is leading the dreamer
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 2: through this dissolute time in the 20s, which Which in
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: some sense I think was a real reaction to the
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 2: break with the father. You know, I'm just going to
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: go kind of, you know, numb myself basically to this
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 2: awareness and kind of live in this slightly self-destructive way
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 2: as we sometimes do when we've suffered a real kind
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 2: of traumatic break. And then T is the one that says,
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 2: you know, this is not going to stay buried under
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 2: sand forever. You know, there's going to be a confrontation here.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 2: And that is, you know, sometimes shadow makes us look
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 2: at what we don't want to look at. And part
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 2: of that is this red hot anger, this devilish anger
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 2: that I imagine maybe the dreamer's been afraid of his
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 2: own anger. He's afraid of the devil. And like you said,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 2: it kind of devolves. And then it's his father. So
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 2: it's like the whole panoply of confusing feelings about this
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 2: father relationship. all the way down to, like, pity. He's
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 2: just an old guy who wants to stay dead. But,
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 2: you know, in the dreamer's psyche, he's not dead. This
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: is still a conflict that's very much alive and is
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 2: continuing to influence the dreamer, I think. I, too, was
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 2: really amazed that you could take it to the book
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 2: of Revelation and the seven seals, because there's something reassuring
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 2: when there's really an archetypal theme.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 4: That this is part of universal human experience, all kinds
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 4: of mythology, and that the first figure that emerges is
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 4: this full-blown red man, the devil. But as other figures emerge,
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 4: they're blotchier. They're more humanized, promising that these are metabolizable.
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 4: This is stuff you're ready to deal with. And then
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 4: I think the telos, the promise that you mentioned, Joseph,
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 4: is the new Jerusalem, the new beginning, is where Psyche says,
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 4: time to go there.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 3: And I think what tickled my imagination was that in
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 3: one of the podcasts that I had said in the
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 3: final moment of my father's life, the night before he died,
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 3: he was kind of petting my hand and was saying,
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 3: I'm going to Jerusalem. I am going to Jerusalem.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's right.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 3: I don't know if the dreamer remembers that particular story,
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 3: but I did. So I find myself thinking about the
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 3: New Jerusalem, Jerusalem, seven piles of sand, and the way
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 3: the synchronicity is just tickled together.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 4: Wow.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 2: That's amazing.
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 3: But what I love what we did is that there's
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 3: an amplification part, which is really interesting, the seven seals.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 3: But also, Lisa-Dev, you guys tied it into this very
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 3: human dynamic that we also could see and And it's
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 3: all mixed. It's all there.
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 4: It's all there.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 3: Or it's suggestively there, which lets us know that our
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 3: personal suffering also has a deep and archetypal dimension to it. Exactly.
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 3: Which is why it's so meaningful. Yeah. And it has
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: a telos.
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 2: And in terms of telos, there's that lovely synchronicity, Joseph,
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 2: that you just brought up about the new Jerusalem. I
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: also want to say that the devil, the little devil
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 2: coming out of this egg reminds me a bit of Mercurius,
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 2: the kind of spirit in the bottle from the Grimm's
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 2: fairy tale, which is, you know, this incredibly powerful force
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 2: that must be channeled correctly. But when it's channeled correctly,
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 2: as in the Grimm's fairy tale, I think it's called
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 2: the spirit in the bottle. It gives, the gift that
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 2: it gives is healing. It can heal anything. So that
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 2: is also telos there.
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: You've been listening to This Jungian Life. From our website, thisjungianlife.com,
• 1:26:39
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• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: and submit your dreams for possible interpretation on another episode.
• 1:26:50
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• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: for today's show and hope you'll let us know what
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: topics you'd enjoy hearing more about. Until next time, keep
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: living this Jungian life.
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 2: Thank you.