The Taproot Podcast - Crosspost: The Psyche Podcast with Quique Autrey

Episode Date: May 18, 2025

Embark on a captivating journey into the depths of Jungian psychology with hosts Quique Autrey and Joel Blackstock. In this episode, Joel shares his unique perspectives on a wide range of topics, including: The potential oversimplification of Jung's ideas by American Jungians How neurology is validating Jung's phenomenological map of the soul Joel's personal journey from CBT to depth psychology and somatic practices The connections between influential figures like Ericson, Hillman, and Jung Navigating the tension between monotheistic and polytheistic psychology The concept of disenchantment in the modern world Jung's three ages and the resurgence of religion in a "post-secular sacred" era The evolution of "post-Jungian" thought and its therapeutic applications Joel's distinctive approach to dream work and adaptive therapy style Unpublished aspects of Jung's life and relationships The enduring relevance of Jung's work in today's world This episode offers a thought-provoking exploration of Jungian psychology and its far-reaching implications. Join us as we uncover the wisdom and insights that continue to shape our understanding of the human psyche.

Hey guys, it's Joel and today's episode will not be the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast, Discover Heal Grow. It will be an episode of this podcast that I recorded with Kike Atri, the Psyche podcast, and I wanted to share it on this channel so that I could promote him and you could check it out. If you like hearing from me, you can hear him interview me and then you can check out more on his channel at kikeatri.com and we'll link to that in the show notes so I'll go ahead and roll that interview now thank you All you children gather round, we will dance and we will whirl.

We will dance to our own song, we must spin to our own world. Won't you dance with me? Stop your crying, dance with me. Feel the rhythm of my arms, don't let's cry now, dance with me. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend.

I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend.

I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. I'm going to be a good friend. So yeah, man, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, I really appreciate connecting. Kat, can I talk about Jung today?

Yes, that's kind of what I'm hoping to get into. I'm no Jungian analyst or anything like that. I'm just someone who's been really impacted by his writings. In my own psychotherapy, I worked with someone who was kind of an in-depth Jungian. So I've been in that world for a little while and I really appreciate many aspects of it. And I actually found out about you, I guess at some level being connected to Jung.

You have this amazing episode with David Tacey that really spoke to me. And so yeah, I was hoping to get into Jung and see how he's impacted you. Yeah, Tacey, we were lucky to have that hour or two with him. I do think he is one of the, definitely the only modern, but maybe one of the few recent people who lets Jung breathe.

A lot of people put Jung into it because he's such a vast writer. He has all these ideas and then people follow the implications of those ideas over the next 30-50 years. Most people, I think, concentrate on one portion of it, or even worse, they try and make him only one element of something he wrote about and not the complexity of all of it. Because he did what I think a lot of people do, is he would get really obsessed with things that he didn't quite even know why,

but he felt like there was something that was in there that needed to be unlocked and understood that would fit back into a larger whole. A lot of the conversations when he felt like there was something that was in there that needed to be unlocked and understood that would fit back into a larger hole You know a lot of the conversations when he is feels like well alchemy is this projection of the human psyche onto in pre scientific minds are you know Describing this change process of alchemy, you know You know he loses you one of his lovers and a couple of friends who are just like, I don't get it, man.

I don't want to talk about, you know, reducing down to the red powder and reclaiming the self. And, you know, later, I think that fits into something, but I don't even think he knew what he was chewing on. So I think David really is one of the only writers that kind of lets him be. And maybe some of that is because he's not an analyst. He's not really in psychology. And so he's, he's kind of more of a scholar there, but I don't know. Okay.

Yeah. No, I, I like that. It kind of lets them breathe, you know, and it's interesting. I think, you know, quite a bit more about this than I do. You guys alluded to this in your conversation, but in his latest book, Jung and spirituality, Tacey talks about some of the American Jungians and how they're putting him in a box and maybe oversimplifying him.

And I didn't know if that resonated with you or if you had any thoughts on that. Well, I think what makes Tacey frustrated with the, particularly Tacey, like his take on why the American Jungians are bad is that they, and I have talked with them about that a little bit off mic, but they both sanitize Jung

and take away kind of the real rawness of it. And at the same time, they overly literalize him. And I've encountered that. I mean, there were a lot of like, there's a lot of Jungian analysts that just kind of act like Jung is like therapy plus Jesus or for whatever their spiritual spirituality is, but there's not like a lot of maturity to it or something.

A lot of that, I think, is maybe part of a political movement. A lot of those things too are, even though I think Jungian psychology is progressive and then it's very far-seeing, it tends to be applied conservatively because most of the time, by the time you're an analyst, you're like 75, you know? So it's not like, you know, it's not like the people

who are really carrying the fire there. And they do the same kind of silly things that everybody, you know, Freud said the narcissism of petty differences and I mean, how many institutes are there? Like every time I look at the British analytic society, like they've split again, there's like five and they hate the other one.

You can never really tell what they actually did because there's a whole thing about, we can no longer abide the lack of transparency and demand that there be accountability and are splintering to make a new organization to whatever. It's like, what happened, man? Give me the goss, give me the hot goss. Yeah, that's a great point. So yeah, they don't get along. A lot of the silliness that goes a great point. So yeah, I mean, they don't get along, a lot of the silliness that goes along with everything.

I don't know how many actual institutes there are now, but there's been a couple of schisms as they fight. So I'm not being an analyst, I'm not in training. I think the beauty of that stuff to me is that, Jung was a thinker who made a really good map of the soul phenomenologically. Then that map is now being validated by a lot of neurology. Just like we always do,

I mean, maybe some of that is being American, but a little bit more of it is probably being human. When we rediscover these things that somebody else pointed out, we don't always go back and give credit, and I think that happens to him a lot. Some of that is just because the history of the profession is not taught. I mean, half the time when I'm talking to

a neurologist about something that, you know, I'm meeting with him about, I'm like, yeah, you know, like the MBTI, you know, I know that that was more Mars and Briggs, but the original theories of those is that the brain basically can think in these four different ways, or eight different ways, but they're mutually exclusive. Four of them are mutually exclusive to the other one.

You can't be introverted at the same time you're extroverting. Acquiring information about my environment, either sensation or interpersonal information, I can't be reflecting internally at the same time. I can switch and I can be good at both of them. But we see those networks and things like QEG brain mapping and some of the fMRI stuff. Half the time when I'm talking to a neurologist about that, they're like, oh, that's interesting.

I don't know anything about him. I thought he was like the collective unconscious guy or he was like the pseudoscience magic guy. We don't teach the history of the profession, so how could people recognize the insight 100 years later? But I think a lot of it is maybe more intentional. There's a lot of people that I complain about a lot that are big academic writers for the kind of academics that I don't really like.

And they'll like, it was trendy basically in the 90s to put solution focused or brief or time limited in front of every model and to just try and make the fastest version of CVT that would make the insurance company the most money. And a lot of these academics jumped on the bandwagon for their career and really made fun of the unconscious and somatic medicine and anything that was depth as being pseudoscientific. And now we're looking more at like trauma.

And a lot of people, the industry is moving more towards looking at polyvagal responses and these kind of deeper echoes of beneath cognition. And so these same guys are basically writing something, still pretending they're right that is totally opposite of what they wrote 20, 30 years ago. And I mean, the example I give a lot of time is there's like one guy that he wrote all these things like saying that the unconscious wasn't real, the subconscious wasn't real, there was no psychishoma, there were no, you know, emotion is totally disconnected from somatics. I mean, the stuff that I think just on its face is There were no, you know, emotion is totally disconnected from somatics.

I mean the stuff that I think just on its face is kind of crazy, you know, and then as soon as the trauma revolution comes back now He's publishing books being like oh, well, we know that there's primary secondary and tertiary levels of consciousness and the the tertiary levels are more symbolic and Biosomatic reactions to and you're like oh, you mean like a fucking unconscious. You can just say I was wrong, but they can't because they always have to be right. I don't know, that just the silliness of academia. As long as I've cited all my sources, I'm correct,

even though the paper that I'm writing now says the exact opposite of the thing that I wrote 15 years ago. You know, I don't know. Like there's just a silliness to that kind of American academia, I think. And our academia is a lot more corporatized than the rest of the world's.

And so I think it is more likely to, you know, those, you're seeing the, you are seeing where that incentive structure is at odds with what would be good practice, what would be good psychology basically. I don't know if that makes sense but yeah man no that's that's like a good riff thank you for that. So I guess one of the things I wonder is how did you first get into Jung and I know he's not the only person that you think about or care about but

we're thinking about him do you remember what stage of life you were in? Maybe what was drawing you to him? Well, I remember always kind of seeing mythology and religions as being connected as a kid. And a lot of that was I was real active in the Episcopal Church in Alabama. And I've heard this from other people. The Episcopal Church tends to be like less literalist and more kind of like mystical in Alabama. Like I've heard that from Episcopalians, they're like, whoa, like this is really wild. Like y'all are using myth and like doing the Valk and the Labyrinth doing this other stuff.

And I've heard that because of anti-Semitism in the 20s, in between the 20s and the 40s, that a lot of Birmingham's Jewish community like converted basically to the Episcopal Church and it gave it this kind of more mystical, Kabbalistic character. I don't know how true that is, but I've had heard of that from a couple of people. And it definitely was true for me where we were just kind of doing myth and whatever. So I never really saw that as tension. I never had like, a lot of people are told to believe like a very literalist faith that is very dogmatic and to have a certainty and that level of certainty is always a fault. I think, you know, I'm big on that the opposite of truth

is not lies, it's certainty. And that when you tell somebody, hey, you're never gonna have to change, you never have to grow, you're never gonna have to have a relationship with the transcendent. You just know everything right now. You just got to remember this for the rest of your life because you're there. You know, congratulations. When you tell that to an eight-year-old, you know, or something like I'm, I kind of think that always is wrong. And those are the people that are more likely to have like a big dark night of the soul and like lose their faith and then encounter Jung and then come back, you know, into religion. I don't really have that experience because I was raised where we talked about, you know,

Greek mythology's relevance to Christianity in church and I didn't see them at attention for me. So when I went to school, I was always into comparative religion because my brain was always like, well, some of this stuff is cultural and that's responding to the environment. It's responding to like the unique need of like the time period you're in.

And then other elements of it are totally universal. So like, what are those and how do we separate those? And I love analyzing cultures and being like, well, here's how everybody reacted to the conformity of the 50s. And then like when these ideas come in, in post-World War II, you get an Eastern influence, you know, into so of course the 60s is going to do this. You know, those are reformed, those are, those are kind of a cultural analysis stuff. That's always interesting to me. But then what elements of it are universal? What elements of it repeat with

these cycles or what lessons can we learn that are timeless? That was just always where I was. When I went to Swannia, I got a comparative religion major. I didn't know that Jung existed. I was reading all these people that were based on Jung, like Elated Mercia and Victor Turner, or in conversation with him in Turner's case,

or some of Robert Moore's ritual and initiation things, and definitely Campbell. I remember a professor saying, you're one of the only people here with the stuff you're turning in that's doing depth psychology, but I didn't really know what depth psychology was. I was just like, okay, thanks, I'm deep. Cool. Then when I was going back to school for social work, you know, you get all this like

CVT is the whatever. And remember like sitting in school and like waiting to like, when are we going to get to the stuff that makes sense? That's good. This all seems so surface level. It seems so silly, but you're being told it's evidence based and this is the gold standard. And then I read because I was, you know, in a job working with schizophrenia outpatient for a long time. So I was trying to prepare to go into private practice.

I thought that everyone else had just read the whole history of the profession, going back to Freud and seen all the schisms and knew every model. Because every time somebody was like, oh, I do DBT-based interventions and I enjoy phase two mindfulness for this whatever. I just assumed everyone knew everything and I was stupid, so I read way more than most therapists normally read. I had read 30 books on CVT and I kept being like, these seem dumb.

They seem like you're just telling people things that anybody who's curious and motivated to change would have already tried and applied before they go to therapy. Maybe, I don't know, like I couldn't do it. And so I started as a therapist when I left React, and I started trying to kind of do cognitive and behavioral interventions, and they felt weird to me, and patients were just kind of like, yeah, I mean, that seems whatever.

And really just out of the terror of working with people that were very sick and wanted to get better, I just started to navigate more towards the open-ended metaphorical language of people like, you know, Ericsson and with his hypnosis. I didn't do hypnosis the way he did. I don't know that it would be ethical to do it the way that he did all the time, but those ideas overlapped quite a bit with James Hellman and his kind of imaginal and archetypal psychologies that you're turning this emotion, not into the literal image of I don't like mom or I don't like the boss at work, but imagine this as you're a hawk in a field or you know how does this image speak to you and then you're working with it and modifying it and

then there's kind of a metacognition and freedom and a lot of that led me into somatic medicine. I was doing EMDR which I don't do anymore, but EMDR led me to brain spotting, which I feel like works a lot better with a lot less risk. And the fusion of trying to figure out what was happening and how to explain it to a patient in a way that was an empowering metaphor that was useful, just continued to kind of lead me back to Jung. I'm not a Jungian analyst, I'm not a literalist. There's a ton of people that will tell me,

well, you can't say that about Carl Jung because this thing contradicts something that he wrote on page 100 or whatever. And a lot of times when I look those things up, I think that's overly semantic. That's not really how I think. So I'm not, I don't want to over-represent, you know, my credentials or my take on him, but it is something that has continued to be the best lens for incredibly complex systems of cognition. I think he probably drew the best metaphorical map that still contains modern psych in a way that is not reductive. Whereas sometimes we're overly reductive and sometimes we say things about cognition that are just wrong. Like in Freud's case, that everything goes back to sexuality or natural selection, I think is just not true.

Okay. Man, Joel, there's many threads in there that I want to follow. Maybe real quick and I'll try to remember all of them. Can you just define what brain spotting is? I know you've mentioned that to me a couple of times and that's something I'm not familiar with. Yeah, maybe go there. Brain spotting is an eye position therapy. Brain spotting came from EMDR, David Grand, who was the founder.

He was a brain spotting therapist, or he was an EMDR therapist. And he actually was an EMDR therapist under the founder of EMDR, Shapiro. And I think Shapiro was dead by the time he came up with brain spotting, I believe, but I'm not positive. But EMDR is very like restrictive. It's the one that your eyes move back and forth. Like you follow the clinician's fingers and they kind of have the photos off a hand, you know?

Yeah. But the thing about EMDR is, I mean Shapiro made completely reasonable guesses about how the brain worked. We just have 40 more years in neuroscience. And that whole thing that you're inducing some kind of like bicameral stimulation by moving the eyes back and forth just isn't right.

It does work a lot of the time, but it works a different way. I feel like brain spotting works with less risk. And so brain spotting is static eye position. Sometimes one eye is covered, sometimes both eyes are open, but you're looking for spots that are more activating. And a lot of times if there's a theta wave that is present, both eyes are open, but you're looking for spots that are more activating. And a lot of times, if there's a theta wave that is present, if the brain is kind of doing what we would maybe call

memory reconsolidation in some schools, eye position is relevant to the type of memory that we access and the way that we access it. Erickson said that in the 70s, and then everyone kind of forgot about it. And newer QEG and fMRI research is validating that that's true in humans and bonobos. And it's not that eye position is relevant 100% of the time

but there are ways to use it in therapy that control the way that we think and help us kind of decompartmentalize trauma. And I am a pretty skeptical about anything. Like I want a really strong result. EMDR works for about 30% of people. And so research never really figured out what to do with it because they would average the 30 and the 70 I want a really strong result. EMDR works for about 30% of people and so research never really figured out what to do with it because they would average

the 30 and the 70 and be like well this is either slightly more effective or slightly less effective than nothing so it might be a placebo effect and when I started doing it I immediately was like okay this does something for some people that is not a placebo like that is a dramatic you know but it also doesn't do it for a lot of people and it also doesn't do it for a lot of people. And it also doesn't work for the reasons that they say it works. It isn't that you get 15 movements instead of 14. It isn't because, I mean, it's just a lot of the things built into EMDR are not right. And with brain spotting, it gave me the ability to help about 80% of people, even

people who weren't coming in saying that they had PTSD or didn't have a significant like a, you know, trauma history. There was still some kind of icky place that they avoided emotionally. And so you, you use a pointer to find an eye position. That eye position becomes very activating. Unlike EMDR, most of the processing's not in the room. You're opening a box and then over the next five, six hours, you know, up to 12, 24 hours, people re-experience these really strong kind of childhood reactions that are emotional or have to do with an intense traumatic experience. Usually you're very tired. Usually your dreams are bizarre. And so all the things that would happen in therapy normally like, you know, somatics

being tied to emotion and dreams kicking up to give you more of kind of a metaphor thing, they happen in like 12 hours instead of like five, six months. And so they're much more noticeable. And for things like dissociative disorders, it's very powerful. It doesn't work for everybody. I think the people that think they have a silver bullet that works for everyone, that's when you're kind of turning into a crank, you got to be flexible. But it does work for a lot, a lot of people.

Emotional transformation therapy is another weird one that I never would have believed I would end up in that world. I wouldn't believe that it worked until I could reproduce it over and over and over again totally consistently with people who did not know what was supposed to happen having the same consistent effect. But ETT is a couple modules and a couple devices, but it uses color and light and light direction against the pupil and flicker rate and it reproduces. You can reproduce four million different colors very accurately, flicker rates very precisely and it also tricks

the brain into having this fugue state where things are experienced. Then over the next couple of days, they're available for therapy and really effective. That's what those are and I think again, those validate a lot of Jung's phenomenology and with methods you didn't have access to at the time. Fascinating, man. I appreciate your confidence and just how articulate you are

with all that stuff. It's really cool. Now, another thread that you kind of threw out there was, man, I've never brought Milton Erickson into conversation with James Hillman. Yeah. Tell me a little bit more of your thoughts on that, of how you bring those two figures together,

because those are two that I really appreciate, but I've never really put them together. Yeah, I mean, I think the three line there. Well, one, I don't think Hillman ever finishes his psychology. I think he kind of gets angry at the speed. I think Hillman gets very angry at like, the way that the institutes are very literal. He wants to blow that up. He wants it to be more shamanic. He wants it to be more spiritual, but he doesn't quite get the language. Archetypal psychology, when you read it, it's not done.

It's like you made a map back to psychosis, but you need something else. You need a return. When I talked to his biographer, Dick Russell, that was one of the things he'd said was that he felt like at that point, Hillman was very mad at Jung as kind of a failure of a father. And when he read the Red Book, when the Red Book was released, he felt like Hillman understood him better and forgave him.

And that a lot of that was what he was sort of looking for with archetypal psychology. So I think maybe when we read Hillman, we should understand those works as unfinished or that process as unfinished because he was basically sort of writing his red book, like when he's in that period. And the thing with Ericsson that I think that overlaps there

is what he was doing was saying, we don't have to treat this image, like this literal image that this happened to you, turn that emotion into an energy that is somatic and metaphorical. And then let's, once we have this image that represents that thing to you, turn that emotion into an energy that is somatic and metaphorical. And then once we have this image that represents that thing to you, you're turning it into a symbol, just like a ritual. Let's start to modify the image so that you have more power over it.

And then that will give you, because the event that happened is not the thing. It's that you're afraid to feel that way again. You're unconsciously avoiding going back into those places. So if it's that mom made you feel small, let's deal with size, let's deal with scale, let's have a predator that's soaring above you and big and that you're small or if it's trapped, let's turn this into a room.

And that's what Erickson did with hypnosis. And it's largely, I think why Ericksonian hypnosis died off is that he was so intuitive and just nobody else was able to died off is that he was so intuitive and just nobody else was able to do it the way he was. I mean, he had students that really respected him, but even they didn't have the same skills that he did. And there's so much that you need to do that kind of intuitive

hypnosis that you can't teach. You know, and so he was successful, but it kind of went away just because, you know, what are the odds that you're going to find enough people that you can teach how to do that? And, you know, Hillman was also, you know, pretty intuitive guy, but they're both sort of turning this event or emotional, they're listening to what the emotional narrative is and then turning that into sort of a metaphor disconnected with it that you can work with, you know. Got it. Oh, that's really good, man.

I have not made those connections, but that's something I want to think more about. Yeah, bringing those two together. That's awesome. That's why. Yeah, please go ahead. Go ahead. Well, no, what I was going to say, what I was going to ask, you know, hitting on Hillman for a second too, I'm always curious how practitioners who are into this stuff, maybe navigate that

tension of like a polytheistic versus monotheistic psychology. Do you see that as a dualism that we have to maintain? Do you find a third way? You're frustrated with the whole model. I think when you turn, I'm one of those people that never was into philosophy because you could diagram an argument and be like, well, here are the six steps to disprove Plato's theory of forms from the parmenides. I just personally hate that philosophy. I think it's not the point. Just going back to comparative religion,

you're saying monotheistic versus apoliteistic psychology. Look at the tensions inherent in a monotheistic and apoliteistic religion. Does Catholicism look that different from Hinduism? When you're saying, I need to access this one little piece of the divine and that piece of in a polytheistic religion, you know? Does Catholicism look that different from Hinduism? When you're saying, I need to access this one little piece of the divine and that piece of the divine is, you know,

a child in a hopeless case in a hospital. So I'm gonna go to St. Jude and ask him to act as intermediary to God. When you're saying, okay, well in India, you know, elephants are used as construction equipment. They move obstacles. So I need an obstacle removed from my life. And the part of the divine, the part of change

that I need to access is Ganesha, the elephant god who removes obstacles. So I'm gonna go to him and ask him to intercede, you know, with Vishnu for me. Like, how different are those things? You know what I mean? So I'm kind of of the camp that those distinctions are useful when we need to paint broadly,

but that you're always painting broadly and that when you dig into a lot of these things, they don't quite exist, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, it does. Even Buddhism, people talk about, well, Buddhism has no self or whatever. What does it really mean to have a religious system where there is no self? You're using self-based metaphors to talk about how to get, a lot of these things... And then Theravada Buddhism maybe is essentially atheism and very mystical,

but in Mahayana Buddhism you have like gods and bodhisattvas that you're encountering who are spiritual entities that are guiding you. It becomes very polytheistic and religious again. Like when you believe in angels that are coming to you and talking to you, how is that the Theravada atheism consciousness is an illusion? I mean, these things, you know, they're big and they're complicated. And a lot of people don't think about the tensions and stuff they believe, you know, and that's doubly true in religion, You know, it's a symbolic language.

I think. Going back to Tacey real quick, as I read his last book and have been thinking about a couple other authors, they're wanting to highlight maybe the disenchantment that we're in, kind of in the modern world and our society. Does any of that kind of stuff resonate with you? Do you have any thoughts on that? Are you even interested in that whole thing? Yeah, I think that a lot of metamodern philosophers, like people like Jurgen Habermas, who are talking about the post-secular sacred, or people like Peter Slatterdeke that are writing

anthropotechnics, they're talking about the same thing as the depth schools of psychology that are saying that there's this this era where we have turned to the world so empirical, so literal, so objective, that we're not noticing how much we're projecting religion on it. And that is something that I talk about a lot, I write about a lot, and it probably is one of the more controversial things I say because a lot of people, well I don't know why, but a lot of people get mad at me and say, no, no, no, that can't be right because of this. Or they think that I'm basically either defending religion or attacking it, which is strange

because I'm not doing either. But it's some kind of noticing how religion is active in their own life and in culture in a way that I don't think certain people wanna do. I mean, and so one example of that would be, well, I don't know, maybe I'm not answering what you're asking, you know, but I think we- No, no, but I like where you're going, please.

Well, that diagram in Edward Edinger's Ego and Archetype, where he's talking about, you know, when you have the USSR existing and functioning and its secular religion, its communism, or when you have, you know, America and the white picket fence and the lost culture of the suburbs, that there's this containing system of metaphors that everyone's symbolism is operating in. But then when you take that away, you have, and I think he's probably quoting T.S. Eliot when he says, the heap of broken images like in that diagram I'm imagining,

probably a right wasteland reference. When he says that central container breaks down, all those archetypes are experienced directly and it's too much. You get a culture that looks like schizophrenia. Which I think you see that things like on January 6, if you talk to the people who are storming the Capitol, they don't believe a consistent thing. Some of them are talking about aliens,

some of them are talking about the 5G cell phone towers making the flu. Some of them are talking about things that are very political. Some of them are talking about things that are very spiritual. Some of them are talking about things that are very spiritual. But it's not like, I mean, that's not the same as like the Cuban revolution where people were like, we don't want gambling machines, we're going to make political change. It looks more like a religious movement than a political one. And you see things like that when empires start to decline or when people feel like the government doesn't reflect their ego anymore, then you get mass religious movements and cults all the time. I talked about that a little bit with Matt Hungelshelling in

his book that is coming out on May 20th, The Ghost Lab that's essentially about him realizing that some of these ghost hunters were doing pretty good therapy when he started to meet them on themselves and others in a system where the healthcare system is kind of failing. So I do think there's this element of religion coming back when we become overly literal. David Tacey writes a little bit in Jung in the New Age and the post-secular sacred and in Edge of the Sacred in those books and some of his other work, he talks about this idea that Jung saw there being three ages.

Like he thought the first age was going to be mythological, and the Bronze Age stuff and the religion. Then that stuff would be dethroned and society would move more to a scientific enlightenment values of more freedom for more people, objectivity, logic, reason. But that that would fail and that you would go back to a thing when they say, science is great and good and these are the things that we can be objective about. But there is this inherent subjective experience and we need to just go ahead and

admit the self-evidential nature of things like that the Earth is sacred and we have to take care of it. I can't tell you with a spreadsheet, I can't explain to BlackRock why we don't need to light the planet on fire. But I think that it is self-evident that that is a bad idea, that we shouldn't end the world just to go ahead and make a little bit of profit for capitalism over

a 10-year, 100-year period, however long we get. Jung was seeing those tensions, a lot of them through impending nuclear age and some things. And so I think that's what Tacey is analyzing when he's saying that Jung saw this kind of third age that Tacey calls a post-secular sacred, where we would come to this idea that we can hold religion and logic simultaneously. We don't have to be literal about religion, but we also don't have to try and make science a religion because it's not and it can't be. It fails to be. I'm thinking right now of the people like some of the people that are the weirder ones

making these like LLMs and AI right now. Where I mean there's one guy like who has said multiple times I'm a Buddhist so consciousness is an illusion and there is no God and that we just need to realize that like we're atoms bumping up against each other and here that to span the illusion of consciousness. But if we can get enough Nvidia cores together and comp time, then the God is going to come out of the LLM. And you're like, what are you talking about? Like you're saying you're an atheist and consciousness is an illusion, but you're going to make God with a video card. Like what are you saying? That's wild. You know, and I'm not making fun of somebody for being religious or being an atheist and consciousness is an illusion, but you're going to make God with a video card? Like, what are you saying? That's wild.

You know, and I'm not making fun of somebody for being religious or being an atheist. I'm just saying like that statement is so, there is so much there, you know, that is scary, that is confusing. And these are some of the most wealthy and powerful people that exist right now, you know. Yeah. I don't know if that is relevant, but those are the kind of ideas I think associated with that,

if you want to apply them to the moment we're in. There's plenty of other examples when empires like Rome fall from the path. Yeah. I think that's a scary but good point. Do you make anything of what some people want to call the Jung-Post-Jungian split? I mean, I know at one level it is a thing, but I've had some people describe it as maybe too exaggerated or maybe there wasn't that deep of a division between Jung and Hillman and some of the others? Yeah, if I say post Jungian as like shorthand, I will have people to get mad at me.

So there are people to react to that because they don't wanna see themselves as separate from him or something. I'm just kind of using it practically. Like obviously the psychology's evolved because this person was so broad and they dealt with the implications. They implied so much, They didn't have time to

resolve all those implications. And so that was kind of the job of the Edingers and the von Franzes and the people that took different aspects that spoke to them and ran with them. And so there is something, what I would say is post Jungian would be something like Hillman saying, well, the anima and the animus have to exist in everybody. It's not that men have an anima, women have an animus. It's that these are both archetypes that everybody has. If they're archetypes, then both genders have them. I think that is a place where Hillman

generally was post-Union. I think there's places where he repackaged Jung or reduced him and then called himself post-Union where he was not right, just because he was kind of angry at a father figure. And I think he moves past that by the end of his life. But with the schools, I think the things that are post-Union are things like

Sidron Halston doing voice dialogue therapy, or Arnie Mandel doing process-oriented therapy. Because there is a trend in the 70s through the 90s where the Union analysts in the institutes became so literalist and so entrenched in sort of concretizing that what I think is a more intuitive psychology than they were letting it be. A lot of people left and they started new models because they said we want the experientialness of Fritz Perls and we want the somatics of the trauma people. A lot of that's in California and you have

Jungian analysts that are watching people do yoga on the beach and making these connections. People like the Stones, which we've talked to Tamar Stone, Hal's daughter on our podcast, and also people like Arnie Mendel, who do process-oriented therapy, which is a really interesting book if anyone is is looking for some kind of ways to apply Jung more, I tell people to do the

post Jungians because a lot of people are like, I want to do Jungian therapy. So I'm going to go out and I'm going to buy the black books. And I'm like, I don't know, Tom, that's going to let you do therapy there. I think the people who figured out how to apply this in the room in a more practical way are probably, if you read Embracing Ourselves, probably, you know, if you read, embracing ourselves, the voice dialogue manual, if you breathe, if you read the process oriented therapy stuff, there's more technique there, which Jung is a map. He's not a technique.

You have to infer the techniques from the map. And that's where a lot of people, I think, get confused or frustrated. They want to make him like a series of philosophical suppositions and then try and disprove him. And that isn't how he writes. That's not what he's doing. No, no. If you look at it like that, you're fundamentally missing the point. How do you work with dreams?

I mean, in part of that question, I'm just curious if you have deeper thoughts on what dreams are and then maybe, I don't know, clinically if you utilize dreams with certain people. So that's another thing that's probably going to make everybody mad at me if I speak honestly there. Yeah, thank you for the honesty. Well, I think dreams are really relevant some of the time. But if you're doing, and maybe other people are better at it than me,

but if you're trying to do everything with dream work, I don't know if that's the fastest way to get there. Where I think dreams are the most powerful is where somebody is right on the edge of change. They already know something, but they haven't realized that yet. I mean, while I've done therapy with somebody for, some of my patients will laugh at these, but I've done therapy for something with somebody for two or three months, and no dreams were mentioned.

But I'm listening to the content of the day and I'm like, what were your dreams like last night? You have any interesting dreams? They're always like, how did you know? I'd never dream. And I just had the craziest. Yeah. You know, if you look at something like the hero's journey, that Joseph Campbell monomyth, you look, you know, a lot of that is relevant to psychotherapy and we don't do it once and then come back and be Gilgamesh.

We do it over and over again with different issues where we want to deflect and make these not real and somehow make them irrelevant. And then slowly have to be like, okay, fine. I'm bad at it. I'm going to go do it. And, and, and when people are at important places on that wheel, that's when you get it. Like I had one, one of the people that I, I don't remember if I'd done brain spotting with him yet, just brain spotting will kick your dreams off. But I think it was before that. And there was someone who had a dream and I, yeah, I was like, you know, he said, initially I can't remember it. And then I said, you know, think about it. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it. but I think it was before that. And there was someone who had a dream and I was like, he said initially I can't remember it and then I said,

think more about it and I better come back to you because it seems like it's still in your body. You have a different kind of activation when you mention it. And he had remembered a dream that he was in a kind of dark house and that there were three voices like screaming his name and that there were three voices screaming his name, and that he went outside and there were these three women that were different ages and masks with torches yelling at him to go into the dark. I was like, well, what did the mask look like?

I have a labyrinth on my desk and he was like, had little lines on it but they were curved, but they weren't a spiral, like this, whatever this is. Which if you know anything about the labyrinth on my desk and he was like, oh, it had little lines on it, but they were curved, but they weren't a spiral, kind of like this, whatever this is. Which if you know anything about the labyrinth, that has a whole lot of significance there, which he had never seen one before. But he was like, yeah, it was this shape, it had that in the middle.

I talked about the Aranese, or there's a lot of things from Celtic mythology too, where there's usually women, but sometimes both genders, but three different ages of people that signify the beginning of a journey, they come and challenge you and say, this is what you're going to do and give you either a prophecy or a challenge or a conflict. He really connected that to a ton of things and said, yeah, that's what's happening.

I'm realizing that all the things I thought I was coming into there before, not really what the problem is. The problem is actually much deeper, more horrible, and I'm ready to look at that now. So that's kind of how I work with them, is I wait until I think they're probably active. I mention that if the client has one, I let them go through it emotionally without any analysis.

And then at the end, I kind of say, these are some universal pieces. How do you think that those might apply to you? And usually that connection is helpful. Amazing. Not the typical way that an analyst would work with dreams, but I'm not a young gay analyst. Right. Yeah. Are there any other theories

or approaches that are really important to you? Because it seems like you're bringing a lot of these things together. No. I think that I'm probably ADD enough to be so easily bored that I love synthesizing information and then I kind of exhaust people because I don't go at depth with any one thing. I tend to just sort of like really need to understand

how a bunch of ideas fit together, what the history of people chewing on those are. And so I mean, a lot of my work, like most psychotherapists is probably populated by a lot of different weird rabbit holes you went down and you collect those techniques and maps and, and ways of knowing as you learn and they become available to you. But I know therapy looks very different for all my patients. It's not like I have one style and sort of adhere to it more flexible than that.

So. Yeah, I'm the exact same way. I mean, part of that's rooted in my understanding of how the therapeutic Alliance works and just how everyone's so different. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Is, is, is, I mean, I know it's going to be important to you obviously as a therapist, but I'm curious, yeah.

How do you think about the relationship side of things when you're kind of building that alliance with somebody that really important to you? Is it less, are you more like technique? No, I mean, I think the relationship is super important, but a lot of people say that and I kind of wonder what they mean. Sure. Like to me, I don't need to be, I think it's kind of myopic to have one of those extremely relational lenses where everything that the patient says is about you, and especially some of that neophoridium stuff where they're

like, well, every time you have to realize that you're the parent and they're whatever. I've had therapists where that was a dynamic and I thought of them as a part of my parents or something and I've had therapists where that was not the case. A lot of those people were like, I think sometimes those things are true as a part of my parents or something. And I've had therapists where that was not the case. And a lot of those people were like, so I think sometimes those things are true as a good lens for like anything in psychotherapy. Anytime you think something has to happen or it has to work this way

is sort of where you're not being flexible. And so the relationship I think is what it needs to be. There's some people that just wanna quit biting their nails and leave and then there's other people that I think are looking for a psychotherapist to be more of a shaman or a psycho-pomp or a guide or somebody who brings in a whole bunch of information and provides them sort of a philosophical or metaphorical language for the way to see themselves in the world.

But to just front load that when somebody doesn't want that or doesn't need it, I think is, is a distraction, you know, in the best case. And I'm just very, very different. You know, I try and meet the need of the person who comes in, but no, like we all used to joke at consultations. Like if any of my patients ever met each other and talked about therapy, they'd be like, you did what? You know, because I have different relationships with them, you know. Yeah, no, I'm the exact same way.

Have you ever interacted with either on your podcast or read Paul J Leslie? Leslie, the names are familiar, but he writes a lot about like Milton Erickson and kind of has developed his own approach to what he calls like a magical session. He's more like in the strategic side, but also into kind of some of the collaborative kind of postmodern stuff. But anyways, in talking to him quite a bit, he's just underscored, yeah, exactly what you were saying. If a certain client needs a more authoritative approach, that's what I'm going to give him. But if he needs something else, it's going to be the exact opposite. It has to be kind of what the client needs. Yeah, and I think that that is one of the reasons why I'm suspicious of when people have a really strong style over the

relationship is because I've seen a lot of people who can only handle one kind of referral. Like, I'm like, yeah, if there's a man that's out of touch with vulnerability, they're going to do great with this person, but I'm not going to send somebody who's already in touch with vulnerability, you know, and isn't threatened by it there because they some like there's a lot of people that can only handle this like one kind of referral of patient and when you start to like need people to go through a certain kind of process, I just think whether you're not making room for everybody, if that makes sense. Yeah. And a lot of so that's kind of why I'm integrative and wear a lot of hats is not everyone's going to think the same way. Not everyone wants to

engage with trauma metaphorically, you know, some people do and some people I think can't. They want to understand what's happening through polyvagal theory or more of a neurobiological lens and that's what's going to be empowering. Sure. Now, okay, maybe as I'm kind of landing the plane a little bit, one question I did want to ask you, going back to kind of Jung, Hillman, and just some of the things that we're seeing in, I don't know how to describe it, just

like contemporary masculinity. I mean, I know even in your conversation with Tacey, you talked about how Hillman kind of linked up with Robert Bly and the mythopoetic men's movement. I just kind of wanted to see where you go with that, like what some of your thoughts are on that whole strand of the kind of Jungian approach. Yeah, I think the 80s mythopoetic men's movement probably gets more criticism than it deserves. Like I think it helped a lot of people that had PTSD,

a lot of people that were veterans, a lot of people in a non-traditional way. But I also think a lot of things that inspired were not great, that there was a lot of, I mean, I guess some people say toxic masculinity or whatever, but we have a very egoic hero myth, especially in America. I think people who are hurt and don't have any personal power are very likely, especially men, to compensate by feeling superior, feeling better than other people,

in a way that's not healthy. And so that a lot of times when you get into the world of people cherry picking young, in order to try and appeal to damaged young men, you have to be very careful. And a lot of the people that are on social media right now are not careful, even if they're trying to be. I don't know if that's what you're asking,

but there's definitely a lot of room for danger there. And I mean, look at somebody like the life of Robert Moore, who was a very kind of gentle guy who dedicated his life to the study of consciousness and reflection and his life ends in a murder-suicide. So, I mean, I think that those things are real and that we have to be very careful about how we treat the woundedness of men, of everybody.

And a lot of the stuff I see on social media is not, about half of it I think is outright grift that the person wants to make money and that they know what they're doing is crazy. And then I think the other half of it are wounded healers that are more wounded than healing because they haven't done their own work, you know. Yeah, man. That's, that's powerful.

So any, anything else about you, man, that, that is important to you? Maybe I haven't asked. I know there's, there's tons we could talk about, but is there anything else that has been important to you about that figure that we could almost end on? Well, I think when you look at somebody who really tried to understand themselves over the course of a life, let themselves change over the course of a life, was not afraid of themselves, Jung is a pretty good example. That's a great way to put it, yeah.

And I was listening to Douglas Raskoff's podcast the other day and the guest said something about like, you can't really know if someone has lived and ended themselves until the end of their life. So don't worry about trying to figure out if you're doing it right. Just kind of navigate to what's intuitive and what feels right in a way that is challenging, not in a way that is easy.

And you're probably gonna get there. And I was like, yeah, that's true. Like when I look for biographies, that's the arc. I read a lot of biographies and a ton of the time we're autobiography, you see where somebody's trying to do something. I think Hillman stagnates at a point that he later recovers from, but there's places where people lose the thread. I think Jung is a really good example of checking yourself with being

eternally curious, I think a deep and profound curiosity, and a comfortability with being open to new perspectives. Not to say, you know, we knew nothing, you don't have to be Socrates. But just really being curious. I mean, there's like a Herzogian, you know, curiosity to Jung where we have the conversations that he had with Pauli about, Wolfgang Pauli about math. That was one of the ways into the post-Cycler sacred that he saw, was that sort of quantum physics and really high order math would get to this place where they spoke to the mysterious, where they were no longer objective things,

that they were more of a, there was some subjectivity there and that's one of the ways he saw. We don't have the conversations he had with Einstein. It would be fascinating to know when he drank a lot of red wine with Einstein what they talked about, and no one ever wrote it down. If he wrote it down, it's not published.

But there's a lot that the family still sits on. One of the guests that- Can you speak to that? Do you know anything about what's still being held on? Well, Jung had a menage a trois, and that's something that even until the past 50 years, I think the family was not super comfortable with the details of. I had a guest who off mic told me that he was in one of the institutes

and went into one of the family estates and he was sitting on a coffin that was there. And one of the family members said, you know, it's in that coffin. You know, it's the unpublished chapters of Memory, Dreams, Reflections, it's what we took out because we didn't want. We didn't want that to be something that was. So it was about his affair with Tony Wolford. I don't know if affairs the right word you know he had an open relationship that

his wife knew about and everyone knew about and it seemed like it didn't cause a problem. I don't know I'm not sure. Was his wife okay with it? I'm only thinking of this is great theologian Carl Bart who had a similar arrangement and the wife wasn't that okay with it but what else was she gonna do at the time? But I'm curious. Do you know how his wife felt about it? I mean that there's a lot of debate about that and I don't I don't know but I think that they continue to work together It wasn't like there you don't sense hostility You know at one point Wolf leaves both leaves when alchemy is something that Ewing's into and she's just like I can't go there

I don't want to do this. And Emma Yun continues to work with him when she dies, Carl Yun grieves her and yells, you know, in the tower, the queen is dead. And they had a collaborative relationship. So I mean, there was a lot of creativity. There was a lot of love. Are things like that messy and we're feelings hurt? Probably.

I don't know, you know, the way that we're supposed to be. And I'm not trying to judge him or excuse anything that was wrong. I don't see anything that's obvious there. It looks like a complicated life. Yeah. No, I'm right there with you. Dude, I feel like your thoughts on curiosity are exactly the kind of person I want to be.

And that's a great way to think about Jung. He was the one who was endlessly curious about so many things. Yeah, I think he was bumping up against the limits of knowledge, the limits of the future. And there is sort of a grief at the end of life because you realize how tenuous this thing is and how much we're like always about to be right on the edge of having fucked it up beyond repair. And yes, when he's talking about, you know, I think the future of the world is hanging by a thread looking at the nuclear age coming. I think he was right, I think he's still right, and I think more than that. And doesn't he say that thread is the psyche? I don't know the extent of that quote. I think it was in the BBC interviews at the end of his life. The clip that I've seen, I mean I've watched that whole interview a couple

times and I don't have, you know, all of you uncommitted to memory, but I think he says the future is hanging by a thread and leaves it there. And it was, you know, you look at the amount of times where we almost wiped the world out through a nuclear arsenal just because of a stupid mistake. The light reflected off a satellite and we thought, hey, maybe the USR is going to bomb us. Let's go ahead and wipe them out. Oh, and then somebody was like, let's wait a couple of minutes and just check on this

thing. And, you know, we really should maybe take some of that, those places, the metamodern is pointing us to, you know, the sacredness of human life, the sacredness of the planet, the sacredness of, and maybe return some of the mystery of consciousness to psychology. All of those things are not just heady English major woowoo ideas that we should talk about in drum circles. I really would like more of that in government. I really would like more of it in the institutions that teach us psych. And it is very absent. It has been.

Good. Couldn't agree more. Love it. Thank you so much again for your time. This has been great. And yeah, man, keep up the good work. Yeah, thank you That boy needs therapy Psychosomatic That boy needs therapy You need psychosomatic That boy needs therapy You lying down on the couch? What does that mean? I don't expect you to get my perspective Or what you expect from a therapy session AAAAAAAA

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