Episode215 - POISON: Toxic or Transformative?

This Jungian Life Podcast

Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

Jungian, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Psychology, Dreams, Jung, Relationships, Selfhelp, Society & Culture, Psychoanalysis

4.8 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2022

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pharmakon, the ancient Greek word for drug, can mean both “remedy” and “poison.” There is a close connection between poison and cure. Poison is stealthy, and takes us by surprise, whether through an unseen snake’s venomous bite or a ripe apple’s alluring disguise. Psychological poison glides past our defenses, pervades our being, and wounds us where we are most vulnerable. We participate in our poisoning through our own unknowing, from toxic cognitions and rigid fixations to self-doubt and self-sabotage. Poison can transform us by stinging us into building the immunity of increased consciousness and insight. Reason and objectivity can act as antidotes, allowing old attitudes to dissolve and new awareness to arise. Whether a poison is injected or ingested, we can use it for cure.

Here’s The Dream We Analyze:

“I am "cooking up" a batch of Xenomorphs (from the movie Alien) for a "client" in an underground lab. I'm mixing chemicals in a vat, and realize I missed a step...I call the client and am reassured it will still work, it will just take some extra time. The chemicals coagulate into a pink goo. The next day, I return to the lab and see swimming in a pool of water four adolescent xenomorphs. A male lab assistant tells me "This shouldn't have worked. They mutated and can only breath flesh." I see the adolescent aliens all have a caul of pink ectoplasm over their faces. The next day, I return to the lab and there is only one xenomorph, an adult, chained as if crucified to the back wall of a cell, wreathed in shadow. I peer at it from across the cell, and a white dove appears and flies across it. The alien's claw shoots out and snatches the dove from the air and crams it into its mouth. There is a great sucking sound, and I realize the alien is breathing the dove's flesh. My vision zooms in to the alien’s face. It regurgitates the dove's carcass, which inverts into a black cage of bone, and the alien screams. I am shocked awake.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this Jungian life.
0:03.0	Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Martiano,
0:07.0	Debra Stewart and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation
0:12.0	that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
0:17.0	I'm Lisa Martiano and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
0:22.0	I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
0:27.0	I'm Debra Stewart, a Jungian analyst and Cape Cod.
0:37.0	The word poison comes from the Latin potare, which means to drink.
0:44.0	And it evokes this feeling that sometimes the poisons in our lives are things that we ourselves decide to ingest
0:54.0	in the hope that we will overcome something in the hope that we are stronger than in the hope that we can work through something as a point of decision.
1:07.0	These are often the poisons that are insights that are so difficult for us to manage that we think of them as dangerous.
1:18.0	Poison as a symbol shows up in fairy tales, in myths, in our literature, in our films.
1:27.0	There's something deep and archetypal and by the way very, very ancient about the idea of poison, both being accidentally poisoned, perhaps by being bitten by a poisonous serpent, but also the application of poison,
1:43.0	whether it's to harm an enemy or for an animal to subdue prey and then be able to survive.
1:51.0	But from the beginning, there is an instinct and an understanding that poisons exist in the world.
2:01.0	Infants are born with natural instincts to avoid foul smelling or foul tasting items.
2:09.0	One of the ancient goddesses of poison, the fittest, is actually the goddess of foul smelling things that come out of the earth, which we are designed at birth to avoid.
2:23.0	So all this goes to say that the archetype and symbol of poison seems to be creeping around and showing up in so many different areas that we thought that we would dedicate an episode to hashing that out.
2:37.0	Well, it's a really powerful image, isn't it, of poison.
2:42.0	And I think it does have all of these psychological resonance and echoes.
2:48.0	And I'm thinking about the fact that poison, Joseph, I think you made such an important point when you said that poison, there's the sense that we either knowingly are perhaps unconsciously partake in the act of being poisoned,
3:03.0	because it does include this idea that we are drinking it.
	...

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