There are natural times where the ego has to have its primary guiding principles re-examined,

and often later in life, they have to be sacrificed,

so that something better, more expansive, more reflective of the maturity that we've gained can emerge.

Welcome to this Jungian life.

Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee,

invite you to join them for an intimate and honest

conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.

I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a

Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, on Cape Cod.

Today, Joseph and I, as Lisa can't be here, are going to discuss an important life process and one that is critical in alchemy, part of our ongoing series of alchemical processes, and that is

the process of mortificatio or death. From a psychological point of view, it's the dark turning

point, but when we are in that process, it doesn't feel like a turning

point. It feels like the end that we are just in the negrado, alchemical term for the blackness

or depression. It's associated with shadow. It's associated with death. It's associated with

putrefaction, dismemberment, you know, all kinds of awful, dark things that we don't want to face.

And yet we do in the course of a life.

So what are the elements, psychologically speaking, that can die and may need to die when we

experience mortificatio?

Well, the first and most universal thing is it's some element of ego

that usually has to accede to a force greater than itself.

As we all know from Jung and others, one of the necessary conditions for humanity and being human

...