Jung Channel Intro

[00:00:00]Hello, I'm Tony Walker, and I'm mostly the narrator of the Classic Ghost Stories podcast. And in that podcast, I've developed a habit of the past 7 years of narrating a supernatural story from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and then commenting on them afterwards. And I tend to comment on all sorts of things, but one kind of viewpoint I keep choosing because of my big interest in it is kind of looking at stories from a Jungian point of view.

[00:00:28]So, people have asked me to do something specifically about Jung. And so, I thought, "Okay, I will." So, let me say how I've come to Jung, Carl Jung. So, I'm 65 now, and um when I was in my 20s, I worked in London, and the organization that I worked for had a uh an analyst that was free of charge. They paid for it.

[00:00:56]Which was amazing amazing offer, really.

[00:00:58]And this analyst came from the Tavistock Centre. And so, we never really discussed her her um kind of psychoanalytical orientation, which kind of brand of psychoanalysis she was involved in, but probably um British object relations, which is kind of an outgrowth of um Freudian thought, really, from Freud's time after he escaped the Nazis and came to Britain uh for a short while before he died.

[00:01:25]So, um she analyzed me, and um I did I wasn't sure I believed in it. And then particularly one time she said something, and I had this this flashback of my my mother driving away with my stepfather on the day they got married.

[00:01:38]They drove away in a black taxi, and I remembered it so vividly, and I had this big um wave of emotion, a lot of anxiety.

[00:01:48]And it took me right back to the time, and I thought, "Goodness me, maybe there is something in this."

[00:01:52]Anyway, I started to read a bit of Freud, and thought, "Yep, fine."

[00:01:56]Uh and then I found Jung, and Jung actually nourished me. I just for the next five or six years, I just read all of his collected works.

[00:02:06]Um, and then later on in life afterwards, I became a I did a degree in psychology. I did my master's in mental health practice. I was a, um, psychiatric nurse. And then that's a very fairly eclectic discipline, really.

[00:02:19]So, it doesn't tend to have one orientation. So, you know, you learn a bit of, um, uh, object relations. You You learn a bit of, um, Gestalt, um, and uh, Rogerian stuff. And then latterly, uh, CBT and things like this. And And And medication as well. So, that's me and Jung. We've been together a long time now. And uh, and then also, I had a Jungian and then latterly in the past four years, which I've just finished, um, I had a a Jungian analysis every week.

[00:02:53]Um, and I gave it up due to cost, really, and inconvenience. But, I found it very useful uh, to speak to somebody who approached the world understanding Jung and and the way he looked at things. So, that's me and Jung. So, what about him?

[00:03:08]I think he's having a bit of a boost at the moment. Um, he's he Since his death in 1961, just three years three months before I was born.

[00:03:17]So, no no, we shared three three months on the planet together.

[00:03:21]Um, al- although we weren't actually in touch. Um, you know, at least we didn't know we were. Or I didn't. Anyway, so, he's never really gone away. And I think the first boost to Jung was through the New Age movement.

[00:03:38]And I I've got to say that my partner is an energy therapist, so she works with Reiki and all sorts of other things. I don't have no sensitivity to that. I don't see energies. I feel things in Tai Chi sometimes. It might be chi. And I've had, you know, so I'm exposed to that world. Um but I'm probably not of it. Um well, peripherally anyway. So, well, one of the things that I find about the new age movement is it's it believes pretty much anything. And that's one thing it bugs me a little bit about it. And the second thing is it's not very rigorous. So, um they'll in they'll have a theory, and there may be some truth in it, and then they will kind of explain it with hand waves to uh uh you know, quantum entanglement or uh DNA double helix or uh Siberian shamanism. And all of these things might be true. Or, you know, I I or and they may be base themselves on proper research, either kind of anthropological or historical or um psychological, you know, but that they kind of wave.

[00:04:40]But anyway, Jung, because he wrote so much and because he was massively open-minded, um and he he didn't turn away from uh looking into uh subjects such as UFOs and uh yeah, aliens and seances and table rapping and all sorts of things like that, and alchemy, of course.

[00:05:00]Um and the I Ching or the I Jing, because he didn't turn away from those, and he wrote so much, there's a lot of hand waving goes on, and so they're like, oh, yeah, Carl Jung, and they find a find a quote from his work, and they put it on. Now, I'm not saying that's completely illegitimate. What I'm saying is it isn't massively rigorous.

[00:05:19]And in his own way, um I think he was very rigorous. People will disagree with that, possibly. Anyway, I think that's the first ongoing slow burn boost to Carl Jung that has kept him in the public mind.

[00:05:34]And I think latterly, possibly since COVID, or, you know, my dating's a little bit vague here, is the the um the productivity sphere.

[00:05:45]And um there's a huge movement and it's it's aligned to the manosphere, but it's not completely because women do get involved in it, but not as much as men.

[00:05:55]So, productivity is being your best self, the ice baths, the getting up at 4:00 to meditate, do your weights, go for your run, um, and then you're going to you're going to use lots of different apps.

[00:06:06]You're going to have I've had the aura ring. I've done that. You know, the gym and the yoga and uh and productivity tracking, tracking your macros, tracking your sleep. I've done all of that.

[00:06:21]And also as part of this, so there's been the physical, there's been the work productivity, there's been this the technological productivity and having the right apps to do the work, and then there's the kind of spiritual productivity, which is you make sure you do your yoga, make sure you do your meditation, uh, and philosophically, we're going to have the Stoics.

[00:06:45]And so, what I'm going to say is the Stoics are explicitly, I think, about being your best self. You you've come into this world, you want to make the best version of yourself. And I think Jung has been co-opted into this. And he lends himself a little bit to that in this in that, you know, what his thinking has been systematized he systematized it himself uh, to an well, to a large extent he systematized it.

[00:07:08]Um, I mean, there's lots to say about Jung, so that's totally that you know, it's arguable, but I think there's something I think it's defensible as well. And so, this idea that we are going to individuate and we're going to become the amalgamation of the self and the ego, uh, which is now a new thing. We can talk about, you know, this thesis, antithesis, synthesis, which he borrows from Hegel, which he's which he's, you know, explicit about that, I think. And of course, he would borrow it from Hegel, he you know, given his his geographical, historical background and intellectual background. Okay. So, I think the second reason why Jung is popular is he's been is is he's seen as a manual to become your best spiritual self. And and and you know, he he travels along with uh sort of you know, the dog chin and the Zen and the um Advaita Vedanta and all of that stuff about achieving moksha or individuation, recognizing your true nature. I've I've been along all of that. Now, I'm going to make a a difference here because I've always I'm never been massively interested in the Stoics. I'm not and I think Jung isn't doesn't turn us down either, but it's not about um how we should live. I mean, he is he's not uninterested in that, but um his main thing is what's going on? And so, me turning to Jung is not so much about how should we live? How should we be our best selves? Although I acknowledge there is a bit of that, but the main thing is what on earth is going on here? Here we find ourselves. Things are going on.

[00:08:41]We find ourselves doing things and this is where of course he emerges from psychoanalysis. We we didn't plan to do and yet they appear to be purposive.

[00:08:51]They appear to have a a telos, you know, that's a great Youngian word. Uh the Greek, you know, you have to have an end. I think it's Aristotle actually.

[00:09:00]Uh the origin of that. Anyway, so I've done all of that and I'm I'm here with him and um I want to say something about his his open-mindedness and his honesty.

[00:09:14]So, so first of all, his erudition. So, this is a guy who can read Greek alchemical texts, Latin texts, German, he speaks English, French, you know, and he will look at them with great rigor and he will research them and and and and it it's voluminous, thoughtful dissection of these things and comparison of them with other systems. He looks at them and how they work in themselves. He he excavates a system of Gnosticism, for example, and of alchemy, and instead of it just being a a rumbledy dumbledy heap of proto-chemistry, he he finds a system in it. Um he discovers he uncovers it. Um I'm being reflexive. I'm going to maybe talk something about grand narratives.

[00:09:58]And uh he's you know you know, he may be accused of that.

[00:10:03]Um but you know, he looked at alchemy, Gnosticism, UFOs, parapsychology. They carried professional reputational risk.

[00:10:09]You know, if you're going to do that and you're going to set out as a psychiatrist these days, they'd say your your your mentor would say, "Leave that alone. Do something about memory or the effect of lamotrigine on emotional dysregulation. Do that. Don't do this."

[00:10:26]And he wasn't credulous. That's the point. You know, I talked I alluded a little bit to the the New Age movement being a little bit credulous. He was not credulous. He looked into it, okay? So, um so he had interestingly, he had two aspects to this um this excavation, this intellectual excavation. And the first was looking at the old manuscripts and collecting them and looking at them. And the second was his own private work where he had spiritual experiences where ghosts came knocking at his door, where he plunged into the unconscious, where he met Salome and Elijah. And he treats them as agents, as creatures, you know? So, he had um mystical tendencies. And of course, this wasn't the main reason for his break with Freud, but they talked Freud was very keen on avoiding was it the black mud of occultism? Although, you know, as Frank Tallis says in his recent biography, you know, when you go to see Freud, you you're going to his um his office and it's full of like God you know, images and idols, and then he he you to lie down and he interprets your dreams and he divines things from the slips of your tongue. He's more like a shaman than a doctor, even though Freud was absolutely important, it was very important to him to be empirical and be part of the 19th century thrust for empirical scientific enlightenment thinking separated from this credulousness, this superstition, this these occult tendencies, you know.

[00:12:00]But, um and so Jung was avoided that but not completely.

[00:12:08]So, he he was very he was there was something about him that wanted to preserve his respectability and his career.

[00:12:14]Um and there was this other bit like it that his self, if you like, was saying, "Yeah, but let's have a look at alchemy.

[00:12:21]You know, let's let's think about Gnosticism and let's do a little bit of this stuff in our side." I mean, it was his mother's side of his family that was did seances and his first work was about looking at the trying to understand psychologically and empirically and scientifically what was going on in these seances, but the fact that he went to seances, you know, and there's something in his family like that. So, he he has mystical tendencies and when what we find out later on is that he was doing this all the time and he did the black books. I've got the black books there and the red book there.

[00:12:53]And and this is all about his mystical explorations, his shamanic explorations into his own self.

[00:13:03]However, I find him >> [clears throat] >> I think he is intellectual intellectually honest by his own lights.

[00:13:10]He's grappling with what he finds and he doesn't always find what he wants to find and he's open enough to then try and look at what that means.

[00:13:20]You know, he he married a wealthy woman who he adored but then had multiple affairs. He was hubristic. I mean, I think one of the you know, my read on it, one of the main reasons of his fallout with Freud is they both thought they were right and they wouldn't back down. They're both like top dogs, you know, and that that's the problem.

[00:13:40]But take take him all his flaws. I think he was a Leo, was he? Which would explain a lot.

[00:13:46]Um let's have a look at his as we're doing it's kind of an an intro. Let's have a look at his his intellectual formation.

[00:13:54]So um there's you know, Goethe, the great German polymath. Um Now his maternal grandfather, there was a family rumor that said he was um Goethe's illegitimate grandson, although there's apparently no proof of that. But Jung was and the family were quite pleased with this association with Goethe and and and I think um Jung has a kind of affinity with Goethe.

[00:14:19]Let's have a think about, you know, we've got this natural philosophy, this this German natural philosophy, Schelling above all, with a sense that nature and the mind are continuous. Jung is born into that tradition. Nature and the mind are continuous. This is his Unus Mundus later on in his life, the one world. The inner psyche and the outer world are the same. And um this is not Cartesian, you know, the Enlightenment and Descartes. They divide Descartes famously divides and gets a dualistic world where there are two things, mind and matter and they're not the same. And you know, accounted that is this thread, this romantic thread um that cuz Goethe was a a romantic. And then we have, you know, like Wordsworth and Thoreau and people like this who were deeply romantic. So it Jung Jung's is between both of those.

[00:15:09]He's partly the 19th century Victorian Edwardian empiricist, scientist and partly romantic um giving credence to the psyche, the natural world, and mystical ideas.

[00:15:28]The instinct is romantic. The psyche is not a mechanism. It is a living thing with its own purposiveness. And myth and symbol carry a form of truth that propositional language cannot exhaust.

[00:15:41]The And the modernity, this scientific thrust to, you know, famously Thomas Nagel, uh, you know, that essay, "What is it like to be a bat?" I may have misquoted the title.

[00:15:54]And I Nagel does another one, um, "The View from Nowhere", which it doesn't exist, but science tries to create an illusion that it's possible to have a world with nobody in it, you know, that is just there without an observer. And I think this has come under massive attack since, but that was the project to and behaviorism and in psychology and all these things is to separate the soul, the the existence, the inner madness, and plurality, and all of these things, the incoherence of it. Maybe it isn't incoherent, but, you know, the inner experience of being a person from a world without anybody in it that is just like a dead machine. And you can tell from, um, my use of that phrase that I'm not keen on that, and so I have my cards on the table. Um, so I think, um, he's a romantic in scientific dress.

[00:16:48]I think we need to just visit, um, grand narratives and postmodern thinking cuz we are now looking at Jung from the future where things have happened. So, you may realize, you may know that the Victorian era and the and the supposed enlightenment here is all about grand narratives. That is to say, great big projects that move forward that that explain huge things, and, um, with an with an an inev- inevitable march towards progress, freedom, mastery of the universe, if you like. So, he Jung does not offer and I think again his honesty is he he's tentative. Uh is he a little bit tentative. You know, he has his system and he says this is this is what he thinks it is, but he's always open to to looking at it again and and having new data and revising, I think, you know? Uh whereas the grand narrative doesn't revise. So, uh but he does have a little bit of a grand narrative.

[00:17:48]So, the postmodernism would be deeply suspicious of.

[00:17:53]So, these are universals. The archetypes are universals. Whose universals? You know, he famously talked about um I mean, he was open to the fact that he was one of the pioneers of the fact that said, you know, people are a mix of um male and female. Um n- nobody's totally male, nobody's totally female. So, you know, he was one of the forerunners of saying that.

[00:18:16]But, then he talked about the animus being how how is the woman's relation to the to the male internally and how it plays out. And he talks about animus-ridden women who have a certain characteristic.

[00:18:31]And anima-ridden men that is the opposite who have a certain characteristic. But, of course, postmodernism would say, "Is that right?

[00:18:37]Is that true for all people in all places?"

[00:18:40]Maybe, maybe not, you know? Is the male psyche really always like that? Is it, you know? So, however, a- and even, you know, somebody like Hillman, one of his followers, James Hillman, he questions this within the tradition. But, so the point about this is the point of me going on about this is to say that Jung is um inevitably a creature of his time, his place, his social class.

[00:19:05]Absolutely. Uh aren't we all? Uh we can only be the people we are. We come into the world. In the sense, do you know, uh that actually reinforces his position.

[00:19:15]We are not blank slates. We are not self-made creatures. We bring with us, and this is a very important Union thing. Uh the CX, but he probably does he he alludes to it in the seven sermons to the dead. But, you know, we carry our ancestors with us. There are still things they want, and we are we are kind of going forward in a trajectory to to that has been set off by people we come from, who are dead, who we never met.

[00:19:42]In the same way, you know, like a bird builds a nest. This is the whole idea of archetypes, of course. The bird bird builds builds a nest, and they start doing things. And my dogs do things.

[00:19:51]Nobody tells them to do it. A wolf pack does things.

[00:19:54]Humans do things, and nobody tells us to do it. You know, and we are being driven from behind, if you like. We're being pulled forward, but we're being pushed from behind. So, I think that's a a Union idea, as well.

[00:20:07]So, yeah, it's a sort of grand narrative, which I think is possibly its weakness, because my impression is that it does not hold for all people at all time. Yet yet you can see it working. Indeed, he was and he was a Western man, and he was very um precise about that. I mean, he was interested in Chinese alchemy and in in Sufism. Uh and he spoke to the some of the Native American tribes. So, he was open to the world, and he was interested in things like Advaita Vedanta and Zen. And you can see parallels between that.

[00:20:45]But, he was a man of his time. And you know, he was a man, as I said, he had a number of affairs, sometimes with patients or ex-patients. And you know, this would be deeply frowned on. He'd probably be canceled now. But, I mean, for all his flaw and and all this this there was a whole thing about him being an anti-Semite. Well, I mean, you know, he had very good friends who were Jewish, and he it turns out was working for the American Secret Service as a as a contact in the Second World War, very much not on the Nazi side. He critiqued some of the Nazi thought. He understood it, but understanding something is not the same as um being consumed by it. And that is a very Union thing.

[00:21:30]I think the problem of Nazism for Young was that this archetype consumed had possessed the German nation.

[00:21:40]He could It was a real thing, this archetype. And I think we're living through times like that now, where I archetypes are possessing huge um huge chunks of the population to the extent they're losing their discretion.

[00:21:54]So, what is my final point here really?

[00:21:57]I started off talking about the lack of lack of discernment in the New Age.

[00:22:03]And then I praised Jung for his his willingness to see his own work as provisional and as valid for himself as a as a And he was a great believer in the individual, which is a very Western idea, Western Protestant idea, you could say. And that's exactly what he what he came from as well. Um and yeah, he he was not I don't think he was dogmatic.

[00:22:31]Disagree with me if you like. Or he was a bit dogmatic, if he can be a bit dogmatic. I He said, "This is what I found. This is what I believe."

[00:22:39]But he was prepared to review it.

[00:22:41]And he was a he was a human being, same as all of us. And and you know, going on that issue of canceling, um everybody's flawed, you know?

[00:22:50]Everybody's flawed.

[00:22:51]Uh this is another thing. We've all got shadows. And when you kind of go, you know, that person is wicked, and they are beyond the pale. I I don't even know if it's true, but I'm going to uh exclude them from my mind. So, whatever they said, did, or thought, they cannot be part of my mind because they are contaminated by something moral I don't agree with. You know, I don't think he would have done that.

[00:23:17]And I don't think you should because I think Okay, let's come to this.

[00:23:22]With Union work, honesty Honesty is the only virtue. Otherwise, you're cheating at patients. This This life we're in, and mine is moving towards its end now.

[00:23:36]It's real. It's not a game.

[00:23:40]Another thing I think is people talk about this being a simulation. And I'm quite interested in things like Donald Hoffman's ideas about this.

[00:23:47]Maybe that's true, but it's not a simulation in it We have skin in the game. This is real. We're really here. And I don't even know if we are here to do anything. But what we are doing is real. If If you understand what I mean.

[00:24:03]I do have thoughts about process theology, Alfred North Whitehead, and some direction of travel. And then I nip back to Albert Camus and go, "Ah, it's all absurd." But all of them are saying, Camus as well, you know, this is real.

[00:24:17]You don't cheat. Don't cheat. It's like going to the gym and going like Yeah, and when when somebody's not looking, you pick a lighter weight up cuz you can get away with it. Well, you needn't bother going. And the point is you're in the gym of life. You didn't put yourself here. Here's where you are.

[00:24:33]I don't know what's going on in your life, but it's definitely real.

[00:24:36]Anyway. Okay, that's my intro. I'm going to start looking at Mysterium Coniunctionis, volume 14 of his work. And I'm just going to try and work through it.

[00:24:49]And I'm going to approach it. I've read it um three times before at different ages. It'll be a different thing every time I approach it. And so, I think it might be worthwhile looking at that. All right. Thank you for putting up with the rambling.