The Taproot Podcast - -/+ Healing the Modern Soul Appendix: Psychotherapy as Negative Space

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

This is the Appendix to the Healing the Modern Soul Series that you can find below   Part 1 - https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/e/%f0%9f%92healing-the-modern-soul-finding-meaning-in-a-world-of-broken-images/ Part 2 - https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/e/healing-the-modern-soul-part-2-the-philosophy-of-psychology/ Part 3 - https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/e/%f0%9f%98suffering-without-screaming-healing-the-modern-soul-part-3 Part 4 - https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/e/%f0%9f%8chealing-the-modern-soul-part-4-poetry-of-the-spheres/   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]

Hey guys, it's Joel with the Tabaret Therapy Collective podcast. And if you're wondering, why is this episode here? Why did God give me this episode? It serves no purpose and is only a source of infection that might have to be removed, but shouldn't exist. It's because this is an appendix to the Making Meaning in the Modern World or Healing the Modern Soul series that I've been doing. And I basically did that series because there's a bigger series about the whole history of psychology.

But with psychology itself as kind of the character, not like a boring, dry textbook, but this thing adapting and changing. If I ever finish that series that I have copious notes for, I think it'll be like my magnum opus that I like have wanted to make for a super long time. It'll be really involved. Um, it'll be like some of the bigger, uh, audio, uh, you know, podcast multi-part mini series event things that I like, uh, but about my interests and I don't have any time to do it. And so I just decided that I was going to read through sort of the rough notes and talk about it. And this was sort of a rough draft of that. So what I was going to do in the appendix is just go through all the notes that I essentially didn't get to and clarify some of the points that it would have slowed down the series to dig into in a more specific way, when a lot of that was about not being specific,

was about being kind of poetic as a point. And so I didn't want to get in the way of myself with that. If you haven't listened to the Making Meaning of the Modern World series, this episode probably makes little to no sense and isn't something that you want to listen to. If you listen to the Making Meaning or Healing the Modern Soul series and was like, I don't like this, or I don't get it, this isn't what we're normally doing, you probably don't want to listen to if you listen to the making meaning or healing the modern soul series and was like i don't like this or this isn't i don't get it this is what we're normally doing you probably don't want to listen to the appendix um but i'm just going to go through basically the notes that

were left um that i didn't get to go through uh in their entirety but we got a lot into a philosophy in that for the first time in a bit and i basically like i don't like philosophy very much like i'm not a philosophy guy. I don't have anything against it. I like some of it, but I think the overall, especially, like, academic philosophy trend in my lifetime has been kind of like, I don't know, it's just not for me. And part of that is I think that a lot of the values that I have

for how we should communicate and what the point of, like, intuition and soul and life and self and all that is, is explained to me better by people fighting about psychotherapy than people fighting about philosophy. Because what happens in philosophy a ton of the time from where I'm sitting is that you have people that basically like make up a bunch of definitions for things and then say, well, if these suppositions are all true then here's all these like little logical games that we can play with them so that i can go get get like into law school and i i just uh i don't get it like that isn't something that i want to do

then you have people that i do like um like nietzsche and wittgenstein and you know there's a there's a lot of humanistic and feeling-driven philosophy to Schopenhauer and people like that, and that's fine, but they usually sort of speak for themselves and stand for themselves, and it's not something that occupies a ton of academic philosophy's time because they're either Plato and Nietzsche, so vague that the point is kind of like a poetic, noetic experience. And, you know, people can say, well, I like it, but they don't really get it.

But there's not a lot of specificity to fight about. And then what sucks up like all of the time is like analytical philosophy where people make all these suppositions and are like, oh, but Diogenes made like the seven step proofs for forms against forms and that's the most complicated proof in all of classical philosophy because he says you know if forms exist then they might be this but then there are differences i don't care like i just um that stuff is uh not anything that i ever really want to get into on here it's just not the kind of uh thing that i devote my brain power to is the seven step proof of diogenes and all the stuff that i uh a lot of um you know

philosophers really like um something like this the schwep podcast that goes through um a lot of like classical philosophy in context and and going through its perspectives that's the way that i want to approach classical philosophy and so that's um to me you know like a branch of psychology not um yeah just like a system of arguments that i think is like turning philosophy into debate club is like kind of retrojective and that like people were making these arguments but that wasn't the point of what they were doing and then we've sort of made that the only point of it because we can diagram them in the same way that like diagramming a sentence and looking at grammar is not the point of like talking I don't think that diagramming logical arguments is

the point of Plato at all so you know what I am looking for like what I'm writing about on here like what I see is the point of you know because it heals trauma essentially and a lot's why a lot of writers and artists are very traumatized is people that are able to use their intuition to see the future I mean that's the thing that I talk about the most when we did the series with Leon Krier, when we did like me talking about the Eames and their development of basically like furniture and culture until they're preempting this feeling, you know, they knew the internet was coming even though they didn't know what it was in this way that I think is purely a psychological, you know, probably material phenomenon, but it's pretty incredible. It feels spiritual. Spiritual language applies to it. And the spiritual metaphysical language might be right. Again, I'm a psychotherapist,

not a priest. I don't really pick a side. I just think it's neat. I don't know. I don't think I can know. And so what I'm doing is like looking at people like Philip K. Dick, like, you know, when we talked to Andres Duany, a billion other artists that I really like, but that's sort of all of what they're doing. And that was the point of the series on philosophy was to look at people that were sort of saying something that they didn't think would be seen for a really long time or they didn't think would be understood or something that they couldn't say, you know, all of that messy stuff um but that whole kind of like one of my um like the most grating things for me is people that think like the debate club thing is productive in therapy like the people the therapists who like debate patients who like try and like make an argument and are like well if i'm not using logical points to refute their beliefs, then how would they ever change? I don't know. Have you ever seen one of your patients change? Like when you get

underneath the logic making part of the brain, like when you get underneath that and you deal with the emotion that is fueling the need to be that intellectual or to double down on these beliefs, that's when people change. And like you can say, you know, well, debate club so important, because you have to diagram these proofs when you go to law school. I mean, yeah, you have to maybe take classical philosophy to get into law school or two, you need to understand the nature of empirical argument that you have to agree on terms and then go into something like, yeah, but that isn't that hard. It certainly isn't as hard as like a lot of people make it. And as soon as you, you know, I know a lot of people that are lawyers, like as soon as you graduate and you're

actually doing law, none of that matters. What you're doing is going back to what I think the point is, which is to tell a story. You know, the, the, the thing that they'll tell you in law school is like, the facts don't really matter. You need to know how the law is applied and what the assumptions of it are. But when you're dealing with 12 people that you have to convince of something, what you, and there's a lot of kinds of law. Like I know that I'm talking about, you know, movie criminal law, but like when you have to do that, the facts don't matter. What you're doing is telling a story.

And that is sort of what I think about therapy in a simplistic way. There's a lot of inability to see that and accept that is immaturity um and the inability to you know accept that you're not going to be enabled in this way or that the world fundamentally isn't fair or that you know like you can't actually have the thing that you want on your terms you have to let go of your terms if you're going to get it. That's what interests me about therapy, and that's sort of what I'm talking about in this series. And you can be one of those people that's like, well, that isn't fair.

Everyone should be logical, and if everyone just did a budget, then there would be no need for government regulation because people could hold giant multi-level monopol know monopolies accountable just with their purchasing decisions guess what people don't work that way like you saying that you want everything to be debate club that you want therapy to be that or politics to be that or philosophy to be that or whatever like that is your inability to accept that people are not that they don't think that way and they never will okay so that's your thing to get over, that we're not actually going to solve problems by sitting there being like,

no true Scotsman, ad absurdum, ad hominem. There's a political party that has tried every other election to run a candidate who says, well, I'm just going to go out and make an incredibly empirically valid argument and tell people to go to page 500 of my website and they always lose. Because whether or not you think people should behave the way that people are programmed, they are programmed the way they're programmed. Whether or not you want to

accept the way the brain works, it still works the way that it works. And, you know, part of the irony and the tension and the funniness of this is people who are studying essentially like the mind, the self in philosophy and psychology won't accept the terms of their own and other people's minds enough to do it well. And I see, you know, basically self being studied better. You know, yeah, every hundred years, maybe you get somebody in philosophy, but generally by academic, never thought I'd say this, I see it being studied better by academic psychology than I see it studied by academic, never thought I'd say this, I see it being studied better by academic psychology than I see it studied by academic philosophy. So it's just like not a thing that I really dig into a ton. The reason why I think it's relevant here is because we wanted to deal with some of those philosophers who come out every hundred years and I think do something

that's pretty incredible because they see through the last 200, 100 years of the world to anticipate the next hundred in a way that no one understands. Nietzsche's like the big figure that always gets credit for this because he's writing about it in a pretty on-the-nose way. He's like having a madman come in and say, hey, you know, y'all don't understand the new world that you're in. And people are like, ha ha ha, you don't understand it because have you thought about how we can't see it and won't accept it yet and he's like okay and he's not really the mad one you know and he's sort

of like uh Nietzsche's sort of like giving an underhanded compliment to all of society always um or at least you know the time that he's writing in um so yeah like there are these these big um philosophers that are interesting but the reason why i ended talking about slaughter duke even though i don't know a ton about him i'm probably not terribly well equipped enough to understand everything by him that i've read or heard him say um which there's not a ton of it in english either uh which is that's one of the reasons why i think these large language models and stuff is so nice as you can actually get translations of things that you couldn't otherwise get I'm not a huge fan of the Silicon Valley stuff but yeah use it for what it can do but one of the reasons why I

think he's so different is that like everyone else who's kind of mucking around right now is like either being incredibly postmodern and calling themselves post-postmodern and pretending to be different, but they're really not. You know, like Z-Tech is not terribly different from Lacan in any way that is important. Like, yes, I know what they believe

and that they don't agree and that they're making different points, but they're still part of the same movement trying not to be. Or there's people out there like fighting against postmodernism and saying, actually, we should go back because I want to retroject all this stuff and see another narrative into the history of whatever. You know, Jordan Peterson has now decided he's a philosopher,

you know, probably because he lost his license. And it's a popular thing that people do, you know, like when you lose your job, instead of saying like, oh, oops, you say, oh, I'm a philosopher now. You know, the I lost my job to philosopher pipeline is a well-worn pathway, so good luck. But, you know, people like him will make this argument that we really need to just go back in time and that like if you look at the first principles of everything, then they all justify these things that he wants you to think in a way that I don't think they do. You know, like you'll say that Descartes is united with Aristotle because Descartes is facing the giants in doubt of saying, I don't know any of my assumptions are true and the only one I can

trust is myself. And so that is dealing with the same connection to the divine that Aristotle sees when he conceptualizes knowledge coming from the form that I'm thinking about? Well, yeah, I don't know. Psychology 101, man, like sometimes it's not terribly wrong to reduce. Like Descartes believes a pretty fundamentally different thing about knowledge than Aristotle. They're not the same. You can't really square that circle. You can talk for a long time until they come back together in a loop. But that tends to be him trying to convince himself of something. and I'm not meaning to pick on Peterson like I'm just saying that there's a lot of people doing that Vervecki or something there's another guy that's like a YouTube guy I don't really like live in

that world but those are the kind of the two movements I see is like post-modernism pretending not to be post-modernism which I guess post-modernism is going to be like good at doing or the tools of deconstruction are going to be useful for you to pretend that you're not a part of the movement that you're a part of that has is indivisible into you know indivisible into a million parts and then people saying i don't like that don't do that um somebody like slaughter deke is not he's like one of the only people and i again like i don't love the guy i don't know anything about him you can't even get anything that he's written largely other than like the spheres trilogy and critique and a couple other things but like um and you know then there's things that

he says that are insane and fascist too like i'm not defending the person the thing the reason that i and heidegger is a nazi too right like half of this stuff is built on following up on dasein and those, you know, connections with time and the nature of ontology. Um, but the thing that is different about Slaughter Deke, the reason that I ended with him is I don't think he's doing the same thing that everyone else is. And that's not really apparent yet. Like if there is going to be this new phase, if there is going to be this new thing that is anticipatory, it probably is going to be somebody like him. He's the one that's starting to see past the things that everyone else is fighting about. And just the nature of so much of this series,

like if you take anything, get the conversation and therapy, is a conversation between the nature of the self there and their relationship to the world around them. And when that world is changing as fast as our world is changing, then we have to, we're going to see not the nature maybe. And again, I don't want to be a philosopher.

Maybe the nature of the human self doesn't change that much, but the reality of the human self changes quite a bit because the world around it is so different. Like I just walked you from there from the seventies to the mid 2000s on that part four and explained like why those forces change psychotherapy so much because people are bringing things into therapy that just didn't exist in the 60s, like conceptions of life that weren't there. And you just couldn't be Freud anymore. Like you had to start making these other things. A lot of those guesses are wrong. A lot of those guesses are overreactions to other things. I'm doing that with are wrong. A lot of those guesses are overreactions to other things.

I'm doing that with my therapy. I'm doing that with my series. Like no one's an exception from it. Like I'm not a prophet. I don't know. I tend to think that it's safer to give the patient more control over their reality and that it is also safer to be more integrative in your approach so that when you're trying to understand the self in

the world that the patient inhabits you're being more flexible um i i've been hurt in therapy like i talked about you know the guy that was like wild and incompetent i'm kind of laughing about it because it's so crazy but like i had ptsd from that you know um i had to go see another therapist uh it's not if something like that has happened to you, I don't take it lightly. Um, and it was very painful when it happened to me. I'm not here to talk about that, but you know, this stuff is important and I see psychotherapy being more therapeutic, um, than a lot of these other like disciplines that are basically talking about self and life. I love anthropology. I love sociology. I like philosophy, but I just don't swim in those waters. You know, maybe the Jungian thing puts me in conversation

with anthropology and self and philosophy. But one of the things that I think that Peterson's doing that's not helpful and that a lot of these newer guys are doing just because like it works to sell a brand and to get people on YouTube to like leave a comment that's like, wow, I'm not smart enough to understand any of these words, but I am smart enough to know that it's the smartest thing ever. And this guy's right. And it's like, okay, well, uh, yeah, that isn't how that works. Um, but the, the thing that Peterson's doing is like a very surface level reading of Carl Young and a very surface level reading of, um,

Merch Eliane, where he's saying that like all religions are saying the same thing. And then if you go in and you just shave off like every single bit of detail in the myth and everything from the Hebrew Bible, um, or the, you know Hebrew Bible or the Talmud or whatever that is actually making fun of like Babylonia or making fun of the Roman Empire and saying that those things are bad and that they'll get destroyed by kind of tweaking their myths. Like if you just take that all away, then underneath it really like all religion are the same

and they just have the same myths and they just have the same archetypes. I mean, I like the jungian stuff archetypes exist but to separate like everything from culture in a way that that is that reductive and just be like we can use jung to show us basically like the cartesian principles we can use this jung in this way that is cartesian to show us like all these things that are present inside of every myth. So they're like first principles that we have to live by. I mean, it's just very apparent that he's doing that. Not because that's like an interesting way to like help anybody or find knowledge or find anything new, but because he believes a bunch of things that he wants you to believe. And he's spinning his tires in the mud intellectually to try and come

up with a way you know the same thing Nietzsche's critiquing to say my belief that I want you to have that I like I'm so emotional about and desperately need to be your reality also and need to be true I've proved as true with reason which is kind of a dangerous thing to do I think because like reason and logic and all that debate clubby philosophy stuff, I just think is silly. I mean, somebody like Wickenstein is maybe waiting for a time like now. Like, he was very famous about saying, like, I don't really like the people who like me, and I'm writing for a later generation. Like, you get, if you've played Assassin's Creed, the first one, like way back way, when, or maybe maybe it's in the second or third, but it's one of the early ones. It's before Ubisoft turned it into Assassin's Creed universe or whatever.

There's a place where the character from the past, his memories are being read by a character in the future, he's like been dead for a thousand years um there's also a scene like it like dune that probably would have been a more like educated like i have many seasoned books type of uh persona if i had quoted dune but it doesn't matter the the character is like i don't understand in the past the character is like his mind is being read by a character in the future is like i don't understand why you're telling me this and the person's like because i'm not talking to you i'm talking through you and they're like yeah but why they're like be quiet just remember this because someone's going to read your brain in 2 000 years or it's not quite that long um don't come at me i'm not a history guy either don't come at me um but the wickenstein would say like I'm kind of writing for an age that's, like, after this. And one, like, really good way to maybe read him is to read him as if he was saying, and he changes a lot and people fight about it.

I'm not saying that I, like, know how to interpret any of this stuff. I don't specialize in it. These are tertiary dilettante silly impressions that hopefully you, as somebody who is interested in the progression of therapy, or a therapist, or a patient in therapy, and hopefully both, can be like, oh, I'll apply that to my therapeutic technique and the dilettante, fun, liberal arts, I don't really understand it, but I want to play with it way that I think therapy should do. And therapists kind of always have done. a whole bunch about the disciplines that he talked about and he said way more crazy stuff that was like way more written off by everybody who was in those fields uh specialized in those individual fields when he put them together so yeah it doesn't always really help you to know a lot um but like wickenstein is saying that he's basically like writing for this age that hasn't come yet and he's writing for an audience that isn't there and i think one of the ways that is useful to read him is that what you can think about is that he's saying all of these like basically what

you're doing are not solving problems that have to do with self or truth or life or being what you're doing is playing games with the limitations of language that language doesn't actually let you talk about these things because their reactions from the brainstem that are describing like very profound sometimes metaphors like jung would say that the symbol is the nature of the soul or something but not always metaphors like other times they're just dynamic processes that are so complicated because they've evolved they involve like three or four nodes of communication between like self and world and spatial awareness and auditory memory and like coherent sense of self in this capacity like all these things that

are like i mean maybe the unconscious maybe tertiary uh or secondary cognitive processes maybe implicit memory, like whatever you want to call it. Like there are processes that we can't really say, well, my definition of time is that you can't do it because the way that your brain

is experiencing it is very complicated. And so what Wittgenstein is kind of waiting for is when people stop fighting about this stuff. Because it's sort of like in math where, and if you're a mathematician and you like it, do it. I'm fine with you doing anything that you like.

What I'm talking about, because I think that therapy is supposed to be material, impactful, and helpful, and I'm interested in the parts of philosophy that help us do that, I'm not really interested in the parts of it that just help us make lists of stuff for no reason. A lot of mathematics is real and applied, and a lot of it is stuff that can never actually like it's just for fun like it's completely theoretical and conceptual and you couldn't put it through a Turing machine and make it real and so some of the things that are happening and especially

analytical philosophy I think are like studying like imaginary numbers you know I remember when they were like hey quit reading will of time and Lord of the Rings in like middle school. Pull your, put those back in your cargo pants and get real and learn these imaginary numbers in math. And it was like, dude, like at least my imagination is interesting. You're talking about an imaginary number, the square root of a negative number. Like, I don't care. I still don't care. And if you like it, that's great. I'm just talking about the practical application that most of analytical philosophy has. I think Wittgenstein is like waiting for those fights to be done and is just like, please, when this is all over, what we can do is realize that what we're talking about is very complicated and that we can refine

language to better reflect like this real meaning for search for something that does something and that also we we can build a language that leaves room for a private language it can leave a language that can leave a language that can say things that that not that we can't say but it can leave room for things that we can't say or refer to it. Maybe like a language of the negative space, like would be a solution to something. So again, I don't want to get too far away, but therapy is struggling with that same problem as it deals with implicit memory, right? So like the notion of self has changed so much in my lifetime. And I haven't really been alive for that long you know I mean it it's been a while but in the grand scheme of things like

I don't matter a ton and I think that um you know somebody's saying hey this is just kind of linguistic confusion it's not actually real is sort of the age that he's waiting for and that's the kind of thing that somebody like slaughter deke why i think he's different he's just operating under that assumption he's being like none of this stuff works you kind of know what i mean like the point is that you have a framework that helps you understand the stuff the point is that you have a framework that lets us understand all the fights of the past and all the splits between the different people and what everyone else was saying and why that was relevant to their time and why it's this time now and it's sort of like it's not exactly critical theory which critical

theory is saying that basically you come up with an analysis and then the world changes and then that doesn't work anymore so you have to come up with a timely analysis and and and run some critical theory on it to make sure that it's actually working to solve the problem that you're trying to solve at the time you're trying to solve it and you're anticipating the timer of history ticking onward and a new thing coming um he's not like doing critical theory but he's like leaving room for every concept that exists in modern philosophy and historic philosophy and not saying right wrong good bad but saying like saying like, here it is, here it is, here it is, here it is. Here's how it's like bumping up against the other thing. I

mean, you want to look at something like spheres and foams and bubbles. Like that's what, that's what he's saying. And those things I think are wildly relevant to, um, psychology. Those are the parts of philosophy where the overlap is so strong that we can't ignore them. I mean, if you can look at, like, okay, look, here's the ancient world, right? You go from 4000 BCE to 500 CE. You've got religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, precursors to Christianity, Islam.

All of these things people are exploring spiritually. And the psychotic experiences that people are having, they're like spirit possessions, divine beings coming into the world. They're handling all of these archetypes in this way that is almost completely similar across all of those things. Like there's cultural things like there's cultural differences because there's different parts of self they're going to be repressed or not allowed or shamed but people sort of understand like hey you know we try and deal with these forces we try and talk about them in this language and then sometimes they get so strong that we call it like spiritual spirituality when the demon or the prophet is here and the space is liminal and that was sort

of the nature of what psychosis looked like then you've got the middle ages where there's like witches demon possession people becoming saints demons witnessing divine visions you know seeing hell that was like big fight from the medieval ages to the renaissance whether or not like anyone had seen hell and if these artists and writers writing about it were actually going there um and the you know doctrine you're trying to solve psychology uh or you know psychotic experience in this religious way or treating it like it has this religious character in a way that is new because it isn't just, um, it wasn't just kind of the open, like, I mean, bad things happen to you if you were psychotic in the Bronze Age. Like, I'm not saying that there was like a great time. This isn't, I'm not making an argument about like, oh, the noble,

whatever. But there was a different character when the Catholic church is burning witches for heresy. Um, then when people are just sort of like looking at jesus go up to the madman and like touch them to try and you know bring a demon out of them um there's more of kind of like an institutional rigidity that is letting some people in the fold and some people out but there's less of like this natural experience of the angelic and the demonic that just sort of happens there's like a very like in the medieval period like fear of holding on to the good holding on to the angelic holding on to the holy repressing everything else killing it um that starts to drive culture in like a very different way than when you just kind

of have the bronze age and people having spiritual experiences of good, bad mixed together. You know, all of them are sort of awful, terrible, inevitable, and mystical and complex. The medieval period, there's very much a binary where there are good ones, bad ones. And if you're going to have a good one, the church is probably going to be very suspicious of it. So, like, then, you know the renaissance early modern period you have the reformation you have scientific advancement you have people basically making things that compete with the church in a way that it's not artwork it's not poetic it's not abstract it's not just like giving you an experience of because that's why we looked at like sculptures and paintings and beautiful rooms, right?

It was to have this like, wow, liminal experience like before film. And it's not, technology becomes not an experience the church can take credit for. You know, in the way that they can say you're feeling the glory of God and you're witnessing this beautiful carving of a saint that we paid for Da Vinci to make. Like you can't do that with something like the steam engine. You can't do that with something like Galileo's model of the universe. Um, because it starts trying to explain things in a way that the church loses control over. And there's this, you know, um, feeling of like secrets of secret societies of like secret motivations. You know, a lot of the, uh, psychological problems that start to come

about are more, uh, stressful, uh, to the person because they're not just like an experience that totally possesses you and takes you over. They're a paranoia. Like you start to get a paranoia about a world under the world, under the world and competing factions. Um, And that's what's happening politically, too. Like, when you move into the 19th century, you see new religious movements, you see like more secularization, you see modern technology. This is the first time where psychosis starts to become something that has to do with like, the government that has to do with um but not just government like i don't want taxes government like that there were giant forces that were could change the fate of the entire world not just like maybe florence falls in my city falls and i can't

fathom that or maybe it sort of starts with the crusades, I think, and then goes faster and faster, where people are like, the entire world as I can conceive of it may be manipulated or destroyed. And then that definitely continues to ramp up until you get the atomic bomb. And we can destroy the world, not just slowly through some miscalculation, but like in a second and then you know that continues until you have you know the idea now of global warming and environmental ecological catastrophe running out of food overfishing you know land masses sinking into the ocean because there's this field being that like not only that the world could disappear in the second like a thermonuclear war and fallout and all that but the world could be disappearing every single second underneath our feet while we're doing other things and we don't even notice you

know which is creates a different kind of anxiety or is like more you know upsetting maybe than something like the atomic bomb um in a different way you know i would definitely prefer global warming to global nuclear destruction you you know. But ideally neither. But, like, in the 50s, you know, you had delusions and psychosis were, like, most often reported as, like, persecution, grandeur, control. You know, you get hypophrenic schizophrenia, which is disorganized speech and behavior, just kind of more erratic acting. You know, antipsychotic medications, like first start to come out. But a lot of that is post-war recovery and emergence of the Cold War. And this idea of geopolitical bipolarization, religious experience is this resurgent,

you know, thing, even though it's changing, it's supposed to be protecting you from this existential anxiety, which means that it gets fused a whole lot with government, that, you know, American mainstream Christianity sort of becomes this not force that's supposed to be separate from or moderating capitalism or American politics. It's the same as it because the Soviets are not Christian and we are. And so it becomes this monoculture in a way that changes things. In the 60s, you know, you get delusions that are more about like culture and politics and the political climate and people watching you, themes related to

like Cold War espionage. It's like the John Nash paranoia of, you know, connecting the dots. You get this idea of like seeing and connecting patterns. Whereas before those patterns were just like, I am an angel. I am a devil. I have a thousand demons in me i am they're they're turning into that you could read the phone book and see what the ussr or the devil is doing you know there's the the increasing um nature of like surveillance and technology that is putting

things into categories and information being represented starts to affect the way that we have psychotic episodes. Because the nature of self is changing. Because the world around it is changing. And so therapy had to change. In the 70s, you have delusions that start to have elements of science fiction. They start to have actual technology in them. People are saying things all of a sudden like that you know invisible lasers and ray guns

and you know alien things things from the the weird science and hp lovecraft stuff start to be what people when they have a psychotic break are experiencing and you know you get this concept of bpd in the 70s which i don't really love the way we conceived of that diagnosis but they basically were saying okay well these people are psychotic because we're asking them what happened. And they're telling us things that everyone saw didn't happen. That's not what they did. But it's not because they're psychotic. It's because they're in so much shame. Like they have so much emotional turmoil that they can't sit with the sense of self of the person who they were when they did that. So it's not a psychotic split. It's an emotional split from reality

where the person who has the borderline personality disorder is saying, well, my sense of self doesn't lie. But we all heard you lie in group. No, no, no, no, no. You're bad because you're telling me that my sense of self isn't real. And my sense of self doesn't do the things you're accusing me of. So my self-image is not lining up with reality. And I kind of need you to enable my self-image that is wrong. And if you won't, I'm going to split, and I'm going to attack you,

and I'm going to say that you're bad, and I'm going to come up with a bunch of made-up reasons. And we all do that to a certain extent. But for the people at that time, they're saying, okay, well, this person is basically not able to do therapy. They're not able to respond to either medication, even though the medication maybe makes them a little bit more palatable, or insight-based therapy because we're trying to tell them things

and they're telling us that that isn't real. And in the 80s, delusion changes a ton. There's a lot of things about infection aids murder paranoia the cia is coming after you um you start to see eating disorders like um anorexia bulimia they get recognition but they also become like a lot more culturally entrenched in what's happening in this culture of kind of like that drugs can control the body and you know you can lose weight on cocaine or you can take this and there's this very externalized sense of self where a lot of things were about how you were perceived you know your your self-image wasn't your self-image, how other people perceived you was your self-image.

And so, so many of those results of a very corporate, very individualistic, very objectively oriented moneyed society start to change things. You know, in the 90s, people are like more interested in DID like you start to see that um more studied childhood trauma becomes this thing the internet leads to um all kinds of social addictions um you know cyber sexing breaks up marriages where it's like not even not even like the before webcams before anything like people were just chatting and they would, you know, role play these different things. And there's this huge change, um, in this digital age where people now have that same

paranoia of the eighties of like, what if people don't see me in the right way? Maybe their perception of me is who I am. That's like magnified so much by the internet, which continues into the two way, maybe their perception of me is who I am. That's like magnified so much by the internet, which continues into the two thousands, because you're not just trying to like go on the weekend to church and then make a good impression there and then go to work, you know, the weekday and make a good impression there. And then also have my family, you know, understand me. I'm worried about what my 10,000 YouTube followers will say tomorrow because the celebrity that I like just said this. You know, it's escalating to something like that now.

And, you know, a ton of things about, like, global conflict and war kick off, like, in Delusions after 9-11. A lot of things about there's sort of another hopelessness that like this thing will never really end like people you know the initial thing is like oh yeah let's go kick some butts and we're americans and then it just slowly becomes this thing that's never going away this anger where you you never the fist can never make contact with anything that's satisfying people still feel like they're the center of the universe, but they're having to think about the experience of American foreign policy and American imperialism and all of these things all around the world in a way that makes them really angry, because I shouldn't have to think about that. That should just happen outside of my experience. And if it

does happen, I should just be able to reduce it down to something that I already understand so that I don't have to learn anything. And y'all keep telling me, as I look at all these things, that there's things that I don't know. And I think that's why you get this kind of like overwhelm and shutdown cycles with the internet, because just collectively, like people cannot drink from this firehose of information. And so when there is a crisis, you know, maybe one of the first technological ones would be something like 9-11. Everyone's very aware and then they're burned out and then they're overwhelmed and then they forget that the war is even happening. And then if you have something that breaks the rules, like, well, Clinton's not supposed to lose.

Trump's not somebody like Trump's not supposed to win. Everybody gets online when you have a giant pandemic, and then they just burn out and kind of dissociate because that intensity can't happen. It's like thinking about a wildfire, right? Like, we used to fight wildfires in the 50s with this, like, you know, World War I language of, like, World War II language of, like, they actually would show propaganda films about it.

They were like, the wildfire would blow through california and it would devastate the economy and the animals and but here's the exciting music and now we're putting it out and not letting it happen well it ends up like you shouldn't do that because what happens is the amount of fuel just gets so full um everywhere that when the fire happens you can can't stop it. It's just this huge inferno that raises everything. And so there's these release valves that you can see in the internet with this like political system where people have this hyper obsession and it doesn't happen all at once. Like Americans aren't monadic. Like I said that in the beginning, what's going to happen is that certain demographic groups are going to have this thing happen.

But where you're going to see like the biggest cultural experience is where multiple ones of those demographic groups are overlapping to the same stimuli or multiple stimuli at the same time. They're having a big obsessive engagement with the Internet and then they're leaving, you know. And I don't really love mckenna um but if you want to look at something like terence mckenna's time wave theory um i don't think it works anything like he did but if you want to look at it like a chinese calendar which it probably was something like that in this rise and kind of like you know he would call it novelty in a way that i wouldn't um but that is i think one of the futures of understanding psychology and the intersection of sociology, maybe anthropology and psychotherapy,

like what psychotherapy has to do to understand and prepare for these things. And so I don't really like the philosophies that are very reductive. You know, that just say like, okay, well, here's all this stuff. And it all can just be boiled down to these definitions. And this is what time is. This is what being is. This is what life is. Because like Wittgenstein, I don't think that language can encapsulate that.

And I definitely don't think numbers can. As we've tried to make it in psychotherapy i mean you want to talk about psychology being a soft science i mean philosophy you know is just has to be one of the softest sciences there is right um but then we have to make it empirical somewhat or else what do we fight about? So I think that the things like what Sloterdijk's fears do and what somebody like Marx was trying to do, even though he's not right a bunch of places about it, is build this predictive engine to kind of understand those boom and bust cycles. And I still think that somebody like Jung, and not even really in anything that Jung directly said,

like I can't point to this in the collective works, I can point to it via implication, where he was dealing with a million problems. He sort of solved some of them. He didn't really get around to going back and doing a lot of it. But the other people like Neumann, that, you know, Jung is kind of like Plato, I think, in psychology. He's probably about as misunderstood as Nietzsche and Plato. But he asks all these questions that you can laugh at him and call him an occultist and like all of these things that don't really reflect anything.

But what you can't do is get rid of him because he came he pointed something out that you can't unsee like yeah you can pretend that it isn't there but anyone who reads it and sees those implications of that the culture has these release valves of explosions where when we make certain functions when we become over empirical we repress all of this like felt information, and intuitive information that is still there, whether or not we're listening to it, and then it becomes something like a psychosis, you know, psychosis is always going to reflect somebody who's repressed all this information. Culturally, it's not a magic trick. This is psychology, like you can be completely material and materialist and still understand this, but you're, you're repressing different information based on the place that you're at,

which is why something like Peterson saying that you can just use Jung and Eliade. And he doesn't even say that because he doesn't say what he, where his influences come from. You just have to hear the misappropriations of like his assumption. And, and here, you know,

he's probably more well-read than than me but he's not more well read about the things that he talks about which is weird um like don't have a debate about Karl Marx if you haven't read Karl Marx you know like he's the first person to be like you have to outline your terms and go in logically okay why haven't you read the thing that you're saying that you know all this stuff about like you why right like don't go into a bait with slobby zizek if you haven't read the material um so like you know it's silly it's like his take on yung is joseph campbell's star wars screenwriter stuff like people like that that feel like everything's under attack and like men need to go back to this

primal source and i i am the one to lead them like they used to just write conan the barbarian or like read it they didn't used to have a youtube um and so like those release valves are built in to jung's assumptions about the way that we repress different psychological functions both as individuals and a society and somebody like like Eric Neumann that's saying, well, culture is like all on this journey. And like, you can see the story in mankind as they are growing up through mythology. And it reflects, um, what we understand right now, which now is a misconception about, um, the biology of evolution, um, is also reflecting the psychology of ideological evolution. Like, that isn't right.

But it's Neumann picking up, which is probably why Jung liked him, picking up on... Because Jung wondered a lot of things that he didn't say. And he was wondering how we grew up and where it went and what you do with that and neumann makes an answer that's interesting and based on the science of the time but it's still not right you know like origins of history of consciousness there's interesting stuff there

but it isn't it isn't real um in the way that the new psychology has to be but like a lot like plato you can't get rid of yung like Plato, you can't get rid of Jung's deeper assumptions. You can't get rid of a lot of these things. And like in academic psychology, they would say, okay, well, if you go back to like the person who cited the most, they're the best because the most people had to like recite their paper. I'm not talking about a citation factor. Like I don't see the point of that that but when you look at the history of like civilization if you look at the people who came up with a perennial philosophy because everyone else like maybe somebody also had the same thing in India you know like the white brotherhood or like another mystic but they

still got to the same place and society was still beholden to answering the questions that they ask because once they're asked you can't ignore them those are the important like hinge points in building any kind of like interesting culture i don't have an answer for that i don't have like a theory but if you want to look at like what maybe more of a universal religion is like, I think it is finding places. I'm not saying that we should go out and build this religion, but if you want to look at sort of the religion of mankind changing as a comparative religion thing, that isn't just like, okay, well now the Protestant reformation happened, but like, what are people beneath their religious beliefs that they're not even acting on most of the time. They're still killing and adultering and drinking and all of this stuff,

even though they say they're one religion. But what do they really believe? You need to go back to these things in implicit memory that everyone is feeling. And it may not be interesting to you to look at any kind of anthropology as a therapist. You just want to deal with individual people. But I still don't think you can get away from the world. And I think that, you know, we are waiting for this next thing that is going to teach us how to ignore the questions that are unimportant. And how to look at the questions

that maybe will never be answered, but are important enough that we're going to have to sit with. And that's kind of what Sloterdijk is saying. And that's probably what Wittgenstein was waiting for. And if you go back and think about those delusions that I'm talking about, one of the reasons that I'm talking about those is if you want to say, okay, well, there's this simple surface-level problem, and that problem is the reason why delusions change in the culture. Like if you want to say, oh, I'm reactionary right-wing, and the Disney movies were slightly different, and that changed psychosis.

Or if you want to say, you know, left-wing, well, I just don't think that the president has the values. I remember the president used to have good manners. You know, this isn't not for you because I don't think that a psychotic break has anything to do with those things at all. I think they have to do with the forces that I'm talking about that everyone's feeling and the person with psychosis is expressing in a way that they can't turn off that is very sad but that does give you a glimpse into these social anxieties and so like you know I'd said that the thing that I like about art and culture and anthropology and psychology and to a limited extent philosophy is its ability

the artists the things I like about artists and creators and innovators is that they have this intuition that lets them kind of see beyond time right and so when i'm saying feel this tension between the self and the world that's why i'm showing you these um delusional timelines of psychotic breaks and culture is because these are the dreams that become nightmares of the society, right? And they let you get at something. So, you know, if you go through that timeline, you're seeing the way that the culture screams that we don't hear until it's asleep or psychotic. And that this is how you're going to have to figure out how you're hurting and how everyone around you is hurting. And the hurt that you're feeling without knowing is how you watch these

things change. And that's that tension between the self and the world that I think psychology has to not have a working definition for it in the way that like an analytical psychologist would. But a language of the negative space to say, here's what we can't say, but we know it's there, but we can't say it. So let's say what we can say, but let's also talk about the stuff that we can't perfectly quantify and talk about. Um, and Slaughter Deeks model lets you do that. Um, it's an attempt to let you do that in a way that no one else is even attempting right now. I mean, one of the reasons why I ended that fourth series with the conversation between Penn Warren and Dickie James Dickie was that like

I do think that that thing is found in poetry like it is found in symbol like that's what lets us talk about something we can't quite talk about I mean Dickie is basically telling students about his like plans for his own death and under buzzards in a way that like maybe

he doesn't even know and he writes poetry so weird like uh he writes it like a fist fighter like he clearly likes it but it's so clunky and it's not pretty and it's almost beautiful you know and ben warren is a very good poet and i'm not saying Dickie's a bad one. He's just weird. But, like, we have to tear down the walls between poetry and these influencers that don't, they're basically going back and saying, I want to phrase history as this narrative where every single thing is part of this progression up until this moment where we are under unique threat that has never been faced before and like your moment is totally different and you know unless you're talking about like thermonuclear bombs if you're talking about culture if you're talking about psychology that just isn't and can't ever be true uh in the way that a lot of these people need it to be in order to sell youtube stuff or to feel the ego inflation that they want to feel. Because like nothing that Peterson says is really like a new idea most of the time.

And again, I'm not picking on him. Like he's not an innovator. He's an academic who wrote to be cited. And he was very successful at that until he decided that he didn't want to be an academic psychologist. He wanted to be sort of like an influencer philosopher. And when he became an influencer philosopher, he needed to be all things to all people. And so he's going to cite all of these things to sound like he understands the interplay between them and to sound like he is

smart. And he is a very intelligent person, you know, a lot smarter than me. But the way that he is picking information is to make it part of this narrative that needs to retroject, you know, go back and insert things into people that just fundamentally weren't there. There wasn't like society figuring things out slowly over time. It was like people doing it right up until a point where they did it wrong and he can take you back there. And tons of people do this. You know, it's a pretty common tactic. But listen to this. What philosophy is, you know, it's two things.

It's not complicated. What philosophy is, is the ability to critique arguments and make arguments. And it is the ability to understand the context of arguments that have been made before. And so you can get the first part really right and feel smart, and you can get the second part really wrong, and you're more better off than if you're more better off. You can get the first part right, and you can mess up the second part, and you'd be better off if you had never done the first one at all,

if you had just left it alone, because the context is the thing that matters right um like the context is the thing that makes plato you know saying a different thing or that makes aristotle saying a different thing than descartes in the way that peterson can't let them because they both have to be neoplatonists. And anybody who is making that kind of argument, I think is sort of dangerous. And again, I don't care what you think about Jordan Peterson. I don't think debating him or something is useful. What I'm pointing to him as is one of these inevitabilities of culture

that he's ignoring, right? And he has to ignore it because as is one of these inevitabilities of culture that he's ignoring, right? And he has to ignore it because he is one of these release valves of this energy that, like, isn't being talked about and isn't being addressed. But the reason why somebody ignoring that context is so scary is that while the language is fundamentally reductive, it's also very empty. So think about Sloterdijk's idea of foams, that you have a hundred people that are sort of believing the same things and all those foams are intention, but they're all in their own different bubble of meaning making. So when you get a group of people together who's listening to somebody and they're like, we want to be religious, but without religion, or we want this to be religion, but we also don't think we're religious

in a way like that. It's scary because you have a lot of zealots, but it's not a crusade because they're not even responding to a coherent idea or a coherent energy because there aren't really coherent ideas there. In order to appeal to everybody, like you can't really say anything wrong, but you can't say anything new. So you have to make everything that you're saying very simple in its nature, but you have to believing all of this stuff that is like on its face so absurd that there's no soul or whatever and then you claim that what

you're doing is the only solution to fix it instead of sitting with this bigger question that we don't really know one that like maybe cleaning up your room or voting for this person has nothing to do with addressing the moment that we're in. And there's a splitting that you have to do that comes from the Iliade that Jordan Peterson is misappropriating. It comes from the very surface level reading of Jung, where what he's saying is, okay, everything out here is order and everything out here is chaos. And I'm on the side of order, but you feel anxiety. So let me explain to you where the chaos is in the world in a way that flatters your biases by attributing it to people who already make you uncomfortable. You just didn't know why. And now I'm telling you that it's this

esoteric spiritual project that transcends time by quoting philosophers contextually wrong. When you do that, like you're not really being anything. You have to appeal to all of these people. And the way that you appeal to them is that you tell them that history is this sort of secret code that validates all their assumptions in a way that sounds smart. But you can't also, and you're the only one that sees it, and they can see it with your help. And I don't think Peterson's lying. I mean, I think he, he, he's doing this relatively unconsciously because he can't conceive of a world where he has to change assumptions. And if you let people strip all of the wiring out of psychology, like if you let it just become something that lets us, like I'm talking about in that third and fourth part, play with people's behavior and treat

psychology like it's this tool to reprogram them. Like people are fundamentally robots that just respond to stimuli and that's it. Like if you do that, you've taken the human element out of psychology completely other than numbers. And that's terrifying because we've done that to other disciplines. You know, I really wanted to go into economics. And then I kept realizing that like nobody who was writing these books about economics, like knew much about it. They knew how to manipulate markets as they currently exist to make people's portfolios go up, but they didn't have any understanding or greater contextual knowledge about like the history of money or what value was, which is a huge question I'm not going to get into, you know, but I saw all these other people who were really

interesting, who were told, we'll go get a PhD and then we'll listen to you. And then they went and they said like, maybe the problem with a post Keynesian economic system is that it can't value non quantifiable assets, which means that, you know, we're not taking care of the things that create value in the first place, like nature and family and people and the long term health of a society, because there isn't a way to reduce them to a number. And a lot of those guys went and they got PhDs and they wrote these papers. And the system still didn't take them seriously because it can't. And what happened to the economic profession? I mean, what was the study that they did where like 85% of working economists

couldn't even attempt, partially attempt. And then like almost none of them but like 5% even attempt it partially attempt and then like almost none of them but like 5% even got it right the process of how money is created of what it is that a bank hits a keyboard and it's lent into existence at debt like that the bank doesn't have a million dollars when they give you a loan for a million dollars they have permission to create a million dollars from nothing by asking it back from you. And when you took the leading economists from the Ivy League schools, this study is more than 10 years old. And you ask them, what is money? They couldn't tell you.

That's happening to psychology, but with people, but with self. And that's scary. That's, that's weird. Right. Um, and I think, but academic psychology, they at least know the context of these arguments and like the history of it and the way that these YouTube influencers like don't even begin to try and understand it's irrelevant to them. Um, and it's no like mistake or it's no like coincidence that they're all going to end up with this like um spiritualism basically and um philosophy because people think the philosophy is smart yet it was people wrestling with questions that aren't the one we're wrestling with now but you need to make history this like projection you need to project into history that it's this um you know huge uh journey to get to where you are to make your point uniquely relevant and when you do that um what you what you're you're

always going to end up with something like aristotle because aristotle's saying that the reason that you have the thought is that the form of the thing, like the idea, the knowledge itself is out there in the universe. And it is, you are resonating with it when you were having that thought. It's not that you were taking in information and then creating something in your brain. It's that you have a divine connection to knowledge, a divine connection to the proof, to the truth. And like Aristotle didn't think that you had ideas and the way that Descartes did. He thought that ideas had you. So when you're an archetypal psychologist who is essentially possessed by the ideas that you're talking about, and of course you're going to be coming back to

how something like that is right. But when you can't admit that, you're going to get just flailing around trying to solve an emotional problem intellectually by using all of this like logical rubrics and like crazy Rube Goldberg machines of thought to try and build some way to prove that the thing that you need to believe is empirical. It's not just that you need to believe it because it justifies who you are and what you want to do. It's that it is handed down by God. And that is something that is a release valve for self and this decaying relationship between self and world that psychotherapy isn't really holding, that society has as an inevitability if you don't build a better therapy. Like if you continue to say CBT and ABA and ultra medical and ultra whatever, maybe they still come to you.

Maybe they still think that what you're doing is helpful. Maybe they still, maybe you still make a lot of money. You know, I think even those things are going to start to be in danger, but maybe that still make a lot of money you know i think even those things are going to start to be in danger but maybe that still happens but where the soul goes you know where the trauma and the intuition and the nightmares of our culture goes is onto youtube So do better. Like psychotherapy, please do better. And that's as much as I'll say about philosophy. And those are all the other notes that I had for this series. Thanks. And we'll get back to the regular normal stuff real soon. We got an interview with Jeffrey Seiler coming up. He's a singer songwriter out of Austin. Really nice guy. Um,

this series is over. I hope you enjoyed it. We're getting back to normal things, uh, and we'll not probably go into this, uh, far in the woods on some weird for, for a while.