VIDEO
AUDIO
Mortificatio is an alchemical term for the moments when your life-organizing identity collapses. We call it burnout, divorce devastation, depression, retirement shock, institutional betrayal, or a life-changing diagnosis. The alchemists called it death because the chemical content they were tracking suddenly became inert. Jung adopted the symbolic language because it perfectly captured a stage of psychological transformation that might lead to despair but placing it in a universal sequence provides confidence that this will eventually pass and new life will emerge.
When we are struggling through a dark period, with no clear end in sight, we can find courage and strength in the eternal cycles of birth, death, and resurrection. Often, it’s when we look back that we discover we were carried through our suffering in an uncanny way. Framed as a meaningful psychological process, when Psyche withdraws energy from a central attitude that once kept us safe, we can draw strength from our future self, waiting for us to arrive.
Jung reminds us, “The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego.” The defeat is functional. A larger center of meaning cannot arrive while the old one keeps occupying the throne. This can comfort us as we hover between the old and the new.
In today’s discussion, we face the death phase from multiple perspectives: the unraveling of a career, the unmaking of a marriage, the crisis of an addiction that careens from pleasure to horror, or an apocalyptic dream that lays waste to our confidence but liberates a season of life restoring grief when we recognize we are the architects of our own suffering. In such times, containment matters more than insight. We need an equable warmth to keep the subtle breakdown active without scorching the greening that is fighting to emerge.
Here’s The Dream We Analyze
I am in a ruined city, and I know that it’s the apocalypse. My father, my two brothers, and I are taking shelter in an abandoned store, and there are other people with us – maybe another family. It is chaos, and everyone is deciding how they want to die. At some point, my father gets up and leaves us, and we know that he has gone out to shoot himself – that this is how he’s chosen to go. I walk out of the store and down the road to the hospital, where my mother is dying of cancer. When I walk into the hospital, I meet a doctor who is taking care of the patients. I ask her if there is a way to go that doesn’t involve pain, and she says yes, that’s what they’re giving the patients. She gestures towards a bed, and I see my mother lying as if asleep. She is hooked up to an IV, and then I look back at the doctor, and she shows me her own arm – she is also hooked up to an IV and has also chosen this drug as her method of death. I go over to my mother, and for a moment I see that she looks uncomfortable, or in pain, but then it passes, and she looks completely peaceful. I sit on the bed and hold her, but I know that she has died. It is a wonderful moment: my mother’s skin is pale and glowing, and she looks peaceful and content. There is light all about us. At that moment, I knew this is how I wanted to die: to take this drug, and to lie on the bed holding my mother, the two of us together. However, somehow, I know that now isn’t the right time, so I get up and walk back out of the hospital. It seems like time passes, and now I’m standing outside a city apartment block at night – the lights of the apartment block are all glowing. I look different, with shorter hair, and I am talking to my mother. My mother isn’t there – I know she is dead, yet I am talking to her and telling her that there are still people who are alive – that not everything has died. I tell her that I know how I want to die, and I still want to be with her, but maybe I don’t have to leave right now – perhaps I should stay a little bit longer here, and try to do some of the things I had wanted to do in my life before the apocalypse happened. It’s like I need to explain it to her. I think of my brothers and realise I don’t know what happened to them – though I imagine they both chose violent ways to die. The dream ends with me standing there, looking at the sky.
