Professor David Peimer
Perspectives on Jung Today: His Life and Ideas, Part 2

Professor David Peimer - Perspectives on Jung Today: His Life and Ideas, Part 2

- Okay. So thanks very much, Karina, and thanks for all your help during the week as always. So, hi everybody, and hope everybody is well in these pretty dark times, as we all know. So I’m going to do part two of Dr. Carl Jung today and finish off some other ideas, which I think are fascinating and emerged from Jung, his contribution to some human knowledge, human understanding. And whether we agree or not with him, certainly the ideas that he came up with, what they have led to in our times, and how they provoked an attempt at least, to have a deeper understanding of this remarkable, strange, mysterious, cruel, crazy, wonderful world called the human mind. So, Mr. Dr. Carl Young. Just, you know, just to show this is of course, I think he grew into the archetype of the sage, the wise elder man, part shaman, all the rest of it in a contemporary European context with the books, the pictures, the maps. You know, if we apply Jungian analysis to Jung himself and look at the symbols associated with him and his look, his image, his choice of studio, of study rather, et cetera. Okay, pardon me. just going back here, Dr. Jung, just to remind us of one or two things that really mark out Freud and Jung as I think two extraordinary contributors to human knowledge from the last century, which is the very idea which we, of course take for granted today completely, but the revolutionary thought that psychological illness, not only so-called madness, but illness may not always be body-based. It may be partly body-based, partly not.

Part mind, part body, or mostly mind, however we want to play it today. With neurology, of course, biochemistry, partly that, partly linked to the mind. He brought back from ancient times perhaps, together with Freud initiating it, something of this fundamental idea. And that I think is a huge shift in modernity and human consciousness, and certainly of our times and how it’s taken root in our times. So words like trauma, repression, projection, interjection, ego, id, the unconscious, anxiety, denial, depression, we can go on and on. These words which have become such part of everybody’s common violence in a way today originated with Freud, of course and then at the time, his anointed successor, Jung, but through the two of them. Pardon me. And I don’t think that we can underestimate for a second how these have become absolutely central in our times. You know, building on the enlightenment idea and modernity, moving away from the predominance of religion or body-based understanding of illness to a mental or mind-based sense of illness, to put it in a certain archaic way, but I think accurate. Okay, so just to remind us that that’s where we’re beginning with Freud and Jung. I’m going to make a bit of a jump to a surprising person, but I think it does link to Jung, and I’m maybe being a bit too overambitious here, but it doesn’t matter, I’m pushing the link between the great philosopher Thomas Hobbes and some Jungian ideas. And without going into, you know, detail about Hobbes and “Leviathan,” his great book, in a way, on philosophy and politics, but philosophy in particular, Hobbes, I’m sure we all know from that phrase, you know, which has become so well-known everywhere.

“Life is nasty, brutal, and short.” Just digging a little bit deeper into Hobbes. Hobbes, and some have accused him of being far too pessimistic or negative. But what I think is fascinating, and where I do think it links to Jung is a profound understanding of the role that conflict plays in the human psyche and in human society. And not just the obvious conflict of, you know, two people with guns or spears or whatever, but a profound sense that conflict is actually the source of creativity and destruction. And that that contradiction, that paradox perhaps, to frame it better, is at the core of the human psyche. For the great German philosopher whose work I love, Hegel, it was the drive for recognition, in a way, what we might call validation in contemporary psychological terms, but the need for recognition, whether society gives it or family or people or values, whatever. For Hobbes, it’s a profound sense of this meaning of conflict. And he gave some examples, conflict among individuals, and he saw three reasons, competition, distrust, and glory. Now, of course, this goes way back to the ancient Greeks as well, Achilles, it’s glory, competition is obvious, you know, to many and distrust. And I don’t think he’s trying to just be pessimistic in his worldview or vision of life, but trying to understand human nature as it is. And of course the obvious example he would give, two individuals desire a scarce commodity. Two individuals want the same piece of ground where there’s a couple of banana trees or some apple trees or cow, you know, two want it, who’s going to get it?

Obviously they will compete for the commodity and of necessity become enemies for a time, for longer, for shorter, in this very simplistic example. And together with that sense of competitiveness and distrust and desire for glory, rooted in the sense of conflict is what Hobbes called a natural desire, a natural right for self-preservation. So given the natural right, or the natural drive for self-preservation, more than survival, self-preservation, preserve what we have, preserve what we might get, preserve, not to lose what we might have attained or achieved. What he saw was a natural right. It’s interesting that word, right. You know, and that that was part of the drive in human psyche. And I think that Jung, I’m going to come into this in a moment. John Grey, the very interesting contemporary English philosopher, would take it a step further from Hobbes and would see that Hobbes is arguing that history is not progressive, but cyclical. And I think that’s a very profound debate, and it’s open for debate 50:50 both ways in our times. Some of us will naturally see history as progressive. Some of us will see history as cyclical. And there’s no right or wrong, there’s no answer. And this goes way back to the earliest writings of human society, this debate in a way. And Grey together with Hobbes believe that this idea of progress existed in the imagination. And of course, we have the enlightenment, we have, you know, movements away from religion towards scientific rationality. But then of course, the dark side, the shadow side, as Jung would say is, well, what happens to the animal instinct? The animal drive in us? Is it drive towards a liberalism?

Okay, but then what happens to the non-liberal parts of the human psyche? The shadow, as Jung would say. The idea that history can make sense, that we are progressing towards something better, something more humane in society. And a debate that if it’s cyclical, we will go through cycles where it is more humane, it is more morally, at the end, the moral endeavours actually shine more brightly in human life and society. But then there are times maybe economic or it’s social, whatever, hardship where it doesn’t, and what happens? What are the unconscious drives that come out? Or not so unconscious. You know, the shadow part of our lives, the darker side that we all know only too well. And we don’t need to go, I mean, obviously the Second World War, the Holocaust, and so many other things are terrifying examples of what happens when that’s unleashed. And I think that obviously, and John Grey and Hobbes, obviously, we’re aware that this doesn’t go against scientific progress. You know, remarkable progress in medicine, technology, running water, obviously, anaesthetics, you know, vaccines. I mean, we can go on and on, the aeroplane, the motorcar, electricity, we can go on and on and on. Remarkable technological developments. This is more a philosophical debate than a scientific debate. But this conflict between rationalism and unconscious drives, drives for religious fanaticism, nationalism compared to more rational social contract perspective on society, you know, that we give up certain amount of our basic drives in order that we can coexist relatively peacefully under some laws or not.

Some morals, which may be religious in origin or not. All of these debates, which I think go way back in many societies are part of what I would say Jung sees as the conflict in the human psyche itself, played out on the stage of society, played out on the stage of cultures, religions, belief systems, value systems and cultures, which, you know, may be part of one geographic area or in our times, globally. So we don’t want to get too much into this, get back to Jung, but I think there were two things that Jung really disagreed with in Freud. And the one was the sense of history, because he argued for a collective unconscious, which is about the archetypal symbols. You know, I’m not just a father, but I’m connected to the image, the archetype of fathers going way back in my culture’s history. I’m not just connected to being Jewish, I’m connected to a whole history of archetypal images I may have in my head of Jewish history, of South African history, whatever. And that in this sense, it’s not just my personal unconscious, it’s my collective, my personal unconscious of my family, my grandparents, my others, but my collective unconscious, which his memory came way, way back culturally, religiously, and so on. So that was the first big difference with Freud. The second big difference was he didn’t just believe, as with Freud, that so much was driven by the libido, the erotic, the sexual libido because of the emphasis of the collective unconscious, the emphasis of being linked to all these archetypes, symbols, figures, going way, way back. And an understanding of that is necessary to kind of grow from being a child, to being an adult, a boy to a man in human life. And that is the source of conflict in the individual psyche and in the society for Jung.

So I have to be in conflict with my own father and all the fathers going way back, images of fathers, images of what it is to be an adult man, all the possible options, those archetypes and of course, the person I am. I don’t just mean me, David, but I’m trying to use that as an analogy for all of us, and not just a mother, but there’s linked to archetypes of mother in the culture that I emerged from looking way back in collective history, going far back in memory. And maybe, you know, identity is never static. Identity is constantly in production and that means the mother today, the mother before, the mother in biblical times, in my head, or the father, the mother in my own family going way back and you know what I understand to be that archetype. And it’s constantly shifting, constantly in production. It’s not a sense of a static identity. It’s, if you like, constantly in production as times change. But the fundamental archetypes for Jung don’t. So there is this conflict between the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious, between the archetypal images of what I might imagine or want to be, and the reality of who I actually am. You know? So all of this I think, links to Hobbes in some way, that the challenge then becomes how to resolve those conflicts between my own personal unconscious and making it more conscious and the collective memory, the collective unconscious in determining my identity and how I live. And that’s where I think Jung spoke about we see, understand so little about the human psyche. And these ideas, we can agree or disagree whether they even exist or not, whether he’s creating a whole lot of nonsense or whether it’s true.

But it does provoke profound thought for us about the nature of creative conflict, destructive conflict. It’s a constant paradox. And through that, we can resolve something perhaps. And I think that’s the path of individuation. That’s what he meant by it. Freud said, “Where the id was, the ego shall be.” And what he meant was where the id, the unconscious was, the ego, the conscious self will be. So the aim is to go into my dimly lit house of my unconscious, go through the corridors, the passages, the rooms of my own unconscious, try and light them up in some way with my conscious egos. Where the unconscious id was, the ego shall be, make it conscious was the aim ultimately of growing up into being an adult and of psychotherapy. And that the royal road to the unconscious was dreams. And I think that’s where Freud and Jung linked. And it’s a conflict because, you know, I may want certain things, but then the unconscious is pushing in another way. It’s constantly playing out between the two. I may see myself as a very tidy person, but go for somebody who’s untidy or, you know, have a very good friendship and how and why? Is there a conflict there or not on a very simple banal example. So I wanted to link this idea because conflict and being a personal theatre, of course, you can’t have theatre without conflict. It’s so fundamental to the understanding of the drama of the human psyche and the drama of the individual in a society. And that conflict between my drives, my ambitions, my, in Hobbes’ words, my desire for certain glory.

What he meant by glory was achieving things, competition and other things and societies need for me to conform so that we can live in relative peace and not kill each other all the time, and solve things. Churchill’s phrase, “With jaw-jaw instead of war-war.” So it’s a stretch to bring in Hobbes, but I think he does come in because I think Jung does see things, and I think Freud did to a degree, that conflict is innate. So the question in the human psyche and obviously in society and between societies, how on earth to resolve that fundamental question about human nature? Okay, I want to move on with this idea, you know, that for Jung, it’s all rooted in the collective unconscious. And in that collective, the answer lies the solution is getting to know our own collective unconscious is a way to solve this conflict in us, because that is how we will live and how we can live with less of the base instincts towards our fellow man in a society and towards ourselves. So the main archetypes in Jung, which I showed before, but I want to just do briefly a couple of these. The hero. And this goes back to, you know, going back to Homer. For the Greeks, the hero were two things. The one was the Achilles, who was the physical, great warrior, you know, physical prowess, physical, and through that mental courage and strength and determination and a certain arrogance that’s necessary and part of that. You know, may be Superman today, may be Batman.

You know, for the better of society, but, you know, could lead and be strong. And Mark Twain’s words, “Courage is the is resistance to fear, not the absence of fear.” And I think, you know, the Achilles in the “Iliad” captures that. And there are others obviously in many other piece of literature. But then there’s also the other hero, which I think speaks to our times perhaps more, which is the Odysseus, who’s tricky and cunning in the best sense of the word, and intelligent and thoughtful and understands that war is about deception and the battle is about deception and winning and, you know, planning and strategy, not only won in the battlefield, but war in the psyche, war in society, psychological, different kind of hero. Then of course, the caregiver> You know, love for your neighbour in Jungian terms, to protect and care for others, to help others. And it may just be the person who lives down the road. It may be helping children. The obvious archetype is the nurse figure, but there are many others. And then of course, the rebel, the archetype, you know, need to break rules, forge new ideas, to overturn. And it does have a destructive and a creative side to it. The rebel may come up with remarkable new ideas, but have to go against the status quo in a society and so on. And we can go on and on with some of these. The last one I just want to mention here is the jester. That’s the trickster. And the tricksters always see the irony and the trickster lives in irony and paradox, you know, in the moment and seeing wit and humour as a way to cope with pain and adversity. And perhaps also, actually I do want to mention is the sage, you know, the wise one, who seeks truth, not necessarily power, and that it’s through the truth and understanding through intelligence that one can be wise and help others and give.

These are all archetypes and we can be two or three, three or four, doesn’t matter. And different ones at different stages of our life. But touching base with these, and we do it as kids, we read it in the comics and the stories, you know, Merlin and even in Harry Potter books, we have these archetypes and touching base with that, we can touch base with a collective unconscious. This is what he saw in it. And he argued that these were universal in a way, whether we look at it in Jewish religion or in Christianity or other religions, or wherever, we find these. And touching base with it and linking it to our own personal conscious was a way out of the conundrum of how to live as an adult, you know, in whatever way we want and why we admire certain people and dislike others. You know, our choices. So again, you could be right, you could be wrong, but before Jung, nobody had really crystallised all these thoughts in as concrete a way. I think poets and writers and thinkers and religious thinkers and many others had all intuited or thought of this. But he in a way, was obsessed with it and crystallises so much of it. And it becomes an interesting challenge to us. And hence the study of myth and folk law and religious parables, religious stories, you know, whether Moses actually existed or not, a debate. Whether Noah and his ark actually ever happened or not, a debate, but through the myth, through the folklore, we understand certain things about society and ourselves. So it’s this that he is arguing, this is what’s inside the ancient myths and the ancient legends and stories. And it’s through archetypes and symbols and storytelling and ultimately what comes into our dreams that we can start to put these pieces of our own puzzles together.

Perhaps an exhausting long journey, but, you know, a fascinating journey to go on. And it does in a way make us step back slightly from the immediacy of solving things in an instinctive knee-jerk way in life. And you know, to use the jargon of conflict resolution, but it can perhaps help when people do step back a little bit and feel this. Freud, I think saw much more, he was obsessed much more with the individual, an individual, the unconscious, the id, the ego, the conscious part of our thoughts, of ourselves and the super ego, which was, if you like, the controlling, mental police or society controlling rules, you know, which would stop the ego just doing whatever it wanted. So much more concerned with the individual. Whereas Jung is much more concerned with the individual in relation to the long, long story of the individual’s past and cultural, historical memory in that way. And going back hundreds if not thousands of years told through stories and symbols and dreams and literature. Okay, so I think also, you know, linked to this, of course, I mentioned last week, the idea of the shadow, which is a classic Jungian archetype, the darker side of human nature, the side we may not like to acknowledge is ours, which may be very selfish, may very self-serving. It may be very persecutory. It may be, you know, capable of doing horrible things to other people.

But Jung arguing as Freud in a way, but Jung called it the Shadow, which I like, because it means that it never goes away. Even if the sun is directly, you know, wherever the sun, there’s always a shadow, whether we can see our own shadow or not, given where the sun is, it’s always there. And it’s a fascinating, I really like the image of his. It’s always there with us and will always follow us. And the more we can get to know of a archetype of our own shadow, the more we have better self-understanding. The Anima and the Animus, everybody knows much more. The Persona, which has become a word which is so bandied about, but it comes from Jung. Of course, it’s the social image we present to the world. I may show that I’m a wonderful good father, good parent, good man, this, that, all these things, but in reality, I may be a nightmare in the home. Never do the washing, never put on the machine, selfish, you know, just never with help the cleaning, the cooking, anything, whatever. The image we present to the world and to protect my ego to what I don’t like, the mask and what’s inside the mask. You know, he puts it in a way that is nonjudgmental, that words of shadow, words of persona, the social mask. He’s just trying to say, this is what I see human nature to be. And of course, the wise old man we’ve spoken about, that the shaman and the teacher, the healer who can dispense with advice and insight, if we like. The trickster we’ve mentioned. The image of rebirth is fascinating to me ‘cause it’s in so much of literature in life.

This idea that we have enormous destruction, destructive periods which are cyclical in history. And then you have the creation of something, a rebirth of an idea, a rebirth of a group, of a culture, of aspects of a religious group, whatever. But it has to go through in a way, you know, escape from the freedom of the Pharaoh and ancient Egypt, and then into, forgive my analogy, but into the desert. And then what happens, you know, Moses goes up for a couple of whatever time and then, you know, and then, well, we’re bored. Anyway, the golden calf, start praying to that. And then come down, all the story we know. The golden calf archetypal myth is of course a myth of rebirth, from destruction to creation, is a constant, cyclical process of destruction and creation in history. And yes, last week I showed that interview with Jung, we talked about the main difference between him and Freud was the positioning of history in our own psyche and in our collective cultures, historical psyche. And that’s the image, the idea of rebirth, as one classic archetype. And you know, it’s obviously coming from the seasons, you know, from winter comes spring, et cetera. So this sense of rebirth, you know? And I don’t want to get into simplistic ideas of, you know, from the Holocaust comes the state of Israel. That’s far too simplistic. But the rebirth idea is so powerful in our psyche and the creation, mythological stories, which go way back in a Jewish culture and in of course any cultures, you know? It’s common to pretty much most cultures, I think, in the world. And that requires the conflict between destruction and creation. And then you have the others, the creator, the explorer, the rebel, you know, the hero we’ve spoken about, those ones as well. The warrior one is interesting.

You know, I don’t want to get into that too much now, but it can be the physical one, the Achilles, or it can be, you know, the physical great hero, the Rambo character, the Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” or… I’m trying to think of the other one, not Rambo. You know, John Wayne in the car, whatever. You know, those are certain warrior fighter-type heroes. But then you get the much more tragic flaw hero, the Odysseus, who is full of anxiety and doubts and insecurities, but still makes that leap into being the heroic warrior. And it may be a doctor, it maybe discovering the cure for polio and saying, “I don’t want a penny out of it. I want to give it free to society,” Jonas Salk. You know, different kind of warrior against disease, illness. It may be heroic warrior in so many forms. You know, Odysseus coming up with the deceptive idea of the wooden horse, you know, the Trojan horse and how to win in a battle with a small group against a much bigger group. So we have all these different examples of links amongst them. Just a couple of quick examples, you know, which are, I want to try and give a little bit less obvious ones. Atticus Finch “To Kill a Mocking” is the idealistic father, the idealist, the father. There’s a hero archetype there, a warrior of a different kind. A totally different kind of hero is Bogart’s image in “Casablanca,” the archetype. You know, even if we think cynicism is the last refuge of the romantic, and often I do think that. Cynicism and romanticism in our times are so closely allied, and yet they’re in conflict, as Hobbes would say. It’s a fundamental conflict in the psyche. And what’s brilliant about this portrayal of Bogart in “Casablanca” and the Bogart image in so many other films, but I think for me, best captured in “Casablanca” is cynicism is the last refuge of the romantic. Of course, he’s ultimately a romantic idealist, but he’s a classic cynic as well.

And he holds that contradiction of archetype. He holds the conflict, as Hobbes would say, in the archetype. And that’s the definition of a modern image of a man, a human being, man or woman, doesn’t matter. And to hold that paradox, that contradiction, you can be a cynic and a romantic. You can be in conflict between the two. It’s okay. In fact, it’s closer to reality. It’s in Odysseus, of a different kind. It’s not a more one dimensional superman, Rambo, Achilles, very different. And Bogart, you know, for me, and of course many, many contemporary versions of this in other film and literary characters, you know, from Shakespeare, anyway, all the way through, of course, flawed, tragically flawed, but ultimately heroic. You know, and this sense of cynicism and romanticism going, you know, walking the same path, these are the shadows of the Bogart archetype image. And I think the reason why it struck such a chord from the movie and from his acting abilities, you know, whether consciously or not, doesn’t matter, be understood it and could show it in a way, you know. And for me, Brando could do it as well. Walking that fine line between defiance and vulnerability, the razor’s edge between the two is another kind of very modern archetype full of conflict and tragic flaw. So how each society will see it, and each epoch in history as the cycles of history move, it’ll come and go. This image will come and then it will go, then the next one come and go, you know, if we go with a cyclical sense of history as opposed to the progressive sense of history, which is a 50:50 debate, there’s no right or wrong.

Some of the core ideas of Jungian psychology for me is Jung saw the ego, which is the conscious thinking self, personal unconscious, which is where our base images, our base drives, our animal instincts, which may be creative and destructive, lie, maybe dimly aware, but then he linked it with a collective unconscious. And that’s the three. That’s the holy trinity, if you like, of going into this Jungian stuff. Very different to the id, the ego and the super-ego of Freud, the id, the unconscious, the ego, the conscious thinking self, and the super-ego, the mental police that stop us just acting instinctively as humans. If you like, how we internalise the rules, the rules, whether they are legal or moral, of values in our society. So for Jung, it’s a collective unconscious. That’s the link that has to be made. And I think, how else can we respond to literature written two and a half thousand years ago? Literature written 500 years ago for a small theatre in London of the Globe by Mr. Shakespeare and so many others all over, if there wasn’t something in this idea of the collective unconscious. And I think that the aim of Jungian psychotherapy is to help the individual find a healthy connection to his or her own unconscious. That’s it. So we are not flooded by it, which would be psychosis or schizophrenia, where we’re not aware of what’s going on in our unconscious. We’re driven by it, but we’re totally unaware of it. That’s psychosis. So we’re not flooded by it, but a healthy relationship to our unconscious, or we’re out of balance, which is more the neurotic state, full of depression and anxiety, what we call personality disorder today, all that stuff. Where we are aware, but it’s so hard to do anything about it. The neurotic state. Neurotic brings in some self-awareness.

The psychotic doesn’t have that self-awareness. So in this difference, it’s all about how on earth am I going to have a fairly healthy relationship to my unconscious? Like I’m trying to do, I’ve got to lose five or six, four or five kilos. I’m trying to have a healthy relationship with my food, whatever, you know, jokes aside, it’s really trying to find that healthy relationship to becoming more aware of my unconscious. For him, it’s linked to that collective idea, which is of course, the archetypes. And out of Jung, so many other ideas come. You know, obviously we have the David and Goliath, which is an obvious archetypal story. We have the cynic and the romantic, the conflict between the two in “Casablanca” and Bogart. We have the “Saving Private Ryan,” the Tom Hanks character. You know, on the one hand, it’s ridiculous that he risks everybody’s life to save one soldiers. It’s ridiculous, it’s absurd. It’s self-destructive for him and the others. He’s cynical about it, the Tom Hanks character, but there’s a romantic side which carries on to do it nevertheless. So for me, it’s a play out of a version in “Saving Private Ryan” of that complex conflict between romanticism and cynicism that I think we see. You know, going on with Jung is that there are other ideas of the introvert and the extrovert, that’s Jungian. It’s not Freud. You know, and there’s a conflict between the two. Not that one person is totally introvert, the other one totally extrovert, but there is a conflict, you know, that somebody can be more introvert, more extrovert. Again, the words he uses are never judgmental.

He’s just trying to identify the psychic conflict in all of us. And ultimately, the process of individuation, the process of getting that healthy relationship with our unconscious is to understand the archetypes in our cultural history. Do you identify more with King David, with Moses? With a rabbi, with a rebel, with a carer? With a physical warrior? With a healer? You know, what’s the deeper identification in a way? And his thing is that we get to this history, this memory of our culture through symbols and dreams, and that’s part of it all. And he’s a pioneer in this. Back to Freud, “The royal road to the unconscious is through dreams.” Not only sleeping dreams, but waking dreams. What images, what archetypes, what physical symbols, you know, burn in our dream? Freud even said that he wanted Jung to be the Joshua to his Moses. Freud identified with the archetype of being a Moses, a leader, a creator, and a destroyer. A rebel, all these archetypes. And Joshua, you know, the crown prince. He would be the next one to carry it all further. Freud said it. Of course, he was pragmatic, Freud. He said, I also didn’t want psychoanalysis to be seen as a Jewish national affair. So he purposely chose Dr. Jung to be his crown prince, in a way. So he was pragmatic, Freud, as well as mythical seeing himself in terms of Jewish cultural archetypes. I mean, the two of them even, you know, travelled to America together, were really good friends, like a father and son, in a way. They analysed each other, they analysed each other’s dreams, put an enormous amount of time. Finally, Freud broke off the friendship in 1913, you know, and Jung said that he was just so… “When Freud thought something through, that was it, it was settled.”

I’m quoting from Jung here, and it was hard for him to argue or debate it, you know. He was stubborn, you know, stuck to his ideas. Jung, Freud rather wrote in a letter in 1913, “That Jung keeps shouting that he’s normal.” This is Freud writing in a letter. “And this gave rise Freud to my suspicion that he lacks insight into his own illness.” Fascinating how Freud would see Jung in his own psychological, psychoanalytic way. You know, Freud to me is the great, great innovator of it all and Jung certainly massively influenced by it and, you know, takes it further in his own way. But you know, so much as footnotes to Freud for me, in psychology. Okay, I want to move on to something quite different from this. You know, I’ve spoken about this here as we go through it. Something very interesting, what Jung wrote about Hitler, trying to see it in these terms, archetype and history and the collective unconscious that Hitler’s voice is his unconscious into which the German people have projected themselves. The unconscious of 78 million Germans. Is trying to understand the terrifying, menacing horror of what this Hitler means, the archetype of it means. Not just call him a monster or call him a monster of evil, but how to understand it psychoanalytically, to analyse it. The unconscious of millions and millions of Germans. Of course, there’s the economic situation, you know, 6 million, 8 million Germans unemployed. Of course, he’s not denying that. But trying to understand even within that, how it works, how fascism, the extreme fascism in this case, but how fascism comes about from the unconscious. “In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler gives me the impression of an automaton, never laughs, no human sign.”

So it’s interesting that he would compare him to Mussolini, like many has. He’s trying to identify the specifics of the archetype. His expression was that of an inhumanly, single-minded purposefulness. “Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside.” Is it purely persona? The mask, the image? Has that become the man? Or is there something deeper inside? Is there an inner conflict? Is this just a politician playing out? Or is it so single-minded that the persona and the inner unconscious are one which is quite terrifying. “With Hitler, you do not feel that you are with a man. With Hitler, you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man because there’s nobody there. He’s not a man, he’s a collective. How can you talk intimately with a nation?” In other words, he’s so taken on to embody the collective unconscious of German memory, of antisemitism, of hate, of so much in the German ancient psyche. By ancient, I mean going back however many years, and in European psyche that he has become it. He is the collective archetype. How on earth do I even begin to deal with such a person. Where the persona and the unconscious archetype are one, the social mask and the unconscious archetype are actually married, are one. Now, we may disagree with this entirely. So theologists, other psychologists, many writers will have a very different interpretation. This is just Jung trying to understand what makes what we call a monster or evil. What makes people who are suicide bombers, what makes people who go out and do terrible things? Is it a more psychological Freudian interpretation we bring in? Or do we bring in this kind of interpretation? Do either of them help or make sense?

Where there is such a connection between a religious fanatical belief and the social persona, and there’s no mediation between the two? That’s scary. It’s an interesting idea for Jung, for me to try and understand this type of personality, this type of individual. Okay, then we have here “The Red Book,” and this was what, you know, where the famous Red Book of Jung’s, he wrote so many of his ideas and you know, sort of like jotting down notes, you know, and this phrase from the interview last week. “We are not of today, or yesterday, we are of an immense age.” But if we are aware of it, we have a mediation between our social persona and our collective unconscious. You know, it’s Alexander the Great is totally aware of whether he identifies more with Odysseus, the cunning, clever leader, or Achilles, the physical, heroic, Rambo-type character or both, okay? And humans are pitifully, you know, and how much he learned from Aristotle in teaching all of this. You know, this goes way back. So “The Red Book” you know, just become famous in the Jungian world, really. Let’s go back to some of the words of Jung’s, synchronicity. The sense that things happen by chance, random. That phenomena occur without a rational understanding. Synchronicity. The very phrase collective unconscious, introvert, extrovert, all of these things, we go on and on, you know, even the word the crown prince, all of these things imply certain Jungian understanding of things.

Jung has proposed that art can be used to alleviate feelings of trauma, anxiety, help to heal or repair or restore, all of that. PTSD comes about, art therapy, music therapy, literary therapy, dance, movement therapy. All of this comes about through Jung. The originators of Alcoholic Anonymous and the 12 step programme, acknowledge that the ideas came originally from a Jungian understanding. You know, and I don’t want to get into it now, but if you look at some of the ideas there, you can see, they connect to something going way back in the collective memory. Fellini, of course, in film it comes out and in theatre, obviously Fellini, it’s all about Jungian dreams, archetypal images, you know, all of this. There’s a fascinating phrase in one of Kubrick’s films, 1987, “Full Metal Jacket,” which is for me, well, Kubrick, one of my all-time favourite directors. And Kubrick in “Full Metal Jacket,” is basically about these soldiers who are being trained in basic training to be a platoon and go out and fight in the Vietnam War? But how cruel and vicious and brutal the training is, break the guy down, become a soldier archetype, go out and kill without thinking and obey orders. And there’s an underlying theme about another one of great of Jung’s ideas, which is, and this comes back to what I started with, Hobbes’s idea of conflict. What Jung called the duality of man. Everything has its opposite, there’s always a duality. And in one scene in the film, a colonel asks an ordinary soldier, “You write born to kill on your helmet, but you also wear a peace button. I don’t get it. What’s this supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?” “You write born to kill on your helmet, but you’re wearing a peace jacket, a peace button.” The soldier replies, this is in the movie.

“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir, the Jungian thing.” And that I think Kubrick gets it in one phrase in the movie, “The Jungian thing, the duality of man, sir.” It’s not a judgement of simple good versus evil, right versus wrong. It’s the duality of man. It’s the creation and the destruction of the individual, of man. That’s it. And I think Jung, and I think in Kubrick’s film, you know, the Jungian thing, the duality. I mean, the ordinary soldier says it. He puts it in the mouth of the ordinary soldier, the ability to wear a peace button and born to kill on the helmet, and still be a soldier. It’s the inner conflict expressed in a very simple way, in a brilliant scene, in a brilliant movie and all about, yeah, I think that’s such a clear point for me. Okay, this is what I briefly showed last week. I wanted to just, you know, come as we push today towards the end, the shadow, which never, ever goes. The shadow of a society, the shadow of cultural values, the shadow of belief systems, of religions, the shadow of a community, you know, the shadow of the individual, always. And film noir captures it as you know, so many other types of film and theatre, other things try to. The duality of man ultimately, you know, and I think that’s what Jung in a way brings so strongly to an understanding of the human psyche and society as well. And you know, at times, the shadow reigns and at times, the shadow comes screaming out and will dominated at times, the shadow won’t. It’s always in that conflict between the two. Okay, I think I’m going to hold it here and we can go onto some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh, Rita. “I studied Jung and love his body of work.” Oh, that’s. I know, Rita, it’s fascinating. And I mean, some of it may be nonsense and some of it may be, you know, the fantasies or the dreams of the Swiss guy who, you know, worked with, studied with Freud and came up with it or not, but there’s a genuine attempt to enrich our understanding of human endeavours.

Q: James, “Are the archetypes based on only culturally or also biological, such as instincts among animals at birth?”

A: That’s a great question, James. I think what he would say is that the instinct belongs more in the personal unconscious and in all of us. And that these are archetypal constructs which enable us to make some sense of our life, some sense of our world. And as we go through different stages of life and our community and the stories we inherit from our cultural memory and the images we inherit, whether it’s going back a hundred years, a thousand years. But it’s a great question, between the cultural and the biological or instinct.

Q: Julian, “Do these 12 archetypes correspond to 12 signs of the Zodiac?”

A: Aha, that’s another great question, Julian. I don’t know the answer. I’m going to have to find that out. It’s a great idea. Maybe, I don’t know.

Monty, “Controversial South African, Laurens van der Post was introduced by his wife to Jung who a great influence.” Absolutely. You know, I love and I used to, I read so much of Laurens van der Post, obviously I’m sure we all did one or two years ago, and “The Lost World of the Kalahari,” so many of the other books that he wrote, which I think are fantastic, are totally influenced by Jung and I know he’s been accused of being over-romantic and over sensationalist and all the rest of it, you know, and sort of romanticising the ancient past. But I think he gets it, I really do, Laurens van der Post does. Nikki, thank you.

Q: “Did Jung and Bakhtin know of each other’s work and off the continuity in our own psyche of those who came before?”

A: That’s a great question, Nikki. Thanks for this. I don’t know. And you are going to have to research and find out, but it’s a great thought, “and of the continuity in our own psyche of those who came before.” Great point. Thank you, Nikki.

Q: James, “Aren’t these concepts of Jung much less alive than real individuals? Moses, Achilles, Oedipus upon whom Jung based them? Aren’t they much closer to reality than the archetypes?”

A: Yeah, I think that it’s a great point, James. I think the idea of using these archetype, the ancient figures, Achilles, Moses, Oedipus, you know, so many others, Adam and Eve, whatever, I think he’s trying to say that they are located in ancient mythical stories and symbols, whether symbols of individuals or physical symbols, the symbol of the flood, you know, the symbol of parting the Red Sea, whatever, all that stuff. And to deconstruct, to decode the meaning of those. And I think he’s purposely using the kind of less real individuals, more mythical ones because, you know, we’ve created them, we talk in terms of them. We talk in terms of David and Goliath, whatever, all of these. So what does that mean? Why do we do that? What’s our link? Is it just a fantasy, just an imaginative dream? Or is there something closer that links us to them and the need for it?

Q: iPhone2, “Is Golda Meir a hero?” What other woman?“

A: Yeah. Well, in my mind, yes, on a whole lot of levels, but that would require going into a whole series of questions.

Bobby, "I wonder how Jung’s inclusion of past events and cultural history intersects with what we call epigenetic PTSD e.g. children of Holocaust survivors experiencing inherited trauma. That is a fantastic question also, Bobby. And I know my sister who lives in Jerusalem has done a quite a lot of work around this idea of inherited trauma and the children or grandchildren, great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We don’t know enough about it. I need to find out, but great question.

Sandra, "Trump unleashed the id in Americans.” Yeah, I mean, it would have to be that the id is already there. The same could be said about Brexit in England, you know, and an English version of pretty strong nationalism and anti-immigrant. And you know, Trump, I don’t know if it’s just the individual. I think that they imbue a collective unconscious, whether they’re aware of it or not, and they’re able to articulate it. And I think that’s the link. And whether it’s a calculated thing, whether it’s just, you know, instinctive, they’re able to articulate what was already there, the id. And I think it does go way back. We can in economically go back to 2008 and the crash and many, many other things. But you know, I think or the movement of a lot of work, you know, to cheaper labour in China and the east elsewhere. So I think we got to include all of that. But I think it’s the ability to embody, imbue and articulate. Whether Trump is aware of it, whether Boris was aware of it about Brexit or not, or they were just playing it, you know, who knows? It doesn’t really matter. They’re able to articulate it, you know as other side, other times.

Susan. “Analyse Trump.” Oh my god. That’s an interesting question. That’s great, Susan. You do it.

Q: Monty, “Is Trump a collective?”

A: Yeah, I think he is. I think he is an archetype of that and I think it is that social persona and the unconscious archetype, there isn’t an ego mediating between the two. It just goes. You know, it appears anyway from the outside. It just goes sort of free flow like a river, you know, it just goes between the two. But you know, I’m just coming away from the outside and you know, looking on TV stuff.

William, “Order breeds habit, disorder breeds invention,” Mao Zedong Yeah, and every crisis is also an opportunity. There’s always the Hobbesian idea of creation and destruction of conflict.

Rita, “Thank you very much.” Very kind.

Q: Judy, “The name of the movie?”

A: I think maybe you meant Kubrick, “Full Metal Jacket.”

Q: Lorna, “Can you perceive Jungianism applied to yourself? I find it hard to.”

A: Yeah, in moments of strangeness, I do. Yeah, I do apply it to myself and people I know, but I would never tell them. I think it helps with my writing of theatre. It helps with my understanding of character and writing my plays, to be frank. You need to write according to it, but it just helps, fill in to play creatively.“ Definitely. I think Christopher Nolan was very aware of it when he did "Oppenheimer” and the way he showed, you know, Tom Conti playing Einstein and some of the others, Edward Taylor and some of the, I think it’s there. I think of a very contemporary film in “Oppenheimer.” It’s obviously there in Barbie.

Judith, “You don’t mention any female practitioners.” It’s not conscious. You’ve brought out something. No, you have to analyse me, Judith, okay. It’s not conscious at all. I think I’m trying to locate Jung in his own times and I have spoken about Lise Meitner, Marie Curie and many others and I’m going to go onto Emily Dickinson with Walt Whitma, but I’m going onto Cowboys I think next. So it’s a great point, which I’ll be aware of. Thank you. Certainly not conscious. James, thank you.

Okay, so thank you very much, everybody. Hope you are well and hope you have a great rest of the weekend. And Karina, thank you so much again, take care, everyone.