Welcome to this Jungian life.

Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, 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 Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.

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

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

Thank you. It's essential for meaning.

It's essential for connection with our self.

It's essential for a successful analysis.

It's the thing that makes us uniquely human. I'm talking about imagination. And of course, it was very, very important to young. So what is imagination? Why does it

matter? And what do we need to know about it to make our lives richer and more full of meaning and purpose?

Well, why don't we, as Maria in the Sound of Music says, begin at the very beginning?

A very good place to start with the anthropological aspect of this, of course, very briefly,

and the great cognitive revolution that is alleged with some real evidence to have taken place

about 70,000 years ago.

So imagination, first of all, just to define it, involves creating a mental image,

image imagination, the word is in there, of something that's not present for your senses to detect

or even something that doesn't exist out there in reality.

And paleoanthropologists believe that this ability to kind of mentally image something

that's not actually there, to kind of manipulate things and to combine things to take two things

that you know about and that aren't related and then combine them in your imagination so that

you have a picture of something new. They suspect that this began about 70,000 years ago,

...