Let's Find Out - Between Myth and Psychoanalysis

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

Think the whole point of this if you, if I had to use one sentence summary, which I am forcing myself to do right now, which un-force oneself, if I am not too. Good evening, everybody. If you like Greek myths, your episode, Nokia, Hansel and Gretel, learn to medieval to ancient stories. It's really hard to draw the, line conscious construction and creation of it versus its prehistoric campfire story water scale what delphi the oracle of delphi tells king laos of thieves that he'll have a child who's destined to kill him and not just that but sleep with his wife chocasta the boy's own mother When a baby comes along and the king pierces his ankles and leaves him on a mountainside to die. A shepherd finds the baby, though, and takes him to King Polybis and Queen Maropee of Corinth,

who name him Oedipus and raise him as their own. Then one day, the Oracle of Delphi to find out who his real parents are. The oracle doesn't see fit to tell him this, but she does tell him that he's destined to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Etybis, Etypus tries to run from this fate, but ends up running several years and several children. Later, Eipus and Jocasta figure out the truth of everything with the unwilling help of Tyreseus. the seer. Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus stabs out his own eyes. The blind king then goes into exile, the only daughter, Antigone, and eventually dies in the

town of colonists. So that's the myth in a nutshell. And the reason I gave you only the summary was that a really interesting article about myth and psychology. I address Carl Gustav Young, who I'm growing increasingly interested in based on his choice to study broad scope of human history, specifically mythology, and how mythology and religion intertwine with the innate psychological structures of our brain that are universal that he calls the archetype.

The theories of these two, Young and Freud, have almost monopolized the study of myth, and Freud's key discussion of his key myth, that of Oedipus, fittingly occurs in the interpretation of dreams. For he and young as well compare myths with dreams. On the surface or manifest level, the story of Oedipus describes the figures

vain effort who elude inly however Oedipus Manifestly he least wants to know He wants to act out His Oedipus complex

That manifest The manifest or literal Level of the myth Hides the latent symbolic meaning The manifest level Oedipus is the innocent victim of fate

The oracle could have Should have told usurp Responsibilities of a king In tradition would have it that he would marry the... He is the culprit on the latent level. And rightly understood, the myth depicts not Oedipus' failure to circumvent his ineluctible destiny,

but his success in fulfilling his fondest. Scarcely stops here. It is not ultimately about Oedipus at all. It's just as the manifest level on which Oedipus is the victim masks a latent one on which adipus is the victimizer So that level in turn masks an even more latent one

Which the ultimate victimizer is the myth maker And any reader of the myth smitten with it Either is an adult A neurotic adult male stuck or fixated At his edible stage of development He identifies himself with Oedipus and through him fulfills his own edible complex. At heart, the myth is not biography but in autobiography. So, another famous psychoanalysts, the Austrian auto rank died in 1939 as well,

who was Freud's protege at the same time, but later broke. broke irrevocably with his master, works out a common plot or a pattern for a key category of myths, those of male heroes. The heart of the pattern is the decision by the parents to kill their son at birth to avert the prophecy that the son, if born, will one day kill his own father. unbeknownst to the parents though the infant is rescued and raised by others grows up to discover who he is returns home to kill his father and succeeds in succeeds him as king or noble now interpret it psychologically the pattern is in the enactment of the pattern is the enactment of edipus and the complex The son kills his father to gain sexual access to his mother. Mainstream psychoanalysis has changed mightily since Freud's day.

Contemporary psychoanalysis. Contemporary psychoanalysts, like the American Jacob Arlo, who died in 2004, see myth as contributing to normal development, though, rather than to the perpetuation of a neuroses. Myth abets adjustment to the social and physical worlds rather than childish flight from them. I guess that means, it helps, encourages, okay. Myth abets adjustment to the social and physical worlds rather than the childish flight from them. Furthermore, myth now serves everyone, not merely the neurotics. The classical Freudian goal is the establishment of oneself in the external world,

largely free of domination by parents and instincts. Success is expressed concretely in the form of a job and a mate. Youngians accept that goal, but as that of only the first half of life, the first half. And I think that's where the Nietzschean influence. on young really kicks in. It's that carries the most burden. That's the physical and fundamental psychological growth. The lion is almost the culmination of the, I guess, the actual climax of the abilities of that growth, physically, more so than mentally. And then the child, the transition from lion to child is one of rare actual, actual man.

manifestation in the real world, whereas where your ego ultimately incorporates the, your place in the actual social, cultural, historical structure that you're sitting within and you recognize that you, you are master of your own personal domain. But in order to do anything outside your own domain, interact with others in the world, you have to accept. your limitations as a finite being in the world. And check, check your ego, I guess, really is what it is. So develop such a powerful, powerful tools in your psyche at that point of the transition to childhood again, is that you can in fact incorporate data into your life that doesn't fit with what you know.

So you're able to, maintain your own awareness of your abilities in the face of something you don't understand. I shouldn't have. Do ideas. I can make a fool of myself. The goal of the uniquely young-in second half of life of adulthood is consciousness, not however of the external world, as summed up by the Freudian term reality principle. but of the distinctively Jungian-Yung-in, or collective unconscious.

One must return to that unconscious, from which one has unavoidably become severed in the first half of your life. But not to sever one's ties to the external world. On the contrary, the aim is to return in turn to the external world. The ideal is balanced between consciousness of the external world and consciousness. this of the unconscious. The aim of the second half of life is to supplement, not abandon the achievements of the first half. Neology of morals right now and as someone who's not being formally or hasn't been formally trained in philosophy, you know, maybe it's ultimately going to be better for me because I don't have a rigid structure in which to put my ideas

So maybe I might see things from a different light, but probably not because it's a little more chaotic to approach it this way. So there's probably a lot of things that a good philosophy professor could in fact teach me or guide me in the direction of observing before I'm conscious of it. But nonetheless, it's really fascinating that Nognecci's idea. is that the reason laws and myths and traditions are so important is that they enable us to have a dictability about society they enable a kind of relative stasis so that change doesn't happen too chaotically too dramatically there's an underlying order to how human beings operate you know for instance the five-day workweek the general fact that we work during the day and sleep at night that's traditionally

culturally enforced almost not everyone does it and that's that's the point is that you want a balance between those two that's probably a really bad example but just almost anything you do like having breakfast three meals a day of course I'm trying to think of things that aren't law explicitly law like stop signs following driving and you know not physically harming other people these things help us because they they are a relative in a small period of time a constant that we can use as a baseline to predict the future and by predicting the future I mean of our personal action

actions so that we can make promises. So basically the significance of our ability to make promises is that A, we need a powerful memory, a will that an event won't be forgotten and a confidence in our ability to predict the future. And that's significant because laws and traditions like I'm talking about, allow us to be predictable and therefore we can assume responsibility of our promises and our ability to fulfill them

and this allows the existence of a sovereign or free individual so through a complex analysis it sounds ironic but the instantiation of rules in a society whether it's explicit in law or implicit in culture, such as, you know, free speech, let someone speak and, uh, you know, don't punch someone in the face without letting them to speak first, I guess, as a very crude example. Um, I'm so immersed in it that I can't detach myself and see it. Like in my room, the fact that we wear clothes, you know, is, is, One thing. Maybe waving to someone.

That's something that, you know, you just say, we just do it to be nice because not everybody does it. But the fact that a lot of people do it is evidence of some sort of implicit agreement, you know, that if we're neighbors and I ask to borrow a cup of coffee, it's implied that there'll be a little bit of. of acknowledged debt to you and in the future you can cash in on that debt to a similar extent but we need rules like this to create a sovereign individual so that if it was chaotic you might not be able to predict the future and you might not

in the sense that society wouldn't necessarily be probable to still exist in the same fashion that it currently does. So therefore you wouldn't be able to predict that in the future, I will have a cup of sugar, I will have a job, I will, my family will still be together to be able to give you and the assets to return the favor. And so society at large is composed and very organized and very rigid roughly because of that reason, because it allows us to say okay it's stable in five years from now I will still be alive because if anything I have the welfare system to back me up or I have my neighbors or my family or something like that or I have just the general good nature or goodwill of other citizens that isn't necessary from a very very

objective standpoint but in fact is necessary if you want to continue to play the game of stable organization. We we call a society over a long period of time with as many people as possible. The reciprocation of debts and credits and general good nature

is a key factor of that. And the sovereign individual has tremendous responsibility then to make claims about their future actions. And so if I know society is going to be relatively stable, and therefore I know that, okay, I can promise you something, then it's my fault if I don't act out and fulfill that promise in the future.

And therefore it's my personal responsibility to avoid. He tried to, basically, he tried to bury very, very deep into millennia of history and prehistory. with human beings and derive where our sense of conscience. That was a terrible explanation, I know, but, you know, I'm just trying to flesh out my own idea. So let's see if I can incorporate that into what we're learning about Youngian theory, about breaking out from that stabilized society and doing something very personal and individual. And, or not breaking out, because you're becoming a... part of it, but if you, you're individualizing yourself by choosing a specific job and choosing a

specific mate, and then you're like a specific example of a very general concept that includes getting a job and choosing a mate and fitting into somewhere into the structure of society. and so Young says the second part of your life, once you've established yourself as an individual in society, then the second part is to return. So this is where Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist, who died in 1987, provides the classical Youngian counterpart to rank on hero myths, where ranks pattern limited to males centers on the heroes

toppling of his father Campbell's centers on a journey and anybody who's taken college college English 101 you know will have you know watched Star Wars or the Hobbit

or something like that to give them a modern day example of how pervasive in your ubiquitous really this this idea of a hero's journey really is and the heroes with a hero yeah the hero with a thousand faces that's why that book was so popular by Joseph Campbell was because almost any story that's a that

ages better that ages well and is popular will have some variant of this myth but the variant can't very too much because there are certain core aspects of the journey that everybody must go through in order to live a fulfilled life and meaningful one at that. So let's try to flesh this out. Campbell's centers on a journey undertaken by an adult female or male hero from the known human world to the therefore to the heretofore, to the here to for. unknown world of gods.

Interpret in psychologically, that journey is an inner, not outer. Trek, from the known portion of the mind, ordinary or ego consciousness, the object of which is the external world, to the unknown portion in the mind, the Jungian unconscious. The successful hero must not only reach the strange new world, but also he must also return. So it's, I guess the alternative would be to either descend into madness and such a perverse new version of ourselves that our old selves would have completely rejected us, which might be a form of madness. In psychological terms, success means the completion of the goal of the second half of life. So the most

influential Jungian theorist of myth after Young himself was Eric Neumann, his protege who died in 1960 and James Hillman which I recommend looking him up on YouTube there's a lot of really profound lectures and more casual talks by Hillman that you can find on. So Young timetizes the developmental or evolutionary aspect of Youngian theory, which is, which is why I like Jordan Peterson so much, because Jordan Peterson has, he's just so well read, and he pulls from so many different areas and science and evolution, evolutionary theory in science, um, as well, is a big part of why he is so confident that he's correct.

about essentially his whole idea is that taking on as much responsibility is kind of what you know Nietzsche is saying really but he's trying to prove it psychometrically or psychologically using psychometrics in other areas of science his idea is that the best way to live for the best life is a life that has the most profound meaning and to get meaning and profound meaning at that, you must take on as much responsibility as you can. And even if you don't believe in objective meaning in a million years from now, your life will be forgotten in a billion years from now, or 10 billion, our star will have already exploded,

and perhaps our civilization, our species. As Nietzsche said, in a few momentary breaths of the universe, our society, our civilization, our earth, the end of it, nothing will have been done. So you can take that perspective and wallow in the meaninglessness, the nihilism of it. Or you can acknowledge that when you feel sad, it's because, well, I don't know why it's because specifically, but the fact that you feel sad and you feel happy and you have emotions tells you that your brain values different things. And when you really ask

that unconscious, that lies within us all, that archetypical mind that we all have, that we all share, from what Young and Nietzsche and Peterson believe is our evolutionary history is a desire to develop our character and our physical abilities,

go out and find something new and explore and experience and create even something new out of all the chaos that we don't know. Chaos being a very general term for things that aren't within your current understanding of the world. And it could be your next door neighbor's room, your living room or something, you know, because if you've never been over there, you don't understand it, let alone their mind, because certainly we don't understand our own, no way we can understand them.

And, yeah, without rambling too much to get off my point, meaning comes from developing your skills to the point that you can confront the unknown without breaking down and without cowering away from it. So you don't want to jump into it too deep. You want to walk that y'all, that yin-yang sign between order and chaos. Have one foot in order, something you're very, very comfortable with, but it's boring, and it's prone to tyranny and stasis.

And then you want to have one foot in chaos, the unknown, the thing that can perhaps bring new and better ideas to the order, yet also has the potential for infinite, you know, regression into a black hole of chaos and negative, negative disintegration of order, you know, which wouldn't be good. You need some order. So his whole idea of what it makes life the most meaningful, and it is almost infinitely embedded in our myths, our deepest myths, from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greek, to Judeo-Christian Old Testament myths, to Indian myths, Chinese myths, Asian myths, you know, Native American myths, is that you want to the individual who has disciplined themselves enough to be able to go out, confront the unknown, create something out of it, and bring it back to help their community. Because we are fundamentally social creatures and we get meaning out of communication and interaction and development of relationships between each other. So yeah, that's why this all interests me because science tells us that when I drop this book

gravity will make it fall at an accelerated rate to ridiculous precision science tells us these things and this microphone in the computer and the cell phone I'm recording on are only able to exist because of what we know about electricity electromagnetism and even quantum mechanics is an integral part of all this so you know just capacers and resistors and you know batteries but also in more complex quantum mechanical level stuff like op amps which are fundamentally a bunch of transistors arranged in a very specific way in a transistor I heard one of my professors say a transistor in a thousand years to you know he's an electrical engineer that he's a doctorate um so of course he's a little biased but he says that in a thousand

years they're going to look back and say the most breakthrough important development technological development of that civilization our civilization will be the transistor so go look that up if you're technically interested in that but that's the whole point is that what Peterson's saying is that technology gives us all these things but what we choose to do with it is in fact a whole separate domain of exploration and intellectual, their pursuits worthwhile, because his main idea of you can have a field. But the field itself, you can know an infinite number of facts about that field. And all those facts themselves don't tell you how to walk through it.

You can have an infinite number of ways to walk through it. It's a little shadier on this side, less lines on this side. There's not a huge pit in the middle of, you know, if you take the middle road or something like that. But I guess the point is that religion and science, or at least myths and tradition and culture and science are the opposite of opposites. In fact, they're integral in society. And also you'd literally not have any time to explain. or fringe concepts of science and philosophy, if you were worried about whether my neighbor

was gonna wave to me or shoot a gun at me tomorrow. You need stabilizing culture, you need enforced, culturally enforced, principles of morality of how to act. Like if I see, I saw a video the other day on Reddit, I looked like it was in Asia, maybe, some two guys guys and biker helmets walked up to a lady carrying walking with her little like a three-year-old three-year-old daughter and they didn't um they basically tried to take the kid and the lady ran across the street yanked him out of their hands but they weren't like being extremely forceful because because there were a ton of

people around they were on a main busy uh a busy main road and the um the exact justification of why we should have cultural norms and agreed upon ubiquitous morals is that she walked across the street a truck of it looked like a fire truck um might have been like a medical like an EMT they got out and chased the guys so I never never realized that psychology young and Freud and Nietzsche had and all these other guys, Adler, Neumann, Joseph Campbell. I never realized they had permeated, they had, and it penetrated so far into understanding our psyche. Like, I always thought it was just boring, you know, uh, like that guy, Pavlov. I thought it was like, interesting experiments,

but they didn't understand, they never had an agreed upon theory behind it. And I guess there are a lot of maybe contradictory theories, but at the same time there are a lot of broader, deeper theories that verified, at least found variants of them are found in myths. So it's interesting that science can... It's still trying to keep up with some of the wisdom of some of the oldest myths that we have. So back from the detour, I really just use this as an outlet to, um, I'm just so grateful that at least that even one or two of you enjoy some of these topics, some of these subjects. So to finish this up, by far the most radical development in the Jungian theory of myth has been the emergence of archetypal psychology,

which in fact considers itself post-Yungian, in fact. The chief figure in this movement is James Hillman. Another important figure is David Miller, archetypal psychology faults, classical Jungian psychology on multiple grounds by emphasizing the compensatory therapeutic message of mythology. Classical Jungian psychology purportedly reduces mythology to psychology and gods to concepts. and espousing a unified self or self with a capital S as the ideal psychological authority. Youngian psychology supposedly projects onto psychology a Western, specifically monotheistic,

more specifically Christian, even more specifically Protestant outlook. That's like a sentence I would have written. The Western emphasis on progress is purported. reportedly reflected in the primacy young in the primacy it accords the ego this is a weird sentence purportedly reflected in the primacy youngian psychology accords hero myths primacy at a core even in the ego's encounter with the unconscious the encounter is intended to abet or aid development I don't know why they keep it, a bit seem like a negative connotation, but...

So, and finally, Jungian psychology is berated for placing archetypes in an unknowable realm distant from the known realms of symbols. As a corrective Hillman and his followers advocate that psychology be viewed as irreducibly mythological. is still to be interpreted psychologically, but psychology itself is to be interpreted mythologically. One grasps the psychological meanings of the myth of Saturn by imagining oneself to be the figure, Saturn, not by translating Saturn's plight into clinical terms like depression. Saturn represents a legitimate aspect of one's personality.

Each God deserves its due. The psychological idea should be pluralistic rather than monolithic, polytheistic rather than monotheistic, or Greek rather than biblical, which is a fascinating topic in itself I won't go into. Insisting that archetypes are to be found in symbols rather than outside them, Hillman espouses a relation to the gods in themselves and not something beyond them. the ego becomes but one more archetype with its attending kind of God and it is the soul rather than the ego that experiences the archetypes through myths myths serve to open up one soul one of this if you uh if i had to use one sentence summary which i am forcing myself to do right now which if i am not too is that our mind operate on so many levels. If I ask you to remember this number 739-846, you do. That's

probably the highest level, I think. The most surface level, rather, because highest might mean most valuable, but that's not what I mean. I guess the highest to the lowest, the lowest value would be the deepest, most emotional, most reptilian, deepest, oldest, evolutionarily. and we simply don't unified theory just like gravity versus strong weak and electromagnetic forces. Myth is still one of the best ways, or no, according to this article, it is the best way to still explain, or at least help, understand better, contributing to our life decision in the study of them, both. is to not just understand yourself, but you do understand yourself. It's helpful to explicitly stated something and understand himself, but he had little glimpses of it.

I guess like that's why Dostoevsky is so important in Peterson's thought or past by anything in terms of explaining our drives. Next time you watch a story, for instance, think of all the objective things that happen. world of the character that are left out because all you care about is what happened to the character the most important thing that happened to the character that forced him to do something and then what was that something that he did in reaction to that and maybe maybe how did it affect some of the people in his life but you know there's a lot left out is my point when we uh when we tell a really

really, really good story. You know, the Godfather, for instance, I bring that up a lot because I'm just, I've watched it like three times in the past six months, I think, because it's so compact and dense, yet it leaves out so much unimportant information to the story. And that's kind of the opposite of the scientific mindset. So, yeah, next time you walk into a room, pay attention to what are the first three things you observe about it. You observe that. And why didn't you choose to look at, you know, what color the ceiling or a wall is versus where, if it's a classroom, where the teacher's desk is, and where all the student seats are? It's because the latter is more irrelevant to you than the former

Are certainly not as I used to think they are Get some sleep I hope your dreams are archipadipal and you wake up in some unknown way To again incrementally change your life towards the better