Alchemical Mortificatio: How to Survive the Wintering of Your Life

There are natural times where the ego has to have its primary guiding principles reexamined. And often later in life, they have to be sacrificed so that something better, more expansive, more reflective of the maturity that we've gained can emerge. Welcome to this union life. Three good friends and union 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 Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod. Today, Joseph and I, as Lisa can't be here, are going to discuss an important life, process and one that is, critical in alchemy, part of our, ongoing series of alchemical processes. And that is the process of mortificatio, or death. From a psychological point of view, it's the dark turning point. But, when we are in that process, it doesn't feel like a turning point. It feels like the end, that we are just in the alchemical term for the blackness or depression. It's associated with shadow. It's associated with death. It's associated with putrefaction, dismemberment, you know, all kinds of awful dark things that we don't wanna face, and yet we do in the course of a life. So, what are the elements, psychologically speaking, that that can die and may need to die, when we experience mortificatio. Well, the first and most universal thing is it's some element of ego, that usually, has to exceed to a force greater than itself. As we all know from Jung and others, one of the necessary conditions for humanity and being human is we develop an ego, and we need to develop an ego. But then it tends to arrogate to itself, a sense of wholeness, power, authority as if that's all that we are. And then we are going to run into these processes of mortificatio. The ego is often represented in alchemy as the king or the sun, the lion, the eagle, and other such symbols. One of the things that can die in the process of mortificatio is also our instinctual nature when it is leading us astray, such as perhaps a process of addiction. The dark, primal material that has perhaps not made it all the way into being integrated into ego. And that can be symbolized by, the toad or a poisonous dragon, something that's very fleshy and material and unevolved excrement and so on. Another thing that can be subjected to the process of mortificatio is the lesser conjunctio of two things that are joined together, but but imperfectly. And this is often symbolized by things like marriage and maybe a career crisis, something we were drawn to, a person we loved, and then it's not perfect. We're not perfect. And that that we projected, onto a person, a situation, a career, …