PUER - PUELLA: Are you trapped by your inner child?

welcome to this Union life three good friends and union analysts Lisa Marciano Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective two important issues of the day I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a union analyst in Philadelphia I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach Virginia I'm Debra Stewart a Jungian analyst and Cape Cod so the three of us have been hashing around this idea of living a marginal life you know living between the seams of what the culture might think of

as a successful life we often have clients who come in and are really having a struggle they're having a struggle launching the kind of career they want sometimes they struggle even wanting a career and as were we're wrestling with the underpinnings of it we naturally find ourselves talking about the poo air and the puella archetype and something that young wrote extensively about which is the idea that the inner child and the dynamics of the inner child can capture people and prevent them from taking an next stage this can look like a lot of different things

in the consulting-room but it feels useful to kind of boil it down to a couple of central difficulties yeah I mean there's so much to say about this topic and there is some overlap with this idea of the poo air and the puella with the idea of dependent narcissism as well which we've touched on in a previous podcast so what are we really talking about here first of all Pierre and puella are the Latin words respectively for boy and girl you know another colloquial way of talking about it as a Peter Pan complex people who

just don't want to grow up and oftentimes these people are very charming they're fun to be around but they have difficulty really sticking themselves to something and actualizing something and as the years go by I mean a poo air is a lot of fun maybe in the 20s and 30s but that person who doesn't really quite managed to create firm stance for himself it starts looking not so good in the 50s or 60s it's costly it's caused some very real ways and often that can be a turning that people do hit midlife 40s and 50s

and then a kind of observing quality if they're lucky constellated in them and then begins to say wait a minute you know what have I been in service to for the last 50 years what do we have to show for it and is that okay with me I'm really resonating to what you're saying about how costly it is because on the one hand you know when I think of Peter Pan I think you know kind of a cool life you get to fly around and battle with the crocodile and Captain Hook and what's wrong with

that but the problem is that the price is not having a full life and it is what you said at the outset Joseph it's a kind of marginal life because a developmental trajectory is meant to ground us in ongoing stages of development from childhood to young adult and going out in the world and testing our mettle and making commitments saying goodbye to the protected and ideal fantasy world of childhood of all those possibilities that I could be when I grow up well when you grow up you have to pick one or pick two and it's

going to be harder and it's gonna be a little more multi-dimensional and it's gonna be deeper and richer as well yeah I mean I think about sometimes my image for this when clients come in is that you know at some point in life it's appropriate to be sort of in the ante room of life with lots of doors to choose from but at some point you have to walk through one of those doors otherwise you risk staying in life's anteroom and when you walk through one door you effectively forgo all of the others so it

is a sense of accepting a kind of limitation turning your back on possibilities but if you stay in the ante room it may seem like you're leaving open all these kinds of rich possibilities but really you're making this an unconscious sacrifice you know the fairytail that I'm thinking of based on your image of the ante room is Rapunzel who stayed up in her tower and the the witch figure comes and brings her food and they have a relationship and Rapunzel's inner world is presumably fairly contented until the prince comes along and sings to her from

the bottom and life calls her but while she's in that ante room up in the tower you know all these rich fantasy possibilities are before her and when she finally yields to the princess call the call of life the call of a bond breaking out of her protected Tower she does suffer life is much harder and yet it is more real and more full more substantial but it does call us to sacrifice our childhood and our fantasies and it calls us to become ordinary mm-hmm no longer a princess but down there in the forest trying

to make a go of it there's a quote actually that I have here by marie-louise von France who wrote a book called puer I tear nests that I think touches right on what you're saying Deb she says that is the drawback of getting in touch with reality because in that way one becomes limited there are restrictions one comes to the miserable human situation where one's hands are tied and it is not possible to do as one would like something which is particularly disagreeable to the Pooh airight Ernests what one produces is always miserable compared with

the fantasies one had lying in bed dreaming about what one would do if one could so this is an ancient theme you know fairytales have been around for hundreds maybe even longer years and they stay alive in the psyche I think in modern cultures sometimes the idea of Grimm's fairy tales and other things fade away but then they resurface and one of the places that this exact situation resurfaces is in the movie The Matrix where you know humanity is being you know cocooned in this fantastical world they don't even know Heather Energy's being siphoned off

for the machines and the goal is to reach Morpheus and if you reach Morpheus he sits there in this chair with his looking very cool with the sunglasses and he says it's your choice you know the red pill is gonna wake you up it's gonna be a life of hard knowledge and desperate freedom and struggle but you're gonna be in reality or you could take the blue pill you'll go back to sleep you'll have this security and tranquility and this ignorant and and you'll live in this illusion so here's the moment of choosing what are

you gonna do mhm and this idea our red pill and blue pill that that has like shot through the collective culture and a lot of young people you know talk about this particularly young men really talk about red pill or blue pill what are you going to do right and in some sense the choice of the blue pill is a choice to stay stuck in an innocence complex where you have no responsibility and that is lovely and it's comforting but at the same time you never become real rights you have fantasy challenges ie the gaming

world but you know what can spend six hours a day you know some young people gaming and they have this feeling of adrenaline as if they're facing challenges and they have to be clever you know these manipulating these games are culturable but in the final analysis and I have some wonderful young people who are in this moment you know at the end of the day I put on the gaming console old and I'm suddenly realizing like I don't have crap in my life like what what am i doing and that feels like you know okay

someone's beginning to tolerate the red pill but we can feel as if in the fantasy life of gaming and other things as if we've actually accomplished something that's a very very interesting thing that we can experience our inner world so intensely that I won in this game we I launched a raid or whatever heroic thing it was I won the battle and I bet that to take the other pill must feel like being trapped in a drab reality of the drab reality of you know get up and get dressed and go to work and bring

home a paycheck must feel like a trap versus the realm of all these infinite possibilities and falling prey to the great feelings that you have in the realm of possibility and fantasy versus life and work and relationships I mean you said it feels like a trap I think it feels like a sacrifice and at some point we have to be willing to make the sacrifice I am particularly interested in this topic because occasionally I will get someone with this psychology in my practice and you know they're always really interesting people usually the work with them

doesn't go particularly well in that they don't wind up changing in the way that they identified that they wanted to change when they came in to see me and it's often this sense that they they will not make the required sacrifice that would be necessary for them to finally commit to a marriage for example I wonder if it's very hard to see what the benefit of the sacrifice is oh I give this up for commitment to a career path or a marriage or some other thing and it must imagine feel very much like all loss

and no gain and being bound to some kind of dutiful prescriptive path that has been laid out and that's going to be just an endless chore rather than an opportunity for inner development and growth and finding something more in yourself versus the fantasy worlds or having something provided for you what are the things that's coming up for me Deb as you're talking is this cultural poison for me that is become so common that people aren't really looking at it which is you have a bunch of young people who instead of turning inside themselves trying to

track where the water of life is flowing they're sitting down with their parents and they're doing a cost-benefit analysis of which degree they should purchase from a university in order to secure you know adequate funding looking forward which often can be totally divorced from where the water of life is growing and so they're back in that situation Deb which is so the cost-benefit analysis says you know I should be an accountant let's say but there's nothing in me nothing is illuminated around the idea being an accountant so therefore I'm gonna stay inside I'm gonna take

the blue pill because those are the only choices that it seems that life or my parents or myself can make so we're also really talking about sort of failed initiation or blocked initiation I mean in this realm like the culture is inserting this totally alienating agenda into it and it has absolutely cutting people off from the kind of magnetic life of desire that they would need to have the audacity to be put in a situation where they have to really fight for something yeah I mean two of the things that initiate us our desire and

suffering and if you've always had a life where you weren't allowed to really have either thing then you never become initiated and I think and becoming initiated is being able to tolerate the sacrifice and I would even say that is desire leads to sacrifice I don't know if the desire is the sacrifice but it gives us the juice to be able to fight and then come to the moment that we'll have to give up whatever it is we have to give up to have the prize I'm thinking in a very literal way about those initiatory

rights that we've all heard about of the young men being you know sort of pounced upon in the middle of the night and you know dragged off into the the tundra or the desert or wherever it is get bitten by ants or you know some sort of other trials and it's in all those hero tales as well and then what happens the young person goes back and re-enters the community as a man or as a woman it has left the realm of childhood it's a real marker and has a sense of autonomy a growth in

ego strength well also a sense of where he or she kind of fits in the community there's a sense of purpose that comes with it and that's often missing in someone that has a kind of poo air puella psychology they're often driven by a desire for safety and or pleasure mm-hmm I have another quote here from my good friend Marie Louise it's just so great I really just love her she says this is also from puer I turnest she says you will find that if you give yourself to reality you will be disillusioned and the

end of it will be that you will meet death if you accept your life you really accept death in the deepest sense of the word and that is what the poo air does not want let's jump into that what does that look like in a life well let's take the example of a woman who has never really committed to her marriage for example you know maybe there's no real intimacy there maybe there's been a series of affairs and there never were kids in the marriage because it you know there wasn't there wasn't really that level

of commitment and so now you know she is in her late 40s and the marriage is kind of on ice the affairs are no longer so so interesting anymore or fulfilling and and there's just a sense of kind of emptiness the opportunity to have kids has passed her by yes and it's like it's like her situation was never really accepted and so there was a lot that was sacrificed against her will it sounds like what the result is is a kind of psychic barren Ness instead of real growth and fruitfulness a sense of inner fruitfulness

of I have I have done these things I made this commitment maybe you know all of those that kind of thing that results in really a green Ness internally versus the emptiness that comes up for me as a descriptor in the context of this hypothetical person who sought pleasure and avoided the struggle and the sacrifice Lissa I want to just come back to the quota I'm tracking you guys did von Franz say that to choose life to choose to come into life is to choose death is that what she said I think that that is

absolutely implied so one of the things that came up in my mind is you were talking about this Perella life and marriage that I've certainly had women who very realistically young women who noticed or were considering giving birth to children and as they're sitting with that they're thinking you know I'm gonna wet it with stretch marks my belly's gonna be a mess my breasts after all this is over are not going to look at anything remotely like what they look like now and this kind of sacrificial moment that they're up against that in order to

incarnate the archetype of the mother they have to put this archetype of you know Aphrodite perhaps you know on the sacrificial altar and and accept the fact of that my body's going to look very different and I'm gonna feel really different after you know I give birth to one or more children and it's a choice and and one has to face this death of the who ella and by even having children there is this implicit acceptance of mortality because this is the ongoing life that's gonna surpass you what dies is the the youthful and unpenetrated

young woman you know even if she's married pregnancy and childbearing and the pain of that is substantial and in centuries past women died in childbirth it was very risky but what do you get well you get new life you get the new life of your actual physical baby and you get new life inside yourself with the feelings and the bonding and the physicality of living so much for this other little being and you get to experience are lots of other feelings like fatigue yet being up for the tenth night in a row at 3 o'clock

in the morning but you get the real you know and even if we're not talking about actually giving birth to a baby there's this there's this way that to really incarnate in this lifetime we have to choose the particular it's sort of like my rather silly metaphor about kind of life's ante room if we never sacrifice potentials and we stay in the realm of the all possibility we never really come down into being into our own particular life you know there's an example from literature that really works for me when I think about this particular

psychological constellation and that is from Dickens Bleak House those of you who are familiar with the book may remember that the book written revolves around a court case called jarndyce and jarndyce and there's a big fortune at stake and it's been tied up in this court for decades I believe and there's all these potential people who might wind up being the recipient of the fortune once it's decided so there's a young man in the book named Richard and Richard is so optimistic that he's going to be the recipient of the fortune so he has an

older mentor who's guiding him who says very sensibly Richard you cannot count on this fortune you need to come up with a career for yourself so he sets Richard up I think in the law first or I can't remember maybe it's not the law but in any case maybe it's a doctor so he's studying to be a doctor and he finds that it's just boring and tedious and he doesn't really like it so it doesn't stick with it and he leaves it shortly thereafter and then he's put in a law office and all he wants

to do with the law office is try to learn more about this court case and he just makes a bad job of that too because he doesn't because he's never really trying to inhabit any of these situations because he's got this gigantic fantasy that he's going to be rescued from his ordinary plight by being the recipient of this money and then finally he tries to the military anyway as you might imagine he completely we saw of his money trying all these different things never really settles into his life and of course the great irony at

the end of the book is the fortune does get settled on him but by the time the court fees are paid there's no money left Wow yeah that's a bitter pill yeah but it's it's a real I think it's a really great as Dickens can do it's a really great encapsulation of what it can look like to be up where's that you're always living in the realm of the fantasy and you never just come down and accept really radically accept the what is there's such a sadness in that of missing the fullness of the real

and the what is and the engagement with one's own self one's own interior tea I go back to your example Joseph of living a life where you play a lot of games online and that that too is terribly sad of all these the fantasies and the possibilities versus meeting oneself in so many more ways in such a multi-dimensional way and finding the core that has life in it and being engaged in all the possible ways that includes struggle and sacrifice and also give us the opportunity to individuate which is what the pure or puella has

truly sacrificed needlessly and pointlessly for something that is not real and this pressure that human beings are designed to channel which is this actualization of the internal images that the self that lives in this inner place is in fact pressing upon the ego to be able to incarnate as you had said Lisa and for them to encounter the real world and to be alive in the outer world and that is a kind of natural current for a human being but then then it begs the question what's interrupted that natural flow because they were kind of

meant to just surrender to that incarnated impulse the other thing I want to say this is I mean you were talking about that movie and that I was landing it a bit in modern culture I've noticed you know a lot of young men who are resistant to letting go of compulsive gaming will then point to examples of you know the one or two guys that won a million dollars in a gaming competition or so-and-so who is making a career of putting up YouTube videos of how they've successfully negotiated points in the game and that's like

that lottery had to see that if if I tread in this fantasy long enough this miraculous situation will manifest and Deb I'm still nursing something that I think is poignant about your description of the tribal initiation where the young boy at a certain point is is just gathered by the men and taken out into an initiating experience and I think and I have encountered a number of young men if they're really looking deep enough they are hoping that something in life will carry them off will abduct them from this really what turns out to be

a very painful life if they're able to really confront it and they want life the tribe of men or or a girlfriend for that matter to abduct them and get them out of their bedrooms and since we don't have kind of modern initiations I often feel like they're waiting for an archetype to activate in the psyche and when an archetype does land powerfully in the psyche it really does gather the libido puts it into a theme and charges it up so that there's a kind of trajectory that the archetype can provide and we might say

actually does in fact provide for many of us we often do have a dominant archetype at least in the first half of life that really just kind of push us in a direction yeah so we're talking about initiation and I'm also thinking about individuation we won one thing we could say perhaps about the prayer or puella is that he or she has avoided becoming individuated it's like a failed individuation because the person has sort of stayed trapped and this kind of innocence complex hasn't accepted their life hasn't taken responsibility and therefore they haven't brought forth

much of that which is in them so let's go back to this idea because as I am seeing those people you're seeing those people what has obstructed them if individuation is the natural state of mankind and the human structure of the psyche what might have happened intra psychically or environmentally which has really thrown that off well I mean first of all I think there's an argument to be had whether or not individual is natural you know at one point Jung said that it's an opus contra not Orem that is true that's right sometimes it's discussed

more like this is just a natural unfolding that we all go through and and sometimes it's discussed like this is a very rare thing so I think the truth is that sometimes it's just easier it's just easier to take the blue pill as you pointed out Joseph I thought that was a lovely amplification to pull in that film lord knows it's easier and and there's a way that it's always a temptation to avoid suffering isn't it and also I think today it's easier to avoid that suffering because we do have games and conveniences and technology

and a hundred other things that are out there for us and what we don't have is a tribal community that says hey look whether you like it or not all the men are coming from the village to drag you out into the wild for your initiation experience or for a young woman marriage and childbearing so there is not the the community norms that really kind of pushed people into the next stage of growth and development it has often has to come much more from within and what if an archetype doesn't land and I just want

to clarify that you know someone could get married and have kids and still the Ella I have seen that you know so sometimes the outer situation in life looks like the person's doing the acceptable things but it's it's really just an attitude but I do want to say and I think that this will bring us maybe full circle around this topic is Joseph when you ask what blocks them another way to think about it might be what is the appeal of being a peer or puella and I think especially again when one is younger being

the high-flying person who always chooses to do the adventurous daring thing and never to be pinned down is very appealing it's appealing to the person and it's usually very appealing to the people around them I mean these are the kinds of people that are a lot of fun they often have very abelian personalities they're kind of the life of the party they're always good for a laugh it's very entertaining and and and fun in some sense who wouldn't choose that at least for part of the time and I think that this brings up for me

a couple things first of all there is a time in life when it's totally appropriate to be in life's waiting room looking at all of those doors and not walking through one I've had people come in in my in their 20s and and you know say with a boyfriend as pressuring them to to get married and settle down and she doesn't want and I'm like well you're 24 like you could you could really just go have some fun you know but the other thing is that this this character of the poo air it is an

archetype the puer I terrace is an archetype there's a positive Pole and a negative pole the positive pole is the thing that you mentioned in your introduction Joseph which is the child you know the child archetype is an incredibly numinous archetype that contains within it this image of Futurity and the promise of new rights and so there is a lot there that's deeply attractive so so it's feels like there's a lot of things that are kind of glued together in our conversation so I just want to parse them out for my own thinking as well

that you're right that when the prayer activates you know we could wind up leading a kind of Elon Musk life it's visionary lots of risk-taking perhaps even Cavalier but if the ideas you're bringing forward have legs on them and if there is a way they could be incarnated and we surround ourselves with kind of manifesting people you know something big could happen in that way so I think when we're talking about this uh nincada who we're we're really talking about you know this latency versus activation that there's there there is an unavailing in some who

wears an Pooh Ella's and so as you were saying Deb there's a question about what induces activity activation and whether that's desire like with Rapunzel it might be sexual awakening you know as a young boy moves from 11 years old to 14 years old he goes from thinking girls are irrelevant you know and and random and a problem just get away from me and all of a sudden because of the sexual awakening you know at 14 just that primal urgency moves him into this terrain and the awkwardness of it and everything they have to learn

about engaging a woman so in Rapunzel you know this courting of the prince kind of arouses something about the sexual and the desire nature but she really didn't need the prints to show up she really did need something to beckon her and to arouse her in a way so when I we think about the really sleepy under actualized person and of course all the consequences of that that something hasn't aroused them adequately to pull them in a direction whether that's initiation sexuality whether it's an archetype whether it's a fantasy about their life which by the

way one of the things that some of the analysts talk about is the maternal reverie about their children's future and how that has a kind of activating intrapsychic potential and fathers who introduce their children to the world you know in the ancient world you were a little boy and you were you know you were walking around and you could lift something you were working the bellows for your dad who was the blacksmith there was this kind of drew pulling you into activity and introducing you to life so part of it very well could be modern

culture it could be all of these opportunities like gaming to disappear into it you know an astral world and then were never put adequately into the context to sacrifice or even want to sacrifice because there's nothing desired adequately desired so as we're hashing it out I'm finding this curiosity about the many things and complicated things that interrupt the flow of desire or even misdirected into a fantastical world rather than allowing it to flow to outer objects which are worth pursuing right I mean it could flow to outer objects like you know a new lover or

a different car or the next trip or something would allows desire to kind of settle into a study group that creates the opportunity for us to route ourselves in our own lives yes that we want to experience it with a full sensual encounter so one of the other ways that people can fail to launch I see this very much with young men even in their 20s that they've had all of this kind of exposure to pornography and their sexuality is is a self exciting a habit and they're looking at these pictures moving pictures of women

who by the way only provide verbal and visual stimulus and it's shocking to some of these young men when I ask them well where are the all the other senses like do you realize that women have a certain scent and when you kiss a woman that there's a taste in that and there's an unexpected reality of where a woman might touch you on your body that you can't predict the way that you are predictable in masturbating so there's this enormous missing realm of all the senses being involved which some young women don't even realize is

missing from their perception of what's possible it's like being colorblind and then someone introduces you to green which you never saw before and you're like oh my god and I think sometimes the external world can be disappointing and then you retreat back and then you retreat back that what I for example in quotes have imagined in my fantasy life is is richer and more magical than my encounter with a boyfriend or a girlfriend well fantasies are always unlimited that's right and I'm still back on what you said Joseph that I thought was so profound about

what blocks desire from its inherent path toward actualization in the outer world of a real substantial engagement with with other people with tasks and and with one's own psyche and it's a very big and Dee question so how much of that is environmental deficits how much of that is you know the D railing of desire into a fantasy life and that what would then allow libido to pool enough so that there's a an inner pressure and and a gradient for it to flow down so that it connects with with something that is real and more

substantive so one of the things in the clinical encounter that I notice welling up in me is you know if I'm working with a young man you know in his 20s let's say and they're in this place and they they present even a fantasy of initiative to allow myself to delight in their initiative to become excited about this idea of initiative that they have and often for some reason their environment seems to provide so little of that it's it's can bring them to tears that I think they're wonderful or what they're thinking about is wonderful

and to be so explicit about it so there's something also missing about that and I wonder if that's also has to do with over-involved parents the whole helicoptering parents where the parents are providing the initiative they're identifying the correct impulse and the kid doesn't even realize that they're not being asked necessarily or allowed to create initiative and then with the parents kind of feel their jobs done mm-hmm you know then they're irritated that their kids aren't leaving their bedroom at 20 and 24 and 25 years old but they haven't actually been given any space in

the developmental window to identify some kind of initiative and to struggle with themselves yes if the path and is laid out ahead of time by so-called providing adults the flip side of that is it's depriving the child or the teenager or the young from developing his or her own muscle for how am I gonna solve this problem oh my gosh I just want to calculus now what am I going to do or a breakup with a girlfriend or any one of a number of other things of vs. you can do it we're leaning into something

here because Joseph you're talking a lot about young men in their 20s and there's a certain way where I'm not sure that I would quote unquote diagnose anyone as a Pierre in their 20s because that's a time of life when it's developmentally appropriate not to be settled but you're talking about you're seeing certain patterns and you're both lifting up these kinds of developmental trajectories maybe with certain parenting styles and I wonder if you're both reaching into kind of this is how puer psychology might get formed by someone for example who has always had over involved

parents and didn't have a chance to develop their own agency yes and we're trying to give living examples of what is the wrestling point so whether the wrestling point happens at 19 or 45 at 45 it feels more tragic but it might be that they're still in this wrestling point I mean I've definitely seen a lot of people in my practice who were in their 30s and they're 40 is their 50s or even their 60s who just had never come down to earth and I'm imagining that with the young men that Joseph has in particular

referenced that there might be sort of the nascent beginning of that and that when you mentioned Lisa that you know just because a young woman perhaps gets married and has a child that following are the sort of traditional if you will path doesn't necessarily mean that a person is coming down into Earth and incarnated and then it shows up in more relief in the person's 30s 40s and even later in in life where there is a kind of inner barren Ness because something a lot of somethings have been missed and part of what that can

look like I think is a kind of sense of superficiality that relationships are kind of superficial that interests are superficial that everything has a kind of as if quality nothing feels really real or substantive right in the consulting-room that feels like as analysts were offering insights or interpretations and nothing seems to make a difference that maybe it's all just kind of humorous or delightful but nothing seems to activate under the skin or there's this kind of terminal ambivalence where I really want to go get a job but I I just can't make myself but I

want to go get a job but I just can't make myself and it sort of never seems to shift and that comes back to the idea of how are they evaluating the target and again coming back to the cost-benefit analysis or some strange alien thinking process which really doesn't capture anything about the soul or anything about the a true emergent image inside of them and then therefore there isn't any it's not attractive and and they're kind of right in a way they are giving feedback to us to the world to other people that I'm not

finding anything inside of myself to really give a about but yet I believe sincerely it's in there now will they tolerate the descent to find it you know on their own or with an analyst or in a meditation class you know however you're gonna go inside and if they find it will they tend it or will it be kind of a hot coal that they just kind of drop because it's gonna especially later in life demand a tremendous amount of accommodation and restore so I think about you know taro the taro ki 16 the lightning

struck tower we can build this kind of structure in the life which could be very alien to our nature and that if the life of desire if the legitimate images that are inhabiting the soul activate there is this kind of conflagration this kind of explosive deconstruction of the life which is of course much more difficult number forty and fifty because we have a lot more structures than we do when we're twenty and so people often shy away and fight to keep restoring the old structure restoring the persona restoring the old way that goes to the

idea of approaching the sacrifice particularly later in life where you actually have something to put on the altar yeah maybe maybe we can wrap up with another really short quote from Marie Louise fine front that's I think relevant here she says and to what you were saying to us if she says whatever one has within oneself but does not live grows against one yes and I think what we're saying is that the prayer and the puella have a lot within themselves that they don't allow to grow and I wonder if we should switch to a

dream it sounds like it's time [Music] hi this is Joseph from this Union Life podcast Lisa dev and I have been deeply moved by your responses to our work producing editing and distributing it involves substantial expenses and now we need your help please stop by our website this yongjian live.com and click on the heading be our patron you'll be redirected to our patreon funding page patreon helps creators connect with people who believe in projects like ours there you can sign up with your credit card to support us with is a little as a dollar a

month and at higher levels of support we'll provide special episodes behind-the-scenes photos and stories and a chance to join a select pool of listeners for dream interpretations thank you so today's dream the dreamer is female and she's 43 years old and works at a nurse it works as a nurse's aide and here's the dream I was in a dark forest at night with my youngest son who's 10 we were standing at the top of an exterior staircase attached to a house which was situated at the edge of a large clearing in the forest the house

had bright spotlights shining onto the clearing and I could see small animals all wandering through it I felt like I wanted to go into the forest but had to wait for something I saw movement out of a corner of my eye a mountain lion had appeared on the edge of the clearing as soon as it stepped into the clearing it changed into a very large snake it began slowly making its way through the clearing killing the small animals it was killing them but not eating them I saw it begin to devour a smaller poisonous snake

the large snake had its head tipped back in such a way that I could see it had a hole in the underside of its throat so it was clamping the smaller snake with its teeth swallowing and pulling it through its mouth but the smaller snake was falling out through the hole in its neck back onto the ground my son and I began to run down the stairs and skirt around the edges of the clearing I needed to get into the forest at a certain location and it was on the far side from the house I

stopped briefly when I noticed a dead kitten right at the edge of the forest it had been ripped in half by the snake another kitten was there it was so young its eyes were not open it was trying to crawl into the forest for safety I felt like I was rooting for it hoping for it to survive but I had no urge to pick it up and help it the large snake noticed us running it changed back into the mountain lion and began after us before we could get to the far end of the clearing

I noticed a hunter's tree stand just inside the forest at the side clearing we had made it too we ran for it I kept checking to make sure my son was still with me I began running up the stairs to the tree stand and when I reached the top noticed he was no longer with me I panicked began looking around I noticed a black panther was now in the trees below the stand jumping from branch to branch the mountain lion was staying back because of it the Panther jumped up into the tree stand beside me

and changed into my son I keep forgetting I do not need to be afraid for you I said to him and then I woke and she says in terms of context I've struggled badly with fears of abandonment my entire life lately I feel as though the issue is coming to a head I desperately want to change and grow in this area but I can't seem to get past the hurdle of ik waiting love with a need for feeling as though my presence is needed constantly by my loved ones I fall into a pattern of anxiety

that they are abandoning me rejecting me when in reality it's just natural periods of ebbs and flows of contact and when I asked what were the main feelings in the dream she replies at the start caution a knowledge of waiting for something to happen adrenaline once the snake was there longing hope and sorrow when observing the kittens panic and then relief at the end with my son and finally she says I feel like the main elements which stand out to me is holding meaning is the scene with the snake eating the smaller snake and the

scene with the kittens I don't feel like the main message has to do with any sort of motherly protectiveness toward my children although I recognize that would be an easy route to go with analysis but it just doesn't sit right I wonder instead if my son is representing something for my unconscious wow this is quite a dream it's like a short story kind of fairy tale with the forest and the animals and the wildlife and the danger and that's where the dream starts I was in a dark forest at night with my younger son who

is 10 there is the psychic situation and I'm thinking about how dark forests are classic fairytale images for being in the unknown in the unconscious and that's a real doubling a dark forest and furthermore it's at night mm-hmm with some part of her own psyche that is being imaged as a ten-year-old boy and sometimes when there's a child or a baby in the dream I will say how old was the child and in this case we'd had that information the child is 10 so I might ask the streamer and what obviously you had this child

ten years ago but what else happened for you ten years ago you know was there a change in attitude was there a change in the outer situation in some other way because this might be representing some new aspect of psychic life that's about 10 years old mm-hmm I also asked about what happened in the dreamers life when he or she was 10 mm-hmm what was that like for you did something overt happen or was it a difficult or interesting time for you so here's this house that has all the spotlights shining into the clearing and

she says I felt like I wanted to go into the forest but had to wait for something there's a real contrast between the house which is civilized or cultural kind of construct versus the-- the natural and Wildish appeal of the forest yeah and the house has all these spotlights yes right consciousness and lights and electricity and you know so fear you know people put spotlights all around their house because they're afraid something unseen will approach the house and that they'll be protected by making sure that at any point during the night they can spot what's

approaching yes so it's a kind of a contrast between ego with the house and the spotlights versus the forest and it's wild animals like I like your reference to fear there were the spotlights Joseph because it seems to me that it is an image of vigilance isn't it and that maps on to what she says about how she sort of vigilant in her relationships for any sign that she's you know no longer important to her loved ones and if we drop deeper I mean that's the outer seeming of it what is revealed in the psyche

is this rapacious creature that cannot be satisfied which shows up at lots of fairy tales there just isn't enough things that it can digest because it can't actually get it down its gullet so it goes it kills which in a sense kind of paralyzes all the other possibilities it's trying to eat them over and over again and we could imagine with this hole in its throat it's never satisfied it actually never gets what it needs and that the psyche the dream ego is becoming aware of the rapacious hunger tries to flee it and if we

imagine that the Sun is actually her is a comment on her psychological relationship to her children that this devouring unresolvable hunger when she flees from that she kind of abandons her kids psychologically perhaps or maybe otherwise and they have to resort to becoming Panthers in order to kind of survive that when the mother flees they have to rely on their instincts to kind of get along in the world she comes back and she has a moment to recognize that and in a sense the ego says oh I don't need to be afraid for you I

don't need to take care of you but that could be a misunderstanding that the child might actually need an ongoing attendance so when I sink down into the kind of serpents and Dragons and monsters that can never be satisfied yes it could very well be this feeling of being unsuited and therefore abandoned later in life and it could also mean all kinds of addictions that the dreamer might be struggling with she didn't mention that but this is the kind of dream that somebody might have if they're struggling with a powerful addiction I don't know if

this will work but I keep thinking about the fairy tale Prince Lindwurm and in this fairy tale there this queen gives birth basically to twins she was not supposed to have two children she was supposed to only have one as a result of eating this flower but she greedily ate two flowers and one of the twins was a monstrous snake a Lindwurm and it went slithering out of the birth room and lived outside in the natural world somewhere it had been abandoned and rejected and that's what the streamer says she says I struggled with fears

of abandonment my whole life and later on the Lindwurm appears and wants to get married and claim his right as the elder son but unfortunately he keeps devouring all the brides that are selected for him until a young woman confronts him and and flay's him and penetrates all his tough outer skin and and tendency to just devour everything and I'm wondering about that if there's even a variation on something like that at the end where the Black Panther is there and the Black Panther is fierce enough to scare away the mountain lion jumps up into

the tree and does confront the dream ego who says I keep forgetting I don't need to be afraid for you but I'm wondering if there needs to be something fierce independent and confrontational here so that this element and the dreamer that is represented by the devouring snake can awaken into a different state I like where you're going to have and I think I'm going to pick up on a little bit of what you both said and Joseph I think you're just right about the snake is unable to fill itself right and I think that that

probably does feel like her own kind of relational hunger which can't be sated but I also see it I see that aspect of the dream also as it makes me wonder if she has difficulty trusting her instincts that is seem dangerous yes her instincts seem dangerous and killing small animals and and that sort of thing snakes are very instinctual and so our cats you know mountain lions and and that sort of thing I think I'm more on Deb's page than yours about our black panther I I think I see it if we're if we're going

with that her son is perhaps an element of her psyche then this lysis feels very positive to me that there there is a part of her psyche which is instinctual which she can trust which is lithe and is able to jump from branch to branch and nimbly change you know into her son that she doesn't need to be afraid that she can meet this kind of these inner frightening instincts with some helpful instinctual part of herself that helps her to master them or be in control or be in right relationship to them really I'm thinking

too about this theme of aggression running through it all of this horrible you know all of these animals are aggressive the mountain lion then it changes into a snake that is rapacious and cannot be sated and just basically goes on a rampage of leaving these smaller more vulnerable dream image animals wounded or dead and I wonder if that's what's going on here a wrestling with her own aggression which is like the Lindwurm that was very aggressive until it was met with something that was sturdy and confrontational and could stand up to it and that that's

where the transformation lay but it's as if the aggression here is very dangerous and bad it's like she is afraid of her own needs and her own anger would be my guess I will be devouring but something's wrong with her instinctive level because it has this hole in it it's a problem it's just a problem she runs for the hunter I know I feel more curious about the end than positive about it necessarily because she's running for the understand but she doesn't find him now it might be positive that she's at least identified the hunter

image as somebody who could meet wildness and respond to it appropriately if she could actualize her own animus her inner Huntsman he might know what to do with all of this wildness rather than just flee it but it's not there yet but there might be a promise of it and she's still in flight and everything's still pursuing her the Sun responds by kind of joining this world this natural world and potentially he could contend with these forces when he becomes a panther that he could normally contend with when he's a boy but at the end

you know I don't actually think anything's resolved I mean she's still in the tension which which is reasonable also this looks like a big conundrum it's not going to be solved in one dream what I find most helpful that the rapacious hunger has been imaged mm-hmm and and that's the gift of the dream the ego still doesn't know what to do with it you know maybe not being afraid it was correct maybe that was just a defense against the anxiety but be that as it may you've got a serpent now you could be really imagining

this problem inside of you as a serpent with a hole in its throat you could talk to it you could draw it the way you drew his monsters and then you might even have fantasies about what you would do with this dragon the serpent inside of you and that could set in motion a kind of energetic shift when we don't know how you're gonna resolve it in the same way that you know a heroine in the middle of the journey she's just you know depending on her wits and her instincts to kind of get her

through this but at least you know you have one image of the enemy I want to just pick up on the image of the hunters tree stand because I think it it's a nice counterpoint actually to the house because it's just inside the forest but it's near to the clearing so it's not all the way in the forest and it is a man-made structure a hunter's tree stand as a man-made structure it's a place to hide and it's a little bit elevated you're absolutely right about all the spotlights Joseph there's something almost kind of paranoid

about that image but being in a hunter's tree stand you're sort of you're sort of ensconced there you're in the forest it's a nice intermediary place it's a little bit of a different image and it might show the possibility of a different kind of relationship with the unconscious and it puts her in the role of a predator we've seen there's stands there in this camouflage they're sitting with their you know rifles poking out of this slot it's in there drinking beer and waiting for something to come along that they can shoot you know so that

puts her in the realm of being a fellow predator and although she doesn't identify with being a hunter again that animus potential but it's still problematic that the son becomes one of the creatures to me I understand that it's more perspective you really depends on whether you're thinking it's an inner and outer Sun and how in the changeling situation you know that's the part that I'm interested in at the very end of the dream there's a black panther so that sort of echoes all these images of forest and darkness and night and it's a different

thing from a mountain lion one might think it isn't about in lion enough I mean why do we need a different kind of a cat and what interested me and this may be really reaching is that the word Panther if you divvy it up turns into pant and her and I kept thinking about somebody who's wearing the pants something there about a panther and this final meeting I mean there is a meeting of the dream ego and this creature that is what the dream says it's not that everything is necessarily resolved but I like that

the Sun has has power here and changes back into the Sun who was smaller and younger and a ten year old and that she doesn't need to be afraid for him anymore or for that part of her yeah I mean there's a lot of fear in this dream so something about the last line being I don't need to be afraid for you feel significant yes Joseph is still not buying it what I love about our conversation is that there's all these lenses you know and we all have a pet you know we just don't feel

gratified by but mine is right this dream has induced a little wildness in us while contending woodland creatures right now and I think we're gonna leave it there for him I think so you've been listening to this Union life from our website this Union life calm you can follow us on Twitter like us on Facebook help us produce future episodes by funding us through patreon and submit your dreams or possible interpretation on another episode we'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream for today's show and hope you'll let us know what topics you'd

enjoy hearing more about until next time keep living this Union life [Music] you [Music]