Angie Brenner – Seal Woman: Emblem of Longing
March 24, 2026 at 08:44AM
Working with fairy tales brings us into relationship with our inherited traditions in ways that make them answerable again to our individual conditions and to the spirit of the current time.

The Seal Woman tale, from the Irish and Scottish coasts, has much to teach us. This story of the capture of a wild and mythic creature, a selkie maid, and her return to the sea, has profound implications for our relationship with the natural world. The trauma, guilt and loss we experience because of human abuses of nature leave us separated and bereft, longing for reconnection. We are called to a metanoia, asked to perceive, to grieve, and to heal the models of exploitation and domination that injure our connection with our native elements.

Like the Seal Woman’s children, we are creatures of dual lineages, drawn to the enlivening, though chaotic depths of sea, yet required to make our lives on land. Attentiveness to longing helps us foster our ongoing connection with the inexhaustibility, creativity and wildness of psyche-in-nature. We will use poetry and concepts from alchemy to deepen our engagement with this tale, turning toward our own longing, to understand it as a force drawing us out of alienation into the vital core of our own becoming. We will let the Seal Woman instruct us on how to bring our depths into embodiment in this world..

Angie Brenner is a psychotherapist in private practice in Melrose, MA, and an analyst-in-training at the C.G. Jung Institute of New England. Her interests include trauma, integration of the Feminine and marginalized genders in the life of the soul, the human relationship with nature, and the transformative potential of mythopoetics on our lived experience.
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