This Jungian Life Podcast

This week’s guest, Jungian analyst Dr. Warren Sibilla, defines patience as the ability to live one's life with eyes, ears, and heart wide open. That is a far cry from waiting to see what happens, or giving up.

Patience asks us to go within, find the capacity for containment, and recognize that choosing non-action can be the needed form of action. We recognize, feel, and suffer the situation that has arisen, but resist the urge to immediate action in the external world. We search instead for discernment, containment, and meaning making in the internal world. It takes work to develop staying power. 

The fairy tale heroine in Six Swans worked in silence for six years to weave starflower shirts to liberate her six brothers. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey spent years weaving her father-in-law’s shroud each day and undoing it at night. Like them, we may be required to work patiently on taxing tasks with uncertain outcomes. The gift of such labors is a sovereign self in relationship with the Self.

The quality of patience is central to psychoanalysis. Analysands arrive seeking solutions to urgent problems, but insights take time to unfold, and it may be longer before paths to meaningful change appear. The Jungian precept of holding the tension of opposites asks us to foster patience. We must neither collapse into despair nor take premature action. Patience is fundamental to inner growth and transformation.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

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The fairy tale of the Princess Who Changed her Fate enacts what Jung tells us will happen when we remain unconscious of an inner situation: it happens outside us, as fate.

Just as the princess in the story finds her unruly “fate” tearing up cloth and smashing her generous host’s dishes, we may find that our unclaimed shadow wreaks havoc at work and in our relationships.

Yet this is a hopeful story.  The beleaguered princess is able to take the right attitude, and so find a path to changing her fate. The character of the second queen gives us a model of feminine wisdom, empathy and patient awareness - this is what is needed at a difficult moment to start the slow process of turning things around.

The princess, the third of three daughters, can also be seen to illustrate the concept of a family scapegoat, bearing the burden of her family’s dysfunction and expressing it symptomatically. As with many who suffer this way, she takes the option of a clean break, setting out on a form of the hero’s journey with gold coins sewn in the hem of her dress.

When the princess changes her fate, we’re shown the potential of deep psychological work: sitting with an ugly fate, tossing the bread back and forth, putting one foot in front of the other, until we  access some valuable information. Rather than just gaining insights into the patterns we’re living out, we’re able to shift them and create different outcomes.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

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Adaptation is a bread-and-butter concept in psychotherapy - can we accept, adjust to, and thrive in the outer and inner worlds we live in? Given constraints, what does it take to find life at least meaningful, hopefully satisfying--and flourish? 

This week Jungian analyst and author JOHN R. WHITE, Ph.D. joins us to circumambulate the complexities of adaptation. Successful adaptation involves making conscious choices based on a realistic understanding of the internal and external parameters in which we operate. Adaptation not only requires a true-to-life perception of possibilities and pathways in the external world, it may also require reassessment and reordering of our values and attitudes. 

We discuss Robert Langs’ “adaptive paradigm,” a distinct model of the mind and the unconscious and emotional components that connect inner life to the outer world. For example, Langs understands dreams as feedback about current adaptive challenges. This is both subtly different and complementary to Jung’s approach, which suggests that inability to solve an outer world problem is often due to an underdeveloped understanding of an aspect of inner life.

Adaptation does not eliminate turmoil, suffering and loss; they are part of life. We need to recognize environmental actualities and internal limitations that cannot be changed—and develop ways to mitigate or adjust to them. Successful adaptation also requires mourning what cannot be changed, developing a less egocentric stance, and building a life in tune with reality. 

Visit our website to read today’s dream and a complete list of the resources we mention: https://thisjungianlife.com/adaptation/

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Lindsay Clancy has brought renewed attention to the horror of infanticide: babies and children dying at the hands of their mother. Infanticide has taken place for millennia, most often due to social pressures or lack of the resources needed to raise a child. Human collectives around the world remain ill-equipped to protect our youngest by providing support to mothers in material or emotional distress.

Today’s guest is clinical psychologist Dr. Brooke Laufer, author of Uncovering the Act of Maternal Infanticide from a Psychological, Political, and Jungian Perspective. Brooke joins us to discuss infanticide, maternal psychosis, and the archetype of the death mother, long portrayed in myth. The Hindu goddess Kali births and nourishes her children -- and also devours them. In Greek myth Medea kills her children after her husband’s abandonment and betrayal. The Black Madonna offers a potentially healing combination of the maternal and the fierce.

The debate raging around Lindsay Clancy’s case asks us not to take sides but to integrate the dark realities of motherhood instead of splitting those off and only acknowledging an idealized version of the maternal. Although motherhood is often portrayed as joyful and fulfilling, we deny its dark side at our peril. Our task is to recognize motherhood light and dark as a prerequisite to providing meaningful measures aimed at ameliorating childhood neglect and abuse.

Visit our website to find the resources we mention.

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OpenAI recently had to explain to frightened users why their models kept introducing goblins and gremlins into otherwise humdrum conversations. Is it possible that archetypes are emerging through the field of collective knowledge amassed by large language models (LLMs)?

This week neuropsychiatrist TOM POLLAK Ph.D joins us to discuss AI, archetypes and psychotherapy. It is perhaps unsurprising that AI, which now contains the symbolic output of much of humanity (cannibalized mostly without permission), should spontaneously generate unpredictable and often dangerous archetypes.

We consider the example of Nova:  a consistently AI generated persona who appears as a kind of fallen angel, or goddess gone rogue. Numinous and tender, she convinces the user she understands them as no one else does, and then in some cases encourages susceptible users toward self-harm or even suicide.

We also discuss the ways in which AI is challenging the work of the therapist, its profound destabilization of culture, and the potential for it to play a positive role in psycho-spiritual development.

Dr. Tom Pollak is a London-based neuropsychiatrist and immunopsychiatry researcher exploring the mind through the frameworks of medicine and science, as well as through lived experience, contemplative practice and the search for meaning. You can read more of his work on his popular Substack, Error Signals.

Find the resources mentioned this week on our website: https://thisjungianlife.com/aiandarchetypes/

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