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This Jungian Life Podcast

How to Work with Denial: A Jungian Guide to Facing Reality

This Jungian Life Podcast

Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.72.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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People often mistake denial for stubbornness, self-deception, or moral failure. Denial is actually a primal psychological defense that attempts to regulate which aspects of reality are permitted to reach awareness. Today, we explore how denial operates within Psyche, why it activates powerfully in response to traumatic experiences and addiction, and how it relates to shadow, repression, and dissociation. Denial is a pre-verbal way of titrating overwhelming experiences by making them unthinkable and unsymbolized. The problem is that they are then stored in the subtle body and give rise to a host of symptoms. Programs like AA explicitly confront the denial of consequences by repeatedly sharing painful consequences within the meeting structure. Some psychoanalysts believe denial is the organizing defense in mania and borderline personality disorder. Art, films, analytic metaphors, and dreams can offer representations of the lost experiences, so the unformulated experiences acquire image and language. Denial can be viewed as a benevolent survival strategy, and yet, like most defenses, must be set aside for us to make full contact with ourselves and the world.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

The etymology of denial comes for the Latin that means to refuse.

0:05.2

So it sort of is like a refusal of reality.

0:09.2

I think we probably all use denial all of the time, by the way.

0:12.9

I don't.

0:13.4

I never use denial.

0:18.0

Right.

0:19.2

Except for Joseph. Were we just talking? Okay. Okay for Joseph.

0:21.3

Were we just talking?

0:22.9

Okay.

0:24.1

Okay.

0:24.9

Is it time for lunch?

0:28.3

There you go.

0:32.0

Welcome to this Jungian life.

0:34.5

Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph

0:39.3

Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological

0:45.0

perspective to important issues of the day. I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.

0:53.6

I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

0:58.6

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

1:20.8

Denial. Denial was one of Freud's initial defenses that he identified.

1:25.1

That concept has certainly entered the popular culture.

1:31.1

We all know that we can see our friends, our colleagues, perhaps our spouses in a state of denial about something or other. It's often very easy to spot in

1:37.9

other people. There you go. It's that sense of thinking, if I don't acknowledge it, it didn't happen or it's not happening.

...

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