https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PH67HpFD2Ew
So, there’s a couple of things I want to tell you about today, many things I want to tell you about. I want to tell you, I want to give you a schema that’s going to enable you to understand, I think it’ll enable you to understand stories like the one I told you last time, you remember Jonah and the whale. I want to provide you with this schema so that you can understand stories like that, but many, many more stories like that. And partly what I’m telling you about today, in some sense, are archetypes. And an archetype is an idea that was made most popular over the last hundred years by Carl Jung, but it’s a much older idea than that. It’s really a platonic idea in some ways. And it means something like fundamental pattern. And so an archetype can manifest itself in different ways. It could be a pattern of emotional response. So that could be something that you’re feeling. It could be the way that that emotional response displays itself on your body, on your face. It could be the way that that emotion feels and displays itself on your face and then plays itself out as a drama in your local environment. So like an angry argument is an archetypal phenomenon. And the reason it’s archetypal is because, well, you have one, them, you have them, you have them, you have them, everyone has them. And so you can’t really think about them as individual. You have to think about them as universal. And you can’t think about them as something that you create, in a sense, although in a sense you do, but also as something that happens to you. Now when you read about Jung and archetypes, it’s quite confusing because you can never be sure whether he’s talking about an instinct, an emotion, a motivational system, or a subpersonality or the subpersonality within which those things manifest itself, or even the social drama that’s being played out in time and space in the social world. But a real archetype, I would say, is all of those things at the same time. Now we use archetypal means of expression to represent how we act. And that’s not the same thing as representing what the world is made out of. It’s a very different thing. And so you could say in some sense we tell stories and understand stories so that we can figure out how people act and how they should act, and then we conduct science so that we can figure out what the world’s like from a material objective perspective. And the two things coexist uneasily. I think the more primary form of knowledge is actually how to act with the scientific model nested inside it, because it’s the most important question that you have to solve as a living organism isn’t what the world is made out of. It’s how you should act in the world, say from a Darwinian perspective even, so that you can live long enough to reproduce. That’s basically, from a strict biological perspective in some sense, that’s what you have to do in order to be successful. It’s kind of obvious, first of all, because you’re not very successful if you just go and die. And then, of course, death from a genetic perspective and failing to leave offspring are much the same thing. So now, one of the questions might be, how is it that we conceive of the world as a place to act in? And that’s partly, I’m going to outline a hypothesis for you and then explain the significance of that hypothesis. And the hypothesis involves the description of what you might consider constituent elements and also transformation processes. As far as I can tell, the constituent elements of the stories that we tell about how people act and should act are characters. Now that makes sense, right? Because you really can’t have a drama or story without characters. Now the thing is, the characters have to be understandable. And so, for them to be understandable, they sort of have to be like you, or they have to be like someone that you know, but they have to be human. But then again, it’s not exactly that they’re human. Because even when you’re telling a story about what happened to you today, it’s interesting to think about what you do. So someone might say, well, how was your day? And you say, fine. I mean, maybe that’s the lowest level, lowest resolution, highest abstract story. My day was fine. It’s a pretty boring story. It’s better than terrible, I suppose, but it’s not interesting and it’s not detailed. The person gets the notion that things went according to plan, or more specifically, that things unfolded the way you wanted them to, which is not exactly the same as according to plan. Because a plan is kind of a cold cognitive thing, you know, or expectation, the cognitive scientists sort of use, whether, well, while how you wanted them to implies that you have desires and emotions and motivations and that they inform the way that you’re acting in the world. Because you don’t just act in the world. You act in the world so that you try to turn it into something better than it is right now, assuming you have any sense. You know, because some people act on the world to make it worse than it is now, but we’re going to forget about those people for now. So when you say fine to someone, you basically say, roughly speaking, I got what I wanted today without undue hassle. Okay. So that’s a really condensed version of the events of the day, and it’s not a very good story, although it might suffice for casual conversation. A person might say, no, no, no, what did you do today? And then maybe you’ll say, oh, I woke up this morning and I went to university and, you know, the subway took a lot longer than it usually does, and so, you know, I used that time to do some studying and then I got to school and I had a particularly dull lecture, but lunch was really good and I met some friends. And so that’s kind of a story, right? And you, the person that you’re talking to might listen to you. It’s not a particularly compelling story, but it’s probably better than fine. And you might say, well, why did you select those elements to talk about? You know, you didn’t talk about how many times you blinked your eyes the first minute that you woke up and you didn’t describe the motor movements that you used to put your left leg on the floor and you didn’t describe, you know, what bowl you used for breakfast. And the reason you didn’t do that is because, A, you don’t remember for whatever reason, and B, you don’t care and neither does your listener. But that’s the peculiar thing is that your listener is going to care about some things and not care about other things. And if you’re a good storyteller, you kind of automatically know which of those things that you should talk about so that you’re interested in, which of the things you should ignore so that you’re not boring your listener to death. And you also understand that they will also understand that. But you don’t know how you do that. All you know is that you’re trying to tell an interesting story. And in some sense, what you’re doing is you’re trying to reduce a sequence of actions and conceptions of exceptional complexity to the gist, right, which is like the essential or the moral in some sense. And you’re trying to convey that, and the other person is listening partly because they want to indicate that they care for you and would like to know they want to stay caught up with your ongoing narrative so that they understand you, and maybe also because they might think that they’ll garner some, you know, bit of information, factual or behavioral, that might aid them in some way. You know, so, and we’re doing that to each other all the time. We automatically do this. We automatically know how to tell stories. And so what I’m saying is that even the person that you describe, when you describe yourself to someone else, isn’t exactly you. It’s some representation of you as a sort of generic human being that’s going about doing certain kinds of interesting things in the world. Or here’s a way of thinking about it, roughly, is that you make yourself the hero of your own story. And so you kind of know that because when you go to a movie, and movies are usually romances, say, or hero stories, romances or adventures or both, roughly speaking, you know, sometimes they turn out well and that’s a comedy and sometimes they don’t turn out so well and that’s a tragedy. But when you go there, what you basically see is a story about another person who’s sort of like you, who’s the hero, and what you do is you track them through a sequence of adventures. And usually what you track them through isn’t things were good and then they stayed good and then at the end they were still the same as they were at the beginning and good. You know, because why do you want to watch that? And you might say, well you should because isn’t that pleasant? The person’s happy and then they stay happy and then they end happy and everyone’s happy. Why isn’t that interesting? But it isn’t. And really what you want to see is you either see, you want to see someone get into trouble and fail in a spectacularly interesting way or you want to see someone get into trouble and then overcome it in a spectacularly interesting way. And so there’s this idea in the story that the person has to undergo some kind of transformation in the midst of their travails and efforts in order for it to be interesting. So they have to start in one place, they have to end up somewhere that’s not so good in a very, very complicated way, and then maybe by transforming their character or by transforming the surroundings or by coming to some sort of realization or maybe just by dim-witted luck they manage to solve the set of problems and emerge triumphant at the other end. Alright, so that’s the meaning of Jonah and the whale. Now remember what happens to Jonah is that he’s got this destiny he’s supposed to be pursuing and he decides that it’s too much trouble. Well not unsurprisingly because if you remember what he was told to do was go to tell a whole city that they were misbehaving, assuming rightly as he did that that would not make him particularly popular and maybe he’d get killed and even if he didn’t it would be extraordinarily difficult. He thought there’s no damn way I’m doing that so he denied his destiny and as a consequence he fell into the abyss and was swallowed up. And then because he repented and decided to carry on with his responsibilities, the creature of the abyss spit him back up and he got to go along his merry way. Now you might say well nothing like that has ever happened to you, but that’s wrong. Things like that happen to you all the time and you know it. So here’s a couple of examples and you’ll be able to draw all sorts of examples from your own life. That’s a story of betrayal for example. Maybe in one of your relatively uninformed flurries you ended up establishing a relationship with someone who was really not good for you and that might mean well it was just a bad personality match or it might mean they really weren’t good for you because you know you could get pretty unlucky and you can get tangled up with someone who’s very deceitful and very malevolent and who could care less about you or maybe who even wants to hurt you. And then you can establish a trusting relationship with them or at least you trust them and then one day you know you find out that they are not who they said they were or even more importantly they are not who you thought they were. And so then maybe you’re in a committed relationship and they betray you with someone else and so then you think well there you are at home and you’re perfectly happy about being at home and then your partner comes home and for one reason or another you find out that they’re having an affair or that they betrayed you or that they lied to you in some other spectacularly important way and maybe it’s a lover, maybe it’s a family member, maybe it’s a sibling, maybe it’s a friend, whatever. It doesn’t matter. And so here’s a way of thinking about it. The minute before they come home you’re in one place and you remember a place isn’t just a place, right? A place is a place in time because we live in space time. We live in time and place. And what that means is you can be in the same place in one minute and a completely different place in the next minute even if you haven’t even moved. And so place is a very very complicated idea. So you’re sitting at home and you’re watching Oprah and you’re perfectly content to do that and then the person comes home and the bottom of your world falls out. And then all of a sudden you’re not where you thought you were. And it’s a really weird place that you are now because it’s not where you were, that’s for sure. But you also don’t know where it is because you don’t know who that person is that’s in that room with you. You don’t know what your past with them was or what it meant or anything else about it because it was predicated on absolute misperceptions. So none of your memories about those events are valid even though you have them as memories. And then you have a worse problem which is if you’re betrayed badly enough, not only are you not going to understand your immediate past with that person. Oh and by the way, your future’s also gone so that’s a big problem as is your present has become radically more complex. But it’s worse than that because if you’re really betrayed you’re also going to think who am I that I could be that stupid and then you’re going to think what is a human being that they can be that corrupt. So not only have the fundamentals been kicked out of the substructure of your perceptions but your notion of what it means to be you and what it means to be human might have been seriously disrupted. And you know, the thing about that is that’s a non-trivial event. People call that traumatic. And it’s like a physical wound. In fact it has, certainly if the trauma’s great enough, it can produce a psychophysiological because that sort of trauma, a deep betrayal is a good example, will damage your brain and maybe you’ll recover from it and maybe you won’t. And one of the ways that that’s been represented forever in mythological stories is by being swallowed up by a subterranean beast. It’s something that comes up from the depths and pulls you down and then you’re in it. Now why is that? Well, that’s an extraordinarily complicated question but here’s the answer as nearly as I can tell. We evolved a very complicated neuropsychological system to signal alarm. So that’s anxiety, threat, threat sensitivity, right, and that makes us freeze, for example. And when you look at how an animal uses that system, let’s say a mammal, just to keep it simple, because we’re all mammals and so we can kind of understand mammals. So if a rabbit sees a wolf, for example, it’s going to freeze so that the wolf can’t see it. And if a rat smells a cat, even if it has never smelled a cat in its whole life, it’s going to also freeze. And interestingly with rats, if you put rats in a natural environment, which means they get to have little rat dominance hierarchies, little rat families, they’re not like little white rats alone in a cage. They’re happy family rats and they’ve got their burrows and they live in their little societies and maybe there’s a part of their territory where they can go get food and they’re used to that. So they’ll scurry out there in the day kind of hiding because they don’t like light or maybe they’ll scurry out at night because rats are night things. And they’ll get their food and they’ll eat it or bring it back or whatever they do, share it with their family or at least bring it back. Let’s say that you put a cat out there or maybe you even just put a cat there and take it away so that the place smells like cat. Well if one of those rats goes out there and sees that cat, first of all it’s going to freeze and it is not a happy thing. Because imagine, you’re a rat and a thing that’s four times as big as a lion suddenly appears on your front yard. It’s like that’s rough, man. You’re going to freeze and then you’re going to go hide downstairs and what are you going to do? Well if you’re a rat you’re going to scream for 24 hours, which is non-stop with your little beak poking out of your burrow so everyone can hear you scream. And that’s the same given the length of a rat’s life as you screaming non-stop for two weeks. So like that rat’s nervous. It’s not happy about the whole cat thing. And then maybe, maybe if no more cat odor happens by and no hyper-vigilant rats see any more cats then after it screams for two weeks it starts to calm down a little bit and maybe then it starts to remember that it’s hungry and that there’s things to attend to and so then maybe it very, very carefully goes back out where it was foraging for food, sort of crouched over and hyper-vigilant and not moving very much in case that damn cat’s around and then maybe slowly it regains control over its territory. It runs back and forth trying to ensure that none of that place that used to be safe has got troublesome cats associated with it anymore. And so in some sense the bottom fell out of that rat’s life. Now the thing is the rat has predator detection systems that are associated with extreme anxiety and escape that are automatically activated whenever there’s a predator in sight. And we have those systems too. But human beings are, you might say, well, okay, rats have predators. Enemies. Humans have predators. Enemies. Okay, so then we might say, well, what’s a human predator slash enemy? Well, it depends on how long a period of time over which you wish to calculate what constitutes human because we know, for example, that 60 million years ago your primary predator when you were wandering around in trees and were only about this big was snakes. And so snake is a predator and an enemy. And you know, you guys can easily learn how to be afraid of snakes and maybe you’re innately afraid of them to begin with. The science on that is not exactly clear, although it certainly indicates that you can easily learn snake fear and it probably indicates that really it’s innate. It’s innate in chimpanzees. So why not in us? It’s not that long since we split off the evolutionary pathway from the common chimp human ancestor. So enemies, snakes, what else? How about crocodiles? Those things pulled a lot of your ancestors. Well, not your ancestors because they got pulled underwater. But when we were wandering around on the African veldt and we went down to the river to have some water, you can be sure that a fair number of us got pulled underneath by crocodiles. And so crocodiles, and you know, those are creepy things, crocodiles. They figure in nightmares and they figure in horror movies. And you can imagine yourself in Florida out there with the alligators and thinking, you know, it’d be just as well if they didn’t come too close to your boat with their little beady eyes and their great big teeth. You know, they’re unpleasant things. And then there’s lions, hyenas. Okay, and those are one of those things. You might think a lion and a hyena are different things, but they’re not. I would say they’re large-toothed mammalian carnivores. It’s like a meta category. And so they sort of fit in that predator-enemy category. And your nervous system is prepared to respond to predatory eyes and teeth. And no wonder, because predatory eyes track you down and teeth eat you and they bite you. And so it’s a good thing that you’re aware of those and that you can detect them rapidly. What else is a human enemy? How about another human? How would that be? You think more people have died from other humans or from predators? Well, I suspect that since we’ve actually been human, if that’s maybe 150,000 years, because that’s about when it appears that we were more or less genetically identical to what we are now, my guess is that humans have got it all over predators. I mean, lots of us got eaten. Let’s not be too, you know, shy about discussing that. But now at least, man, it’s other people. Okay, well what about yourself? How about you as your own enemy? Well, or then you can make it psychological. Maybe it’s not other people, maybe it’s the evil in their hearts. Or maybe it’s the evil in your hearts. So you see, so this is a way of thinking about it, is that we have a circuit to deal with threats. But the threats exist all the way from the primordial biological, like actual predators, like snakes, all the way up to the incredibly abstract, like my great enemy is the evil intentions that other people harbour towards me or that maybe I have in my own heart. Okay, so that’s that entire complex of predatory slash threat slash evil, because it’s become psychologized to that point, that’s one of the things that can be a character in a movie. And it is, right? It’s the antagonist, it’s the adversary, that’s the archetypal element, it’s the thing that opposes you in every way. And you can locate that in all sorts of different places, right? You could have a story about how someone is grappling with their own evil impulses, what’s the name of that serial killer thing? Dexter. Dexter’s got that problem. People are pretty fascinated by that show, right? A serial killer who can do good, that’s sort of like a human being in some sense, you know? So Dexter’s got this psychological batter between good and evil in his heart, or maybe the enemy is externalized, so maybe it’s Batman and the Joker. And the Joker’s really a figure of chaotic evil fundamentally, you know, in the best Batman movie, which was the one with the Joker, and it wasn’t Jack Nicholson. Who played the Joker? Heath Ledger? Yeah, yeah, Heath Ledger. You know, that was rough on old Heath, and no wonder, you know, because he embodied this archetypal character. And that Joker was so much of an adversary that he didn’t even want to win, right? You can understand adversaries that want to win. There’s adversaries that want to make everyone lose that are really hard to understand, and that’s part of what made that movie, you know, relatively striking and memorable, and he really embodied that character well. And so, one, here’s two sets of characters that make up stories. Hero and adversary. Okay? And you can understand that at multiple levels simultaneously. Here’s another set of characters. Here’s why I think these characters are fundamental elements of our cognitive structure, cognitive substructure. First of all, I think that really what we want to know is not what is, but we want to know how to act, how to conduct ourselves in the world. We’re moving creatures, right? We don’t just sit there on a rock and filter seawater through our gills. We have to go out there and contend with the world, and so we need to know how to do that. We need to know how to do it and how not to do it, so we can look for good examples and we can look for bad examples. We don’t want just any old good example. We want a good example that’s boiled right down to excellent example, and we want a bad example that’s boiled right down to excellent bad example. And so a good example would be a character who is an amalgam of all the good things about good people, and an evil character would be an amalgam of all the evil things about bad people. And the more pure, in some sense, in essence, both of those characters are, the more archetypal of the story. And so an archetypal story is good versus evil. You might think you don’t believe in good versus evil, but it doesn’t really matter what you believe because when you go to movies you watch that and you watch it as if you believe it. And I would say, this is an existential claim by the way, is that it doesn’t matter what you say you believe because what do you know about it? What matters is how you act out what you believe. And if you really want to find out what you believe, you don’t ask yourself what you believe. You watch yourself act and you deduce from that what you believe. And so if you don’t believe, for example, in a good versus evil archetypal struggle, then what are you doing watching Star Wars, for example? Okay, because obviously that’s an archetypal story, just like Harry Potter is an archetypal story, and both of those are archetypal stories about good versus evil. Okay, next set of categories. So imagine that we’ve been living in familial groups for who knows how long. Let’s say three million years, just for the sake of argument. We were living in tribal groups way, way longer than that. If you think about a tribal group as something that might extend back farther than chimpanzees. We were living in dominance hierarchies for way longer than tribal groups. But the family group, you’ve got to think we’ve been living in family groups for about as long as we’ve been extraordinarily dependent as infants and as long as we’ve had really large brains. And so again, you can’t draw a tight line because we’ve been getting bigger and bigger brains for quite a long time. But it’s in the millions of years, let’s say. And the other thing that you might think about is that your cognitive apparatus, your perceptual apparatus, your emotional apparatus has originated within an environment, obviously. Now we tend to think of the environment as the natural environment, and then we tend to think of the natural environment as like a forest. But the natural environment for primates, say, is only forest to some degree. I mean, first of all, we didn’t just dwell in forests because we were also veld dwelling creatures. But also we didn’t really dwell among trees. We dwelled among other primates like us. And so our primary environment is actually other people. And then you might say, okay, what are the fundamental categories of the other people? Well, how about mother? That’s a big one because the probability that you had a mother is like it’s up there at about 100%. You know, and if there wasn’t, even if you lost your biological mother at birth, if someone didn’t fulfill the archetypal role of mother, then you don’t live. And that doesn’t just mean providing you with food and water and shelter because if you provide a child under one with food and water and shelter, and that’s it, they die. You have to pick them up. You have to touch them. You have to rock them back and forth. You have to communicate with them. If you don’t give them physical attention, their nervous system’s shut down and they die. And so that’s part of the reason why in, well, in Eastern European orphanages, before the wall fell down, the death rate, especially in places like Romania in the orphanages, it’s an awful story, was unbelievably high. And if the kids didn’t die, they were just so crippled psychologically that they never recovered. And that was because people didn’t touch them and didn’t interact with them. And so you need a creature playing out the archetypal role of mother to entice you into life. Otherwise, you just perish. So mother, that’s a category, man. And then, well, father’s a category too. And the same thing applies there. And even if you don’t have a father, there’s a male power structure around you, a dominance heart, roughly speaking, that acts in the paternal role. And there’s no getting away from that unless you don’t live in a society. And then if you don’t live in a society, then you just die because you can’t live by yourself. So father and mother are primary categories. And then there’s the primary category of the individual. Because wherever you are, there you are. And that’s been the case for every human being that’s ever existed. So the fundamental categories are individual, mother, and father. Well, and there’s another fundamental category, which we alluded to, which is horrible thing that lives at the bottom of a pit that will devour you. And that has a psychological reality and objective reality. And that’s, as I said, that’s equivalent to the story of Jonah being gobbled up by the whale. That sort of story is very common. Pinocchio is a story like that, right? Pinocchio has an existential problem. He doesn’t know how to be a real boy. It turns out that in order to become a real boy, we might regard that as a fully developed individual, he has to go down to the bottom of the ocean into a whale and rescue his father. Well, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the kinship between that story and the story of Jonah. It’s the same story. Jonah had to reestablish his relationship with God the Father in order to successfully make a passage from aimless and disobedient character to someone who was alive on shore in pursuing a particular path. It’s the same motif. It’s a very, very, very common motif. And the reason for that is that that’s how people transform. You know, they hit an obstacle of some sort that just blows them into pieces. They go down into the depths, into the abyss, and they live down there for a while, and it’s not pleasant. And maybe they learn something while they’re down there if they’re lucky, and they get back up. And that’s the story of human development. You never learn something without having something small die, and sometimes you learn something and something big dies. And then, you know, you put yourself back together and you pick up the pieces and you emerge unscathed, hopefully, and perhaps transformed, and you carry on. So the human developmental story isn’t an upward march in a linear manner, you know, up an even slope. It’s perhaps upwards and onwards, but it’s like this. It’s punctuated by catastrophes. And of course, you guys know that, because obviously, I mean, how many people in this room have been seriously unhappy at one point in their life for more than two weeks? Okay. Is there anyone who hasn’t had that experience? Really? Yes? Have you not had that experience? Oh, yeah, oh, sorry, I thought you raised your hand. Has anybody not had that experience? Okay, okay, so maybe not you? Well, that’s good. Congratulations. That’s really amazing. So it’s coming. Yeah, yeah. So the thing is, you know, here’s one way of looking at it. That’s reality. Reality is that your environment is punctuated by descents. Your pathway is punctuated by descents. And when you’re ascending, that’s one place. And when you’re descending and at the bottom, that’s another place. And I can tell you, and this will help you with your interpretation of stories, is that The times when you descend is equivalent to a voyage to the underworld. That’s what a voyage to the underworld means in mythology. The bottom has fallen out and down you go. And you know this sort of thing because, look, if I say we’re all skating on thin ice, is there anybody here who doesn’t know what that means? Okay, so what does it mean? What does it mean? One mistake and the ice could break. Or it could fall out at any time. Right, the ice can fall out at any time. And then what happens? Yeah, down you go. Right, and it’s cold down there. Yeah, and maybe you don’t get back up. Yeah, and it’s the sort of story that sends a chill down your spine. And it should, because that’s life. And so one of the things that I really like about advanced personality theory is that it takes that into account. It says, yeah, yeah, that’s life. Okay, now that we’ve established that, what do we do? And so then it becomes something like this. It’s not so much how do you stop yourself from descending and ascending, because good luck with that. But since you’re going to have to do that, how do you do it? And so part of the reason that I called this course Personality and Its Transformations is because one thing that you can learn about yourself is who you are, and that’s really useful. But the other thing that you can learn about yourself is how it is that you can conduct yourself across time. That means you’re going to have to conduct yourself so that you can weather storms. And some of those might be you make a mistake in the ice breaks, you know, and some of it is yeah, the ice breaks. And it’s no mistake at all. It’s just how it is. So when one of your parents develops Alzheimer’s disease, for example, well you could say that’s your mistake because you’re not smart enough to do anything about it. And you know, be a better clue in, because otherwise the disease is going to continue. But on the other hand, really thinking about it as a personal fault seems inappropriate. It’s just a catastrophe that’s associated with being alive. And that’s what life is, you know. And so one of the things you see, for example, in all of the major trends of religious thinking all around the world, and I talk about religious thinking because those are the deepest kinds of stories. That’s really what makes them religious, by the way. It’s always the same message. Life is suffering. And the reason for that is because we skate on thin ice. Okay, and you can say, well we should thicken up the damn ice, and fair enough, you know. Right, definitely. But you should also prepare yourself to swim so that when you fall in you don’t die. So now, the Job story has a hint or two in it, you know. So the first thing that happens is Job is in some sense called to action. Now because that’s an old story, because it’s a primarily Judeo-Christian and religious story, the call to action takes the force of a divine command. Right now you might think, well does such a thing exist? And it’s a silly question in some ways, because whether or not something exists depends on what you mean by exist, you know, and that can vary with your philosophical presuppositions. But it also varies on why you’re asking the question and where you’re looking for the answer. So for example, here’s an example. Do you believe that there are things that you should do? Like, is there anyone here who doesn’t believe that? Or more importantly, is there anyone here who doesn’t act like they believe it? So you wake up in the morning and you think, yeah there’s a bunch of things I should do. Or there’s some things I should do next week. Or there’s some things I should do with my life. Yes, that’s a common thought. Does anyone not think that way? Okay, so you know if you don’t think in that way you end up pretty depressed, because then you think, well there’s nothing I should do with my life. And that’s not such a happy thought, because life is hard and then if there’s nothing to do with this, well all you’re there stuck with is a bunch of suffering. And that doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Okay, so then you might say, well what exactly does should mean? Well it means that you have a moral obligation of some sort. You might say, well you’ve decided that yourself. And the answer to that is, like, no, wrong. You haven’t decided that yourself. Are you kidding? You’d be a complete psychopath if you’d decided that by yourself. Right? I mean, if you’re even the vaguest bit civilized, then you decide what it is that you should do, or what you should do manifests itself within you as a context of a dialogue that you’re continually having with yourself, but also with everyone around you. And not only with everyone around you, but with the entire history of mankind. Because we’re all historical creatures and, you know, what you think you should do is being shaped by what your parents think, and that was shaped by what their parents thought, and that was shaped by what their parents thought, and so on, back into the depths of history as far back as you can possibly imagine, both historically and biologically. So in some sense there is a call to action within people. Now you know in any sort of quest story, like The Hobbit, let’s say, or The Lord of the Rings for that matter, you know, the story always starts with a call to action, right? For some reason or another the little hobbit character, which by the way is you, you know, the hobbits live in this little protected place, and they’re not very big, and they’re not very smart, and they don’t know about the wide world beyond them where the great forces of good and evil are at combat. And one hobbit who’s a little bit more adventurous than the rest gets called upon to act, and in The Hobbit stories it’s usually the wizard who manages it, right? So it’s a magical figure of some sort who’s extraordinarily wise and extraordinarily old, who might as well be God for all intents and purposes, who says, you know, it’s time for you to go and become a thief. Well that’s what happens in The Hobbit, right? It’s a very weird thing because obviously that’s Frodo, right? Frodo’s the hobbit in The Hobbit, and Bilbo’s the hobbit in The Lord of the Rings, if I remember correctly. Other way around? Bilbo is the hobbit in The Hobbit. Fine, Bilbo. Okay. So Bilbo gets called to action and he’s going to go find a dragon. While the dragon is the same thing that swallowed Joel. It’s the same story. And the dragon has a treasure, which is a weird thing. It’s like, what’s up with dragons, right? What do they hoard? Virgins, that’s the St. George story. It’s a very, very old story. Or gold, and that’s weird behaviour for a predatory lizard. But anyways, you accept that without any problem. Of course a dragon lives underground in a big mountain that was excavated by dwarves and sits on a treasure. It’s like, we don’t have any problem with that idea. While why? I mean, really? You really believe that? And the answer is, well, well enough to read the damn book and to make the… I mean, how many people went and watched The Lord of the Rings? How many people… and think about it worldwide. How much money did Harry Potter generate? You know, I bet you Harry Potter generated more money than the remaining steel mills you calculated across the amount of time since those stories emerged. So of course there’s a lizard in… predatory lizard in Harry Potter too. It’s the thing that skitters around underneath Hogwarts and turns you to stone with the glance of an eye. Oh, and does that lizard hoard virgins? Well what’s the name of the woman that… the girl that he kidnaps? Ginny, right? Okay. What’s the word Ginny from? Virginia. Right? Good. Good. Right. And she’s Harry’s first love interest and he rescues her from the damn snake and he gets paralyzed while he’s doing it. What rescues Harry? Phoenix. Right? A phoenix. Okay, so the basilisk bites Harry and so he’s going to die. The phoenix comes along. Who owns the phoenix? Bumblebee. Bumblebee. Yeah, yeah. What does the phoenix do? Cries. And he cries into Harry’s wounds. Yes? But what happens? Then what happens to Harry? He comes back to life. It’s a death and resurrection story. So the thing that’s willing to die and resurrect is the thing that gets the virgin from the snake. It’s like, does that make sense? Well, you think it makes sense even though you don’t really know why it makes sense. And then what happens to the phoenix after it does that? It burns itself up in a puff of flame and is reborn. So it’s the story told twice. The thing that dies and is reborn is the thing that conquers the serpent and rescues the feminine, roughly speaking. So it’s not gold in that situation, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same story. It’s always the same story. When you don’t hear that story, like when your culture isn’t providing you with rich stories of that sort that are derived directly from your tradition, somebody like an unemployed welfare mother in Britain has it pop up full-fledged in her brilliant imagination and lays out seven books and makes herself more money than the queen. Right, right. And then it’s a Cinderella story. It’s a bloody amazing story. And then there’s all those books and all those kids learn to read because of the books. And then there’s all those movies and everybody goes and sees them and no one notices that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing while they’re doing it. And it follows the same old story. So you’ve got your individual, that’s you, the hero. Then you’ve got the adversary to that, that’s your enemy, wherever that enemy might happen to be. That’s the forces that oppose you, but mostly psychological forces of one form or another. Then you’ve got the father. Well, there’s two kinds of fathers. What kind? Good fathers and bad fathers. So here’s an example. The Lion King. So the Lion King has a father, right? Mephosa. And Mephosa has a brother. Who’s his brother? Scar. And what’s up with Scar? Not a pleasant guy. Partly maybe because he’s scarred. Something’s happened. Well, really, eh? He’s kind of skinny. He said he came from the shallow end of the gene pool. Obviously something’s happened to him because he has this scar. He’s arrogant and brilliant, which is a very common set of attributes for negative father figures. And he’s out to do in the cave. Right. So what does he represent? Well, you could say, here’s a way of thinking about it sociologically. One of the things you hear very frequently, I’m sure many of you have heard this ad nauseum, is that there’s such a thing as the patriarchy, right? The patriarchy. Okay, the patriarchy is a mythological construct. And I mean that technically speaking. You have a paternal figure that basically represents, it can represent the father directly, or it can represent the structure of male power. It’s not just male power, but whatever. For the time being, we’ll stick with that. It has a positive aspect, which is why you get to sit here and you’re not being snowed on and freezing to death. That’s the positive element. And it has a negative element. And the negative element is the arbitrary tyranny that’s associated with any social organization. Right? So, okay. What do you think of the U of T? Like your first year, did you enjoy it? How many people didn’t enjoy it? Okay. How many people did enjoy it? All right. So more by the looks of things, some of you, and some of you are neutral. You neither enjoyed it or didn’t enjoy it, or you don’t have the mental energy to like crank your arm up and down. So okay. So most of you didn’t enjoy it. What the hell are you doing here then? Like, why bother? So someone who didn’t enjoy it answered me that. Maybe you really didn’t enjoy it, but here you are. Why are you still here? Why are you here? That’s the sub-cost answer. It’s like you waited for a bus for half an hour, it hasn’t showed up. The right thing to do is wait for another half an hour. To put it in a more metaphorical term, I approached it from a different angle. So basically I changed what I was studying. How did that work? It worked out well. The second time I tried it, it worked out well. Good, good. So was that an unpleasant process? Yes. Were you confused? Yeah. Did you come out the other end? Yeah. Right on. Good work. I learned that I have. You’re more mature? Yeah. You know more than you did five years ago? I hope so. Was it worth it? I hope so. Great. Good for you. Good for you. Well look, you make a calculation. What’s wrong with the University of Toronto? Well there’s 60,000 students for a starter. Like what the hell do you matter? You know, really you’re numbered. And it feels like that a lot of the time. You know, and so it’s a very impersonal institution and you’re sort of tossed into it. So you’re basically facing a giant of some magnitude who’s kind of blind and who’s sort of archaic, which is always what culture is. Culture’s always blind because it’s a product of yesterday and it’s archaic. It’s not up to date. So you’re going to have a problem with it and you have that problem when you come to the university. So you stick with it though because it’s got two faces. One face is sink or swim, there guys. And the other face is, man if you’re careful and you establish a relationship with this kind of institution, you can learn so much that you won’t even be the same person when you come out. Maybe you’ll be able to think. That’d be good, you know. If you learn to think then you don’t run into sharp things when you wander through life because you’re smart enough to see where they are and avoid them, you know. And maybe you can think your way to a target or maybe you can even think about a target that’s worthwhile and you can figure out how to attain it and maybe you learn to write and then you can articulate your ideas and you can express them with some power and you can be a positive force in the world and you can be successful in all sorts of ways. If you have to put up with being tyrannized by a half-dead monster with Alzheimer’s disease that’s blind, well that’s life. And it could be a lot worse because at least you’re contending with something that has a positive element. You know in lots of societies if you’re up against the blind giant of society, the best that you can hope for is that it isn’t running around trying to stomp on you all the time and I would say that’s more the standard human experience. So yeah there’s a patriarchy and yeah it’s negative, obviously, it’s always been like that. But by the same token, you know, there’s a good guy embedded in that too and that’s the thing you want to have a relationship with. And that’s the same old story. It’s always been like that. There’s always a wise king and a tyrant and they’re always fighting and sometimes the wise king wins, sometimes the tyrant wins. And then when the tyrant wins, it’s up to the hero to defeat the tyrant and reestablish the rightful king. And that’s actually what you’re trying to do when you’re in university. Because the rightful king in some sense is a corpse that’s embedded inside the university. And your job is to revivify it. You know, you’re the living element of the university and all the knowledge is dead. It’s just lying around and some of it’s out of date. You come in here and you revive it so that society can continue and so that you can benefit from the relationship. Well that’s the positive and negative great father, the wise king and the tyrant. And then another level is the feminine. The feminine is not women. Women partake of the feminine and the masculine, just like men partake of the feminine and the masculine. But the maternal element, the feminine element, is nature. Positive nature, well that’s the thing the environmentalists love, right? and French landscapes and you know pleasant days picnicking in the park and beautiful sunshine and fresh air and clean water. But then there’s another side. Another side is, do you know what the guinea worm is? Does anybody know what a guinea worm is? Well I’m going to tell you, although you’re not going to be happy about it. So a guinea worm is this horrible parasite that burrows under the skin mostly of children, mostly in Africa. And it’s about two feet long so it makes these coils around their legs and then it’ll poke its little head out. And then you can pull it out but it tends to break and if that happens then it gets infected and maybe you die. And so you can wrap it around a pencil very slowly and pull it out. That’s nature. Now there’s a doctor who’s a Canadian doctor who wasn’t really very happy about those damn guinea worms and he’s just about eradicated them. And like hooray for him. But you know when we’re talking about the environment, especially when we’re thinking about it in mythological categories and we’re talking about nature, it’s like yeah yeah, it’s nature in all its beneficial glory but it’s also all the things that would just as soon eat you in the most awful possible way. And you need to know that too because if you think of nature as only beneficial in its positive archetypal element, that that’s mother nature in all her glory, then you tend to denigrate the utility of the positive element of culture. You know it’s culture that protects you from the horrible elements of nature. You wouldn’t even be able to think about nature as beautiful if you weren’t already so protected from it. You know you’re more protected from it than any human beings ever have been anywhere in the entire history of life. And so in this unbelievably protected environment you can think oh well we should go easy on nature because isn’t it so beautiful. It’s like yeah well yes and no. And it’s not all beauty. It’s certainly not because nature will eventually kill you. So even if it doesn’t, well it’s going to kill you, it will also make you sick. It will also make everyone that you know sick and it will kill all of them too. So it’s not such a bad thing to have a little bit of empathy for human beings given that we have to contend with that. And you know if we’re destroying everything, which we’re not, it’s also returning the favour. So alright so there’s the substratum. At the bottom of things there’s this terrible monster. But it hoards gold. And so encountering it, defeating it, challenging it, facing it, can be unbelievably productive. And that’s a symbol of the absolute unknown. That’s where you go when things fall apart. You don’t know where you are, so where are you? You’re where you don’t know what things are. And that’s a place. And what’s interesting about it is that there are rules to act in that place. And that’s what’s so helpful because you know if you’re in a place and you don’t know And that’s that. You’re done. But if there’s a pattern to what you can do in a circumstance like that, then you land on your feet and you’re ready to contend. And maybe the trip down into the underworld is something you can undertake on your own accord and you can come back with the treasure instead of ending up as dragon food or worse. And then when you’re conceptualizing your relationship to other people, well let’s say to society first of all. It’s like yeah obviously you face a tyrant. Of course you do. But that isn’t all you face and you need to be grateful for what you’ve been given by your culture. And you actually have to understand what that culture is because it’s you. And if you don’t rescue that part of you and that part of the culture then everything gets dead and stale and tyrannical and everything goes immediately to hell. And that’s not a good thing. And then with regards to nature, well you obviously have to appreciate the positive element of nature and you have to enter into a relationship with it. You don’t bloody well want to forget that things are out to get you. And you know you have to be intelligent and ready and awake so that you can prevail against that. And you have to be grateful for what you’ve been offered by other people and by the tremendous efforts of all of human culture across all of time that’s put you in a position where you’re so unbelievably privileged and have so many opportunities at your disposal. So that’s kind of the archetypal story of human beings. We always face nature and it’s always on our side. We always face our culture. It’s always on our side. And we always have ourselves and those things that are arrayed against us internally, externally. And that’s the, you could say that’s the existential world. It’s the world of drama. And the things that are really compelling to you as means of communicating use those categories to provide you with information. Because what you’re trying to figure out is if that’s the landscape that makes up your being, that’s a phenomenological idea, how is it that you weave your way through it? Well, that’s what we’re going to figure out while we go through this class. Okay, so that’s the mythological background. So there’s the characterological elements that I just described and then there’s the punctuated movement forward. Now, you know, the problem with that is that when things fall apart, it’s not like you just fall apart psychologically. It’s not just a psychological condition. You know, if someone’s betrayed you deeply, that might be because you’re naive and unready. And maybe that’s a psychological element. Maybe you’re just young and you don’t know better and you couldn’t. But there’s also the real fact of the problem that you have in fact been betrayed and now you don’t know what to do. So there’s reality in it as well as just what’s psychological. And so one of the things that you might, one of the ways that you might construe personality theories that have to deal with a description of the way people are and a description of how they might move towards mental health is that there are maps that tell you how to, there are maps of that landscape that tell you how to orient yourself so that you can succeed. And even better, and this is a Piagetian idea, it’s not only so that you can succeed, it’s so that you can succeed in a way that your family succeeds so that they can succeed in a way that society succeeds so that everything works better at the same time. And that’s really success. You know, and that’s like you’re winning a game that everyone wants to play. Well, what a deal. You get to move forward and everyone else gets to enjoy it. Well that’s a good definition of success. It’s an archetypal definition of success actually because if you succeed properly then your success benefits everyone else. So hard to imagine that there could be anything particularly wrong with that. Alright, so that’s the mythological element. Now I want to tell you a little bit about the shamanic element. Now the reason I want to talk to you about shamanism is because shamanism is a very, very old phenomena. And shamanism looks like a phenomena that involves the dramatization of transformation processes. So one transformation process might be the initiation of young men. Now it’s more typical for young men to be initiated than young women. And no one really knows why that is except men seem to be able to go more spectacularly wrong than women. So if you look at, we’ll talk about that later, but there’s also competing theories that say you don’t have to initiate women because nature does that all by itself. And I think that that’s not a particularly bad way of looking at it. So women are going to be confronted with the brute force of nature. But men can either do that or not do it. And so there’s in some sense an element of choice. And so the initiation rituals take away the element of choice. And so in a typical initiation ritual what happens is that young men, usually at the onset of puberty, are taken away from their familial dependence, which really means their And then they’re put into some situation and terrified three quarters to death. Now more or less they do that voluntarily. So perhaps, here’s an example, maybe you’re 13. So remember, think about you’re 13. Think about that. Okay, and so you’re still afraid of the dark when you’re 13 even though you’ll tell people that you aren’t. But you are. And so like if you were dropped naked in the middle of a forest when you’re 13 and it’s midnight, you’re going to be plenty frozen with terror. And a good thing too because, you know, it’s dangerous out there. Okay, so then you think, well maybe it’s just a park. But you’re still out there and it’s dark and you’re afraid. And you might say, well what are you afraid of? And one of the things you might come up with is, well you’re afraid of what you’re imagining. And then you might say, well does that mean that you’re afraid of your imagination? Or are you afraid of the things your imagination represents? Well you kind of have to think if there’s no actual objective danger there then what you’re afraid of is your imagination. Now, did you guys ever see The Blair Witch Project? How many of you have seen that? How many of you haven’t? Oh, so it’s a pretty lousy example. Anyways, it’s a horror movie. Now there’s kind of two kinds of horror movies. There’s the splatter type horror movie, and I think actually those expose you to disgust. And then there’s the fear kind of horror movie, and that doesn’t need to have any gore at all. It just makes you afraid. And the Blair Witch Project is a very good example of that because all that happens, nothing happens. Nothing happens. But you think something terrible is going to happen every second, and the sense that something terrible is going to happen keeps climbing through the whole movie. And so what they do is put you in a state of radical uncertainty and never let you off. Okay, well so basically they’re playing with your imagination. And that can work very effectively. Like it’s often, a horror movie is often more effective if they don’t show you what’s making those horrible noises off screen. You know, because no matter what they show you, the probability that it can be as personally horrible as what other monsters you’re dredging up out of your imagination is very low. So okay, and you know it’s reasonable to be afraid of the dark because throughout our biological history lots of unfortunate people were devoured by things in the dark or hurt very badly by them, etc. etc. And we’re also daytime creatures, right? So we don’t like the dark very much. So what you do to someone if you’re going to initiate them is maybe you take them when they’re 13 and you put them in a really dark cave, and caves. They’re so dark, man. Like if you’re in a cave you just can’t believe how dark it is. You can’t see anything in a cave. So you don’t know how big this space you’re in is, and you don’t know how small it is, and you don’t know whether or not it’s going to collapse or whether it’s going to stay up. And you don’t know how far you are underground, especially if the people who took you there didn’t walk you around in circles and didn’t let you know where you were going. And then maybe they leave. And maybe they leave for three days. And so you’re sitting down there thinking, well what are you thinking exactly? Well you’re thinking the most horrible thoughts you could possibly imagine. I’m never going to get out of here. They’re never going to find me again. Some horrible snake thing that lives in the darkness is going to come and eat me slowly because fast would be, you know, merciful. And then I’m also going to go completely out of my mind so that even if something doesn’t eat me I’m going to come out of here and it’ll be worse than being dead anyways. And so partly what you’re doing in that circumstance is you’re facing the demons of your own imagination. And if you can stand that then you grow up. And that’s what an initiation ceremony does. Now a lot of what you’ll find if you look at clinical theories of psychology, the same motif applies. If you want to get better you have to find out what you’re avoiding and what you’re afraid of. And maybe what you’re disgusted by even. And you have to expose yourself to that voluntarily and you have to let that change you. And so it’s not a pleasant prospect. I mean it’s not dancing through a field of daisies, right, with Muzak playing. It’s not follow your bliss, you know. It’s not the natural unfolding of a positive process. It’s not that at all. It’s the voluntary confrontation with the things that make up life’s horrors. But what’s interesting about it is that there’s an idea there that lurks under the surface archetypally and that is there’s a lot more to you than meets the eye. But it won’t be released unless it has to. And so you’re not going to even figure out what it is until you put yourself in peril. Now part of that you might think, like imagine that you’re an introvert and you’re socially awkward and you’re highly neurotic so you feel a lot of anxiety and depression. You don’t like going to parties. That’s because the horrible tyrant lives at parties and always glaring at you and judging you and telling you how useless and insufficient you are. And so you go there and you don’t even look at people because you know that if you did look at them you’d just see the face of the judgmental tyrant, which by the way you wouldn’t if you actually looked at them but you won’t because you avoid. And so you’re going to go there and you’re going to put yourself in this terrible situation and if you’re lucky and you’re a bit awake then you’re going to incorporate all sorts of information from the external world that will help you develop your social skills and make you more sophisticated. And even if that doesn’t happen you’re going to learn that you can tolerate your own fear. And you might say, well what’s better to not be afraid or to know that you can handle being afraid and obviously to not be afraid. Give that up because that ain’t happening. So the next best thing and the realistic thing is to know that you’re the master of your own fear. And so a lot of what we’re going to talk about in relationship to classical theories of personality is exactly that. It’s not that the world isn’t terrible. It’s that the world is terrible. But you’re a lot stronger than you think. And the way you, okay, and so part of that is the strength that you gather is partly the information that you gather when you go somewhere that you’re not good at, you know, so you’re establishing new skills like you have at university. But there’s another part that’s interesting that’s related to the little video that I showed you at the beginning. DNA turns out to be a very complex structure. And so if I put you in situation A then DNA codes certain kinds of proteins that help make up the way that your mind is and the way it works. But if I take you and I put you in another situation, completely different genes turn on. And so what that means is that you have a biological repository of potential use lying dormant at the highest resolution level of your molecular structure. And that if you push yourself in all sorts of different directions and you find different things to pursue and test yourself against, then you’re going to turn on parts of yourself that aren’t currently on. And God only knows what you’d be like if you turned yourself completely on. And maybe I could use a better metaphor. I’ll tell you a little bit more about the shamanic routines because they’re more, you know, if there’s a initiation archetype, which I kind of just described to you, which is you can do this to yourself. I’ll tell you how. And this is a good way to live. It beats the alternative anyway, which is like the definition of a good way to live. So imagine you’re trying to pursue something. So you’ve got a goal. That’s a good thing. You’ve got to have a goal. And you don’t want to hold on to that too tightly because you might be wrong. So you’ve got to be willing to let that go and have a different goal. But you need a goal. And then, you know, while you’re pursuing the goal, you’re going to find out that there’s some obstacles in your path, obviously. And maybe some of those obstacles are of a frightening type. Or maybe they’re even of a disgusting type. You might say, I don’t want to turn into that kind of person. So those of you who are sort of socialist, utopian, left-wingers might think that way about business people. It’s like I would recommend that you get over it as rapidly as possible. So anyways, you might think there’s no way I’m going to act that way. So you sort of put it off limits, say. Or maybe you’re afraid to do what you need to do next. Well, here’s the rule. Don’t avoid doing things because they make you feel negative emotion if you have to do those things in order to pursue your goals. In fact, you should do exactly the opposite. So let’s say you’re pursuing a goal and you find that you’re afraid about something and so you’re avoiding it. The first thing you should think is, aha! Look, I’m afraid of something and I’m avoiding it. Dragon. Treasure. Exactly there. And that’s exactly right. That’s precisely right. If you’re afraid of the thing, then what that means is that you’re not developed enough to handle it. And you need to be. So you should think about that as a discovery, like a positive discovery. You found out where you have a weakness and you’re now able to address it. So you know, if you’re an introvert and you think, it’s Friday night, I could go to this party but I really don’t want to, then you think, oh, that means I should go. And that’s exactly right because you already know how to do the things that you know how to do. And it’s the things that you don’t know how to do that bother you and oppress you. And of course those things are going to be difficult to learn about but you need to learn about them because you need to get yourself all switched on. How’s that? Switched on. Because then you’ll be able to tolerate the fact that life is fundamentally suffering. And so you don’t, the world doesn’t get safer as you develop. In fact, quite the contrary. You just get more competent. And that’s better anyways because it’s conceivable that you don’t want safety anyways. You probably want adventure. You probably want to be compelled. You probably want to be engaged. You know, if you want security you might as well be dead. Well because nothing’s happening then and there’s no danger left. To be alive is to be contending with the world. And you want to be the best at that that you can possibly be. And that’s partly what we’re going to learn about as we go through the entire course but certainly the elements that have to do with clinical psychology. Because all of them circulate around this fundamental theme. They have to because it’s the fundamental story of mankind. And we want to know what that fundamental story is because you’re all human and you need to know the story. And then you know, you can decide how you’re going to act it out. But at least you need to know the damn story first. So, we’ll see you.