DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Complaining is universal, perhaps, like gossiping, one of the first uses to which developed language was put. Overall, a complaint can refer to a perceived legal injustice, medical symptom, or other personally painful matter. The chronic complainer feels a lack of agency, and implicitly pleads for emotional support and/or effective action from another. A complaint may therefore range from a request for empathic engagement to an effort to assign responsibility to others. Listeners have a felt sense of a complaint’s legitimacy; we resonate to injustice and its reparation in the tale of The Goose Girl. We feel exasperation with the heroine’s petulant entitlement in the tale of The Princess and the Pea, and take satisfaction in the punishment of greed in The Fisherman and His Wife. A chronic complaint is a call to identify and understand an underlying problem rather than externalizing it.

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DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Although these Jungian concepts have become familiar psychological terminology, they remain difficult to understand. According to Jung, animus and anima are innate psychic structures shaped significantly by the archetypal world, whereas the shadow is predominantly shaped by personal experiences of ego formation. Whereas shadow tends to be rejected, animus and anima fascinate and attract. Although images like sol / luna or yin / yang amplify the a priori nature of these inner opposites, the animus corresponds to the paternal Logos and the anima to the maternal Eros. Parents are the first external experience of this innate predisposition, and a developmental psychic trajectory may be inferred from mythology and individual dream images. Animus and anima represent adaptation and attitude to the inner world; they serve as the bridge to the collective unconscious and are experienced as “other.”

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As the mother is the generator of life and usual primary attachment figure, the mother complex is universal. As the image of a “personified affect” fueled by an archetypal core, the mother complex is especially powerful. In its negative aspect, it may arise from a mother who was experienced as uncaring, attacking, possessive, withholding, absent, or wounded. It is likely to show up in relationships with others and in the relationship with oneself. Fairy tales like The Raven and Six Swans teach us that healing a negative mother complex takes time and perseverance—and that we may be aided by an animus prince or an anima princess, images of the autonomous unconscious. By responding to the turmoil of the mother complex one can embrace the task of finding the mother within.

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DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠While psychiatric diagnostic labels often reify the complexities of psychological dynamics, they can also orient us to the essential qualities of a particular emotional and behavioral field. BPD is characterized by difficulty with affect regulation, intense and unstable interpersonal relationships, impulsive behavior, and a tendency toward highly polarized emotions: idealization/elation versus devaluation/despair. BPD is associated with early relational deficits, especially in caretakers’ capacity to maintain connection when their child is angry or aggressive. If intense early emotional states have not been well moderated, they can take on the force of emotional tsunamis, overwhelm the ego, and lead to impetuous and self-harming behaviors. A deep therapeutic and human process can re-inspire the possibility that one can find one’s center in a human relationship.

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DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠We all procrastinate. Tasks from making a doctor’s appointment to preparing taxes to doing the laundry invite us to put off until tomorrow what we can postpone today. We may distract ourselves by going online, doing errands, or minimizing the time a job will take. Although procrastination signals that a given task is hard and emotionally charged, it buys only temporary escape from anxiety. Furthermore, procrastination can lead to disappointment in oneself that can undermine the self-confidence needed to face subsequent challenges. We are called to the hero’s journey in confronting the dragon of deficiency that inhabits our inner world as procrastination. If we dare to begin, we can find the help we need, and may discover that the task itself is not as onerous as we imagined--and that we are more.

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DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠If the passage into fullsome adulthood is avoided, a person can be trapped in the world of childhood. This protected realm is a nexus of potential, defined by avoiding the rigors of the real for the pleasures of possibility. Peter Pan, who chose to remain in never-never-land, is a well-known image for the flighty ingenuousness of the puer or puella. What stops libido from becoming more grounded in order to engage in more purposeful, ego-strengthening commitments? Charles Dickens’ Bleak House portrays a protagonist who felt that dedication and discipline were intolerably confining. Rapunzel, however, broke out of her elevated tower when a prince kindled her desire to bond in a more earthly way. If an initiatory experience does not activate libido, and the protected world of childhood is not sacrificed, entrapment in a marginal life may ensue.

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⁠⁠DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Although only some of us talk aloud to ourselves, all of us have inner voices, even if we are not aware of them. These autonomous parts of ourselves provide running commentary on how and what we are doing. Are our inner commentators friendly and supportive, or critical and attacking? We turn to fairy tales, stories that arise from the collective unconscious, for wisdom about our relationship with those parts of ourselves that tend to operate autonomously. The Ill-Fated Princess must climb a mountain to confront and befriend her “bad Fate,” after which her destructive unconscious complex befriends her. In Vasalisa the Beautiful, a loving mother gives her daughter a doll that provides good advice in difficult situations. The bad Fate and Vasalisa’s doll illustrate the process of noticing how we relate to other parts of ourselves—and by changing a negative inner dynamic we become more whole.

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DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠We define dating as the quest for serious partnership or ongoing companionship. Today’s dating world is radically different from that of even a generation ago, and is light years away from previous generations. Dating apps and social media expedite and expand the range the search for a suitable other - and often turns dating into an exercise in personal marketing. Dating also now spans an age range from teens to older - even elderly - divorced or widowed adults. If today’s dating culture provides individuals with autonomy and choice, it also denies them the safeguards provided by family, religious, and cultural norms. The online persona may be very different  from the actual person, from age and appearance to character misrepresentation. Lacking social context and mutually understood social norms, individuals are required to be more aware of what they seek in another. They also need to be more aware of the projections and relational complexes to which they are susceptible.

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⁠⁠DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The life transition we call retirement mandates a major readjustment in how time, energy and money are spent, whether retirement means becoming a “snowbird” or having a stepped-down lifestyle. Work has structured the rhythm of life and time; most have found aspects of identity, status, and socialization at work, regardless of how fulfilling, arduous or well paid it may have been. Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon illustrate contrasting inner attitudes and their outcomes. Jung believed that the second half of life had a prospective and healing function in the psyche. If retirement can be considered redirection, these years hold promise: life can now be oriented to internal life and meaning, especially awareness of the ego’s secondary place in relation to the Self.

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DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Chronic illnesses affect many, creating diminishment of physical ability and energy for life activities. There can be loss of agency, loss of one’s expected future, and a sharpened awareness of loss of life. There is a new need for conscious intention and reality-based decisions in order to avoid denial while adjusting to limitations and managing self-care. Deb, Lisa and Joseph discuss emotional factors in the loss of the healthy, autonomous self –and the possibility of a profound shift in inner life. The blindness of mythological figures like Tiresias and Oedipus symbolized the development of inner vision; Jungian Harry Wilmer used active imagination to personify his tuberculosis bacteria. And Jung believed that chronic illness could serve the process of individuation.

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