THE WHALE: a film about trauma, obesity, and the undying hope to connect.
Release Date: 04/13/2023
TAMING YOUR INNER CRITIC: Turn Self-Attack into Self-Awareness
This Jungian Life
Our inner critic—that voice constantly tearing us down—can stem from difficult childhood experiences, negative cultural messages, or even powerful archetypal forces deep within us. While healthy self-assessment involves honestly owning our mistakes, feeling genuine regret, and making amends, the harsh inner critic keeps us stuck in cycles of self-hatred and shame. Sometimes, beating ourselves up can actually be a sneaky way to avoid openly engaging a problem or soberly accepting responsibility. The trick is to slow down, get curious, and talk back to that voice—to have an honest inner...
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SHARK: Elemental Symbol of Our Will to Survive and Ravenous Hunger for Experience
This Jungian Life
Primeval, silent, relentless—the shark announces itself as its fin slices the water. In that instant, ego’s barriers shudder and give way: you’re not anxious; you’re utterly alert, stripped of distraction by a force both familiar and uncanny. When you stop battling that raw terror and honor it—offer a silent libation of attention—the predator becomes a protector. Here, in the shark’s unblinking gaze, you meet the stranger in your depths, the animality you once fled, now guiding you to face what you’ve long denied. Read along with our dream analysis ....
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MOTIVATION: What Happens When Your Get-Up-and-Go Leaves Without You?
This Jungian Life
Motivation rises from conscious and unconscious dynamics. We can reason with ourselves to take logical action while our libido flows with its own intelligence. When these two aspects align, we find ourselves acting decisively and effectively with remarkable freedom. When we’re at odds with the secret intelligence of the unconscious, we can find ourselves uncomfortably suspended. As we honor the autonomy of Psyche and cultivate a curious friendship with it, we can discover a creative collaboration that sets us in a fresh direction aligned with the Self. Read along with our dream analysis ....
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Sibling Rivalry: Archetypal Conflicts and Shadow Dynamics in Families
This Jungian Life
Sibling rivalry can bruise and build in equal measure. On the hard side, the older child feels toppled from the throne, the younger scrambles for a foothold, and both learn how quickly envy, resentment, and score-keeping ignite—whether over a parent’s extra hour of attention or the larger slice of birthday cake. Those early contests can calcify into adult grudges that surface in estate negotiations, workplace jockeying, or mismatched relationships. Yet the same daily friction teaches useful skills: we sharpen empathy by reading a sibling’s next move, develop a theory of mind through...
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Mandala Archetype: How the Self Turns Chaos into Cosmos
This Jungian Life
Mandalas are Psyche’s way of drawing a compass for you when life feels off-kilter. Jung noticed that these circular patterns—whether they appear in Navajo sand paintings, Tibetan yantras, or last night’s dream—pull everything back toward a stable center he called the Self. The rim defines where your ego ends; the cross-lines and repeating fours help you locate sensation, feeling, thinking, and intuition in relation to your core. By “walking” the circle, even in imagination, the ego learns to orbit rather than hijack the organizing center, and the usual tug-of-war between instinct...
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House Dreams: Schematics of Your Psychological Functioning
This Jungian Life
When a house turns up in a dream, it isn’t a staging background—it’s an architectural X-ray of your inner life, drafted by the dream maker overnight and delivered to your doorstep at dawn. Floors chart levels of awareness, locked doors expose repressed material, intruders crash in as disowned traits, and every leaking pipe or crooked stair announces a personal attitude in need of repair. In this episode, we’ll teach you how to read the blueprint with the same clarity you’d bring to structural engineering, and your dream will hand you a working map for shadow work,...
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Ready for the Real Snow White? The True Tale of Envy, Murder, and Retribution
This Jungian Life
Ever wonder why “Snow White” still hooks us after all the Disney glitter flakes off? This episode strips the tale down to its psychological wiring: murderous envy of the mother shadow, malignant innocence, the unforgiving “mirror” inside that only answers the questions we’re brave enough to ask, and the dangerous alchemy that transforms three lethal mistakes into mature authority. You’ll hear why the dwarflike bits of half-formed masculinity in all of us mine gold from the unconscious, how raw instinct often finishes the work refined methods can’t, and how real agency...
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Forging the Upward Thread: Why Do We Create Religions?
This Jungian Life
The religious function is part of who we are — as natural as needing food or love. It’s the inner drive that pushes us to find meaning, to touch something larger than ourselves. Jung saw that if we don’t tend it, it doesn’t go away; it twists itself into addictions, compulsions, or a kind of soul-sickness. Religion, in the deepest sense, isn’t about belief systems. It’s about real encounters with the Self — the larger reality inside us that humbles, heals, and reshapes us. Dreams, symbols, and moments of awe are how Psyche keeps that connection alive. Without them,...
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Trauma Can Be Rewritten: The Use of Art to Reimagine our Past and Grant Us New Life
This Jungian Life
Viviane Silvera animated 30,000 of her hand-painted images to explore how traumatic memories are formed, stored, and ultimately transformed. Her animated documentary, SEE MEMORY, traces the intimate story of a young woman caught between past and present; her film captures the fragmented texture of trauma and the healing that becomes possible when painful memories are witnessed. In our conversation with Viviane, we explore her process of recovering lost memories and how opposing perspectives can constellate new attitudes toward trauma. We discuss cutting-edge findings on the way the brain...
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How to Develop Your Inner Guidance: Charting a Path Through the Current Chaos with Jung’s Insights
This Jungian Life
Today you'll learn about inner guidance--the quiet, built-in compass that surfaces when we pause the outer noise long enough to feel what rings true inside. It is less a mystical oracle than a subtle convergence of bodily signals, emotional undertones, and intuitive "hunches" distilled from our lived experience. When we meet a decision with open attention—neither forcing a rational verdict nor surrendering to raw impulse—this inner faculty sorts, weighs, and hints at the direction that aligns with our deepest values. Acting on it demands two skills: discerning authentic signals from fear...
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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