The Age of Estrangement

The Collective Unconscious in Popular Culture

Often popular culture reflects the collective unconscious. Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology, believed that beneath our individual experiences lies a vast shared reservoir of memory, symbol and instinct that he called the collective unconscious. This is a deeper psychological field that holds the archetypal patterns of humanity itself: the universal images of the mother, the hero, the shadow, the child, the trickster, as some examples.

When a society shifts politically, morally, emotionally these archetypes stir and begin to surface. They don’t appear as academic theories or mystical visions, but through what we watch, share and talk about. Jung observed that when a culture is collectively anxious or in transition, its myths and stories become more charged, serving as mirrors for the unconscious contents rising within it.

In today’s world, our myths no longer live in temples or folktales, they live in popular culture. Celebrity narratives, social media trends and public conflicts now carry the weight of our collective projections. They are, in essence, modern mythology: stories through which society works out its psychological conflicts in full view.

In my own work in the therapy room I am able to have direct insight into the collective unconscious within the stories my clients share. For as long as humanity has been able to speak, we have used story to make sense of existence. Before written language, myths were the vessels that carried wisdom through time shaping our understanding of love, loss, power and morality. Legends of gods and heroes were not just entertainment; they were psychological maps, encoding truths about human nature and the cycles of life and death. Through myth, societies externalised their fears and desires, giving form to what could not yet be consciously understood. Stories are therapeutic universally.

In every era, stories have served as both instruction and reflection: guiding us on how to live, what to value, and what to avoid. The tales of Icarus, Pandora, or Prometheus, for example, warned of excess and curiosity’s double edge; just as today’s celebrity sagas warn of visibility, materialism and emotional boundaries. Whether inscribed on cave walls, spoken around fires, or streamed across screens, mythic storytelling remains our oldest form of therapy: a collective effort to turn chaos into meaning.

This is why the tensions within prominent public figures and their families resonate so strongly. They’re not just entertainment (although many see it as that); they’re expressions of something happening in the collective psyche, like a rebalancing between old and new values, between belonging and individuality, loyalty and autonomy, legacy and reinvention.

Just as Jung might have analysed Greek myths to understand a civilisation’s psyche, today we can look at celebrity dynamics as living case studies of the collective unconscious at work. They reveal not only our fascinations but also our wounds: the parts of ourselves that are trying, however clumsily, to evolve.

When the son of celebrity couple David (ex-England Footballer) and Victoria Beckham (90s popstar Posh Spice - now fashion designer), Brooklyn Beckham chose to align publicly with his wife Nicola Peltz’s family, reportedly excluding his parents, from his recent wedding vow renewal celebration, the headlines were harsh. Was this a power struggle many wondered - the world's media watched and reported intensely: maybe a generational clash, or something deeper? A reflection of how modern relationships, from families to romantic partners, are being rewritten around a new emotional contagion?

Behind the celebrity gloss, the Beckham-Peltz story touches something universal. It mirrors a larger shift in how an entire generation defines love, loyalty and emotional safety and how easily those ideals can slip into estrangement.

The Generational Realignment

For much of the 20th century, family loyalty was unquestioned. Each generation can be identified via their well known titles: Baby Boomers and Gen X were raised to endure difficulty, often prioritising unity over individual truth. But Millennials and Gen Z have grown up in a different moral landscape, one informed by therapy culture, trauma awareness and social media’s amplification of psychological language.

The new relational beliefs are built around boundaries, autonomy and emotional validation. These are, in many ways, healthy evolutions. Yet, as psychologist Joshua Coleman PhD, observes in Rules of Estrangement, they can also create “a new form of inequality between parents and children,” where “your adult child has more power than you to set the terms of your relationship because they’re more willing to walk away.”

This cultural shift where care is measured by one’s willingness to cut ties with the “toxic or narcissistic parent” has redefined what it means to love and protect oneself.

The Rise of “Narcissistic” as a Cultural Label

Few words have travelled faster in our collective vocabulary than narcissistic. Once a clinical term describing a fragile sense of self masked by grandiosity, it’s now a social shorthand for any behaviour that feels emotionally unsafe, controlling, or invalidating. The word Narcissist originates from the Greek Myth of 'Echo and Narcissus'. This myth tells the story of unrequited love, rejection and self-love - Echo who lost her voice and could only echo the spoken words of others and Narcissus who rejected the love of others and was cursed by the Goddess of Retribution, Nemesis, to fall in love with his own image - what a tale of tragedy!

When we think of the tale of Echo through the lens of social media algorithms that learn to show you more of what you pause on, this then becomes the 'echo-chamber' from this Greek tragedy. Narcissus' story reflects the modern age - the need for psychological safety at whatever cost - estrangement - just as he was cursed for his constant rejections of others - it led to his final downfall. When we see all sides of this myth, we can see what a tragedy it truly was. Narcissus sought connection but couldn't commit, Echo was envious and desperate to be seen, but lost her voice through her actions - each of them had a back story.

Social media has created a whole following on the outcome to this myth, but with its flood of pop psychology content, it has amplified one lens of this tale - protection at all costs. Hashtags like #toxicparent and #narcissisticmother have millions of views. The result is a language of emotional self-defence, one that empowers people to name harm, but sometimes oversimplifies it.

Coleman cautions that “evaluations about whether emotional abuse, trauma, or neglect occurred are today based on the child’s perception… It’s what I feel that matters.” This is not to dismiss those perceptions, but to recognise that modern emotional narratives often privilege subjectivity over intent or context.

The cultural shift, then, is from “What happened?” to “How did I feel?”, a huge shift and reorientation of a moral compass.

The Beckham-Peltz Dynamic as Cultural Symbol

In the Beckham-Peltz marriage, observers see an interplay of psychological archetypes: the eldest child of a world-famous family seeking individuality and the youngest daughter of eight children in a billionaire dynasty defined by power and self-assurance.

Birth order psychology suggests that the youngest children like Nicola often grow up negotiating for attention, developing charm, independence and a strong will. Eldest children like Brooklyn, meanwhile, often shoulder expectation and responsibility, traits that can make them sensitive to criticism and eager to please.

The dynamic between them, then, mirrors a familiar pattern: one partner leading with intensity and control, the other with loyalty and emotional absorption. It’s a combination that can quickly slide into 'trauma bonding' (a term first coined by addiction therapist Dr. Patrick Carnes in 1997), a cycle of idealisation, dependency and conflict that feels intoxicating but destabilising.

On a cultural level, their story resonates because it symbolises the modern tug-of-war between family legacy and chosen love, between belonging and individuation. As Coleman notes, “Because today’s parents have often invested more in their children, financially and emotionally, than previous generations, they may feel entitled to a kind of availability that is at odds with what their adult child can reasonably or sanely provide.”

In high-profile families like the Beckham's, where identity is woven into image, that tension is magnified. Boundaries can look like betrayal; autonomy can resemble disloyalty.

A Society of Emotional Vigilance

Estrangement is increasingly common, not just in celebrity families. Surveys in the U.S. and U.K. show that nearly one in four families experience some form of parent-adult child cutoff. The reasons vary: abuse, incompatibility, ideological differences, but the cultural permission to estrange has widened dramatically.

We now live in what sociologist Frank Furedi calls an “emotional culture of safetyism,” where psychological harm is treated as equivalent to physical harm and protecting one’s emotional boundaries becomes a moral imperative. While this awareness can heal generational wounds, it can also lead to polarisation and fragmentation.

The cost of safety, sometimes, is connection.

As Coleman poignantly writes, “If your child actually dies, everyone will feel sorry for you. If your child stops talking to you, everyone will judge you.” Estrangement carries a stigma that few discuss openly, yet it sits at the heart of today’s relational crises: the fear of being either engulfed or abandoned.

From Blame to Repair

The Beckham-Peltz story, stripped of tabloid drama, reflects a deeper human dilemma: how to love across difference. It shows what happens when autonomy collides with legacy and when individual healing is pursued without the parallel skill of conflict resolution.

To repair these dynamics, whether in families or society at large, requires a move from diagnosis to dialogue. The language of pathology (“narcissist,” “toxic”) must give way to the language of systems: For example: What patterns are we enacting together? What vulnerabilities do they reveal? In families we often adopt unconscious roles to fit into the family system. Being aware of these roles and making conscious choices for growth without blame is key.

Psychologist Lindsay Gibson, in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, reminds us that “growth is not achieved through blame, but through differentiation” the ability to define ourselves without destroying connection. That’s the real cultural task ahead: to evolve from emotional hypervigilance to emotional intelligence.

Beyond the Beckham Mirror

If there’s a lesson in the Beckham-Peltz saga, it’s not about villains or victims. It’s about how visibility has made private pain public and how we are collectively experimenting with new rules for closeness.

As social media blurs boundaries and psychology becomes everyday language, we are all navigating the same paradox: we crave connection, but fear the loss of self it might entail.

Estrangement, in this sense, is not just a family issue, it’s a metaphor for our times: a culture learning to protect itself, but still unsure how to love safely. Rupture and Repair - this is the key to the future of our humanity.

My new book 'The Spiral of Becoming: How Personal Healing Shapes Our Inner and Outer Landscapes' comes out Spring 2026 - this invites readers to recognise any repeating patterns in their lives. Through a grounded blend of psychology, story and soulful reflection, I explore how personal healing echoes through generations, community and the living Earth.

References

• Coleman, J. (2021). Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. Harmony Books.

• Gibson, L. (2015). Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. New Harbinger Publications.

• Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.

• Furedi, F. (2017). What's Happened to the University? A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilisation. Routledge.

• Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism. W.W. Norton.