Category: Development and Growth

Kathryn Bond Stockton on gender and masculinity

“There are so many different things interacting with that thing we falsely isolate as ‘gender.’ What is the interaction of those elements that produces either a sense of ease, or a sense of concern and anxiety?

“Part of what we’re seeing in our culture is tremendous anxiety surrounding boys, young men, and I have to imagine that that doesn’t really end later in life. Sometimes later in life we all kind of get used to things and we chill. But I have a feeling that these things do remain of concern because they are so extremely bounded. And that’s where, if you watch something like Fight Club, or watch other cultural products, they get at the strange way that white men in particular sort of painted themselves into a corner. Masculinity becomes a whole series of things you can’t do.”

— from The Ezra Klein Show – Gender is complicated for all of us. Let’s talk about it. (2022, August 5). The New York Times.

“This Jungian Life” podcast: Our Attitude toward Death

A mandala at Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland. Source: Marcobeltrametti. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

As a medical social worker in a trauma unit, I was frequently in situations where a family was being informed that their loved one had passed away or was passing away. I witnessed an extraordinary spectrum of ways that people had — or had not — developed a relationship with the archetype of death.

For the most part in American culture, it seems that we are so defended against the certitude of death, so frightened by the cessation of life, that we are often philosophically unprepared to imagine who we would need to be in order to gracefully slip into the hands of the death mother when the time is just right, to welcome the mercy of being liberated from our suffering. We make it more difficult, more painful, more frightening, more alien than perhaps it would need to be.

Certainly, we deprive ourselves of the elegant religious aesthetic that more ancient cultures had been able to cultivate. This was due in part because, lacking the technology we have in the modern age, they could not forestall death. Therefore, developing an attitude of acceptance of death was essential.

But also it seems that death was considered an intrinsic and essential part of life. Part of the religious shaping around death was the certitude that the ancestors continued to be in intimate relationship with their progeny, facilitating, protecting, helping, nurturing. The way we have adopted a scientific attitude in the modern era has deprived us of some of the essential aesthetic that the ancient world had around death.

Of course, embracing science and a scientific attitude has given us a great amount of benefits, but when facing existential realities like death, we have actually been deprived of the help we might have had. We insist on consciousness as the sole reality, we insist on cognition, we insist on science. But by its very nature, death is beyond our ability to think through or cognize.

This is where the realities of the unconscious can come into play, where we turn to mythology, we turn to images from religion, we turn to dreams, we turn to psychic life. But in our modern day world we tend to be so concrete, and so insistent on consciousness as the arbiter of reality, it makes something like death very foreign and alien.

from Stewart, D., Marchiano, L., & Lee, J. (2022, June 10). Episode 217 – Death: A Jungian perspective. This Jungian Life.

Without an understanding of myth, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.

Marion Woodman

R.D. Laing on Psychosis and ‘Ontological Security’

Separation in porous and dense membranes. Source: Michele Ongis. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Biological birth is a definitive act whereby the infant organism is precipitated into the world. There it is, a new baby, a new biological entity, already with its own ways, real and alive, from our point of view. But what of the baby’s point of view? Under usual circumstances, the physical birth of a new living organism into the world inaugurates rapidly ongoing processes whereby within an amazingly short time the infant feels real and alive and has a sense of being an entity, with continuity in time and a location in space.

In short, physical birth and biological alive-ness are followed by the baby becoming existentially born as real and alive. Usually this development is taken for granted and affords the certainty upon which all other certainties depend. This is to say, not only do adults see children to be real biologically viable entities but they experience themselves as whole persons who are real and alive, and conjunctively experience other human beings as real and alive. These are self-validating data of experience.

The individual, then, may experience his own being as real, alive, whole; as differentiated from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly that his identity and autonomy are never in question; as a continuum in time; as having an inner consistency, substantiality, genuineness, and worth; as spatially co-extensive with the body; and, usually, as having begun in or around birth and liable to extinction with death. He thus has a firm core of ontological security.

This, however, may not be the case. The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

It is, of course, inevitable that an individual whose experience of himself is of this order can no more live in a ‘secure’ world than he can be secure in himself. The whole ‘physiognomy’ of his world will be correspondingly different from that of the individual whose sense of self is securely established in its health and validity. Relatedness to other persons will be seen to have a radically different significance and function.

To anticipate, we can say that in the individual whose own being is secure in this primary experiential sense, relatedness with others is potentially gratifying; whereas the ontologically insecure person is preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying himself: the ordinary circumstances of living threaten his low threshold of security.*

If a position of primary ontological security has been reached, the ordinary circumstances of life do not afford a perpetual threat to one’s own existence. If such a basis for living has not been reached, the ordinary circumstances of everyday life constitute a continual and deadly threat.

Only if this is realized is it possible to understand how certain psychoses can develop.

from Laing, R. D. (1965). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Revised ed. edition). Penguin.

* This formulation is very similar to those of Harry Stack Sullivan, Lewis B. Hill, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Silvano Arieti in particular. Paul Federn, although expressing himself very differently, seems to have advanced a closely allied view.