Episode 57 - Ambivalence
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2019
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Having mixed feelings, or strongly opposing feelings is a normal occurrence in human life. We can find ourselves in a quandary about big decisions, upcoming life events, or experience being stuck without quite knowing why. Deb, Joseph, and Lisa consider various facets of ambivalence: anxiety around foreclosing options and missing out fear of regret over a possible wrong choice, or inability to raise complexes and shadow elements into consciousness. All aspects of the personality need to be allowed to dialogue and have it out with one another. Instead of complicating matters and adding to stasis, this process releases energy for movement in life. We can come to accept the certainty of uncertainty—and find our life-giving psychic wellsprings.
The Dream:
I was walking on a cobbled street looking for a store where honey was sold. I was looking for honey to heal (however, I don't know what was that I needed to heal). I entered into the store through what seemed to be the back door. Inside, I saw wooden shelves with glass mason jars full of different-colored honey on them. The room was rustic and had a dim light, though sunrays illuminated it. One of my great aunts from my mother's side, whose name is C., was there working, filling up bottles with honey. She greeted me and was happy to see me as she always is, and
the owner of the place, whose face I don't remember, came to me and told me the honey would help me heal. He gave me honey. I think I ate it because it was for me to taste; I don't remember clearly. However, I do remember he also told me to cover my body with honey, especially over my arms, chest, belly, face and hair, so he poured some honey on my hand (I think it was the left hand), because the hand was the most effective way to cover my body, according to him. I did cover.
The honey had chunks of honeycomb in it. The owner told me to eat the honeycomb chunks, so I grabbed a honeycomb chunk I had in the left side of my neck with my right hand, and ate it. Its taste was delicious.
References
Jung, C.G. Aion (Volume 9ii, Collected Works)
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens, HarperCollins, 2015.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 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 | We wanted to tackle the topic of ambivalence. I think it's a really interesting idea when you |
| 0:38.9 | drill down and think about how normal ambivalence is, and I hope that part of what we're going to do today |
| 0:46.7 | is to normalize it, to discuss how this is a very normal reaction to a lot of different things in life, but it can really |
| 0:56.4 | hamper us, it can keep us stuck, it can sabotage us, and so hopefully we can unpack a little bit around when |
| 1:08.2 | ambivalence is normal and doesn't really keep us from moving forward and when it's a real problem. |
| 1:17.0 | This idea of ambivalence, I was so refreshed to hear that this rises up from the same time period that Jung and Freud and Jung's |
| 1:29.8 | mentor, boiler, were all in the early formations of psychological theory, and that this is really part of the early mucking around in how the psyche works. |
| 1:43.2 | Yeah, I mean, so the term was coined by Boiler, who, if I'm recalling correctly, was working at the Berg-Holzley Institute in Zurich with |
| 1:57.5 | Jung in the early part of Jung's career. And Boiler tossed out in his thoughts that there were three main types of ambivalence, |
| 2:07.0 | volitional, intellectual, and emotional. |
| 2:10.0 | And these were generally categories of something to do with the will to take an action, |
| 2:16.4 | something that the mind is wrestling through with conflicts of reason, |
| 2:20.8 | or emotional ambivalence, for instance loving and hating something or someone at the same time, and Freud grabbed onto this and integrated it into his psychology as well. |
| 2:32.0 | And it also has some kind of an ancient... to his psychology as well. |
| 2:32.6 | And it also has some kind of an ancient theory |
| 2:36.0 | going back. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

