Episode 228: Forever Jung

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] I am NOT a bad guy! I just have a bad personality. It's not my fault. The Queen in Oz has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Are you? Who are you? I'm a very good man.

[00:00:46] They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. Pay no- Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man! I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:16] Dave, we're a young-ian podcast now. When are you finally going to confront your shadow and start to individuate? You know during the one hour in which you were trying to troubleshoot your computer, I was totally doing shadow work. It was mostly doing shadow work. I can imagine, yeah.

[00:01:35] I was staring into the face of evil itself. I don't know what the deal was with that, all of a sudden no headphone recognition. Yeah, maybe it's just been so long since we recorded it, just forgot. It has been for us, it's been forever.

[00:01:53] We're not like these podcasts that breaks between seasons. No, and we certainly aren't the kind of podcast that can record three in a row. Case in point, but we're always scrambling till the last minute. This could be a good episode. Plus we're both on edge.

[00:02:11] Dave is shimmering with resentment and I'm just agitated and frustrated from the troubleshooting I had to do. It's like you're going to treat me like you did Christina after the Katonic mother. Based Katonic stepmom. That's an archetype, the Katonic stepmom. Where did Jung place that?

[00:02:37] I got to remember next Thanksgiving to introduce her as that. Katonic stepmom. Anyway, before we, so we're going to talk about Jung in the main segment, but before we do, we're going to try to talk about disparaging humor. I guess you put this in our slack.

[00:02:58] Where did, was this like a neuro skeptic? Or Reddit. Reddit's been a kind of gold mine for us for like our Reddit for opening segment ideas. So I don't remember. So there's an article that was published in November called Uncover the Offensive Side of Disparagement Humor,

[00:03:17] an FMRI study. And okay look, it's an FMRI study. Everything we've ever said about an FMRI study applies here. I don't think that there's anything new that we're going to say about the value of imaging while giving people stimuli, psychological stimuli.

[00:03:37] But there are some aspects of this that I think are worth talking about. Maybe what do you think? Yeah, well just to sum up just very briefly what you said because it's true.

[00:03:50] We're not going to rehash our criticisms, but they do like a behavioral study like a lot of these FMRI studies. They do a behavioral aspect of it and then the FMRI aspect of it.

[00:04:01] Like there's nothing that you learn in addition from the FMRI part that you wouldn't know from the behavioral stuff except maybe like, oh well this is, I mean presumably I'm sure this is all problematic too. But this part of the brain activates when this stimuli is applied. Right.

[00:04:22] Certainly like you might, if there's anything to be learned it would be whatever parts of the brain are being activated. So I suppose that if you're a neuroscientist there might be something interesting in these findings.

[00:04:34] But even then I don't think they would be because I just don't think that the study is designed such that you can say much about anything. Right.

[00:04:46] Like no matter what your dependent variable is, so the basic design of the study was they wanted to investigate the differences between disparaging humor that is like insult humor I guess. So jokes, jokes where someone is the butt of the joke. Yeah, just belittling.

[00:05:04] Right, belittling versus just offensive statements that aren't funny like what they call socially inappropriate statements versus neutral statements that are neither offensive nor funny.

[00:05:15] And so they construct like in order to try to control for as much as they can they use the same setup line for all three categories of things. So either either disparaging humor, socially inappropriate or neutral.

[00:05:33] And so I'm going to say the Santa Claus one because it is just so bizarre. A prostitute to another one. What did you ask Santa Claus? And so the funny response 50 pounds or 50 euros like everyone else that's the joke. Yeah, it's like the real joke.

[00:05:53] That's the funny one right because it's everything is funny or socially inappropriate or neutral. Right. The socially inappropriate response Santa Claus is a lousy old man and the neutral response of better life. Why is that socially inappropriate? I don't understand that.

[00:06:11] You can't just defame Santa Claus, you know. Can you not? This is, this plagues the entire study. Just like what they consider funny or socially inappropriate is pretty arbitrary and often like bizarre, just weird. Yeah. And so like the authors are Italian and French. I like this too.

[00:06:35] Yeah. But I don't know where the data was collected. I'm not exactly sure and I don't think they say what language whether there was a different language. So those three were presented like they got pre they got a separate group of 15 people to rate all of these.

[00:06:52] But they also had people while they were in an MRI, they were given sets of these jokes that were either funny, socially inappropriate or neutral. And they were asked to rate how funny they were.

[00:07:05] And then later on outside of the scanner, they were asked to rate how offensive they were. And I don't know. I guess the finding is that disparaging humor was not offensive, but it was funny. It's funnier than the neutral ones. No, no, no.

[00:07:25] I thought it was if you labeled an offensive thing funny, you saw it as less offensive. Right. If you look at the plot of like the punchlines with the disparaging humor, those were seen as more funny and less offensive.

[00:07:41] But the socially inappropriate version of that was considered to be more offensive. Offensive and not funny, right? Well, right. If the point is like depending how funny you saw it was related to how offensive you thought the...

[00:07:57] And so their idea is that it generates this conflict in your brain. Right. Whereas you want to laugh at it, but you also think it's offensive. And so the way you resolve that in part is by just making it less offensive or judging it to be less offensive.

[00:08:16] Right. So you're somehow like the funniness defeats the offensiveness of it. It's like I saw it as trying to resolve a kind of cognitive dissonance where you just... Even though in a non-funny context you would rate it as offensive and this...

[00:08:32] Like on an offensive scale, say eight, if it's funny, rate it to the same kind of socially inappropriate offensive remark, you would rate it as like a five just to resolve the fact that you also want to laugh at it. Right.

[00:08:46] Which would work if they were actually the same... Like if you could actually control for that carefully. Like it's just very... The easiest explanation is that the disparagement jokes were jokes. Right. So like they had a shot at being funny. Right. But also like I...

[00:09:03] Yeah, I mean this is something I've always thought about for humor is that it is legitimately less offensive. Right. Like this is only a surprising result if you think they're actually the same level of offensiveness

[00:09:14] but yet we judge it to be less offensive in the case of funny ones. But no, like the fact that something is funny makes it less offensive I think. Like... I think so too. Right. And that may not be the case. I don't know that this can't say...

[00:09:29] I tried my best to read the brain analyses to see if they were saying anything but it just relies sort of on this inference about what these regions in the brain are doing and I'm just not sure that it's interpretable like this.

[00:09:42] But that's the part that has the grain of interest. Like is it the case that we... Is there like a stage-like process where you judge something to be offensive but because you interpreted it as funny, you then don't think it's offensive? Or does it bypass the offensiveness altogether?

[00:10:02] That's what's not clear. Like... Yeah and it's also a conceptual point where... So there's yeah the cognitive mechanisms that are going on assuming like this... That's the right way to think about this. But I also think like...

[00:10:15] I mean, I remember you were talking about the Chappelle special, the most recent one. And one of the things that you found distasteful about some of the trans jokes was that they weren't funny. It's like if they're funny, you get it.

[00:10:29] But if they're not funny and still like socially inappropriate, then that becomes more offensive just in virtue of... Well, if it's not funny then what are we doing here? Right.

[00:10:41] Like if it's a comedian making offensive, Joe, this is why like funny comedians can get away with most things and not funny comedians. But I think that's just because when it's funny, it's just less offensive. And I think... So here's my psychological theory of it.

[00:10:57] Like I think that the appraisal of humor is an unconscious quick one. Like we're not doing much work to try to figure out whether something is funny. The moral appraisal about whether a statement is offensive requires some degree of conscious judgment.

[00:11:13] So if a joke is gross, I could have that gross feeling immediately and whether or not it was funny would be independent of that. I could have both of them.

[00:11:22] I think the funny part comes in so quickly that you then sort of have to like after the fact make the judgment as to whether you should be offended by that. Right? Yeah.

[00:11:35] And I think it's just too, it's too primal or quick or unconscious like whether or not something is funny. Right. Right. It's definitely not something you think... I mean, sometimes you have to think about it in order to get it to know what's right.

[00:11:47] But once you get it, it's just like, is it funny or not? Like you just can tell. I think that's right. The most interesting thing in this article is that I learned of a new term that I didn't know about called gelatophobia. Did you catch this at all?

[00:12:03] No. It's the fear of being laughed at. It's like an... Apparently it's an actual phobia that has been measured that some people are just like really deeply afraid of being laughed at by other people.

[00:12:17] So when they hear laughter, they get paranoid and think that it's directed at them. I feel like I have that. See you're laughing at me. You're fucking laughing at me. It's the peshy. The joke has your problem. But I also think like you could make just an argument.

[00:12:37] So I get what you're saying at the psychological level, but if a socially inappropriate joke is funny, you feel like the intentions of the comedian, it justifies saying it's the social inappropriateness because of it's for the service of something that is funny.

[00:12:56] And you feel like that's the goal of it. That's the goal is to be funny. But if something is not funny and socially inappropriate, it's like oh, and the goal is just to be offensive. Right.

[00:13:07] It's really interesting because whether or not you are interpreting the goals to be funny is so context dependent. So you can engage in like, you know, snapping like battles of wit where you just insult each other's mother. Yeah.

[00:13:23] And you can say something super funny about how you know your mom is so fat or whatever. But out of that context, even an attempt to be funny out of that context might be met with some sort of like, wait, are you just being mean?

[00:13:37] Like are you actually saying something about my mom? Like it's a pretty complex calculation that we're making when we're hearing these jokes. And that's why I think very funny jokes if you go into that setting of like say a stand up comedian who's like edgy in that way.

[00:13:56] If you go in prepared to be offended, you're not going to find things funny and you're going to find them offensive. But they might be able to win you over if they engage that laugh like that primitive laughing part of you. If they engage that then they're good.

[00:14:14] But the sort of the other the kind of unfair part of it though is I think just in my folk way of understanding it. Well, if it's not funny then you must have some agenda or something like that and that doesn't involve humor.

[00:14:29] But the fact is some people just aren't as funny as other people. And so they have the same intention to be funny when they make their like racist or anti-Semitic or sexist joke. It's just that they're not funny. And so they can't make right.

[00:14:43] And so and now those people are considered offensive. Whereas the person who can do that with the same intention but be funny is like, oh, that's just, you know, that's just Pizarro. Right. Exactly. Have you seen that Phoebe Waller Bridge series that she did before? Fleabag.

[00:15:03] Oh, before Fleabag. Yeah. She did one called Crashing and I was just been watching it. So that's why at the top of mine because I watched Fleabag with my daughter and Nikki and we're watching Crashing.

[00:15:14] And there's like great, there's just this great instance of like there's a real anal woman who never lets loose and she's trying to engage in all of the dirty humor that's going on. And she says something and everyone just stops and like looks at her. Yeah.

[00:15:30] I guess you just have to stay away from it, you know? He just, he's not like, it's just off limits for you. And it's not because like you're a bad person. It's just because you're not funny. Yeah.

[00:15:41] And you just have to know that it's like, it's like a know-thyself sort of way. Here's the question though. Like if I'm right about the funniness being sort of automatic and then the offense requiring judgment, it should be the case.

[00:15:54] And I think this matches at least with my experience that I can have sort of a second order offense reaction that I can make even after I laugh at a joke. I can say no, actually that was really fucked up. Yeah.

[00:16:10] But you can't really have a second order like, okay, that was funny and now I'm going to laugh. No, right.

[00:16:17] Like you've convinced me, we talked a little bit about this in the context of something else, but we, you and I were talking about how, how you can't really convince somebody that something is funny. No.

[00:16:28] Like if they don't get what the joke is, you know, if they don't get the double entendre or something, you can explain it. But you can't, you can't say no. Like, no, this is why this joke is funny and then have them spontaneously laugh.

[00:16:40] And even the former is a stretch sometimes. Right. And even if it's their fault for not getting it, like once you are in the business of explaining it, it's going to be less funny. But you certainly can't if they got the whole thing.

[00:16:53] And I know that feeling where somebody will tell me a joke that I just don't find funny and then those start explaining. I'll be like, no, no, no, I get it. You know, like that's not the issue.

[00:17:03] It's a funny, a funny response is that I get it, but it's not funny. Okay. So let's not pretend, Tamler, that there hasn't been approximately 12 hours since or 16 hours since we last recorded. We had a bit of a weather situation in Houston.

[00:17:39] This has really been, I think you texted me that like the universe doesn't want us to record this episode. But like the dark forces, the demons are lining up to try to prevent us from doing this. But it really felt like that.

[00:17:52] It really felt like that, like a tornado knocking on your door. We in the middle of talking about people not getting jokes and or getting them but not finding them funny. And all of a sudden my power goes out for like two hours. Yes. Yeah.

[00:18:09] And we had tornado warnings last night. My dog is terrified and our bed is essentially just like a drool pond right there. And you're on very little sleep. So who knows what this will mean? Maybe this will be a looser segment than it would have been last night.

[00:18:28] Maybe this is good for accessing my unconscious. That's right. That's right. If only you had dreamed. Okay. So yeah, you were saying something about people explaining jokes to you and you saying, Yeah, I get it. It's just not funny.

[00:18:43] And that is one of the most frustrating things when you really do genuinely find something funny. It's hard to get into the mindset of someone who doesn't find that thing funny. So it feels like a natural thing to do is to try to explain it.

[00:18:57] And then to be met with the, no, I get it. This is like one of the worst feelings in the world. I don't do that. I don't try to explain a joke to somebody if they either get it and they don't find it funny or don't get it.

[00:19:08] Like there's really nothing you can do at that point. There really isn't. It's a futile. It's like a bad instinct. But I feel like people do it to me. They'll explain their jokes. And that's why I'm more often in the position of being like, no, no, no.

[00:19:22] Because often like, like you'd have to be stupid not to get it. So them explaining it to you is sort of a veiled insult to your intelligence. So you have to just explain to them. No, no, no, that's not the issue. The issue is it's just not funny.

[00:19:37] Right. It's like someone explaining to me like, no, no, see Lin Manuel Miranda is like writes raps and like they're really good. He's like hard. Boy, the world has come around to you. Your opinion of Lin Manuel. Well, it feels like in a lie. It feels nice.

[00:19:57] You were one of the like early haters back when there weren't that many. It was pretty much you and Michael Rappaport. It's it's it's early corny detection. I'm going to write a paper on it. Cordar. Exactly. Yeah. Well, anyway, what did we have left to say about this?

[00:20:24] I think what we want to do is there was a great example of how explaining a joke makes it brings it down. Except that I think like there's no real hope for this joke, whether you explain it or not.

[00:20:40] No, it brings otherwise like not funny joke to the depths of hell of like. Right. So here's the line in and this is this is a problem that runs through the paper. I know there are a couple of examples I could give.

[00:20:54] We gave one already, but in disparagement humor and individual or a category of people is typically portrayed in a ridiculous manner. Consider this joke. So this is their example deriding the category of engineers, the protected marginalized category of engineers.

[00:21:12] An engineer is on his first day of work when he arrives. His boss gives him a broom and asks him to clean the floor. The guy protests, but I am an engineer. Ah, you're right. The boss replied. I'll show you how it works. Okay. It continues.

[00:21:30] This is it's terrible. It continues in this joke. The category of engineers is targeted and the perceiver must cope with two different and contrasting processes. The feeling of mirth. I'm sorry. The feeling of mirth derived from the comprehension of humor and the perception of offense.

[00:21:50] It just like, I don't find feel like either of those things is remotely present in that joke, either the perception of offense or certainly not the feeling of mirth. Yeah.

[00:22:04] You know, again, we're going to give them a bit of a pass for what appear to be clearly non native English speakers, but I can't imagine that in any language this is the perils of the deep fear.

[00:22:19] This is what you fail to admit, Tamler, over and over again is the chilling effect that would make somebody use as an example of an offensive joke. Such an innocuous, non offensive.

[00:22:33] And actually one that I wasn't sure I got, but I got two paragraphs explaining it to me. That's right. And the incongruity resolution model. There is incongruity here, but the incongruity is how did the authors think that that was a funny joke? Like clearly smart people, right?

[00:22:52] Because I mean, you know, the fact that they're using it as an example makes me think they used it in the study. They don't have an appendix of all the jokes which I'd love to see. No, they don't. I really wanted to see it.

[00:23:03] But given that both all the neuroscience and the behavioral results depend on these things actually being like, like disparaging, socially inappropriate and funny. And it just doesn't seem like they like any of these that... We get one more.

[00:23:23] We get one more example of a joke in one of the graphs where... Yes, I was going to say this too because I want to know where you think they put this.

[00:23:31] I was curious to see, okay, so this is in the graph demonstrating the timeline which is often, you know, for fMRI studies, they usually show you what happened at like the first, second, second, second. So the setup line, a drunk guy meets a nun and beats her up.

[00:23:46] Then he says, and then it shows that there's like a half-second and then the punchline is delivered. Then he says, I thought you were stronger Batman. That's the closest one to a funny joke. It's not that funny. It's just kind of...

[00:24:05] It's almost postmodern, which is what made me think that maybe that wasn't the true punchline. Maybe that was... Just the socially inappropriate one? Yeah, but it can't be, right? Because I thought you were stronger Batman. The punchline isn't what's socially inappropriate. This is the thing.

[00:24:23] The socially inappropriate part of this one if they used it is the setup. So if they're looking for the part of the brain that lights up for social inappropriateness in the punchline segments, then they've already kind of ruined it. Right.

[00:24:36] It's not like you perceive the offense afterwards when you realize he thought he was Batman. Right, well beating up a nun is fine, but Batman? What? No, there's a lot of issues with this.

[00:24:49] There are very few studies that I've seen and I went through a period of looking at research both in philosophy and psychology on humor and especially like offensive humor. I even wrote a little paper.

[00:25:01] I never tried to publish it, but on why some people can get away with offensive humor and some people can't. I think we talked about it at some point, but they're just not good.

[00:25:12] And this is part of the problem is if you are an academic researcher writing on humor or trying to create studies on humor, chances are you're not going to be funny enough to actually come up with things that you will correctly identify as funny.

[00:25:31] And certainly not, it would be way too difficult to both come up with a good stimuli also in a way that is tightly controlled in the way that most of these experiments want to be. Right, because so much about also humor is delivery.

[00:25:46] Somebody in an fMRI machine getting a joke, is that the same? Is that generalized to how most people react to humor if they're not in an fMRI machine? So there's all sorts of problems. This also reminds me, there's this episode of Star Trek where Data the Robot

[00:26:01] who is trying really hard to grasp human emotion. There's an episode where he's trying hard to grasp humor. And so as part of his studies, he goes into the holodeck right where there's full blown simulations of a comedy club.

[00:26:15] And what's hilarious is that the stand-up comic is Joe Piscopo and he delivers a bunch of jokes that are just really, really not funny. So it's exact same feeling that I got here. Like this is what you're using to learn about humor and humanity? Yeah, totally.

[00:26:34] Well, I apologize to all the engineers listening to this. You got offended without laughing. Yeah, no. We feel really bad and you know maybe that's the next thing. Those are the next people. Who's going to drive the trains if engineers are offended?

[00:26:52] Yeah, who's going to make the metaverse? Alright. We'll be right back to dive into our collective unconscious. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Check out betterhelp.com slash VBW. Life is full of stressors. It doesn't matter who you are or what you have.

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[00:28:28] by going to betterhelp.com. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P.com. Thanks as always to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode. Thank you for watching. Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the podcast where we like to take a moment to thank all of our listeners

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[00:32:20] and those have been some of our best episodes, I think. You get our Brothers Karamazov series directly to your podcast feed and you get Dave's video lecture series and I just put up something too, a little lecture on Play-Doh. Not as well produced lecture on Play-Doh.

[00:32:39] I looked at it. It was fine produced. It looks good and people really liked it. So I hope you keep doing it. I mean, I could post a couple others too. I didn't do that many of the human situation, the great books, lectures online.

[00:32:55] But yeah, if I find another one that would be good, oh and then at $10 and up per month, you get a monthly... Per episode. Per episode, sorry. You get a monthly Ask Us Anything video that we will put out

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[00:34:05] So thank you so much to everybody for everything that you do. We're so grateful for that. And now let's turn to Carl Jung. Alright, so Carl Jung, Dave, I have no idea what your exposure to him is, whether you teach him in your intro classes

[00:34:22] or at any level, what you think of him at all. This was pretty much, I just knew little fragments of basic ideas about archetypes or I knew that he had this idea of the collective unconscious. I didn't know really what that meant in any detailed way.

[00:34:38] What about you? You know, I studied some YUM in undergrad as part of my major in psychology. I happened to have a professor who is super into like depth psychology. So that's where I learned a lot about Freud and some about YUM. What's depth psychology?

[00:35:02] Depth psychology is a term that collectively would refer to the theories of Freud, YUM, and other kinds of psychoanalytic theories that believe that the font of human mental life is really deep in the unconscious way. So depth psychology, I guess referring

[00:35:27] to like let's plunge the depths of your psyche in order to have insight, which something like say kind of behavioral therapy is not because that's very much about just what are you currently thinking? Like what's in your conscious mind? And what habits are you developing right now?

[00:35:42] Exactly. Like who cares why you are a phobic of dogs. Let's just work on, you know, like your appraisals in the moment when you see a dog or whatever. So I've always felt like I know enough to talk about YUM in the sense that I

[00:36:01] like I knew the basics of his theories. But as I think maybe you realize, I think you could read YUM for the rest of your life and not quite understand everything that's going on with him. So there's a lot of, I think, the basic stuff that is accessible

[00:36:23] and then there is, like his view of the mind, the rest of his works are like plunging the depths of somebody's very idiosyncratic thoughts on culture and the mind. And I think here it might help to contrast YUM with Freud.

[00:36:39] I don't think we'll talk too much about their history, but of course, YUM and Freud had this friendship, YUM being the younger viewed Freud as a father figure. But the differences and part of the reason that they split apart, differences between the way that Freud tackled his project

[00:36:59] and YUM did is for whatever sloppiness Freud often gets accused of in terms of his unscientificness and his sort of lack of falsifiability and all that stuff, Freud was a real systematizer. He was a very, like his system was clear and he thought led to some very clear,

[00:37:25] there are some very clear consequences to the way that he viewed the mind. He spelled out how the unconscious was supposed to work and how defense mechanisms worked and how therapy was supposed to, he had a theory of social development and he thought therapy was a good way

[00:37:41] of bringing the unconscious into the conscious through this talking cure. And then later on when he gets to things like civilization and its discontents and all these fancier books where he tackles all of culture or all of religion, he goes beyond that basic theory

[00:37:58] but it's always I think that his basic theory of individual psychology is at the heart of everything. YUM is not clean like that. YUM does not specify clearly the mechanisms at least in my understanding, like the mechanisms by which archetypes influence behavior or motivation

[00:38:19] or how exactly the process of individuation which we'll get to is supposed to work in therapy. The closest he comes is just giving examples of how. Yeah, Freud again it's somewhat ironic given how some scientists and psychologists view Freud now but he really thought of himself

[00:38:37] as a scientist. He was thoroughly naturalistic. He rejected like mysticism of all kinds whereas YUM was much more open even though he was also, he thought that this was an empirical project he was engaged in. He was more open to mysticism

[00:38:56] and had a lot more respect I think for religious ideas than Freud did even if they sort of would sometimes come to the same conclusions about what the loss of religion meant for modern man or something like that. Yeah, Freud was obviously cynical about religion.

[00:39:18] Fair to say that he was cynical just about the human condition and YUM has this like you say mysticism that he embraces where he thinks that the unification of the psyche is almost as if the ancient wisdom has been trying to tell us all of this

[00:39:37] all along we need only sort of come to terms with it. Yeah, and recognizing them as like deep facets of the world like kind of core elements of the world and human consciousness whereas for Freud I think he would tend

[00:39:55] to be like more reductive about a lot of that stuff. I was listening to in fact I should shout out JF Martel, I know he just from listening to them that he knows a lot. He's read a ton of YUM and he recommended these

[00:40:14] four essays on the four main archetypes that you and I read. They did a podcast episode on YUM's approach to art and one of the things they said was a big difference between Freud and YUM is how they would view say

[00:40:33] I think they use as an example of Leonardo da Vinci painting like something about Mary and somebody else and Freud would just say oh just this just he would just say this just shows that Leonardo has two mothers

[00:40:47] or this is the expression of the fact that he had two mothers and YUM, like that was a foreign and like unproductive way of approaching art for YUM he's like that just tells you about Leonardo da Vinci it doesn't tell you about the art

[00:41:02] and the art itself is this autonomous thing that once it's out there you wrestle with and you're not just trying to learn the personal history of the artist in some way. You're not just trying to learn how fucked up they are because of this aspect of their history

[00:41:18] which relates to the big content difference between them too. That's right, yeah that's right. So the difference in Freud's emphasis on the mind as produced by an individual's personal history so really solely like if you understood some basics about how the mind is structured

[00:41:38] and an individual's specific personal history then you're understanding psychology you're understanding that person psychology. Right, that person's unconscious is entirely it consists of just his personal history which he has in his life. And some basic universals like a drive to sex whereas YUM divides the unconscious up

[00:42:04] into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. And you can see like obviously YUM has built his ideas on Freud a lot of the concepts that he uses are based on his borrowing or whatever you know of Freud's. In Freud's, yeah. Yeah, of Freud.

[00:42:24] I don't think we should talk too much about it but they did have a really funny relationship and a weird falling out. That is worth reading but I'll just say this given that both of their theories kind of are it is very difficult to falsify any claims

[00:42:39] it's no wonder that they ended their relationship with a lot of accusations back and forth that the person was just, you know, Freud was just saying like you're just you have a father complex with me and you're just projecting whatever you're neurotic

[00:42:52] in this way and you would say you're neurotic in this way that my theory says. Yeah, exactly. One concept I think especially that they both share is projection, this idea of projection when you're unconscious can't find expression in your own consciousness and your own self

[00:43:10] then you project these aspects of you onto other figures or onto the world. And I just Freud just thought again that's just your personal history that's influencing what you're projecting whereas for Jung you can be projecting either something from your personal history which is usually the shadow,

[00:43:31] these parts of yourself that you've repressed or it can be one of these main archetypes that form the collective unconscious like so you could be projecting animus or anima onto other people and he even thought that's how people fall in love

[00:43:47] I mean we'll go into these things more detail but often falling in love is just projection of this unconscious anima anima is within the man and animus is within the woman. Yes, animus is the male archetype that resides in a woman. Yeah, and not only fall in love

[00:44:05] but also the petty bickering of a couple. He has a great description of that. Both of them believed that then the goal really was say the therapeutic process but I think just of humanity I just thought that therapeutic process was necessary was to bring the unconscious conscious

[00:44:27] and for both of them dreams were very important so analyzing dreams was central to Freud's methodology because he thought you could bring the personal unconscious into conscious light but again for Jung it was more than that so you asked something I didn't answer at the beginning

[00:44:50] which was what I think of Jung and what I think of Jung and his ideas are almost beside the point here in the sense that I enjoy reading Jung and I really enjoy like the deep dives he takes into mythology

[00:45:09] if you push me I think it's a crock I think it's a lot of the kind of p-hacking that we had before statistics which is him going through whatever mythologies of the world he could define examples that would fit but that sounds much more disparaging

[00:45:25] than what I like like with Freud and I believe we had really similar discussion I don't have to buy into any of the empirical claims or even the description that Jung has of how he goes about testing his claims to find gems in here

[00:45:45] and to find some wisdom about the human condition and so... Yeah, I would maybe go a little further than that I actually think he's on to something when he talks about these archetypes these features of the collective unconscious that in a very Kantian way structure our experience

[00:46:08] he was influenced by Kant and this is the side of Kant that I actually, all joking aside kind of find very interesting what's his terms for them like the categories universal categories like time, space and for Jung it's obviously way more specific than just

[00:46:32] time and space and things like that but the idea is the same you have these archetypes which he says are formal purely formal and they manifest themselves in different ways depending on the culture depending on the person, depending on all sorts of

[00:46:50] contingent factors but they have at their core this common formal element and his evidence for this again not evidence in the way that he's going to think is the only way to take anybody seriously now but the idea is like look at all these myths that have

[00:47:11] strikingly common central symbols, right? The great mother, the mother the earth mother, the flood the wise old man father the traveler, the hero's journey all that stuff and also in this part I don't know about because I don't know if I dream like this

[00:47:35] like Jung's patient's dream but these same things just show up in people's dreams and so the fact that you have all these myths from all these different traditions that had no contact with each other and you have some of those same elements showing up in people's dreams

[00:47:50] it does seem like that is a real discovery of some kind and to assimilate those two things and to make at least a hypothesis about why, like what explains that. Well here's where I say you can't have your cake and eat it too

[00:48:05] like you can't claim that this is empirical and that you have a method of discovery that's rigorous and also have sort of the kind of weak evidence that he proposed so I'd rather he didn't say that this was that he had an empirical

[00:48:23] rigorous process because he does outline this but since we're talking about it let's just talk a little bit about one of the problems I have with the whole idea of the collective unconscious is that he really believes that this is hereditary that somehow these forms these archetypes

[00:48:41] made it in genetically into the mind and so that early human beings experiences are the universal source of these forms that exist in all of our unconscious minds wait a minute because that was not my understanding that they're the source of it

[00:48:59] we're all equally the source of it it's just how all human minds are structured but the reason that it is in your mind the reason that you have the animus the old man the hero is because these were ideas that our ancestors had so that's not my like

[00:49:17] are you sure about that that that's his view I thought he was very kind of ambivalent about how this is hereditary right but I don't think he means that necessarily dark in a Darwinian terms I think he means that as this is something that has been

[00:49:32] passed down to us I don't think he means that the reason we had this is because you know when we broke off from the monkeys in fact there is something in what we read I think it's

[00:49:41] what we read where he says look I'm not taking a stand on whether these are metaphysical or whether these are you know purely biological he's just like I'm just saying that they're there and this is how human the human psyche is structured

[00:49:56] I'm not taking like I'm going to be more neutral on how it got to this place in any case also the idea that any commonalities would be due to a deep structure a deep shared structure of the mind so any common myths would be evidence

[00:50:14] for the collective unconscious because of the say lack of communication between cultures right really rests on the assumption that there was no communication between these cultures and there really was like a whole like that I think most people believe

[00:50:32] that the epic of Gilgamesh has a flood and the Bible has a flood for very simple reasons that people actually told those stories and those stories made their way across cultures not because they were somehow imprinted in our minds right I mean my again we've

[00:50:50] been reading different things but my understanding is there are plenty of cases where it's just according to like archaeologists like these two cultures didn't interact some of the East Asian cultures and some of the like ancient Greek cultures and yet

[00:51:05] we'll see a lot of the same stuff at very deep and core levels well so it does rest on that right so there are two sources the archetypes of mothers and fathers can easily be explained by a universal experience that we all have with fathers and mothers and

[00:51:26] that I think is enough for a lot of things communication between cultures is enough for a lot of the same thing but also you know there are things that cultures can independently come up with that are not evidence for anything like a collective unconscious

[00:51:41] like two completely independent non-communicating cultures can come up with an umbrella because it solves the problem of keeping your head safe from rain nobody would think that this is evidence of an archetypal umbrella being embedded in our mind it's like yeah true

[00:51:59] but I will say that even if there is there was some communication between cultures and again I really think there are examples where there just definitely wasn't but even if there is the fact that these main story themes and motifs in the most famous

[00:52:17] myths that continue to live on and on and that we keep going back to and remaking over and over again whether we've even read the originals or not I think just like it doesn't prove that our minds are structured in a way

[00:52:32] where certain kinds of stories appeal to us on a very deep level and certain stories don't but I think it's very suggestive I think a lot of the young stuff and we should get into the details before we start arguing about

[00:52:47] but a lot of this stuff is at the very least suggestive and something that I think you have to take seriously is the kind of hypothesis that does call for some kind of explanation the fundamental aspects of certain kinds of stories and myths

[00:53:02] and religions you know whether or not there was contact we seem drawn as a species to these kinds of story structures Yeah and that's why I kind of wanted to sidestep this criticism because I knew that we might have a disagreement here it's sort of

[00:53:22] I think an issue that I don't feel the need to resolve in order to find value in discussion of these universals so that's why I don't approach this in a curmudgeony way although I might have sounded like that just now

[00:53:38] In the forward I write as a physician with a physician's sense of responsibility and not as a proselyte nor do I write as a scholar otherwise I would wisely barricade myself behind the safe walls of my specialism and not on account of my inadequate knowledge of history

[00:53:53] expose myself to critical attack and damage my scientific reputation which when he said was like I feel like that should be our opening we're just we're not speaking as Jungian scholars. Yeah I think this is one of the things I like about him and Freud because I think

[00:54:14] about maybe like Freud didn't it wasn't as transparent or open about this but like I am raising a bunch of interesting ideas in ways that might border on crazy or very inspired by mystical worldview magic worldview

[00:54:32] like but at least I'm willing to do that because I find it fruitful to just draw attention to these ideas and I know you're I know the Dave Pizarro's of the world are going to start clicking their tongues and picking yeah like actually looking up your references

[00:54:47] the number crunchers what that I were yeah that's what's fun about him though too yeah absolutely agreed absolutely agreed he's he's under no pretense I feel like Freud was under a bit more pretense about what he was doing yeah all right well let's talk about it then

[00:55:08] let's try to get into at least the main elements of the psyche I can't say that I'm 100% sure I understand any of them even the most basic like start with the ego so the ego tell me if this is right is sort of the center of all conscious

[00:55:26] experience yeah so and this is I think the idea of the ego is straight up the Freudian one where where he tends to just say look like the con that part of the mind that is clearly accessible is what we will call the ego the like start

[00:55:44] with that that is the content of your mind that's available to you right and it's just the parts where he says but it's not identical with the things you're conscious of our conscious like it's in some ways the seat of all that but I guess

[00:55:59] we don't have to yeah try and figure that out you're not yeah moving on I guess so there's there's the ego and the conscious self which I don't think is an archetype but it's just the seat of your conscious life and then

[00:56:15] you have an archetype like the shadow but before we get to the shadow I think there might be something in between that which is the persona oh yeah that's right and I think the persona is still part of the ego

[00:56:31] because so the persona is the mask you put on to interact with society it's a bridge it allows you to engage with ordinary society with the norms and expectations that it has yep very much that very much the mask it's the nice the nice you

[00:56:51] that you put on to be accepted and and get along and what that is will depend on your history or your job or your society that you live in but I think he thinks we all have a persona of some kind did you

[00:57:05] think a lot about the movie persona in young in terms I did not I had completely forgotten about the persona according to you yeah because persona really is a lot about this idea as a mask of all these expectations that society has for women so if you

[00:57:22] interpret it we I was even saying this though not really conscious of the young Ian ideas that if you think that it's almost movie her persona is like the expectations for being a nurse and a mother and and that is what she is trying to

[00:57:39] make her whole self and young and that's where the danger comes in she's not accepting that she has all these other aspects of her that will try to manifest it themselves in other forms and young thinks that it's a real danger when the person person identifies

[00:57:57] with their persona too much right yeah he thinks that's just straight up unhealthy okay shadow the is an archetype maybe we should talk a little bit about what it like what is an archetype so an archetype is a is a form I guess a

[00:58:14] concept it's a it's an idea but it seems that it has also a motive for also a motivational aspect to it it tries to express itself it seeks given that it's part of an unconscious element it's part of the collective unconscious like personal unconscious it will seek

[00:58:34] expression and if it is not integrated if it is not confronted and faced the hero archetype say and its influence on you and the it's motivational influence on you will really depend on all sorts of cultural factors and personal factors right so yeah so the shadow is it's

[00:58:56] it's your target literally is your dark side it's the dark side the dark side of you that you have repressed in orders that you may interact with polite society so you push it down into your unconscious and it will even as you're doing that

[00:59:13] will seek expression in certain ways if you do not confront it and one of the main ways that it expresses itself is through projection and so you see evil tendencies in others and you know one in reality what you're doing is suppressing or repressing these qualities or

[00:59:36] tendencies in in yourself and just pointing out in others and it is something that you need to work through like you need to do like literal shadow work in order to embrace those aspects of yourself that are darker because if you don't so he has a nice

[00:59:53] line this is in the chapter on the shadow that we read projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face right so if you're somebody who's isolated and has this real dark side that you won't face you will project malevolence onto

[01:00:09] the world you will find the world and alienating in an evil place that will then make you more isolated because you're mistrusting everybody and you're maybe acting aggressively towards them and the circle is will just intensify and intensify right and there that

[01:00:26] you know there's something to that I think like the people who see themselves as holy good and everybody else around them right it's that's like that old saying like if everybody if everybody around you is always being an asshole like maybe maybe you're really asshole

[01:00:42] totally and a lot of people's political I think in political life it explains you know it can go a long way towards explaining just this idea that a lot you know a lot of your beliefs and your core kind of political convictions are not shaped by like

[01:00:59] you know some sort of rational evaluation but it's a reflection in some way of your personal unconscious drives or desires and you know and and and what those things just come out as something that are actually in you and that leads to a lot of problems

[01:01:19] in terms of political discussion because you're really not discussing the same things even if the words are the same and he says like there's a great line that I thought really represents liberals well one can imagine how desirable it would be in such cases to dissolve

[01:01:37] the projection and there are always optimists who believe that the golden age can be ushered in simply by telling people the right way to go but just let them try to explain to these people that they are acting like a dog chasing

[01:01:49] its own tail to make a person see the shortcomings of his attitude considerably more than mere telling is needed for more is involved than ordinary common sense will allow and so he calls this like a fateful misunderstanding when you try to reason somebody out of their projections

[01:02:04] it's like no no no you got you're not speaking the same like psychic language at that point that's right and that's why you know it's it's a good hypothesis as to why political discussion is so often futile frustrating and you just get mad and why

[01:02:20] your communist utopia won't work because you can't just present that as an idea everybody has to do their own shadow work well yeah but like the revolution sometimes the gun sometimes the gun is all the shadow work you need exactly this episode of very bad wizards is brought

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[01:05:51] at least like a more straightforward cinematic representation of shadow work then when Luke Skywalker goes into this cave and battles what he thinks is Darth Vader cuts his head off removes the helmet and finds that it's himself right so yeah

[01:06:11] so for you as you're doing this work of trying to integrate these shadow parts of you as you're doing the shadow work your persona breaks down a bit as you integrate the shadow and integrating the shadow is perhaps the easiest of the archetypes yeah integrate yeah because

[01:06:31] he says this is what moral education is often about it's pointing out that we're not all perfect we get told this is just part of like human wisdom to be told but like you're not you know your farts may actually do stink

[01:06:43] and in that sense it's an archetype you know the you know you find the idea of original sin or you find like endowism right idea of good and evil being two sides of the same coin name so he really thinks that this is the one

[01:06:57] that you're gonna most likely have success with not that you always will for sure but it's it's not something that you can do like I think the teaching that you're talking about preps you for that that's right it just makes you more open yeah yeah you doesn't believe

[01:07:11] that there's anything really in normal everyday life that prepares you to do this kind of individuation work yeah I should say I've I think we've used the term individuation already before describing it but this is what you viewed as the goal of all this yeah but

[01:07:29] you can with work of you know much easier than with these other archetypes start to integrate your shadow which will in turn make you identify less with your persona and you know of course this is a big aspect of a lot of works of art

[01:07:43] the person and his evil side or her evil side that they won't accept that they are keeping down and that then finds ways to fuck up their own lives and the lives of people around them often through some kind of projection right yeah right from the most

[01:08:03] the heavy-handed ones like Jekyll and Hyde but I like most works that I find interesting are people whose bad sides emerge sort of in this in a way that might not be expected by them or others which I think you know is certainly true

[01:08:25] to some degree that this is something that often our things that we don't want to admit about ourselves will end up being something that we see and other people and young is very clear about how this will be your reality this is what's hard about it

[01:08:43] is you will really see people like this or the world like this because it's so deeply ingrained in your psyche to do this that it will affect your perception and your evaluative judgments at core levels and so that's why it's so important

[01:09:03] even if it can be so difficult at times to incorporate these things and actually I don't know if you ever finished talking about individuation but do you want to just say what that is yeah so individuation is Jung's term for

[01:09:19] the goal but it's not so much an end state it's still a process but it is it is incorporating elements of your personal unconscious your collective unconscious and your conscious self into a sort of unified unified unified self so that these aspects of you aren't battling it out

[01:09:41] so there's no self deception going on so that you can actually become who you are that is the process of individuation and then those elements will be in balance like the symbols of individuation for Jung were things like these mandalas like these circular forms that

[01:10:01] in represented wholeness holistic unity that's the self in in balance yeah it's a very simple example it was just the yin yang that you find in that way and this is why which I really like and it took me a while to

[01:10:21] figure this out as we were reading it being relatively new to Jung but the idea of a self as archetype was I was like I thought the self is this goal for us you know part of individuating is the self is this organizing principle that can

[01:10:37] integrate aspects of the unconscious and your ego and but he also thinks it's an archetype and that you see this idea of wholeness in so many religions and so many you know works of philosophy works of literature and myth the unity wholeness of

[01:10:59] the self is not just something that we maybe aspire to create within us or to achieve it's actually it's also an archetype it's also kind of a framework through which you know will affect us but in this way it's a motivates us in a good way

[01:11:17] and for him these archetypes of the self often took the form of deities right deities or you know wise old man eastern religions it can be I thought it would be more like Jesus's love like this all-accomposing unity like kingdom of heaven but it is true

[01:11:39] that Jesus never made it to be old thanks for pointing out that painful painful historical fact we took care of that yeah so I understood it more like the Buddhist notions of awakening where you just recognize a unity to everything that's the self archetype and

[01:11:59] Christian I was thinking Christianity has it in the form of like this all-encompassing love or you know or the God figure that's everywhere but we stopped at chapter 5 Christ a symbol of the self but I assume from the title yeah exactly but

[01:12:15] you know I was thinking of like Judaism do we have this and they don't know that we did notions of divinity within Judaism especially the mystic this is the part of Jung that I love which is like the full-on embrace of the mystical traditions the alchemical

[01:12:33] ones the Kabbalah and Gnosticism there's plenty of Jewish symbolism for that yes anima and animus interesting ideas that I that as you say I find it hard to wrap my head around exactly what's going on yeah so there's there's two aspects to it

[01:12:53] first of all that we have the the opposite gender or sex so if all men like you and I would have anima which is the female kind of I guess great mother archetype or some sort of mother wife slash feminine spirit feminine spirit that is part of our

[01:13:21] unconscious and that we can sometimes recognize in symbols sometimes in dreams and my sense of it is he thinks one it protects the ego from the unconscious so a lot of the unconscious stuff is filtered through maybe anima or animus but it's

[01:13:43] also a bridge to the unconscious once you engage in the individuation process so there's definitely good things about the anima animus too it can lead it can lead us to the deepest parts of our unconscious and the self and so like that's the it's like a way of

[01:14:01] getting to the self to hold this is through the anima recognizing the anima or the animus yeah um so the anima and animus are having this influence on our behavior on our psychology and Jung says just as the anima becomes through integration the arrows of

[01:14:21] consciousness so the animus becomes a logos and in the same way that the anima gives relationship and relatedness to a man's consciousness the animus gives to a woman's consciousness a capacity for reflection deliberation and self-knowledge so the integration of whatever Jung thinks is the female side

[01:14:41] for men will make us more holistically healthy whatever actualized human beings in the same same for the other like in in one stroke it's both sort of the sex sex hysteria type that he's dealing with essentialism yeah um yet at the same time with a

[01:15:03] message that like both men and women would do well to sort of integrate these aspects of themselves into right it's not like saying yeah you go to your men's club and start drumming or like get into fight clubs and stuff like that it's actually saying those are probably

[01:15:21] projections of something but the healthy thing is to actually integrate this female more female caring uh spiritual side but it's when you don't integrate them that some of that stuff was a little confusing to me um like the woman starts getting very argumentative starts getting often because

[01:15:43] there's this aspect of her that she hasn't integrated yet and so it finds manifestation in yeah not admitting that you're wrong can I read some of this so he says look like better I describe some of what I mean so he says

[01:16:01] woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has so to speak a masculine imprint this results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women and accordingly I've called the projection making factor in women the animus which means mind or spirit

[01:16:15] the animus corresponds to the paternal logo logos reason rationality just as the anima corresponds to the maternal aeros but I do not wish or intend to give these two intuitive concepts too specific a definition he goes on to say okay in women on the other

[01:16:29] hand aeros is an expression of their is an expression of their true nature while the logo is often only a regrettable accident it gives rise to misunderstandings and annoying interpretations in the family circle and among friends this is because it consists of opinions

[01:16:43] instead of reflections and by opinions I mean a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth so think what he's saying is when it's a projection purely it's not doing the real work that the logos would do like it's taking the form of making absolute statements

[01:17:01] but since it hasn't been actually like a part of the woman it's just a weak imitation of true reason yeah well it's just you take these a priori assumptions assume that they're facts and base your arguments or judgments on those a priori assumptions I don't think

[01:17:27] you recognize that you're making these assumptions so you're taking the form of the male argument but with like all you're borrowing is the absoluteness of the conclusions exactly as the animus is partial to argument he can best be seen at work

[01:17:43] and disputes where both parties know they are right men he says can argue in a very womanish way too when they are anima possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima with them the question becomes one of personal vanity and touchiness

[01:17:57] as if they were females with women it is a question of power whether of truth or justice or some other ism for the dress maker and hairdresser have already taken care of their vanity so when when men haven't integrated the anima they will also take the form

[01:18:11] their arguments might also take the form of a stereotypical female which is you know getting all whatever but hurt like in your arguments yeah no now I feel like I understand you a lot better I was going to say the same about you

[01:18:29] you can argue in a very womanish way actually this is true but except for it's integrated yeah this is I'm sure like I didn't actually come across that much stuff about like the sexism inherent in young but I would think that there is a fairly big literature because

[01:18:47] he relies on these fairly stereotypical which he might say they're stereotypical because they're archetypes and that's why these stereotypes are going to pop up you're not going to be able to talk people out of them or have like seminars

[01:19:05] that will just show people the error of their ways so I don't know but I think the reason why he doesn't get a lot of flack and there's no calls for cancellation or anything much like that is because his intentions here are to integrate both these aspects

[01:19:21] in both men and women and everyone can get behind that I think that's right so I think that's the charitable interpretation and like I don't think it's wrong to say that he's calling for some sort of unity here I mean look if he was calling

[01:19:37] for the unity of the shadow which is essentially incorporating trying to find the evil parts of yourself and incorporate them he's calling for for the unity of all the unconscious archetypes and as you say an archetype is just a stereotype by a different shaped in a different way

[01:19:57] he even says most like he talks about him like he says in men heroes the function of relationship is usually less developed than yogos and in women it's more often the other way but using terms like that doesn't seem like an essentialist because especially

[01:20:17] in the sense this could be culturally influenced as well it's just at a very deep level culturally influenced if it's the archetype I like to think that that Jung would have very little interest in those kinds of debates I agree or his interest would be more idiosyncratic

[01:20:41] less trying to start fights about it he would I think he would find a lot of projection in many of the debates over like culture war as people have said there are many cultures where you have things like two spirits the notion of something both masculine

[01:20:59] and feminine at the same time is there it's there and we were reading the Dao De Jing and it's all over the Dao De Jing with none of the stuff about men are better reasoners and are more caring or something like that it's just it just talks about

[01:21:19] the feminine and the masculine and the need to have or embrace both so what does it mean to integrate say like for me to integrate my anima it's a good question you know he had this these ways of say visualizing the self and the ego

[01:21:43] and you couldn't have the self encompass the ego or the ego encompassed the self and the symbols of unity and balance were what he used to refer to the individuated a person I think taking him at his like in his very psychiatric like I am

[01:22:01] a practitioner of this like I am bringing you into my office to talk about this I think it is the process of individuation is confronting the archetypes how they have given rise to projections and in making the unconscious conscious stripping it of its power to be projective

[01:22:25] and rather making it making you accept that it's an aspect of your own personality you know I am like this it's still abstract but I think that's the goal of the therapeutic process yeah and I think it would be via so you talk about a dream

[01:22:41] or you talk about this myth that you are drawn back to or you talk about your fantasies and that will show you certain aspects of yourself which you don't think is a part of yourself and it's in that recognition say that no you have these evil characteristics

[01:22:57] or you have these really dark aggressive hostile that you're now projecting on like trumpists or something like that it's a part of you and so is this kind of craving for some more feminine that's the one that's a little harder like confronting your shadow and recognizing

[01:23:21] the parts of yourself that you don't want to admit are parts of your personality that I get more than animus yeah I mean and let alone then bringing all of the other archetypes in which is it's unclear also you know how many archetypes there are in his

[01:23:37] sort of pantheon like the sub archetypes like I think it is helpful to recall that Jung as like with Freud that their therapeutic goal was was to bring patients in who were exhibiting mental disorders like neuroses and that this process was supposed to bring about

[01:23:59] the healing of these neuroses so you come in I think like Freud would say you have a fixation at this stage of development and once we get to the root of that thing you're unconscious we can cure you Jung would say it is this archetype that's projecting

[01:24:17] that's causing this particular ailment so let's work on this aspect of your personality but as I understand it the difference is Freud like once he were cured and recognized you know this thing that was making you this part of your unconscious that was fucking up your mental health

[01:24:33] you were kind of done you were healed whereas Jung thought healthy people need to do this individuation process too because it's the fundamental goal of human life is to integrate to individuate to become a fully realized version of your particular self and that's like what

[01:24:51] gives life meaning yes and moreover you were constantly doing this like this was a process for you it wasn't that you got there and you were done and I think for Jung for like a quote-unquote normal person has with for someone with a disorder that

[01:25:09] this process of individuation was supposed to give you something like a freedom like in some abstract sense a freedom that you didn't have before before you were he talks about patients being controlled by their own neuroses controlled by

[01:25:25] the influence of their unconscious and so that's what he's trying to give an individual like get back that control over who you are but at some fundamental level even people that are reasonably psychologically healthy so say you and I and other people might disagree

[01:25:41] but like we still have they're wrong and evil yeah exactly and stupid but we still are less kind of destructive in less disruptive ways maybe controlled by certain aspects of our unconscious that we won't we don't accept or don't recognize and we

[01:26:03] could be a lot or a lot more free or you know actualized if we did this like anybody can go through would benefit from in fact I think for Jung thought just like this is it this is what we're here for is to find out who we really

[01:26:21] are and who we really are in court that incorporates both these unconscious collective unconscious and individual unconscious like that's what gives life meaning for us right now and you don't have to be a neurotic or you know have some kind of mental disorder to benefit

[01:26:41] from this pro process like everybody would right yeah there is something about authenticity that's supposed to I think come with this which is like the taxing work of denying or ignoring these aspects of yourself essentially led to a constipated psyche and what we need to do

[01:27:01] is stop ignoring stop denying like there is something inherently unhealthy about all that yeah he says our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now and this brought about a demonization of man in his world demonization the phenomenon of dictators and all the misery

[01:27:19] they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the short-sightedness of super intellectuals like the post Christian age the disenchantment of the world by like scientific people make yourself like them he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness but

[01:27:37] man's task is the exact opposite to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious neither should he persist in his consciousness nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being thus evading his destiny which is to create more and more consciousness

[01:27:53] as far as we can discern the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being beautiful yeah and I get why he would think that you know in a post religious world this would be harder and harder

[01:28:09] because he thinks that we're turning our back on these universal symbols but I don't think that's necessary it's necessarily the case in an increasingly secular world these symbols should rear themselves regularly maybe it's just we don't treat them with reverence but you know most of good cinema presumably

[01:28:29] is doing some of that work for us or at least enlightening us as to how to do that work yeah I think the kind of mentality that he would say is destructive is the kind of stem only stem you know humanities are worthless

[01:28:45] because it won't help you get a job and things that even push you away from myths and art and you know it's that mindset that I think he would find to be destructive and for instance the current strain of dominant Christianity yes right it's not just

[01:29:03] scientism no that's right it's but I think yes it's a lot more respect for Christianity than Freud did well yeah but Nietzsche too they thought Christianity was actually something that repressed you or minimized you whereas I think Jung thought that like a lot

[01:29:29] of religions he also had a ton of respect for the Eastern religions it could open you up you know it was a symbol that could lead you to finding out aspects of your psyche that you don't know you have and this is maybe one of the last things

[01:29:45] that I just wanted to talk about which is Jung's fascination with mysticism which makes sense to me because the symbols in the mystic traditions the kinds of things that one focuses on the kinds of things that one is taught I think in the more mystical traditions

[01:30:08] coincide much better with the personal transformation that Jung is talking about so Jung interpreted alchemy which is often just thought of as the precursor to chemistry where people wanted to turn anything into gold all of the the symbols of alchemy like there was a lot of weirdness

[01:30:31] there he thought were simply that it was all a metaphor to the uninitiated it was good that you think we're just here in the library trying to turn shit into gold but to the initiated what was going on is this transformation this personal transformation

[01:30:47] of the self into the individuated self and to recognize that we're all the same substance or that we are all have the same foundation I like that stuff too again as somebody who is not temperamentally you know attracted to mystical ideas but I think

[01:31:07] like I have a ton of respect for them and their potential well and I'm a fan just to me there are just these lines of connection in in the thinking of Jung, the writings of Borges who also deeply respected sort of the mystical tradition

[01:31:27] all that shit that's Gnosticism and Kabbalah that stuff to me has always been fascinating and maybe the opposite of you I feel constitutionally drawn to those things and intellectually rejecting of it much as I described my stance toward Jung which was I like this I just don't think

[01:31:49] I don't think it stands up to empirical scrutiny but that doesn't mean sounds contradictory but there's a deep way in which I enjoy it and I think that's why I enjoy it in the works of fiction like deep down I kind of want to believe like this stuff

[01:32:03] yeah you do Gnostic stuff just like you know what we could do one time is like or the Kabbalah stuff do you ever see the movie Pi the Aronofsky movie that might be fun to see in this context either for a bonus episode or for this episode

[01:32:21] but yeah cool I had some more things to say but maybe I'm sure we'll come back to Jung at some point there's a lot yeah so let's leave it there for now yeah oh maybe Joseph Campbell maybe we could talk about Joseph Campbell at some point

[01:32:39] I have his book you know the interviews with Bill Moyers I think some of the stuff on myth and Joseph Campbell on myth and stories would be really cool to do alright hope you have expanded your consciousness by listening and join us next time on Very Bad Wizard