MORAL INJURY: Violation of Meaning

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

🗓️ 7 April 2022

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Moral injury violates our sense of justice, loyalty, and meaning—and creates a storm in the soul. Those who directly affect others’ lives are most at risk of suffering irreconcilable conflicts between behavior and belief: military, police, medical, educational, and other human service providers. The purported “cost of doing business” also calls us to confront institutional shadow--moral injury does not belong to the individual alone. The integrity of organizational and community values plays an important part in condoning morally distressing situations—and should play a role in healing the injured. Conflicts between actions and values are inevitable in life, and the core of being human is our unique capacity for choice. There is no way to escape shadow, and we are more than our mistakes. They are neither our totality nor our destiny.

Here’s The Dream We Analyze:

“I am standing near a well. I have to go down into it. When I am in the well, I am me, but I am also a slightly younger, stronger man. The cylindrical walls of the well are grim, dark. There is a cylindrical metal structure, and on the outside of this are two dead babies/toddlers and a slightly older one who is not quite dead but needs resuscitating. The water has been polluted as a result of the bodies. I shout, “Rocket up.” This is so the babies can be pulled up. I wake up and feel dark. As I think about the dream, it occurs to me that “Rocket up” could have been “Rock it up.” However, in the dream, although I didn’t see the structure move up, I imagined it going up at great speed.”

REFERENCES:

Jonathan Shay. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684813211/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_FVEHY95SXRA73DWABH7M

Film: Quo Vadis, Aida? https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B08YP6238S/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano,
0:07.1	Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation
0:12.3	that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. I'm Lisa Marchiano,
0:20.2	and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
0:22.5	I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
0:27.5	I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod.
0:58.2	Today we are going to talk about moral injury, the definition of which is social, psychological, and spiritual harm from feeling that there has been a betrayal of one's core values,
1:03.4	fairness, loyalty, justice.
1:09.0	In other words, moral injury wounds one's conscience.
1:18.5	And this can take place interpersonally, and it can also take place as a result of having to obey orders from an official supervisor, boss, military, superior. And it results in a loss of trust, a sense of ongoing guilt, distress, and unresolved conflict.
1:36.4	And it also attacks the person's self-concept as a good or as a decent person.
1:45.3	And I think moral injury takes place in a number of areas, certainly the military,
1:51.6	but also the field of medicine and other caretaking responsibilities, teaching politics,
2:06.6	when institutional values go against what a person's personal code of conduct and conscience is.
2:11.9	You know, for me, when I was resting into this and trying to think about sort of, you know,
2:17.3	what does it look like?
2:19.1	The image that came up for me is that older movie, Sophie's Choice, which was, I believe,
2:27.3	based upon a book. And in the movie, and it's been a heck of a long times, I've seen it,
2:32.4	but Meryl Street plays a Polish woman
2:35.7	who is in an abusive relationship and she's abusing alcohol and she's just kind of a mess.
2:43.4	And it's sort of like, why?
2:45.3	What's going on with her and what you discover by the end of the film is that as she was
	...

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