Rev Left Radio - The Shadow and the Specter: Carl Jung, Psychoanalysis, and Modern Politics

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

In this episode, Breht speaks with scholar Angie Bittar about the life, thought, and enduring relevance of Carl Jung. Together they explore Jung's understanding of the unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, individuation, dreams, symbols, myth, and the modern search for meaning. After introducing Jung on his own terms, Breht and Angie place Jung in conversation with Marxism, historical materialism, and revolutionary politics. They discuss alienation, spiritual hunger, reactionary projection, fascist myth, scapegoating, bourgeois individualism, and the ways unconscious forces shape ideology and political life. They also ask what radicals can usefully take from Jung, what they should remain cautious about, and how the left might confront its own shadow without reducing politics to therapy.   ----------------------------------------- Check out a great new resource for revolutionary education, Unlearning Capitalism: https://unlearn.capital/ Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio   Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. All right. On today's episode, we have Angie Bitar, who has actually been on Rev. Left a few times, specifically on our episodes around Syria. She reached out and we discussed our mutual interest in psychoanalysis and Jung and Freud. And we decided to do an episode explaining, clarifying, and putting into conversation, Jungian psychoanalysis with revolutionary politics, with Marxism, anti-imperialism. We discuss fascist myth making. We discuss the individual psyche, the role of the ego, various forms of neuroses, core Jungian concepts like individuation, the shadow, the universal unconscious, and much, much more. This is a two plus hour conversation on psychology, on history, on culture, on politics.

And I think it's fascinating and I hope incredibly useful to our audience to understand. aspect of our world that doesn't get talked about obviously a lot on left-wing podcasts like this, though we do, of course, pride ourselves on covering unorthodox topics on this podcast. But of course, we put it into conversation with politics, as we always do. We can't help ourselves. And so I'm really excited to share this with you today. I also wanted to plug a really great learning resource called Unlearning Capitalism. I've been linking to this new website in our show notes.

It allows people who are interested. in Marxism and anti-imperialism and decolonization, in theory more broadly. It offers them a really easy to navigate resource that I want people to check out. It was made by a comrade of mine, and I'm very excited for people to learn about it and to share it. So I'll link to that in the show notes.

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Help support the show. Help me and Dave pay our bills and provide for our. families, it's deeply, deeply appreciated. All right, without further ado, here is my conversation with Angie Bittar on Jung, Jungian concepts, and how those of us on the revolutionary political left can utilize them in ways that are useful for our broader project. Enjoy. Hi, everyone. My name is Angie Bitar. My background is a bachelor's in political science and psychology and a master's in international relations. So while I don't have necessarily the strictest academic background with Jung, I did my master's in Switzerland, of all places. So I just sort of fell into his local lore there

and began studying him much more deeply based on my background in psych. And it was just love at first read. Absolutely. Well, it's a pleasure to have you on. Longtime Revilef listeners will be somewhat familiar with you, although you've been on episodes with multiple other guests to talk specifically, I think, about Syria a few times and West Asia more broadly. So you've been on before, but always in the context of multiple other guests and always obviously about a geopolitical, international politics issue, anti-imperialist issue. This is very different. We've talked behind the scenes that this is a core interest of yours.

It's a core interest of mine. I've had many episodes, I think, through the years on and around psychoanalysis. But I think this one's going to be interesting in that we're going deeper than we have before and we are explicitly walking through perhaps some of the contradictions and ways in which Jungian psychoanalysis could be helpful to revolutionary politics. So we'll get into Marxism and try to see how we might be able to use Jung from an actually Marxist perspective, which is counterintuitive because these are two very different fields of study. They break from one another in important ways over their personal politics. I mean, Jung and Freud, these are not revolutionary. political, you know, figures by any means. They are, you know, individualists in a deep sense.

I'm not sure about Jung's politics, but I know that Freud himself was fairly, you know, center-right, conservative type of person. So, you know, all that out there. I also wanted to mention that one of the more interesting places I've traveled, I went to Vienna, Austria, which is sort of, you know, Freud's home territory. Him and his family were chased out by the Nazis, of course. But I went to the Freud Museum. which was actually Freud's old apartment slash office where he would take on clients and his office was attached to his living space with two separate doors so patients could enter into his office from one way and his family could enter into the house proper another way.

And it was just kind of fascinating to sit where his desk was and look out the window that he looked out of. And I've always been fascinated with that history and these particular figures. So, you know, I'm very interested in getting into it. maybe a way before we get into the actual content itself, can you talk a little bit more about how you came across Jung in particular? I know you said that you were in Switzerland and you were sort of in that milieu, but how did you personally become interested in him and perhaps what does, has he offered you throughout your life that you find valuable? I think that I first encountered

young truly in terms of like seeing his his work. Probably somewhere in my undergrad degree, maybe when I was like 19 or 20 through, if I had to guess, probably his work on dementia, actually, just because I think that those were the types of courses I was taking at the time early in his career. He did a lot of work on the aging mind before he connected with Freud. And I lost touch with him for a good while until really later in my undergrad. I graduated college right on the early, the early kind of cusp of COVID, where we were still kind of masking, but not really sure what the hell was going on. And I had this real desire at the time to kind of make a space in just the world of literature for Levantine mythology. I had grown up with

Greek mythology books and Egyptian mythology books. And I knew of, you know, the mythology of my homeland and home region, but had never encountered like, you know, the tales of Baal or anything like that. So that became like the small passion project of mine. And just over the course of researching, trying to find sources and particularly sources in the Western world that had tried to do anything like this, ironically, Jung was who I came across most frequently. I believe man in his symbols was probably the first full text I read from him when I was maybe around like 21 or 22 and just felt like every page I was reading was written specifically to help me better understand the world and the psychological context that I was suddenly existing in, being kind of

diasporized but still incredibly rooted in my home mythos and my home culture. So it was a very personal experience kind of coming to Jung that the study of him and his work, I'd be I began studying him chronologically from there, going from his earliest works to the latest works of his life and just felt very inspired by him and the way in which he engaged in psychological scholarship. Yeah, wonderful, wonderful, very quickly and briefly because it's not, I don't want to get too bogged down in my personal relationship with him, but I kind of come across Jung, you know, through general intellectual investigation in my youth, you know, late teens, early 20s,

investigating psychology, philosophy. all these major scientific thinkers and certainly came across him more. I think initially I was more interested in Freud for various reasons. But later in my life, I kind of rediscovered Jung and found him, I think, incredibly helpful and like a particularly dark period of my life. But also Jung is really represented well in, for lack of a better word, like spiritual communities, you know, whether that is sort of hippie-dippy, new agey nonsense sort of stuff or like serious, you know, Buddhist or perhaps Hindu, even Christian mystical traditions

where Jung coming out of a Western scientific tradition is speaking, and we'll get into individuation and why this relationship makes obvious sense, but is speaking about adult development, right? Freud is interested in like sort of, you know, not to be reductive, but, you know, sort of looking in your past and seeing how the past has affected the present, how past past traumas have inflicted neuroses on you that you're still working through, et cetera. And I've always seen Jung, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but more interested in, like, adult development, like how do you take the adult self, integrate the components of the psyche in such a way that you can reach what he calls individuation, but which echoes very interestingly

with certain notions of awakening or enlightenment in Buddhism and Christian mysticism, etc. Does that all sound right to you? Very, very close. And I'm being super nitpicky. Individuation itself is actually a process that Jung sees starting in childhood when we first differentiate the concept of like me, the self, the lowercase s self from others. And he sees that as the starting point of the ego, which is the closest kind of bridge between the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious. From that point on, our young kind of early molding psyche is developing and just absorbing all of these concepts

and psychic elements that become like a mother wound or an anima complex or elements of our shadow, whatever they are, whether they're good or bad elements to us, they become our persona, our whatever it may be, that then eventuate to things we have to intentionally integrate in order to come closer through this process, this ongoing process of individuation, towards our capital S self, which Jung saw as the totality of the individual psyche, which is the combination of the conscious, the individual unconscious, and whatever of the collective unconscious that we can access. I see. So individuation is a process that starts very, very early, but can culminate in the sort of realization of the self if the psyche is navigated properly?

Exactly. Okay. Okay. I see. Wonderful. All right. Well, that's, I think, a good table setting for this conversation. The first half is going to be just understanding Jung and Jungian concepts.

So we're going to go through many of them. And then the second half is going to be kind of putting Jung in discussion with our politics as anti-imperialist, as Marxist, as those interested in revolutionary outward political change and see what he might. might be able to offer us and where, you know, he might diverge in a way that is perhaps unhelpful. But let's go ahead and get into it. So for listeners who, you know, they may know Jung mostly through vague references to perhaps archetypes or dreams or the shadow, how would you introduce Jung as a serious thinker of the psyche? And importantly, what problem did he see himself as trying to solve or address or at least approach? So you'll have to forgive me because I think that any introduction

to Jung really requires like a true introduction to him and his history and psychology. Because the fundamental problem he's trying to fix is like his own anxious breakdown. He enters, I believe graduates with his degree and begins practicing psychotherapy under the School of Freud somewhere around 1901, 1902. And his dissertation is published around that same time, which is on psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomenon. So he's already super interested in the non-scientific, if you will, because even early in his career, young in a lot of his lectures and his early writings, which this man was a prolific journaler, this is a Kafka-esque person, he's writing to himself that these things like myth and

culture and literature that may seem unimportant to the scientific mind immeasurable, they, I'm Occupy so much of man's psyche, of man's consciousness, that to proclaim we can study the mind without studying what occupies it is a fundamentally, he sees that as an incongruent assertion. So he's studying the occult, the mythos of places as early as his 20s when he's getting his degree. He connects with Freud about four years after that, and they become really fast friends because of just the ways in which Jung was. able to really match him in the analysis of dreams. So Jung is known throughout this period as like the wonder boy of psychology. He's set to inherit Freud's crown in a lot of ways, so much so that I think another four or so years after that he becomes the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. And I believe one of his founding, one of its founding members, but I could be wrong

there. And not even two years after that, Young published. is the psychology of the unconscious, which is his formal public, like, 3, 400 rambly break from the Freudian school. And in the year, two years after that is published, he resigns from his position at the University of Zurich. He resigns as well from his position in the International Psychoanalytical Association. And he begins essentially having anxious nightmares. and meltdowns on the daily that he is recording through what he eventually puts together in the form of the Libre Novis or the Red Book. So he's documenting his dreams.

He's writing out essentially free association. He's writing all of the things that one would call kind of the writings of a madman over the course of, I would say, oh gosh, I want to say like 15 years from 1914-ish to 1930 when he's done formally with the Red Book, documenting his progression and his process of integration of his own psyche. And it's only around 1920 that we see the vocabulary of what we now know as Jungian analysis starting to form. The document, like the written documentation of words such as like the personal and collective unconscious, the anima, the person. even individuation, like we see him come up with these over the course of his own psychological

development over these years. So his problem is very much his own. It's this kind of personal crisis that he faces when he's separating himself from the school of psychology that he fundamentally sees having a flaw he cannot, he can't agree with or he can't converge into his own theory. So he's literally like navigating his own existential crisis in the wake of his break with Freud and all the uncertainty and professional stress and personal stress because the Freud with the break with Freud was not only professional. It was it was very personal. And Freud, you know, took it personally himself, himself. Freud was sort of like an older pupil figure to Jung. You know, Jung came up under Freud's wing, as it were. And Freud really saw him perhaps as

wanting or being able uniquely capable of carrying forward his theory but when yung started to diverge from core aspects of Freudian theory proper um Freud just could not take it is that is that right absolutely they actually and this is kind of contested depending on the source that you read but there are versions of the story where a lot of their disagreements come from the fact that they would often sit and share each other's share their dreams with each other and interpret back and forth, analyze each other's dreams. And in the writings of some of Jung's friends and contemporaries, they would allege that Jung often complained that Freud saw a lot of Jung's dreams as being rooted in jealousy or competition with Freud. And Jung didn't necessarily

really relate to that. So he felt kind of a distancing there. I think there was also a bit of clash of personalities. But another thing that's important to, and this is a little bit of the woo-woo side of Freud, but, or of young, but he begins having his nightmares around, I believe, 1911. And it's very quickly thereafter that he starts seeing his nightmares actuate in World War I and then later in World War II. So he, a lot of his writings that event, like, come into the collective on. and speak to the world outside of the individual are also dealing with this crisis of trying to understand, like, was this a hallucination? Were these the writings of a madman? Or is

there something in our individual capacity for consciousness that's able to access something in the world's consciousness that's able to somehow feel the, the vibrations or the elements of something to come. Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, a fascinating concept. We're going to get to that in a second. I want to go through his idea of the personal unconscious first, and then what we'll get to the collective unconscious is I think these are obviously core elements of his work.

And as you say, he's having these pre-World War I apocalyptic sort of images in his dreams over and over again. and then World War I and World War II quickly follow chronologically from that. And so you mentioned this idea of woo-woo. And I'm wondering before we move forward, if you can kind of give us your assessment on, you know, how scientifically minded Jung was. Sometimes he is dismissed, you know,

especially sometimes with his, I think, ultimately erroneous connections with sort of new agey, hippie-dippy-dippy stuff, that he can be dismissed as overly mystical or, you know, too spiritually minded or something like that and therefore not scientifically rigorous enough. How do you think about that? I think that that often is coming from a really a historical reading of young from a lot of those new age. I mean, it's, I would compare it to kind of comparing kind of modern day Wicca to the ancient

druids. When you seek to commodify this type of literature and philosophy, into like a new age context or into a self-help context, I think you diluted a lot and you lose a lot of the original scientific rigor that Jung really was dedicated to. I think it's really telling that synchronicity, the final essay where he actually comes out and asserts his theory of connection through the universe, that there perhaps is a way in which our individual psyche is able to connect to something in the collective psyche that exists outside of what we understand as traditional space and time, that is the last thing, nearly the last thing published,

with the exception of, I think, actually, Man in His Symbols, which is published post-Humisceil. So he really, and that synchronicity, he consults physicists. He's consulting, I believe, the work of Nicola Tesla at a certain point. He's conducting his own experiments looking at. the astrological compatibility predictions of married couples and looking at whether or not it's necessarily astrology, the movement of the stars, or the symbolism that we as humans have ascribed to it that is perpetrating those connections and those patterns that we see. He was an incredibly rigorous man, but he was also a man who understood the bounds of what we kind of in modernity

see as scientific reason? Absolutely. And I do think that there's a very popular way in which science is weaponized as a sort of doctrine and it's very reductive, you know, it's sort of vulgar. It's scientism. We've all come across people who like, I believe in science. Well, do you believe in science or do you believe in the methodology of science? And, you know, the latter is much more, you know, correct in the sense that science itself is always open-ended. And the, the, the scientific methodology can be applied to things that, you know, science itself and its current status quo configuration might see as outside the bounds of scientific investigation, but there's a way in which one could explore those things on the fringes through a genuinely scientific and rigorous

lens. And I think that U.N. rises to that. And I just also want to say that, you know, I'm using new age in a pejorative sense because I think a defining feature of new age, quote unquote, spirituality is precisely this very shallow grab bag of different ideas from different traditions, whether that's Jungian psychology or, you know, Hinduism or Buddhism or whatever. It's a very often, or astrology, you know, a mixing in of different sort of a cafeteria approach to. Absolutely. Yeah.

And that by doing that and shoving a bunch of things together based on your personal preference, it's definitionally sort of shallow and doesn't do those subjects justice. I just wanted to clarify that. But we're talking about the unconscious, and let's go ahead and get into it. How did Jung understand first the personal unconscious and how does his view differ from Freud's more familiar, perhaps, concept of the unconscious? So the personal unconscious to Jung, I would argue actually, isn't necessarily that far from Freud's idea of the unconscious, where the distinction enters is really in their understanding. understandings of how repression happens and what the sources of repression often are. So for Freud, a lot of what makes it into the unconscious is almost explicitly related to sex. He saw human sexuality, particularly in childhood, as kind of this paramount experience or series

of experiences that, like, if one domino fell the wrong way, you would see, this trickle into the adult psychology. Jung didn't necessarily see that same level of importance in sex, but what he introduces is the symbolic interpretation of our psyche. So where Freud would interpret an individual's dream about perhaps incest or something to do with a young man and his mother, he might interpret that literally as you have an issue. you have an edipus complex, literally. Jung saw that as rather a psychological projection, a symbolic projection of perhaps a mother wound or an anima complex, as he would call it. But those things exist in the personal unconscious, the same way that they would for Freud.

The differentiation was that Jung saw things symbolically. He saw that any dissonance between our conscious perception and the integration into the individual unconscious could create a dissonance that could then, even if not creating a full complex, could create something symptomatic in our personality, in our behavior. So he sees that as the root of neuroses pretty similarly to Freud. It's really in their fixations that they differ. And what's your assessment as somebody that's obviously a fan of Jung and somebody that's approached these thinkers in a serious way with regard to Freud overall? Like what is your perhaps core critique of Freud? And do you agree with sort of Jung stepping away from Freud's literalist and highly sexual interpretations of psychology?

Well, it's funny. When you mentioned earlier that you kind of started in Freud's I really do think that it's like a gender divide, which of the two you're able to resonate with first. Because I think that my connection to Jung came in part out of the idea that these ideas could be presented in a way that was not explicitly, because we're still talking about a man writing in the early 1900s. But we're not explicitly misogynistic or explicitly rooted in the gender binary. Because that is very much the struggle with Freud's work is that when you divorce it from the kind of nuances of like weird urossexual tension within the family, it's very hard to broadly apply his psychoanalytical theories, which is why I would argue so

much of his proposed dream analysis has now kind of been discounted. Whereas, and, you know, I'll actually make this point, the key difference between the two of them in the way that they do interact with the psyche is in the definition of the libido. So for people who are more familiar with Freud, the libido is like this sexual energy that exists within our mind and our unconscious, and it's what drives everything. So when it exists in the end, it's, you know, driving our base desires. And the goal is to have it focused in the ego and the super ego so that you are in control of that sexual energy. For Jung, he's like, that doesn't really make sense to me. Not everything is really driven by sex. Is the relationship between a mother and

her infant child really driven by sex? Or the relationship between platonic friends or the the mythological relationship between a God and his servants, his human servants, are those sexual relationships not necessarily, if at all? So he redefines the libido as just the concept of psychic energy that moves from one psychic concept or psychic element to another, and it can move through the individual unconscious, to the conscious, to the collective unconscious. And focus or the collection of value of that libido, that psychic energy, is what tells him or tells the analyst where the individual ascribes the most value in their psyche. So a man who is really preoccupied with perhaps the concept of bearing his own children and asserting his masculinity

and, you know, having a very kind of like modern red pill take, young, 100-ish years ago might have said that he dealt with a deep mother wound or perhaps a persona complex built upon by a father that didn't necessarily model masculinity in a way that was reasonable for him to project. Right. Or perhaps modeled a masculinity that the boy feels like he cannot rise to and inhabit and therefore. Yeah. Which we'll get into more because I have lots of examples like that when we get into the shadow. And it makes a lot of sense out of many types of guises, neuroses, that we've all come across in various ways.

But we'll get there. I feel bad. I should say, I do feel bad constantly bringing up mommy issues and men. But, like, I fear the majority of the world's issues are kind of. It's unavoidable. Yeah. So I will do my very best to start coming up with different examples of, uh, um, um, the complexes and archetypes. So apologies in advance. That's funny. Yeah, but I, just to kind of

briefly summarize what you're saying, would it be fair to say that Jung desexualized the libido? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I like that. I like that move a lot, because I do think, you know, Freud kind of takes that stuff, takes that stuff way too far. He also, though, really importantly, neutralized the concept of human nature by neutralizing the psyche. There's a really great line. I don't know if I have it here. There's a really great line in man and his symbols where, ah, our actual knowledge of the unconscious shows that it's a natural phenomenon and that like nature herself, it is at least neutral. It contains all aspects of human nature, light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil,

profound and silly. So it gives back almost this levity and this breath to the idea of humanity and the human psyche that like this is not a strictly set in stone we are absolutely evolving and products of nature and b there is no strict morality we can't moralize it it is it just is in the same way that our libido our energy just is we our nature just is well that that opens up into something that we've alluded to, which is the collective unconscious. And this is an aspect of Jung that I find particularly potent. And, you know, I have lots of sort of engagement with this idea. And I think it's a very serious idea that we should take seriously. And having three children, very young

children seem to have certain, you know, perhaps archetypes is too strong of a word. And we're going to define that in a second. But they have certain base, perhaps fears. Like they've never come across, for example, a wild animal, like a really rabid, violent wild animal, a predator. And yet, you know, their pictures of a monster and their conception of what a monster is already seems to have things like fangs and claws, which harken back to our sort of shared evolutionary history as evolving primates. So that's just a little precursor to this question. And you could correct me if I said something wrong there. But kind of with that in mind, what are archetypes and Jung's work? And how are they connected to his conception of the collective unconscious?

And perhaps you can even give us some examples to help clarify these ideas. Totally. Before I can really, I think that the archetypes are presented sort of prematurely. A lot of the times in the study of Jung's work, the archetypes, what they are are symbols. And they are countless. Like anything could be an archetype. What they symbolize is typically critical points or critical aspects of the individual or collective existential process. So we see symbols of birth, symbols of the hero, symbols of the maiden of the Madonna and the whore would be considered also an archetype. So where the archetype is differentiated from the standard symbol, I think you could say like the white dove can be described as a symbol. Where the archetype is different is where Jung argues the collective unconscious through centuries and millennia of myth building and literature and art have created specific unconscious associations.

around this particular image or representation of a thing. So I would say a really good example of almost a universal archetype is a woman in white. We see it a lot of times in the ghost stories in the supernatural lore of just any culture, the idea of a woman in white, you can, I mean, if I asked you to give me like five traits that that archetype might have? What are what are a few that you might throw out? Perhaps purity, some sort of deep wisdom, love, safety, comfort, etc. So those are all, exactly. Those are all kind of the points of the process of individuation of the anima that you've kind of listed there. And the woman in white typically is seen to be a arched, you know, archetypal representation of the anima, which I should define now is the archetypal representation

of the feminine within the masculine psyche. So for the traditional man, the anima represents the womanly or feminine characteristics, inclinations, tendencies. It's typically associated with the unconventional, the unscientific, the in concrete. So the base level of the animal is Eve, the biological instincts, but still the woman in her purest form, in her most kind of, if you had to think of one woman that would be known across all of history, it's Eve. And then you move on if you individuate beyond this base level instinctual woman, you get Helen, the symbol of purity and seduction simultaneously, where she is so beautiful and so enticing that she seduces all around her, but still remains pure through her own will and discipline.

Beyond that, you get the Virgin Mary, the one who is deified through her spiritual devotion. And then you get Sapashia, the spiritual, the transcendental wisdom that sees beyond exclusive purity and is able to reconcile the unconventional wisdom of instinct and just that kind of like intuition that is associated with femininity with the real hard, hard, I mean like tangible or structural concept of what it means to be a man on earth. Does a,

does like Gaia or Mother Nature fit into here at all? I would argue that probably, yeah, at the end there, so each of those steps from Eve to Sapashia are what Jung considers to be the steps of individuating or integrating the anima. And there's an equivalent concept for the feminine psyche, which is the animus, which is the male elements of the female psyche. And later scholars, Jung saw these as very strict. So the man has an anima, the woman has an animus. Later, Jungian scholars believe that both of those archetypes and concepts exist in every individual and culminate in kind of the push and pull of masculine and feminine within the individual. So you can really kind of see them very fluidly. I think you could argue however an individual psyche has integrated gender probably depends a lot on the society that raised it to see gender, you know? Absolutely. And I think that's an important point, too, with a sort of Marxist analysis is that these archetypes exist as templates, perhaps, in the shared collective unconscious, but are historically and culturally mediated. And so they, you know, and they sort of are filtered through the actual material experiences of an individual embedded in a certain history and in a certain culture.

And to his credit, Jung did do a great, not a great job, but did a job of traveling to, at least India and various parts of Africa and the Middle East. I believe his father was also a scholar of the Arabic language. So I think he had a lot of access intentionally and unintentionally to the myth and just the kind of archetypes and potentially the concepts of the non-white world, which is contemporaries did not. Right, yeah, absolutely. So these archetypes are sort of figures. they appear in myths, they appear in religions, fairy tales, literature, fantasy, from, you know,

sci-fi movies we might watch today to, you know, spiritual traditions in various cultures dating back thousands of years. Another example, perhaps, of an archetype is the wise old man. You come across that time and time again in various things, the trickster, the hero, the hero's journey itself could be perhaps traced back to Jungian archetypes. Absolutely. Yeah, but how do they. relate to the collective unconscious in particular, maybe you can define that as well? The collective unconscious, Jung sees as this almost natural, large bed from which, rather,

we all pull our drop of consciousness from. I think that his view is probably very Buddhist. I don't personally have a lot of experience in the Buddhist tradition. I've done very cursory research and understanding, so I don't want to misspeak. But the kind of drop of water returning to the ocean is a great analogy to how I think Jung sees the collective unconscious. But I don't believe Jung's conception of it is necessarily as permanent as that Buddhist conception. The collective unconscious to Jung exists prior to modern man. It's almost, you could argue, you like the soul of man. So when Jung writes about us in modernity or us in 1930 something, being disconnected from our soul, the loss of the modern soul, he's writing about the disconnection

from the modern conscious and the collective unconscious, which he believes is the root of all human thought and feeling and integration of psychic activity from the dawn of human. humanity. Yeah, I mean, go ahead, sorry. No, please go ahead. Well, I thought you were finished making your point. I don't want to interrupt. I would rather take direction from you, honestly, because I think it goes so many places.

Yeah, I would say the concept of a collective unconscious might even be more resonant in some ways with Hindu mythology and Hindu religious tradition, with the Brahma or the ultimate self, losing the godhead, sort of losing itself in the individual nodes of consciousness within his own creation, but always behind the ego and the individual self and the individual psyche is a sort of drop of the collective from which they come. Especially early Buddhism can be much more about sort of escaping samsara and extinguishing the flame, as it were, that propels you through karmic rebirth after karmic rebirth. It's interestingly about escaping that hamster wheel in a different way.

but, you know, that's neither here nor there. My question is more interested in how the collective unconscious might be scientifically, you know, biologically perhaps rooted in our shared evolutionary history. If you think about our ancestors, the vast majority of, you know, the existence of human beings have been in a hunter-gatherer context. And there are certain patterns of life. There are certain ways of being rhythms, perhaps, of life. that are shared in our deep ancestral history.

Like, you know, we're scared of almost all people have a sort of repulsion to snakes and spiders. Because, you know, as we're early primates climbing in and around and ultimately out of the trees, those are serious threats to our well-being. And they embed themselves in us so much that I live in Omaha, Nebraska, where there are no poisonous snakes or spiders to be found, really. and yet, you know, people still have, you know, deep arachnophobia or whatever it may be. So I'm wondering if you think there's any connection biologically, or maybe perhaps you could scientifically root in some sense the collective unconscious in biological evolution, our shared biological evolution, or if that itself is too reductive in union terms. This is actually something I go back and forth on personally because I think that there are occasionally contradictions between.

what we would necessarily see scientifically as generational inheritance and what Jung might see as the collective unconscious. I think that, but I mean, one could argue that a lot of modern psychic problems come from that cognitive dissonance. So I don't know. I think that Jung was less interested in seeing a direct genealogy and more interested in the more interested in. seeing the ways in which we were not necessarily hardwired to come to the same conclusions, but that our existence necessitated that we come to the same conclusions in order to guide our survival. So for Jung, I think most of the archetypes and most of the elements that make up the collective unconscious, for example, the hero myth, it's very much a coming of age story.

Like if we want to be straight up, that's, that is what the hero myth is. It's meant to be told and meant to exalt the individual into identification with the hero and the various stages of the hero from trickster to cosmic man so that they can find it in them to, you know, set aside the silliness and just kind of like time of joy and play that comes with childhood and start to take on the responsibility of existing as a fully formed individual in the world. Like those were what a lot of those myths were made for. And Jung sees that as the connective tissue throughout humanity less so than necessarily

a evolutionary or genetic link. Yeah, that makes sense. And we see the hero's journey, for example, everywhere. I mean, you know, we could talk about a million different books, a different, million in different films. Blood, the three-day resurrection. I think I, as someone who comes from, like, one of the most ancient Christian traditions,

I love talking about how ancient the concept of the three-day resurrection is. Like, people, Inana was coming up from the dead after three days, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago. And we pretend to imagine that our religions are somehow unique or, different from one another. Yeah, that's fascinating. I, in a much sillier way, thought of Simba in the Lion King. Absolutely.

But ultimately, I think the impetus for the hero's journey is often tragedy. And then obviously the case of the Lion King, it's, you know, his father dying in the stampede, him sort of being exiled from his own community, having to find himself and time and time again. I mean, Neo in the Matrix, right? There is always some sort of traumatic event, some unveiling of the truth of the adult world, perhaps, or of the darkness of reality that to begin the journey one must be confronted with. And that's often being ripped out of, you know, the idyllic innocence of childhood and forced into the reality, the sometimes dark realities of adulthood, right? Absolutely. And I will, I want to add just for the girls listening,

that I believe it's Emil van Frans in Mennonist symbols. She writes a fantastic, still wanting analysis of Beauty and the Beast as the hero's journey for both the man and the woman, where the woman has to confront leaving her father. She has to depart from the concept of explicitly platonic familial love and has to go through a process of not only self-sacrifice, but endurance of the absence of familial love as she explores what romantic love could have for her and what the rest of her life progression will look like.

While the man has to learn how to sort of go from this wild beast that quite literally has no one to account to, no one to answer to, to accommodate, to become a man. who thinks that if I want a family, I have to do this. If I fall in love, I have to do this. It's very much also an ancient tale, one that exists in practically every culture across time and typically does have a degree of animism in the sense that the beast is very often transformed from human to creature and then back to human. There's an element of transformation in learning there. And it's a very great, it was the first time I had ever encountered one of these more female catered tales to be a truer understanding of what it meant to develop as a woman in the world. So it's, I think that that's what's so incredible is that when we look at any of the myths, even the myths we tell ourselves today, whether they're well-intentioned or not, I think that there's a conversation to be had about like how a society creates myths when it knows it's created.

myths versus when it is just coping with its reality. But they're meant to guide our progression. They're meant to guide our life cycle. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the important thing to note is that when people sit down to write Beauty and the Beast or the Lion King or the Matrix or whatever, they are not thinking about Jungian archetypes or anything like that. It comes out naturally and organically when they begin telling stories. And if I had a bet money, I think that you go back 300,000 years when our ancestors are sitting around campfires telling stories, these archetypes are coming up out of the human mind over and over again. Certainly. I mean, the epic of Gilgamesh is where we, I believe, see one of the first iterations of things like the three-day resurrection or the foil of

Gilgamesh and his counterpart. Like there's a lot of, we just see these things time and time again in manners that are, I mean, Jung at the end of his life was writing about UFOs. Yeah, yeah. I think that that's also really important to remember is that the ancientness of it isn't even so much the point as it is how it functions in our psyche. Like, what is it doing? What is it allowing us to deal with or to conceptualize? So what was really quickly, if you can remember, what was Jung's take on UFOs?

Because it wasn't as simple as like, you know, there are UFOs, right? He was going into the psychology of humans and trying to figure out what about our psyches gives rise to this UFO type myth, perhaps? I honestly didn't read. I can't remember. I believe it was titled Modern Myth Scene in the Skies. That's what it was. I have never read it in full. It's on my list.

One of the arguments I've seen made by Jungian scholars is that the myth of the UFO exists in the, the same way that all of our other myths have. It's just that it's the only one technologically suitable for the modern age. Like it's really, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to tell people you believe in a deity or believe in a spiritual element. Like you're, you're going to face a lot more scientific opposition to that than to the idea of extraterrestrial life. So it's a way for the individual to project the desire for not necessarily a deity, but like a spiritual devotion, something to believe in beyond the scene into the modern age.

Yeah, it's really interesting. And of course, you know, the modern UFO concept, you know, arises in the United States in the context of the Roswell incident right after the Manhattan Project and the unleashing of the atomic weapon. And so we're entering this new age of technology and science. And in that age, the myths around, it takes the form of UFOs because you can make a scientifically valid reasonable argument that given the vastness of the cosmos, of course, intelligent life almost certainly has arisen, given our own capacity to produce technology, even at this relatively young phase of our civilizational development. Certainly given a billion years, we would have profound technologies we can't even imagine today. that would be possible or would make us capable of, you know, going across galaxies, perhaps,

or at least jumping to different solar systems. And so there's a certain sort of scientific baseline reasonability to that myth that perhaps older myths no longer have in the modern age. Certainly, yeah. Well, let's go ahead and move forward because these concepts, while we can discuss them on their own, they are often very interrelated and interconnected. And that's certainly the case for this next concept, which is the concept of the shadow. So can you talk about what the shadow is, what it means for a person to encounter,

integrate or even fail to integrate their shadow? And kind of what's at stake for Jung in this whole process? The shadow for Jung is often characterized as it translates in a silly way, but he calls it the unknown or little known attributes of the conscious. So it's the things that we don't acknowledge in ourselves that we dislike in the world. Typically, they are behaviors or attributes in terms of personal characteristics, things that we would say would cause shame, something that if you were to describe a neutral individual, an objective person in hypothetical, we could collectively, maybe not collectively, but as an individual say that, oh, God, that person should be ashamed of X, Y, Z, but not necessarily acknowledge in themselves.

So in the previous example of a particularly toxic man, the shadow in them may be men who are deadbeats, men who don't take care of their children, men who physically abuse their wives or partners, men who don't produce any net good to their community, But when they present those qualities, those attributes, they are so disgusted by them. They are so put off and horrified by those characteristics, those attributes, that they refuse to acknowledge them in themselves. And thus, refuse to address them. Let's spend some time on this because there's so much here. I immediately think perhaps of, you know, this type of guy now on the internet. internet. This is an extreme example, but you just made me think of it with what you said that kind of make a significant part of their personality hunting petos. I don't know if you've

ever seen this. Oh, wow. Absolutely. The guys who even have shirts and hats that says, you know, kill your local pedophile and they make a big part of their thing about going out and searching for petal. What is going on? Nobody likes pedophiles for sure. But there's this, why would it, why would it consume such a large part of your time that you need to make your outward presentation to the world significantly orbit around the fact that you really make a point of letting people know that you hate pedophiles and a big part of your time and energy is spent on thinking about them, hunting them, tracking them, outing them. But it's presented, of course, as like community service. Like, isn't this nice

that we're going out and finding these dangerous people? But it always makes me like really kind of stroke my chin for a second. I'm like, what's really going on here? And that could be perhaps one example. Oh, I would argue that that's actually a really great example of like the projection of the shadow. So the way Jung sees the refusal to integrate the shadow is that it will project onto the people and the world around you. There are certain schools of thought that believe that the shadow will more directly impact your relationship with people of the same sex. I don't necessarily, I didn't get just kind of, from all the writing, that I have consumed, it seems really clear that the shadow is just kind of an outward projection

that will then become kind of what you are focused on. So if misogyny, if women is the fixation, then a fixation upon women and how they present, or perhaps on masculinity and how to differentiate oneself from women will be the focus externally. If internally, it's like, I don't know, like this attraction to younger bodies that is fed to us by society. Outwardly, there might be this projection of constant justification. I would argue, honestly, that what you're identifying is actually a projection of like a halo effect almost. Like there is a shadow, but in my experience of those people, that shadow is more often

racism and sexism and just like shit, shit geopolitics, like some really, really bad takes from people who maybe kind of whitewash themselves and absolve themselves from harmful ideology by just engrossing themselves in this work that is child-focused, that evokes this very innocent, very pure archetype of the hero. Yeah, absolutely. That's probably more reasonable than simply they are a closeted pedophile and they're projecting their own pedophilia. It might much more be a subtle whitewashing of their own sort of identification with other harmful cultural movements or strains or ideas and using this as a way to present themselves to the world as fundamentally a good person because on some level they're perhaps unconsciously aware of their own participation in cruelty and harm, etc. Absolutely. Young would argue that even if they are not aware in their individual unconscious, the capital

as self doesn't exist there. It exists in tandem with the collective unconscious. So there is a part of them. There's a part of every individual that knows and keeps the score when we harm someone else. So when someone is espousing racism, their psyche is aware of that and is at some level, unconsciously, collectively, taking tabs of that harm and repressing it, probably, in terms of this is something I do that I have to justify because I know in other contexts, it would not be okay. So let's explore some more examples here. I think on a collective level, right the shadow of you can think of american society you can think of israeli settler colonial society in which the the entity in this case the u.s or israel acts on their perceived other with extreme barbarism literally terrorism right that the

the whole point of israeli genocide over the last two and a half years uh is obviously a land grab and all this other things but it can't be just metabolized or articulated amongst themselves as that. We have to kill these people because we want their land. What they do is then they project their own insane barbarism onto the colonized. And they say they're the terrorist. They're the threat. They're insanely violent. You know, they are motivated by these dark forces.

And we're actually the good guys. I mean, Hitler himself and the Nazis didn't tell themselves that they were an evil force. They justified their own evil by projecting the evil. They're actually inflicting on others onto the intentions of the people that they are destroying. So I think that's one way in which this sort of projection happens at the level of the political, right? Certainly. Certainly. I actually believe that it's in, oh, goodness, which one of his works is it in?

Oh, gosh. I'll find it. I'll dig it up. But Jung at one point writes about how, the actions of the state are the actions of the people and the beliefs and the thoughts of the people is the psyche of the state. And it's very hard to not hear those words, to read that language and not immediately think of Israeli society, I think, or American society to a larger extent. The ways in which violence writ large, I think, like violence definitionally has

become integrated into the shadow of Western society writ large is so fundamentally damaging. I don't know where to start with it because I think that it's also the reason we have such a hard time acknowledging and understanding resistance. When violence, the action of violence, divorced from context, is absorbed into us as something that we should be ashamed of, we, lose the agency that comes with the violence against our genocides. Yeah. And the Israeli state and the U.S. state are pathological, right? If you can see it for what it is, these are pathological states. When Trump gets up and tries to justify the American worldview, for more and more people, it just falls on deaf ears because it is so obviously discordant

with reality. And there's so much that is not being addressed, not being faced. And it is, like I said, pathological. But on an individual scale, there's a couple other things I wanted to toss your way. The shadow in my understanding doesn't only have to be negative traits. It can also be positive. There can be a repression of perhaps positive traits. And sometimes I think a lot of guys, for example, a lot of my friends, a lot of my coworkers, people at myself at various times of my own development, might repress their tenderness or their vulnerability.

out of fear of what that might mean and present themselves as sort of unbothered, unnerved, to show any sense of emotionality or vulnerability or tenderness as seen as gay and something to be disowned or mocked or laughed at. And always, and everywhere where this sort of stuff is said and projected, if you really know the people involved, there's almost always some form of deep insecurity within them that is being patched over, that is being not addressed, that is being repressed. And that comes out in these sort of kind of pathetic and boyish displays of machismo or the other rising of people. So for an insecure masculine, right?

So let's say I'm a man and I have all these ideas of what a real man should be. But deep, deep down, I don't feel like I actually rise to that level. I don't actually think that I can fulfill that masculine. ideal, but I don't want to admit that to myself, let alone others. And so one way, one form that that takes is projecting perhaps things onto women or onto the LGBT community and then policing what really is man and what really isn't and explaining your own struggles in life as a result of those damn women and feminism or gay people and trans people.

And it's this pathological fixation on what is not masculine in the other. right, that must be policed, but that can't come out of a healthy internal masculinity. It has to come out of some sort of repression or, you know, unwillingness to face something deep within yourself, especially, I think, something surrounding insecurity around your inability to achieve and rise to the standard of what you perceive real masculinity to be. Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely. I want to kind of preface what I'll say here with the idea that I personally, my head canon is that misogyny and sexism and patriarchy writ large actually come directly out of this fundamental societal refusal to deal with its anima. Because I mean, society is a man.

Yeah. Like we accept that all. Society, if we were to personify it, is a man that has completely neglected. absolutely its shadow, but 100% it's anima. It has refused to engage in any of what would be considered the feminine attributes of natural life in centuries, you know, to the point where, like, birth is highly politicized and policed in most Western societies today. So I think that our understanding of individual complexes with the shadow and with misogyny, have to be rooted in this understanding of misogyny itself as this like psychological error that we are continually, it's like a complex of society that we are manifesting the symptoms of.

Right. And in some ways it could exist in the ideological superstructure of a society given its baseline material sort of conditions out of which it emerges. And, you know, angles and the formation of the family talks about, you know, the rise of patriarchy along with with class society emerging historically as a way to pass down inheritance through a lineage and that that gives rise to a superstructure that is patriarchal and it's religious and legal and moral pronunciations, et cetera. So does that make sense and does that fit in with this whole idea? Definitely. But each and not but and each of those specific steps that are taken, to kind of divorce the idea of human from woman,

they are all also divorcing man, like men, from what it means to engage meaningfully with the opposite sex. So in the same way that Jung sees the modernity, the machinery of modernity as separating the individual conscious from the unconscious, let alone the collective unconscious, I would argue that a lot of the machinery of early capitalism and early patriarchy are divisively severing man from woman and making it so that their individual psyches were interpreting their perception of each other in a way that makes it so much harder for men and women to exist together and to engage meaningfully in each other's experiences. Like for a man to wholly understand the experiences of a woman is near impossible on the basis of this kind of psychological complex before it is a social understanding of misogyny and patriarchy, I would argue.

Interesting. Yeah. So, and obviously, the more that perhaps an individual man represses his anima or, you know, his feminine energy or, you know, his own pathological neurosis around his inability to be a full masculine, the more he alienates himself from women writ large. And the more he comes into troublesome relationship with the women in his life. And, you know, you look online today and you see a lot of young men being sucked into the man. Phanosphere, for example, and while they think that they're solving a problem, their pathologies are only being deepened such that the more you spend popping the red pill and on the manosphere, the more grotesque you become to regular people writ large, but to women in particular, the very people that you're trying to ostensibly attract or get closer to or understand in some way. So there's this really grotesque, counterintuitive thing where you're doing the red pill and you're doing the manosphere stuff, I guess in hopes that you could become more masculine, therefore more appealing to women, but by imbibing all that nonsense, all that neuroses

that comes from this sort of repression, you're further alienating yourself from yourself and from women at all. Well, yeah, do you have any thoughts on that before I ask this other follow-up? I, you know, I think that it's important to note that also like a lot of that just comes out of the lack of male community. And that is kind of a uniquely male problem in modern society that the shadow is probably a lot harder for men to confront in the year of our Lord 2026 because women have mirrors in each other every single day. Like any, any close female friendship that I have typically will operate as a mirror for me and will allow me like to be called out if I'm betraying myself. if I'm not acting up to my own values, will note a change in me.

So we, women are more adept to those social networks that allow reflection, I think, whether or not it's taken seriously, because I think that the white woman syndrome we see today is also a large product of the shadow. But men just have so much less access to that kind of community that provokes reflection. that I think the red pill, unfortunately, does become one of the only sources of socialization for a lot of young men and boys these days. Absolutely. Spot on. Spot on.

Well, I want to kind of think about how to integrate the shadow, because insofar as people accept on the level of the individual, including themselves, that we all do have, according to Jung, a shadow aspects of our being that are repressed or escaped. from or not looked at, not integrated as it were. And so the obvious solution to that problem is to become aware insofar as you can of your shadow and to integrate it. One tool that I use in this sort of shadow work, if you will, is that whenever I find myself having a strong reaction to a trait or a behavior in somebody else, I ask myself, why does that bother me so much? What about me is provoked by that trait or that behavior. And sometimes that could be very generative in regards to finding some sort of wound or something that I'm not facing in myself that makes me lash out at that exact same trait

in somebody else, right? 100%. The language that I use when I'm kind of reflecting myself is literally, where do I see the threat here? Because that's where the shadow is coming from. You are interpreting, I mean, I think that psychologists that come from, perhaps the field of trauma work might use the language of like triggers. What's triggering me in this moment? What's making me think that either myself or someone I care about or something in my

environment might be unsafe that I have to have this reaction? And I think that, I mean, I'm glad that you earlier brought up the concept of a lot of the shadow integrates not necessarily being negative. Because for plenty of people around the world, there are. A lot like purity culture exists in the shadow and really shouldn't. So shame around things like sex or gender, anything related really, I think fertility just personally as a woman, fertility is one of the first things that come to mind. A lot of the woman's shadow in the women I see today is guilt and fear over motherhood, over what it means, over our obligations to each other,

to the people that rely on us. And much of that shame and that guilt is not necessarily, it doesn't belong in the shadow. It needs to be integrated in a way that we can see those feelings, but disconnect them from our relationship to caregiving, our motherhood, or whatever it is that the individual woman relates to there. Yeah, one thing that another tactic I might use is to really be honest about what I am insecure about.

Like, where are my insecurities? What am I most inflamed by? Like, what am I least likely to be able to be vulnerable about confessionally to somebody else about myself? And then to work backwards from there about what is this insecurity? Where does it actually come from? You know, how might I be able to integrate this insecurity into myself and face it in a way that doesn't run from it anymore?

But that accepts it as an insecurity, as something that, bothers me for whatever reason and that's something that I'm not going to run away from. That might be helpful to some people. One example I give of the shadow revealing itself in people, which we've all experienced, is the sort of person who gets drunk on alcohol and becomes somebody totally different. So alcohol obviously lowers inhibitions. It lowers the egos, perhaps ability to control deeper urges. It lifts the lid off of what has been repressed.

And when you see somebody that drinks and gets incredibly violent, or gets incredibly weepy, right? It gets very sad, you know, gets sexually creepy with people in a way that they don't do when they're sober. These are interesting indications of something within that person that is coming out when the controlling mechanism of the ego has been lowered and subdued by chemicals or alcohol in this case. And then you see this really ugly part of this person come out. That almost always indicates.

The need for some shadow work on behalf of that person. Does that make sense? I think I would generally agree. I also think kind of from like a trauma-informed place, I don't know how much work has been done by modern unions to understand the relationship between trauma and the shadow. But I would really hope that some is being done. Because, I mean, as you're kind of listing things,

I wonder like where where does hypersexuality fit into this? Where do things like reactive, reactive violence or kind of, I don't know, there's so many things in our world where I think you can be really intently repressed or oppressed even in one aspect of life. But then, whether it be through alcohol or through economic class or through your gender, you are given avenues by which you can like shed inhibitions and act out. And I'm always kind of torn on how much of that is like internal shame and how much of that is a degree of like trauma reenactment. And Jung in his kind of clinical notes a lot of times notes the need to be able on the part of the analyst to be able to recognize when an individual is protecting themselves from the

their individual unconscious versus just ostracizing themselves. And the nuances in how that individuation needs to occur a little bit differently and a little bit more perhaps carefully, literally, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I do think it's probably very difficult, if not impossible in many instances, to do this all by yourself. Sometimes it takes... You shouldn't. Oh, my gosh.

I have this. I'm so sorry to interrupt you. in my notes for later on where we talk about like what individuation means for our society and like its connection to new age and like that kind of hippie like peace love and shadow work and my my shadow journal and I love witchcraft all of that like individuation was never meant to be and I do this myself thing like it was absolutely supposed to be in tandem with an analyst if not also done within kind of a supportive home environment wherein people are looking for ways to support you,

looking for ways to remind you to write things down, to remind you to think about what you're feeling, to be, you know, it's such a community effort to partake in individuation that I think the individualizing of it, ironically, is a lot of what dilutes young to begin with. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's go ahead and move into that. So you've mentioned individuation. It means something very specific in Jung. So I'm wondering if you could tell us what it means for Jung. And is it simply, as it's sometime presented as just becoming yourself? Or is it a deeper and more difficult process of integration and ultimately transformation? So individuation doesn't necessarily have an end point that I think, in the sense that like there's no nirvana. There's never, we're never done. individuating. The process of individuation, as I kind of mentioned earlier, is generally understood

in Jungian analytical psychology to be the development and regulation of the psyche. The goal of individuation should be to be regulating that psyche towards the higher capital S self, or the unconscious, the unconscious complete psyche. But in his, in Jung's initial understanding of what the psyche is, he kind of unpacks this larger, almost like physical, like psychodynamics is what he calls it, of how the psyche takes on information, integrates it, and then how that then requires individuation. So to Jung, and forgive me for the kind of long digression here. Please. The conscious is essentially like a receptacle for perception. Everything that we perceive is going through our conscious and it's being interpreted into our individual unconscious.

Because the capacity of our individual conscious is so small. Like, think about your attention span. That's kind of what he's thinking about. everything else is being pulled out of memory and individual unconscious. So for Jung, he argues that as we are interpreting things, when our interpretation that's getting pulled into the unconscious is at odds with what our unconscious recognizes was the conscious perception, that creates a dissonance that can create a complex around that issue. So if an individual is regularly experiencing animal abuse, they're regularly seeing a parental

figure abuse animals, that is a cognitive dissonance where the individual child is viewing violence. But the adult committing that violence may be telling them, this is fine, this is normal. But the unconscious knows, so that dissonance remains. And with enough representation, repetition, a complex can form in the psyche, in the unconscious psyche, around that psychic concept, around the concept of animals or around the concept of physical harm. That's just kind of the example that popped into mind, unfortunately. But through that process, Jung sees two ways that information can be integrated into the psyche. He sees progression, wherein perception or or concept information, like movement in the psyche, emotions and feelings, can be taken,

acknowledged, integrated, and moved past. He sees that as progression, where an individual is starting to understand where some thoughts or fears come from, perhaps reworking their understanding, renegotiating the amount of value that they ascribe to certain concepts. then we have regression, which is the tendency to regress, repress, and ignore the concepts around which we have created complexes. So individuation is technically happening, regardless of which of those is going on, but ideally we want to be integrating the complexes. So when we encounter dissonance, the goal is to confront it rather than repress.

So in some sense, my understanding of it and based on what you said in my other readings and engagements with these theory is that in its best instance, it is this process of moving from an inherently sort of fragmented, divided self, internal subject, if you will, to a more psychologically whole, integrated being a personality that is, that has gotten, that way through integrating the unconscious facing it, confronting the shadow, you know, differentiating your true self from the social masks you put on, the social roles that you perform. It really requires like a much more honest relationship with the totality of the psyche and the accepting of deep things that you might not have wanted to accept before. And it's not really, it interestingly moves with like conversations around the ego, So not that the ego is destroyed in Jung, but it ceases to be the main thing, right? It sort of takes its place in a broader psychological totality through which it has its role to play but is not the entire thing.

Is that right? Does that make sense? Am I missing something? No, fantastically put. For Jung, the ego exists kind of separate from a lot of these other psychological concepts and archetypes. there is a concept in the unconscious, the collective unconscious, known as the persona. This archetype is sort of what we project onto ourselves. If the ego is the conscious self, is the aware individual personality, if that's kind of how we think of it, the persona is like the inflated ego.

It's how one perceives themselves whether or not it is divorced from reality. So the goal of individuation is 100% not to absorb these other elements into the ego, but to slowly absorb the ego into those other elements until everything has subsequently, not necessarily collapsed, but like swallowed back up into the, capital S self. This is also where a lot of Jung's dream analysis theory comes from because he sees dreams and generally kind of symbols, the things that we notice as coincidences or, you know, like you find a penny on the ground and then you have a really lucky day.

Those kind of synchronicity moments, he sees those unconscious, the capital S self, moving through symbol in order to speak to the conscious. Because the consciousness no longer, like we've divorced ourselves from the unconscious, we don't have access to it in the way that we used to, which Young has a really beautiful argument for why that happens. But since we are no longer able to access that collective unconscious, it has to project itself to us through these images, through these emotional pictures of dreams or through symbols that are just moments in time that

cause a gut reaction for us. They have to interact with us through a veil in order to push us towards this rebalancing of the psyche is what Young argues. And if this process is navigated properly, correctly in a healthy manner, the ego is not, inflated. It's actually humbled in a serious way. It takes its role as a part of a broader psychic totality. It is not the whole thing. And that results in what we might think of as like authenticity and maturity that the final product of this positive process would be a more integrated, a more psychologically healthy, a more mature person, a less reactive person, a more responsible person, a more self-aware person. And this I think has,

genuine implications for political, for politics, for political organizing, because so often, at least in my experience, on the left, but that's just because I'm from the left, but this is, this is predominant throughout all political formations, right, left, and center, is that we often come across people who, you know, bring their unresolved wounds into politics. They project onto other people. Sometimes they'll become self-righteous moralizers. Um, use politics as a way to dominate or to increase their status, you know, purity spirals, splits, the need to be right and other people are wrong. And that's unacceptable. Like, these are all things that actually weaken, if not outright undermine our organizations, our organizations, our credibility, our ability as a movement to advance the ball for a liberatory politics.

because in so many ways we are unliberated from these sort of subjective fetters, if you would. And so going out on a process, you know, and we could talk about it in spiritual terms and Buddhist terms and psychological terms, psychoanalytic terms, in Jungian terms, this process of individuation is worth pursuing, if you're interested in politics, because you would come out the other end better able to serve and to listen and to lead and follow and to sacrifice and to, to actually contribute in a meaningful and positive way to the movement for a better world and not be constrained by your own basically immaturity. Does that sound right to you? Absolutely. And I would honestly, like even before things like responsibility, I mean, totally a lot of what Jungian integration and individuation pulls you towards is like development

into adult maturity. But it's also things like compassion and general care for others and reflections upon the responsibility to nature and the broader world. There's just so many other implications to, I think, how we fundamentally live our lives that are a little bit inconceivable. I mean, in a world where, like, Jungian psychotherapy had been, prime over, you know, CBT or whatever is the dominant form of therapy now, I think we would see a population that isn't having as many children, literally like birthing as many children, but is much more involved on an individual level in the child rearing of the society, on a base, base level. I think that that is a huge thing we miss when we talk about Jung and kind of the ivory

tower is how much of individuation in practice probably is done with children, is like telling fairy tales, is sitting with your friends' kids and talking to them about the things that they're experiencing for the first time or talking to your grandparents, experiencing life through the eyes of, our elders in the world and understanding what have they experienced differently? What are they now learning about the world that I'm going to have to learn in a few years too? Those are also all elements of individuation that I'm, yeah, like I'm kind of in awe of. I don't think we have a really good way to conceive of what our society would look like if we all did those things more. Except to say that our society is the opposite of that. And if you look at how our society particularly treats children, right? From the Epstein files to the genocide in Palestine to free lunch, the lack of free lunches at public schools, we terrorize children. And, you know, the James Baldwin quote that, children everywhere are our children. And if we can't see that, then we are incapable of morality, as Baldwin put it. And I often reflect on our own society.

I often think that how a society treats its children and its elderly is indicative of core aspects of what that society is really about. And on both of those, I think American society is dismissive, right? The old person is unproductive. The young person is incapable and ignorant. And there is a disdain for them. And if you look at MAGA, you know, what is actually the real concrete political achievements of the MAGA movement? It is just a devastation of children. It's murdering children across the world.

The Epstein files sexually, you know, assaulting, trafficking, in some cases, perhaps even murdering. We don't have the full files. We don't even know of children. The very same forces that a few years ago were talking about groomers and save the children are now part of a political project that is fundamentally about brutalizing children. And it is so fucking sick, but I think so revealing of like core dynamics within, you know, late capitalist American society that is just grotesquist.

to look at when you can really see it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have to be a really psychologically sick society to be doing a lot of the things that we are doing today. And I say we really intentionally, because of that quote from Jung, that is, I mean, that the people are the state and the state is the people. I don't think we can divorce ourselves from the psychological consequences of what is happening to children right now. And that's what I think is most difficult for me. I mean, specifically when

it comes to psychology, I've told several friends now that in a world where access to mental health care and this type of treatment wasn't commodified and held up on a pedestal, I would do this. I would practice. I would be a probably psychologist, if not a psychiatrist. I would be very much engrossed in the work of analysis, if not directly in the work with children. But it's so hard to stomach working in and around a mechanism that is devouring its most vulnerable. And our, I mean, once we get to kind of thinking about the political implications of Jung, I think it's not at all an accident that he has been excluded from, psychological education writ large because a cursory look at Jung would help most psychiatrists really

understand the moral apathy and the tendency to kind of more and more alienation in our modern society like it's so rooted in the way we are treated economically and politically absolutely and that really is the perfect bridge to the second part of the conversation where we're going to put Jung in conversation, perhaps, with Marks, or just with politics more broadly. But before we move on to that section, I know in the notes we had talked about Jung's clinical experiences and some other things. So is there anything else you want to address or say or articulate before we move into this second part of the conversation? There's, I will say, as a general note, anyone that has any interest in this should absolutely read man in his symbols. It is phenomenally written. It's written by Jung and several of his contemporaries. And it's, you don't need to have any background in psychology. You really can go in with just a cursory knowledge of these terms and have an incredible time with this book. I would also encourage people to really look into and research a lot of Jung's clinical examples. And if it's okay, I want to point out just one in the first chapter of Man and His Symbols. Carl Jung discusses.

a dream journal that a friend of his provided him, which that friend's daughter, his 10-year-old daughter, had written up. It contained a series of dreams she had when she was eight years old, and it's about, I think, 12 dreams. I'm going to give just a few quick summaries of the dreams. They were childlike, he describes them as childlike but uncanny containing images whose origin was wholly incomprehensible. So the first dream is an evil animal, a snake-like monster with horns that kills and devours all other animals, but God comes from the four corners, being in fact four separate gods and gives rebirth to all the dead animals. The second dream is an ascent into heaven where pagan dances are being celebrated and a descent into hell,

where angels are doing good deeds. Another dream is, where a drop of water is seen as it appears when looked at through a microscope. The little girls sees that in the drop of water is a full tree of branches portraying the origin of the world. Another dream, a bad boy has a clod of earth and throws bits of it at everyone who passes. In this way, all the passers by become bad. This one is particularly incredible. The scene is in America where many people are rolling on an ant heap attacked by the ants. The dreamer in a panic falls into a river.

There's a desert on a moon in another dream where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell. She has another dream where she's dangerously ill and suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely. there's maybe five more dreams in the sequence that I haven't touched upon. Jung further describes in this clinical example that this family is Christian, but in a very casual way, they're not teaching her Christian lore in any way. They have no exposure to any of like the ancient traditions or the ancient mythos. And unfortunately, this little girl became very ill in the year after she gave her father. this gift and she actually passed away from her illness. And in a lot of these dreams, I mean,

you can tell me kind of what you interpret them as, but it's absolutely about the creation of life, about destruction and rebirth, but a lot of them are framed around in Jung's interpretation, helping this little girl start to come to terms with not only her puberty, her exiting childhood, but also the end of her life, the premature end of her life. And it's this clinical example that actually becomes kind of the jumping off point of Jung's theory of synchronicity, which is that the collective unconscious exists outside of our traditional understanding of time. So that sometimes when we're given a dream or we're kind of struck with this feeling of significance over a symbol, that it could be at certain points our unconscious sensing something, whether it's from our past

or that has yet to come. But we're sensing it in the unconscious to prepare us psychically so that when we reach it, we've individuated to the point that we can handle what's about to come to us. I only bring this up because I think it's like the most poignant example of Jung as a clinician and as a practitioner and as a friend because this is his friend's daughter. I think that he is incredibly thoughtful. I think his theories apply really broadly in terms of cultural context and so much of it is around helping us understand like the spiritual ailments of life. living in the world that we live, that if a child who has no experience, no exposure to these symbols can use them, can be guided by her unconscious through the last years of her life, unknowingly, is I think one of the moments in reading him that made me really like convinced. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

It's fascinating to do. I recommend people do it. I have kind of three quick points that were generated by you talking. One is, you know, France Fanon and Wretched of the Earth. He's also in the psychoanalytic tradition. And he's not, I think, particularly Jungian, but he's in the general psychoanalytic field. And at the end of the wretched of the earth, there is a psychoanalytic investigation into the psyche of the colonizer and the colonized. and it's another really interesting clinical approach to trying to understand the psychodynamics of colonialism in particular. I highly recommend we have an episode on Red Menace where we do the entire book of the wretched of the earth in three parts. People can check that out if they're so inclined or just go get the book and read it themselves. The other thing is with synchronicity, one of the most predominant ways that it manifests for me in my life is like those moments when you're thinking about somebody,

Like, you know, I should reach out to them. I should call them or I'm about to call them. Even sometimes opening up my phone to call them and then they call me. It feels very eerie in the sense of like, well, maybe you could just write it up to happenstance and statistical odds and coincidence. But sometimes if you take the collective unconscious seriously, is there some way in which there is an anticipation or a bleed over of intention where you are kind of connected in some ambiguous way to that person's psyche? and you're kind of both on the same wavelength for a moment and have that synchronicity. I remember one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me. I don't mean to digress, but I think it's interesting and worth it, is I was one time I was meditating,

looking out at my backyard, and it was a snowstorm, and there was a pine tree out there, and there was a cardinal sitting on a branch in the pine tree, and I'm meditating, you know, and in my mind, in my mind's eye, I play out this scenario in which the cardinal swoops out of the tree comes right at me and smashes up against the sliding glass door that I'm looking out of. And it's just a weird but very vivid, you know, sort of daydream as I'm meditating. And right after I have that full image, the cardinal leaps out of the tree, flies directly at me and slams into the sliding glass door. It shook me to my core.

I literally like jumped back. I was like, my mind was blown. Still can't explain it to this day. not even sure how it fits in with a Jungian synchronicity, but something interesting happened in that moment. I've never been able to make sense of it. And then the very last, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

No, please. I just say the very last thing for my own dreams is a reoccurring dream that I've had my entire life, is that the context is always a little different, but the core issue is the same. I am somewhere and I can't get home. I'm in an airport. I'm in a different city.

I'm somewhere that's not home. I'm trying to figure out how to get home. And my phone doesn't work. The car, the flat tire on the car. I can't find my gate in the airport. Time and time again for years and years and years. It's like 70% of my dreams are something where I'm not home. I'm trying to get home and I fucking can't.

And it's a really uncomfortable and shitty recurring dream. And again, I don't really know what it means. I've tried to figure it out, but I can't. But yeah, I'll toss it back over to you for thoughts on any of that. My initial instinct is like, is it, would you describe it as a nightmare? Because in Jungian tradition, nightmares are shadow dreams. So like your shadow could be kind of not, not knowing where to put like feelings of displacement or, you know, I don't know. It is not merrish.

Yeah. It's a very uncomfortable dream. I don't, they're not enjoyable dreams by any means and I'm relieved when I wake up for sure. Yeah. I will also say just really quick on that topic that union dream analysis, don't, don't, don't, look up any guides, like don't do any of that because, and again, if you read Man and His symbols, Young does a fantastic job of really impressing on the reader just how much individual research and reflection has to be done on the part of the analyst that is interpreting one's

dreams. So for Young, he believes in interpretation through a process called amplification, which is where the, if you were describing your dream to me, and I was the analyst, I would say, okay, I see these particular things in this dream, an airport, maybe you have your passport, maybe there's a bird flying somewhere up above, maybe in iterations of your dream, like you're in a car and you're lost, whatever it is, if there's landmarks, if it's hilly, if it's raining, we're going to pull those pieces apart and I'm going to ask you, talk to me about your relationship with airports. Talk to me about what you associate with that. And we are going to work together to figure out what is the symbolic association that your unconscious is trying to evoke? What is the meaning? Because not every translation,

like the symbols are not encoded in all of us in English or in, you know, Arabic or French or Swahili. they're a symbolic pictorial language that predates in Jung's theory. It predates our human ability for linguistics. So since we have now adopted to linguistic thinking and linguistic communication, we've lost that ability to completely understand and perceive our pictorial symbols that we have to kind of like sit and play, push and pull with ourselves. Like what is this? trying to tell me. And Jung actually uses a really funny example of his own, where he had a recurring dream in which a man was constantly, he would disagree with the man in an argument, and then he would constantly try to jump up on his back. And after having the dream for three or four nights, he realized that his unconscious was taking an Austrian or German kind of turn of phrase, which was kind of meant to evoke like, I don't care if we disagree, kind of similar to like, go jump in the lake. The phrase translates to, you can jump on my back.

So he was dealing with this fear or anxiety about people disagreeing with him and people not seeing him with legitimacy. And his unconscious was portraying it in that manner. So it really shows how individualized our dreams are. They're evoking things from our experience. so that it triggers it for us. And I think that that's just one of the things that is so often lost in like pop, pop analysis of Jung and pop analysis of like dream interpretation

that is really, really cool. And people should consider just like journaling. You should journal your dreams. Everyone journal your dreams. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And yeah, when you do go online and you find dream interpretations, it's very rigid, right?

It's like, oh, this means this. the horse means this. Teeth falling out always means this. But what you're saying is, no, you need the nuances of your own relationship to your culture, your own personal history. And then ideally a clinical professional who knows how to interact with that material and work with you to illuminate their actual meanings. If you just do this copy and paste idea that that means this and this means that,

you're going to get nowhere, right? You're going to get nowhere at all. Which Young does identify that, like, a lot of the same thing. of things in dreams are recurring, like teeth falling out, flying, falling through, like, feeling like you're sinking in quicksand. He calls these motifs. But even those, he, I believe, puts archetypes kind of in the umbrella, under the umbrella of motifs, that these are things that recur throughout cultures. We see them everywhere. There may be common fears, but the individual association to them can be very different. So to kind of go back to your question earlier about, like,

evolutionarily, where's the root of all of this? The serpent fear or like the attachment of negative emotions around serpents or spiders could have really different roots in like the consciousness of different people or unconsciousness rather, but it could evoke the same association. It could be associated with the same fear or the same point in light, whatever that is. So that's what makes it such a culturally universalizing symbol. Yeah. Interesting. Fascinating. All right. Well, let's go ahead and get into the, I think, the political implications of Jung, for lack of a better, you know, term for this section of the conversation. So far, we've talked about Jung largely on his own terms, right? The unconscious,

archetypes, shadow work, individuation. I want to kind of bring in the social and historical dimension. From a Marxist perspective, human beings are, of course, not just psychological creatures. We are literally formed through labor, class society, material conditions, ideological superstructures, as I mentioned. How do you think Jung's account of the psyche can be placed in conversation with that kind of historical materialist view of the human being? I know that's a difficult question, but I wonder if you have thoughts on it. I honestly, I think it can fit surprisingly well. most of my interpretation of Jung politically comes from the undiscovered self, which is originally published in German as past and future. The original title is past and future. In the

undiscovered self, Jung is essentially documenting the loss of the soul. He's looking at how we eroded our ability to see the symbols and to understand them. And much of how he views that we did that is civilization. The civilizing mission was largely this kind of transition away from what we viewed as kind of quote unquote primitive man. I think that for probably many of your listeners that are attuned to philosophy, like the dialectic of enlightenment, right up this alley. They are probably perfect tandem reads in the sense that Jung understands the divorce from nature in the same way that Adorno and Horkheimer understood the reification of man as ultimate deity. So there's, I think, a lot of really good foundation for understanding the psychology of symbols

in terms of like the rejection of race and the rejection of class and the rejection of not class as a concept, but of class stratification. Rejections of those elements, particularly in post-colonial context, the rejection of sectarianism or nationalism in a lot of contexts. So there's definitely an intentional kind of obfuscation of Jung because of how well his theory and his psychology would mesh with a lot of revolutionary theory. Well, you know, the Dialectic of Enlightenment is a work that I have never read yet, what has always been one that I felt like I needed to and I should. and I'm fundamentally interested in the court thesis of kind of critiquing the Enlightenment's failure to achieve the liberation. It sort of articulated itself as attempting to do. So, I mean, I don't know. Maybe you can come back on sometime and we can discuss that text, although it is notoriously difficult.

That would be a long one. Listen, there are a lot of issues with the Frankfurt School. And you can make a lot of points on how critical theory does a great job of like pointing out issues and not really imagining a new world. But I don't think if you have not read the dialectic of enlightenment, particularly in like your early 20s, it helps so much to give language to some of the experiences. I think especially as a racialized subject. I'm referring to myself in that term. So people don't need to get upset about me like objectifying someone else. But as someone who grew up between worlds, but when.

with a very strong sense of who I was and where I came from, it felt like finally understanding the Western world for the first time at like 17 or 18, granted. It's not a digestible read, but it is incredible for just formulating a worldview, for actually formulating an opinion and giving oneself the language in which to then engage with Marxism and dialectical material. realism and the theory oppressed people's worldwide. I think it is, it should be required reading for a lot

of people these days. Angie, you reading the dialectic of Enlightenment at 17 is absolutely fucking crazy. I was still learning my ABCs, dude. Well, yeah, that's awesome. And again, I'm serious about having you back on to discuss it if you're so inclined, but we'll talk about that

later. Let's go ahead and move forward. Another question I have is that Jung's idea of the shadow does seem, and we touch on this a little bit politically useful because I truly reactionary politics so often works through projection, right? Like I really think like core repression of reactionary psychology is the repressed fear predominantly, but also repressed shame, desire, aggression. They all get projected onto immigrants, communists, racialized others, LGBTQ people, feminists as we've seen in our own society so often recently or some other demonized enemy it's the whole reactionary framework is

this scapegoating and this projection so how useful do you think yung's concept of the shadow is for understanding this type of fascist and reactionary scapegoating and the broader reactionary political psychology i i mean like very i think that we're often like the lay person particularly in America or Germany or France or the UK, any of these nations that view themselves as like democratic and secular. I think that we really underestimate how many people are in our leaders, our heads of state's ears, saying things like, you know, we have to manipulate their psyches, or we need to pull these strings. Like there was a period, I believe, right when Donald Trump was first elected, where people were really shocked to find out.

that a lot of congressmen and women and a lot of prominent politicians across America have astrologers. And I'm like, yeah, they're willing to do whatever works. They don't care. I think where it's more useful is in understanding how long that shadow has existed. I think that political shadows are really engaging for how quickly they change and when they change. because the American shadow, like the American political shadow, was very different. I mean, not very different, but different in priorities in 1776 versus 1850, versus 1930s versus 2026. So I think what's really fundamentally interesting about understanding reactionary politics is about how long it takes for them to inspire the reaction.

Like how long does it take for a government to take people from neighbors to reactionary violence? And often not long. Absolutely. I mean, the American mind and the American narrative about itself, which is rooted in freedom and liberty and emancipation, really the Enlightenment values that we were just kind of talking about or hinting at with the dialectic of enlightenment. It's so often the exact opposite of what America actually does on the domestic stage as well as the world stage. It is born out of settler colonialism and slavery and talks about itself, even its founding documents, as this enlightened, you know, purveyor of freedom and liberty. And the communist, right? The immigrant always, you know, queer people, women for sure.

The communist continues to play the psychological role for the American mindset. like Trump will get up there, even with no really discernible communist movement in the United States, certainly no threat to power whatsoever and still opine on the radical left and the radical Marxists and the anarchists and all of these things. Not to say we don't exist. I mean, we're here. We do. But that we're not really a threat yet, hopefully, to their political power.

And yet still in the American mind, you know, we must stomp out the communist. And reactionaries will often blame. Like if you talk to a reactionary of a certain stripe, like what is wrong in our economy? What is wrong in our society? He's like, well, the Democrats are socialist. They're communists. Obama was a Marxist. And that's why things are bad.

So literally as capitalism decays, there's a certain American mindset that blames abject failures of capitalism on its exact opposite. And it's just fascinating the role that that plays in the American imagination. I also want to add really quickly that Jung actually expressly, he's in his work kind of a fence sitter. Like he abhors capitalism in much of his writing and makes that pretty clear. But he also has pretty harsh critiques of the communist regimes at the time. But at a certain point, I can't recall which of his works it is. He writes something along the lines of the communist states have a myth of perfect unity. and utopia where in everything is shared and this can be a tangible reality, but that the Democratic

and the capitalist states all have this similar myth of a perfect time that we just have to like realign the conditions to get back to. And that really is even for the best among us, like even for the wealthiest class, there has never been a time where it's been like that awesome to be American. You have mostly been globally, like America being the superpower that it is in the 20th and 21st century, total accident shouldn't have happened the way that it did. Prior to that, the domination of America geopolitically, to be an American man meant that you like made a living and hopefully were not like the direct butt of any geopolitical jokes. Like that was your goal as a guy. You didn't really have this huge influence that you do now culturally and socially. And I think that there's an element.

There's something to be said for how our psyches have definitely changed amid all of that. Absolutely. So relatedly, I have just a couple more questions here. I might skip the individuation one because I think we touched on it already. But fascism doesn't usually mobilize people through rational policy argument, much to the frustration of liberals who think they can, you know, win a debate and beat the reactionary. What it actually does is it mobilizes myth, symbols, wounded identity, heroic fantasies, purity, notions of rebirth, right? Israel does this. The U.S. does this. Nazi Germany did this. Do you think Jung gives us tools for

understanding the mythic and archetypal power of fascist politics in particular, even if he doesn't necessarily articulated as such? I think that in the sense that we can understand co-optation, I think that he does. He's really explicit in the way that he describes myth and the impact that myths should have on us. And even in his recounting of myths globally, because if my kind of dates are correct, he's traveling throughout the world from like, late 1920s till the 1950s when the death of his wife occurs and his health worsens. So he's really writing and documenting a lot of international myth with decent respect and honesty and genuineness to the source material that he's able to reach. And I think that he's able to give us a really good foundation for what good, I don't like the pejorative of good, but like authentic

mythmaking is as opposed to exploitative or co-opted mythmaking. And I would argue particularly in the case of Israel, but perhaps in the case of most fascist myth, that it's never something original. It's never something that existed on its own prior ex-Nylo. It's always an appropriation of something that existed before. So the Israeli appropriation of Arab culture writ large, but also of a lot of the traditional, you know, the foods, the sounds, the acts of celebration, the co-optation of myth in terms of the people. without a land for a land without a people, the co-optation of frankly

biblical lore and things like that where they've taken elements of Christianity that exist in the region and tried to assimilate them into state Judaism in order to remove them from access of local Christians. But also in like the creation

of the state language. Hebrew as it exists today is not a historical language that was ever spoken by Jewish peoples historically. I mean, had they adopted Yiddish, that would have been one thing. But there is something to be said about like, if the people leading you are having to bend and snap the mythos that existed before them in order to provide their platforms, we should be wary. Yeah. There's a way like, you know, for me thinking about Jungian, you know, union dynamics, there's a way in which fascism in all of its forms is like this, it's like this sort of, it doesn't even try to persuade as we, as we talked about. It's not about persuading or about, you know, offering policy goals or anything even rat. It's actually anti-rational. It's anti-intellectual. It's like this possession. It possesses people. I think by activating. unconscious fears, longings and fantasies and resentments.

It's very, people are very susceptible to it. I've always found that to be in a time of capitalist crisis, right? There's the fascist, right, and the Marxist or liberatory left. And to convince people of our stuff is like, we've got to talk about history and politics and philosophy and economics and political economy. And for the fascist has a much easier time because it just needs to like tapping. through myths and archetypes to this deep pool of like sort of unconscious fear and longing within people and it's very emotive it's for all as much as they'll be like fuck your feelings right

it's all about feelings trumpism for example fascism is all about feelings it is not intellectual it's not sophisticated it's not thought out but precisely because it is so tapped into people's emotionality it makes it so much more. more, you know, effective for that. Where we have to meet people on the level of making them understand the world, fascism has to just reach them in their gut, right? I think I have like two quick points on this. I think the first is that we also, one of the big things is that for a fascist to succeed,

he just needs to get his subject to apathy. Yeah. He, like, for fascism to succeed, the, only thing that needs to happen is for no one to stand in its way. Like the absence of action is success on the part of the fascist for the majority of the population. But for us, we need on the left and I mean, like, what is the left in the right anymore? But in terms of any type of progressive move toward global justice, we have to find ways to motivate people to action, to bring them to a place where they no longer see their investment in the status quo as worthwhile,

but rather see that they have more to gain than to lose by abandoning that status quo. That's like a much heftier ask. And I would argue, frankly, that Jung himself was up against a huge hurdle by the fact that our psyche, He was perhaps an enigma of his time that has birthed several enigmas since through his writings. But we have been conditioned psychologically for hundreds of thousands of years in different ways to adapt to the way we live now. So if we just looked at the past 2,000 years since the dawn of Christianity, what have we been psychologically conditioned to accept as okay? And I think that if we really interrogated those things, like, are we okay with the fact that homelessness exists? Are we psychologically?

Not like facts and feelings and bullshit like that. Are we psychologically okay with the fact that members of our species do not have to live on the street like animals in the cold with nothing, with no shelter, with no food? but they do because of a system we have socialized ourselves into believing in that in enough itself is such an intense complex psychologically that i would argue the individual can individuate all they want right so like if i am sitting if i go fuck off to bali and decide that i'm going to meditate for three years and write my own red book i will only come out individually as liberated as i'm as my society is. I will perpetually be stuck in the shadow of American colonialism, of French, British, Portuguese, Spanish colonialism, of the sex trade,

of patriarchy, of racism, of colorism. I will perpetually be living with the shadow of those things, and I will perpetually have to integrate that into my psyche because the society I live in has already ascribed so much psychic values, to those things. It would be like saying that I don't as an individual need to continuously deal with the fact that I'm a woman. It's just a fundamental. It's become a complex. The archetype

of America is slavery right now. We need to acknowledge that. I wrote this down in my notes, I think, for a later question. But like the shadow of political society right now is the slave owner. It's the colonial headmaster. It's, I mean, it's the governor. It's the capitalist. It's the technocrat. All of those people, we are still psychically dealing with the ramifications of their actions. And I think until more of the population on the left is willing to confront psychologically and deal with the responsibility of.

of the actions of the right, we are never going to get anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, everything you said there is so powerful. And I would just add to that, like, individualist modes of betterment, right? As you said, will always be constrained by their manifestation within a collectivity. And I think there's a deep, there's a deep dialectical relationship between inward and outward transformation that have to happen together. Right?

If you're just trying to transform the outer without ever looking at yourself and ever trying to enhance and elevate your own consciousness, your own behavior, mature and humble, your ego, etc., you will be held back from your capacity to change the outward. And if you're only fixated on the inner, you're just trying to kind of escape the outer and just deal with yourself in isolation. You will always be dragged into and down by the collective in which you exist. So we actually have a responsibility to do both at the same time. And that's a core sort of thesis of, I would say, Rev Left Radio, is that these things are not separable from one another. It's an individualist delusion that you can escape your society or that you can change your society without seriously doing work on yourself. And I think you and I would agree that psychoanalysis is, in this sense, union psychoanalysis is very helpful. but if you just retreat into a therapeutic soft environment or you go to a cave and meditate all by

yourself, yeah, maybe you have some interesting breakthroughs inwardly, but you've done nothing to contend with the outer and the outer and the inner really aren't fundamentally separable in the final instance. Absolutely. I think one of the key archetypes of the self, the capital S self that Jung identifies, is the cosmic man, which is ultimately this personification of the idea. that as above so below. And it would be so fundamentally dishonest of us to think that we can somehow deal with our own

personal neuroses in a society that actively dehumanizes us. I mean, it's just not possible. Even in the ideal world of Jungian analysis, Jung does not see the shadow as something that is ever completely integrated. It is something we're constantly wrestling with because no one is completely free from insecurity or free from guilt or shame. These are natural things that happen to us. And Jung isn't saying that the shadow is bad. He doesn't attribute those kind of evil good, moralistic attributes to any of these archetypes. They're just things that we have to engage with in order to be

responsible caretakers of the earth that we inhabit. Yeah, absolutely. So one or two more questions here and we'll wrap up. But if if we're going to, because we've talked about applying Jungian concepts to the fascist and reactionary right, but if we're kind of kind of apply him critically to our own side, what might be some elements of the, you know, maybe the American left or the left in general's shadow? What would a healthy relationship as left wingers, whatever that means, progressives and Marxist, revolutionaries, whatever, a healthy relationship to our collective shadow look like, because I'm thinking of things like, you know, hyper-moral, capitalism, purity politics, you know, ego attachment to being correct, things like that that

manifest themselves on the left that we would do ourselves as service by looking at honestly in ourselves and in our movement and trying to address as opposed to trying to ignore or, you know, wave away. So I think that a lot of our issues in terms of the left and psychologically comes from the fact that we overcorrected in much of the 21st. century, the political left became about establishing statistical truth in a lot of ways. And if the last six years have taught us nothing, it is that people are much more inclined to believe in their truth than they are to be convinced in a objective truth. So that was a really, like, that was a sunk cost. That was 20 years we can't get back. But what we did by so

firmly embracing statistics and like the firm logic of science and research and being able to back our every claim with some sort of like hard data is that we have never been more detached from the idea of like true spiritual collectivity in the left in the western left i should say um and that means that the white left particularly has got it wrong more than a few times in recent history on like really intense scales. Like I think Syria is probably one of the most prime examples of how the left has gotten it wrong. But on a much more accessible maybe pop culture level, the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial was a really horrifying example of how the online left got it extremely wrong. Laran.

largely because the online left has a really big problem with a misogynist shadow. We've talked about that enough already that I don't really want to dig into it a lot, but I think just the left is built up by what we've had to react to. We call our opponents reactionary a lot because they are, but we're the ones that have had to react from a place of disempowerment. So we need to be much more aware of the ways in which our beliefs are built and our responses to things are formulated. What we saw with Johnny Dap and Amber Heard was that, for better or worse, black Americans didn't give a fuck about these two people. And so they didn't have their eyes on it.

And so they weren't there to be the moral siren, to be like, hey, this is. really horrifying. This is a really gross reaction to a woman that is recounting her sexual abuse on the stand with cameras in the room. And people are meaming it on TikTok and siding with the abuser and arguably, you know, just making a farce out of what should have been a private matter in all, just a really horrifying case. It became this like glaring example of the ways in which the political left online was ready and able to drop the care of women and the care of victims when given a viable socially conventional avenue to do so. And we have not reconciled with that.

We've had several similar occurrences pop up in pop culture now that have created similar buzzes not to the same degree. But we haven't reconciled with that. It's arguably the same violence that allows people like O.J. Simpson to get away with murder. Those are the particular elements of the left's shadow, like the really base roots of the things we're against, are I think what still has its roots in our societies, especially now in an age where our elders have, for the most part been ostracized from the movement, either by choice or by exile or have been killed off, and a world in which we're not seeing revolutionary scholarship nearly to the rate or degree that we used to before. Like, we need to be much more in tune to what's happening

politically in the cultural sphere, because I think that's going to be our bigger indicator of, like, where is our barometer as the left? Like, what do we need to work on? Yeah. No, absolutely. I think that's all very, very interesting and insightful. I would just add maybe, just for my own kind of contribution to this idea is like,

there's a way in which I think people on the left will adopt a left-wing politic and let that be proof of their inherent goodness without ever having to actually deal with their own personal behavior in relationship to other people, and this can quickly lead into moralizing, you know, where they're wagging their finger in the face of everybody else, why they themselves behave in ways that are, you know, completely undermining of the goals that they might profess to believe in, egoic, manipulative, you know, doing these power plays within organizations, the cynical weaponization of identity to beat out a political opponent or the dressing up of interpersonation.

conflict and the garb of principled political disagreement. These are things that I see a lot happening on the left that turns other people off to us and also undermines our broader project. But again, that could be a, that question could probably be its own episode if we really wanted to dive into all the nuances. Honestly, the only thing that I would add there is like the profiteering off of our movements. Yeah. We need to be a lot more kind of, and I don't mean critical in like a call out way. There's a few creators that I've started consuming their content quite recently who use the terminology of like calling people in rather than calling them out. And I do think that there's a level of that needed in that not everything should be a battle within the left.

Not everything should be like you need to unfollow this person and we need to cancel them because X, Y, and Z. Sometimes people are making mistakes in good faith. But there has become a trend. in late capitalism of just like, if I can make this my career, I will. Yeah, absolutely. We should be hesitant. We should be hesitant to make these types of people are cornerstones of philosophy or politics. We should be really critical, I think, of the people that we see behaving like capitalists while espousing Marx.

Absolutely. Amen to that. All right. So for my final question here, just kind of a summation and just your final thoughts, overall, for radicals, materialist, anti-imperialist, Marxist, whatever, anti-colonialist, people committed to collective liberation in general. What would you say is the most useful in Jung, perhaps? And what would we, should we be cautious or even skeptical about in your informed opinion? I think that Jung's writings generally about myth and the collective unconscious are very unifying. If for no other reason, if you have no interest in psychology, if you're not particularly

like into ideas of the unconscious, if this just isn't your cup of tea, I recommend his writings on the mythos of China and of the LeBont and of the Africans, the African countries and the Americas, because he writes about them with a kind of like third eye. He's at that point in his life been studying alchemy. I believe he starts his study of alchemy in early Byzantine alchemy. He's studying alchemy. He's studying, like, early witchcraft terms.

He's studying the druids. Just any, any element of culture that has lived on the fringes and been seen as the caretakers of myth, he was attempting to understand and fit them into his understanding of the world. And I think for a world that is as connected as we are today digitally in terms of, like, being able to access one another, we don't have a very good understanding of our unified histories, like our unified human roots. We've lost a lot of that that, you know, actually was kind of on the rage in the Victorian era. So Jung offers a fantastic insight into like the collective

mythos of man. If he could put together a giant encyclopedia of, like historical myth. I bet you it would be the richest piece of modern historical literature that we would be able to consume. So I think that that is what's most useful in Young. I don't know that his theory of individuation is perfectly applicable to every cultural context, but our ability to understand the place of myth in the individual and the collective psyche is so imperative to how we operate as individuals and then how those values trickle out into our societies. I'm cautious about any type of direct application of Jung. Anyone that calls themselves off the cuff like a Jungian analyst, I'm a little skeptical about

because Jung tends to be like a trigger word or a, I don't know, like a buzzword type of thing. People who do this type of work tend to frame it within the realm of trauma therapies and psychoanalysis writ large, sometimes just dream analysis. I don't know. I think that anyone who is taking Jung very literally is missing the forest for the trees. Jung is best in the big picture. Like if you're reading Jung for a specific problem, we're not going to get there.

He needs to be applied either in full to every aspect of life and society or not at all. Yeah. Very good, very interesting. I would say overall that, like, Jung genuinely helps us understand the depths of the subject and of human subjectivity. There could be a tendency within him or a way to read him that sort of a historicizes things that kind of might become idealistic or extracted from material conditions. I think, you know, what Marxism helps us understand broadly is that the world that produces the subjects in the first.

first place. And so, you know, but Marx doesn't get into individual subjectivity, obviously. So I think these things like Jungian psychoanalysis are very useful in their own right and should be engaged with, but they should be engaged with dialectically, neither rejected nor uncritically embraced, but put into dialogue, dialectical engagement with other traditions, with world cultures, with different religious perceptions, and importantly with a revolutionary politic. insofar as you can do that meaningfully, I think, you know, Jung has a role to play in our understanding of the world

insofar as he helps us understand the human mind. Absolutely. And I think that generally speaking, we undervalue just the study of ourselves as a political, like as political people when we enter the realm of politics, we really undervalue things like anthropology, theology, sociology,

anything to do with the study of us as subjects. And part of that has to do with like putting man on a pedestal. Like we are the top of the food chain. We don't need to be studied. We just get to act. That is a, that is an error. You know, if Jung invites us to do anything, it is to investigate ourselves and to ask ourselves questions.

So if we take nothing else, I think that that is a very good, good thing to carry into our lives. But I also, I mean, I've had a friend who once described Freud and Jung to me as Freud is Hobbes as Young as Rousseau. And I think that that's honestly a pretty good way to kind of like think about it. I think that Jung offers us a slightly different, less rigid and less, less deterministic. perspective on our psyches and on what it means to be human. And that's very valuable for us in the modern world.

We have not asked ourselves what it means to be human in a long time, and we should. Well said. Angie, this has been absolutely fascinating. I appreciate you being so generous with your time and your knowledge. I really think and hope that our audience will get a lot out of this conversation. I'd love to have you back on the show to discuss. Many things, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, if we ever get to that. But truly, thank you so much for taking the time and care with this broad field of study and bringing it to our audience.

And again, with almost two and a half hours down, being so generous with your time, I really appreciate it. Happily, thank you so much for having me on.