https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DC0faZiBcG0
So, today we’re going to talk about Jung, and I find that tremendously entertaining. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anyone as intelligent as Jung, except maybe Nietzsche. It’s funny, he’s accused of many things, such as starting a new religion, by some rather unscrupulous biographers. But what he did was actually far more radical than anything he’s ever been accused of. One other thing I should tell you too is Jung is often being accused of anti-Semitism, but one of the things that came to light last year was that he was working as an agent for the American government during World War II, and frequently set updates on Hitler’s psychological condition to the highest levels of the American government. He never told anybody about that. So, you know, that’s a little hard on the old accusations of anti-Semitism, I think, which I’ve never thought held any merit anyways. So Jung, he was a strange guy in many ways, extraordinarily imaginative. He could get lost in daydreams, and was a tremendously powerful visualizer. And a lot of what he discovered was a consequence of engaging in long-term elaborated fantasies. And in these fantasies, he could have conversations with figures of his imagination, and communicate with them. I had a client at one point who was a very prolific dreamer, and she could talk to her characters in her dreams and ask them what they meant symbolically, and they would tell her. That was really something. I’ve only seen one person who was capable of doing that. She was, I don’t know if it helped her that much in the final analysis, but she could do it. Jung was very, very interested in the depths of the human imagination. Now his body of work can be viewed as an amalgam of many things, but he had deep knowledge of Latin and Greek, and he’d studied alchemical manuscripts for many, many years as an older man. So he was very interested in the emergence of the idea of science from what he considered the collective imagination. But in many ways, his primary modern intellectual influences, I would say, were Nietzsche and Freud. Jung really set out somewhat like Piaget to address the gap between religion and science, but he did it for different reasons than Piaget. Jung took Nietzsche’s comments about the death of God very seriously, and one of the things Nietzsche predicted at the end of the 19th century was that there were going to be two major consequences of the collapse of formal religious belief. He believed that that would lead people to a morally relativistic condition that would prove psychologically intolerable, because if you adopt a morally relativist position and you take it to its final conclusion, then everything is of equal value and there’s no gradient between things. There’s no better and there’s no worse. In the final analysis, you might say, well, there’s no good and there’s no evil. The problem with that is you can’t actually orient yourself in a world that has those properties because in order to act, as we’ve already talked about with regards to the cybernetic models, you have to be aiming at something that’s better than what you have now, or there’s no reason to expend the energy. And so you need the gradient. You need a value differentiation in order to act. And Nietzsche’s analysis was predicated on the idea that if the value hierarchy collapsed, well, not only would people not be motivated to do anything anymore, but they would also be extraordinarily confused and depressed because the value would go out of their life. And the consequence of that would be that they would become somewhat nihilistic or maybe absolutely nihilistic or that they would turn to rigid ideological systems as a replacement. Now what Nietzsche offered as an alternative to that was that human beings could create their own values. And so his idea was that the Superman, the Overman, depending on how you look at it, would be the person who was capable of transcending the valueless universe that the decline of religion had left with us and creating their own values as a conscious act. The problem with that is that it isn’t obvious that you can create your own values as a conscious act because it’s not obvious that values are consciously created. And I think this is why the psychoanalysts had so much to add to the philosophical debate, at least the philosophical debate that developed to the point of Nietzsche’s observations. When Freud entered the scene, the idea of the unconscious was in the air, but Freud formalized it to a much greater degree than anyone else had. Freud’s theory really is deeply biological. It’s biological, it’s social as well, but his proposition, the proposition that there’s an id, is fundamentally the proposition that you’re not necessarily, your consciousness, for sure, is not the master in its own house. Now I think part of the reason that people like to go after Freud, there’s a variety of reasons, but one of them is that modern people basically accept radical Freudian presuppositions more or less as givens now. And so if you’re a brilliant thinker and your thought permeates a society to the point where your most radical propositions are accepted by everyone, all that’s really left are your errors. And so it’s easy to concentrate on Freud’s errors because we’ve already digested everything he had to say that was particularly profound. I mean I don’t imagine, perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t imagine that there’s anyone in this room to whom the news that many of your motivations aren’t conscious comes as a surprise. I mean even psychologists have admitted that in the last 20 years, you know. I mean they talk about the cognitive unconscious, which I think is a real sleight of hand maneuver to stop them from having to credit Freud with his discoveries. I also think that Freud’s notion of the unconscious is far more sophisticated than the cognitive scientist’s notion because Freud viewed the unconscious as a place that was basically populated by fragmented personalities, not cognitive schemes of one form or another and not processes, but things that were like living beings. And you know, you think, well, are there living beings in your unconscious? And the answer to that is, well, are you alive or not? And you’re alive, so you’re composed of living sub-components, and they’re not machines, or at least not in any way that we understand machines. They’re fragmentary sub-personalities, and each of them have their own worldview and rationalizations and emotional structure and goals. And so that’s why when you get hungry, you see the world through the eyes of a hungry person and you think thoughts about food, and your emotional reactions depend on whether food is available or whether it isn’t, and maybe whether or not the food you want is available and whether it isn’t. And you know, that’s nature, so to speak, imposing its necessities on you as a living being. And for Freud, that was the id. And Freud thought of the id really as something that was primordial and primitive. And that’s one of the things that really separated him from Jung. And I think Jung is much more accurate from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. In fact, I think he’s radically underestimated as a thinker whose thought was unbelievably deeply grounded in biology. And Jung was a remarkable person because his notion of history and the relationship between history and the human psyche covered spans of time that were really, until modern historians and evolutionary psychologists started to talk about deep time and the fact that the entire four billion year history of the world is in some sense relevant to us as beings, or at least the 3.5 billion year history that there’s been life on the planet. Ancient history for European philosophers was like 500 to 2000 years ago. And Jung thought way past that, way back farther than that, and started to take into serious account the fact that the origins of our psyche, the ground of our psyche is deeply biological and that it’s an emergent property. So for Freud, Freud’s idea of the unconscious is somewhat difficult to understand because there’s sort of two elements to it. There’s the id, which is the source of primordial motivation. And Freud concentrated mostly on aggression and sexuality. And the reason he concentrated on those two, although he concentrated on what he called the death instinct later in his life. The reason he concentrated on those two primarily wasn’t because he regarded them necessarily as the most compelling of motivations, but he regarded those motivations as the ones that were most difficult for most people to integrate successfully into the social world. So he thought that they were most likely to be repressed and therefore underdeveloped and immature. And I think that’s a reasonable proposition. And I think that modern people would have to add eating to that because since the time of Freud, we’ve gone, I would say, from a high proportion of sexually related pathologies to a very, very high proportion of eating related pathologies, but that’s in some sense beside the point. So that’s one part of the Freudian unconscious, sort of an implicit unconscious. And then the other part of the Freudian unconscious is those things that have happened to you that you’ve repressed because you don’t like what they imply. And those are very different kinds of unconscious because one of them is dependent on your experience and the other isn’t. And you could think of Jung actually as a deep archaeologist of the id. And Freud thought about the id in sort of primordial terms. So his angry id would be like a beast that’s out of control. But Jung recognized that the unconscious was far more sophisticated in many ways than the conscious parts of your being. And that it guided your adaptation in ways that you didn’t understand. The ways in which it guided your adaptation and structured your understanding were universal, hence biological, and far more sophisticated than a somewhat primordial notion of biological drive might indicate. So one of the things that you might consider, for example, is that from the Jungian perspective, a lot of the forces that ancient people considered deities were personified representations of instinctual systems. So here’s a way of thinking about it, and this is a way of thinking about the collective unconscious which is Jung’s, in some sense, Jung’s replacement term for the Freudian id. So Mars, for example, is the god of war, Roman god of war. And you might say, well, what does it mean for there to be a god of war? Or Venus is the god of love, actually of sexual attraction more particularly. Or of sexual possession, which is even a better way of thinking about it. And you say, well, why would people conceptualize of those phenomena as gods? The Greeks said, for example, that human beings were the playthings of the gods. No, that was Shakespeare. I’m sorry, that was Shakespeare who said that. Well here’s one way of thinking about it. What’s older, you or aggression? The answer to that is, well, you’re 23. And the system that mediates biological aggression in mammals and their progenitors is tens of millions of years old. And if you think you control it rather than the other way around, you’re deluded about your central nature. Part of it is that you don’t control it at all. What happens is that you never go anywhere where you need to use it. And so one of the things that happens to soldiers in wartime, for example, is they go somewhere where they could use it and out it comes. And the consequence of its emergence is so traumatic that they develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they observe themselves doing things that are hyper aggressive that they could have never imagined that someone like them could have manifested. And then you think, well, what about Venus as a goddess? Well if you fall in love with someone, who, is that a choice? It doesn’t look like a choice. If it’s a choice, it’s often an incredibly self-destructive and idiotic choice, and it’s often one that ruins people’s entire lives. It’s more like a state of possession. And then you might say, well, possession by what? Well, it’s a dynamic living system. And it’s also immortal in some sense, which is another reason why conceptualizing it as a deity makes sense. The phenomena of love, which is the manifestation of a complex biological system, will be around long after you’re gone and was there long before you showed up. And when it manifests itself, so to speak, within you, you’re possessed by it. And you do its bidding. And you may do its bidding despite what you most deeply want. Modern people tend to think that the conscious parts of their brain, or let’s say the more newly evolved elements of their brain, because we don’t actually know what the relationship is between consciousness and the newly developed parts of the brain. The assumption is often made that the reason we’re conscious is because we’ve developed a very spectacular cortical cap. But consciousness appears to be far older than that. So that’s an erroneous assumption. But we do tend to believe that the most complex and sophisticated parts of our brain are the cortical cap, the complex cortical cap that’s quite enlarged in human beings relative to our body size. Because it’s the newest systems, and it’s also part of the systems that allow us to do such things as communicate with language and think in abstract symbols. But there’s a different way of thinking about this from a biological perspective, and that is what makes you think the newest system is the most sophisticated one? Why don’t you assume that the oldest system is the most sophisticated one? Because it’s been around for, well, for example, the mechanism in your neurological, the mechanism that underlies your conception of your relationship to the dominance hierarchy, for example, is at least 300 million years old. And the reason it’s lasted 300 million years is because it knows what it’s doing. It’s far older than the parts of your brain that make you conscious in the specifically human way. And it’s so deeply embedded in your brain in some sense that you have almost no voluntary control over it. And that’s why, for example, one of the things that happens to people who are depressed is that the system that reports their dominance status reports that they’re low. Now sometimes that’s true because they’re not depressed, they just have an awful life and they’re actually at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, and that’s not the same as being depressed. But sometimes it malfunctions, so someone who’s competent and well situated in life and who appears to have everything that a person could possibly desire in order to have a decent and meaningful and positive life are still catastrophically depressed. And what seems to happen in those circumstances is that the dominance counter, for one reason or another, is acting as if they’re incredibly low status when they’re in fact not. And I think that’s a good definition of clinical depression. I also think that part of the reason that there’s mixed results with regards to antidepressant trials is because antidepressants don’t help you if you’re at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. How could they? You’re not depressed. You just have a terrible life. That is not the same thing. And they need to be carefully distinguished because if you’re unemployed and you’re facing the loss of your home and maybe your partner’s going to leave you and your children hate you, an antidepressant is very unlikely to fix that. Now to the degree that misbehavior on your part caused by impulsivity and increased aggression and decreased mood because of your reaction to that circumstance is making it worse, then the antidepressant might help you. And maybe the antidepressant will help you regain enough cognitive control so that you can plan your way out of the situation. But as a medication in and of itself, there’s no possible way it can lift you out of those often catastrophically complex and disintegrating circumstances. Whereas if your life is fine but you feel terrible, well, it’s much more likely that an antidepressant can help with that because in some sense what it’s going to do is to readjust your dominance, the reporting of your dominance counter, so to speak, to the level that’s appropriate for your level of competence, which is really what you want. You know, people say you should have high self-esteem. I would say idiots say that you should have high self-esteem. It’s an unbelievably corrupt construct in many ways because it’s actually very, very highly correlated with baseline levels of neuroticism negatively, which is a fundamental personality trait, and baseline levels of extroversion. So someone with low self-esteem is generally someone who’s introverted and has high levels of negative emotion. It’s a trait-like phenomena. It isn’t clear at all that calling that low self-esteem has any utility whatsoever. But then you also might ask yourself, well, how much self-esteem should you have? Well, and that’s a very complex question because you can clearly have way too much. That’s what would make you a narcissist. So I would say your self-esteem should be roughly equivalent to the esteem in which you’re held by members of your society, you know, your family and your society, because they’re judging you at least in part on your competence. And you shouldn’t think that you’re more competent than you are, and you shouldn’t think that you’re less competent than you are. You should think that you’re as competent as you are. And sometimes that means you’re not competent at all because you don’t know what you’re doing, and sometimes it means that you’re quite competent. Now I think it’s complicated by the fact that you should also regard yourself not only as who you are, but as who you could be. And so if you’re of lowly dominant status, which for example, in some sense you guys are because you’re young and you’re starting your lives, the fact that there’s a lot of potential that you still are able to manifest should tilt the self-assessment balance in your favor to a fair degree. So anyways, Jung was very interested in the depths of the psyche. And for him, the unconscious wasn’t a repository of repressed experiences. And it wasn’t a repository of underdeveloped and irritated biological systems. It was instead the underlying structure of consciousness itself. So Jung believed that human experience, as it’s consciously manifested, was structured by underlying patterns of behavior that were specific and unique to humankind, although shared to some degree with other animals. And then on top of that, a realm of imagistic and symbolic representation that in part was a consequence of representation of those underlying behaviors. So here’s a way of thinking about it. We act in a human way, whatever that means. And we’ve been acting in a human way for as long as there’s been human beings, and we’ve been acting in a mammalian way for as long as there’s been mammals. Now human beings are quite peculiar creatures because not only do we act, we also watch ourselves act, and we represent those actions. And Jung believed that as a consequence of us manifesting a specific set of typically human behaviors over hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of years, we also evolved a cognitive apparatus that was capable of representing those patterns of behavior. And that cognitive apparatus expressed the representations of those fundamental patterns of behavior in imagistic and symbolic form. And the basic imagistic and symbolic form is something like drama. Now why would that be? Well it’s obvious in some sense. What is drama? Drama is the representation, the abstract representation of patterns of behavior. That’s what you do when you go to a movie. You watch people manifest their characteristic behaviors. Then you might note that there’s characteristic, quasi-unique patterns of behavior that are portrayed in drama. So for example, there’s the bad guy, and he wears a black hat in a cowboy movie. And whenever you go to a movie, it’s pretty clear to you right away who the good guys are and the bad guys are, and you accept the distinction between good and bad guys as an a priori acceptable distinction. So Jung would say, well that’s the action of an archetype. What underlies that is the archetypal story of the hostile brothers. And the hostile brothers for example are Cain and Abel, which is the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis by the way, is really the second story that’s in that origin myth. And it’s the first story about real human beings. Because Adam and Eve, so to speak, were created by God, whereas Cain and Abel were born, the first brothers. Well what happened? Well one of them became insanely jealous of the other and murdered him. So that’s a pretty harsh story when you think that the monotheistic religions of the West, roughly speaking, put as one of their foundational stories the idea that there’s a twin pair of forces operating the human psyche that can be conceptualized as brothers who are murderously opposed to one another. That’s part of the reason why that story hasn’t disappeared. It’s so powerful, it’s so shocking, it’s so powerful that it can’t disappear. And the reason for that is that it’s true in a sense. It’s true like, it’s true that a reasonable drama, not all of them obviously, but a large proportion of them, has a bad guy and a good guy. And then you might say, well what would the archetypes be? The archetypes would be the ultimate good guy and the ultimate bad guy. And there’s representations of the ultimate good guy and the ultimate bad guy. Jung was very influenced by Christianity and part of the reason for that is that he grew up in a state that was Protestant, primarily Christian, and a number of his immediate ancestors were pastors. So he grew up in an atmosphere that was pretty saturated by religious ideas. And so a lot of his thinking was heavily influenced by Christianity. So one of the things he pointed out was that just like Cain and Abel, who are archetypes in a sense, they’re the Old Testament version of archetypes of the hostile brothers, Christ and Satan are archetypes. And the reason they’re archetypes is because virtually by definition, the satanic symbol, so to speak, is a representation, a symbolic representation of everything that’s terrible about human beings. It’s an archetype. You can’t imagine anything worse than that, so it’s like a limit case. And then when you go to a movie and you see bad guys, you can think of them as partial approximations of the archetype. Or you can think about them as the archetype differentiated in a manner that makes exposure to the archetype fresh and interesting. Because you just don’t want to go and see the same old bad guy over and over and over. You want to explore the entire complex behavioral and representational system of the archetype of evil in every conceivable situation. And in the same way, you want to explore the archetype of good. And the reason you want to do that in principle, depending on your motivations, is to control the influence of the factors that underlie the negative archetype in your life and to manifest the factors that underlie the positive archetype. And that’s why you hope for the good guy. It’s also why generally speaking in a drama, you embody the good guy while you’re watching the movie. So I can give you an example of this. One of the things I learned to do with my son when I took him to movies, because when he was a little guy, I took him to fairly intense movies. And sometimes too intense, but one of the things I taught him when he was afraid was keep your eye on the hero. Not don’t be afraid or it’s not real. It’s like you could easily make a case that a movie is more real than normal life. Why would you watch it otherwise? What a movie is, is normal life stripped of everything that’s trivial. So if you strip a representation of everything that’s trivial, what makes you think that isn’t more real? So is fiction more real than life? Well, is abstraction more real than reality? It certainly is in many cases. I mean, there are people who believe, for example, that mathematical representations are the most real of phenomena. And they certainly, if you’re a very powerful mathematician, you certainly become, or if your society is very powerful mathematically, it certainly gives you a tremendous amount of control over your environment. So the idea that abstractions aren’t real is, that’s a silly idea. And the idea that fiction isn’t real, all that indicates is a confusion about what constitutes real. A movie is a representation of characteristic behavioral patterns extending across time. And it can be a more or less useful and accurate distillation of those representations. And generally what we assume is that the greater the fictional representation, because we make a distinction between great fictional representations and second rate fictional representations. So Shakespeare, for example, is a master at exploring the contours of the archetype in a complex, realistic, and useful manner. Now Jung also believed, so that there were these patterns of behavior, and they would constitute the typical behavioral patterns of human beings. And then we evolved a system of representations of those patterns, and that would enable us to understand the patterns in a way that other animals can’t, because we’re self-conscious, right? So what does it mean to be self-conscious? It doesn’t just mean that you know that you exist as a separate entity. It’s not just a state of conscious awareness. It’s a knowledge condition. You have at your fingertips a very large representational storehouse of abstract knowledge about what human beings are like. And that’s developed over tens of thousands of years, right? It’s a collective activity. The generation of all these stories we tell about each other. I mean, we have ancient stories. The oldest stories we have, by the way, are Mesopotamian stories, as far as I know. And the oldest Mesopotamian story, or one of the oldest Mesopotamian stories we have, is a hero story, where the god, Marduk, fights a great dragon and cuts her into pieces and makes the world. And you might think, well, Mesopotamians, what do you mean the world’s created out of the pieces of a great dragon? Well, it’s a Piagetian idea, with a bit of narrative complexity added to it. It’s like, well, how do you create the world? Well, you confront the unknown, and you transform it into the known. Or you confront unexplored territory, and you transform it into explored territory. And then you might say, well, what exactly is the unknown? Or what exactly is unexplored territory? And a scientist would say, well, if you walk out in a field that you’ve never been in before, there’s soil and material elements, and that’s what’s really there. But that isn’t exactly what’s really there. It depends on your time frame. So one of the things I could say about that, for example, is that if you wander outside the boundaries of your knowledge, if you wandered outside the boundaries of your territory when you were an animal, or when you were a more archaic human being, the probability that you were going to run into something that was going to tear you apart and eat you was extremely high. And so then I could say, well, the fundamental nature of the unknown is that which tears you apart and eats you. And you might think, well, what sort of reality is that? And I would say, you know how you hear evolutionary psychologists talk sometimes about the fact that we evolved on the African veldt, and now our nervous systems are sort of adapted for that primordial environment and not really for the modern environment. So there’s a mismatch between us and the modern world. I think that’s an absolutely reprehensible theory, partly because we didn’t just evolve on the veldt. We’ve been evolving for a very long time. We spent a lot more time in trees, for example, than we did on the veldt. And while we were spending time in trees, a lot of us were eaten by snakes, for example. And so that’s another reason why the unknown itself is represented as this terrible, predatory, reptilian beast. And then the human being is represented as that which, or the conscious element of the human being, which was represented by the Mesopotamians as a god, the highest god, actually, in the hierarchy of gods, which was a brilliant Mesopotamian realization, because the Mesopotamians basically concluded in their drama, their religious drama, that the highest faculty of the human being was the capacity to consciously attend to the unknown and to make something new out of it. Well, that’s a Piagetian idea, right? That’s exactly what Piaget was talking about when he talked about the necessity of comprehending knowledge as a process rather than as a collection of facts. It’s a process. What’s the process? Confront what you don’t understand. Boldly go where no one has ever gone, right? I mean, Star Trek, that’s where systematizing minds get their mythology. It’s rife with mythology, and its initial statement is a mythological statement, and it’s a statement of the eternal explorer. And that’s an archetypal idea. And you might say, well, are you still threatened by those terrible things that threatened your ancestors on the veldt? Normally people would say, well, no, because there are no lions. But that’s because they don’t get the categories right. Lion is a subcategory of unknown horrible thing. And you guys are surrounded by unknown horrible things just like people have always been surrounded by unknown horrible things. So because you’re just as prone to disease, not quite as prone, but fundamentally you’re a finite being. And there’s things everywhere that act in a predatory manner in relationship to you, and you will die. And so the idea that the material conditions of our environment have changed in a qualitative manner since the time we spent on the veldt is an error of category. The mythological categories are categories that represent environmental entities, so to speak, some of which are social, that have existed for vast stretches of time and which exceed our capacity to detect with our senses. So one representation, for example, is the great father or the wise old man. And the wise old man or the great father is fundamentally a representation of the dominance hierarchy. Now, the problem with the dominance hierarchy is you can’t see it, but it’s there. It’s really there. And then figures like the great mother, especially the tarot, because most of the archetypal figures come in pairs, a positive element and a negative element, and that’s because virtually everything that manifests itself to you in a complex environment, if you’re a living being, takes with one hand and gives with the other. So nature is benevolent and kind and wise and the source of all new knowledge and also cancer and malarial mosquitoes and the tsetse fly and the guinea worm and all these things that are horrifying and destructive beyond belief. And you’re stuck with both. And then society, we talked about this before. That’s the great father. It’s on the one hand, here you are, benevolently protected by your social surround. On the other hand, social structures tend towards tyranny and authoritarianism, and they oppress the individuals within them at the same time that they sustain their development. And so that’s a dichotomous archetype. And then there’s the individual who’s, on the one hand, a remarkable and wonderful creature, and on the other hand, someone who’s capable of atrocities like those that characterized the actions of many millions of people in the 20th century. Those are all archetypes. There are more archetypes than that. The archetype of the predatory reptile with something to offer, which is essentially a dragon, is the most fundamental archetypal representation. You found that representation in alchemical manuscripts, mostly in the form of the Ouroboros, which is a snake that eats its own tail. And it’s a symbol of matter and spirit in union, because the snake is sort of matter, and the wings on the snake, the dragon, make its spirit. So it’s like the fundamental elements of reality are matter and spirit in some kind of conjoined state. And the fundamental task of the human being is to come to terms with the nature of that unknown thing. Now think about it this way. Well, why would ancient people represent the unknown as such as a reptilian, self-contained reptilian form that was both spiritual and material? Well here’s the reason. First, the unknown’s dangerous, and you could be its prey. So you better have that representation at hand. And then you might ask, well, is that really the unknown? And then I would say, well, it depends absolutely on what you mean by really. From a Darwinian perspective, that was the best way to conceptualize the unknown. And then you might say, well, that doesn’t make it real. And then I might say, are you sure about that? Is there anything more real than representations derived from Darwinian processes? The Darwinists would say no. OK, so why is it matter and spirit? Why is it winged and on the ground at the same time? You can also understand this from a Piagetian perspective. And so that is because when you encounter the unknown, you separate the material world and the spiritual world. And the spiritual world is the psychological world. And so what you’re doing when you encounter the unknown is you parse some of it up into the world, and you incorporate other elements of it into yourself. And the best way to think about that, I think, from a conceptual perspective, so it becomes more understandable, is that what you encounter when you encounter the unknown is patterned information. And you take some of that patterned information into yourself, even by doing something as simple as gripping something you want to pick up, because you’re imitating the pattern of the thing that you want to pick up. And that’s how you’re transforming its structure into an element of your being. And so when you’re exploring the unknown, it’s a constructivist idea, you’re simultaneously constructing the world and constructing yourself. And thus, the inference is the unknown is made out of that which can be parsed out into psyche and matter. And it’s dangerous. So it’s a perfectly reasonable representation. And that’s why it won’t go away. So Jung’s fundamental contribution, I would say, is his analysis of hero mythology. And I would say that’s the fundamental element of his thinking. Now the relationship between that and Nietzsche is fundamentally this. Nietzsche believed that once the religious systems collapsed, we would have to consciously produce our new set of values. But Jung believed that the psyche was the source of all value. And so that it wasn’t a matter of creating new values, it was a matter of discovering the values that were already lying dormant and implicit within us. And the next thing I would say about that is you all know this. You just don’t know you know it. And so one of the reasons to be educated from a literary and historical perspective is that you can come to understand what you already know. Because if you don’t understand it, then there’s an element of your being, the element that knows it and acts it out, and there’s another element which is sort of you as a personality that are completely at odds with one another. And that makes you weak. It makes you something that’s divided within itself. Now you’re doing everything you can as a general rule to incorporate this information. Now for a long time it seems as if as long as we acted it out and represented it symbolically and didn’t argue about the assumptions, it was more or less okay. But we’re past that now. And in order for us to benefit from the same protective structures that our ancestors benefited from, we now have to understand what they mean consciously. And that’s really what Jung was up to. What he was really trying to do was to resurrect deep religious representations from the dead, so to speak, and to make them conscious so people could align themselves with them again. Now I’m going to show you something that’s related to that. All right, now, so I’m going to show you something from Pinocchio. Now this is an initiation ritual. It’s a journey to the depths, so it’s a journey to the underworld. It’s the consequence of a collapse in previous personality and the disintegration of that previous personality into a chaotic state prior to rebirth. Now what happens in Pinocchio, which by the way was released at about the same time that World War II was brewing, and which also contains one of the best representations of the individual motivations for fascism that I’ve ever seen anywhere. That’s the scenes that are associated with Pleasure Island. Remember all the puppet is trying to become a real boy, right? So he’s a marionette to begin with. Something else is pulling his strings. Well for Jung, that’s your habitual state of being. Something else is pulling your strings. Even the idea that you’re autonomous is the consequence of something else pulling your strings. And for Jung, what you needed to do was find out exactly who and what is pulling your strings and decide if that’s the direction in which you want to go. And that’s really what happens to Pinocchio, because we’re going to watch Pinocchio part of it, in the Pinocchio story. He starts out as a marionette. Now he’s a marionette made by a good father, because Geppetto is a good father. He’s a good craftsman and so on. So he’s a marionette with a benevolent puppeteer. But as soon as he develops some autonomy, then he becomes prey to forces that are elements of the demonic archetype. In fact, the worst bad guy in the entire movie turns into Satan himself at one point in the movie. He basically has horns and a bright red face. He manifests himself as so terrifying that the coyote, coyote? Wolf? Fox. And the cat that are trying to corrupt Pinocchio are terrified, because they get, like they’re criminals, they’re petty criminals and deceptive and so forth, but when they get a look at who’s pulling their strings, it’s enough to terrify them. And so Pinocchio goes through a series of temptations of various sorts, including a Freudian temptation, and the Freudian temptation is to remain weak and sickly instead of becoming a real person. So it’s an eatable problem. And another problem that faces Pinocchio is that he’s offered false celebrity as a way of solving his life’s problems, so he’s offered the opportunity to become an actor. And what that means is a deceitful fake who’s constructed a persona that makes him appear far more valuable than he really is. So the movie outlines two pathological modes of movement towards maturity, one being a and the other taking the easy way out and hypervaluing all your pathology so that you become dependent. So anyways, and then another mode of pathological development is offered to Pinocchio, which is to do nothing but engage in short-term impulsive and destructive play, and that’s on Pleasure Island, but when he goes to Pleasure Island, he finds that it’s actually ruled by demonic forces with faceless entities who are transforming all the pleasure-seeking marionettes to braying donkeys who are slaves. So Pinocchio escapes from that, and he does it basically by jumping into the unknown, and that’s where we’re going to start our exposure to his initiation. Okay, so now you can imagine what’s happened is he was on Pleasure Island and everything went to hell fundamentally, and so he jumped into the water to escape from that, and that’s equivalent to plunging into chaos. And so chaos was an escape from pathological tyranny, and now he’s tried to go home. So this is the psyche in its search for maturation runs into an obstacle, which is the tyrannical element of the Great Father that it cannot cope with, and it trots home, runs home. It’s a defeat. Typical part of a hero’s story is the initial defeat of the hero when he encounters usually either the terrible Great Father or the terrible Great Mother. And so this is a retrogressive, Jung would call this retrogressive restoration of the persona. So it’s sort of like maybe you’re a well-adapted adolescent and you live at home and you’re a happy adolescent and everything’s good at home, and then you go out to try to be an adult and you fail, and then when you come back home you try to act like a happy adolescent again, but you’re not. What you are, in fact, is an unhappy adult. And if you move back to the happy adolescent mode of being, then it’s false and pathological. You can’t go home again, another typical motif in literature. Now the cricket, I can’t tell you everything about this story. I can tell you a couple of strange things about it. One is that the cricket is Jiminy Cricket, right? And the initials of Jiminy Cricket are J.C. and Jiminy Cricket was a common southern American mild form of cursing. It’s the equivalent of Jesus Christ. And so you might think, and of course the cricket is Pinocchio’s conscience, and well, so then you might ask yourself, why in the world would a pejorative, mildly pejorative term for Jesus Christ be applied to a cricket who’s guiding a puppet into the water to rescue his father from a whale? Why would any of that happen? And the answer to that is, you know why, but you can’t say why. You can’t say why you know, or what it is that you know. But the mere fact that it makes sense, and it does, is an indication from a Jungian perspective that you’re operating at an archetypal level. You understand this. And so I could say, here’s an example of why the cricket is a bug. Well things bug you, right? We say that, things bug me. Well you should do something about the things that bug you, because that’s your conscience calling to you. It’s destiny in some sense manifesting itself as an unconscious impulse. That really bugs me. Means if you can, you should do something about it, because you think about it, man. There’s a lot of things out there that might bug you, but lots of them don’t. But some of them do. Well why do those bug you? And not the other things. Well that’s a complicated question, but one potential answer to it is that there’s part of your psyche that’s oriented towards further development. Jung would call that the self. And that’s like the totality of everything that you could be. And it’s a strange sort of entity in some sense, because it’s partly potential, and it’s potential that expands across time. But the way that your potential totality calls to you in the present is by placing things in front of you that are your problem. And they announce themselves as your problem, and they do that by bothering you. So then if you pick up the task of fixing the things that bothers you, then you find the pathway to further expansion of your personality. So and that’s what’s happening with Pinocchio. Now one of the things that’s really interesting about the Pinocchio movie, and it makes it incredibly sophisticated, is that despite the fact that the cricket is an avatar of Christ, so to speak, the cricket has things to learn just like Pinocchio. And so that’s very cool, because it’s so cool, it’s so sophisticated, because it means that you do have a conscience that guides you, but until you establish a dialogue with it, both you and the conscience are immature. You have to establish a conscious dialogue with it, and then interact together in a manner that propels your development across time. And that’ll stop you from being a marionette of forces that would make you a braying donkey who does nothing but slave away in salt mines. So okay, so Pinocchio goes home, that doesn’t work, and that’s where we’re going to start here. Okay, so what’s happened there? Well, many, many things at multiple levels of reality simultaneously, and that’s the characteristic of an archetypal story. So on one level, Pinocchio’s too old to go home. He can’t go home to his father, because in some sense he’s already transcended his father. So there are things, for example, that your father can’t help you with, and the reason for that is that he doesn’t know any more about the situation than you do, and he can’t. And so that’s where his knowledge limits out. So that would be sort of on the personal level, and then on the transpersonal level, which would be the deeper archetypal level, what’s happening to Pinocchio is exactly what Nietzsche described at the end of the 19th century. Just remember that Geppetto is his creator, and now he’s dead, he’s gone. And so Pinocchio is bereft of placement, so to speak. His soul has been corrupted, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. And when he returns to his family home, or when he returns to his tradition, what he finds is nothing. Okay, so then what happens? Well this is another thing that you’ll swallow with just no problem whatsoever. Well this dove comes along that’s sort of golden and glowing, and drops a note right in front of him. Now you may remember, and perhaps you don’t, but the star from which the dove comes is a representation of the blue fairy. And the blue fairy is the positive element of the unknown in Pinocchio movie. And so what it basically is saying that when you’re despairing because your father has died and your tradition has nothing to offer, that the positive element of the unknown may provide you with a message about where to go if you pay enough attention. That would be an intuition. Or it would be the automatic attraction of your interest to a new thing by forces that you do not understand. So one of the real ways of coming to grips with the idea of the act of unconscious is to understand that you cannot control what you’re interested in. And so then you might ask, well if it’s not you, what is it? And if you think about that problem long enough, you’ll start to understand what Jung was talking about. Because that is the way that you can understand in your own life that the things that direct you as a being are not things that you consciously choose. In fact they’re not even things that you can consciously choose. They’re directed by other forces. So anyways, the dove drops a message in front of Pinocchio and the cricket. Now it’s the cricket that reads it. So it’s the same idea as what bugs you, so to speak. The cricket is the interpreter. Okay, so now what have we found out? Well we found out that God the Father, and God the Father, the Creator, are not in fact dead, which is what Nietzsche pronounced, but alive in some weird way in this horrible creature at the bottom of the ocean. And so what does Pinocchio decide to do? He decides to go find him. That’s actually what you’re doing at university, by the way. After all the chaos that you experience when you come to university, and all the uncertainty, and all the doubt, what you’re trying to do is to resurrect your dead father from the bottom of the ocean. And if you do that, you won’t be a marionette. And if you don’t, you will be. Now this is very interesting, because the conscience here plays a very dichotomous role. So on the one hand, Pinocchio is often ahead of his conscience, so to speak, so he’s taking the leading role. And the dialogue is kind of choppy, and neither of them know exactly what they’re doing. But in this situation, it’s very paradoxical, because you can see Pinocchio’s been half turned into brain jackass at this point. Something you might well consider when you remember your adolescence. So in this point, the cricket, his conscience, does two things. It warns him how horrible this is going to be, and how utterly dangerous it is, and then at the same time, it helps him prepare and goes along with him. And so it’s quite comical. So watch what happens here. Okay, so I’ve cut this a little bit, but what happens in the movie is that he goes to the bottom of the ocean and he starts to ask about Monstro. And as soon as he asks any of the fish down there, the denizens of the sub-oceanic world, where Monstro is, they just run away. So Monstro is he who cannot be named. Right? And I’m sure you’ve encountered that in your reading before. Right? That’s the hallmark of the Harry Potter series. Right, see, now you’ve done it. So this represents something so terrible that it can’t even be talked about. Okay, so what happens is Pinocchio ends up not only at the bottom of the ocean, but he has to go to the deepest part of the bottom of the ocean where the most terrible thing rests. And so we’re cutting to the point where he does that. So now you might ask, how did Geppetto get in the whale? And the answer to that is it’s never really made that clear in the movie. But I can tell you some things about that. If you conceptualize your historical tradition as a personality, like a body of laws and customs say, it’s not alive. It’s dead. Right? Because it’s composed of the past. And because it’s dead, it can’t come up with anything new. So if it encounters something new, it’s stopped. And that’s what’s happened to Geppetto. That he’s engulfed by this entity that represents the absolute unknown, and he cannot figure out how to get out. And the reason for that is none of the things he knows, so none of the things that history has produced as a body of knowledge, are sufficient to deal with the fundamental problem. That doesn’t mean they’re useless. It just means that just like the puppet is lost without the father, the father is also lost without the puppet. And that’s the relationship between you and history, your history. When you study history, you think, well, you’re studying a record of events in the past, and that’s not right. What you’re studying is the circumstances that gave rise to you as a being. And unless you understand your history in every way you possibly can, then you’re an incomplete creature. You don’t know enough to move forward. In the same way, your culture, being composed of dead fathers, so to speak, can’t progress without you, because you’re its eyes. And there’s an Egyptian story that features the god Horus, who I’ve talked to you about before, who actually resurrects his father from the dead by giving him an eye. So Geppetto can’t figure out how to get out of this whale without help. So he’s kind of pushing up tombstones there, you might note. All right, now something very sophisticated happens here. And I have to explain it to you at multiple levels at the same time. So now Geppetto is hungry. And when the whale opens its mouth, a lot of fish come in. Now one of the things I want you to think about, you can just put this in the back of your mind, is that one of the oldest symbolic representations of Christ is a fish. And all of his followers were fishermen. And so there’s this weird relationship between the messianic figure who’s at the base of at least at the base of Christian culture, and the idea of things that are pulled up from the depths. Now here’s what happens in this part of the movie. It’s so amazing. So Geppetto is looking for fish. And the reason for that is he doesn’t think he can get out of the whale, and so he might as well have some fish while he’s in there. So he’s given up on getting out. Now what happens is that the whale swallows Pinocchio as if he’s a fish. So Pinocchio is put into the same category as fish. And it happens to Geppetto a couple of times. He mistakes Pinocchio for a fish. You’ll see. So what that means in some sense is that Geppetto can’t distinguish between the fish that will feed you for the day and whatever it is that Pinocchio represents. And so you can think about Pinocchio as a fisherman instead of as a fish. And so you can think about it this way. And here’s an old saying. If you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day. But if you teach him to fish, you feed him forever. So the idea is it’s better to develop the skill to acquire something than it is to have the thing. Now what Pinocchio represents is he’s like a meta fish. I know this is a strange way of thinking about it. Geppetto’s problem isn’t that he’s hungry. His problem is that he can’t get out of the whale. And so what he’s fishing for isn’t something to eat. It’s something that will help him get out of the whale. But he can’t recognize the difference between the proximate solution, which is so that he’ll just no longer be hungry. So he’s got a very short-term outlook, and a solution to the much broader problem. So what happens is the whale swallows a bunch of fish and Pinocchio’s in there and Geppetto’s fishing away and he catches Pinocchio. And Pinocchio announces himself and Geppetto tells him to be quiet because he’s interfering with him fishing. And he turns to hug Pinocchio because he wakes up. He actually hugs a fish and then he discards the fish. So then he figures out that Pinocchio’s there. Then Geppetto decides that, well, they’re going to have to live inside the whale. And it’s another idea of his blindness at this point because he’s composed of the dead past, so to speak. So what Pinocchio does is start to destroy the ship itself, which is what they’re floating in the whale, to start a fire. And the fire makes the whale mad enough to spit them out. And the whale then transforms itself into a dragon and tries to kill them because it’s a fire-breathing entity at that point. And so part of the understory is it’s better to figure out how to fish than to fish, or that more profoundly it’s better to figure out how to do something than to merely benefit from the thing itself. Pinocchio represents that which can do new things. So he’s a hero. And he’s willing to destroy part of the current order, that’s the ship, in order to produce a new strategy that will actually free them from the whale. Now he wants to get his father out of there too. So that’s what happens in the next five minutes, I would say. Hey, look! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Christine spews Plus Dog filter that 수중 Hey, what am I? Open up! I gotta get in there! You’re a smackin’ bastard! Here! What are you doing there? I’m gonna get you! Hey! Here’s another one! Hey, father! Father! Don’t be hard on me now, you know you are! I love you! Father! I love you! Hey, father! Here I am! Oh, so cute! Hey, father! You’re not supposed to catch cold! You shouldn’t have come down here! But I’m awfully tired to see you! Hey, father! Oh! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I’m sorry I’m so sorry! perfection and the individual in relationship to that archetype is always pathologically flawed and so the embarrassment of that realization which is exactly what’s happening to Pinocchio right now is often enough to stop people from doing it. So what that would say, to say what that means in some sense is that in order for you to mature in the fullest possible manner you have to understand the manner in which you’re deeply flawed in relationship to your potential as it might be historically determined and that’s a very bitter thing to do. It’s much easier, and people do this all the time, to engage in half-witted formulaic ideological criticisms of the system as a whole. It’s like the probability that the system is more flawed than you is pretty damn low. So you might want to start with getting rid of your donkeys in your tail and stop bringing nonsense before you judge the entire historical process by which human beings have come into being. So anyways, that’s kind of what that means. Oh, no, no, no. I have tried everything. Why, I didn’t learn a word. A word? That’s it. You’ve learned a word. And with a real open chest now. No, no, no, no. Now listen, he has opened his mouth when he sees. Then everything comes in. Nothing goes out. It’s hopeless, Pinocchio. Okay, so this is very interesting too. So Pinocchio ends up being a master of fire. Well you can think about that as there is a book written a while back by a primatologist who also wrote Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham. And he talked about the origin of fire. And as far as Wrangham is concerned, we invented fire about two million years ago. And that enabled us to cook food. And that enabled us to swap intestinal length for brain. So if you look at a chimpanzee, you know, chimpanzees are like the ultimate in couch potatoes, right? They’re about this high and they’re shaped like this. They have this huge barrel body. And the reason they have that is because they eat leaves. And so they have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves. They will eat meat if they can get it. They have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves and just chewing them over and over because like leaves, A, they don’t want to be eaten. So they’re pretty tough and inedible. And B, they don’t have any nutritive quality to speak of. So the chimpanzee has to spend all of its time chewing, which is rather mindless endeavor, all things considered. Whereas human beings two million years ago or thereabouts invented fire. And as a consequence of that, we could cook meat. And meat is incredibly energy rich. And so and it’s easy to digest once it’s cooked. And so the consequence of the invention of fire was that we’re the way we are today. We could have a brain instead of a gut. And so the idea that Pinocchio’s mastery of fire and it’s as something more than merely a means of cooking. That’s how it started out, right? But you can think of our entire technological capacity as stemming from the mastery of fire. Now the other thing you can think of, and this is very much worth considering, is that Pinocchio masters fire. And that turns the whale into a dragon. And so the idea there too is that, and this is an old idea, is that our technological prowess is something that makes nature itself angry. And of course you might say, well do you believe this? And the answer to that is, well how many of you have environmentalist leanings? And that’s exactly the story that you’re following. Because you’re still wondering about whether or not mastery of fire was in somehow against the natural order and then it will end up in all of our deaths. And you know that’s a reasonable thing to worry about. But not mastering it was going to end up pretty badly too. So here what happens is that in the midst of this complete chaos, Pinocchio has a choice. He can either save himself, which is a very very selfish choice, and reduces him to an ahistorical individual because he has no relationship left with his father, or he can put himself at great risk and rescue his father, finish the process, stop his father from drowning. And completely… Okay, so… Pinocchio dies, and then his father brings him home. And so because he’s rescued his father, the benevolent spirit of nature appears, resurrects him, and turns him into a real human being. So it’s pretty funny as far as I’m concerned that the answer to Nietzsche’s Greek question manifested itself in mid 1930s in the form of an animated child’s movie. So you know, that’s an example. It’s an example of a number of things. It’s an example of how archetypes work. It’s also an example of how artists are on the edge of discovery all the time, and they discover things they don’t even understand. So we’ll see you next Tuesday.