https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4tL0srSieGI
You discuss almost any thinkers flaws in their thinking except for Jung’s. What were his? Well, I think Jung over generalized his experiences, his clinical experiences. He conceptualized the hero’s journey as something that was fundamentally creative and interior. And I think that that’s probably true only for people who are really high in trait openness, who are creative. And I suspect that Jung attracted a tremendously disproportionate number of creative people to his practice, given the nature of his personality and his interests. I found in my own practice that when I had creative people, they were very inclined towards the discussion of literary themes. They framed their life in literary terms. They were prolific dreamers, very interested in dream analysis. They enjoyed a literary approach to life. My more conservative clients, often equally high performing, although I had a practice that spanned the entire range of human ability, they weren’t interested or captivated by that at all. And for them, the primary adventure of life wasn’t internal or literary. It was external and practical. And the more agreeable types, their life was primarily social rather than symbolic or creative. They found most of the meaning in their life as a consequence of the intimate relationships that they were able to establish. It wasn’t infrequent, and this was more true of women than of men, and they are higher in agreeableness on average. I had conscientious clients who would frame their life in terms of their accomplishments, their career accomplishments. That’s how they parsed their life up temporally. First, I was in school, and then I went to university and I studied this. And then it was all achievement oriented. Whereas the more agreeable types, they would say, well, when I was 12 years old to 14, I had this relationship, and then I moved to this relationship, usually the intimate relationship. So sometimes familial framed their life that way. Jung was an introvert, was introverted and highly, highly open. And so that skewed his view in a particular way. And then because he was psychoanalytic, he also tended to view the psyche as sane as a consequence of its internal organization and even its internal ethic and placed much less stress on the role of social interactions and society as a whole in producing sanity. A sane person is not only organized internally, but they’re integrated with their society and the internal organization actually reflects the social organization. They mirror one another. And there’s, although Jung being a very sophisticated person, of course, knew that social adaptation was necessary. It was more his colleague, Alfred Adler, who was more politically on the left, by the way, as well, who concentrated more on the interpersonal aspects of life and the role of socialization in the maintenance of intimate relationships, say, in relationship to sanity. That’s not stressed much in Jung. If you immerse yourself in the Jungian world, you’d end up convinced that we were all creative religious mystics and that was our essential destiny if we were going to realize the highest reaches of our being. And there’s some truth in that, but there’s also truth in the proposition that you can find your pathway as an agreeable person in your relationships or as a conscientious person in your duty. You know, a Jungian might argue that all that still has to be nested in something transcendent at the outer reaches of personality, and I suppose that’s possible. But that’s what I would say with regards to the limitations of Jung’s thinking. It’s also the case that although he identified at least one of the major personality traits, extraversion, although the modern version of it is somewhat distant from his original conceptualization, he didn’t notice that one of the major personality traits was neuroticism, the tendency to feel negative emotion. He never formalized that idea in his thinking and he didn’t realize that idea in his thinking. And it’s a great oversight in some sense because the capacity to experience negative emotion, when that’s exaggerated, that seems to be the core feature of everything that we regard as psychopathology, psychiatric and psychological illness. It’s not the only thing, but it’s the primary factor. So what is the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking? Well, a large part of that I would say is habit, the development, maintenance of good practices, habits. If you find yourself dissolute, neurotic, if your thought tends in the nihilistic direction and you tend to fall apart, organizing your life across multiple dimensions is a good antidote. It’s not exactly thinking. Do you have an intimate relationship? If not, well, probably you could use one. Do you have contact with close family members, siblings or children or parents or people who are even more distantly related? If not, you probably need that. Do you see your friends a couple of times a week and do something social with them? Do you have a way of productively using your time outside of employment? Are you employed? Do you have a good job or at least a job that is practically sufficient and that enables you to work with people who you like working with, even if the job itself is mundane or repetitive or difficult? Sometimes the relationships that you establish in an employment situation like that can make the job worthwhile. Have you regulated your response to temptations, pornography, alcohol abuse, drug abuse? Is that under control? I would say differentiate the problem. There’s multiple dimensions of attainment, ambition, pleasure, responsibility, all of that make up a life. To the degree that it’s possible, you want to optimize your functioning on as many of those dimensions as possible. You might also organize your schedule to the degree that you have that capacity for discipline. Do you get enough sleep? Do you go to bed at a regular time? Do you get up at a regular time? Do you eat regularly and appropriately and enough and not too much? Are your days and your weeks and your months characterized by some tolerable, repeatable structure that helps you meet your responsibilities but also shields you from uncertainty and chaos and provides you with multiple sources of reward? Those are all the questions that I would decompose the problem into. The best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking.