Episode 075 - Negative Mother Complex: When Our Painful Childhood Owns Us
Release Date: 09/05/2019
Selkie Folklore: Should we force soul to serve us?
This Jungian Life
The Selkie swims ashore at night, sheds her seal skin, hides it, and delights in her human form. In Celtic lore, she is the wild feminine soul, a creature of land and sea, innocent and beautiful, who cannot thrive in domesticity. In folklore, the seal-folk are discovered by humans. Their natural, joyous spirit, grace, and affection invite contact. Humans are drawn to them, but if they touch, parting is unbearable. Many a young man, desperate to maintain the life-giving embrace of nature, steals a Selkie’s seal skin, locking her into a human form. Helpless, she is led into...
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INITIATIONS: universal processes that spark transformation
This Jungian Life
The archetype of Initiation is primordial, and its force guides our transformative transitions. For Jung, this change reshapes spiritual, emotional, intellectual, behavioral, and social dynamics. Rooted in his anthropological studies, Jung emphasized the vital role of formal ceremonies in fostering separation from parental influences and facilitating integration into adult communities. These ceremonies marked a clear transition from childhood and established an essential connection with the adult community, promoting the collaborative culture by containing unconscious forces. Derived from...
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The Barbie Movie: Can it Dismantle an American Myth?
This Jungian Life
[Spoiler Alert.] In the opening scene of the Barbie movie, listless little girls dressed as drab Dust Bowl mothers play at ironing as they tend plastic babies until a gigantic cosmic Barbie appears on the landscape in a vogue pose. Her presence inspires the girls to smash their dolls and cast off their pretend chores in a whirl of rageful frustration. While this scene spoofs 2001: A Space Odyssey, it unknowingly dramatizes an archetypal event in the collective American psyche. In 1959, the Barbie doll hit the market and created a stir. American mothers objected to her sensuous form, so...
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From SHAMANISM to JUNG: Understanding 'Loss of Soul'
This Jungian Life
As Jung’s anthropological studies expanded and his international travel exposed him to new cultures and ideas, he was taken by the concept of ‘loss of soul.’ A collapse of energy, a strange sudden alteration of personality, or episodes of blinding rage could signify a loss of soul from a shamanic perspective. The soul carries the animating and regulating forces as well as memory. In most traditions, it was expected to fly away upon death, much like the Egyptian Ba, depicted as a bird with a human head. Because the soul had an independent life, it might flee suddenly, leaving a...
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HAGITUDE: Sharon Blackie on the power of aging
This Jungian Life
Sharon Blackie calls us to the ancient archetype of the Hag as a figure of unapologetic emergence from cultural pressures that lock us into outworn roles and limiting beliefs. Drawing upon her transformative experiences in menopause Blackie grounds the mythic figure of the old woman who fashioned the world in her fierce determination to dissolve and reconfigure her professional and personal life. Identifying and rejecting cultural pressures to look and act a certain way as she ages, she claims the second half of her life for a post-heroic journey of intense creativity and unapologetic...
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THREE VOICES, ONE SONG: Lessons in Friendship
This Jungian Life
The essence of friendship is visible in its linguistic root: ‘to love.’ Cicero wrote, “Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief." In modern times the art of friending seems lost. We have replaced shared experiences with Facebook posts and quell our loneliness by scrolling. With high spirits, we three revisit our first meeting and reflect on the discovery of kinship between us. Our experiences of trust, reciprocity, and shared hardship marked by endless conversations and abundant laughter forged our bond during...
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You're Not A Fraud: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
This Jungian Life
Imposter syndrome constellates the gut-wrenching fear of being exposed as a fraud no matter how much we have learned or the successes we have demonstrated. In 1978 two researchers identified and explored a painful phenomenon among some high-achieving women. Despite their high levels of success, they were convinced they were not as competent, intelligent, or skilled as others might think. Instead of identifying with their capabilities, they often attributed their success to luck, personal persuasion, or an unanticipated burst of energy. Further research revealed this struggle was equally...
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FRIEND or FOE: The AI Debate with Michael L. Littman, PhD
This Jungian Life
The uses and abuses of ChatGPT artificial intelligence language model have taken the collective imagination by storm. Apocalyptic predictions of the singularity, when technology becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, frighten us as we imagine a future where human intelligence is irrelevant. Prof. Michael Littman joins us to contextualize the advancement of artificial intelligence and debunk the paranoid rhetoric littering the public discourse. Michael has made groundbreaking research contributions enabling machines to learn from their experiences, assess the environment, make decisions,...
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The Conjunction of Art and Life with Peter Kramer
This Jungian Life
"Death of the Great Man" by Dr. Peter D. Kramer offers a glimpse into the character disordered alpha narcissist. It is more than a satirical political commentary on Donald Trump. It points us to a broader discourse on power dynamics in the collective psyche, the potential for authority to corrupt our humanity and the dangerous ways we escape from freedom by surrendering self-responsibility. The unique blend of psychiatric insight and literary narrative brings an unusual depth to the work. The narrator, psychiatrist Henry Farber, places the reader at his side, admitting his negative...
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Meeting Shadow on the Spiritual Path with Connie Zweig
This Jungian Life
Award-winning author, depth psychotherapist, and guide Connie Zweig shows us encountering darkness is a necessary part of our spiritual journey. In the first half of life, we disown aspects of ourselves to fit in and navigate our world more smoothly. Over time we realize all aspects of ourselves must be recalled and befriended. Integration of these shadow aspects lays the foundation for spiritual awakening. Through careful introspection, dreamwork, and self-confrontation, we can see beyond stereotypes and projections, avoiding the pitfalls of black-and-white thinking. Jung reminds us,...
info_outlineHealing a Negative Mother Complex
As the mother is the generator of life and usual primary attachment figure, the mother complex is universal. As the image of a “personified affect” fueled by an archetypal core, the mother complex is especially powerful. In its negative aspect, it may arise from a mother who was experienced as uncaring, attacking, possessive, withholding, absent, or wounded. It is likely to show up in relationships with others and in the relationship with oneself. Fairy tales like The Raven and Six Swans teach us that healing a negative mother complex takes time and perseverance—and that we may be aided by an animus prince or an anima princess, images of the autonomous unconscious. By responding to the turmoil of the mother complex one can embrace the task of finding the mother within. Dream
"Last night I had a dream I was in a cave that had mosaic designs all over the walls. They were old ancient ruins like from Ancient Greece or Turkey. The first one was of some type of fertility goddess-like Ishtar or Lilith, but I can’t remember the details exactly. But the image frightened me, and I was afraid to go inside. Then above the ruins, there was a church. It was an Eastern Orthodox Church. It sort of reminded me of the Hagia Sofia. A painting of the Black Madonna was hanging on the wall. All the church members were women and the pastor was a woman as well. I don’t recall what we were talking about or what the pastor was saying, but I was transfixed upon that painting. That’s all I can remember."
References
Book: Elinor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
YouTube: Clay Weiner (“Videos”: Mothers Day) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAxfh8ukosQ