LISA MARCHIANO MAKES FRIENDS WITH DOUBT
SUBJECT
Lisa Marchiano
OCCUPATION
Social worker and Jungian analyst
INTERVIEWER
Berry Liberman
PHOTOGRAPHER
Kriston Jae Bethel
LOCATION
Philadelphia, US
DATE
January, 2021
How do we create spaces of three-dimensional discourse where nuance is allowed and where certainty is not the aim of the game? What are the kernels of medicine we can find in the fake news stories that are tearing through our culture at light-speed? This is some of the terrain I cover with Dr. Lisa Marchiano, Jungian analyst and co-host of the brilliant podcast “This Jungian Life.” For her, curiosity, humility and doubt are the essential qualities we need to cultivate for this moment of cultural instability and social change.
Lisa speaks, writes and thinks about the human condition through a Jungian view. Her lens is profound at a time of increasingly shallow, shouty, aggressive and militarised public discourse around the things we care about. The world inside our phones has no room for subtlety, nuance, or exploration of and investigation into ideas from a depth perspective. Algorithms deliver certainty, not knowledge or wisdom, and certainty is seductive.
Whenever I need to redress my fear and anxiety provoked by doom scrolling, I lift my head up, take a breath, look around and orientate myself again in the world around me, connecting with the hearts and minds I know who promote curiosity, critical thinking and humility. Lisa Marchiano is one of these people, always encouraging a bigger-picture perspective when the suffering and hurt of the moment shrinks my creative capacity. We need to stay expansive as the world of ideas shrinks and contracts out of fear and tribalism.
BERRY LIBERMAN: Lisa, you’ve got an amazing book. Has it been launched into the world?
LISA MARCHIANO: It comes out on May 25th in the United States.
Tell us about it.
It’s called, “Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself.” And it grew out of an experience I had when my daughter was two and my son was just a few months old. It was that really hard time in early motherhood when it’s 8am and you think, Oh my God, it’s like 12 hours ’til bedtime! How am I going to manage? “Ugh, okay, here’s something we can do for the next 15 minutes.” And the whole day goes like that and just everything is so hard. It was one of those days and I had put them in the double stroller and gone for a walk just to get out of the house, but it was December, it was freezing. And the double stroller was getting caught on all the tree roots on the sidewalk and I was like, Everything about being a mother is so hard! Then I had this thought that caught me off-guard. Which was, And I’m learning so much about myself as a result.
Hmmm.
Jung had this idea that he called “individuation.” And individuation is the lifelong process of, I want to say, “becoming the person we were meant to be.” Learning as much as possible about ourselves and becoming the most expansive version of ourselves possible. So I thought this is really an opportunity to individuate, to learn about myself. I went home later that day and was looking online to see who’s written that book? And I couldn’t find it, so I began researching. So it’s been a long, long time in process! But it is about how motherhood helps us develop psychologically.
I love it. We’re collectively being challenged to the degree that parenthood really breaks