Welcome to this Jungian life.

Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, 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 Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

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

Today we're going to talk about crazy parents.

And I know that there is a way in which the term crazy parents I've got crazy parents can be humorous, it can be used as a dismissal of parental authority.

It can be a way that we exaggerate to be funny when we're looking for commiseration with our friends.

I think teenagers will often say, oh my parents are crazy as a way of diminishing their

authority in service to the teenagers desire to be independent or to

reinforce their own will their own decisions. But dropping deeper down into

the topic, what is it really like to have a truly mentally ill parent, a father, a mother, or both?

What does that do to the psyche of the child and to the general field of the family.

How do kids survive that or thrive in that environment?

And what do they draw upon to be able to come out of that later in life in a way that perhaps has made them even stronger?

And I would add to the mentally ill category a parent who is alcoholic or who is otherwise addicted

to not just a substance but to something like

sort of mental illness and or something like

sort of mental illness and or serious dysfunction.

Yes, you know, not sort of garden variety, you know, I mean, all parents have failings,

but then there's something else that we recognize as a little more serious that is a truly

impaired. Yes, yes. So in this episode some of the speakers myself and are going to drop down into a little bit more personal experience and open up a little bit more.

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