This Jungian Life Podcast

Episode 107 – Nigredo: Finding Light in Our Darkness

Listen here: http://www.thisjungianlife.com/episode-107-nigredo-finding-light-in-our-darkness/

Introduction:
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.

Lisa Marchiano, Jungian Analyst, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Joseph Lee, Jungian Analyst, Virginia Beach, Virginia
Deborah Stewart, Jungian Analyst, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Joseph: The three of us are sitting with the unfolding events of the times and thinking about the
great arc of transformation that life imposes upon us. Jung thought greatly about his own process
as well as the process of the culture and if he were here today, he might say that we are all
participating in a collective nigredo; that something is emerging that is unexpected, that we
weren't prepared for, that demands an accommodation, and that causes the death of all kinds of
illusions, both collectively and individually. How do we sit in that?
Lisa: It seems like the first place to start is with that term and defining it a little bit. Nigredo is a
term that comes from alchemy which was kind of a medieval, material and spiritual practice that
later became chemistry. Jung was fascinated by alchemy because of the incredibly figurative
language and colorful metaphors that the alchemists wrote about as they worked with materials.
He felt they were metaphors for psycho-spiritual transformation. The nigredo was often referred
to as a black blacker than black.
Deb: Yes, it sounds so mystical. The black blacker than black of the darkness, that place where
there's no light, but it's also associated with the incubation process likened to pregnancy that
takes place unseen within in a blackness, or a seed beginning to germinate in the blackness of
soil. So it's also associated with an opportunity for a new beginning. I don't know that it's

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restricted to that but it often appears at the beginning of psychological work. And I think we see
that a lot of people come in because they're in a life crisis--a nigredo.
Joseph: What that brings to mind, Deb, is that there are times in our lives where we begin to get
the sense that something very important is about to take place, but it hasn't landed yet. And
there's a kind of pressure that begins to thrum in the personality, sometimes even in the body, in
the emotions, which gives us a kind of anxious sense of something bigger than us that's arriving.
Deb: Are we in a place like that right now collectively? That we are in a kind of darkness? We're
isolated, secluded, hopefully many of us anyway, in our homes, and yet there is that sense of
anxiety and what’s next and where we’re going.
Lisa: Yes. And I think it's important not to wander too far away from the fact that the nigredo is
associated with suffering. Jung at one point talks about it being analogous to this mystical idea of
the dark night of the soul. I mean it may be where something new is germinating, but boy, it sure
does not feel like that. It more feels like the death and the rotting away of everything that we
previously clung to. And that's why it's also associated with the alchemical operations of
mortificatio and putrifactio.
Joseph: I think there are subcategories around the nigredo, which by the way is just a Latin word
for black. When we look at a piece of fruit or any kind of natural process--a leaf falls from a tree
and loses its greenness and eventually rots down into the blackness of soil-- it suggests that
there's a natural process occurring. But there are some categories: the nigredo, the mortificatio
and the putrifactio. So this idea of something turning black, something beginning to die, and then
something to beginning to rot--they're all in this category of Saturnine decay. But I think the
nigredo is thought of as the initial part of Jungian work, the confrontation with the shadow.
Deb: Absolutely. And that is a subjectively experienced process brought about by the subject's
painful growing awareness of his shadow aspects. And it does, I think, take us by surprise ust as
this pandemic has taken us by surprise. Where did this come from? How could it come out of
nowhere, it seems, in its suddenness and it’s all encompassing quality on the collective front?
Individually it takes us over as well.
Lisa: Yes. There is a sense of no stable ground, isn't there? And I think that there's a way that
when something so big is going on in the collective right now, as with the pandemic, I imagine a
world war would feel this way, too. It just feels like everything is suddenly tossed up in the air.
We have no stable footing, we don't know what's going to happen, and it can lend itself to a

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reorganization of the personality where everything comes into question. But I want to back up
for a second. Deb, you were talking about this confrontation with shadow and there's a really
lovely quote from Jung in Collective Works 14 that speaks to this. He says, "Self-knowledge is
an adventure that carries us unexpectedly far and deep. Even a moderately comprehensive
knowledge of the shadow can cause a good deal of confusion and mental darkness since it gives
rise to personality problems which one had never remotely imagined before. For this reason
alone, we can understand why the outcome is called the nigredo melancholia, a black blacker
than black."
Joseph: So when we think about the darkness versus the lightness or the black versus the
sunniness of the personality, most of us create a sense of self and a sense of outer personality, or
persona, that allows us to seem kind of bright and appealing and congruent with the norms of the
culture. And when the nigredo, when the shadow begins to roil, all of a sudden those pretty and
nice elements of the personality begin to become challenged at the very least. I'm thinking about
a lot of YouTube videos of people lunging at rolls of toilet paper. And although that's become a
point of comedy and scorn, at the same time if we think about being one of those people racing
to the shelves to greedily or desperately grab 48 rolls of toilet paper, later that day we would sit
down quietly and think: "I'm that person? I'm the person that elbowed the old lady to grab the 48
rolls of paper and scurry them into my car?" And then, "Where do I put that image of myself?"
And yet there it is.
Lisa: I'm thinking of a fictionalized case here, of someone who maybe is mid-career and very
well established and finds that partly as a result of the disruption of the pandemic, he falls in love
with his colleague who's his junior. This has never been something he would ever have thought
could happen. It was never in his value system to cheat on his wife or have an affair, and this is
the wrong thing to do for all kinds of reasons, and yet he just tempest tossed with these wild
desires that seem to be propelling him to go in this completely new direction. That is like a
nigredo place and it has to do with the dissolution of old forms. Things that used to work and
support us and contain us and give us direction and meaning now suddenly feel like they've been
swept away or melted down and we're left really confronting ourselves and wondering, "Who the
heck are we?"
Deb: I think that speaks so poignantly to exactly what a confrontation with shadow feels like,
whether it's your example, Joseph, of the person that scoops up lots of toilet paper in desperation

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or greed. And then what do we do with that later? Or your person, Lisa, who has to realize that
there's an attraction that doesn't really fit with what he had thought was his morality system.
There's a death of illusion about who we thought we were that ties into what you talked about,
Joseph, the persona of “I'm a nice person, I am good to people, I feed my cat, I do all these nice
things.” Then what really we're called to do when we get home that night or home from the
grocery store is to confront that part of ourselves that is not what I want it to be. “Look at what I
have done or what I have said--this illicit or seemingly illicit relationship, the hoarding of stuff
from the grocery store.” That is part of who I am.
Joseph: I think that's the beginning.
Lisa: Yes, It's the way that realizing you have to own your shadow just kind of melts you down.
Deb: It is a real and terrible disillusionment that I am not all those things I thought I was. And
the point isn't necessarily to remonstrate with oneself: “Oh, I really shouldn't have done that,”
the point is to come to terms with that as an internal reality so that it doesn't have to be enacted.
Jung says we all have a thief and a trickster and probably a murderer within, but if we can give
them a place at the table of consciousness, then we are paradoxically freed up from having to
enact these things in the outer world.
Lisa: I agree with you Deb, having sat with someone who is like my fictionalized case. I have sat
with people going through things like that and I just want to say that it's easy to jump to
believing that if we just give it a place at the table then we won't have to act it out. But when
you're caught in this and you really want to leave your wife and go have the affair with the junior
colleague, you really are suffering it and there is no shortcut.
Joseph: I think an alchemical image that really captures that, and I think it's one of the Rosarium
images, is a vibrant, muscular green lion that is chomping and eating the sun with saliva dripping
from its mouth. That's a depiction of raw, powerful, instinctive energies that have the capacity to
take hold of the ego and gobble it down, sink its teeth into it, and that it's not a pretty process. It's
not an abstracted process. It feels like being chewed up by the passion to have an affair with the
junior colleague or grab and hoard things because we feel that our survival suddenly depends on
it, when we've always been a rather refined or elegant person. And there's this terrible behavior
that's happening where if somebody appears to be not complying with social distancing, this
vigilante attitude is springing up in communities and individuals are harassing people, screaming
at them, if they're not following what the authority figures in the culture are telling them to do.

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This kind of shadow bullying is rising up in the culture. Now, one of the things we do when
shadow first rises is to defend against it: "Oh, that's not me." Sometimes we'll literally forget that
we did something because it's so incongruent with our view of ourselves. Sometimes we project
it onto another person and say: "They're the one that's doing it, not me." But the nigredo begins
when we have to put hands on the experience. And if the nigredo is navigated successfully, at the
end we can say, "I am that. I am everything I have been. But I am also that."
Deb: I want to acknowledge my predilection for optimism and that these confrontations with
shadow can become a nigredo. They are a call to consciousness that we need to face--the call to
confront these blackened, hard, suffering confrontations with our dark side. And that's where the
real rub is: “I did that. I said that to somebody in line who wasn't staying six feet away. I did
that.” And to take that in fully and reflect on it is really the call to answering these difficult
aspects of ourselves that we are confronting collectively and individually in the midst of this
pandemic. What do I do with it? Do I even allow myself to have that confrontation and regret--
and then what? It is a call to acknowledge something in ourselves.
Lisa: Yes. I appreciate what you're lifting up Deb, and this idea about the necessity of
confronting it, which to me is similar to saying that we have to suffer it. We said earlier that the
nigredo often occurs at the beginning of the work. And it was commonly understood that the
work progressed in these three phases; the nigredo, the albedo, and the rubedo. And I want to
read a little bit from Jung, where he talks about how the nigredo becomes the albedo, because I
think that's where we are right now in the conversation. He says: "the work is difficult and
strewn with obstacles. The alchemical opus is dangerous. Right at the beginning you meet the
dragon, the cathartic spirit, the devil, whereas the alchemists called it the blackness, the nigredo
and this encounter produce suffering. In the language of the alchemists, matter suffers until the
nigredo disappears, when the dawn will be announced by the peacock's tail and a new day will
break, and that's the albedo." So it is the suffering that turns the blackness into the whiteness.
Joseph: I would add that it's conscious suffering that makes it alchemical versus instinctive--that
we know what we're struggling against. And so when we first begin to feel uncomfortable and
aware that something is turning, but we don't know what it is, Jung referred to that as the
emergence of the masa confusa, which is a word I throw around all the time.
Lisa: You like saying it, don't you Joseph?
Joseph Lee: I love saying it. It rolls off the tongue in a tripping way.

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Deb: It sounds poetic.
Lisa: It does. It's a big confusing mass, you know? And if we think about it as a big roiling cloud
with all kinds of images just halfway poking out of it, and all kinds of feeling and lightning bolts
zinging around it, we come into this inner state where we're boiling but can't quite put a finger on
the problem yet. I think all of us can associate and remember moments at least where we felt that
way. And if we can stay attentive to it and not go back to sleep, things begin to emerge, which
we normally don't like to see in ourselves but which can be very valuable. And then we're on the
path of change if we can put our hands on it and not let it go.
Deb: Jung writes very movingly about being in this place of the masa confusa and the nigredo.
He went out and sat by the edge of the Lake Zurich and built little houses and so on. He was lost.
He said that he needed a point of support in this world and that his family and professional work
were that to him. And I think I want to offer that there is also that in the masa confusa and in the
suffering. What needs to be done? You need to go out and get some groceries. Is there a meal to
be prepared? Is there a phone call to be made? Is there a room to be cleaned?
Lisa: There's always a room to be cleaned.
Deb: Jung says his family and profession always remained a joyful reality and a guarantee that “I
also had a normal existence.” So what is the next step? What is the next thing to be done? What
can you put your hands on or put your voice to that you could do right now?
Lisa: In AA, the advice given is just to do the next right thing. I really love that. It's very
practical. When you're lost, you're confused, you're depressed, you don't know which end is up,
what is the next right thing to do, even if it's just simple.
Deb: Cleaning the bathroom.
Lisa: Yes.
Deb: Yes, but it's lovely and it's grounding. I think we have lots of examples of that. You feel
what you feel--and what is the next right thing you can actually do?
Joseph: I think the image you're bringing forward, Deb, rightly belongs to the albedo stage and
particularly one of the images of doing the laundry. I feel like in the conversation, we keep
slipping out of the nigredo into the next stage because sitting in the nigredo is hard, even in our
conversation, to just circumambulating this particular emergence of what we don't want to see;
not necessarily how we'll cope with it, not necessarily what comes next, but just in the
discomfort of what we're seeing and that that is actually transformative. If we solve it too

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quickly, I tend to become suspicious. And we can go into a clever solution so that we don't have
to feel uncomfortable. Lots of therapies will do that very quickly: choose three thoughts that
actually are comforting and relaxing and every time you have the uncomfortable thought, just go
to the comfortable thought and just shut the uncomfortable thought down. There's a lot of advice
around that and the reason we like that advice is that we don't like being uncomfortable and
nothing in us wants to suffer. So sitting in the nigredo is feeling that we cannot escape the reality
that's emerging and that we must sit and brood on it and look at it and not go away to something
else. And the question that I would ask is, “What am I being brought down to?”
Lisa: Yes. I think one aspect of the nigredo is that it does feel inescapable. You may want to
escape it, but often you really can't. It punctures your defenses. I like your question, Joseph.
What am I being brought down to? There is a humiliation that goes along with it. We have to
admit that we thought we had it all figured out, and guess what? We actually don't. I think that is
true on an individual level. And it's also true on a collective level. We did not think we could be
laid low like this. That the global economy could be cut off at the knees by a virus.
Joseph: I think that's so important, Lisa. I think about just several months ago, there was this
great debate in the United States about whether we should put more energy into the welfare state.
And by that I mean the social safety network. Should we fund universal health care? Should we
strengthen social security or Medicare, Medicaid--you know, all of the safety nets of our culture.
And that was often met with a kind of bravado that one would never need that. If you plan
correctly, you should never be dependent upon some kind of an agency or anything that is
governmental. That we're all like pioneers in the 1800s, and what's happening now with this
sudden emergence of shadow is dependency. There is this enormous feeling of vulnerability in
the American psyche and crying out for a kind of parental caretaking response from the
government that was vilified just several months ago--even gleefully vilified. So this goes to
your comment, Lisa, of the humbling that's required to admit dependency and vulnerability.
Lisa: Yes. And this relates to this idea of the relativization of the ego. Edward Edinger, a
Jungian analyst, wrote a great book on alchemy called Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical
Symbolism in Psychotherapy. He talks about this concept a little bit in relation to the mortifcatio
and the nigredo around King Lear. Early in the play, Lear is so sure of himself and his own
authority, and over the course of the drama, he loses authority, power and control. Then he loses
his dear daughter and undergoes this total mortificatio and goes mad. But it's in this nigredo that

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he is transformed because he gets a glimpse of the transpersonal psyche that he is now willing to
serve. I've been paraphrasing Edinger here, but that's a good example. And perhaps Joseph, you'll
accuse me of slipping into the albedo, which is kind of where it goes. But it is always going
somewhere, too.
Deb: Exactly. What I have been thinking about is how important it is to think about where this
might take us, and just begin to imagine the telos, the trajectory. It's going somewhere and that
doesn't necessarily negate the nigredo. The image that I have is Persephone, who was abducted
by Hades as she sat innocently, a young maiden picking flowers in the field. She was taken down
to Hades and spent--different myths have different time frames-- three to six months down there.
I used to like to think about what she did there every day. There she is in Hades, kidnapped, and
in darkness-- a great image of the nigredo. But down there she had to be doing something.
Lisa: I always assumed she was having really hot sex with Hades.
Joseph: I was exactly thinking that.
Deb: Of course you were Joseph. That is not what I was thinking. I was thinking, did she wander
the hallways? Did she light candles? Did she talk to Tiresias, one of the dead who retained some
consciousness and wisdom? She learned things down there because when she emerged, she was
no longer the maiden she had been before, she was Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. And
I'm thinking, here we all are in a nigredo as a collective around the world. We're all in this
pandemic. What is it that we need to learn about our individualistic egos, beliefs, wants, the
control we think we have over our lives, such as “I'm a self-made man.” Or are we part of
something greater, something that has its own life and its own laws like Mother Nature, for
example. What do we need to learn while we're doing this? What are some of the steps that we
can take as individuals? And they may be very mundane.
Joseph: This descent, this encounter with the personal unconscious, also inoculates us relative to
other stressors that are happening in the environment. The more we are aware of our personal
unconscious material, through this self-acceptance, the less vulnerable we are to the negative
collective unconscious forces which leach into us through kinds of gaping holes in the
personality. And to that end, I have a quote from Jung in his dream analysis seminars. He writes,
"When you come to that loneliness with yourself, when you are eternally alone, you're forced in
upon yourself and are bound to become aware of your background. And the more there is of the
personal unconscious, the more the collective unconscious forces itself upon you. If the personal

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unconscious is cleared up, there is no particular pressure and you will not be terrorized. You will
stay alone, read, walk, smoke, and nothing happens. All is just so. You're right with the world."
Deb: That is a real inspiration for how to engage shadow, be in the nigredo, and have a kind of
incubation or creative depression.
Lisa: Yeah. Just to be with it, you know? And there's a way that you really can't fight the
descent. I'm wondering if the three of us have anything to say about dreams that arise during a
nigredo. Have you seen that?
Joseph: I think any time an analysand dreams of something that they defend against, they're
flirting with the nigredo, and in that way every dream is an opportunity for a nigredo. For
instance, I'm thinking about one client sometime back who was having a dream in which he was
feeling very defensive because a bunch of construction workers were wolf whistling at women.
He was in this kind of outrage, a heroic solar outrage. And that went on for awhile and we
processed it. And then I said, “Well you know, those construction workers that are sexualizing
these women, wolf-whistling them, are actually inside of you. So how would you walk on the
street and wish that you could wolf whistle or cat call to women” That's so unacceptable that it
gets put down. Then his face turned bright red and that's a nigredo moment. It's that moment
where your dream has kind of tricked you into admitting something that is really uncomfortable.
Lisa: That's a great example of kind of what a little nigredo feels like. It's like “oh no.”
Joseph: Busted. They're small nigredos which are really important because they keep us human.
Just as you were saying, Lisa, this idea of being humble and humiliated comes from the root of
the same word humus, which means soil. So it plants us down in the soil of the culture and the
personality, which of course is a place we can derive nutrients from as well.
Deb: I'm back on the corollary between nigredo, shadow and the humbling of our egos. Our
heads want to think “this the way to go” and have a plan for life, for the next promotion. The
nigredo is often imaged as a decapitation -- where things go caput. It’s cogitation thinking, ego
and planning that has to be literally cut off when all these contents from the unconscious have an
upwelling and insist that we pay attention; they take us over.
Lisa: The image of the decapitation is interesting, Deb, because I think a lot of times this reaches
us from the body. You know, it's like our head is riding around all day thinking, "I've got this,
I'm totally in control, I know what I'm doing." But then maybe our body throws up a symptom or
it gets sick or there's an instinctual pull towards something -- and then we lose our head.

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Joseph: Sometimes to good effect for a short period of time! Because it's often in the head, in
the ego, that we disavow parts of ourselves and block becoming more whole.
Deb: Yes. Jung talks about the nigredo as great suffering and grief which nature inflicts on the
soul, and hasn't that happened? Something else is here, something that is greater. The dream ego
says, “I would never wolf whistle at girls. I would never do that.” Our dream egos, like our
waking egos, say no, no, not that. But we're confronted with it and it is bodily. Just as you said
Joseph, this is physical nature happening.
Joseph: All of the naturalness of the presentation of the shadow that I think is happening right
now is partially because people are sheltering at home and they are separated from their
distractions and entertainments. So as I had read in the quote from Jung, whether we're a single
person literally alone in the house or we're alone with our spouse or family, we are cast upon
ourselves and we begin to feel the rumblings of the unlived life, the rumblings of parts of
ourselves that we have very successfully kept quiet and locked away. And so much of what I see
on Facebook are these complaints that people are having about being alone. I'm listening very
carefully to what's rumbling in its cage, under the ground, in these various memes, and the
incredible lengths to which people go to avoid all that. So this is an opportunity for an enormous
amount of growth.
Lisa: Yes. I like your use of the term, “the unlived life,” because I think the unlived life is an
aspect of shadow, and it reasserts itself at times, particularly at times of upheaval, either personal
or collective. Also, if there's a weakening of ego function for some reason, that's when the
unlived life will poke through and it can be tumultuous.
Joseph: As if the inner zookeeper is falling asleep and the creatures inside of us are breaking out
of their cages. There's a darker side to the nigredo, I would say: when one is faced with
unacceptable truths, there are a lot of places we can go psychologically. One of the things people
can battle are suicidal urges, which in alchemical language is sometimes called a lead mania--the
leaden part of the personality emerges to such a state that people begin to spin toward any way of
shutting it down. The most important thing to remember about the nigredo is you must survive it.
Deb: I'd like to talk about how people can escape into narratives that simply are not based in fact
and that is a refusal of the call to suffer, the refusal to give up illusion, or face shadow. We are
called to face the reality of ourselves in a given situation and see what is objectively true as well
as subjectively felt inside ourselves. I'm thinking about what I would call conspiracy theories, for

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example. We are called to face this and not defend, not construct fanciful storylines and not
evade our inner and outer realities. If you're in the nigredo, you have no good choice but to be
there.
Lisa: Yes, you really need to sit in it.
Deb: Yes, we have been abducted and the question is what we do with it. Everything we do, we
do with ourselves. So it's a call to take that into consideration. What do I do when I am in the
nigredo? And you know, Jung had his personal introspective time by the lake and then he did his
work with patients. He stayed grounded in the realities that he needed to face squarely.
Lisa: Deb, you're building on Joseph's point about just needing to survive. Joseph, I'm glad you
brought up suicide because some nigredos are darker, blacker and more depressing than others.
But the nigredo is the time when we might think about giving up.
Joseph: That's the danger. But often Jung wrote that at the nadir, where the suicidal fantasy
begins to rise, if one can muscle through it, something breaks free and new life is possible. of
Another thing Jung did to survive this was to talk to himself about what he was experiencing. He
wouldn't just experience it and shrug his shoulders and say, “Well, there it is,” which a lot of us
would do. He would write these experiences down notebooks and come back to them and reflect
on them. And he might research parallels in ancient literature and capture these feeling states and
inner experiences in works of art. Transforming our experiences into visual symbols helps store
the quantity of suffering in an internal object, which then gives us a bit of breathing room. It
doesn't suppress it, but it titrates some of the intensity. One of the delightful things that I'm
seeing very much on the internet is that people are taking on really marvelous creative projects
that they can do from a distance, like singing to each other, creating games and works of art, and
channeling some of this into a creative endeavor.
Deb: It goes to what you said earlier, Lisa, about doing the next right thing. Whatever we do, we
do with ourselves. If you have a sewing machine you can make face masks for people, or you
can talk to yourself, a practice I heartily recommend, or create art. There are wells within us that
we can dip into.
Lisa: Because people don't have as much to do these days, there's a lot going on in social media.
And Dr. Erin Bailiwick, a psychotherapist and an author and the Director of Still Point UK,
recently tweeted, "The psychoanalyst I'd most like to spend my quarantine with is…" The
choices were Freud, Jung, Winnicott and Lacan. When I saw this tweet, Winnicott was in the

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lead and Jung was in second place. Of course responded -- I voted. You can guess what I voted.
And then I retweeted the poll on the This Jungian Life’s Twitter feed. And shortly after that,
Jung had pulled into the front and the final results of the poll were Freud 11% Jung, 51%
Winnicott, 32% and Lacan 6%.
Deb: I think it was your vote that really put it over the top for Jung.
Lisa: I think it was all our listeners over on Twitter who voted. I think we tipped the scales, so
well done.
Joseph: Well done.
Deb: Okay. And now a dream.
Deb: Hi, this is Deb from This Jungian Life podcast. Joseph, Lisa and I have been deeply moved
by your response to our work, but producing, editing, and distributing it involves substantial
expenses and now we need your help. Please stop by our website, thisjungianlife.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
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provide special episodes, behind the scenes, photos and stories, and a chance to join a select pool
of listeners for dream interpretations. Once again, please go to thisjungianlife.com and click on
"be our patron." Thank you.
Deb: This week's dreamer is 29, a woman, and a high school teacher. Here’s the dream:
I was arriving to a commotion in a beautiful open-space garden beside the university building
where I graduated. As I was approaching the crowd, I wondered who it was that everyone was so
excited about. I was carrying a sort of notebook and wearing a sort of girly school outfit that
indicated that I was a student again. I was surprised to see a slender gay man who was topless,
and with a floral headpiece, dancing in a circular motion -- like he was just so free and flowing
and everyone was hoping he would notice them. He was dancing backed up by 3-4 women with
floral crowns and white flow-y gowns. He was just so fluid and beautiful. Then he looked at me.
And I knew he liked me. When his dance was finished and everybody had left, he came to me
and said hi. And then, we kissed. It was a deep and profound kiss; I have never been kissed that
way. With our tongues doing the talking, we communicated to each other. He told me, “Why are
you so sad?” I said I was afraid. Then I woke seeing my sleeping baby beside me.

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Deb: For context the dreamer says she just gave birth to her third child and feels confined by the
responsibilities of family. She just started reading Jung’s Man and his Symbols and she says the
main feelings were infatuation, fright, being torn, really liking it, yet horrified by the
consequences. And she adds, "I've always been fascinated by male gays. They seem so fluid and
courageous, and sure of themselves, qualities I wish for myself."
Lisa: Well, it seems to me that this dreamer is perhaps facing a little nigredo of her own.
Deb: And the albedo has appeared in the dream with all these white and joyful images like the
sunlight breaking up dark clouds. Very compensatory, isn't it?
Lisa: Yes, but there's something dangerous about it. I mean, this dancing man and the three to
four women with him make me think of Dionysus and the maenads. And we know how
dangerous that energy can be. It tears you apart, or it can.
Joseph: Having this passionate French kiss with the flowered gay man feels very transgressive
to her, but at the same time powerfully influencing, opening her up to certain feelings much as
we had said in the beginning of the episode--the green lion forces, powerful instinctive, hungry
parts of her personality which grab hold and make a demand.
Deb: I'm back on what you said, Lisa, about the maenads, and what you're saying, Joseph, about
how this is transgressive. I see it as compensatory in that Dionysian rites were not necessarily
dangerous. They were also spiritual and full of spirit, joy, dancing and celebration of spring and
new growth, like going to a big party. Let's say, to put it in modern language, it’s like going to
Miami beach for spring break. And so I wonder if something in the psyche has arrived in an
erotic and healing way to provide some hope and freedom to a dreamer who's going through a
difficult time. It's hard having a young family, and she has just given birth to a baby. Some
infusion of this kind of Dionysian energy may be exactly what is needed.
Lisa: I agree it may be needed, but she also talks about being horrified at the consequences. So
this may be just the thing that's needed and yet it may bring tumult with it. I'm noticing that she's
29 and now she has three children, which is to me is a lot by 29. Around that time, as we’ve
talked about before, is a transition and the Saturn return. There's a way that she may be
evaluating her life and the choices that she's made. She may be recognizing that she has made
some choices that have limited future options, as we all need to, but it can be a heavy thing to
take that on board and realize she doesn't have freedom and the fluidity right now in her lived
outer experience as this male dancer.

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Deb: I agree; she doesn't have that freedom in her outer life—but somewhere in the psyche, it’s
there.
Joseph: I think this idea that the mother complex or the mother archetype that I imagine is
powerfully constellated in her by virtue of having three young children and also being a high
school teacher--professionally caring for children--is being being pushed aside a little bit in the
compensatory nature of the dream as you had said, Deb. She has allowed herself to experience
herself in the role of the lover or young maiden who is reacting spontaneously to this display of
beauty in front of her. That may allow her to then go back to the various maternal roles she has
undertaken with a little sigh of relief, and a reminder that she is not just a mother figure.
Lisa: I think it's interesting that the dream has her going back to the school she graduated from,
and she's got a notebook and a kind of a girly school uniform. She's back in the role of student. A
lot of people have dreams where they're back in college or they're back in high school and we're
going back to an earlier developmental phase. Maybe you didn't finish learning everything you
needed to learn at the time and there's some unfinished business. So I'd be curious, if I had the
dreamer here, what time was that uniform from? Was it from college? What got put aside back
then and didn't get fully lived out that maybe is making a reappearance now?
Deb: Okay, if you're back with your notebook and in school and a student, what is it that you
need to learn? Marie Louise von Franz has this great sentence: the psyche doesn't waste much
spit telling us what we already know. So I would be curious about what she needs to learn. It
seems that there she is at school, but she's not going to class and taking notes, so perhaps what
she needs to learn is how to dance and have her erotic spirit brought to life in the midst of all of
the dailiness of taking care of a newborn baby and an active young family, which is burdensome
and just hard.
Lisa: I'm also thinking that another way to understand this dream is in terms of an activated
archetype. And we said maybe it's Dionysus -- it's like the god has appeared and he's going to
have his way with you one way or the other. What we know from Greek tragedy is if you resist
the relationship with a god, you will be torn asunder.
Joseph: Yes. Her embrace of the god is a really good sign because she could have fled.
Lisa: That's a good point.
Joseph: One way to put this into a category, referencing our alchemical discussions earlier, is
that the dancing male figure could be seen as a symbol of Mercurius. The alchemists, when they

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were in their laboratories watching various substances turn colors and vaporize, were trying to
imagine what the motive force was that made all these things happen. They supposed there was a
spirit that was animating all of these things as an activating phenomena. And so Jung came to
think a lot about the idea of Mercurius, and he thought of it as God's capacity to take on
innumerable forms and yet remain Himself. I think that this male figure, whether we think of him
as Dionysus or Adonis or maybe the risen Osiris, is still in that category of Mercurius—including
the impishness and transgressiveness which is also associated with Mercurius. So it all points to
something rather wonderful if she can embrace it.
Deb: Yes, I'm interested in the kiss. There are a lot of things that could have happened. She
could have joined the dance, but what happens is this very specific kiss. She says it's a deep and
profound kiss, and “I had never been kissed that way with our tongues doing the talking. We
communicated to each other. And that is when he asked me, ‘why are you so sad’”? So there is
some exchange and communication in this erotic intimacy. In the kiss, there's a real merger, but
it’s not intercourse, it’s a kiss. That brings forward two parts of her own psyche, the guy and her
dream ego that lifts into awareness of her sadness. What is a kiss? It seems to me that kisses are
soulful. We do it with our heads, where there's consciousness, and our mouths have so many
communicative and sensing functions. Tere's something about this is how this conjunctio takes
place with a kiss.
Lisa: Yes. It's a lovely image of a specific kind of union, isn't it? He says, “why are you so sad?”
And then she says, “I'm afraid.” I think if I had the dreamer here, I would want to know what she
is afraid of. Or what she was afraid of in the dream. It seems like that’s where the dream ends. So
somehow that's an important question.
Joseph: I'm holding the image of the kiss, and thinking about how a kiss is also a transitional
gesture. You know, in one moment you're on a date or you've met somebody. Then there's all the
banter. But a kiss is often the salvo to a whole other category of intimacy. To go from ‘hello’
to a kiss offers a promise of what might happen with a continuation of the intimacy. So the kiss
is that wonderful transitional realization of possibility and erotic conjoining with this part of her
psyche. And if it is a divine figure as well as a feeling of sympathy, there's a possibility of radical
transformation. Jung felt both excited and sober about images of the divine that manifest in the
psyche-- that when the ego is being courted by a force of that magnitude, powerful and

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inescapable demands are likely to rise up. This can lead to tremendous transformation and a
movement towards authenticity, but that transformation can come at a cost and require surrender.
Deb: Yes, the kiss here evokes the erotic. But there's also something very soulful, with a kind of
sacredness in it, because it brings into awareness the sadness. The two parts of her communicate:
the erotic part that is represented by the gay man dancing shirtless and the dream ego part.
There's a real exchange here, a felt and soulful connection that's infused with erotic energy. And
I think it's a really beautiful and encouraging lysis.
Lisa: I agree and I am also with Joseph--we don't know what the god is going to demand of her.
And that may be why she's scared.
Joseph: And rightly so. There's a little bit of awe or awe-fulness about where this might go in
terms of her own trajectory. In one of the associations toward the end, at least on a conscious
level, she says she's always been fascinated by male gays because they seem so fluid and
courageous and sure of themselves, and these are qualities that she wishes for herself. So this
may be the beginning of a very constructive salvo where she has an opportunity to not project
those qualities exclusively onto other people, but to begin to claim them for herself—that she
also has a capacity for fluidity and courageousness. In the dream that is highly visible in the
image of the fellow dancing in the midst of a group and everybody hoping they will be noticed
by him. There's an exhibitionistic quality, a performing quality that she's really attending to.
When I think of her being a high school teacher and the mother of three children, I think often
there's a constant sacrifice of narcissistic needs. And in the dream there's this hope that she can
claim something just for herself--that she can be seen as beautiful and fluid and separate from all
of the roles and responsibilities that she has, which sounds very reasonable to me. I think all of
us feel very optimistic about the dream. It's a gift that might come with a demand, but it's a gift.
Conclusion:
You've been listening to This Jungian Life from our website, thisjungianlife.com. You can
follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, help us produce future episodes by funding us through
Patreon, and submit your dreams for 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 Jungian life.

Copyright © 2020 This Jungian Life. All rights reserved in all domains.

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