Episode 30 - Escaping Literalism

This Jungian Life Podcast

Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2018

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We consider literalism as a normal state in childhood; children’s literalism can be funny and charming. We grow first into the ability to understand metaphor and conceptualize symbols and levels of meaning. Literalism can then serve as a defense against uncertainty, as ego’s resistance to any threat to its power, and as a refusal to confront unwelcome truths from the unconscious. A symbolic attitude, however, opens the inner world to adventure, mystery and creativity.

The dream:

I had a wild animal skin. At first, I thought it was a zebra skin but then I realized it something more rare and dangerous, the skin of a white tiger. I knew it was wrong and illegal to have it but I loved it and it felt so warm, comfortable, and safe to be inside of it.

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.
0:22.0	I'm Joseph Lee 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	Hi, this is Lisa from this Union Life podcast.
0:35.0	Joseph Deb and I have been deeply moved by your responses to our work.
0:39.0	Producing, editing, and distributing the podcast involves substantial expenses and we need your help.
0:45.2	Please stop by our website this union life.com and click on the heading be our patron.
0:51.8	You'll be redirected to our Patreon funding page.
0:55.0	Patreon helps creators connect with people who believe in projects like ours.
1:00.0	There you can sign up with your credit card to support us for as little as a dollar a month and at higher levels of support will provide special episodes, behind-the-scenes photos and stories, and a chance to join a select pool of listeners for dream interpretations.
1:15.0	Thank you. In today's podcast, we're going to be talking about escaping literalism and in a very informal way just stop taking things so literally what does it take to
1:38.7	look under the surface of our dreams to look under the surface of our dreams, to look under the surface of our relationships, to look under the
1:47.6	surface of other people's behavior, to look under the surface of the news and literature and to really reject
1:55.7	that things are simply what they are at face value and that's what we mean by
2:01.8	having a depth perspective.
2:03.5	Going deeper.
2:04.5	Right, it's not rejecting that the face value is true in some sense.
2:09.2	It's just rejecting the thought that that's all there is. Right, exactly. So children are hilariously
2:17.5	very literal and we were talking about recording this there were a number of charming and funny examples of children overhearing
	...

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