The Taproot Podcast - 🦋Demystifying Carl Jung - www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

Subscribe to the podcast and delve into intriguing topics like astrophobia and its connection to trauma patients' fear of space: 🎧 https://GetTherapyBirmingham.podbean.com/e/astrophobia-why-are-so-many-trauma-patients-afraid-of-space/ Explore a wealth of free resources on our website to support your journey: 🌐 https://www.gettherapybirmingham.com/ Jung, a multifaceted figure, ventured into parapsychology and ESP, pushing the boundaries of psychology. While he didn't define the limits of his psychology, his legacy birthed "depth psychology," studying archetypal images within the collective unconscious in fields such as sociology, anthropology, creative writing, and comparative religion. Jungian psychology stands apart, focusing on growth and self-discovery throughout life. Instead of symptom reduction, it aims to help individuals explore their desires and express their true selves through creativity. Join us on this transformative path. For more information, visit    Address: 2025 Shady Crest Dr Suite 203 Hoover, AL 35216 Email: [e-mail] Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/cnverPNUPuxiPkbc8 Podcast: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone]

Hey guys, it's Joel and I wanted to do a short video today, or short-ish, called Demystifying Jung, because I get a lot of questions about Carl Jung. Every time I post a video somebody says, well I really like this idea you shared that comes from Jungian thought, could you tell me what Jungian thought's about? Or I really like this thing that comes from Jungian thought could you tell me what Jungian thoughts about or I really like this thing about Carl Jung you mentioned could you tell me what to read or what to do that's a really big question because Carl Jung's a really big guy he's a contemporary of Freud he has kind of a falling out with Freud like most everybody that Freud decides that you know Adler right that they're going to be his legacy and then he later has a falling out with them and gets and Reich, that they're going to be his legacy, and then he

later has a falling out with them and gets rid of them. So they're not talking by the end of their life, but at the beginning, Carl Jung is in touch with Freud and part of his circle. If you touch on him at all in your Psychology 101 class, it'll be to hear that he was this idea of the collective unconscious, or that he had this idea of archetypes and then they kind of move on. But there's a lot to that kind of thinking and even though you probably don't talk about him a ton in psychology, he influences an enormous body of thought. So when you're talking about what Jung is, there's kind of what he did during his lifetime, which is a lot.

Not all of it is even published now. I think the last figure that I heard was that they've only published about 30% of what he wrote. A couple years ago, they came out with the Red Book, which was his deep personal spiritual journey and active imagination and kind of art. And he didn't want that to come out during his lifetime because he wanted to be seen as a serious scientist, a serious doctor, and for his ideas to be taken seriously. And so his more kind of woo-woo personal spiritual things, he kept private. But then that is very influential, this idea of active imagination. So, I mean, I'll try and break it down into a couple of parts, and then where those parts go into the world, and kind of give you some direction

if you're interested in part of this thinking and what to do. So the big idea that Jung comes up with, I mean, one of his, I think one of the two major cardinal insights that he makes is that the thing that we attack externally is actually a part of our deep unconscious self. And so we have a shadow, and the shadow are all the things that I carry around with me that I don't like that I'm repressing and because I'm repressing those things and I can't stand them my ego is repressing my shadow I attack them externally or I judge them externally I react violently you know it's to find the shadow you

follow emotion maybe when somebody's greedy or somebody's judgmental or somebody's bad you're supposed to have a little bit of a reaction to that. But if it's this much, you're maybe looking at shadow projection there. And so what you have with this idea of Carl Jung and the shadow is you get into this idea that you have to go back into your shame, back into your own sense of inferiority in order to be whole, in order to find your whole self. When you go back into that labyrinth though, the problem is you are still the same age you were at that point in your life. I like to tell patients we have all of these places in childhood that we learn, I can't

go back there. If I go back there, I'll die. And it's things like a place where I feel unlovable, a feeling of if I lose control, then it's going to be the end of the world, or a feeling that, well, if anyone really sees me, if I really let the guard down and they see inside me, that's bad and shameful. They're going to see something they don't like and they'll judge me. It's going back into those places, which are, it's not an intellectual journey. It's a deeply emotional one in your body brain and your kind of deep emotional awareness i mean we can talk a lot about this stuff but we really have to go back in and re-experience it and that's shadow work going back into these places where we didn't think that we could survive that we try and turn off our life becomes this

construction of running from i'm going to turn it off by. I'm going to turn it off by eating, I'm going to turn it off by drinking, I'm going to turn it off by exercise, by work, by dating. And when we let those protective parts go, we can go into these places where we didn't think that we could survive and we can learn that we can master them, that we can reclaim these damaged pieces of ourself and we can be whole. I mean, shadow projection, if you never eat the shadow, if you never really dissolve your ego and become something that can hold it, then what's happening is it's getting projected all the time onto other people. So if I have my, maybe I have an abusive father who's kind of a narcissist and teaches me that like vulnerability is bad, shame is bad, anyone who's weak is bad, you know, it teaches me to disown my

own vulnerability, then I may hate my vulnerability so much. I might despise that so much that I repress it and I attack it externally. I hate vulnerable groups of people. Anytime anyone's vulnerable or sad or getting hurt, like that's their fault. They didn't try hard enough. They're weak and I despise it. And that comes out throughout my life where i'm reacting to that now the the point of yin yin channel work is to let go of what you are right now because if you're able to let go of what you are right now and dissolve that ego you're able to become something bigger and grow that can actually hold your shadow but that's very scary because letting go of what I am right now and all that I've ever known, the only thing that I've ever known how to be, feels like death. It feels like dying because I'm letting go of a rigid self-image and I'm letting something else come up.

This is very different than a lot of styles of therapy that are essentially ego management strategies. Cognitive therapy says, no, don't go there. Don't go to the places that cause you anxiety. Don't do that. You know, kind of cover that up or move away from it. Jungian therapy is taking you into that. And the idea that we attack the things externally that we don't want to hold internally is probably one of Jung's major ideas. So later on, you get this kind of birth of comparative religion movement in the 70s, and Joseph Campbell's a part of that and one of the things that Joseph Campbell does is he says okay well there's

essentially this sort of structure that gets projected onto the universe by people and they and they see this in this projection comes out through storytelling through myth through legends religion, that we're looking out and then we're creating these figures and we're telling these stories, but they're really what our unconscious mind is telling us that is the formula for a healthy life. That really is the journey of a full life that you should live if you're really going to grow and integrate.

And that's why we put it in story and we make it this hero myth. And so Joseph Campbell is one of the people that you probably see in the kind of New Age or Yungian circles if you hear the idea of the hero's journey. And very briefly what that is, is he says that if you, you know, that there's this sort of cycle

that all of storytelling follows, that there's a hero that is kind of in a static world and this force says, you know, the deep unconscious is calling to you, the magical world, it wants to pull you in. There's little glimmers that the world that you, the static world you're in is not all of what you could be. And there's guardians that say, oh no no no Lucy, the back of the wardrobe is wood. And like, oh Luke, you can't leave the farm this year. And then eventually the hero breaks through into the world of the unconscious.

They're pulled into a giant, larger world that's bigger than them that they can't understand. And they get hints that there's this big evil that they have to fight. There's this big thing that is the antagonist. And then they face it and they are scared by it. And as they finally get down to the bottom of the wheel, then they face their shadow. And when they face their shadow, the way that it's defeated is not by killing it. It's by integrating it. It's a surrender.

You can't kill your shadow. You can't attack it. All the things that you hate about yourself really are hurt places you have to learn to love and accept. And so during at the bottom of that wheel, you get, um, you know, uh, Luke accepting that Darth Vader is his dad. You get me realizing that, oh, I'm not so different from the bad guy that actually, if there's something that happened in my life, I could have turned into that, that there's this deep acceptance. I mean, Gilgamesh does this. Zoroastrianism does this. The Odyssey does this. It's this kind of formula for heroic storytelling. And then the hero comes back into

the world, and when they come back, they have one foot in the unconscious kind of fantasy realm, and they have one foot in the real world, and they become the wise wizard that pushes the next hero on this journey. The second thing that Jung comes up with, which is a really big, powerful idea that has some resonances. So Jung is a lot better educated than the people of his contemporaries, or at least he's educated in more areas than they are. Like Adler, Reich, Freud, like they're doctors, they're medical, and they're looking at the brain through this lens of neurology and where consciousness is held in these tension spots and neuroses. But that language is generally where their education is. Jung comes from a relatively wealthy family. He's trained in

ancient history. He's trained in mythology. He's trained in religion. He's trained in socio and political thought. And so he's bringing this lens that's bigger than psychology into psychology. And one of the things that he starts to notice about what the unconscious must be operating in is when you have somebody who has taken, you know, maybe a hallucinogen like LSD that dissolves the ego, they're having a dissociative experience, the ego is kind of dissolved and the unconscious is just being projected and it's at play So so you's working with patients that have schizophrenia basically they can't tell the difference between their unconscious and reality and all these things are just being projected all the time and He starts to realize that these patients are largely alcoholic. They're

Impoverished they've never had any education at all, and yet they're describing these scenes to him from mythology, from all these world religions. And so he's going, well, they never were taught this, yet this is what they're seeing. So there must be something in the deep unconscious, I'm going to call them archetypes, that are these pieces of story that we as humans project on the world that we create because they're some part of our deep unconscious mind. And this also kind of goes into the comparative religion movement. I don't really think that Jung meant to start this thing that said, okay, let's go back and see what the common pieces of every religion is. You know, like, I'm going to see what makes a peach tree a peach tree. Okay, well, this peach tree is a little shorter.

This one grows over to the left. There's some differences here, but I'm going to define all the common elements and then say, well, what is it that makes a peach tree a peach tree? There's kind of this attempt in the 70s to do that with religion, to say, like, what are the common elements that mankind will always use to create a creation myth? And what does that say about ourselves? What does that say about the way that we think and make meaning and make art and make humanity, make self? And I don't think he really means to kick that off as much as he does. It's kind of like Charles Darwin probably

doesn't mean to create the debate that he does. He's just sort of writing, hey, look, these birds beaks on this island, you know, Charles Darwin's saying they eat these nuts and their beaks are a little bigger. And then this other bird, it doesn't eat those nuts and his beak didn't get bigger and harder. And then people say, oh my God, birds can change. You know, if the bird is in an environment, then the other birds get these genes and then they change. So what did humanity used to be? What if we came from pondonscombe? And there's sort of a larger movement maybe than was intended. And so Jung gets criticized a whole lot during his life for being spiritual, for being woo-woo, for bringing spirituality into therapy too much. A lot of that is because he likes the idea of projection so much that he uses it all the time. So he'll have a sand tray and you put these little figures in the sand and then he would

interpret the symbols that the patients were drawing and making, you know, where they put the figure of the night, where they put the figure of the rose, what that meant. He would interpret dreams. He would even sometimes bring in an astrological chart and see what the patient, you know, projects onto that. He's into a lot of these new age things as a form of projective identification. And so Jungian analysts, if you're going to be in a very traditional Jungian school, when they're looking at a myth

or a fairy tale or a legend, they're seeing that as not just a historical story with a beginning, middle, and end, but that all the characters in these fairy tales are actually pieces of the psyche. They're pieces of the same mind. And so when you're looking at the story and trying to figure out what it means, you're seeing the jealous stepdad as a protector of ego. You're seeing the naive but young princess as the vulnerable child. You're seeing the terrible ogre as a traumatic event. And so you're sort of seeing this as a telling of some sort of psychological archetype. So traditional Jungian analysts use that kind of thinking a lot. Because Jungian thought is so much about going in and discovering this deep sense of self

and continuing to grow. And then looking at what we project onto religion, project onto God, and say, what does that say about me? You know, if I think that God is, you know, discriminating or punishing or angry or he only likes a certain group of people, and I decide that's what God is, really maybe that says more about what I need him to be, what my biases are. And so that when I work on myself, when I discover my deep self, then I'm projecting my biases a little bit less as I eat my shadow and what I'm able to do is let God be a bigger image, a bigger projection, a more gentle sense of religion. And Jung, I think that's why Jung goes into a lot of obsession with mysticism and Gnosticism by the end of his lifetime.

It's because those are philosophical traditions that are about going in and unearthing the deep self and knowing the deep self so that the deep self will let us see God in his fullness, or this projection of the deep unconscious in honesty. And that is something that he chooses to do privately, which is just now kind of coming out. He did publish Seven Sermons to the Dead, which is a Gnostic publication in its lifetime, but now we know that he really didn't want to. That was something that he wanted to keep secret in the Red Book and everything else were things that he did keep secret until years after he dies when his family publishes them. So, I mean, there's still a whole lot more to get into. There's a lot more things that he does.

Probably the biggest one that I don't have time to go into very much is the idea of the Myers-Briggs. Jung takes those union archetypes and he says, okay, well, these are different modes of thinking, the knight and the warrior and the king and the wizard, and we can only be using one of these problem-solving methods at a time. When I'm introverting, when I am going deep and pulling images from within the self to try and understand them, I cannot be extroverting. I cannot be taking in new images to try and understand them. Those are two modes of thinking that are completely opposite. And so what Myers and Briggs do in order to make Jungian thought a little bit

more mainstream is that they take this and turn it into a test with these letters, you know, EI, introvert, extrovert. But what the Myers-Briggs essentially is, which is Jungian therapy, I mean, he is responsible for that, is it's saying that there are four ways of problem solving, or eight ways of problem solving, but we can, four of them are diametrically opposed to another one. So at any point in time, we're only doing one, and then we all kind of have a comfort system where we are more comfortable with one mode of thinking, introversion or extroversion, or intuition versus detailed, logical, you know, rule following. And then we cling to one of them, and then as we integrate the shadow,

then we're kind of letting it go, we're growing, we get better at it. A lot of times, you'll sort of marry your shadow, you'll marry your opposite. So that would be another direction that his thought goes. So hopefully that's helpful and clears my mind in explaining a couple different directions of Jungian thought if you are wanting to get into any of the ideas and read a little bit more about them. If you do like the Myers-Briggs stuff, I highly recommend John Beebe. I think he's an incredible scholar and he does a lot of work with the Jungian typology that is really

cool. So leave me a comment. Let me know if there's anything that I didn't get to or that you would like to know and check out the website gettherapybirmingham.com for more videos. We are located at 2025 Shady drive hoover alabama and come see us if you're in the area take care