Promethean Inflation: Will our creations destroy us?

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

🗓️ 25 January 2024

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are we inadvertently summoning forces beyond our control in our relentless pursuit of innovation and progress? Can we harness the power of our creations without unleashing terrible consequences upon ourselves and our world?

Prometheus and his brother, Epimetheus, were tasked by Zeus with fashioning all living creatures. They granted animals remarkable abilities - feathers for flight, claws, fangs for hunting, tails for balance, and gills to breath underwater. When it came to humans, they had no gifts left. Still, Prometheus loved his human creations and daringly stole fire from Olympus to provide them with warmth and protection. This act of defiance has inspired and cautioned humans for millennia as they reflect on Prometheus’ punishment.

Prometheus embodies the eternal struggle between conscious and unconscious forces within psyche. His act of rebellion, like the ego's desire for independence, results in detachment from its unconscious origins. Wild archetypal forces become impossible to contain and chain him to a rock where an eagle eats his liver each day. Prometheus's liberation by Heracles represents the relativization of the estranged inflated ego with the unconscious, fostering growth and humility.

The relentless pursuit of Promethean treasures propelled figures like Oppenheimer and Madame Curie, Louis Pasteur, George Washington Carver, Henry Ford, and Elon Musk. As they extended their grasp into the boundless skies of human potential, these brilliant minds bestowed upon humanity invaluable gifts and some brought risks they could never have imagined.

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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 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. God. Hello everyone.
0:37.0	Today, Deb and I are going to be talking about the myth of Prometheus, particularly this complicated tension
0:50.3	between foresight and hindsight, the way that human beings can reach into this creative stratosphere
0:59.7	and bring down from some mysterious place inside of themselves or perhaps from the collective unconscious,
1:09.5	knowledge, wisdom, capacity, insights, discoveries, and wisdom capacity insights discoveries and sometimes wisely implement them and
1:19.6	sometimes create disastrous results. The myth of Prometheus gives us a window into that tension
1:30.1	and affords us some mythic metaphors to consider how complicated it is to bring to fruit some of the remarkable things that we can discover.
1:45.0	We'll talk a little bit about Frankenstein.
1:48.0	We have a wonderful dream that centers around an eagle part of the Permetian myth.
1:56.0	And we hope that you'll listen right until the end. I am really glad that today we are going to engage with Prometheus because he's been a kind of a lifelong
2:18.8	on and off interest of when I was a child and there was we didn't have a TV or anything. I went to the library and I had a book of Greek myths written for children and I saw the picture of Prometheus. It was pretty
2:38.6	vivid. He was chained to a rock and there was this big bird and eagle coming down ready to dive bomb his side.
2:47.5	And I read the story about how he had stolen fire and given it to humans and that he was punished for this by Zeus.
2:59.2	And I remember going around and asking adult after adult, you know, what was so bad about stealing fire and why
3:07.4	wouldn't Zeus want people to have it so they could cook their food.
3:13.0	And I remember sort of indulgent smiles from adults,
3:17.6	like, you know, that's such a cute question
	...

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