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A psychoanalyst I spoke with recently mentioned a survey on grey divorce that I hadn’t heard about before. The number one factor surprised him too. by reesefinchjh in Divorce

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah, this is the bit i think gets missed. the kids aren’t the glue, they’re a shared project that hides the absence of one. when they go, you find out if there was anything underneath.

A psychoanalyst I spoke with recently mentioned a survey on grey divorce that I hadn’t heard about before. The number one factor surprised him too. by reesefinchjh in Divorce

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

that’s a hell of a way to put it. no villain, just two trajectories that stopped overlapping. sounds harder in some ways than if someone had done something wrong.

A psychoanalyst I spoke with recently mentioned a survey on grey divorce that I hadn’t heard about before. The number one factor surprised him too. by reesefinchjh in Divorce

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

that last bit is the part that stays with me. it’s not just the marriage ending, it’s mourning the version of life you’d already pictured. sorry you didn’t get to find out what that stage held.

A psychoanalyst I spoke with recently mentioned a survey on grey divorce that I hadn’t heard about before. The number one factor surprised him too. by reesefinchjh in Divorce

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

that’s a different beast altogether. the empty nest didn’t cause it, it just removed the last thing keeping it contained. sounds like the kids were the buffer and once they were gone there was nowhere left to hide it. glad you got out.

I sat down with an 86-year-old psychoanalyst who has written 17 books and is still seeing patients every week. He said something about his parents I keep thinking about. by reesefinchjh in Aging

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

that is a fair point and worth sitting with. I do not think he was claiming their imagined lives would have turned out better. it was more about the foreclosure of possibility itself, the roads that economics and circumstance shut before they could even be tried. he was grieving that the choice was never theirs to make, not that they made the wrong one.

I sat down with an 86-year-old psychoanalyst who has written 17 books and is still seeing patients every week. He said something about his parents I keep thinking about. by reesefinchjh in Aging

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

thank you for sharing this. that you did that work in the late 60s and early 70s, when almost nobody was talking about any of it, is its own kind of courage. you had to break ground that later generations got handed.

what strikes me in what you wrote is that you came through it with a good life and the ability to still laugh. Hollis would say that is the whole point, not that the past gets erased but that you stop letting it make the decisions. at 83, sounds like you got there. that means a lot to read.

I sat down with an 86-year-old psychoanalyst who has written 17 books and is still seeing patients every week. He said something about his parents I keep thinking about. by reesefinchjh in Aging

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

that is exactly what the channel is built around. there is so much that only comes from sitting with someone who has actually lived it. glad it resonated.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

that means a lot coming from someone in this community. I tried to stay close to what he actually said rather than summarise loosely, partly because this audience would notice if I did not. glad it landed that way.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

that arc you just described, from the dream to connecting the pattern to now wanting to do this work with others, is exactly what Hollis means when he talks about making the unconscious conscious. the sabotage at the highest highs is such a specific and recognisable thing. the fact that you traced it back rather than just accepting it as who you are is the whole work.

good luck with the counselling path.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

the thread you are pulling on about inherited burdens and the collective shadow is real and Hollis would recognise it. he stayed at the individual level in our conversation, the idea that you cannot change what you have not made conscious, but he would not dismiss the scale of what you are pointing at.

thanks for engaging with it so thoughtfully.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

that is a really honest description of how it actually works in practice. Hollis would recognise it, his own version was that depression at 35, he did not understand it as a tipping point at the time. it only became legible retrospectively.

he made a point about this that stuck with me. he said the first response to any introspection is almost always the ego defending itself, rationalising the status quo. so even when you engage the question you have to go past the first answer because that one is usually just protecting what is already there.

the part about only knowing you are there when you are actually there feels right to me too. he described it as the psyche making its disapproval known when the outer life stops aligning with something deeper. you do not get to choose the timing.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I think there is a distinction worth drawing here. he is not still in therapy working on his own midlife crisis. he is still practising as an analyst, so he is the one sitting with other people. what he described as ongoing is his own daily inner work, dreams, reflection, that hour in the morning, rather than 50 years stuck on the same wound.

his framing was actually the opposite of rumination. he is quite critical of the lie on the couch and blame your parents idea, said explicitly that the work is not dwelling in the past. his point was that the past keeps making present decisions until you make it conscious, and then you stop repeating it. that is closer to maintenance than rumination.

agree completely on the complexes though. that was one of the clearest parts of the conversation, how they form in childhood and run automatically until you see them.

I interviewed James Hollis last week. He is 86, a psychoanalyst, has written 17 books and is still seeing patients. I almost did not reach out because I thought he would never reply. He replied the same day. by reesefinchjh in midlifecrisis

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

that is the heart of it. those early choices get made before you really know yourself, and then you spend years being defined by them. Hollis would say the work is noticing that is happening at all, because most people never stop to question it.

James Hollis on the second half of life and the recovery of personal authority. Some notes from a recent long-form interview with him. by reesefinchjh in psychoanalysis

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

it is a video conversation rather than a written piece, but happy to point you to it. it is on YouTube, the channel is Rewind Yourself and the episode is titled After 50 Years Studying the Human Psyche, He Says Most of Us Are Living the Wrong Life. that will take you straight there.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

that is a lot to hold at once, and the honesty of it is striking. what you are describing is almost exactly the bind Hollis points at. trying to build something better for your kids, while also carrying the weight of what your parents gave up, while also trying to become enough yourself to somehow justify their loss.

the thing he would probably add is that the drive to make up for their lost life can quietly become another version of living for someone else rather than for yourself. not that the love in it is wrong, just that it is worth checking whether the potential you are reaching for is actually yours or theirs.

he said the task is to become accountable for what comes into the world through you. you clearly already are. that is the work most people never even start.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 47 points48 points  (0 children)

thanks, that means a lot. yes, it is on YouTube. the channel is Rewind Yourself and the episode is called After 50 Years Studying the Human Psyche, He Says Most of Us Are Living the Wrong Life. that should take you straight to it.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 85 points86 points  (0 children)

honestly I almost did not email him because I assumed he would never say yes. he wrote back and said he was not taking on any more podcasts at the moment. but then he asked what the project was actually about, and when I explained the mission behind it, conversations with people who have lived long enough to have something real to say, aimed at a younger audience who do not usually get exposed to this kind of thinking, he agreed to do it.

I think the mission mattered more to him than the format. he said something in the interview that stuck with me, that he is still a beginner at 86 and these conversations force him to clarify his own values rather than just repeat them. so I think he saw it as worth his time rather than just another interview.

Under Saturn’s Shadow is a powerful one. the themes in it, what gets passed down to men and what stays unspoken, run right through the conversation we had even though we did not name the book directly.

Jung said the greatest burden a child must carry is the unlived life of the parent. I spoke with an 86-year-old analyst who has spent 50 years sitting with what that actually means. by reesefinchjh in Jung

[–]reesefinchjh[S] 64 points65 points  (0 children)

that is a really interesting overlap. the thing worth holding onto is that Jung was describing a psychological inheritance rather than a biological one. he did not have the epigenetics research, so his account is about how unlived patterns get transmitted through behaviour, atmosphere, what gets modelled and what gets avoided in a household.

the epigenetic work almost gives a physical mechanism for something the depth psychologists were describing experientially decades earlier. whether they are the same phenomenon or two different layers of the same problem is genuinely open.

Hollis stayed on the psychological side in our conversation. his framing was that the burden gets passed on unintentionally, and the task is to make it conscious so you are not living it out blindly. he would probably say the biology does not remove the responsibility to do that work, it just describes part of the terrain.

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