https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pKmDGKGlAVA
when you’ve made an error, when you’ve fallen off the pathway, when you’ve deviated from what you know you should do it produces a state of internal chaos and worry and concern you’re thrust into the unknown, you’re thrust into unknown territory and chaos, you don’t know what to do and that’s often symbolized by the encounter with a monster, like a dragon or something that lives under the water, and I think the reason for that, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is that human beings, because we’ve been prey animals forever in our battle with carnivorous lizards, for example, and alligators, and even dinosaurs, because there were dinosaurs around at the time of our most distant ancestors there was even a cat at one point that was adapted with teeth to pierce human skulls so it had a head that was exactly shaped to grab you here and put a tooth through the back of your skull so like, we’ve come through some rough times, man, and we have a system in our mind that’s a threat, predator detection system that’s the thing that makes little kids think about monsters in the dark because while there is monsters in the dark, parents always say, well there’s no monsters in the dark, it’s like that’s not true, the dark is full of monsters, there might not be any in your room right at that moment but that doesn’t mean there aren’t monsters in the dark crimes take place, like criminals don’t get up at six in the morning and like, you know, have breakfast and go rob a bank they do that sort of thing at night, people do the things that are fit for the night in the night and lots of predators are nocturnal, and you can’t see very well in the dark and kids aren’t stupid, you know, they’ve evolved to stay pretty damn close to the fire because the kids that wandered away from the fire got picked off by hyenas and lions and, you know, crocodiles and whatever else the hell was out there to eat the unwary so the circuit that we use to defend ourselves against predators as we’ve evolved cortically, that circuit has come to represent what we don’t know in general because the predators of course inhabit where we don’t know and so, evolution is a conservative force, and we use the circuits that we’ve evolved to represent new things and so, the unknown, the chaos, is often represented by a monster that swallows you up and pulls you down and you know, when you’re feeling terrible, you don’t say, well I’m feeling up you say, I’m feeling down, well why is that? well, down is worse, I guess you’re flat on the ground when you’re down or you’re in a hole or something like that you’re hiding in a hole, you know, it’s down and you’re threatened by something, you know, maybe you’re threatened by your own inadequacy that might be part of it, maybe that’s partly what you imagine as a monstrous force because, you know, your proclivity towards procrastination and your weakness of character is part and parcel of why you happen to be in the underworld and that’s the underworld, the mythological underworld that’s where you go when things fall apart and if you understand that, if you know that that’s what that means then you have one of the keys that opens up ancient stories to you and you understand things your life can be organized, going very well, and then something comes up and poof! everything changes some axiom that you were living by, and it might be the existence of a partner it might be a job, it might be your health any of those things gone and you go somewhere when that happens you go somewhere, it’s a state of being you’re still in the same world, but it’s not the same at all anymore everything about it is different it’s all negative and dark, and you don’t know what to do, you’re confused and so, what do you do down there in the underworld when things have fallen apart especially if it’s the worst possible case scenario and you realize that you actually had something to do with your demise that’s really annoying, you know when something bad happens to you, and then you grind yourself into bits trying to figure out what the hell happened, and then you realize that well, you are playing a causal role now, sometimes you’re so depressed, you assume you’re playing a causal role and you weren’t, it’s not easy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination and it isn’t that everyone who does something terrible is at fault for it but sometimes you find that you are off the path somehow and maybe even that you knew it and didn’t attend to it and that’s why all of this hit the fan and so then down there in that chaos, you decide that you’re going to do what you’re supposed to do instead and then maybe you get to rise up again, renewed if you’re lucky, and then you can go fix the city and that’s what this story is about and that’s why I picked the image to represent the course because really what happens, you see with the psychoanalysts the road to health, if you’re not doing well which means that as you act in the world, you’re not getting what you want there’s something wrong with the match between your presuppositions and your actions habitual, and the way the world is responding to you and so it’s not turning out for you and the question is, well, what can you do about that? and one answer might be to examine yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well, and to find out what they are and what to do about them and maybe some of that is, maybe you’re not moving forward because of fear and maybe that fear is grounded in terrible experiences that you had in the past that you’ve never been able to understand and maybe one of the ways of gluing yourself back together and expanding your personality so that you could in fact live properly in the world is to go back to those terrible events and untie them, and straighten them out, and understand them, and drop them and that’s what psychotherapy is about, in large part psychoanalytic, behavioral, doesn’t matter what are you afraid of? what are you avoiding? what are you failing to develop? maybe from fear, maybe from avoidance, God only knows maybe from disgust how can you get over it? how can you reclaim those parts of yourself?