https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BsUquRO-70w
Again, with Anderson Todd, his first name is Anderson, his last name is Todd. Some of you have noted that the discussion I had with him was causing quite a stir. We were talking about Jung, shadow work, the work of Jordan Peterson, and the relationship between Jung and Christianity. And I’m pleased that Anderson has agreed to join us again and to answer questions. I want to indicate something. I’m going to give priority to the questions that are specifically towards Anderson. Some of you are sending questions to me. Please resubmit those to the general Q&A I do for Patreons. I want to focus today on the questions that are specifically directed towards Anderson and a response to our previous discussion. At some point, Anderson, it might be good if you went over your discussion of the golden shadow again. But I’d like to begin by a question. I get the first question, it’s my channel, which is some people have commented about the argument that I was weaving through our discussion, but you were largely in agreement with, that Jung is better understood as a non-theist and that his relationship to Christianity was much more ambivalent and critical than an apologetic relationship. That was part of some of the criticisms of some of Jordan’s take on Jung. Some people replied by that by saying, because I’ve seen this, and I know that you have too, this famous interview with Jung towards the end of his life, I believe, where he was asked if he believed in God, and he said, I don’t believe, I know. Many people take that as, well, they seem to be taking it as an indication that Jung was stating very clearly that he was some kind of theist. How would you respond to that? Well, I guess the first thing I would say is that, as I mentioned in our talk, Jung is perhaps best approached with an eye to completeness over consistency. His work does change and the emphasis changes. So particularly after he had his heart attack, I think he comes in much more strongly sort of firing the guns in a mystical sense and also indicated that he had sort of more direct rather than sort of inferential or logically derived in some way in college. However, when I think about this, I often think about, because it is in fact a common question, I think about Jung’s relationship to A.A. in the 12 steps. So a lot of people don’t realize that Jung actually had some impact on A.A. in 12 steps. I didn’t know that. Yeah, so Bill W., I think, the guy who’s the A.A. founder, was in correspondence with Jung during the period. And there is a sort of a famous set of letters that’s exchanged where Jung basically says that if he wants to conquer his addiction, he needs to make a sort of a transformative appeal to a higher power. Now the interesting thing is, right, when that sort of filters through A.A., eventually that becomes a relatively theist and sort of Christian-centric sort of take on things. But of course, if you read Jung, the notion of an appeal to a higher power, when you’re considering a relationship to the capital S self, is considerably more complicated sort of thing, even if it has all of the symbolic machinery and appearances of that stuff. So when Jung says that he doesn’t believe he knows, is what does he know? What does he mean when he’s talking about God? And that’s sort of how I would approach it. And to whatever extent you wanna draw a distinction between theism and non-theism in that sense, it’s like, well, the appearances might be the same, but how you’re interpreting the underlying event is different, right? And I would tend to say that based on sort of the overarching body of his work, that it’s fairer to interpret Jung in fact as saying, we can’t really know the underlying, we can know that there is an event, we can know that it’s powerfully meaningful, we can have an encounter with that thing and know it in that sense, but that’s not quite the same as sort of the theistic faith commitment into a particular metaphysic. So that would line up with the fact that Jung often points to impersonal representations of the self, like the sun or Mandala figures, as also things that point towards how he knows God. Isn’t that correct to the speaker? That’s right. And so you have a kind of a double relationship there, as you do with many archetypes. So there was sort of the personalized intercessor and emissary versions of the self, and we talked a bit about Mercurius. Last time, and that’s sort of very close to the self in a way as far as archetypes go. But then there’s also these sort of, yeah, impersonal principles of organization that you see. And so there are sort of archetypes of pattern, right? So the Mandala is sort of the best known example of this, but you get a bunch of other examples. Well, we talked about the sun, right? And the sun as being a thing is, you can treat it as a personal sort of figure, but the whole point is that it’s more transcendent than that. Yeah, I think about the use of the sun in Plato in the Republic and how it’s a representation of the good. Yeah. I often consider this stuff, and this is not directly derived from Jung, but I often think of it sort of in Kabbalistic terms, right? And as you climb the tree of life, you’re dealing with sort of these increasingly rarefied versions of the divine in some sense, right? So the solar sphere, which is sort of in the middle of the tree of life, is a kind of solar resurrecting god representation. It’s definitely divine, right? But it’s the sort of birth, rebirth kinds of gods. But when you get up to the top, when you get up to things like Kether, that doesn’t even have energy or form. It’s just kind of like raw godhead, right? And so there are, I think, some representations of the self that capture that overarching and non-personal sort of aspect, impersonal aspect, but again, the stuff is quite nuanced. Right. That’s very interesting. We have time, I’d like to talk to you more about the sort of polarity between the personal relationship to a god, which might be sort of more intra-psychically directed, and the impersonal one, which might be sort of more ontologically directed, and what happens when they get into sort of an anagogic resonance, because it strikes me that people generally are trying to point in both directions at the same time when they’re invoking this notion of god. So we have another question I’d like to ask you. We’re switching to questions from Patreons. So once again, thank you very much, Patreons, for all your support. It’s much appreciated. And so the first one is from Igles and Connie, I believe. And I’ll read these questions out to you, Anderson. Thanks. My question for Anderson Todd, how would you evaluate Carl Jung as a philosopher? Was he one, if so, to what degree? If Mr. Todd would be able to explain Carl Jung’s philosophy? I just want to mention one thing before we begin. Not only is Anderson a practicing psychotherapist, somebody who’s been through it, he’s continuing to be within Jung’s therapy result. He’s also the person who teaches the Jung courses at the University of Toronto. So Anderson often has to deal with these kinds of questions in his courses about the relationship between Jung as a psychologist and Jung as a philosopher. So what would you say about, you know, what kind of philosopher is Carl Jung, and what’s the elevator pitch version of his philosophy? Right. Okay, so it depends in part what we mean by philosopher. I mean, Jung as sort of an analytical tradition philosopher is, I would say, quite weak. Yes. As a continental philosopher, on the other hand, he’s sort of well nested within a tradition of other people in that vein. Both Kantian in that way, too. Yeah, very much, right? And so when you look at the influences, which we discussed before, right? You look at Hegel, and you look at Kant, and you look at Nietzsche, and you look at, he hated Schopenhauer, which is weird, actually, anyway. But you look at those people, and he is firmly situated in that tradition, and I would say, in that sense, how is he as a philosopher? Relatively derivative. But, insofar, if we mean by philosopher, if we mean philo-so-via, if we mean a lover of wisdom, there’s no question that Jung is firmly situated in that camp. And I think that the thing that Jung brings somewhat uniquely, I don’t know if this qualifies as an elevator pitch, but when he interfaces and knits together a bunch of this material, he does so with an eye towards the phenomenology of lived experience, which is very important. And so, you know, depth psychology, in many ways, is one of the last sort of big umbrella psychologies, right? Psychology in academic psychology, experimental psychology, now tends to be very focused on relatively narrow kinds of questions. Depth psychology is, in some ways, a lesser psychology, per se, than it is a sort of overarching worldview and method. Like, it sort of encompasses virtually anything. It can talk on almost any topic, right? So, in that sense, as a lover of wisdom, I think Jung is deeply committed to philosophy and to asking the questions that I would say are fundamental to philosophy. Who are we? Who are we as people, and what are we? What kind of beings are we, right? And his answer to that is that we are not unitive beings, right, that’s sort of the psychodynamic basis, is the rejection of this unitive bias. So, in that sense, we’re not unitive beings, that’s an important part. He has a lot of emphasis on this transjective quality, although I don’t think, you know, I think Corbin, in fact, sort of articulates a lot of that much better than you do. But his lived sense of it, as being sort of a clinician and working with people, and his sense of how those inner transformations map, and ultimately speaking, the efforts that he made to try to, you know, to try to seal the mind-body rift, like we talked about that, and I think he just didn’t have the machinery available. But given what he did have available, he actually makes some sort of remarkable inroads, right, for the time, which is why I think a lot of, you know, there were a lot of other thinkers in the period that took him quite seriously, even when he was persona non grata. So, you know, how do I think he rates as a philosopher? He does not always have the meticulousness of mind, I think, that characterizes the best philosophers, but he has a scope and a breadth and a depth that compensates for that, provided that you’re not reading them in isolation. Yeah, that’s a good answer. Thank you, that was very helpful. So, the next question is from, a patron from Connor. Aside from dream journaling and in your experience, what practices would you recommend for getting in contact with the archetypes after having done shadow work? The archetypes after having done shadow work. That’s what the question’s asking us. So, when I teach this material, very often, I mean, doing dream work is useful, in part, because it is a very ready at hand altered state. So the argument that I typically make when I teach this material, and I teach a course on this, is that, in fact, our best bet is altered states broadly construed. So, what I would include in that is, you know, I make a rough, you know, there isn’t very good taxonomy around altered states, we don’t have good categorization, but roughly speaking, I sort of drop them into three camps. I think of endogenous altered states, I think of sort of psycho technological or technique based altered states, and then I think of exogenous altered states, right? So the endogenous are all of the states that, you know, deviate from some kind of statistical baseline and give us an extreme experience. So, for instance, experiencing extreme emotions, bends our salience landscape, bends our experience in ways that the ancients, for instance, could easily recognize, it’s like love is madness, right? And so all these things that are in some sense madness, right, that are a form of madness, for whatever that’s worth, are states which give us sort of an access and a perspective to parts of the unconscious and parts of our own nature that we don’t normally have. And so being able to move into those states and move back out of them, right, and reintegrate that material is sort of the first move that I would generally recommend. So that can include strong emotions, it can include other kinds of endogenous states that are easy to get to, spinning, right? So spinning, I joke, is sort of the first altered state that kids figure out how to reliably reproduce, right? And they’ll spin and spin and spin and spin and spin in the grass. But it also plays a somewhat central role in various religious traditions, right? Think of Worling-Durvish’s, the Sufi tradition. And I have some sort of cog-side theories about how that might involve the hyperactivation of the cerebellum to produce insight and whatever. But the point is, right, you’re trying all these things where you’re moving your experience, you’re moving your sort of phenomenological landscape into novel configurations and different experiences, and that’s gonna reveal things about you. Would states like the flow state also be included in that category? Yeah, I would say so. I mean, the flow state, hopefully, is a relatively common one, but it is a relatively also extreme state, right? So peak experiences, for sure, insofar as we think of Maslow’s peak experiences as a link up with flow states, absolutely. States of awe, right? So all the stuff around positive psychology, states of powerful states of awe. But also other kinds of things. I mean, basically making a picture for experience. If you want to get to know your unconscious, you combine together experience with a certain kind of analytical mindset. And you want your experience to be, in many ways, as sort of varied as possible. You wanna chart out far points because you’re gonna get more information about yourself, the nature of your mind, and then you have to treat it with a kind of analytical eye. So is it kind of like a deep learning cycle? You run all this experiential variation and then you do a sort of an analytic compression to try and pick up and then you re-variate and you’re sort of cycling through it in that way? So you’re looking for invariance. I think that’s something that you’re definitely looking for. But there’s also an analytical component, which is you’re drilling in with sort of successive, Socratic, but what are we actually talking about? Oh, I see. Right, so as an example, a thing that I find a lot in clinical work that was something of a discovery for me was a lot of people have a hard time accessing their preferences, right? So people don’t know what they want. And that was a shock to me because I have very ready access to my preferences. But this lines up with some good cognitive psychology. People are very bad at effective forecasting. They’re actually very bad at forecasting how they’ll be happy or sad when some future- And forecasting generally, right? End of history illusion and all that business. So yeah, I think people, and that typically to me demonstrates, it’s like, right, we don’t really know what the arc and velocity of our being are, right? We don’t really know where we’re going. Right, right, right. So, but nevertheless, nevertheless, when we’re doing this sort of back and forth, right? Where we’re expanding into the space and we’re bringing it back, the analytical question comes up. So when people don’t know their preferences, that’s hard enough. But even if people do know their preferences, the question is then why do you have those preferences? And the more extreme or unusual the preferences are, people don’t question them. So it’s like, you really like a piece of music. Why? Why do you like it? And there might be a lot of reasons why. You might have particular attachments to it. You might have whatever, or you have a particular taste. So for instance, people’s tastes in sort of fiction or sex are often very revealing, right? So people’s attractions. So people, if you start to ask yourself, why, why do I like this, right? And drilling in. And also you’re altering your state frequently enough that you’re having novel experiences and then sort of tracking your own experiences in this analytical way. I think you begin to be able to sort of infer both a bit of structure, but also some of your unconscious contents that are normally harder to get at. So that was the endogenous. What about the psychotechnological and the exogenous? Right. So really, I think those things are a continuum. I mean, it’s kind of an arbitrary distinction. The endogenous are just easy to get at and typically safe. Like if you’re doing breath work, for instance, to move into an altered state, you might oversaturate yourself with oxygen or something, but you’re not gonna have too serious a problem. The psychotechnological, I think of as being techniques and sometimes technologies, but mostly techniques, which leverage the existing systems in different ways or exempt those systems or build those systems. So these things like to prep, maybe chanting? Chanting, meditation, extreme exercise or pain, pushing yourself into places or training yourself to enter states that normally would be difficult to access. So that sort of thing. And then the exogenous is introduced in whatever way. So psychoactives are fairly classic, but also things like strobing technologies, that kind of stuff, exposure to art or certain kinds of ritual that happen to you. And now, of course, things like noninvasive brain stimulation and neurofeedback and these sorts of technologies that we didn’t have access to, but that do allow us to intervene on our state. So is there a programmatic recommendation here, like start with the endogenous stuff and move, because you talked about the need for variation, and then do you move into the psychotechnological and then perhaps only when you’re with a good guide or a therapist? I think there’s, so yes, a good guide and a therapist. So the general rule around altered states is you should always have safe containment. So it’s the same thing with psychedelics. It’s been known for a long time, if you’re gonna engage in this stuff, you need to have a sitter, minimally. And probably you should have a sitter that has some experience, and you should control for set and setting. And all that stuff is pretty primitive. Like, I mean, I often say it’s like set and setting is a very large. Yeah, yeah, you know that I argue about it extensively. Yeah, right, and if you look at like the Griffiths work around psilocybin, you can see that you really wanna have things a bit more controlled if you’re gonna start getting into the mystical experience territory. Well, certainly, a lot of that research shows that a lot of these profound benefits of using the psychedelics are in conjunction with therapeutic practice. That’s right, yeah. So, I mean, I just recommend therapy to everybody. I think that we should think, I think we should think of therapy as less like emergency medicine and more like, you know. Dentician. Well, more like some combination of a personal trainer. I used to say dentist, but people, a lot of people are afraid of dentists. So I stopped using that analogy. I’m not afraid of the dentist, it would never occur to me, but yeah. But, you know, a personal trainer or even something like basic preventative medicine. I mean, you go to the doctor every six months or whatever for a checkup, and it’s a checkup. But people typically only get into psychotherapy when. When they’re in emergency. They already feel like they’re about to implode. So maybe another analogy might be like sort of a seafood within a dojo or something like that. Sure, yeah, yeah. So yeah, so that is a general containing thing, right? You know, play safe, have containment, have some kind of integration and decompression in mind. Yeah, and then as a general program, I mean, a lot of it is about your comfort zone. You know, not all altered states are for all people. Is there kind of like a zone of proximal development? Yes. There is, but the problem is that that’s a very sensitive area. I mean, you know, if what you’re telling somebody is like, you know, stay inside your comfort zone. The thing is that’s not quite true. You actually wanna be slightly outside your comfort zone. But simultaneously, you don’t want to be urging people to go outside their comfort zone, right? Because, so there’s a balancing act there. There’s, I think, and people differ, right? Some people want to take small steps. They might want to do a little bit of dream work, investigate a little bit of meditation, and maybe try a float tank or something. Other people want to load 24 different things into a catapult and launch them all at once. And so they’re interested in simultaneously doing ayahuasca and holotropic breath work and strobe stuff and suspending themselves from hooks. I think it’s a matter of preference. And so, and you know, in general, my recommendation though is you don’t need necessarily to go into the deeply exotic to achieve significant results, right? If you spend enough time meditating, meditating in the old sense, contemplating. If you spend enough time analytically contemplating your interpersonal relationships, you can do a lot. If you spend some time paying attention to your dreams and your imagination, like what are the things that float up in your mind, you can, you know, pick up all kinds of things, right? And if you want to move beyond that into, you know, deeper fields of experience, it’s sort of a matter of temperament and preference, I think. I would also say also perhaps also a matter of skill. Yes, yeah, no, I agree. All right, so that was an excellent answer for a very good question. There’s another question I want to ask you from Clara, who’s also a patron. Thank you for the critique of the hero’s journey. I am left to wonder, however, about the role of fear. My felt sense is that the hero’s journey is all about conquering your deepest fears in order to improve your relation to the world. Aren’t fears a big source or even root cause of self-deception? So I just want to remind everybody that we talked about that mythology isn’t just, there aren’t just myths of the hero’s journey for every Odysseus and Jason. There is, you know, there’s a Phaeton or an Icarus or an Arachne. And so hubris is talked about as much as the hero in a lot of Greek mythology, for example. And you were trying to say, no, no, you’ve got to set this all into a much more comprehensive, almost like a self-correcting system, rather than focusing a little too much on the hero’s journey. So I’d like you to comment on that in answering the question. But I also want to slant it a little bit towards something that we talked about last time and that I’ve argued about is also the role of mythology, the hero’s journey and the aspirational project. Okay, so on the first point, I guess, the role of fear in the hero’s journey. Well, I mean, so I’m not sure, first off, yes, it’s true that fear is a significant obstacle in some ways, although fear can also be an ally. And this is the thing, in many cases, what you’re doing with shadow work is not about conquering. Well, that was my point about hubris. Hubris is not having an adequate fear of what you should be afraid of. Right, that’s right. So fear can have utility. Now, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t come to some kind of more balanced relationship with it often. There are things that we fear that are disproportionate or there are things that we fear where we are not in control of our fear. But having some relationship with fear, you don’t just want to remove fear. People that have no fear typically do not have great lives. And we see this in cases of, there are interesting developmental cases of fearless people. And there are cases where people have sustained brain insult, and they have no fear. And that’s a problem. Fearlessness can be a problem. It can lead you into dangerous situations. That said, for the most part, we tend to have a kind of excess of fear and our relationship to it is a fearful one, if that makes sense. And that needn’t necessarily be so. Okay, so on the things that you can do in an altered state territory. A game that I sometimes recommend to people if they have this particular taste is called Werewolf. So here’s the game. You’re sort of tapping into some leftover machinery, I think, from earlier in evolution. So here’s the game. Go on a camping trip with your friends. Have a fire in the woods. Be careful about that. And then once it gets good and dark, walk in the forest, ideally an open stretch, and walk far enough away from the fire that you can sort of make it out a bit and you have a clear path. And then turn around and run back to the fire in the dark as fast as you can. Almost immediately after you start doing this, in my experience and lots of people I know, you’ll begin to have the terrible, like, atavistic sensation of being chased. Because I don’t know how many times in our history did we run back to the fire through the woods with something after us, right? So it sort of conjures and constellates this fear thing. And it’s a terrifying experience. I mean, I’ve undergone it a bunch of times. And it sounds like fun and games until you’re actually doing it. It sounds to me like it would be good. So it’s not for everybody, right? It’s like roller coasters. It’s sort of a horror movies, right? Which I also like. It’s a matter of taste. But the point is, in doing that, one is directly moving towards a fear. And you’re coming to a different relationship to your fear than simply being fearful. Your fear can be a set of experiences that you have, but that you can process as sort of useful information in some cases, or an ally, without it being an unconscious dominant, right? Without losing agency to it in the same way. So instead of just suffering it, you can actually reflect on it. You can reflect on it. So, you know, I think that when we’re talking about the hero’s journey, you know, in that sense, you’re potentially overcoming a lot of things. I mean, there are worse things than fear. There are worse things than fear. I would argue that meaninglessness is worse than fear, right? Fear, at least, is sort of motivating. But when you, you know, traipse into a patch of, you know, nihilism, right? You stumble in the slough of a desk pond, where it’s just nothing moves you in any direction. You just kind of want to lay down and die. That is worse than fear. Fear, at least, will move you. It’s something you can work with. It’s something you can write, whereas often, you know, nihilism is sort of unanswerable. The absurd can be very difficult to answer. I was thinking of there’s even, you know, mythical elements of people, heroes getting stuck in the doldrums. Right, or the slough of desk pond. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, exactly. Or Odysseus on the island of the lotus eaters, and things like that. That’s interesting. I think of that as an intoxication story. Right, that’s true. But they sort of lose motivation at the same time. Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, straight, we just did the Odyssey in my course, because I do it every year. Right. Of course, there’s a whole series of things where these accompanying figures with Odysseus all sort of regress. Right, they’ll lose consciousness. They turn into pigs. They, right, and he has to drag them out of the opium den, so to speak, right, the lotus eaters. So yeah, there’s a whole bunch of those. So I think that yes, you know, overcoming fear is an important part of that overall journey, but it’s not the only thing. And in fact, right, like it can be equally important. All this stuff is typically balanced. You’ve got sort of, you’re trying to integrate opposites, right? So it can be just as hard to have to overcome the heroic components of your psyche. Right, right. Right, so an example of this is people who suffer excessive ambition, right, which can be a kind of heroic inflation, where, you know, that kind of like, I can do it, attitude pushes too hard on the psyche, and then you start to cruise towards burnout, right? People, and that’s very widespread and reported. So again, there’s, right, we’re both laughing with recognition. There’s a sort of a back and forth, and I don’t think that you can sort of pick one thing in a sense and tag that. There’s always something else coming up that has to be negotiated. Yeah, and then above and beyond that, negotiating the heroic archetype itself, which is what I pointed out, right? So did we get into the dream with Siegfried? I think I mentioned it, but maybe didn’t. Okay, there’s a famous dream that mentioned in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, where Jung has a sniper rifle, and he blows the solar hero away, blows Siegfried the dragon slayer away, then he has terrible guilt, and then a massive storm washes away, and he feels this immense relief that nobody will discover the evidence of his crimes. There’s a lot going on there, but one of the things is that, you know, he wakes up from that, and as he starts to chew through it, he’s like, oh, right, I have to kill the solar hero in myself, because lowering that kind of confrontational adversarial go, go, go, externally focused energy is necessary to move in a state of more spiritual equanimity and balance that it characterizes wisdom. You, that’s great, because you actually, I think, did a lot towards answering my second point, which is that the relationship of aspiration is an anagogic relationship. It’s not just the hero’s journey. That’s right. There’s a sense, yes, you do take the step forward, but then you also have to, right, you have to then re-internalize the patterns that you learn about. There’s much about, there’s much appreciation in the sense of learning, understanding, coming to have new preferences and values, as there is in just sort of making the hero’s journey that’s involved in the process of aspiration. Yeah, that’s right, and I mean, you know, these things have a way of shifting. I mean, there are values and challenges associated with stages of life, and I think that we used to have a better recognition of that in some way in our culture, right? There are unique challenges that come with particular phases of life, and making emotional transitions into those and then dealing with those particular issues, right, is often central to the process of going through some kind of psychic growth. So Jung talks about this, you know, when he says the first half of life, and obviously he’s generalizing here, but the first half of life is external. It’s an extroverted half. You’re challenging the world and building stuff up and doing all that heroic stuff and taking it on and building yourself a career and building yourself a persona and getting status, and then the second half of life, post 35, is turning inwards and, right, trying to process through the nature of being, who you are, what your legacies are, death. Yeah, so this lines up with the shifting of the temporal horizon. Right. So people, until they’re 35, they live from their birth, and then after 35, they start living towards their death. That’s right. Now, I don’t think that that’s totally true in all respects. Like, I disagree with Jung that you can’t do any important, right, inner work under 35, but I think it’s interesting that traditionally, before you can train as a Jungian analyst, you can’t train if you’re under 35. Right. You can’t even begin, because the assumption is that you don’t have the requisite life experience and depth and stuff to even start the process. Here, I think in Toronto, it’s not 30. I think it’s 30. Well, that’s the same age Plato recommended that before. Right. Yeah, so that’s interesting because that also, like I said, it reflects that sort of cognitive factor, that the temporal horizon flips around that stage. Yeah. Okay, let’s pass on to another question, if that’s okay with you. Sure. So this is from a Patreon, Mackenzie Levitt, who is also somebody who writes to me, and she asks, how should we apply self-compassion in the process of shadow work? Judiciously. Okay, so could you expand on that a little bit? Sure. So are we using self-compassion in its neph-technical sense here, I wonder? The problem I have with that right away is, I have deep arguments about that being sort of theoretically incoherent and bordering on self-contradictory. Right, I think it’s a language of training thing. Yeah, and I think it’s also, there’s kind of a circularity even in the analysis of that. Yeah. So do what you wanna do with it. Okay. I’m just, I’m just, I’ll rise in you of my attitude towards this. Yeah, and I know that there are, it’s a contested space. So I’ll approach it, I guess, maybe in the colloquial. So where is self-compassion playing with shadow work? I think it is necessary when you’re doing shadow work to be realistic about the harms that you are inflicting while still bearing in mind that- Harms to yourself or other? Both. Okay. While still bearing in mind that you have a responsibility to attempt to address those things, right? But that a lot of it was unconscious. Like there’s a balancing act with all these things. And the thing that I say most often is an explanation isn’t an excuse. Mm-hmm. Right? Or a justification. Yeah, but nor is an excuse, right? Like it’s not an excuse. So in a sense, it doesn’t get you off the hook, right? But at the same time, you often need to go kind of easy on yourself. It’s contextual. This shifts around a lot. I mean, some people are more inclined to sort of let themselves off the hook, right? They project onto other people. It’s not my fault. We talked about this before. And in that case, sometimes the sort of locus of control and also the locus of responsibility needs to shift inwards and people have to- Yeah, guilt is not a bad thing that should always be avoided. No, yeah, nor shame. It’s just that they’re often misapplied or they’re disproportionate. So let me try and counterbalance this for all my criticisms of Neff’s work sort of scientifically and what we just said about the, we need a more balanced attitude towards guilt and shame. You know, we have our mutual friend Leo and he has often said of me that I have a sadistic super ego as his way of, and so is there, is that the kind of thing that this question might be addressing the concern that because of people’s upbringing or perhaps their religious formation or some combination of constitution and upbringing, they might have, I don’t even like the Freudian language, but you know what I’m talking about, the sadistic super ego. Yeah, I mean, I think so. Like when you’re doing shadow work, as we mentioned, there are sort of multiple aspects to it. So some of it is some of this golden shadow retrieval stuff where you’re going back and you’re pulling out aspects and you’re doing an aspect shift on them to recognize that they are not necessarily bad to begin with or that there was no reason to abandon them. Right, that can include things from your childhood, but also just traits that you chose one path over the other because of emotional reasons or associated, whatever your reasons were, and you go back and you reassess those things. Oh wait, maybe actually it’s not so bad and I can have that back or maybe I didn’t need to throw that away. So the golden shadow stuff. When we’re talking about sort of deep, dark, personal shadow stuff and collective shadow stuff, well, then it’s the two in the morning confrontation with yourself. It’s looking at yourself in the mirror and recognizing, oh, I’ve been a shit, right? The problem with that is if you don’t have sort of experience and control and balance, it’s very easy for that to turn into self-flagellation, depression, right? Like you can implode. So I don’t know that there is a one size fits all answer. I wasn’t asking for that. No, no, no, I didn’t think you were. But what I mean is, you know, where does self-compassion come in? Judiciously. It’s applied where it needs to be applied. And when I say judiciously, I mean like there is a judgment. So lots of discernment is needed. That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. And frankly, a lot of it, as most things, is sort of trial and error. This is why I say that moving outside of your comfort zone is almost unavoidable. But this is again where, I mean, this is where tradition can help because tradition can set up banks of constraints. So the variation on our trial and error doesn’t take so long. I mean, Paul Van de Klaay said something I thought I really liked. He said, you know, your culture is good if it’s got resources so that you can acquire wisdom through the culture faster than you possibly could on your own. Yes. Yeah, totally. I think that’s an excellent recommendation. Yeah, I agree. It’s interesting. It seems to me that Jung often appeals to kind of lone wolf alchemists, or people who really want to do the spiritual project all on their own. And there is obviously some community stuff around it. I mean, I belong to some communities around it. But the notion of alchemy as a kind of model for how the stuff works is that you are working in solitary and in code. There is a kind of an obscurantist, but also this heroic, almost Faustian kind of approach to it where you’re coming at it all on your own. And that certainly wasn’t the case sort of with early people around Jung. That was an intense and lively community of discussion. Jung also had a community at Corband and other people. Right, that’s right. And right, Aeronos. Those Aeronos lecturers, but other analysts. So I agree. I mean, you want the stuff framed inside wisdom traditions. And even if you’re, to whatever extent you’re within an operating tradition, that’s good. Also, despite Lao Tse saying that books are the leaves and scum of dead men, there’s a lot to be gained from the wisdom traditions that we’ve accumulated in the last 7,000 years. For sure. Right. So drawing that stuff in often allows you to take a certain amount of perspective that can give you some guidance where you might not otherwise have it to know where to put the boundaries. But even still, you’re bound to overstep because it’s the nature of exploring the space that sometimes you’re going to put your foot someplace that hurts. And so in those cases, if you’re on the edge of exploding, sometimes a bit of self-compassion is what’s necessary. Sometimes what I advise my clients to do, if they’re going through something really hard that’s in this area, is I tell them to move the line of their free will around. So what I mean by this is like try to shift yourself around from a state of feeling like, right, trying to feel as though you exist in a state of agency and free will in your making choices, right? But occasionally to move over into a state of determinism. And we do this anyway to take away pain. We say, well, it couldn’t have been any different. It is what it is. Right? We say, you know, like, well, I don’t, would I have made different choices? Like, all of these things are ways of pushing ourselves into a more deterministic framework because it removes a certain amount of the pain and guilt of personal responsibility. But then, of course, the problem with that is that then we feel like we have no agency and no control. So then we swing the other way, but then we have… There’s a very other reflectiveness gap. Right. Exactly. And so moving around in that space, and especially moving, you know, if you feel yourself being really stuck and experiencing a lot of pain, moving around in that space is often part and parcel of that. And so self-compassion, it’s like to the extent that the slider moves towards determinism, you can great yourself more and more self-compassion, right? Because it wasn’t you. But as you move the other way, you’re going to rein in the self-compassion. That’s right. That’s very helpful, Anderson. That’s very helpful. Yeah. So this is a question from Daniel Fossey. How does the breakdown of the nomological order relate to the current world view perspective clash of economy and ecology, or perhaps even nomos and logos? In another sense, given the two worlds problem, I think he’s referring there to the axial age mythology that I criticize in The Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. Would a useful geometric metaphor of the nomological order be orthogonal maximal contrast rather than bipolar maximal conflict? Wow. Okay. That was a lot of theoretical moves in a short space. Yeah, I was impressed by that. Yeah, that was cool. That was cool. Okay. So sorry. Let me take this through one more time. Do you want to read it again? Yeah, yeah. Go through it, and maybe I can address it on a kind of point by point. So the breakdown of the nomological order. Relate to the current world view perspective clash of economy and ecology. So he’s saying we’ve lost the nomologic order for reasons articulated in The Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, but we still do have these opposing opposites, like economy and ecology, or perhaps even nomos or logos. Well, I mean, the first thing I would say is, of course, that the dichotomy between economy and ecology is stupid, right? That’s a bad move. The idea that those things are opposed is a very poor conceptual… You’re not criticizing the question. No, I’m not criticizing the question. I’m criticizing our culture. Right. So when we have that split between ecology and economy, I mean, I guess we could say they both start with the eco, don’t they? Like, what basis could the economy possibly have, except in ecology? What meaning would it have? At some level, we have to admit that the basis of economics and of the moving around of value has to have some grounding in the productive capacity of the planet to make a life. And if it’s not that, then I don’t get it. Are we just moving gold around on the moon? So, but it actually, right, traditional economics, and this isn’t a criticism of economics, just of the way that it implements sometimes sort of treats it that way. Economics exists in a space of sort of infinite growth, right? And infinite growth is not a thing in the world. It’s certainly not a thing within a finite ecological system, but that’s where we actually live. You know, likewise, as we’ve moved to more abstract and notional ideas within economics, that has value because those things can zip around, right? Like zephyr, we can manipulate them, we can twist them, we can derive things, we can do all kinds of fascinating things with this sort of high abstract conceptual material. But the further we remove it from food, the further we go from having a sense of what economics is supposed to be talking about, which is the movement of value. And value, at the end of the day, has to be about sort of, you know, sustaining human life. At least that’s me. I mean, maybe I’ve gone all green on this. Okay, no, I think that’s fine. The second part of the question that you wanted to address was, in another sense, given the two worlds problem, would a useful geometric metaphor in the nomological order be orthogonal, maximal contrast, rather than bipolar, maximal conflict? So he’s trying to say, is there a way that we could perhaps restructure the cultural cognitive grammar so that we move out of this oppositional mode, which is in alignment with basically what you just said? Yeah. Yes. I think. I would have to think about that more deeply. It’s a really good question. Yeah, yeah, it’s neat. It’s a neat question. So I like the set of moves. I would have to sit and think about it, I think, maybe at length. That’s a tough one to do off the top of my head. Intuitively, it seems like the answer is yes, but I always want to check intuition against rational procedures. Well, part of the difficulty we’re facing, and there’s no criticism of Daniel, is he’s proposing a metaphor, right? Working out what aspects of the metaphor we’re supposed to be picking up on will require some hermeneutic discussion, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, my gut says yes, and that’s cool. Like, works for me. But first you have the intuition or the insight, and then you sit down and do the hard work of checking your proof, right? That’s right. So yeah, so I’d have to think about it, but that’s a cool idea. I would encourage you to expand and articulate that idea. Okay, but Daniel, please do so. All right, we’re going to now shift to some live questions, a couple. Sure. So this is from Kwaistator. How do we know what kind of therapy might be useful for us specifically? Ooh, that’s a good one. Okay, well, so there’s a few different answers I could give to that question. One is, I mean, like most therapists, I think, these days, I tend to have an eclectic standpoint. I don’t… Is it eclectic or integrative? That’s what… That’s a matter of, you know, is it self-care or self-hacking? So… Well, there is a philosophical… There is a philosophical difference. Okay, so it is integrative, but as you know, I hold my integrations lightly. I don’t force an integration where I don’t think that it’s sort of due. Right. So I probably, I’m an eclectic, properly speaking. But I mean, you know, making strong intellectual and personal efforts to integrate things. So I just haven’t succeeded in doing it yet. And actually, maybe I should touch on that. I haven’t succeeded in doing it yet for some important reasons, right? Like a thing that I bring up with my students, but also with my colleagues regularly is, there’s a sort of running set of battles about the theoretical basis of therapy, of psychotherapy, right? And so if you consider something like CBT, right? The core idea in CBT, right? One of the core ideas comes out of Buddhism and Stoicism, and it’s the thought comes first. So if you control the thought, and there is a circularity to it, but the thought comes first. You control the thought, you control the feeling. Well, EFT, which was a mode that I trained in, has precisely the opposite. It’s no, no, the feeling comes first. And the actual answer to this question, drum roll, please, is we don’t know. Because we don’t know how it works yet. We don’t. We know in black. We only have evidence for both. We have evidence for both. Lots of therapies in different modes perform approximately equally well, right? And is the rapport the single best predictor? So that’s the thing. We have a kind of pre-post black box, right? Assessment model around psychotherapeutic efficacy that shows that, yeah, there are definitely some factors that are important. Rapport accounts for, depending on the study you look at, between 50 and 70% of the side. Which is huge. It’s huge. Yeah. It’s huge. I mean, if you think about it that way, the question, you know, what therapy is good for you is, no, what therapists… Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Doesn’t that change the question? And you should chop around. Yeah. You should chop around. Like any relationship, and it is a relationship. It’s a human relationship. It’s a relationship of psychological intimacy. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, even more so, like, I would encourage people to chop around for their doctor. You know, don’t necessarily go to the first doctor. Go to a doctor that you feel that you have a good working relationship with. And we don’t always have that option, but, right? Likewise, even more so with therapy, like, see one and see how you hit it off. Like, do you have a good working relationship? It’s possible your complexes are going to interlock in a way that’s going to make the work almost impossible, but also just it might not be your style. So since rapport accounts for so much of the effect, the question, you know, what therapist are you looking for? And of course, with all things, you know, it’s like a normal distribution. So you want to try to find one that you think is good and one that you think can keep up with your concerns, right? One that has the training that you want and so on and so forth. Above and beyond that, I think some of it’s a matter of taste and some of it’s a matter of what issues you’re working on. So if you are doing things like CBT, for instance, I think of as a terrific tool, right? It’s a tool and it’s good for certain kinds of things. If what people are experiencing is like an onslaught of negative thoughts they can control, CBT can be very effective. And it’s worth learning anyway. It’s a terrific tool to learn. If, on the other hand, what they’re having is, you know, a set of deep unresolved issues, right around, say, you know, an absent parent or something, right? An absent might mean dead and it might mean inaccessible and it might mean missing and it might mean emotionally distant and right. Well, there are techniques for that. Like there’s the empty chair technique, which is for unfinished business. And Emotion Focused Therapy uses that kind of technique. Uses it. Borrowers it from Distalt. It comes out of Distalt. But yeah. So EFT might be what you’re looking for in that context. Likewise, if what you’re looking to do is sort of deep meaning-based work about the narrative arc of your life, what it means to be you, well, then you’re not doing CBT for the most part. You’re doing something depth. And when you look at the profiles of these therapies, yeah, they perform approximately as well. But a few years ago, I think it was Sweden, switched over their healthcare system. I should really check this reference. But switched over the healthcare system entirely to CBT. They went all in on CBT. They were like, that’s what we offer. We offer CBT. And in some ways, it was kind of a disaster. Right. I would expect it. But interestingly, what they did after that was track the relative efficacy of CBT against depth, against sort of psychodynamic depth psychotherapies. And psychodynamic depth psychotherapies have taken a beating because CBT has managed to sort of establish itself as the empirical. The evidence-based. The evidence-based therapy. But actually, what you see in the profile in the study is that CBT has a strong initial response, but often that efficacy and usefulness falls over time, whereas depth tends to build over time. Yeah. So one is, I mean, you’d expect it. One is more cognitive intervention. The other is more existential. Yeah. So, you know, the general answer I would give as a collective integrationist, synthesis, let’s say, synthesis, is do both. Again, you want a variety of tools. It sort of depends what you’re working on. But you always want to be working with a variety of tools because they’re going to tend to balance each other off. Ecology. Yeah, in ecology. You know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But if you put enough discount items into the basket, right, at least they balance each other out. That was a weird mixed metaphor. But I liked it. It was good. Okay. Here’s one from Alex Levy. What is the best way to understand Jung’s archetypes? What’s the best way to understand them? Well, it might be helpful to, I mean, let’s rule out some popular alternatives that might be misleading as a way of zeroing in rather than trying to get sort of an a priori definition. Okay. So one thing that I would stay away from is trying to essentialize them. People really want the list. They want the list and the map. So they want a fixed map that has fixed structures and they want a fixed list with fixed properties. Sort of a cast of characters at the beginning of a drama or something. Yeah, even more than that. They want something that’s really structural, right? So it’s like, what’s this and what’s it do? It reminds me a little bit actually of functional localization in neuroscience. Oh, right, right, right, right. That’s good. I like that. We really want the brain to be a map of Europe and it’s like, oh, Liechtenstein is where you do your language processing. And of course the work of Michael Anderson is radically undermining that with the… Yeah, massive redeployments, but also connection networks and the whole thing is much, much messier. Plus, your brain cells are all squirming around in there. But anyway, so people want a fixed map and they want a fixed cast and you should abandon both of those ideas. The nature of the thing is more like a concept and concepts have blurry boundaries and they contain each other. They can swallow each other. They can have relationships with each other that are more complex than sort of hard boundaries. It’s very rare outside of pure math and maybe fundamental physics to be able to get a concept that you can nail down to an Aristotelian list with an essence. Right. So are they kind of like a Bickensteinian family resemblance thing? Yeah, I think so. So that’s one thing is that you sort of want to move away from trying to nail them down in that sense. Now you can get a really interesting sense of archetypal material by… There’s a reason that Jung focused on myth and that primarily actually von Franz, his follower got really into fairy tale. Fairy tale is really interesting in part because as I say, fairy tales don’t contain psychologies. They are psychologies. The characters in fairy tales don’t have… They don’t have psychology. They are psychology. And what I mean is like, you know, there once was a woodcutter and he lived in the woods and there was a wolf. You don’t get a lot of interiority. But what you get is this sense of the typological cast interacting in certain ways and being able to do analysis on that minus trying to drill into their psychology, you know what I mean? Like not getting homuncular with them. This is for instance why I have deep beef with Shrek and Wicked and what’s the other one? The Angelina Jolie one. Maleficent. Maleficent. Maleficent. Costume looks great but it’s like, please stop muddying this stuff up. You’re going to mangle kids. First they need nice clean categories to move this stuff around. Anyway. Okay, so you can do interesting work. Now if you just dive in and start reading that stuff, it’s not that helpful. You would want to do that with an eye to reading some of the analysts who have done that work and certainly loads and loads of analytical work unpacking that stuff. I mean that’s the bread and butter of sort of mid-century. But this seems like an epistemological question, right? Because if they’re Wittgensteinian like games and like it’s, how would any claim be open to disconfirmation? Right. Well, okay, so the thing is that then, right, that’s about making general investigation of why. Why are you doing this? Well, ultimately speaking what you want to do, of course, is learn how to pick up phenomenological markers in your experience. Right? Because that’s what this game is really about. So does it shift from being a theoretical account more to being like a path of training and transformation? Yeah. Yeah, totally. That’s why, you know, it’s easy to get stuck if you’re interested in Jungian psychology and just doing like endless, and I like doing this, right, analyses of films and books and comics and novels and fairy tales, right? And that’s fine. You can get really interesting stuff out of that. But if you’re not then re-grounding that experience of mythology or fairy tale or story in that high abstract sense, if you’re not re-grounding in the lived experience, you’re missing the point. So it’s a therapeutic system. I’m sorry for interrupting, but I just want to make sure I’m getting it. The empirical confirmation is in a degree to which it facilitates sort of long-term transformation. That’s right. That’s right. So, I mean, you know, you can think of it experimentally, right, that you’re like, okay, well, maybe I should interact with it this way based on that and then you see the results. And of course, it’s the kind of anecdote-driven, you know, on the ground and in the mud sort of experiment that our lives are composed of, where you don’t typically get nice, clean test conditions, controls and stuff. But there’s no question that we do, you know, sort of run little experiments in our lives. Well, that’s what the Bayesian proposal is. Right. Totally. So, you know, so that is the sense in which you get it sort of as a lived experience. And so all of the reading that you’re doing around it is about trying to pick up the structural phenomenological markers that will enable you to start recognizing these things and then applying the techniques. So this means there’s deep truth to this claim that some people made in the comment we took our last video. Like, if you haven’t gone through Jungian analysis, there’s a deep sense in which you’re not really understanding it. Because if the normative standard is the degree to which it’s being implemented in transformation, then you’re really not applying the appropriate normative standard, which means you can’t be appropriately understanding it. Well, look, I wouldn’t want to go too strong on that. Okay, why not? Because I like that argument. Okay, so I wouldn’t want to go too strong on that because in many ways, because people already interact with this material in a sort of a naive way. I mean, naive like they’re they are unaware of Jungian material, but they interact with the structures that are being described in a kind of any way. Right. So being through Jungian analysis or going through Jungian analysis, right, it brings a particular focus and language to it that helps shape it. It’s like any other community of practice. You learn what things are called. But it’s all the point of it. My point is, you know, it’s in community of practices that we establish our normative standards. And if you don’t have that, and if that community is aren’t you going to fall into inevitable issues of autodidactic bias and all kinds of things when you’re working with this kind of, you know, it’s as you’ve argued, it’s not really tightly conceptually constrained. Right. Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, if you just launched in, if you just sat down with the collected works and read them end to end and attempted to implement in that way, could you? Yes, sort of. I think you could. Right. You could take the kind of it would be a very uphill battle. Right. And if there’s a part of you that sort of enjoys that, you know, like the alchemical struggle of working through the great work in your own time, and lots of people do. I mean, you know, I’m not the only person in the world, I think, who does a certain amount of like self-development semi recreationally. Right. Right. And there’s a weird line, right? You sort of get you become increasingly interested in your own pain and dysfunction, not hopefully in a narcissistic way, but rather as just like, oh, like I’m doing the work, I’m doing the work. And it just becomes part of your day to day is being part of a community of practice and going through it and going through the established stuff. Like, is that important? Of course. But I don’t think that existing union practice is the last word in doing some kind of archetypal or depth work. I see. So like people could be, for example, within a religious community and accessing this material. Is that what you’re alluding to? Yeah. And indeed, I think that they are. I get that. Okay. I acknowledge that. That’s a good point. So I wrote a paper a bunch of years ago for you. Although I think maybe Leo read it. Where I was talking about Vajrayana, Tibetan Buddhism, and specifically talking about practices in Tibetan Buddhism that really interest me. So in the book of prayer, you use a combination of ritual and meditation and prayer to visualize a artificial spirit or tutelary deity into apparent existence and autonomy. Okay. So you’re conjuring like a ghost or a spirit in a sense, right? But it should have apparent autonomy. It should be solid and seemingly independent of you. And then as soon as you’re done, the idea is you dissolve it back into the pure light. And so doing, you’re giving yourself a direct experience of the fact that the imaginal space creates reality within that system and whatever. When you’re doing that kind of stuff, the connections between Jungian psychology and Tibetan Buddhism are all over the place. It’s a very Jungian kind of system. It’s all gods that are very archetypically driven, heavily symbolic, right? And using techniques that in a lot of other forms of Buddhism would be sort of slightly eyebrow raising. And yet, they’re doing all this stuff and there’s no mention of Jung. They’re just working with archetypal energies and materials. I get that. So yeah. No, that’s a good, okay. That’s a good- And actually, on the note of Tibetan Buddhism and shadow, right? Just because I think this is sort of an interesting anecdote. I’m really interested in this figure. So we tend to think of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama, etc. as having sort of no shadow. That’s a guy who does not seem to cast a shadow. And they have obviously a very good reputation and they’ve been quite hard done by, and no question, right? However, there is a group, a sect, in Tibetan Buddhism that has been excommunicated by the Dalai Lama. And they’re a group that deals with an entity called a Dorje Shogunate. And Dorje Shogunate is like the Darth Vader of the Bodhisattvas. So there is an ongoing argument, right? The Dalai Lama pushed these guys out because he basically said, you’re demon worshippers and you’re out. This entity that you worship and communicate with and so on and so forth is bad news and he should be gone. And their response is, you are a bigot and you’re pushing us out. You just don’t understand the symbol. See, when he’s drinking from the goblet of blood, what he’s really doing is ingesting the ruby red light of compassion. And when he’s chopping the heads off of his enemies, he’s slaying ignorance. There’s this symbolic recontextualization where they’re arguing about the hermeneutics and the kind of exegetical qualities around the symbol. But that’s a pure shadow right there. So in a sense, that’s some collective shadow stuff going on. Are they in or are they out? In the question of Dorje Chogadan, for them, you could easily interpret with Jungian lens, but you don’t need one necessarily. I see. You’ve made that case a lot. Is that fair? No, I think that’s fair. Yeah. Yeah. I think my argument holds, but what you’re saying is the point I was making about being within a community of transformative practice doesn’t have to be exhaustively applied to just the Jungian community. That’s right. I mean, you know, and Paul’s point that you want to be within a culture that facilitates, right? That you’re the self-appropriation of your own development and wisdom. Yeah, of course, right? Nobody wants to be in the culture that tries to put its boot on, you know, wisdom. And obviously that’s helpful, but I don’t think that the Jungian community sort of super specifically, I don’t know, that’s a tough question in a way. No, no. So we’ve come to the end of our time and I thank people for joining the bonus Q&A. There was lots of great questions and some fantastic answers from you, Anderson. We’re going to be doing our regular Q&A with me on the third Friday of the month, which is the 21st of this month. Again, thank you always to my patrons for making this possible. Yeah, thank you. Great questions. Oh, excellent questions. Again, you can support my work on the meeting crisis at patreon.com slash john.fervecky. So thank you very much, Anderson, and thank you all for your questions and for your attendance.