Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall, B.A., M.A. is known for her work in comedy and writing. Here we discuss a wide range of issues in an extensive talk on comedy and life. Here is session 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start with a little bit of your background, you mother, Brenda Hosbrook, felt “like a stranger in her own life” (Carlin, 2015, p. 6). She was like her father, Art Hosbrook, who was a jazz musician in the 1930s. Alice Hosbrook sensed the wild nature in Brenda.
So, she kept her on a “tight leash,” except for the childhood boy, Ken. The approved of the boy next neighbor. I find that amusing. You can’t necessarily make that stereotype up for a real situation: good boy next door. Did you feel, as with your mother as a stranger in her own life, as not quite in place?
Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall: Yes, absolutely, I am guessing most people feel that way, and it takes a lifetime to feel as though you’re living life in an authentic way. I think we are all trying to figure out what the rules are as a kid, in general, and then there’s the family rules and the parts of ourselves that have to hide from the world because they are deemed “unacceptable,” whether it’s your chaotic self, or your anger, mischief, or sexuality. All of that stuff.
Robert Bly has this great essay called The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us (Bly, n.d.). It is about how, from day 1, we take parts of or aspects of ourselves to hide them in a bag behind us. By the time we get to adulthood, we are dragging this bag behind us, which are now shadow parts because we are not allowed to have them. So, yes, I think so. I did feel like a stranger a lot of the time in my own life.
Jacobsen: The terminology you used there was the “shadow self.” Does that come from your graduate training?
Carlin-McCall: The shadow is an aspect of the personality that Carl Jung talks about. In the end, it is the part that we don’t like. It is the part we don’t approve of, which means it is the part society does not approve of. We tend to push that behind us. What we put out front is our persona, the good version of our self.
The upstanding citizen version of our self. Our true nature and a lot of us have the same stuff in our shadow, which is a lot of stuff society rejects and tends to be the same list over, and over, again. It is something that keeps leaking its way out. We like to pretend it’s not there. It is the ‘emperor with no clothes’ thing.
Jacobsen: Is this a Joseph Campbell thing?
Carlin-McCall: Joseph Campbell was someone who stood on the shoulders of people like Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Carl Jung is the one that talked about archetypes and mythology, where the archetypes are forms of thinking, forms and ways of being, e.g. the father and mother archetype. We are hardwired for them. We know how to be a father, instinctively. We know how to be a mother, instinctively.
We know how to be these things. There’s the child. There’s the Devil. There are all of these forces inside of us. Campbell studied this, and the various philosophies and put them together. He showed the same archetypes and forms across every civilization and every culture. He began to connect the dots, specifically around those things. He was a great thinker.
—
Original publication (1, 2, 3, and 4) on www.in-sightjournal.com.
—
Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images