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. Contempt is a cold distancing attitude that writes someone off as beneath respect and not worth engaging.

As a defense, it takes feelings we don't want like shame or fear and hurt and projects them onto someone else turning our psychospiritual problem into a blanket

judgment of another. The personal cost is significant. Interpersonal connections thin out. Curiosity dies and empathy

shrinks. There's a strange somatic whiplash effect and some research suggests that the

contemptuous person suffers from strange physical tensions. And as we would imagine,

contempt ruins relationships. For the person on the receiving

end, it humiliates them, lowers their standard in the entire community, and invites others to

pile on, and drags down their performance and mood. So today, we're going to explore the psychology of contempt.

I have often thought of contempt as the relationship shredder. You just get your

claws out and rake them down another's face or a group or an idea that one is not so much

angry as superior, unfeeling, as you mentioned, the distance distance and the other deserves that kind of scorn and condemnation.

They are beneath decent treatment.

They are beneath any kind of concern.

So it sort of embraces a lot of feelings.

It can embrace disgust.

It can embrace disrespect.

...