Shadow and Self in Adolescence: Navigating Rage, Love, and Individuation
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2025
⏱️ 102 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
Think of adolescence as life’s built‑in boot camp: your body hits the gas, your mind scrambles to keep up, and suddenly you’re wrestling with raw impulses, big feelings, and the question “Who am I, really?” That surge of anger toward parents often hides an intense love that feels too risky to show, so teens push back while secretly measuring whether adults—and the wider world—can handle their storm.
Without clear rites of passage, they test limits through friends, online thrills, and daring choices, all in service of hammering out a story that’s theirs, not just a hand‑me‑down from family. If they can ride those waves—owning both the wild Shadow and the hopeful Self—they step into adulthood with a genuine sense of direction; if they dodge the work, the unfinished business shows up later as anxiety, depression, or a nagging sense of being stuck.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:04.2 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:09.7 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:19.4 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, |
| 0:24.9 | and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, |
| 0:31.1 | and Cape Cod. |
| 0:52.0 | Thank you. Well, in considering topics for this week, we were surprised to realize that we've never talked about adolescence. |
| 0:54.1 | So we thought we'd take a crack at it. Adolescence is a word |
| 0:56.4 | that comes through French from Latin and is related to the Latin word for to grow to maturity |
| 1:02.9 | and to ripen. And it is both, perhaps, I think it has both a biological and also a social significance. So adolescence |
| 1:15.9 | refers to this kind of prolonged period of brain development that probably evolved about |
| 1:24.7 | two million years ago as we developed a greater need for the transmission of |
| 1:32.4 | complex information like toolmaking and more complex social structures required by our lives |
| 1:41.2 | at that point in our evolution. And of course, it also encompasses the idea of |
| 1:45.9 | puberty or sexual maturity. But there's also social significance to it. And adolescence has been |
| 1:53.1 | treated very differently by different cultures. Maybe it's been a very short period in early modern |
| 2:00.0 | Europe. |
| 2:04.9 | Maybe, you know, it's now it's extended. |
| 2:10.6 | I think hard lessons probably starts around 11 and maybe ends around 30. |
| 2:11.9 | Or 40. |
| 2:15.0 | Yes. |
| 2:20.9 | So, so we, we have different cultural and social ways of understanding it. |
... |
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