How to Remain Human on an Emotionally Fluctuant Mothership
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
Lately, I have found myself returning to an unusual image. Perhaps it comes from conversations with patients, perhaps from reading too much news, or simply from living through these curious times. Imagine that we are all passengers on a vast spaceship. It is an extraordinary vessel. It has never travelled faster, processed more information, or possessed such astonishing technological capacities. Yet its passengers seem increasingly caught in radically different realities unfolding at the same time.
In one part of the ship, artificial intelligence promises to transform medicine, extend human capacities, and solve problems once considered impossible. Elsewhere, passengers are preparing for ecological collapse, war, democratic breakdown, or technological catastrophe. Some believe humanity is approaching an unprecedented evolutionary leap, others fear we are approaching the end of something fundamental.
Utopia and apocalypse no longer alternate. They travel side by side.
Perhaps this is what makes the ship feel so familiar. Our world is not only politically polarized. We seem increasingly pulled towards extremes of hope and despair, omnipotence and helplessness, connection and isolation, acceleration and paralysis. Contradictory realities coexist, sometimes within the same society, the same family, even the same person. The mothership is useful as a metaphor for the difficulty of maintaining psychological orientation when so many extremes coexist and compete for our attention.
As a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, I increasingly hear people describe not simply being overwhelmed by events, but by the speed with which experience arrives. Before one event has been psychologically digested, another demands a response. We know more, react faster, and communicate more frequently than previous generations, yet psychological understanding does not necessarily follow the same rhythm.
The psyche appears to live according to a different tempo.
Jung understood that psychological transformation does not occur simply because something happens. Experience needs to enter into dialogue with dreams, memory, imagination, and unconscious life. It needs time before it becomes psychologically meaningful. Symbols cannot simply be produced on demand.
Perhaps, then, our problem is not only information overload but symbolic overload. Thousands of images, opinions, catastrophes, and predictions pass through consciousness, but surprisingly few have time to become symbols capable of transforming us. Experience accumulates faster than meaning can emerge.
Hartmut Rosa distinguishes between a world that is available and one that is resonant. Contemporary technology has made astonishing amounts of the world available to us. But resonance cannot be accelerated or optimized. It requires enough openness, and enough time, for something genuinely to reach us and for us to respond.
Perhaps we are moving too fast for the psyche to answer.
This is where Jung’s idea of individuation becomes unexpectedly contemporary. Individuation is not simply self-discovery or personal fulfilment. It involves learning to distinguish what genuinely belongs to us from what belongs to the collective psyche, while remaining in relationship with both.
Jung’s question might once have been, "Who am I beyond the collective?" Today, the question may be slightly different, "How do I continue hearing my own inner voice when the collective never stops speaking?"
The collective now wakes with us, accompanies us through meals, interrupts conversations, and follows us into bed. We carry its emotional weather in our pockets. Perhaps never before has the collective been so continuously present in the intimate spaces of individual psychological life.
Under these conditions, remaining open to the world without being flooded by it becomes an important psychological task. We need enough openness for unexpected experience, emotion, and imagination to reach us, but also enough inner differentiation that every headline, fear, outrage, or collective reaction does not immediately become our own.
Neither complete withdrawal nor unlimited openness allows symbolic life to flourish.
This may be why dreams, art, imagination, contemplation, and genuine conversation matter so much now. They create spaces in which experience can remain with us long enough to change form. Every night, dreams quietly remind us that another rhythm still exists, a rhythm largely indifferent to productivity, algorithms, and acceleration. The unconscious refuses to hurry simply because the culture does.
Remaining human on this emotionally fluctuant mothership may therefore have less to do with resisting technology than with protecting the conditions under which meaning remains possible: silence, dreams, art, conversation, uncertainty, imagination, and above all, time.
Perhaps individuation today does not ask us to repair the mothership.
Nor to abandon it.
It asks us to become passengers who are no longer carried entirely by its emotional weather.
We may not control the speed of the ship, or the contradictory directions in which it seems to be travelling. But we still participate in something profoundly our own, the quality of consciousness with which we travel.
Perhaps individuation has always begun there.
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Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist & Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslav roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
