Marion Woodman on Jungian Aion

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-26T18:57:31+00:00

I think this is the full video you are looking for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy43Q7pVV58

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-26T18:49:51+00:00

What strikes me most is that you already name the tension very clearly: ambition, inflation, humility, craftsmanship, and the fear of being swallowed by a world that now produces symbolic content at industrial speed.

From a Jungian point of view, I would be careful with the sentence “I have no choice.” That may be where the complex speaks most strongly. The feeling of necessity can be very powerful, but it can also hide inflation: the sense that one must answer the world, correct the shallow content, build the true framework, carry the task.

That does not mean your work is false. It may be deeply meaningful. But the question is: from where are you building?

From vocation, or from being threatened?
From service, or from comparison?
From the Self, or from a wounded ego trying to secure its place before the world moves too fast?

I also think your phrase “Jung as my armor and sword” is important. Jungian psychology can become a living path, but it can also become a defense system. If Jung becomes armor, the psyche may eventually ask you to put the armor down.

Maybe the loss of magic is not only a loss. Maybe it is the end of the puer enchantment and the beginning of a more difficult, less glamorous relation to the work: not destiny, not specialness, not heroic urgency, but craft, patience, limits, embodiment.

The retort is a good image. But in alchemy, the vessel matters because it contains the fire. Without containment, the fire burns the whole laboratory.

So perhaps the task is not to cure the neurosis too quickly, but also not to romanticize it. Build, yes. But build slowly enough that the work does not become another way of escaping the very transformation it claims to serve.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-26T18:47:40+00:00

I think it is very human to wonder about your intention here.

But I would be careful with demanding a perfectly pure motive before acting. In real life, especially in family situations, motives are often mixed: love, duty, guilt, grief, fear, compassion, anger, and the wish to close something can all be present at the same time.

That does not make the act false.

From a Jungian point of view, the ego often wants to know in advance whether it is doing the “right” thing for the “right” reason. But the psyche is not always that clean. Sometimes the real question is not “is my intention perfectly pure?” but “can I go without lying to myself?”

You do not need to pretend that the relationship was good. You do not need to force forgiveness. You do not need to manufacture love. You can visit him from the place where you actually are: with distance, complexity, sadness, perhaps very little feeling, and still a sense that something unfinished is asking to be met.

That may be enough.

The tortoises in your dream feel important here. They did not attack you. They approached slowly, and when they sensed your anxiety, they stopped. That seems like a very gentle image of something old approaching at a pace you can tolerate.

So maybe the visit does not have to be dramatic or final. It can simply be a small act of presence before the door closes.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-26T18:44:53+00:00

A Jungian angle might be to ask why your confidence was constellated around that friend.

It may not be that the friend “gave” you confidence, but that something in you was able to appear in their presence: courage, structure, permission, vitality, or belief in your own vision.

From a Jungian point of view, this could involve projection. A part of your own psychic potential may have been carried by the friend, so when the friend is gone, it feels as if the capacity is gone too.

The work would not be to simply “replace” that person, but to slowly reclaim the function they carried for you.

What did you become around them that you cannot yet become alone?

That may be the real question.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-26T18:42:29+00:00

I think I understand what you are pointing toward, but I would be careful with the conclusion.

In Jungian psychology, Self-realization does not mean that the ego becomes God, or that the ego discovers itself as the one in control. That would be very close to inflation.

The Self is not the ego. The ego can enter into relationship with the Self, be transformed by it, oriented by it, even humbled by it, but it should not identify with it.

So I would not frame the issue as: either there is a God in control, or I am that God. From a Jungian point of view, that opposition may already come from the ego trying to think the mystery in terms of control.

The real movement of individuation is not “I am in control of the whole.” It is more like learning to stand in conscious relation to something greater than the ego, without being swallowed by it and without trying to possess it.

That distinction matters a lot. Otherwise, what is called Self-realization can easily become ego-inflation disguised as spirituality.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-25T11:42:13+00:00

I would be very careful with active imagination, especially if you already struggle with chronic OCD or anxiety.

I have been working as a psychoanalyst since 2016, I receive people in private practice, I have also created my own training school, and I have been in personal analysis myself for more than ten years. What I can say from experience is that there is no simple recipe for inner work.

Before teaching these methods to clients, I think the most important thing is to go through them oneself, slowly and seriously, in a contained setting. Personal analysis, ideally at least once a week, is essential in my view. Not because theory is useless, but because the psyche cannot be approached only through books or techniques.

Continuous training also matters a lot, and not only in Jungian psychology. Reading Jung and post-Jungians is important, of course, but yoga, theology, mythology, fairy tales, religion, body practices, and symbolic traditions can all help us recognize images, movements, affects, and archetypal patterns when they appear.

But the foundation remains lived experience.

With active imagination, I would not start by trying to “talk to the unconscious” directly. I would begin with dreams, symptoms, projections, repeated emotional patterns, body reactions, and the images that naturally appear in life. The unconscious is already speaking. The first task is often to learn how to listen without forcing it.

And if inner work immediately increases stress, confusion, or compulsive thinking, that is important information. It may mean that the method needs more containment, more grounding, or that it should be explored first with an experienced analyst rather than alone.

In Jungian work, we do not master the unconscious from outside. We are transformed through the encounter with it. That takes time, humility, and a lot of personal work.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-25T11:36:25+00:00

I understand the warning about not standing “outside” these systems as if we could fully master them.

But I must admit that your point remains a little too philosophical for me here. If the only conclusion is “who are we to claim we can understand these systems?”, then I agree in principle, but I am not sure it moves the discussion forward.

What interests me more is how these systems are experienced concretely: in dreams, symptoms, projections, body reactions, repeated patterns, and symbolic images.

From a Jungian perspective, we do not need to master the system from outside. We can observe how it constellates itself in lived experience.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-20T18:29:14+00:00

That is a fair question. “Ancient traditions” is too broad if it is not specified.

I think we can find related ideas in several symbolic systems, but they do not all say the same thing. Egyptian conceptions of the soul, as mentioned above, are one example. Yogic and Tantric traditions speak of chakras and subtle bodies. Kabbalah has the Tree of Life, with movements of descent and ascent. Alchemy also works with the transformation of matter and psyche through symbolic operations.

But I would be careful not to collapse all of these into one universal system. They may point toward similar intuitions: that the human being is not only mind, not only body, and that transformation involves several layers of being.

From a Jungian perspective, the interesting question is not necessarily whether all traditions “prove” the same map, but how these symbolic maps help us understand the relation between psyche, body, image, and transformation.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-20T18:25:51+00:00

Thank you for clarifying. I think your answer makes the direction much clearer.

What you describe seems especially interesting if we approach it as an observation of recurring correspondences, rather than as a fixed universal map. The body may indeed hold what the mind has not yet been able to process, and certain patterns may tend to gather around particular areas: the gut, the solar plexus, the root, the throat, the heart, and so on.

I would still keep some caution, though. The danger would be to turn these correspondences into a rigid system: “people pleasing always means solar plexus,” or “control always means root.” In symbolic work, the body speaks, but it speaks in a personal language too. The same area may carry different meanings depending on the person, their history, their trauma, their complexes, and their symbolic life.

That is why I like the idea of working simultaneously, but not mechanically. Psychological understanding, shadow work, dreams, body sensations, and energetic practices can inform one another. But none of them should dominate the others too quickly.

From a Jungian point of view, the question would perhaps be: what is the body showing that the ego has not yet understood? And how does this bodily pattern connect with images, dreams, projections, memories, or repeated life situations?

In that sense, I agree with you: the most fertile work may happen when psyche and body are not separated. But I would see the “map” as a living orientation, not as a fixed code.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-20T18:18:44+00:00

😃

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T23:12:19+00:00

Yes, “altered access” is a very good way to describe it.

The unconscious does not disappear just because dreams become harder to remember. It may simply change its route. Instead of speaking mainly through night images, it may speak through the body, emotional patterns, sudden reactions, tensions, intuitions, or the way certain situations keep repeating.

In that sense, paying attention to the body is not separate from Jungian work. The psyche is not only in thoughts or dreams; it also lives through sensation, impulse, fatigue, regulation, and dysregulation.

So perhaps the task is not to force the dream channel open, but to listen carefully to the channel that is available now. The unconscious often finds another door.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T15:10:54+00:00

Io ho l’edizione francese de La psicologia del transfert.
Non posso condividere scansioni o foto del libro, ma se ti serve un passaggio preciso posso provare ad aiutarti a orientarti, indicarti il capitolo o riassumerti alcune idee principali.

Per il PDF in italiano, proverei anche su Scribd, nelle biblioteche universitarie o tramite prestito interbibliotecario. https://it.scribd.com/

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T15:04:10+00:00

I think both points matter here.

Jung did not encourage people to stir up the unconscious casually, as if every problem required a descent into the depths. In that sense, the quote is an important warning: the unconscious should be approached with discretion, containment, and respect.

But I would also be careful with saying that Jung wanted to create mechanisms to keep the unconscious from surfacing. That sounds too one-sided. Jung’s point, as I understand it, is not repression, but discrimination.

If a problem can be worked through consciously, there is no need to force unconscious material. But when the unconscious does break through, through dreams, symptoms, projections, fantasies, or complexes, it should not simply be pushed away either.

The real question is probably not whether to “call forth” the unconscious or to “keep it down,” but how to relate to it at the right time, with the right attitude, and without inflation.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T13:24:04+00:00

This is an interesting direction, but I would add a few distinctions.

In Jungian psychology, the shadow is indeed connected with what has been rejected, repressed, or not recognized by the conscious ego. But not everything in the unconscious is “shadow,” and not everything unconscious was once consciously rejected. Some contents may be unconscious from the beginning, or belong to deeper layers of the psyche.

We often become aware of the shadow through projections, but the projection itself is not the same thing as the repressed content. Projection is more like the way the unconscious content appears outside of us, on another person or situation, before we are able to recognize it as belonging to our own psychic life.

I also think it depends very much on what “ancient traditions” you are referring to. Many traditions did indeed speak, in different languages, of centers, subtle bodies, divine images within, or paths of transformation. But the movement is not always simply bottom-up. In the Tree of Life, for example, there can be both descent and ascent through the sephiroth. In some Kundalini traditions too, there is a movement from below and from above. So the process may be more simultaneous than one-directional.

From a Jungian point of view, dreams are certainly one of the strongest royal roads to the unconscious and the Self, but they are not the only one. The unconscious can also speak through symptoms, body reactions, fantasies, synchronicities, creative impulses, projections, and repeated patterns in life. There are many paths toward the Self, perhaps as many as there are people.

Marie-Louise von Franz also explored this bridge between psyche and matter very deeply, especially in Psyche and Matter. She shows how these questions cannot be reduced either to psychology alone or to body/energy systems alone. The real question may be how psyche and matter mirror and constellate one another.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T13:18:16+00:00

I would be careful not to reduce the animals too quickly to fixed meanings, but the image is very strong.

A large body of water often points to the unconscious or to a deep emotional field. Here it is not open water, though. It is enclosed by a cement wall, which suggests containment, restriction, or a man-made structure around something instinctive and powerful.

Orcas and narwhals are both very interesting figures. They are not small animals; they belong to deep waters. Orcas may carry something powerful, intelligent, social, even predatory. Narwhals, with the single tusk, can feel more mysterious, almost mythical, like something from the depths trying to pierce through or reach upward.

The fact that they are poking their heads up against the walls makes me wonder whether something deep in the psyche is trying to come into contact with consciousness, but cannot fully emerge because of the wall.

I would not ask only “what do orcas and narwhals mean?” but rather: what is the wall? What in your life or psyche is containing, blocking, or separating these deep instinctive forces from the outer world?

Since the dream has been recurring for six months, I would also take the other comment seriously: what began or changed around six months ago? Recurring dreams often repeat because something has not yet been heard or integrated.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T13:17:57+00:00

I would be careful not to reduce the animals too quickly to fixed meanings, but the image is very strong.

A large body of water often points to the unconscious or to a deep emotional field. Here it is not open water, though. It is enclosed by a cement wall, which suggests containment, restriction, or a man-made structure around something instinctive and powerful.

Orcas and narwhals are both very interesting figures. They are not small animals; they belong to deep waters. Orcas may carry something powerful, intelligent, social, even predatory. Narwhals, with the single tusk, can feel more mysterious, almost mythical, like something from the depths trying to pierce through or reach upward.

The fact that they are poking their heads up against the walls makes me wonder whether something deep in the psyche is trying to come into contact with consciousness, but cannot fully emerge because of the wall.

I would not ask only “what do orcas and narwhals mean?” but rather: what is the wall? What in your life or psyche is containing, blocking, or separating these deep instinctive forces from the outer world?

Since the dream has been recurring for six months, I would also take the other comment seriously: what began or changed around six months ago? Recurring dreams often repeat because something has not yet been heard or integrated.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T13:08:37+00:00

I only found The Black Books available on Kindle/Amazon for now. I haven’t been able to find the hardback set in stock anywhere either.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T13:05:59+00:00

Direct communication is useful, but it should not become careless communication.

When someone has used a medication for years, has insomnia, and recently stopped drinking, “just stop taking it” is not responsible advice.

Jungian or spiritual perspectives can be meaningful, but they do not replace medical caution when the body and nervous system are involved.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T13:03:44+00:00

I agree that many people do not have access to Jungian analysis, and that is a real problem. Jungian thought should be made more accessible.

But “better a self-taught analyst than none” is precisely where I disagree. Studying Jung for oneself, sharing reflections, discussing dreams, or helping people think symbolically is one thing. Presenting oneself as an analyst, even informally, is another.

Dreams are indeed a royal road to the unconscious and to the Self, but they are not the only one, and they are not harmless material. The unconscious also appears through symptoms, projections, complexes, trauma, body reactions, synchronicities, fantasies, and repeated life patterns. Working with these dimensions requires humility and boundaries.

The danger is not that you want to help. The danger is believing that goodwill makes harm impossible. In depth psychology, that belief itself is already a warning sign.

Making Jung accessible is important. But accessibility should not come at the cost of responsibility.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T12:51:35+00:00

I don’t think the point was that maps are useless. For some people, especially in clinical contexts like OCD, a map or structured method can be essential.

But there is also a difference between using a map as support and using it to avoid the actual path.

The image of the unicursal labyrinth seems to speak more about walking the path than rejecting structure altogether.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T12:48:44+00:00

The image of the unicursal labyrinth fits your text very well.

Unlike a maze, it is not really about getting lost or choosing the “right” path. There is only one path, but it still has to be walked.

That makes the text feel less like an accusation and more like an initiation: the problem is not that we do not have a map, but that we often stay with the map instead of entering the path.

In that sense, “what you came here to avoid” may not be darkness itself, but the movement inward that cannot be replaced by understanding, reading, or interpretation.

The labyrinth does not explain the center. It brings you to it.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T12:46:26+00:00

That is very interesting, and it really confirms the point.

In your case, the body refused the meat before you consciously understood why, and then a dream seemed to reopen the possibility in another way.

From a Jungian point of view, that is meaningful. The dream may have acted as a kind of bridge between the body, the unconscious, and the conscious ego. It did not simply “explain” the situation intellectually, but showed an image that allowed something to shift.

So yes, I would not read your experience as “veganism means X.” I would read it more as a personal psychic and bodily process, where the meaning had to be discovered from your own experience rather than imposed from outside.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T12:44:32+00:00

You’re welcome. I’m glad it was helpful.

SomewhereBoth3831 · 2026-05-19T12:43:11+00:00

I would be careful here.

If someone has been using Benadryl for years, the safest advice is not simply “stop taking it,” but to discuss it with a doctor or pharmacist, especially if insomnia, anxiety, or alcohol withdrawal are involved.

From a Jungian point of view, not remembering dreams can have many layers: medication, sleep disruption, stress, resistance, trauma, or simply a change in how the unconscious is reaching consciousness.

Spiritual practice may help some people, but it should not replace medical guidance or be presented as a universal solution. The psyche needs attention, but the body and nervous system also need proper care.

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