DEATH: A Jungian Perspective

This Jungian Life Podcast

Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

Jungian, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Psychology, Dreams, Jung, Relationships, Selfhelp, Society & Culture, Psychoanalysis

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2022

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Awareness of death can help us create an intentional life—one that serves the movement of soul toward wholeness. Jung realized that although we experience death as “a fearful piece of brutality,” the unconscious images death as celebration. On a night train, after his mother died, Jung reported that “during the entire journey I continually heard dance music, laughter, and jollity, as though a wedding were being celebrated.” Our limited capacities and the conditions of earthly life preclude certainty about life after death, but Jung’s recognition of universal mythic patterns led to his theory of archetypes and a psychic reality beyond our grasp. We glimpse it in dreams, visions, precognitions, and synchronicities, and it can inspire connection with the infinite, which Jung considered life’s decisive question. For Jung, death was “an archetype rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole.”

REFERENCES:

C.G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004X19L3E/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_BZYJF184D3ZSXT9WR3ZF

C.G. Jung. Collected Works, Vol. 8: The Soul & Death. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691097747/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_38HYESF2JQ13FB49H0E9

Von Franz, Marie Louise. On Dreams and Death. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812693671/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_ND8DQF0VKRXW8GQ9P9R7

Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385418868/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_SB4EJWY02WJ8XGWCRF42

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano,
0:07.1	Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation
0:12.3	that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. I'm Lisa Marchiano,
0:20.1	and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
0:22.5	I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
0:27.5	I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod.
0:37.2	We wanted to address this enormous topic that we've been talking about bringing up on the podcast for a while, and we just decided to go for it this week.
0:47.4	We're going to be talking about death.
0:49.7	This is obviously an enormous topic.
0:51.9	We've given some thought to trying to make it a little more specific, but it's not really
0:56.8	yielding to us as is fitting.
1:00.9	And so we're aware we're stepping into some very, very big territory.
1:04.9	We're all feeling somewhat inadequate to the task, but we're going to launch in and see how we do today with an eye toward
1:14.4	exploring what Jung thought about death and perhaps exploring a little bit what dreams have to say
1:21.7	about death. And so with that as an introduction, let's set off into this very mysterious territory.
1:31.1	There is a fairly long chapter in Jung's memoir, Memories, Dreams, Dreams,
1:39.1	Reflections, Life After Death, that's the title of the chapter. I've read it before. I've read it again yesterday
1:50.3	and went back to it. Jung really speculates on what might be and gives some credence to the speculations that we're all, I think, familiar with from many a religious tradition.
2:13.3	He gives credence to the primacy of psychic reality and how we experience those psychic realities
2:22.9	through our dreams and other kinds of experiences.
2:30.3	And I found that an interesting and important kind of nodal point,
2:37.3	that there is a liminal space, perhaps a transcendent space,
	...

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