With all the concerns these days about AI replacing human creativity and wisdom, let’s take a moment to consider how there is at least one thing it can never replace: your inner “resident therapist.”
This is how Naomi Quenk describes the inferior function:
So we can imagine the inferior function as a person’s “resident therapist,” available to share the broader vision that is possible when unconscious information is accessible to consciousness (p. 125, Was That Really Me? How Everyday Stress Brings Out Our Hidden Personality).
Quenk describes how when we “flip” into our opposite, represented by the inferior function, we are forced to look at ourselves differently and acknowledge what we previously ignored or rejected. When we are in the “grip” of the inferior functon we lose confidence in what was once familiar and taken for granted.
In the novel Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty we get a brief glimpse of Call’s “resident therapist” at work. He is a Texas ranger who, to everyone’s surprise, suddenly decided he and his ragtag group should uproot and travel to Montana with a large herd of cattle.
This risky move was contrary to his usual deliberate nature (his inferior function was likely intuition, counter-balancing his dominant sensation function):
Call felt uncertain. He had never had to plan for a storm in brush country, with a fresh herd of cattle. There were so many factors to consider that he felt passive for a moment–an old feeling he knew well from his years of rangering. Often, in a tight situation, his mind would seem to grow tired from so much hard thinking. He would sink for a time into a blankness, only to come out of it in the midst of an action he had not planned. He was never conscious of the trigger that set him back in motion, but something always pulled it, and he would find himself moving before he was conscious that it was time to move (p. 263, Lonesome Dove).
I’m pondering these things under the Full Moon in Gemini, which is the domicile of Mercury/Hermes. Full Moons are about opposites—in this case, the Moon in Gemini opposite the Sun in Sagittarius.
What it comes down to is embracing paradox—the understanding that both things can be true. Robert A. Johnson is brilliant on these points in the book Owning Your Own Shadow.
(Fun fact: Johnson was a Gemini. He had natal Mercury, Mars, and Sun in Gemini in his natal chart. No wonder he understood the Mercurial dance of opposites so well!).
To focus only on opposites drains our energy. The goal is to transform opposition into paradox, which “is to allow both sides of an issue, both pairs of opposites, to exist in equal dignity and worth. … If I can stay with my conflicting impulses long enough, the two opposing forces will teach each other something and produce an insight that serves them both. This is not compromise but a depth of understanding that puts my life in perspective and allows me to know with certainty what I should do. (p. 86). “
Johnson says that “highly conscious waiting” is required for the development of paradox. Consenting to paradox “is to consent to suffering that which is greater than the ego.”
This Full Moon asks: Can you wait consciously with your contradictions? Can you resist the urge to choose sides and instead let the tension teach you something new?
James Hillman says, “When Hermes is at work in an analysis, one feels that one’s story has been stolen and turned into something else ( Healing Fiction).” With AI, that is the very thing people worry about—one’s work being stolen and turned into something else. But when your resident therapist transforms your familiar story this isn’t theft, but healing.
As Johnson says, “Heroism could be redefined for our time as the ability to stand paradox (p. 92).”
This Full Moon in Gemini, ruled by Hermes himself, asks: What paradox are you being asked to hold? Your resident therapist is available for consultation.
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