This weekend the II All-Russian scientific and practical conference on analytical psychology, dedicated to the individual and collective unconscious, is taking place. The first talk that deeply touched me was given by Jungian analyst Michael Comforti. He talked about how a person experiences loss in the deep layers of the unconscious (I would add that this applies to any psychological trauma). To illustrate, Michael takes the myth of Orpheus, the greatest musician, enchanting everyone around him with his music. Orpheus falls in love with Eurydice, whose name is translated from Greek as truth/fair verdict. After the wedding, Eurydice dies. This is a very familiar motive for many, says Michael, the death of a loved one. How do we live when faced with such terrible trauma? This is a key issue in analytical therapy. Michael goes on to mention Robert Langs, who wrote that the psyche is not evolutionarily equipped to cope with the horrors of emotional trauma. Moreover, we can never return to this experience to relive it again. We can only see references to this experience in the history of man. The myth of Orpheus shows how man copes with the horror of loss. Orpheus descends to Hades to return Eurydice. He believes that he can charm death itself with his music. This is how the defense mechanism of denial works. Orpheus asks Hades to give Eurydice, to which Hades agrees with one condition: “Euredice will walk behind your back, but don’t turn around to check. You must trust me.” And Orpheus, on the last steps, still turns around . Eurydice is lost forever. At the end of the myth, Orpheus is torn to pieces by the maenads. Michael wonders: was this a trick of Hades? And then he answers that Hades in all myths was never a deceiver, but was a teacher. Humanity cannot face the truth of loss. The point is not in trusting Hades, but in the fact that Orpheus would not have returned with Eurydice in principle, and Hades knew about this. Mmph reveals the most important secret: the illusion is that consciousness believes that it can create any illusion it wants. With the development of the mind we believe that we can rationalize everything in the world (quote by Elie Wiesel). Torn Orpheus is an image of how we live with illusions. Every day we are forced to live part of the tragedy if we deny it. Our life itself turns out to be torn apart, because more and more we have to repress what really hurts. The ending of Orpheus is a symbolic expression of the life that a person lives when captured by denial. And what images and thoughts arise in you while reading the retelling of the report? Do you notice your defense mechanism - denial??