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. When Jung studied alchemy, he discovered a symbolic language that clarified his understanding of the ways his patients grew and changed.

Now, the alchemists were the predecessors to our modern chemists.

They worked very intuitively combining chemicals and processes, and they observed the results.

But remarkably, they created their own unique language to explain what they had observed.

There was no scientific language at that time.

So Jung surmised they were projecting their own psychosiritual fantasies onto the various observations.

Now, when they observed this kind of uncanny experience, which many of the listeners may remember from like high school chemistry classes, where you could take a solid substance and if you heat it, it would just vaporize and skip the liquid stage.

Most of us have seen dry ice, which does the same thing. It doesn't become a liquid. It just vaporize and skip the liquid stage. Most of us have seen dry ice, which does the same thing.

It doesn't become a liquid.

It just vaporizes.

And the alchemists called that sublimation, or in Latin the sublimatio.

So for them, it seemed like an object was rather magically just turning into air.

So we can experience this psychologically when we have a sudden shift of attitude.

And this might happen if we just find the right way to name a symptom,

like discovering that our horror when we give a presentation is actually performance

anxiety. And then we have this sense of relief like, this is understandable. Many people have this,

...