Episode 20 -- Mother-in-Law
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2018
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The mother-in-law is not only the subject of many a joke but the subject of fairy tale and myth. Conflict between the older and younger woman lies in the archetypal realm, as both struggle to come to terms with differences, age, and the power of both youth and age.
The Dream:
Somehow my baby’s right arm has come completely out of her socket and is completely detached. I try to put it back into her socket, hoping for a miracle (which doesn’t happen) so I put her back into her cot. Later, I look for her, thinking I need to feed her but cannot find her. I search high and low, still there’s no baby. By chance, I find her in another room, it was like she was deliberately moved there. Her skin is very cold but she is alive. Her arm is still detached. I’ll have to take her to the doctor’s, I think, and get her arm sewn on, if that’s even possible. I wake up.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:03.0 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:09.0 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 0:27.0 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a youngian analyst on Cape Cod. |
| 0:31.0 | So today we are going to talk about a topic that's been the subject of |
| 0:36.4 | lots of jokes and I'm sure plenty of therapy sessions. There are some books. There's a rock song and here it is the mother-in-law. Here's a |
| 0:48.5 | typical mother-in-law joke. There are lots of them right online. |
| 0:53.2 | So David is finally engaged and is excited to show off his new bride. |
| 0:58.0 | Mom, he says to his mother, I'm going to bring home three girls and I want you to guess which one is my |
| 1:03.8 | fiancee so 20 minutes later David walks in the door with three girls following him |
| 1:08.8 | it's that one says his mother without blinking and I holy cow cow exclaimed David, how in the world did you know it was her? |
| 1:15.0 | I just don't like her, she replied. |
| 1:18.0 | Oh yes, what fraud territory. |
| 1:24.5 | And there aren't any daughter-in-law jokes or son-in-law jokes or so it goes, but mother-in-law |
| 1:30.0 | has a real archetypal bedrock that's large, heavy, and deep and that's what we're going to talk about. |
| 1:41.0 | It goes to the mother archetype, doesn't it it is how that sits in one's life. The negative |
| 1:46.8 | aspect of the mother-in-law archetype, the mother-in-law has attracted all of that sort of iron filings like a giant magnet around the negative aspect of the mother. |
| 2:00.0 | So talking about the bedrock of it, the ancieness of this tension, there's probably evidence |
| 2:09.8 | in myths and fairy tales in all kinds of places around this. |
| 2:12.6 | Oh yes, oh yes. |
| 2:14.6 | There are a lot of fairy tales actually that feature a mother-in-law. |
... |
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