Episode 127 - Seeking Certainty: The Seduction of Conspiracy Theories
Release Date: 09/03/2020
Signs Contempt Is Ruining Your Relationship & Ways to Cope
This Jungian Life
Contempt feels like a gut punch. It’s a cold, distancing act that devalues a person even as it avoids solving a real problem. The contemptuous are full of shame, fear, or hurt, so they recreate those feelings in others to evade their own issues. Unlike anger (which tries to correct an injustice), disgust (which avoids what feels contaminating), or hatred (which seeks destruction), contempt asserts superiority and cuts off relatedness. It shows up in eye‑rolling, sarcasm, mockery, and a habit of judging others as beneath one’s standards. Whether you’re struggling to survive it...
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SEPARATIO: The Alchemical Secret That Ends Confusion
This Jungian Life
Alchemical separatio is the skill of sorting out your mind. You separate what belongs to you—your complexes, habitual triggers, and painful memories--from what is happening in the world around you. In the laboratory of your life, you separate present triggers from older wounds, and literal facts from symbolic meanings. This is part of your essential self-ordering instinct. As you bring more and more of yourself into conscious awareness, a delightful calm will tell you you’re on the right path. Join us and learn how to gain the profound clarity necessary on the path of Individuation. Read...
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LUCID DREAMING: How to Make the Most of a Magical Opportunity
This Jungian Life
Lucid dreaming is an interesting ego state when we are dreaming and regain full self-awareness. Being awake in the dream world can be useful, but imposing a rigid agenda can undermine the Dream Maker’s attempts to educate and help us. Each dream is crafted to incrementally expand our awareness and acceptance of unconscious factors we need in order to grow. When we wake inside a dream, we can lose track of that important attitude and may use the dream as our playground—most people try to fly and miss significant opportunities. If we can achieve a non-grasping clarity, lucidity can deepen...
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Shadow, Evil, and Individuation: Jung’s View of the Devil
This Jungian Life
The devil archetype carries three qualities: it promotes bestial violence of every kind, it tries to convince us that the material world is the only reality, and it fools us into thinking we can spiritually ascend through intellect alone. On a personal level, it gathers our disowned infernal traits—envy, rage, greed, and the wish to dominate —and seduces us into believing those qualities are virtues. Once we face our own devilishness and grant it a symbolic form, we can assume a choiceful stance. Lacking that, we try to evacuate our own evil by projecting it onto others and then...
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Horror as a Mirror: What Netflix’s MONSTER Makes Us See
This Jungian Life
The new controversial Netflix series MONSTER: The Ed Gein Story offers a window into the devouring mother archetype, a transformation fantasy gone horribly wrong, and the human capacity for monstrous behavior. Gein’s crimes inspired the Hitchcock movie Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs. It challenges the audience to confront its fascination with evil and begs the question, where do the monsters hide in our own Psyche? To help us wrestle with these questions, we’re joined by Joey Pollari—actor, musician, director, editor, and the man who plays Anthony Perkins...
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SUBLIMATIO: Jung’s Alchemical Method of Turning Problems into Archetypes
This Jungian Life
Do you get overwhelmed by intense feelings and old patterns, feeling stuck because you can’t make sense of what’s happening, and reacting on impulse instead of pausing to choose a steady, thoughtful response? Jung’s alchemical insights will help. Sublimatio is an old alchemy term for heating a solid so that it turns directly into a gas, rises, and then cools back into a solid higher up. As a psychological metaphor, this happens when we discover an archetypal image or idea that adds a fresh perspective on an old problem. The vapor becomes a solid again when we apply the new attitude to...
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People Pleasing Is Making You Sick!
This Jungian Life
People Pleasing is a compulsive strategy that disavows your needs and surrenders your agency. It begins in family systems that only reward compliance, which produces a false self. If your soul is constantly devalued, you may develop dependent narcissism with a covert contract: “I’ll keep you happy, and you’ll keep me safe.” Healing comes when you identify your true experience—notice whether you feel drained, tense, or obligated versus calm, interested, or genuinely willing. Give yourself permission to pause before agreeing. Say, “I’ll think about it,” step away to check...
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If Looks Could Kill: The Death Mother Archetype
This Jungian Life
Some mothers attack life in their children. They crush appetite, joy, curiosity, and initiative. They call it love or duty. It is not love. It is domination dressed as care. She withholds warmth to make the child obedient. She intrudes when the child needs space and vanishes when the child needs help. She shames tears, punishes play, mocks ambition, and polices the body. She turns boundaries into punishments and favors into chains. The Death Mother archetype is ancient and modern, requiring careful confrontation to free the parent and the child from its destructive grip. Today, we will help...
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Projection and Play: What Dolls Do to Psyche
This Jungian Life
Dolls are human stand-ins that invite projection and play; children use them (including action figures and Barbies) to try on identities and develop imagination, then later withdraw the projection as the figure becomes inert again. Icons and idols differ because their meaning is fixed and not for play, which limits imaginative engagement. The healthiest use of dolls is symbolic—relating to them without collapsing into literal belief—while overly realistic “reborn” dolls, talk-box toys, and similar literalizations can narrow imagination, blur symbol and reality. Across history, dolls...
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MYTHS: Maps of the Collective Unconscious
This Jungian Life
Think of myths as the dreams of an entire culture. Those stories reside in the collective unconscious and influence all of us throughout our lifespan. Mythic patterns shape our attitudes, and when we recognize them, we can link our personal experiences to the universal. When you’re panicking, you’re under the influence of Pan; when you’re sunk in gloom, you’re on a night-sea journey like Odysseus. Jungians’ call linking the personal to the universal, amplification: take a symptom, link it to a myth, and you’ve shifted it from “my private defect” to “a shared force,” which...
info_outlineIn times of uncertainty truth is hard to discern, collective cohesion frays, and social factions become embattled. Unmediated shadow then seeks expression through the archetypal realm and takes on extra-ordinary attributes. Persecutory mythologies arise, for big psychic situations need big stories to compensate for big feelings of anxiety, powerlessness, and marginalization.
Insecurities are projected onto the outer-world as clandestine enemies of mythic proportions: alien rulers, government cabals, and other images of secret domination. Understanding conspiracy theories as symbolic expressions of unconscious contents can allow us to take them seriously without taking them literally. We may then respond with consciousness and empathy instead of judgment--and begin to shift the collective psychic field toward wholeness.
Dream
I am with my housemate, L, and we are in a city. The dream begins with us trying to get an answer to a question about the psychology of animals (I do not remember specifics of the question). We have gone to see a psychologist whose last name is Green. He is writing something on his laptop and when we ask to speak with him he asks for 30 minutes. There are churros in the waiting area, and for some reason I am taking some in a bag.
Somehow I know there is a party that I am supposed to be bringing these back for. There isn’t even a churro machine, a stack of them just continues to appear in the same spot on a desk. Once I have entered the conference room with Dr. Green, I am in the middle of eating a bite of churro and cannot respond to what he is saying, though he is laughing at the fact that my mouth is full of churro. Suddenly, the entire world has changed, I am entering what looks like a room from the back of a club, or maybe an abandoned house?
The dreamscape room has a deep purple color and though there is no light in the room, I can still see. At this point in the dream I become lucid and think “I should make something appear here”, however, a man appears in the room and he begins to wrestle me to the ground. We begin fighting and the face of the man seems to be changing as we roll. I do not recognize him. I have an intuition that I am dancing, however, I decide to fight back against the attacker. I punch the man and the dreamscape changes again. I am in the middle of a living room at the bottom of a tower and realize that I have just punched Dr. Green.
I apologize profusely, and end up saying, “sorry, Dad… I mean… Doc”. I put my hands on my head after this slip up and am feeling very confused. Dr. Green says it’s ok and that we should begin making our way up the tower. I look up and see L climbing the stairs and her face is covered in sweat. Dr. Green begins up the stairs but I realize I can float. I allow myself to float just to see what it is like and then I wake up.
References
C.G. Jung. The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society (Amazon).
Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary: The divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Amazon).
Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Amazon).