THE WHALE: a film about trauma, obesity, and the undying hope to connect.
Release Date: 04/13/2023
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_outlineWe are born with a drive to connect meaningfully with our caregivers. When that is thwarted by fate, deprivation, or hostility, our psyche rallies, it redirects our instincts to the imaginal world where archetypal forces can care for us, and our intolerable feelings can be hidden in a cast of inner characters. We still long for compassionate connection, but the inner figures of our caregivers are intolerable, so sometimes the archetypal mother hides in food—and we follow.
In the recent film “The Whale” starring Brendon Frasier, we meet his character Charlie, an English teacher trying to motivate his online students. With his camera off, his disembodied voice admonishes them to communicate clearly with him. This foreshadows his great struggle to make contact. When the class finishes, the scene expands, and we slowly see Charlie, a 600-pound man struggling to meet the last few needs he permits himself.
Unresolved relational trauma is like a slowly shrinking room. Year by year, in tiny increments, without noticing it, we give up choice after choice until we are boxed in. The few thin channels of life that can reach Charlie are his friend Liz and his online students. The remaining totally unobstructed channel to take in goodness is food, his lifeline beyond the shrinking room.
Unlike his troubled caregivers, food can be controlled and so rendered harmless; it’s allowed in and brings relief and pleasure. All of us cornered by trauma find a secret tunnel through which some small goodness can touch us. Throughout the movie, life tries to rescue Charlie, walking through his front door despite his frightened protests. Characters storm in, demanding acknowledgment. Through these encounters, Charlie is forced out of his shrinking life.
Obesity is never a choice; it is a sign that other paths to receive have been ruined. Many fight their way free, some are rescued by love, and some seek promising new medications. Charlie fights for love and finally resurfaces, drawn by his daughter’s fierce eyes demanding engagement.
“The Whale” depicts a real-world problem and is also an allegory, a contemporary retelling of an epic story. When we learn to see beyond the surface of people’s specific struggles, we can recognize the great human endeavor we all share-- to love and be loved, to know and be known.
HERE’S THE DREAM WE ANALYZE:
“I just moved to my childhood neighborhood with my best friend, and I wake up before dawn. As I walk home to school, my legs melt, and I fall to the floor. A classmate finds me lying on the floor and takes his chance to try and have sex with me. I beg him to please carry me home. Inside, my ex-boyfriend and family became concerned about my state. I need to rest; everything is fine. This new house is big and has a beautiful light, yet it seems old and dusty. There are several pieces of wood of unfinished furniture that I cannot work on now. I leave the house again; everything seems nice, but on my way home, my legs stop working, and I desperately start to crawl. Now I seem not to find the door to the house; luckily, a cleaning worker comes up to help me, then she hands me a caterpillar having babies. She tells me had I been lying on my bed for more time, I would have woken up surrounded by them.”
REFERENCES: THE WHALE (film, 2022)
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