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's episode, we're going to talk about the pressure to conform.

And as we've been mulling this over between the three of us for some time, there is so many dimensions with which this is significant.

The way in which families can force us to conform, the way our religious groups can force us to

conform, and in mythology, the way our religious groups can force us to conform.

And in mythology, we find many examples and fairy tales

of the struggle between conformity and following one's own path.

And another area we'll be sure to cover is when is rejecting conformity or rebelling

against conformity in service to the self to individ, and when is it just a form of being precious and stirring up trouble?

Yeah, or attention seeking or lots of other things in some other way defensive. Yeah, that's instead of really in the service of one's own

developmental arc and I feel like I want to sort of plant a stake in one side of the

argument here that it's it's pretty easy to go to a kind of

sentimental place about this like oh it's really good to strike out on your own and

go your own way and that that's always virtuous. But of course everything in the

psyche has two sides and the thing about pressures to conform is that

conformity serves us. It serves the collective and it's often serves the individual.

I mean, Conformity is what helps us establish an orderly collective life, and it helps us find our path maybe when we don't

know what that path should be. I mean I think there's real value in sticking with what has worked

...