Silk Road Seminar: Jung, Meaning, and Cognitive Transformation

27:16If these things are natural and they're evolved and so on and so forth, right, then what limits does that subject archetypal forces to, to the extent there are such things? You know, questions like this. But yeah, I think it's a a large, weird, often countercultural, kind of fashionable way of accounting for a huge number of things that don't get accounted for in people's sort of day-to-day accounts very well. Does that track?

27:45Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah. Yeah. And before I let Kevin respond, I want to ask you a couple of clarifying questions. So it sounds, I mean, you're articulating it very beautifully as you're, as is often the case. Thank you. You made an allusion specifically and clearly to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, which are also going through revivals right now in very significant ways and intermeshed with the psychedelic Renaissance. So we can potentially talk about the connections to Jung there. But it seems to me that what you have in Jung is you have this, you have this, I don't know what to call it. I'm trying to use a neutral term here.

28:30Dr. John Vervaeke:You have this mixture of mythological forms of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. He doesn't really lay out any of Plotinus's arguments or anything like that, right? Even though he's making use of Proclus's notion of the one within is how we get to the one without. That's like very clearly there. you have that and so there's there's kind of a philosoph it's it's impregnated philosophically but it's it's imaginally available people can participate in it because it has a mythic structure not just a conceptual structure but there's also there's a mixture with a lot of scientific language and I you're right there's a shift but that that that that that desire to be doing science, it seems never completely goes away either in Jung.

29:21Dr. John Vervaeke:And he does keep binding himself to the emerging science of psychology. And I'm wondering if that's, is that convergent with what you're talking about? This mixture in Jung also makes him particularly attractive because it seems to legitimize people talking mythologically, having these kinds of experiences within their phenomenology, but nevertheless still feeling, whether or not it's accurate, we can talk about, but still believing or feeling that they're staying within the realms of scientific legitimacy without necessarily buying into any of the overarching institutions. Like, it seems that there's this kind of sweet spot that Jung is for people who are, you know, wrestling with the fact that the current scientific worldview has no ontological home in it for science or scientists.

30:25Dr. John Vervaeke:And of course, I've been arguing this for quite some time. And Frank Gleiser and Evan Thompson have argued it in the blind spot. Many other people are now making this claim. And so what do you think about that? That, you know, there's an attempt to not be prey to the blind spot. And Jung, at least, I don't know what, I'm trying to be neutral, right? Like there's a lot of material there that talks these multiple different languages that holds out the possibility of a way of rehoming everything that has been killed off in the cultural domicile that's been progressively happening since the European Enlightenment.

31:08Yeah. So, I mean, you know, as I said, I tend to view Jung as being, you know, on this sort of scale of… Completeness rather than consistency. Yeah, yeah.

31:20Dr. John Vervaeke:The Godelian trade-off. Relevance realization, right? Yeah, yeah, bingo. And, you know, whatever. This is probably projection in no small part. But I tend to see a certain kind of kinship in his approach with mine because I often think there are so many people working on the consistency problems. So it's okay to emphasize the completeness side of things a bit, right? Not to not to think that it's sort of over the top, but to say, you know what, let's include as much as possible and see if we can render some kind of clear idea of what's going on here in experience. You know, and so in that sense, Jung is willing to admit, you know, like I said, a lot of anomaly.

32:03Like he talks about a lot of things that are not sort of respectable in some sense. You know, he's got a an interesting, I don't think especially insightful, but kind of interesting chapter on UFOs from the 1950s. Right. Which would have been kind of a semi radioactive topic. You know, he talks about although this would have been considerably more credible at the time, but he talks about sort of parapsychology, which after J.B. Rine, you know, during that period, that would have been considered, you know, sort of respectable and largely established by many people. It was an area where they were seeing competition in the Cold War and where both sides were publishing.

32:39I have my own ideas about what happened around that. But the point is, there were a lot of edges of physical phenomena, plus the overturning of multiple systems of science. We had just had multiple revolutions. So we had the quantum revolution. We had relativity, both special and general. We had, well, Gödel. Right. We had all of these sort of revolutions of thought that were occurring around, you know, shortly before that period or leading up to it. So the idea that we might need to kind of overhaul our worldview was very much already in the air. And I think Jung is trying this this thing. You know, some of it also is.

33:21I think that in some ways he's coming at the kind of the meaning problem, as you're putting it, the meaning crisis, the meaning problem and less the poly crisis. in the broader sense, but he sort of references that down the line as it starts to be clear coming into the 60s that we're maybe going to be in some bigger trouble. You know, but a lot of the time when he's talking about that, he's almost come to it from the other side. Right. So whereas there's an attempt to sort of look at the large scale phenomenon and ask ourselves, like, why are there no why? Where is the meaning in this system? Where is the way that it generates explanations?

34:00Where do we live? Where are we embedded in the world? Jung sort of takes that disembeddedness as his first point, assumes that it's sort of must not be true in some sense, and then devotes himself to attempting to find some explanation of the actual phenomenology of the separation that we experience. And one of the reasons someone's late work is so provocative, I think, is that, you know, trying in a not especially philosophically deft fashion in some places, but he's trying to solve the mind-body problem. So he has big aims in that sense. He thinks that being able to overcome this gap in the mind-body problem might go towards restoring some sense of our embeddedness in the universe.

34:49So I think he comes to a similar place. And in a way, as a therapist, I think he couldn't miss it. Like with his own experiences, but also the kinds of experiences that his clients were going through, he was seeing these large scale traces. And he was interested in sort of large psycho scale forces, right, moving through the population and the collective, as well as the wave of those things were sort of transjectively reflected in individual psyche. And so I think he could see sort of big fifth swimming and understood what all of that, in a sense, gestured towards or implied that there was a particular movement happening in the collective psyche of the West, right?

35:35And that he could see what that was pointing towards kind of almost inevitably. But so I think he almost reaches, interestingly, similar kinds of positions from very different starting places than Cox's Eye. And he is difficult. Sorry, I'm talking and talking, but he is difficult to locate. He's not quite a philosopher. He's a clinician. He's quite philosophically literate, like he knows his way around, but doesn't often do the job of, you know, making his references and his arguments explicit. He's borrowing a little bit from here and there. He's quite synthetic. There's a creative component to his work.

36:09So he's doing automatic writing and channeled writing, right? The Seven Sermons of the Dead, the Red Book. Now that we've had a chance to look at the Black Books as well, you can see that his actual procedure is quite different than what you might think of as a sort of sanitized view of theory making, right? He is very much engaged in experiential experiments. And he's doing clinical work, right? Which has his aim, and I think he was an excellent clinician, right? Above and beyond the question of theorists. So he's a complicated figure. It's really hard to get a grasp in that sense. Yeah, I'm going to flip this over, though.

36:46Kevin, what do you think? I just want to say one thing and then I'll turn it over to Kevin.

36:51Dr. John Vervaeke:It seems to me that then that I think Jung is a religious figure. I think the category that comes closest is he's a prophet. And I don't mean that in the everyday sense of somebody who tells the future. He is somebody who is often using imaginal, mythological, provocative, and engaged in practice and individual transformation to try and disclose important patterns that he believes need to be addressed, acknowledged, and properly appreciated. And I mean prophet in that sense, in the proper biblical sense. Moses is a prophet. He never tells the future, right? Yeah. He's a nose twisting imp is what he is.

37:37He's a provocateur to some extent.

37:40Dr. John Vervaeke:And most prophets are too, like Socrates. Yes. So, I mean, it's so one of the things that's coming clear to me, I'm putting that out and I'm going to turn it over to Kevin, is it's not only that he is interested in and maybe legitimizing religion. He's actually, I think for many people, a properly religious figure. And that might also be a reason for why he is so attractive to many people at this time. So, Kevin, you've been very patient. Given everything that's been going on, quickly and easily summarize it and respond. I would say it's a struggle, right? Because I think, you know, at core, when you're looking at the founders of the depth psychologies, there is a subjective experience at the heart of it as well.

38:25And, you know, I'd like to think of the theorizing that occurs as not being devoid from them living the experiences and living the theories and trying them out in their everyday lives. So, I think earlier, there's something about the relationality, right? That we see the theories, but those theories aren't disembodied from the experience itself. He had a lot of issues with his father growing up, his father having lost his own faith. And yet, because of whatever pressures, kept persisting with his duties as a pastor. And for Jung, I think there was a real conflict between the more Protestant aspects of his upbringing.

39:04Can I have a direct relationship with that which I consider holy other? Or do I need organized religion to, as I think Anderson was saying, to kind of be that container, to provide that frame towards the numinous? Because I think for Jung, the original founders of the core religions at heart were containing that initial numinous experience. And for followers, what the religion actually entailed was that kind of containment, that frame to say that in the absence of that one-to-one connection, here is a framework through which you can live a life, perhaps a value, integrity, etc. etc. that might bring you closer to something or the realization of something we call the archetypal self.

39:50So I think with Jung at heart, there was that aspect. Now, where I think things go wrong is that kind of crisis of meaning that for him, religion ceases to hold and contain that original experience of the numinous. That's where Anderson, I think you hit the nail on the head where you get that kind of counter-cultural aspect in Jung. He doesn't want to take the stories as they are. He wants to reinvent them, reinvent them in terms of his vision of what wholeness actually looks like. So, if you look at his thinking and interpretation of the life of Christ and others, Edinger who came after Jung, but really in answer to Job as well, what you see is this very Gnostic representation of Jung's life, saying that, you know, the vision of Jesus that we get in John, well, that's just not it.

40:48you know, if we're looking to the synoptic gospels, there is someone who is absolutely struggling. Am I bringing an axe? Am I bringing a sword? Am I bringing love? And that's the aspect, if you will, that Jung wants to jump on, the kind of struggle, the innate tensions that we find in his psychology and in this experience of someone who is supposedly both human and divine. And I think he wants to kind of restore those humanistic aspects as the integrity of the struggle towards individuation. So, the interpretation for him goes is that, well, religion in and of itself or Christianity specifically has kind of split off evil, right?

41:27That evil is not within me anymore, it's actually cast out onto this figure of the devil and therefore we can preserve this image of Christ as being all good. And I think what he wanted to redeem and I think through his psychology as well is that sense that well actually it's a bit more of a complicated picture. And if we really want to bring religion forward to become that container again, that good enough, if you will, container, that it needs to be able to kind of integrate this fourth, if you will, to integrate this aspect that it's actually missing. I think he struggled through his whole life in terms of where he stood with organizational religion.

42:06I would say by 1957 in The Undiscovered Self, he's coming very, very close to saying, you know what, maybe we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe there is something still in organizational religion that we can take forward. Now we could argue this but you know, Richard Knoll especially but others would say that what Jung was trying to do was to say in the absence of a religious approach that could hold and contain the numinous, psychotherapy is now there as the answer. So perhaps that's something we can reflect on. Is that something he did purposely or is it just by dint of the fact that Jung's own approach to the depth psychology's integrated that kind of aspect of unknowing?

42:55To say that in addition to let's say the more kind of hard science and knowing aspects, there is always a sense that we also have to let the unconscious lead as well. That there's something we will never know. So then you have that tension within Jung when he talks about the archetypal self of dangers of the self going two ways, right? That you can completely identify with the self and be overwhelmed with the self thinking that you are God. Or the other aspect of it is that the ego that actually subsumes the self, where we don't actually allow any room or agency of the unconscious to actually guide us and to show us what we are missing in our lives, to have that compensatory function to say, hey, you know there are things that are yet unlived that we need to pay attention to

43:44Dr. John Vervaeke:that was excellent Kevin I'm so glad you're here so first of all and we'll reverse order we'll go Kevin then Anderson I want to make a couple comments and then I want to bring up a couple challenges because we've spent a lot about why Jung is attractive but I want to take a look at why it's fair to say that many people, many people who work on religion, religious studies, the psychology of religion, cognitive science of religion, generally neglect or dismiss Jung. And I want to put out a couple of the usual challenges that are offered. But first of all, I want to observe a couple of things here.

44:28Dr. John Vervaeke:This, as Kevin so beautifully put it, um this this getting this right balance i mean this is drew highland has argued this is the central theme running through platonism and neoplatonism which is what he calls finite transcendence that plato is always trying to get us to orient that we hold the tonos the tension between our finitude and our transcendence we just adopt our transcendence or identify with it we become hubristic tyrants we just we just identify with our finitude we neglect our dignity and we because of our potential relationship to what is ultimate, and we become servile and slaves.

45:06Dr. John Vervaeke:But if we hold the two together, we avoid becoming slaves and we avoid enslaving others. And we can lead, Plato's, the core of his approach is to always, always push for finite transcendence. And I see Jung as like rejuvenating that, especially the way Kevin put it. I think the ego self relationship is his way of trying to give people a more, and I mean, this is a compliment, by the way, a more concrete practice around finite transcendence. And I think that's something very valuable in Jung. So I want to, I want to praise him. I think also like, um, you know, you're both making use of Jung's always wrestling with the opposites.

45:48Dr. John Vervaeke:Um, and of course he also brings in, you know, famously from Nicholas of Cusa and Neoplatonists, the coincidence of the opposites, a neoplatonic theme. And of course, we're now seeing, I mean, I mean, I can't do this without talking about myself, but the idea of opponent processing is core to relevance realization. It's showing up now and being acknowledged as needed for predictive processing. There's all the work you can read it in, you know, how does life work? That this opponent processing goes all the way down. And I think this is a way in which Jung is deeply prescient, but I think it's another way in which he again gives people more concrete, practicable ways of trying to realize the coincidence of the opposites.

46:35Dr. John Vervaeke:If you read Nicholas of Cousa, that's hard. It's hard. He does a few images, but most of the time it's like, whoa, this is really hard. And so I see Jung also serving as a viable bridge to the depths of Neoplatonism, which I think is the alternative ontology that's reemerging. So I've praised Jung now. Now I want to say, bring out some standard challenges, especially around the issue of religion. We'll hear from Kevin first this time, and I'll interact a bit with Kevin and then we'll pass it to you, Anderson. So a couple of standard criticism is Jung psychologizes religion and this guts religion, because whatever religion is, it is a community process.

47:19Dr. John Vervaeke:It is a collective intelligence and a distributed cognition. It's not the dyadic process of psychotherapy. It is things, right? It's not individualized practice or even didactic. It's about whole communities. And that if you're not providing something that is properly addressing that and affording it, then you are missing something crucial. I won't say essential for obvious reasons, but something crucial or key to many religions. Religions are their collective intelligence distributed cognition models. 4E cog sci is very big on this because extended cognition is part of the 4Es. So that's one standard criticism.

48:04Dr. John Vervaeke:And then aligned with kind of a psychologism criticism, if I can put it that way, is a perennialism criticism, which is what Jung is saying that at its heart, all religions are having the same experience or maybe even saying the same thing. And perennialism, that kind of, well, there's two kinds of perennialism, but I'll concentrate on this, right? That kind of propositional or phenomenological perennialism, the idea that they're saying the same thing or they're having the same experience has been brought under some very devastating critiques, like very, very powerful, right? You know, like saying that this thing in Japan and this thing in ancient Egypt are both the tricksters, like, come on, that's really, it's only true if you're irredeemably vague.

48:59Dr. John Vervaeke:You're both familiar with these criticisms, but I think I want to hear, I want to hear your answers. Now, I myself think that constructivism, the alternative, is just a form of process perennialism. The constructivist just says, there are perennial things. They're not propositions or pictures. They're processes. And just the way evolution is a perennial process that produces a wide and ever widening variety of products. It doesn't produce homogeneity or sameness, but it produces a dependence on the same processes. So I think there's a possibility that Jung could potentially be redeemed if we see him as a process perennialist rather than a product or a proposition or picture.

49:51Dr. John Vervaeke:So, Kevin, those are the two main things. Psychological reduction, which moves something core to religion, which is community. And community is one of the things lost, damaged in the meaning crisis. And the other is perennialism. Perennialism, it looks almost imperialistic. Standard perennialism. So, there's two central critiques, and they have to do with religion. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. First thing that comes to mind, the little spat between Jung and Martin Buber. Oh, yes. they had where you know much of what you're saying john was articulated by boober i.e that what jung is doing is reducing um the the real core value if you will of religion and religious symbolism to kind of psychological archetypal imperatives right that if anything he's kind of seeing religion through the lens of his psychology as another way to prove the efficacy of his psychology and i think there there is a certain element of that and i think what buber also um throws at jung is that you know you don't really understand a real kind of um oh hey anderson you know his level of understanding is kind of confined to the i it relationship rather than the i-thou relationship right right i think there's there's a lot there um that is actually of value Now, in terms of the kind of more collective communal aspects of religion versus perhaps what you find in a traditional therapeutic setting of this kind of dyad, right?

51:37In terms of where that transformation occurs. I guess the question that I would pose is whether or not there has always been a relational aspect to Jung's thinking. So, even if, and then it's then a question of, well, what do you need from Jung and what version of Jung abides, you know, do you abide by that kind of reflects of what you want to take out of Jung. If I'm looking at his definition of individuation, yes, of course, you know, you have those definitions where it's this kind of one-on-one historical, sorry, struggle with oneself, this heroic struggle with oneself, right? To kind of dig to the depths, to find that core, to bring it back into consciousness, all those good things.

52:22But equally, there are elements of his definition of individuation where he makes the distinction between individualism versus individuation, right? Where individualism is something about your own kind of subjectivity and proclivities, whereas real individuation is a way of bringing the world to oneself and thinking about the value one can actually bring to the world in return. And what you see, especially with a lot of post-Jungian thinking now, is that relational turn. That's what we want to emphasize in Jung. Because ultimately, for me in particular, that individuation doesn't happen alone.

53:01It happens in relationship to others. It happens within communities itself. And I think there are even developments in terms of perhaps classical symbols, if you will, of the self, like trees, where, you know, recent research, debatable, you know, whether people want to see how concrete and how effective it is. But there are strands of thinking that will actually, even if you look at a forest, trees are actually communicating with each other through the mycorrhizal network, right? And if anything, there is a community of support that's actually occurring, which then I think leans more heavily into that relational aspect of Jung-Yin thinking.

53:42So, that's one thing. In terms of the perennialism, yes, absolutely agree. I think it's there. This is something I really had to struggle with in terms of my own journey and understanding of Jung that when we say, you know, if you look at historical instances and I think you frame this really well, John, that this is the same as this is the same as this and yet we kind of jump historical time and context and it all gets poo-pooed and thrown out. And I think that is really, really difficult to take and I think for those who abide or follow Jungian and post-Jungian thought, this is something one really needs to reflect on.

54:21You know, is Jung's archetypal hypothesis the culprit that prevents a more constructive dialogue with sociology, the social sciences, etc. Because you know, ultimately there are connections but what are the stumbling blocks that are actually happening? For me, they're different. Now, there are theories, ideas that have developed that might give credence to what some would call the cultural unconscious. Now, I've had a debate with others about who came up with the idea first of this kind of more historical layer, if you will. I think there is something in this idea of the cultural unconscious because it sits within i.e.

55:01the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. So, there's something, if you will, in the soup that we're brought up in that actually helps define us, actually helps construct those patterns, those expectations in terms of our behaviors, in terms of what we need to produce, if you will, in terms of our persona to kind of fit within society itself. So, for me, again, it's more about adapting Jung's thinking and leveraging on those aspects that might bring us into that greater, wider conversation, John, that I think you're trying to promote in Anderson as well. Now, in terms of that more constructivist aspect, quite a few people have talked about this.

55:42The one paper that comes to mind is by Louis Zincon. He wrote a paper published in the JAP, The Self. Did you find it or did you construct it? It was something along those lines. And I think ultimately what he was arguing in that paper was that before we begin to have that internal conversation with oneself, that in the first instance was a relational conversation that we had with our primary caregivers.

56:09Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, Vygotsky. Yes, yes. Yes. And that becomes the imprint for us to have that and the capacity that allows us to have that internal conversation. So again, I would agree that there's that relational aspect and relational turn in Jung that I think is so important and in psychoanalysis in general. And I think it's really important that we kind of turn our attention to that. Thank you, Kevin. I just want to observe that the idea of this interdependent loop, chicken and egg thing between the external and the internal dialogues, again, is a rich platonic theme. so you've got you know Plato has got you've got the the inner dialogue between the tripartite soul but there's the outer dialogue with Socrates and other interlocutors always going on the circumambulation another theme that Jung got I think pretty directly from Plato so I appreciate that and I think I think what you said is extremely helpful so for you both of you I want to hear from you first Kevin and Anderson don't forget your response to the initial two set of problems I've got a pin in it but both of you I mean you've labeled it specifically Anderson self-labeled and Kevin you're alluding to it I think there's kind of like there's talk about Neil Jungians, post-Jungians, right?

57:42Dr. John Vervaeke:And I'm not claiming your authorities, but you know more than I do. I know the difference between Kantianism and Neo-Kantianism, and I know the difference between Platonism and Neo-Platonism. I don't really know the difference between Jungianism and Neo-Jungianism or post-Jungianism. What are some of the central things? Are they the kind of things you're talking about, Kevin? Are those some of the... What distinguishes it? What makes it neo, to put it in a sentence? Yeah, yeah. No, this is really interesting. So I think there's been a real push by some colleagues to try to systematize and to understand the kind of diversity of Jungianisms, if you will.

58:25And I think it started with our colleague Andrew Samuels around the 1980s. I think Jungian and the Post-Jungians was published in 84. He brought Australians. Yeah, if I remember correctly. And you know, his explanation was that, you know, he was one of the youngest trainees ever to be accepted into the SAP and what he saw was this kind of plethora of diversity. And in order for him to begin to understand where things were, he tried to create a structure, right? He tried to kind of create the different schools of thought and that's where you get this initial distinction between the classical Jungian school of thought, the developmental which I would say is more located within the United Kingdom, the rapprochement, if you will, with psychoanalysis, really kind of leveraging on the relationships that Michael Fordham forged with Winnicott and various other psychoanalytic thinkers.

59:18So, you have that perhaps more focus on the childhood aspects that you might not get in the more classical. And then you have the archetypal school, which would be more of James Hillman focusing on the image, focusing on the phenomenological. He revised that structure as well. So, it's a bit of a complex picture. But suffice it to say, someone comes in, wants to understand the variation within a particular field and discipline, both in terms of clinical practice, but also thinking and theorizing as well. Now, Anderson, you might be able to say a bit more about neo-Junganism, but I think there's a kind of development and confusion that's actually happening.

1:00:02So, correct me if I'm wrong, but really the original term kind of stems from Robert Moore. And what he was trying to do was kind of create the structure in terms of the psychology of masculinity and saying that there are kind of four archetypes within the development of a mature masculine personality. And the way the ego needs to position itself is to be able to kind of activate those energies, magician, warrior, lover, royalty. King. Yeah, exactly. Now, where the complexity happens, John, is that there's a colleague and a good friend of mine, Stefano Carpani, who's actually utilized the term to kind of move beyond the post-Jungians.

1:00:51So, if you're looking at a timeline, if you will, what he's saying is that we have the classical Jungians, we have the post-Jungians and now the post-Jungian era is actually complete and dead and we're moving into the neo-Jungians. And that neo-Jungian era is actually those scholars, thinkers, clinicians who are not purists, right? Who are not afraid to play with other theories and to be open, if you will, to that kind of mutuality and exchange with other ideas and other fields. So in a sense, that kind of pure classical unionism is actually diluted, but in that process of dilution is actually enriched, right?

1:01:32And perhaps building that stronger bridge to other disciplines.

1:01:35Dr. John Vervaeke:Thank you, Kevin. Anderson, both on what Kevin said and also the two challenges I sort of posed. Right. So actually, I thought that was a really terrific summary of the kind of post-union through Samuels. Thank you, Kevin. That was really good. The couple of streams that I might add, and it's hard to say, I don't think this quite applies as Neo-Jungian, but after we get the archetypal school, there are reactions to that. Wolfgang Gigerich, for instance, is a pretty sharp reaction to people like Hillman. And he has things like the soul's logical life, where he's undertaking a particular kind of take.

1:02:17I tend to see that stuff as being, in no small way, in counterpoint to the kind of neo-Jungian strain that wants to say, well, maybe we can actually interrogate this and put it into dialogue with other disciplines in this way, right? And, you know, not to overgeneralize, but the early classical school, insofar as Jung was something of a conduit for religious sentiment, religious contact in some way, the numinous, right? The early kind of classical schools tended to canonize a bit. And that tendency, I think, has fallen away in the later neo-Junion. So, you know, the way that I personally shorthanded is just to say, well, at least 50 % of every theory I've ever encountered was wrong.

1:03:06And so, you know, He might be a genius, but that doesn't give him it doesn't give him privileged infallibility. Right. And it may be that there are conflations happening between languages of training and languages of explanation. Yes. And it may be that his rhetorical emphases for various historical reasons are are off. You know, when it goes to that first concern, the concern that, you know, in some sense, it's a it's a very dyadic, inward turned, you know, doesn't sort of concern itself with, you know, communitas or what have you. You know, I think that, in fact, you know, although the work is performed in that space, the subject of the work being transjective is necessarily socially entangled.

1:03:55So one of the things, if we consider the complex as being sort of a cornerstone concept, right, is the idea that the complexes project.

1:04:09Right.

1:04:32the analysis, the withdrawal of the projection, or frankly, just getting your ass ticked by having made that projection, that you are learning about the inner machinery, right? In some, machinery is probably not the best term because he was very sort of organic in his take. But, you know, the idea is that that projective mechanism is constantly engaged socially. That is how you are learning about yourself in part through your interactions with others. So, I mean, it's important to note, and we really have lost sight of, I think. I was talking about this in class last week, but, you know, Jung held pretty firmly for most of his life that the kind of work that he was talking about, the kind of inner work he was talking about, was the second half of life kind of thing.

1:05:14You were supposed to engage in your mundane, you know, whatever worldly stuff before you ever started looking at these problems. He has a curious passage someplace where he says, you know, of the few people that have started to examine individuation in their 20s, they all died soon afterwards. It's like, what are we supposed to do with that, right? In my experience, that's not true. People have, you know, meaning issues well, well before they hit 35. But you know, he is pretty clear. It's almost, you know, I think of it as being akin to the rule that says you can't run for leadership unless you're at least 40.

1:05:50The idea is that there has to be some worldly encounter under your belt before you're even in a position to start sorting out that transjective distinction and trying to figure out what's outside and what's inside so it's inherently social right the material is going to come from that engagement um you know the the other thing that i would say as far as the perennialism is concerned is yeah i mean he is certainly guilty of that to some extent he's riding you know he's riding a high wave of modernism and you you look at people that surround him and they're thinking very yeah right auto but even people in you know sort of um adjacent fields talking in very similar ways like north of fry who of course claimed you know in his modernist take on you know the tropes and archetypes that are guiding myths and story right he claimed to not have a lot of influence from you know i find that hard to believe and uh you know there are there are some things that i've heard about what was found in his library after his death, but we won't get into that.

1:06:52So, you know, the thing is that he's in this very modernist period. Again, I think some of that is a certain kind of emphasis that he's placing. And he, I mean, it would have been good probably if Jung had read some Wittgenstein, right? He read Hegel, he read Nietzsche, you know, you can see these threads, you can see Plato, you can see Socrates, you can see, you know, pre-Socratic threads, you can see a lot of his reading and learning in there and a sophisticated play of metaphysics ideas. But, you know, the concept of family resemblance rather than concept essentialism is something that he models at, but doesn't kind of have the same intellectual rigor, maybe, as Wittgenstein does when he approaches it as a family resemblance kind of thing, right?

1:07:40And so he doesn't have an easy way to talk about the question of similarity. Instead, what he ends up doing in no small part is defaulting back to something that really owes to ideas like the doctrine of signatures and concepts of correspondence, right? These analogically driven explanatory frameworks

1:07:57Dr. John Vervaeke:that - But also, also contient a priori imposition, right? Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. So, you know, some of that is true. Now, on the other hand, you know, one of the objections that that I've made is that both Jung and to a great extent, the people who have followed his work afterwards have put, for instance, enormous emphasis on integration, right? Integration of psychic contents. But if you, I think if you give a really close reading to the texts, what you find out is that that rhetorical emphasis on integration, right, is in practice matched with emphasis on differentiation. It puts him into a very different kind of situation where he's, yes, there is an attempt to find integrative higher categories, synthetic categories to be able to reconcile things.

1:08:48But there is also all this differentiation happening. And it doesn't tend to get the same kind of attention because it's sort of the background of analysis that is happening, that we're pulling these things apart first.

1:09:00Dr. John Vervaeke:So do you think, you know, current ideas about complexification. I've talked about this at length. So some of my, you know, students, online students will be familiar with this. A system is complexifying if it's simultaneously integrating and differentiating, and you get emergent functions and you get self-transcendence baked into the very dynamics of things. Do you think that's appropriate better? Well, so that is how I tend to read things also, which is that, you know, the process of individuation such as he seems to describe it, right, from his perspective, if we're not sort of wrapping it up into a, you know, an easy package, which he resists doing quite a lot, right, trying to give the like, here is the simple checklist, or here is the easy map, you know, he's quite resistant to this.

1:09:49When you look at his actual practice, it seems pretty clear that what he's doing is something like simultaneous differentiation and integration, he's attempting to foreground the notion that really there is kind of a community of agents operating within the psyche and that, you know, our greater sense of, you know, self-being and wholeness and the lack of conflict comes in no small part from smoothing out the interior society, right, to make the inner court function harmoniously, too, right? And so when you start looking at things that way, you know, simultaneous integration in differentiation is complexification is specialization.

1:10:32And so I tend to read individuation in that way. It's like if you are constantly creating these differentiations, but also reconciling them and attempting to synthesize the opposites, what does that mean? And to me, it means both, you know, synthesizing sort of higher dimensional perspectives, right? A little bit like, you know, binocular integration, right? There are depths of reality, but but also in some sense recognizing the the play of process and so in that sense john i would agree with you it's a it's a process thing it's not just about reaching some particular final crystallized situation it's not about you know shadow work is not about taking your shadow and mashing the whole thing into your ego that's not what it's that's not what's happening it's about a continuous overturn of materials, which changes the ego and also changes the shadow.

1:11:29It's just not as simple as let's mash it all together and then we're done. So in that sense, I think that there are places where, and I suspect that this is going to be some of the edge of scholarship, where we're actually seeing a difference between Jung's actual procedures, the things that we saw him do. This is why I find the Black Books so interesting, for instance, is they're really this sketchy notebook version of his own inner experience, his own experiments, right? Not even the somewhat polished version of the Red Book, which has the pretty paintings and stuff to go with it, right? Important imaginal work, but we see the raw points of contact in what he's doing.

1:12:10And looking at that, it seems very clear to me that it's like, ah, he is creating separations or acknowledging separations within the psyche, trying to bridge those, but not with an eye to eradicating them, not with an eye to fusing everything in some sense.

1:12:24Dr. John Vervaeke:So a potential universal perennial process would be, you know, complexification of the psyche, both internal and external, in order to better couple to the complexity of reality, the ongoing dynamic complexity of reality. And this is a universal theme that more and more people are talking about across many disciplines. that, and you both pointed to that, you know, Jung is coming alive, you know, at a time in which the complexity of reality is returning to center stage after we had this long project of trying to reduce and simplify our ontology as much as possible. That basically gets smashed, and we're sort of reeling with that now.

1:13:15Dr. John Vervaeke:Gentlemen, go ahead, one quick point. We're not we're not ending what we need to do is we need to open ourselves up to questions from uh our watchers but go ahead i'm just going to say well a couple i'll say them very quickly which is um you know we i think it's worth looping back to this concept of the universals right human universals and to what extent those are establishable and exist because i think that is his starting point and the material our research around that there has to be yeah that's right That's right. You're just giving descriptions. And unless there's some complexification, unless there's some distinction and generalization going on, you're not offering explanations.

1:13:55Dr. John Vervaeke:You're merely describing. So, yes. So I think Jung's attempt at the time to frame the discussion beginning in human universals is an attempt to form a stable, homogenous class of psychic life, right? The basic components that are shared, right? And so on and so forth. I think that that is really important to the project, whether or not it's, you know, ultimately the things that he's dealing with are constructed or found. He's interested in these human universals. That tends to be sort of my jumping off point. But okay, but I'll cap it there because we got to open it up. And I do think replacing the notion of essence with stability and metastability is also the turn that is happening right now.

1:14:41Dr. John Vervaeke:People are saying, don't look for an essence, look for how stability is realized. Because stability is a transjective phenomenon. And then of course there's metastability, which is a developmental way of understanding stability. And there have been quite a few connections between dynamical systems theory and Jung and developmental theory and dynamical systems. So there's a possible conversation there. We're going to have to do this again, I see, but we have to now also open ourselves up to some potential questions. Ben, are you there? Are you going to be able to help us with some questions? If you're asking a question, you can put it into the chat.

1:15:23Dr. John Vervaeke:Could you please let us know if you're directing the question to one of us, two of us, all of us, like do you want to ask a question of Kevin, Anderson, myself, or a question directed to all of us or potential combinations therein. Okay. So Benjamin's going to help us out here. So we'll take one, maybe two, depending on their length, questions that anybody might have from YouTube. And then we'll move to Riverside. I'll read the question out because it usually comes up on my screen. I would love to hear you guys talk about the overlap between internal family systems and Jung's theory. This would be for all of you, any of you.

1:16:02Dr. John Vervaeke:I love this question, but I'll let let's let Kevin go first on this it's his turn and then we can bring it to Anderson and then I'll comment on it so internal fantasy I'm not too familiar with this so I would actually be very happy to kind of join in the conversation if someone else fair enough Kevin I'm sorry I didn't mean to be presumptuous why don't you go last last and Anderson you can go first and then I'll go sure Okay. So, so. Anderson, and I think appropriate, and this is relevant to a lot of my online students and some of the criticisms I get online. Can you loop in ally work? Because you're also the person that made me familiar with that.

1:16:49Dr. John Vervaeke:That was very helpful to me. Sure. Sure. Although that's a big extra loop. Okay. But so internal family systems, you know, it's, it's interesting. When I first encountered IFS, you know, I had sort of a surge of mention among, you know, students and colleagues and so on and so forth. And, you know, so I went and picked up, I forget, self-therapy, which is typically the intro text. And as I was reading it through, you know, I had maybe a little bit of, I don't know, whatever, neo-Jungian defensiveness or something. I read through about halfway and thought to myself, what the heck? This is just depth psychology with the serial numbers filed off.

1:17:30Dr. John Vervaeke:that was how i initially felt repeatedly claims that he has not read or been influenced by young that's i so i i have whatever i'm not allowed i don't want to be engaging in anything in that sense yeah suffice it to say that i have whether or not it was um it could be converging maybe maybe it was yeah maybe it was convergent and it to the to the extent that we're talking about universals that makes it more likely that it's convergent yeah and given that i think that we are multiple beings. I think that lots of cultures and persons have discovered that fact and interacted with it in different ways.

1:18:06But my initial experience was, okay, wait a minute, though. This is just, it's depth work. And so initially I was quite resistant. And then gradually I tried to soften my position because that's the thing I tried to do. I tried to be charitable. And what I realized was that in no small part, yes, IFS was playing in similar territory, but it was doing so in a way that was considerably more accessible and palatable to the average person.

1:18:31Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, the writing things down as opposed to trying to do them in visualization, that was powerful for me. That was powerful for me. Yeah, and lots of Jungians had used writing-based practices, but part of it is, I think, the change in the language. There is a simplified modern language version of parts. It breaks them down to categories. It gives distinct and specific procedures. Now, I think that the core of those procedures is, in fact, in my experience, somewhat incomplete, which is to say that it is an excellent intro to parts work, but breaks down, in my opinion, once you start to move deeper into parts work, you start to encounter things that frankly are, in some sense, anomalous.

1:19:15As happened to me. Yes, and me. So, you know, so the idea is that there is a more simplified form of parts work going on. There are exiled parts, right, which are parts that have been broken off in some sense, you know, like structural dissociation to contain your pain, or otherwise, you know, keep some psychic aspect from you. There are guard figures whose job is to interrupt. And again, I think there are strong associations there with things like structural dissociation, where you can view different parts in their operation and activity on the formation of consciousness. They can do things like introduce dissociative effect.

1:19:56And in my general experience, when you're sort of doing complex tracking, you look for a few things. You look, of course, for the basic irrational discontinuity of will. Why did I do that? What was I thinking? Why did I behave that way? You look for these kinds of breaks. You look for things that seem to be disproportionate or inappropriate. In what way does this just not fit? Why am I having such a strong reaction? Why are they behaving in this peculiar way? In what sense is this echoed developmentally? But in what sense does it reflect other kinds of things? So it gives you this kind of, you know, in a sense.

1:20:38I sometimes compare it to the solar system model of the atom. OK.

1:20:43Dr. John Vervaeke:Oh, that's interesting. Because the solar system model of the atom is largely wrong. But yes, but but it's what Elgin calls a felicitous fiction. It ushers you to a place and it gives you skills and orientations and perspectives that then make it possible for you to go into the more quantum picture of the atom. Yes. Yeah. So I sometimes think of it similarly, which is to say, I usually borrow from the Buddha side and say, you know, not to equate or conflate or equivocate on individuation and enlightenment. I want to be clear. I think those are distinct things, you know, even if those are unitive categories themselves.

1:21:26But yeah, I think there's a Trojan horse effect in some ways, but certainly clinically, that's true, right? There is often enormous resistance to the practices. You do something that is not too emotionally triggering so that you can do that and get inside a space where people can accept this anomaly without it triggering a rejection of whatever, intercategorical stuff or whatever right it's horror yeah yes yeah it gives a it gives a nice little container but you know in the same way as you know whatever reason you're pursuing enlightenment is wrong yeah right just by definition it's wrong when you get to the finish line you realize just how wrong you were about the project there is something of that in individuation i think too One of the things that IFS, I think, does that's really clever is, to be honest, remove the self largely from discussion.

1:22:24Right. So it's there in broad gestures.

1:22:27Dr. John Vervaeke:One of my criticisms, though, the ontology of itself and the seed of consciousness, there's these two functions, the seed of consciousness and the self that are – their ontology – because we don't – their structure and their function is unclear. Their ontology is very unclear. And that affects practice. That affects practice because people are always struggling around blending. Am I blended or not and stuff like that? Right. Right. So so this is actually where I think your model of the atom piece, right, the planetary model of the atom is appropriate. You know, when I was in high school chemistry, right, I can remember, right, going through high school chemistry.

1:23:08And at some point, you know, you learn the raisin bun, Rutherford's raisin bun. You learn the planetary model. And at some point I said to my my dear chemistry teacher, who was very tolerant of me, like, why are we learning any of this nonsense? like this is all wrong it's all wrong and we know and his answer of course was yeah okay but you build up and you topple and you build up and you topple and people are going to have a limit not everybody in this you know a lot of people in this classroom are going to be concerned with practical questions of chemistry not questions about what an eigenvalue really means yeah right and so you know you you you tailor and you introduce you move essentially speaking towards the kind of uncanny, right?

1:23:50Versions of this is through. And I think IFS is a bit like that. From a marketing perspective, I think it's actually clever that it steers away from this. It doesn't load people down with gobs of, you know, Greek that they need to decipher, you know, exotic terms drawn from the esoteric, right? For some people, that's a feature, but for others, it's a bug. And it removes, you know, sort of in its procedures, a lot of the things that are places where people typically stick on what is perceived woo. Yeah. Right. Now, obviously, you know, you're at some level having conversations with yourself. So that's a non-starter with some percentage of the population, right?

1:24:30Right away. Just the idea of having conversations with yourself as being, you know, something that might be productive or, or, you know, illuminating.

1:24:39Dr. John Vervaeke:It's not, it's not a scientific position though, to my mind. Right. Right. So my experience with IFS is it's a terrific introductory framework for parts work. And it can pull people in the door when, frankly, sometimes you're dealing with an uphill battle. In my own practice, sometimes people are coming because they love the weird. Those people tend to be highly tolerant of ambiguity, often high openness. There are certain personality traits to go with it. And I'm among that, right? I have a certain curiosity for that kind of thing. But I also recognize that for most people, it's just too weird.

1:25:18It's just too weird. It's, you know, you start by talking to somebody about like, well, you know, the issues that you need to work out in your romantic life, and you end up talking about the divine marriage, the high rose gamos, right? Like, it's just, it's too much for people to handle in one go. So it gives a very nice thing. And when it starts to hit sort of what I would think of as diminishing returns, at that point, it needs to open up to what you might call a supraconscious or the more developed unconscious functions. So the unconscious functions perhaps that are facilitating development or implicated in that, right?

1:25:54So yeah, that's kind of where I see the two in overlap. I think IFS is a brilliant way to reintroduce parts work into the conversation uh in some ways without having to scrape young off its

1:26:08Dr. John Vervaeke:shoe i i like this but i've already made the ontological critique of these two things that are highly functional but are not really explained well the seat of consciousness and and the self yeah um and how that just how how those are distinguished from internalized role models of wisdom and so forth. You know, it is not I who live, but Christ lives within me. Is that a guardian? Is that the self? Like all that sort of stuff. And that brings me to one of my deepest criticisms. There's a sense of a single level or degree of sensed presence. And the work of Anderson Day in his book on presence makes it abundantly clear that that's not how sensed presence works.

1:26:50Dr. John Vervaeke:Sensed presence goes from the sensed presence of your hand to people having full-blown experiences a third man factor, something external to you that comes up in a very traumatic situation and speaks to you and alleviates, right? And I had such an encounter when I was doing IFS and the IF machinery was not available. It had nothing because it's sort of saying there's the same sort of phenomenological tone, a constant phenomenological tone to sense presence. I think that is just simply false in terms of the scientific work that Anderson Day has gathered together in his book. And in terms of some of the things that actually happened to me in practice, that's why, and Anderson helped me a lot because when that happened, I'm talking, of course, with my encounters with Hermes, he helped me a lot by pointing me to the work of RAF and ally work about that, try to give a more comprehensive ontology and a continuum of sensed presence or at least something consistent with the continuum of sense presence that I found lacking in pure IFS.

1:27:58Dr. John Vervaeke:Is that fair, Anderson, to say that? Yeah, I think so. You know, Raph's got a particular take. I recommend reading it. I'm not endorsing him without question. I'm just pointing out a particular story. I wouldn't think so. Endorsing that question, I assume it's not something anybody's doing. But, yeah, I mean, so I find myself on the fence sometimes, I must say, right? You know, and I think this is a reasonable question as to whether, you know, in some sense, you know, exploring the unconscious and the imaginal and working with figures in this way, etc., is, you know, exploratory or constructive.

1:28:42And I have, you know, reasonable ideas in both directions. Part of me says if you treat a process as person-like, you are perhaps granting it access to the very faculties that allow it to express itself that way. So it might be a constructed practice. But one of the things – It's probably constructed both within and without, right? That's what I – yes, right. Right. You know, and so in that sense, you know, one of the things I think that's striking about sort of the margins, the outer edges that I think IFS maybe doesn't speak to easily, right, that you're pointing out, is that. Is that, yeah, the felt experience just doesn't fall very well into the explanation, doesn't feel like broken bits.

1:29:26It feels like something, you know, perhaps more integrated, differently integrated. I think a lot of that is prefigured in sort of modern dream work. When you look at dream work in the German schools.

1:29:39Dr. John Vervaeke:Lucid dream and Foley's work. But I was going to say to you, but this encounter with sense presence, this is – but this – in religion, this is a much more common thing, right? Right. And that's why I find and it's no coincidence that Ralph often uses more religious example to try and point out what he's talking about. Yeah. I mean, the thing is that I think for Jung and certainly, you know, my experience is that I just I had encounters with things that were difficult to categorize. right and then you know personally i had the option to either say okay this represents a broad dysfunction in my perception of reality right or what's happening to me or something but nevertheless i'm having these experiences and they seem coherent they strike me as intelligible they seem to have a a complexity and a you know a set of coherent operations that are distinct from my consciousness and I seem to be encountering them rather than creating them, right?

1:30:45You start to move into the space and the sort of the autonomous or semi-autonomous nature of these factors becomes very clear. And in some ways, I don't think that it strikes me as if anything, kind of weirdly controversial that we hang on to the idea that we're youthful. Yeah. That's where I've gotten to.

1:31:02Dr. John Vervaeke:It's a holdover from modernity and a certain take on pre-modern notions of the soul as an individualized substance and stuff like that. Yes. And a hangover, I suspect, of modern individualized society. Oh, of course. That's what I'm saying, that too. Right. Yeah. But, you know, I think Jung was having these encounters and then attempting and seeing them and attempting to find something that could incorporate them. ifs i think maybe it is actually just sort of trojan horse concerned in getting people through the door and that is my experience a lot of the time you do this work it's you know it's hard to get people to start to do this kind of thing but it starts gently and then at some point things take a turn where it really starts to emphasize the serious aspect of the serious play like it stops being it stops being you messing around with your mental contents and all of a hits you with something that is very difficult to account for.

1:31:58And I think IFS gets you to that threshold, but thereafter, you know, you're sort of stuck trying to engage. Yeah. Start trying to engage things. So, yeah, sorry. That's been talking and talking. Kevin, I'm curious. Yeah. Is that enough? Do you have enough of a like implicit sense of IFS?

1:32:14Dr. John Vervaeke:We'll let Kevin talk. And that will unfortunately be our only question from YouTube, and then we'll move to Riverside. Sure, sure. Lots of things. Thank you so much. really helpful description of the framework. So, I guess, you know, I had a few questions in mind. It sounded like a structure, right? A methodology for engaging those unconscious contents. And in many ways, it struck me, the term that came to mind is active imagination light, right? But what I was hearing also like a very dangerous aspect that it takes you through the doorway, but it doesn't give you the tools when you actually meet something potentially powerful.

1:32:54Bigger than your head. Exactly, right? That then it's like, well, we didn't want to, you know, it's up to you now. So, it's always like, you know, we wash our hands clean. So, that was what came to mind. It just seems, you know, there's a part of me that would value that kind of transparency and clarity in terms of the writing. I think and the way we convey things because I'm all for that. I think sometimes within the academic realm but also in Jung's writing, you might argue that he was writing the unconscious and that in many ways impacted the clarity with which he pursued certain arguments with a lack thereof.

1:33:30But what I find sometimes, you know, especially in academic work is that language is used to conceal rather than to reveal. So, I'm all for any approach that actually tries to clarify things and say, well, this is what it is. I mean, there was a part of me that also felt when you were speaking that it seemed like there was almost kind of a paint-by-numbers approach to this, right? That this is step one, you know, you begin the conversation, these are the types of questions you ask and then we'll progress to this. Now, there's several takes to this. Jung never really clarified what his approach to active imagination actually was, right?

1:34:08So, we don't, you know, I know there's some new work that will be coming out soon in terms of some lectures he gave on active imagination but he never had that kind of approach, step one, step two, step three. All we know is that, well, it's for the latter stages of the therapeutic process and actually we're only going to choose a few people and those few people really have to have developed that kind of ego strength in order to be, you know, one foot in both realms, both in the unconscious and then one foot in the unconscious as well. I mean, it strikes me as very interesting. I probably want to go away and do some of that reading now.

1:34:43But that kind of paint-by-numbers approach or what struck me as a paint-by-numbers approach, there's a kind of positive and negative side to it. Positive in the sense that they're actually trying to clarify and pinpoint and it's helpful actually to begin to do that. But equally, and I think we can all agree, engaging with the unconscious is messy. and sometimes the structures and systems we kind of put in place need to be expanded and therefore they can't hold that kind of messiness. So, that was the kind of question that came to mind and I think what John, you were saying is that, you know, when things get real, i.e.

1:35:21psychologically real, is that tool going to do the trick? And it doesn't seem, Anderson and John, what you're saying, that's where the kind of tipping point is. Yeah, I want to thank you for that.

1:35:36Dr. John Vervaeke:So, we're going to be leaving our YouTube audience now, and I want to thank everybody who's attended. Thank you for that excellent question. Sorry we couldn't get to other questions, but that question is perhaps one of the best questions we could have been asked. I think it's a question that's to the moment. I think there's a reason why we're seeing the parts renaissance and the psychedelic renaissance happening at the same time. I do not think that is a coincidence. Before we pass to Riverside, just so I can do it publicly, I want to thank Kevin and Anderson. Kevin, it's been great tasting your mind.

1:36:09Dr. John Vervaeke:It is really delicious. You are really, really, really. I want to have you back more. That's really good. but Anderson, I'm going to say something and I hope you take it with the affection and the compliment I mean. I mean, I'm really proud of you. Oh, thank you. I'm proud of you too. What do you mean? Well, like you were my student and like, you're not my student. You haven't been my student for a long time, but you were my student. And like you have grown, like I think there's something parental about being a teacher. You want to see your children thrive independently and take what you've given them and do things with what you've given them that you could not do or didn't.

1:36:55Dr. John Vervaeke:And you're doing that. And that's what I mean to say when I'm proud of you. Thank you, John. That is actually extremely touching. And yeah, thank you. You know, I'm proud of you, too. And, you know, I'm it's I have been in hermitage somewhat. So the opportunity to reengage with sort of the intellectual frameworks here is it's not a small opportunity. Yes. And I'll say following upon John, I won't I won't use maybe the mind flayer metaphor of tasting your brain. but um uh but but i will say that it's been a super interesting conversation and like it really does feel like we're only sort of touching at the edges so if all if all three of us are game for uh a second round of this i would certainly be happy to do it yeah yeah yeah all right i'm going to shut us down here on youtube and then we're going to move to riverside so you two gentlemen are not going anywhere everyone else uh except those are following us to Riverside because you're part of the lectern community.

1:37:59Dr. John Vervaeke:I hope you have a good day. All right. Here we are in Riverside. Thank you for your patience. There was a minor glitch. We are still trying to figure out the magic capitalistic formula of buttons to turn on and off as Riverside continues to change how we're supposed to do things. But we're finally here. And so these sessions are, as you know, this is for the lectern community. These are for you who are especially supportive of my work and are deeper students of my work. And this is an opportunity for you to ask any questions that you might have. So again, we're going to allow Ben to translate the questions for us onto the screen.

1:38:47Dr. John Vervaeke:And please put your questions in the chat and Ben will pass them on. So we have a question from Luke directed towards Anderson. I would love, I would like to give you a chance to expand on Jung's library. Could you discuss more influences, philosophers, as well as fiction and technical authors? So that's to you, Anderson. Okay. So, I mean, speaking to his library, I am maybe to my shame as a bibliophile. I don't have a deep sense of his library. I don't even have a deep sense of mine. But he was very widely read. You know, he was pretty voracious, kind of omnivore, you know, relatively precocious, you know, was reading in an extremely interdisciplinary way very early on.

1:39:35And maybe even more so than his library, I think that, you know, he was engaged in active intellectual dialogue with so many of the other, you know, kind of intellectual luminaries and in some cases oddballs of the period. Right. We think about the Eranos lectures and so on and so forth. So, you know, his library, you know, we have to remember that he was married to one of the richest women in Switzerland and he built a castle at the side of Lake Bollingen. And he he was aside from being a successful analyst and, you know, for a while, the crown prince of psychotherapy or whatever, he was wealthy.

1:40:10Right. So he could afford to purchase things. You know, he studied alchemical texts that are relatively speaking, you know, rare. Things that now we would have no problem coming across because we have access to every, you know, every sacred text ever written is accessible to us in PDF instantly. But, you know, he was very widely read, right? Often noted, you know, by contemporaries as being sort of extremely erudite in small minutiae, right, on all sorts of things. So I actually can't describe his library. And now that you've told me, I have obsessional homework to do hereafter. But certainly, you know, his his reading was very wide.

1:40:51Maybe you can speak to it. Kevin, do you happen to know more about, you know, the composition of Jung's library and readings across those periods? Yes, I've been to his library, which is very. Oh, wow. Oh, lucky. When I was teaching at the C.G. Jung Institute, it's more of a recommendation. So, Somu Shamdasani has published a book called, I think, A Biography in Books, which kind of delves her into Jung's library. So that's the recommendation. But, you know, Anderson, just kind of going on some of the things you said, and I love little bits of historical kind of gossip that you find along the way.

1:41:28But absolutely, Jung married – well, he was poor. You know, he came from a very respected family, but poor initially. But Anderson's right. He married into the second richest Swiss family at the time, the Rausenbach family, who made their fortune originally in agricultural machinery, but then made some very smart investments in terms of watches. So, IWC, the International Watch Company, is actually the company that the Yungs invested in. And actually, it was actually those timepieces they were using in the word association experiment. Really? Really? Yeah, just a bit of a little footnote. So anyone interested in watches, timepieces, it's IWC that has the historical link.

1:42:21Dr. John Vervaeke:That's so cool. That's cool. Yeah. Ram is wondering if the critiques we made of Jung on religion generalize to a critique of him on collective behavior and perhaps some of the work he was doing around archetypes. I hope in my realm I got the gist of your question. I couldn't hold it all in working memory. But Kevin, what do you think about that question? First of all, does the question make sense for you? Yeah, I think I can pull a few things out and comment on it. I mean, Jung, during that period, there were a lot of different interpretations, right, of his involvement, of the things that he got entangled in.

1:43:07And I guess for me, if we're just looking at the writing and Wotan, right? His essay on Wotan is the one that actually sticks out and what is he actually arguing there? Basically, he's arguing that there's a constellation of an archetype at a collective level, right? That this god of frenzy, of wind, of storm gets constellated and he uses that as the explanation for how a whole nation was swept up in this frenzy, right? Now, I have a few issues with that. Someone who is deeply interested and respectful of history kind of compels me to ask, but there are narratives and stories of those who resisted, of those who didn't get swept away.

1:43:52So, what are those stories kind of telling us? Now, when Jung kind of publishes Voten and some of the other problematic essays around the time, it really makes him gun shy. And it actually makes the whole community gun shy in terms of applied psychoanalysis. That's why I think that where psychoanalysis perhaps advanced a bit quicker in terms of psychobiography, psychohistory, was that they didn't have that same baggage where Jung actually put himself out there, put out a very kind of generalized explanation of a very problematic cultural historical phenomena And that impacted years and years and generations of Jungians of not wanting to be in that space and to kind of touch applied psychoanalysis.

1:44:38We do have that turn. I would say Andrew Samuels is a big part of that kind of turn and saying, well, let's not be shy about what therapy thinking can contribute to understanding larger, wider societal processes. And if anything, if we're thinking the location of analytical psychology in the academy, one way it survives is actually to be in dialogue with these other disciplines. Anderson, I'm not sure what the situation is at the University of Toronto. I know that within the kind of UK context, Essex is having its own issues, but it's still actually very strong. And it's strong because it's pivoted with the relationship within sociology, right?

1:45:19So, for me, I guess the way to answer that question, there is a lot of problematic aspects of Jungian and post-Jungian forays into larger conversations, into other disciplines. But for me, it's about approaching things with a sense of humility and realizing that even within other disciplines, there are debates that have occurred that have touched on these topics before. And it behooves us to be able, as those interested in applied psychoanalysis, to know what those debates are. And for us to actually engage in true interdisciplinarity, I see that word being used and thrown around, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinarity.

1:46:02And for me, in order to really kind of respect that other discipline, whether it's history, sociology, philosophy, etc., we just can't go in with this kind of conquistador union approach and say, but you've missed the psychological angle and this is what we're going to add and this is how we're going to transform a discipline. It is that kind of dialogical aspect and that humility says, well, you have a lot to say and I have a lot to learn as well.

1:46:29Dr. John Vervaeke:Anderson, do you want to say something about? Yeah. So I would say that, you know, at U of T, you know, the union court suite has been in dialogue with other interdisciplinary disciplines, as it were. Right. You know, historically, it's had a fairly close dialogue with cognitive science. Right. It's had a close dialogue with the former Buddhist psychology and mental health program, which itself was kind of this this chimeric, you know, fusion. of, you know, different kinds of impulses that are attempting to address, you know, big psychological questions, but not from a single lens. So at U of T, I think it's been very interdisciplinary.

1:47:14And I would say that the live issue, certainly when I'm talking to students in this space, you know, if there are three hot buttons that everybody hits on repeatedly, well, four, the first hot button you always encounter is, is he a Nazi? Right. Which is a thing that, Obviously, right, you can't shy away from. The second thing, of course, which is not a problem if you're not canonizing, but it's like, what were his limitations as a human being? And to some extent, that is getting gossipy. But, right, some of his approaches as a person do not meet our modern standards for what we consider to be safe and effective practice, right?

1:47:51He was often sort of boundary violating with his clients. And right, there's a host of things in his historical personage that really need to be grappled with if you're going to assess the ideas. And I think, you know, the degree, there is sometimes a perceived degree of gender essentialism in Jung. And I think that that tag is unwarranted if you read Jung corpsely, right? But I know quite a few, for instance, queer Jungians and analysts, right? And they have spent a ton of time dealing with, you know, how we should be reinterpreting his concepts of inner masculinity and inner femininity to account for the data of what is clearly not just this binary, you know, earlier framing, you know, and that's hot, contentious territory.

1:48:42The, you know, the other part of this is, yeah, that certainly there was a kind of like almost a totalizing modernist impulse early on, The desire is to form a kind of capstone that can deal with the extraneous issues across psychology, personal development, metaphysics, whatever. He's trying to come up with some overarching frame. And that's tricky. It has to be in dialogue. So, you know, I see a lot of that exchange, that give and take. I see certainly the people that I am engaging with are interested in very critically engaging that material and putting it into dialogue. Where you see that in the rest of the community, I mean, it differs, right?

1:49:28People have all kinds of different positioning. Some of them are, you know, more orthodox than Jung himself, right? Concretizing systems that he himself did not concretize. Some of them placed emphasis in different directions. There's a splintering. But there definitely is a strand that is, you know, putting it into dialogue and attempting to kind of go back to certain kinds of first questions without imposing too much framework. Wotan's an interesting one as an essay. I mean, it's an interesting essay. It's one that I hear people reference a lot now for reasons that I suspect for some people might be obvious, right, as they attempt to make sense of certain kinds of thing.

1:50:08You know, whether or not it is helpful at some level to conceive of the German public as being possessed by, you know, Teutonic war impulse, etc., etc., etc. You know, I tend to look at that and think, well, that is one level of analysis, you know, and the mythic level of analysis can't be ignored. It clearly does move people, understanding those kind of operative meaning structures that people are attaching themselves to, even when it's sort of pseudo-religious ideology. So, you know, even though there are stark differences and you don't want to collapse the distinctions between things, I have seen people actually see Wotan in many ways as being, frankly, quite apropos for the situation that we find ourselves in currently.

1:50:54currently. And I don't want to stray too far into politics, because that's a tinder fire waiting to happen. But, you know, there are some similarities that I see between the period in which Jung was doing his work in the sort of post-war period, especially post-World War I. And I tend to think of the whole 20th century as a series of footnotes to World War I, as far as, you know, sort of the West was concerned. You know, there is a collapse of a great deal of certainty, place in the universe, et cetera, et cetera, and things rushing in to attempt to fill that void. And it is in that space that this kind of Wotan flourishes, right?

1:51:30That people grasp for something to be, you know, some kind of binding set of symbols, or they are deliberately exposed to a synthetic set of symbols to attempt to compel this, right? Yeah, we could go down the route of, you know, Nazi propaganda and the way that propaganda, generally speaking, relates to psychotherapy and psychodynamics. They have a rich and complicated tangled history with each other. But, you know, I think a lot of people are seeing now the sort of resurgence of the irrational in a way that they have an extremely hard time dealing with. Right. And there is very frequently a kind of public comment that things are both not surprising, but kind of unthinkable also.

1:52:15They're shocking, but not surprising as things continue. And it seems as though there is something very akin to what Jung was talking about with this idea of a deep kind of confrontation with what the full scope of human behavior is actually like, that we are not just, you know, you know, tremendous cruelty, hatred, exclusion, etc, etc, that those forces have not gone anywhere. Right. So, yeah, it's interesting. You know, I would be hesitant to apply WOTAN to anything uncritically. And I think that there are deep problems with it. Interestingly, I would say that it's, if anything, I would say more resonant now than it was five years ago, certainly 10 years ago, right?

1:53:03It's very much in people's thinking. And my thinking there is that that is not accidental, and they're grasping for something because of the, you know, the functional similarities in some ways. Is that, yeah.

1:53:19Dr. John Vervaeke:So I'd like to reply too, I think, and I want to, first of all, acknowledge the proper historical complexity and nuance you're both saying. And there was a kind of, Nazism is a very messy, complicated mess. And trying to understand it through a single lens is, I think, whether or not he was being, you know, sort of maniacal about it or not, it's dangerous. However, I would also like to say, you know, since the, you know, the pivotal work of, you know, Chalmers and Clark and others, and then the growing work I've published with Dan Chiappe, multiple papers on this. I know that Patrick McNamara has a new book coming out on this, the work of Uraro and Hull providing rigorous mathematical models for the proposal that collectives of human beings can form a distributed network that has a collective intelligence that has causal powers and informational access and therefore problem solving and also problem making abilities that is not explainable in any kind of reductive fashion to the component people.

1:54:34Dr. John Vervaeke:within that group. And we have very strong modeling for this kind of causal emergence. It's very rigorous. It's very powerful. And Dan and I talked about how the NASA scientists form this kind of collective intelligence and agency in order to move the rovers around on Mars. And the rover is included in this. And Hutchins did this a long time ago with who navigates a ship? Nobody. There's a bunch of people and a system of tools that forms a dynamical system that is capable of dealing with this huge object, the ship in this hyper pattern called the ocean. And so the idea that there is actually an ontology, there could be, I'll be more cautious, there could be an ontological basis for the idea of a spirit as the collective intelligence of a distributed network.

1:55:25Dr. John Vervaeke:This is now extremely plausible. And I think even a legitimate topic within bonafide cognitive science, neuroscience, et cetera. And I've given you a couple of names of people who have published on this. And so I would like you to consider the possibility that there might also be something prescient in Wotan. The idea that there is collective intelligence in distributed networks that has independent causal power, non-reducible in that sense, not completely independent, but non-reducible causal power and informational access that is not possessed by the individual people therein. And that, of course, that spirit can work for good or for ill, depending on what it is configuring on and what it is configured for.

1:56:14Dr. John Vervaeke:It can help move a rover around on Mars. It can steal an ocean liner, but it can also steal a battleship or a nation. And so I think that part of Jung is not only coming back because of what Anderson said, which I agree, but I think there's been some significant ontological revision within cognitive science, especially for ECOG-Sci and overlapping disciplines that I think means we should consider again very seriously the topic of spirits, that spirit is not just either a purely psychological or a purely superstitious category. And I would like to put that also on the table. I accept all your criticisms of Jung, Both of you.

1:56:57Dr. John Vervaeke:I take them all in hand, but I want to say, but maybe there's a kernel in there. There's an important observation and an insight. Maybe presented incoherently or incohately. I don't know. You two are better than I am on this, but I think there's something he's putting his finger on that is of value and is pertinent now. In the same way that IFS is a potent and practical intro to parts work and deeper therapy, could you maybe give us your best summary of Carl Jung's internal family and major psychic parts. You mentioned his father earlier, mother, children.

1:57:37Dr. John Vervaeke:And then maybe a window into your own family. Okay. There's the question. I think it was directed to Anderson. Is that correct? Right. So, you know, when we get the boiled down version of this, you know, there are a few kind of inner figures or something that Jung stands up for. They're obviously the external people, right? He has a complex relationship with his mother who's kind of frightening and slightly occult-tinted. He has a, frankly, kind of contempt laden in many ways. And, you know, sort of a contempt for the, I don't know, bougie emptiness or something, maybe, of his father's, you know, spiritual career.

1:58:22You know, he has clearly some very big breaks, right? The breakup with Freud is, of course, massively psychically as, you know, substitute father, right? He is the crown prince of this and very rapidly bucks up from under it, published as something that Freud does not like. And they really go on a scorched earth kind of campaign. It's extremely acrimonious. Right. So, you know, clearly that precipitating the confrontation with the unconscious is a huge inner psychic event that he's grappling with. On top of that, he has, you know, the set of projections that he has around women externally. Right.

1:59:03not least, you know, people like,

1:59:10oh my God, I'm completely blanking. Well, his various collaborators. I mean, there's Von Franz, there's Sabrina,

1:59:17Dr. John Vervaeke:Is he involved with Lou Salome at all? Or was he, well, was that, was there any overlap there with her? Sorry, I didn't quite check that. I know she was involved with Salome? Yeah, Lou. Yeah. Yeah, certainly there's some there, But there are, you know, the variety of figures who are, you know, often starting as clients or patients, but then graduating into analysts themselves, including his wife. And, you know, whatever. It's a complicated situation with his sort of feminine production. You know, he boils this down. You know, he gives the well, I'm not giving you the prearranged pathway, but, you know, do shadow, then do a contrarsexual soul image, then do self.

1:59:58Right. It's as close as he gives you to a ladder of things. But his inner pantheon, as it were, is extremely complicated. There are guide figures. He has numerous interactions with figures of various kinds that are by turns angelic and demonic. They urge him in various directions. And it's a lot more intense than what you typically saw in the downstream publications where it was cleaned up for the general audience. so you know his inner family i think is uh appropriately right is partly about these interactions obviously that he's had with these various people in his life and the significant constellation that that plays but a big part of it is also about his inner relationships it's like young personality one and young personality two right this distinction that he makes early early on with memories, dreams, reflections.

2:00:52It's this idea of being internally fractious and having in some sense a multiplicity of agents internally that are not necessarily obviously linked, right? It's not a sort of Freudian derivative or something of his familial relationships. So yeah, I mean, it's complicated when you read sort of the extended stuff in his practices, You know, he obviously has, you know, significant mercurial sorts of guide figures, right? Like Philemon, right? And, you know, as a link back to internal family systems, you know, Philemon, I would say, in no small part plays this, this, whatever bridging aspect towards a wider field of experience, right?

2:01:37Philemon does not easily fall within the what IFS would categorize, right? In that sense. So, you know, he does a bunch of that work, but I think he is to a great extent approaching it in terms of its like libido swollen hammering him aspect and then working it back out towards the more mundane or something, the more prosaic. Yeah. Does that answer the question? That was it's hard to pin down as the answer because he sort of exceeds IFS significantly.

2:02:11Dr. John Vervaeke:Kevin, did you want to say anything? Yeah, I mean, you know, I am interested in families, in siblings. Often one of the individuals from that period who's often forgotten, Alfred Adler, who wrote about birth order, right? And was that kind of classical element of thinking that's gone into the popular culture parlance of the middle child, right? I was the first to kind of really begin to signify, well, the impact on your personality is not just in terms of your relationship with your parents, i.e. this kind of vertical relationship, but also a horizontal relationship that you are impacted by your siblings and cousins and those kind of born in that particular line.

2:02:59So, I think there's a lot of work from psychoanalysis and beginning to emerge a bit more from the Jungian point of view in terms of the impacts of siblings. Abramovich had a book which was much more kind of amplifying the mythical stories of siblings, etc. that may or may not resonate with certain relationships that we have with our siblings. I mean, the other element and again, this is an area IFS I'll probably want to get into but the whole kind of field of the transgenerational transmission of trauma and family systems therapy where we're kind of building genus-oceograms of the gaps in the family tree.

2:03:39So, what we're looking at are not just, you know, who did what, but what are the silences, where are the traumas and do things have the possibility of skipping generations where then they land on particular people. So, even if it's the case that there could be five siblings in the family, why does it fall to a particular family member to be the historian of the family, to kind of bear the brunt, if you will, on behalf of the family and to kind of dispel those hauntings and ghosts that may be coming down the family line. So really the task there is to begin to separate, well, what is me and what is not me, right?

2:04:13What is my psychological challenge that I might have to go through? But what am I living on behalf of the family? Because there are certain things unresolved. So quite a few interesting books in that regard. One book, I can't remember the name of the colleague, he's actually Canadian, but he wrote a book called Not In My Family. and what he found when actually he had this beautiful relationship with his grandfather right and when his grandfather passed away he's kind of going through sorting through the stuff and then sees his grandfather in an ss uniform and then that begins to challenge everything he knew his perception of his grandfather which then kind of drives this whole kind of psychobiographical psychohistorical exploration of the impact of our relationships, our perceptions, if you will, the personas of our family members and how that is generative, if you will, if we are choosing to investigate that of how we've come to the place where we are.

2:05:23Dr. John Vervaeke:Thank you, gentlemen. I'm going to have to end this. I'm sure there might be still some more questions, but I'm running out of steam and we're running out of time. We're already 15 minutes over what I asked you to commit. And so I want to thank you for your generosity. And I want to thank everybody who made this possible. Of course, Ethan, I want to thank him. I want to thank Ben for making sure the Imp of the Perverse has been held pretty adequately at bay. And I want to thank both of you. This has been rich and wonderful. And I'm sincerely hoping we will do this again. I think there's more to explore around the cognitive science of Jung.

2:06:04Dr. John Vervaeke:Take care, everyone.