Bipolar Disorder: A Jungian Perspective

Welcome to this jungian life three good friends and jungian analysts Lisa Marciano Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day I'm Lisa 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 Deborah Stewart a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod foreign bipolar disorder it is very important and prevalent kind of disorder it seems to affect 2 to 2.4 percent of the population worldwide it is the sixth leading

cause of disability worldwide it seems to affect both men and women and pretty similar ratios there are a lot of Life issues that go Along with this there is a greater incidence of self-harm through substances and other kinds of Behavioral activities there is an incidence of suicide that is greater than in a typical population people with this disorder can have a great deal of anxiety substance abuse personality issues migraines obesity diabetes the list goes on and on so from a union point of view as well as From a biological point of view we are going

to engage this important difficult and still not at all well understood disorder and before we jump into our topic I want to let listeners know that you can support us on patreon go to our website and click on podcast and you'll see a place to go to our patreon page we produce many episodes every week in which we answer a question from a patron discuss a topic or interpret the dream Of a patron so if you're dying to get your dream discussed by the three of us becoming a patron increases your chances and we have

a lot of fun making that extra content so every week we post another kind of 10 to 15 minute episode so hope that you'll check that out and think about supporting us we really do appreciate it so all of us working in this mental health field have come across And in all the sounds with an array of struggles and various difficulties one of the most challenging things that we come across is bipolar disorder in as much as it is so resistant to normal therapeutic interventions there is something so deep and foundational in both the psychic

structure and even perhaps in the way that the brain functions that it can be quite difficult To use simply talk therapy to move into a more integrated place but I have had that happen on occasion that the swing between the Mania and the depression turns out to be in certain people more of an archetypal wound an archetypal problem so one way that we might frame that is that the manic experience seems to be connected to the energy of the puer and the depressive experience Could be typified by Saturn or Kronos and The Swinging between the

two suggests a lack of integration between these various opposites so um maybe we can talk about the the puer in its most difficult aspects and how that might be connected to Mania you really highlight an important dynamic in this disorder which is alternating between puer and Senex or High and low or up and down uh rather than integrating them and integration is what we hope for really for everyone we could call it individuation uh and a great visual image of integration of course would be the yin yang symbol of both retain their distinctive qualities each

has a little of the other they are in Harmony and uh and comprise a United whole versus swinging back and forth as you Said Joseph right so bipolar disorder used to be known as manic depressive disorder and that calls up this fact that people suffering from bipolar often alternate sometimes rapidly between states where they're absolutely euphoric and maybe grandiose or as we would say inflated and then feel kind of crushing despair at other times so if we imagine some of the qualities of Hermes or Mercury There's uh this very youthful dynamism there is a sense

that the mind can move with stunning rapidity from one idea to the next idea from one person to the next person Mercury never fatigues never needs to rest some people in a manic episode or many a report that they don't sleep for many days um sequentially that's often the first Sign of alarm that I note if someone says that they've had trouble sleeping ask them what does that really mean and how long has it been going on I have a kind of rule of thumb that if somebody hasn't slept for about two to four days

then we're going to move into crisis mode that just sleep deprivation can trigger a psychotic state so that lack of Need for sleep and then there's a rapidity of speech again the Mercurial soaring of words Back and forth and there can be a feeling of secret messages even people in manic States may be driving down the highway and believe that the next 10 license plates that they see if they can suddenly decode and feel that there is a profound message that's being told to them that feels kind of life-changingly important they sometimes can become promiscuous

in nomadic episode and of an affair or they'll have a sexual encounter and then Maybe a an hour later they'll find another opportunity for a sexual encounter much like Mercury who uh you know famously would race around and have these sexual conquests which is why in the ancient world the crossroads were all marked by Mercury who was the god of Travelers but it always had a small uncircumcised Direction carved right into the middle of the pillar because hermese was always kind of ready To go with that much Dynamic energy so that hypersexual behavior is also

part of mania and then of course there's sobering stories of Perez getting into a lot of trouble I'd like to add that in addition to this sort of euphoric mode there can also be a highly irritable mode of restlessness can't can't sit still and that even in a kind of euphoric State uh it is from my experience Obvious to any Observer that this person is not really happy yeah there is um in that state there is a profound lack of relatedness that the uh the ideas are so um electric that they consume all of the

libido in the psyche and so how other people are perceiving us in that state is just kind of absence or the repercussions of our actions are meaningless much like the story of Icarus Icarus was the son of Daedalus who was the Greek mythological Master Craftsman Daedalus built the famous labyrinth in which the Minotaur was housed that took on a number of other uh wonderful magical prospects but wound up along with his son being jailed in a high tower by King Minos of Crete and in order to escape Daedalus fashioned for himself and his son some

special wings and they had feathers glued onto These Wings by Wax and so as The wings were completed and they prepared to make their escape Daedalus told his son Icarus that he could not fly too high or the sun would melt the wax of his wings and he would fall but neither could he fly too low for the moisture and wetness of the water would cause everything to become sodden and weigh him down and once again he would fall and of course Icarus as the young man pure lit off from the tower And he did

fly too high he was so thrilled with his Newfound ability to fly that he crashed and it's a wonderful mythological image for what this particular disorder can be like yeah I think we're in the realm as I said earlier of inflation and grandiosity is one of the kind of Hallmark symptoms of a manic episode so someone comes in and they're going to start a company or they're going to write a book or they've got big ideas And uh they're they're very certain of their capacity to live these out there's no real uh kind of reflection

about the reality principle they're just certain that they can overcome any obstacles and of course we we think of that in Union terms as inflation which is connected with this idea about becoming identified with the archetypes so one of the ways that I think about bipolar disorder and Mania in particular is that we we are identified with the Gods and it's as if when we're in that state we are living in the realm of the Gods we think everything is possible everything is suffused with this intense meaning we have sort of spiritually surpassed the normal

bounds of what it means to be human and of course that's not possible we're not God's and So eventually we we have a often bruising coming down to earth but it is so wonderful and magical in a sense to be in that inflated State I Mean I appreciate what you're saying Deb that Mania is not happiness and there's often irritability that goes along with it and there can be something infectious and and wonderful about someone who is in a little bit of that state I'm thinking of Robin Williams who had bipolar disorder and I think

in some ways exemplifies the golden side of it if you will when when he was when he was sort of up and on you know he was just electric and of course that Informed his really appealing and infectious performances I I also I also want to talk about uh how this can be a kind of spectrum disorder I mean Deb I think you put it right out there at the beginning that this is one of the this is one of the DSM diagnosis that has the strongest case for it being really biologically based yes and

uh you know Joseph I appreciate what you said too about uh there there does seem to be a psychological and even archetypal Element and I I would agree with that and you know this is maybe more so than some of the others this is really this is really in your genes there's a significant hereditary component but I also see in my own experience that some people have it to the extent where they're really incapacitated they have difficulty functioning they're constantly having to get their medication fiddled with they may spend time in and out of hospitals

and other People seem to have just a little bit of it and that can be tragic as well I'm not saying those people only get the upside of it but you know it's not a coincidence I think that there are an extraordinary number of very uh successful brilliant people especially in the entertainment field who suffer from bipolar disorder and it's because I think that the Mania is a little bit like being kissed by the gods and it Comes with a curse as well Jay Redfield Jamison has written a number of books on bipolar disorder and

I will list not all the books but I will list her and you can look up all the books on online and uh one of them is um Touched By Fire manic depressive illness and the artistic temperament so that there is um a tendency for people with this disorder to be drawn to poetry and music and acting and a whole list of of other Artistic ways of expression expressing oneself and and I like that title and what what it makes me think of is that you know these are people like Robin Williams for example where

their Fire Burns very brightly I'm not wanting to romanticize it but I'm just aware of this element as well I know someone in my personal life who comes from a family of uh several siblings and a couple of the siblings have bipolar disorder to the extent Where they're they really can't function uh you know it's very sad but their lives have really been blighted by this but my friend I think has sort of just a little flavor of it and he tends mostly to be very up and have a lot of energy and he's the

kind of person that you know when you spend the weekend with him he's up at 5 30 going great what are we going to do today and he's always got big ideas and tons of energy and big schemes and he he can go to Dark Places But but mostly he just has this incredible energy that I think has really fueled his incredible success in Corporate America I think the world is run by people who are chronically hypomanic which is different than full-blown Mania hyper means a bit less than so when we're when we're shy of

the true possession by the Gods um these are people who really can work uh 18 hours a day at something they love And do it brilliantly and feel revived with a short amount of sleep and do it the next day and there is a place for people that are just blessed with whatever that is which yet often comes at a price my fantasy is that if we think about this from an evolutionary perspective a little bit of this confers something really wonderful and um there's another book by Kay Redfield Jameson called exuberance Passion for life

and somebody like Teddy Roosevelt is a great example of this he was always in motion he did all kinds of things you know whether you agree with the decisions that he made or not um he had that passion for life so I think your point about there's a spectrum and some of this infuses a culture families uh communities with some zest and Spark and too much like fire can can burn So hypomania can lead to exhaustion injury of the body by overworking over training um it can leave the subtle emotional dimensions of relationship and intimacy

unexplored because there's so much energy to move so quickly and yet as we said Steve Jobs looks like somebody who probably was hypomanic this is purely speculative and accounted for this Fierce capacity to work and create an empire And famously at the end of his life when he was dying uh of cancer he was telling people that he he was grieving the loss of relationship and family and intimacy and those parts of light that require gentle and slow tending so yes it brings us gifts and yes it costs us great things terrible things so one

of the tasks in treating a bipolar disorder working with it is to help the person go more slowly the old saying About making haste slowly really applies here how to slow it down a little bit so that the person isn't always going 85 miles an hour sometimes medication especially if it is at the you know burning more hotly under the Spectrum medication is important so is helping the person to cultivate you know sort of healthy lifestyle habits a sleep regimen a sensible diet that of course includes some fun Foods Really watch it with substances of

all kinds alcohol drugs whatever else and Psychotherapy because that ties into the relationship part you were just talking about with Steve Jobs someone that the person trusts who can be supportive containing directive and help to establish an objective point of view and observing ego so that the person develops the capacity to say whoa I was going way too fast yesterday I stayed up way too light late last night you know I Need to get back on track a couple things come up for me Deb on what you were saying first of all I want to

jump in on this idea about kind of regulating sleep and eating and that kind of thing I've worked with people who maybe were a little hypomanic and one of them in particular I'm I'm recalling that it was so important for this person to make sure that he slept a lot he learned that he just needed a lot a lot of sleep and he also tended to need to just make sure He ate well I mean and and ate a lot and that was very grounded for him to just you know eat a nice good healthy

big meal and go to bed early and he figured out how to kind of work work in a nap and also exercising this person did a lot of yoga and I think that these things really helped him keep his feet on the ground he was really aware that these things were really important and that switching up any one of those things would make him vulnerable to Becoming a bit untethered working this metaphor of the puer and Mercury Hermes and the remarkable speed reminds me a little bit also of mercury poisoning and we could even say

that there's a correlate that the science of a manic episode are surprisingly similar to mercury poisoning Mercury being one of the elements natural elements in the world And stuff you see in your thermometer Etc so mercury poisoning also has that effect of sweeping people into a hyper-aroused kind of sweating State there's tachycardia the heart is beating very very quickly the brain is firing too quickly and we get this term uh from the 17 1800s mad as a Hatter and in Alice in Wonderland there's a Mad Hatter but this actually was a medical Problem because the

creation of those felt hats and other objects millinery a work that Hatters would do involved mixing liquid mercury with various fibers and other things to create effects and as the Mercury volatilized and was inhaled or penetrated through the skin this metal poisoning would build up in the body and create these um terrible conditions one of which being a chronic Mania One modern example of this which is so extraordinarily demonstrated was captured in a podcast it's available online at s town podcast.org s-t-o-w-n-p-o-d-c-a-s-t dot org and the S stands for Town um that the main character who

is chronically manic in the episode called an NPR producer and relayed that he was investigating a terrible Murderous cover-up in this small southern town that he lived in and there was something about the intensity of his voicemail and the follow-up phone calls that the producer had with this person a compelled them to want to go and investigate and record and take a look at some of these things and what they found was this rather extraordinary man who was profoundly uncontained And and wild in a fashion who begins to unfold a story unfold his life and

the producer slowly begins to put together a story that no one in the town seems to have noticed and towards the end this gentleman I believe commits suicide his mental state is intolerable to him and it turns out that he was repairing clocks And replating some of the metal objects gold plating them and when one does that in a non-laboratory environment as he was doing you take large amounts of mercury to solve a bit of gold in it and even with his hands just washing metal Parts in these tubs of Mercury no one in the

town had speculated he was experiencing metal poisoning but the reporter puts this together in a Way that is just heartbreaking because you really you come to care for this fellow he's funny and Brilliant and eccentric and strange and trying to survive in this state that he's in and tragically the inability to recognize what was happening did Costa's life but it's it's a lived example of this congruence between the archetype it's poisonous affect the quite literal physical problem of it And the general energy field of a manic episode and the burdens of people who who frequently

cycle in manic episodes I just also want to add in terms of clinically there's something called bipolar one and bipolar two and the differentiation in the distinction is some people have a tendency towards a predominance of manic episodes and fewer And sometimes rarely depressive episodes some people tend to be on the depressive pole with few manic episodes and the predominance of one over the other is seems clinically significant particularly in terms of medication choices so some people are marked by mercury in a way that curses them and perhaps at times blesses them Joseph I find

it really remarkable what you've come up with about the consonants Between the archetype of mercury the substance Mercury and and its effect on our on our psyche to set a biological level and uh you know I guess I suppose the correlate would be what does lead poisoning do lead is associated with Saturn and that's the more kind of depressive archetype and of course my understanding of lead poisoning is that it does uh really depress the central nervous system I I think I mean I I know people can become kind of catatonic with Lead exposure where

they can become constipated which is another that kind of locking up and things won't move fatigue they lose their sex drive they can become irritable they don't want to eat they can lose certain um capacities to manipulate objects even in that same description could be used to describe somebody who's in a severe depressive episode that there's a seems to be a congruent energy field Just to let everybody know I'm not suggesting people who are suffer from depression or literally have lead poisoning but in this jungian world of metaphor you know to be poisoned by Chronos

or Saturn to be led to poisoned as an extraordinary archetypal metaphor does does seem to have a correlate and we associate Kronos with the kind of slow plodding Sequencing of of life where there is too much coagulation things things are getting so thick and people will say this that like getting their foot out of the bed onto the floor is like moving through peanut butter we've often had those dreams right where you're running to get away from something that's disturbing you and all the sudge and your arms can't move it's like the spirit of Saturn

has just Landed in the dream and is thickening everything and making it very very slow and the effect that that house on someone's life can be you're just devastating people who've never been in a major depressive episode sometimes have a hard time imagining this padaya when I was in my 20th I didn't even know what was happening but I had a single major Depressive episode after I graduated from college literally I would wake up in the morning and I I could not find the energy to move the blanket off of me I actually needed Mercury

so to speak and Mercury is often associated with the conscious mind that I have to talk to myself and say pick up my hand take the blanket move it three inches pivot my body put a foot on the floor I Literally had to narrate my body as if I was made of wood luckily whatever was going on with me by the time I could get into the shower and had some kind of stimulus I could get in motion and go to work and but it was uh it was an extraordinary capture in the spirit of

Saturn and the agony of that that it was emotionally painful and I had no insight into why it had Happened I can speculate now but it really felt like my body had been hijacked by something and Jung might have said yes you've been aware most of your life here and here you are at 25 and you are going to have a visitation by Saturn and Kronos and boy it was a visitation now you've really um Illustrated generously I may say you Know what it is like to be uh in the depressive poll of of a

bipolar disorder although yours was unipolar as we say in in the trade as it were and that the manic part the manic polarity can be just as intense and just as excruciating in its own way and the person that has this disorder is is sort of suspended or ricocheting between these two extremes The goal is like Icarus to find to find the middle way the lifestyle component of a therapeutic regimen cannot be overemphasized and having a relationship with a therapist where there is trust and caring and support for staying on medication there's a tripartite kind

of lens that can be a huge relief and very helpful to helping the person stop alternating between this soaring search for for Transcendent spiritual exalted Experience um which is compensated for by um extreme lifestyle sleeplessness overeating over indulging and other sort of concrete or if you will profane uh kinds of activities this is a state of real suffering that is predominantly genetic and if we could just take a look at it as a a disorder that has a lot of biology that's not well understood but a lot of biology going for it it might Help

us be more patient and more compassionate and more generous to the treatment of people many of whom if they are at the extreme end of this really cannot live independently hold jobs take care of themselves well and deserve a kind of containing care that they often don't get often people are captured in a Health Care System more often if they are manic because they're often acting in ways That capture people's attention when I was working in the inpatient psychiatric hospital those were two common events that somebody would have been captured by the mental health system

through police assistance to bring somebody in who is in a very severe manic episode and conversely if somebody was suicidal they wouldn't be brought in unless they declared a suicidal uh plan in ideation so that it's a it's a different kind of Extreme that could bring them into intensive care in the manic State when people return to their more balanced Consciousness and in that environment it is really is through uh medical intervention so we're injecting them with Geodon to calm them down and also just get them to sleep that the sleep deprivation is makes it

almost impossible for the ego to function after a while and and by the way this is often advice That I give people is if people are prone to Mania I will ask them to meticulously track how many hours they're sleeping and as soon as they are sleeping less than five hours a night to seek go to their um physician and just get a sleep aid I have absolutely and I still have clients who've been able to forestall manic episodes because they will force their brains to sleep when they their brains won't normally do It and

that keeps ego function intact it also keeps them in relationship to the unconscious because they're dreaming and when somebody is awake for days as well as burning the brain out from exhaustion they're deprived of the corrective effect of the dream I appreciate what you've both been saying about the biology of it and I'm fully on that page but I want to just go for another second to this the archetypal aspects of it that you've Been lifting up Joseph and to say you know if it is a spectrum disorder and I think it is then we're

all somewhere on the Spectrum and there's a way that all of our lives are touched a little bit by Saturn and all of our lives are touched at times by Mercury and I'm aware also that our culture is perhaps a kind of manic culture at least aspects of it it's certain we certainly live in a culture that rewards hypomania I'm thinking of corporate America The tech sector I mean the the the faster and more light-footed you are the better you do in these fields the the big visions that Tech Geniuses have these kind of spring

from the creative fields of mercury I think in some sense and I think it's good for us to know this I mean Mercury is after all the god of Technology the technology that we're using to record this erases limitation we can instantaneously be with each other even though we don't live in the Same place so in some sense we are living in a profoundly kind of manic culture right now and that might be important for us to know because we might have to cultivate an opportunity to spend some time with Saturn in relation to this

I also want to bring up this wonderful psychoanalytic term that is just so evocative for me as many of these terms are we speak sometimes about the manic defense and I think that many of us spend a lot Of time in the manic defense manic defense does not mean that you are manic it certainly doesn't mean that you have bipolar disorder but it does mean that you escape from uncomfortable Feelings by kind of compulsively doing something by busily cleaning the house or raucously going out and dancing or or just getting very very busy with work

perhaps that there is a kind of driven quality to our doing and we can ask ourselves against what am I defending by Doing this so in the manic defense the declinian he's what is the Telos of the manic defense in terms of their understanding of that well I mean I think that a defense is is always an effort to avoid some unpleasant part of reality whether it's psychic reality or outer reality I suppose that Jung would take that a step further and say that you know the neurotic suffering there's always kind of a kernel of

wisdom in it or that These symptoms are always the psyche's best ability at it best best effort at a cure so in that sense Joseph I wonder if you're saying you know when we find ourselves in the manic defense where is the wisdom in that little bit of mania that's showing up in our lives you know what we're you know looking at over and over again is um a kind of compensatory effort that we all make uh when we're down we try to do something that will bring us back up you know Maybe we we

engage in some kind of huge project to take our mind off the thing that we don't even want to recognize now we we all do that or we've engaged in something and we're just exhausted and wiped out after a big effort or a deadline and we just say well I've just got a crash for a week so these are alternating States and it is different in degree but perhaps not so different and kind from what happens in bipolar disorder Except that it's more severe and it's dysfunctional and what we want for ourselves and for everyone

is first of all equilibrium of how to balance the ups and downs but later we want Insight we want a synthesis we want a symbol making function so that these ups Downs opposites can come into relation with one another like like the yin yang but but job one is to achieve a kind of equilibrium a basic lifestyle with Medication and Psychotherapy equilibrium and that is true for all of us to balance the opposites so if you think about that what that might look like in a very lived moment when somebody is Cinematic episode they often

feel omnipotent which I think Lisa you were talking about with the quinine construct of it I'm thinking about uh an older woman that was in one of the wards that I was working on and she had Come in her medication was restored and her rationale came back to her and one of the experiences people often have when they recover from a severe manic episode is the restoration of Eros they remember that they are in relationship to other people and they have affected them often quite negatively And that's followed by a sense of grief and grief

is that dose of Kronos that doses LED that needs to come into the soul to put them back in their feet and this particular woman in the you know exuberant extended manic episode had spent her daughter's entire dowry and when she was returned to herself and she was left in that Saturn iron grieving and heartache place and having to now negotiate This situation with the daughter whom she seemed to really sincerely love but this is the the cost when when the gods take us over so to speak their agenda and our human agenda don't often

mix well and I'll share a quote this is from the collected works 13. paragraph 55 and I'm just taking the last bit of it it is not a matter of indifference whether one calls something a Mania or a god To serve a Mania is detestable and undignified but to serve a God is full of meaning and promise because it is an act of submission to a higher invisible and spiritual being this personification enables us to see the relative reality of the autonomous system and not only makes its assimilation possible but also de-potentiates the Demonic forces

of life When the God is Not acknowledged egomania develops and out of this Mania comes sickness so if we say that perhaps you know Hermes Mercury any of the puer Puella gods are repressed that we don't have a sense of the inner autonomy of these images we don't have a way to personify them is what Jung is saying a way to imagine Them reading mythology was something you only encouraged as a Curative intervention because it gives us these conceptual frames to place certain qualities outside of the ego and in to the collective unconscious where it

should reside instead of inside of us and that I'm not saying that that would cure bipolar disorder necessarily but it is one of the ways that Jung was trying to address The costly behaviors that any of us are vulnerable to when these forces take us over and I love that quote Joseph because it really brings up the spiritual side of this disease which Deb you've alluded to that there there is a hunger for Transcendence and and again that is very human and it can take on these really even kind of dangerous proportions when someone is

suffering from bipolar disorder the Desire for Transcendence and when we're Manic the belief that we can achieve that uh perhaps through uh really not so well advised means I'm one of my uh I don't wanna I don't know that's right to say my favorite but one of the most compelling portraits I've seen of someone with bipolar disorder is this Verner Herzog uh documentary called Grizzly Man and it profiles this young man Timothy Treadwell who becomes just entranced with grizzly bears and he kind of knights himself he dubs himself the protector of the Grizzlies and this

just vast tract of wilderness in Alaska and he goes to live with the Grizzlies and they're there's this incredible footage of him you know swimming in a river bear tested with this grizzly bear and you know reaching over and touching the grizzly bear and the grizzly bear kind of you know irritably snaps but Treadwell felt you know the Bears are my friends he it's it's a it's just a remarkable watch because talk about inflation to think that you could you know kind of romp with the grizzly that you you were you were on that level

there's uh there's a point in the film where uh Herzog speaks with um a native uh Museum director there and he makes the point that you know his culture has always lived alongside the grizzly bears and Has afforded them a great deal of reverence and distance that we have to have a right relationship with the unconscious we have to understand that it is more powerful than our egos and we have to have a reverence for it but we also have to kind of give it wide birth we can't become identified with these forces in the

unconscious which is what Treadwell did and you know you can imagine his demise and it is exactly what you would Expect and it's very uh Tastefully handled in in the documentary but um he does not survive this is a really powerful and so on point example of What mania can look like and I've seen the film and of course um he's there by himself in the in the wilderness he is untethered from relationship with other human beings with culture with Society with With things that might help him stay a bit more grounded which takes me

back to the myth of Icarus and I wonder what it would have been like if his father Daedalus had said stay right next to me or follow me follow right behind me we are going to do this together and uh stick with me rather than simply giving him directions because relationship as part of our common Humanity Is especially important in you know all kinds of mental health disorders but especially I think in bipolar disorder because people long so for the Transcendence they long to be received they long to be understood I would like to add

here that as we considered this topic and I did some more reading and note taking and through this podcast I wondered if I would really want to share of what has been with me all along which Is that my mother had bipolar disorder and other family have it and I'm newly moved by how powerful this this is how important it is and how incredibly human and poignant this can be and what one hell of a struggle it can be to stay in relationship with somebody who has bipolar disorder this takes us really right to the

roots of our our hearts our minds our persistence our determination To really accompany with discipline and compassion and patience and most of all persistence somebody who has this disorder I think you're you're bringing in a a discussion which I think we often don't have as I'm realizing on the podcast is the effect of some of these events on the children of such people we talk about all kinds of archetypes and human experiences within the Intra-psychic environment but there is a whole other social dimension that has a powerful powerful impact I appreciate you bringing that up

for further conversation between us and of course I will add that my mother suffered she had a difficult life and she was a remarkable vibrant passionate talented Human being and I loved her very much it's all there in a particularly demanding intense multi-colored mix I can feel what you're saying Devon and wanting to honor your mother's strength and integrity and that she like all who suffer extraordinary States was a human being that she was a soul in relationship to her children and her Family even though these um extraordinary archetypal storms affected her I'd like to

take just a minute to deepen our discussion about the depressive side we've talked about creative depression before which was I think very helpful for many people to understand that sometimes the drawing of the life force into the underworld actually is in service to a rebirth Experience and and sometimes it's not so I wanted to unpack just a bit more of the mythology of Kronos Kronos and Saturn uh and different systems are are connected so Kronos was the son of Uranus and his mother was alarmed by Uranus's relationship to his son And she convinced Kronos to

castrate his father and the phallus is thrown into the ocean and has a whole other storyline about what that does but I want us to look at this symbolic connection between intense depressive States and castration that if Uranus is the Primal self the original Matrix and something has happened So there is a kind of insurrection in the deep deep part of the psyche and the creative fertilizing aspect of the self has been cut off and thrown into the ocean thrown into the unconscious that lack of fertilizing excess has an effect on the psyche and so

it's no mistake that Cronus was associated with with lead and slowness and even deadness as the myth continues Kronos marries produces the first Olympians and he is so afraid that they will do to him what he did to his father that he eats them Zeus's mother's help they trick Chronos into not eating Zeus he's able to get the children out of chronos's belly and the Olympians are this next stage of dynamic life and chronosis cast into the underworld where He lives in Tartarus which was a particularly disturbing kind of hellish kind of world but this

image of Kronos as the castrating Force in Kronos that eats all Dynamic potential just stuffs it inside I think it's a extraordinarily powerful and instructive symbolic way of understanding that kind of depression And how how life is really um captured and dissociated so perhaps we can wrap up by just appreciating the jungian contribution to the conversation that in most modern treatment paradigms the view is that the brain is broken so to say and there are these mechanical things that can be done we try this Medication and that medication or in in older times they would

uh do convulsive electroshock therapy and the focus was very much on the machine of the brain and we still have much of that attitude and there is some truth in that because we do have some science that suggests the neurochemistry of the brain becomes problematic and that changes how it functions So I again no disrespect to the interventions that save people that happen in pharmacopoeia I think we're adding that simultaneously the soul the psyche is also contending with these powerful archetypal forces that interfere with the ego's relationship to the self as debuted said with the

Transcendent function That something interferes with the symbol making function in the psyche because symbols capture force and distance them from the ego so there can be inner objects that are related to and not forces that possess the ego and even disruptions to sleep can have some violating influence on this ego self-access and one of the jungian correctives is to be able to find mythologic metaphors to describe states of consciousness So that once again the ego can have distance from these powerful Energies and it's in the distance that people can then restore themselves to their reasonable

life-affirming behaviors so we hope that in this episode we've touched on that and piqued some curiosity about this additional way of considering Bipolar disorder so before we switched to a dream I just want to take this opportunity to let you all know about dream school dream school is our online program that teaches you how to work with your dreams there are audio components there are 12 of them they're 12 different topics that should last you about a year to go through them all one by one and we we really walk you through the entire Union

approach to working with your own dreams which can Be a really powerful way of of Shifting things and working with the wisdom that is an aspect of the unconscious so that we hope that you'll go to our website this unionlife.com and check out dream school and consider joining foreign [Music] comes from a 32 year old male artist and here's his dream I'm in a restaurant busy with people standing and moving around I too am standing and have been given a seafood dish in an opaque glass at first like a fancy stemmed glass for cocktail shrimp

and I slurp some of it down looking into the vessel I realize I've been eating raw sea horses I continue to eat one and then another not wanting to be rude they're slimy room temperature and gray I look again into the vessel which now is narrow at the top and white at the Bottom as if the seahorses barely submerged in a gray liquid are in a dark pit that I have to peer into and I do realize that some of them are still moving puckering their lips trying to breathe I decide I cannot keep eating

them I go to where murky puddles have formed in the cement by the melting ice and crab parts of the kitchen's Seafood prep I assume the puddles to be brackish or at least can provide a more bearable end of life for the seahorses so I throw them in by flicking the glass there are still more sea horses stuck to the bottom of the glass my flicking hindered by its strange shape people are standing and talking around the puddles now so it's discreetly that I quickly flick the rest Of the seahorses out not wanting to be

seen doing it and not wanting the seahorses to be seen in the puddles he adds his context the past several months have been marked by a lot of depression and isolation loneliness and as a result I've been feeling pretty insecure about my social world I'm about to go live in Italy for a couple of months which is very exciting but also because in fact I won't know Anyone there is in a sense a big step backwards from feeling stable and in a community he says his main feelings in the dream are mild disgust sadness empathy

for the seahorses and a kind of social discomfort or embarrassment and then he adds a little bit about his associations I did not feel like I had any close companions or familiar friends in the dream it was sort of like a fancy dinner I was only at incidentally and at a location I did not recognize nor was particularly distinct in fact I'm not sure I noticed any walls at all just many people I have been living in Brooklyn the land of restaurants and vague social anxieties so that could be related in terms of seahorses they

are not something I've dreamed about before that I can remember and not an animal I have Much particular experience with that being said it's only this past summer that I learned you can find seahorses washed up on the Ocean Beach I have a dried sea horse now from a City Beach and they keep it in an oyster shell in my bedroom well I I find this dream so poignant actually um I mean just a couple of things that Jump out at me is uh you know he's in this he's in this sort of land of

um social Persona he's at this fancy dinner with this kind of cocktail Glass by the way I just love that he calls Brooklyn the land of restaurants and vague so she fake Social anxieties is so perfect oh yeah um yeah I can really feel that so um but anyway so he's in this kind of persona land and then suddenly there's this Awareness of something and as he pays more attention to it it be it goes from being inanimate to alive barely alive but alive so what I sort of Imagine about that is that sea horses

image some aspect of inner unconscious life that has been inadequately attended to and perhaps has been used as kind of a in a callous way as a sort of resource you know it's just being served at this In this fancy cocktail dish but when he begins to pay attention to it you know he doesn't even notice that there are lies until he pays attention so it's that sense of when we begin to tend the unconscious it comes alive I really appreciate it I have to say I I just have this sense of um I think

I like the streamer you know I love his sort of ethical stance of I when I realize they're alive I cannot eat them Like he can't do this he can't continue to treat this content as uh as just this sort of soulless resource you know that this is something important and he doesn't have the wherewithal to really um make it completely better but he is interested in trying to give them the best end at least that he can and the end of it with the puddles and he's kind of embarrassed there's self-consciousness to me that's

like the feeling of being slightly embarrassed That we're attending to Seoul you know that maybe all of our friends are going to go out and they're going to go drinking or something and you know we we realize that uh I don't know that that what we what we really need to do is uh stay in that night and journal about the dream we had the previous night you know it's a little embarrassing you know who's going to understand that or value it that's that's him you know trying to do the Best he can with the

seahorses in these kind of brackish disgusting puddles but but also not not wanting anyone to see him there's a there's a kind of sense of embarrassment about it so I'll I'll just stop there for right now but I I think I'm very much um in a place similar to where you are Lisa especially the part about Brooklyn being the land of restaurants and uh vague social anxieties having lived in Brooklyn for almost uh 20 years but you know the dream starts with um you know this sort of preciousness about the restaurants of and it's in

you know all kinds of magazines of special dishes and what kinds of exotic things can we eat and all kinds of wonderful ethnic foods and the new restaurant that opened up on Smith Street that you can't even get a reservation for for at least three months so there's this sort of elevated Uh aspect where culture has almost become you know sort of Rococo and overly done and overly ornate and uh the seafood dish is being served in a special glass like a glass for cocktail shrimp so there's such a discrepancy between all this sort of

persona aspect of restaurant and Foodies and culture and what turns out to have life and he's he starts out by slurping some of it down but they're Raw And they're in they're slimy and room temperature and gray and they're in a gray liquid and a dark pit that he has to peer into this is not something that can be you know that one would serve in a fancy restaurant so in a way there's a kind of bipolarity here between the presentation of we're all at the wonderful restaurant and the actual reality which is uh this

is not even appetizing from the get-go And as you said his then deepening appreciation for there is life here and isn't that the way the unconscious often presents itself to us is not as you know sort of multi-colored lovely little fairy lights twinkling in the evening but as something slimy and dark room temperature not all that appealing but alive and then we have of course the image of The seahorse which we all checked our symbol dictionaries and could found could find nothing and yet of course seahorses are really such magical Little Creatures they really do

look like horses and horses are often an image of just the life force itself and so it's the life force that inhabits the ocean of the unconscious in some sense so this is uh this is a pretty special thing to find I think I I think what's Interesting about sea horses is that they're small and they're very odd little creatures they're not Dolphins they're not uh you know anything Grand and grandiose but they are charming and childlike every child loves seahorses because they're the life force in a quirky manageable understandable kind of presentation I find

the dream slightly confusing honestly uh and I would really want the Person here to to move in a little bit more I find myself having a body reaction to eating something that's ostensibly disgusting although he doesn't use that word in the moment he doesn't later on but I certainly uh recoil all right I remember once um going to a really fancy restaurant and you know as always I got myself in trouble by wanting to try something new um and so there was just a little bit of Pasta and it was covered in Squid Ink and

some other kinds of things no no offense to those gourmands among you but it was like eating rotten fish bait I mean it was horrendous and and I'm forcing myself to eat it you know like because someone's decided it's a delicacy and I don't want to embarrass myself and so I'm like like chewing and not breathing to get this kind of this Stuff down and then finally I hear somebody several seats back talking to the waiter really angrily saying this is totally disgusting like I cannot imagine you would charge anybody money for this and I

was such a relief to have somebody just say the truth about it but it begs that question which I really find Curious in the dream and I find Curious in myself is why why did I keep eating it that even the smell of it was my body Was saying this is horrendous and so there is um this interesting tension between a kind of the authentic body response and then the the persona and the social milieu and status and this weird way that the culture can declare something a delicacy oh it's a delicacy to eat live

sources it's a delicacy to eat something vomited on the squid onto a plate you know that's rare so it must you know let's All let's all take a mouthful of that and there's a certain uh cultural perversity about assigning value uh to quote-unquote Delicacies that then like trick us we have to override our Natural Instincts to participate in this bizarre fantasy in the culture of eating or doing something that our bodies are like oh my god well I guess I should and I just wonder about that dynamic You know that that seems to be highlighted

for this fellow and that uh I wish that I had honored I did not get ill from it thank goodness but I wish I had just kind of honored my body and that disgust is a powerful feedback process between Primal instincts and what's happening so where is he overriding something some deep knowledge about What's truly valuable he's forced to swallow which is a term used in the culture all the time I just had a swallow it and move on suck it up suck it up I'm going to par uh what he says in the context

um that parallel so much of the of the dream of that the past several months have been marked by a lot of depression and isolation loneliness as a result feeling pretty insecure about my social world And then he's going to go to Italy in a couple of months which is very exciting but I won't know anyone there so is it a big step backwards and he doesn't have a community so you know here is you know sort of the outer World situation of he's not you know all that happy in in Brooklyn uh the land

of restaurants and vague social anxieties um he's going to go to Italy which is exciting but also you know will be Lonely when he doesn't know anyone at least at first of really trying to go back and forth between those two feelings just like he did in the restaurant that he's been given this dish which is supposed to be something special and his body experience of revulsion and so I think we're seeing two polarities here played out in the dream and and he's living it in his Waking Life World so he asked this outer World

situation where he's looking for more connection and community and the dream is an invitation to invest more in the inner world it also suggesting right along those lines that he's out in the middle of this kind of party and he's somehow contextually pressured to digest something that's disgusting so I'm wondering if there's also Something going on in the back of the head back of the Mind that leaving the isolation and returning to communal life to the community will force him to have to eat something digest something that he does not want to and I have

to say that many folks that I've had as analysis who are profound introverts often do find that if they're forced to extrovert too much they're forced to socialize too much it's like something's Being crammed down their throat it makes them feel unwell and they start getting very resistant so I'm wondering if the dream is also talking about some price that the psyche at the moment feels it has to pay in order to be part of of the social scene I agree with that and I'm putting it together with what you said Lisa uh it's an

invitation to the inner world it's Not as if this conundrum is about should I stay here or go to Italy will it be this or will it be that do I have to conform to be part of a community which at least I have in Brooklyn versus be isolated and lonely in Italy it's not about any of those it's about where are your own inner sea horses that are slimy at room temperature gray and need to be tended to need to be cared for in a way that Beyond just throwing them into the brackish water

Behind the restaurant the last thing I want to lean into which is going to be rather Freudian is that Chinese medicine a signs as it does to many things certain medicinal properties and seahorses are dried and ground up and made it to different preparations to treat erectile dysfunction and lack of energy so there's somehow archetypally I suppose connected to that so sometimes with a dream I'll step out Of the narrative and just circle certain phrases gray liquid slimy discreetly flicking not want to be seen doing it that sounds like masturbation it sounds like sex to

be honest so there is a possibility that part of the loneliness um that one experiences of course it's a 32 year old fellow it's a lot of natural sexual tension and the dream I think is also brings up A conversation around the ambivalence around masturbation and what that symbolizes for him because in the gray liquid are these tiny living creatures called sperm to flick them into a puddle or down a toilet or a shower drain or whatever happens to them there's some how the psyche is possibly monitoring that and it's not uncommon many of us

are raised in cultures where masturbation is a very ambivalent Activity whether it's through religious Prohibition in the cinnabonin as well as many men feel sad after they masturbate because it is a demonstration that they do not have a partner and those things can be inexorably linked together so just another dimension on top of all the other wonderful archetypal and social pieces here to not shy away from Because it feels provocative you've been listening to this jungian life from our website this jungianlife.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 Union life [Music] foreign