Ambivalence

Earlier this morning I shared that I was “…sitting with my ambivalance, and other tightly packed contradictions…coffee?”

Well, I’ve had some coffee and in the process of unpacking the general malaise of ambivalence, the following nuggets surfaced.

Defined as a simultaneous and contradictory attitude or feeling toward an object, person, or action, ambivalence is often experienced as a lack of any of feeling both by the one experiencing it and by others observing.

The co-existance of attraction and repulsion, for example love and hate, at first create at kind of psychic vaccum.  But the dissonence of the experience of the opposites puts oneself right dab in the middle of what Jung taught to be the essential underlying activity of psychic functioning: namely the combination of the opposites.

While the ego may not find confidence that it will develop a solution to the predicament it finds itself in, it is the coming together of the opposites which creates the new thing…