The Taproot Podcast - 🛐Interview with David Tacey on Carl Jung, Mysticism, and the Politics of Religion

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

*Corrections and clarifications: - David Cronenberg directed A Dangerous Method - James Hillman's book is called A Terrible Love of War Dr. David Tacey: Exploring the Depths of Literature, Depth Psychology, and Spirituality 📚🌌🔍 We are delighted to introduce Dr. David Tacey, a distinguished professor in literature and depth psychology at La Trobe University in Melbourne. With a prolific career spanning eight books, including "Jung and the New Age" (2001), "The Spirituality Revolution" (2003), and "How to Read Jung" (2006), Dr. Tacey has made significant contributions to the field of psychology and spirituality. Born in Melbourne and raised in Alice Springs, central Australia, Dr. Tacey was deeply influenced by Aboriginal cultures, their religions, and cosmologies. This early exposure to indigenous wisdom and spirituality profoundly shaped his worldview. After completing his PhD at the University of Adelaide, he further honed his expertise as a Harkness Fellow in the United States under the guidance of James Hillman, a prominent figure in depth psychology. Dr. Tacey's scholarly pursuits also led him to lecture courses at the summer school of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, further enriching his understanding of Jungian psychology and its applications. For those who have grown up reading David Tacey's works, it is an exciting opportunity to engage with his ideas through this interview. Dr. Tacey's generosity shines through as he offers listeners the chance to request essays from academic journals that may no longer be in print. Simply reach out to him via email, and he will gladly share the requested essays in PDF format. Such accessibility is a testament to his commitment to spreading knowledge and fostering intellectual curiosity. While the resources, videos, and podcasts provided by Taproot Therapy Collective and its social media platforms offer valuable insights, it is important to remember that they do not replace professional mental health treatment. If you require assistance, it is essential to seek support from qualified mental health providers and contact emergency services in your area if necessary. Join the exploration of mysticism, psychology, religion, comparative religion, sociology, anthropology, depth psychology, psychoanalysis, and therapy by delving into Dr. David Tacey's writings and engaging with his fascinating ideas. #Mysticism #Psychology #Religion #ComparativeReligion #Sociology #Anthropology #DepthPsychology #Psychoanalysis #Freud #Psychotherapy #Therapy #Podcast #CarlJung #Mythology    Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast 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] The resources, videos and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency to a provider in your area. Our number and email are only for scheduling at Taproot Therapy Collective are not monitored consistently and not a reliable resource for emergency services.

Hi, this is Joel Blackstock with the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast. And today I sat down with someone who I've been a longtime fan of and been reading since I was in high school, David Tacey. Tacey is kind of a public intellectual in Australia. He's a writer of many books. One of the first books that brought me to Jung called How to Read Jung and the Jung Reader. He's a professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and he's also a professor at the Australian Center for Christianity and

Culture. To list all of his accomplishments would take a long, long time. But Tacey is a student of anthropology, religion, sociology, and the history of psychoanalytic therapy. So he goes back and knows a lot of the history of the profession and is a very interesting writer with a lot of very unique insights. The conversation covers a lot of Jung's early life and work and exactly what Carl Jung was. Also comparative religion, politics, and all the things in the middle. So I hope that you enjoy the interview,

and I'm going to go ahead and roll that now. That boy needs therapy. Lie down on the couch. Frontier Psychiatry. Well, I was interested in a lot of the one of the things that we talked about is just kind of because the podcast is for people

who may not have a huge vested interest and they may not have a ton of knowledge about all these things. They probably have encountered Jung a little bit. One of the things we talked about is just that Jung is such a big topic. People kind of cherry pick different things in a way that doesn't make sense a lot of the time and i think american yungianism particularly is bad about just

sanitizing it where it's like it's almost like well it's religion plus supportive counseling that's what it means to be a yungian analyst or it's but you know they kind of discard the the process or the parts of it that are maybe threatening to them or harder to do something with. I mean, do you have anything to say about that? Well, Jung is a huge area. I mean, I've spent 50 years in the area and I don't feel I've even begun to really cover all bases. Jung is a kind of a universe of thought within himself.

And there are parts of the, there's still parts of the collective works I haven't even read. They're so dense, especially the last work he did on alchemy. You virtually need a much better knowledge of Latin than I have to work through those. As you know, Jung often dropped Latin, ancient Greek, Arabic, French, Italian terms and phrases,

and it's quite inhibiting. So that's why a London publisher asked me some years ago to write a book called How to Read Jung because there's really no way that people could just dive in unprepared. Perhaps the only way of diving in unprepared would be to read his memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It's a very accessible book. And the other book that's accessible is Essays on Contemporary Events

and also, of course, Man and His Symbols. But the problem with Man and His Symbols, he's deliberately trying to reach a wide audience, and it's almost a kind of a kindergarten book. It's a publisher book, you know. I mean, he's responding to the publisher in london who wanted him to do an introduction and i think that was john freeman who who interviewed him on the bbc on a number of occasions um so that book is not terribly

terrific i'd rather suggest people start with Memories, Dreams, Reflections if they want to dive in. In the collective works, well, even to buy them is a big financial investment. But the one to start with, I think, is Volume 7, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, is a nice introduction to the field. When I was young, someone gave me Aion, or I-on as it's pronounced, A-I-O-N, and that was far too advanced for me.

I think I was 19 or 20, and i couldn't make head or tail of it too many ancient languages and too many scientific terms so um just just getting your toe into the young field is quite a challenge for starting off it It's hard to understand what it is. I mean, a lot of your work and John Beebe's work with MBTI brought me into it because we're kind of in a cognitive behavioral therapy desert here. Depth psychology is just not something that you encounter the people. If you encounter it, it's just to write it off. Either like, okay, Jung invented the collective unconscious and did nothing. that was a little bullet point in the psychology 101 chapter moving on and um yeah i mean i think what gets people too is that there's a ton of phases over his life and i mean i have a hard time following him into

the alchemy stuff i just i mean i believe that early science probably was projective and he's right that people were projecting psychology onto you know pre scientific science it's just not super interesting to me personally um but there's these phases that he goes through as a person and i think a lot of different jungian scholars or analysts relate to different parts of those phases and they kind of try and make that all of it even though he changes quite a bit um and maybe doesn't know what he even thinks he's you know chewing on things as he's as he's uh growing i've just finished reading catafalque by peter kingsley um and that's a very fascinating book um another another writer from the uk and he he adopts the view which I have a lot of sympathy with,

that most Jungians have got Jung completely wrong, that they've domesticated him. That would be my experience. Yeah, they've turned him into a pussycat, but actually he's a raging lion and a very dangerous and threatening thinker in the tradition of Friedrich Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or Schiller or any of his German forebears and of course one of the tendencies that America does when someone becomes popular. America tends to make them more simple than they are. They make them somehow more digestible and more domesticated.

And it's a strange habit that America has with popularizing people and often getting them wrong in the process. But Jung, according to Peter Kingsley, Jung is a full-blown mystic and a religious prophet and that the Jungians don't want to admit this because they are invested with the idea of him being a scientist. And, in fact, when I met the Jung family in Switzerland some years ago to ask for permission to write a book which I've published called The Jung Reader, which has come out in several languages now, that book was designed to replace Joseph Campbell's book, The Portable Jung, which was

edited by Joseph Campbell in 1972, which is a long time ago. And there's been a massive amount in the Jung field written since 1972, changed our views of Jung almost completely. So I wrote that and I met the family in their house in Zurich and they still have this impression that Jung is a scientist. I mean, I found it really hard to understand. I mean, he's a philosopher, first and foremost. He's a philosopher who works in the field of psychology. That's how I would define him. And his philosophy is, of course, extremely dependent on theology as well and on ancient medieval studies and classical studies. He's a kind of Renaissance man, a Renaissance thinker, and he seems to be fully grasped,

have full grasp of several disciplines, including biology, anthropology, archaeology, physics of course he worked with the Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and before that he worked of course with Einstein in in Zurich they were in the same Institute together the Polytechnic, and they befriended each other. And it was Einstein who suggested to Jung that he might explore the field of synchronicity. That came from Einstein. And they both liked red wine, and they would go to Jung's holiday house at Bollingen on the lake called the Bollingen Tower. And apparently they had rip-roaring times down there. But unfortunately there's no record of the conversations

between Einstein and Jung. And I think that would be be mention what kind of gold mine that would be today to release this type of information well i think there was a just voracious hunger for him to create a kind of lens to few human experience that was a unified principle the unified theory of everything you know there was no discipline left out because like the the difference in jung and i i think what a lot of other people who are doing objective sciences is that his psychology is purely phenomenological i mean it is what he is feeling on the inside he's not really worried about what is on the outside as much as what is

the experience of this like and i think in my i mean and you know more about this than i do but like what i feel when you read his career is that he tries to be a scientist until he can't be anymore and then he and then and he's worried about the perception he's worried about this and then he gets to a point where it's like you know i can't do this scientifically. It has to be this direct experience, descent into whatever. That is beautifully said. It kind of looks crazy to people. May I quote you on that? That is a great quotable quote.

He tries to be a scientist until he can't do it anymore. That is so good, Joel. And there's probably some of that inner voice where Freud is pushing him for a long time to be a scientist get this weird new age stuff out of there so that people will respect you know this profession because don't forget that freud got rid of jung in 1913 because he felt that jung was could be seen as a prophet or a mystic or a spiritual leader and but did jung get rid of Freud? He's maybe still having a fight with someone who is not there for a while. He was having a fight with someone who

wasn't fighting back all his life. I mean, you can read the last pieces that Jung ever wrote in like Memory Streams, Reflections, Man and His Symbols. Jung is still fighting Freud, although Freud died 40 years earlier. But absolutely right about that. When they met, it must have been absolutely electric, the atmosphere. I think the first time they met, they talked nonstop for nine or ten hours straight. You know, they had a lot in common, but unfortunately, they had more not in common than they did have in common.

But both of them were committed to the unconscious, which, by the way, Freud called it the subconscious. And Jung said, no, we can't call it the subconscious. That's too demeaning. Let's just call it the unconscious. So Freud took Jung's advice and Freud stopped after he met Jung. He stopped using the word subconscious. But Jung also offered Freud the word complex.

That was Jung's own making which came out of his word association tests. He started to realise that people had complexes. When they were asked certain words and there was a long pause, Jung figured the reason there was a long pause was because people uh were confused on that particular something it triggered something in them so jung called it a complex and freud took that up and um when he split with freud that's when he invented his theory of psychological psychological types, which, of course, is now a huge industry in its own right. Every workplace in the world uses the Myers-Briggs type. They change it just enough to patent it and call it something else.

Yeah. And, in fact, sometimes these people ask me to speak about this background to psychological types, you know, introversion, extroversion. Jung uses those terms, and every time we talk about introverts and extroverts, we're quoting Jung without knowing it. Yeah. And that's why Jung invented that, because he could see that Freud was a different type to himself

and that part of the reason of their falling out wasn't just personal difficulties or faults but they were looking at the world through different lenses and Adler too I think he saw Freud Adler and him so passionately and going in very different directions adler probably had more in common than you than freud did the compensation and tension of opposites is a lot like yes the power struggle power was very important to adler as well and the idea that for every external part that's big there is an internal part that is big that is unseen you know they're both noticing that probably because they're sitting with Freud, who has a lot that he never deals with. But the problem is that Freud wasn't at all grateful.

I mean, Jung spent several years of his life constructing this theory of psychological types, almost as an apology to Freud as to explain why they split. But Freud never received the gift in the right spirit. He just ignored Nul from then on. And of course, it was a very Adlerian-like power struggle between Freud and Jung. But Freud had coordinated this so-called special committee that sat in London under the leadership of Ernest Jones to try and test the scientific credibility of Jung's ideas. Naturally, Ernest Jones, who was a close associate of Freud, came up with a view that Jung's scientific ideas weren't really empirically valid, and that Jung had gone off into philosophizing. Well, it's an intuitive and felt psychology, you know, it's not one that you can measure and turn into a number, like behaviorism or cognitive therapy to a third.

Yeah. But that London group was so savage toward Jung. I actually feel that he never really recovered his reputation. That was so influential, especially in Europe and parts of America as well, that in Canada, that Jung was sort of completely knocked out of business and he had to rely on his close associates, most of whom, by the way, were Jewish. And yet, you know, Freud kept claiming that Jung was anti-Semitic.

And so Freud played the race card on Jung. And I've written about this extensively. And I thought it was very unfortunate because, of course, this was during the Nazi era. And so Freud was very careful to try and pin anti-Semitism on Jung during the Nazi era, which basically meant that Jung's reputation was sunk. One thing that fascinates me, Joel, is that Jung's relationship to the Nazis was on the whole a very negative one. Like, you know, he wrote essays called Wotan, which was about the madness of Hitler. Whereas someone like Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, probably the most philosopher of the 20th century, was a full-blown member of the Nazi party.

And somehow or other, he has- He's rehabilitated pretty fast for some reason. How did that happen? You know, I mean- Or the scientist happen you know i mean or the scientist you know the rock you look at von braun and a lot of these people who had to know about the supply chain and things that we wait and forgive them because they're useful yeah so heidegger was forgiven i mean admittedly it took a while he Heidegger was only forgiven quite relatively recently, during the 1980s, late 70s,

but Jung has still got the stain of anti-Semitism. There's some hit pieces. I mean, I think one of the things that, it may be part of the reason the Red Book got published, but Richard Knoll has these books where he attacks young and says all this stuff that i really just don't think is true at all you know he says he was trying to start a cult and it was like he didn't want an institute he the only reason he did it was he was like they're going to do this with or without me so i might as well be a little bit

involved in it um you know he asked not to be lionized after he died you know there's if he was trying to be kind of a mad prophet or start a cult he did a bad job of it um but one of the things with noel because i i actually read richard noel's stuff before i read uh young before i knew a lot about young and so i was willing to kind of accept the theory and then it was slowly like what because you know he he says you know that a big tenet of unionism not richard noel doesn't say this but like a big part of jung's psychology is that religion is projective you know we we take something internal and then we need the world to function a certain way and then we start to believe certain things through mythology or ritual or and and that process is how you can understand what's going on on the inside

and the deepest part of the unconscious and so as you're reading the book, and Noel essentially is like, well, yeah, you know, the biggest organizing principle of our entire civilization and society since the Bronze Age, it doesn't correspond to psychology at all. It's just created randomly in a vacuum, totally removed from the psychology of the people making it. It's like, wait, what? I mean, I don't, is he Catholic or something? I mean, I guess if you're saying that the word of God is handed down in this book, then you need to separate

that from psychology. But with any kind of healthy perspective on religion, how can you say that none of that corresponds to a psychological state? Our psychology is not part of our religion. I mean, we're picking these things at random to build civilizations around. That's wild.

Well, I think Richard Knoll started with very malicious intent. You know, he had obviously read some Jung, but I don't think he read him correctly. And I think that Richard Knoll had deliberately misread Jung. See, one of the big things that separates psychology and religion is the symbolic attitude. So in depth psychology, pretty much everything is read through the lens of symbolism. But Richard Knoll is persistent in his tendency to read what jung says literally

you know and to read it literally is to make it almost bizarre and um religion is not literal it's not a literal thing you know i was raised to episcopalian and it's there's a certain point that some people get to where they're like, OK, that's an allegory. That's an allegory. That's an allegory. But from here on out, it's literal. You know, the first book, there's a snake that is talking about eating fruit. Most people, you know, maybe not everyone, but most people who are Christian in America are probably like, well, you know, that's that's a myth. It's an allegory for something. But then you get a little further in the Bible and they're like no but that part you can't and then some people are willing to make the whole thing a metaphor um but it's you know how much your religion is in control of your life or or where

you stop being a scientist and start being a person of faith where do you stop that i've written a whole book on this topic so i could talk for this for an hour. Those books tend to not sell a whole lot in the US. I don't know how they do in Australia. You can write books of religion and sell them, but you can't write books about religion and sell them. One of my books recently is called Religion as Metaphor. And it's all about this question and it it it says that there is um a tendency for christian for christians to read the old testament metaphorically you know that the the the eden garden of eden creation myth a lot of christians are happy to read that as a myth one of my students said to me come on she said you can't take a book that starts with a talking snake literally i think people do um i mean i've heard defenses of the snake

but i imagine there are many people in the deep south and the midwest of america who still read the bible literally that's the feeling i get I used to live in the States some years ago. Texas. You used to live in Texas too. Yeah. And a lot of people in Texas are reading, still reading the Bible literally. They've not caught on to the modern interpretation

about reading it through symbol, myth, and metaphor. In fact, I did think about calling my book Religion as Myth, but my U.S. publisher advised me against that because in America, like in most countries, the word myth means falsehood, you know, like it has no merit. It's just untruth. And I didn't want that because I have a very strong respect for religion, but I also have a strong respect for the intellectual reading of religion.

And it was Jung who pointed out to me, one of the first people, that there's been a mistake made a long while ago of reading the Bible literally, and Jung couldn't abide the virgin birth of Jesus, for instance, nor could he abide the physical resurrection. But he saw both of these events, very important spiritual ideas that we need to contemplate. And he let patients continue their religious traditions. A couple of places he points people back to their religious tradition.

He tells them to go back to the, there's the Muslim man and the Christians. So, I mean, he had respect and viewed the utility of this as something that enriched life and was helpful. Yes, he told them to go back, but he didn't tell them to go back to the literal reading of it all. So, you know, like if you were a Christian and you lapsed out because you couldn't read it literally, Jung would support you in that lapsing out and saying, look, but go back and read it non-literally and it would still be more important for you than read literally.

So, you know, that's a big topic of its own, but I don't want to waste our time talking only about religion. But as you know, Jung wrote whole books and volumes on religion, psychology of religion, East and West. American Jungians will tell you that Jung is their religion, which is a strange way to use Jung. I mean, it's a lens to understand what it is, but I don't think being a Jungian analyst is a religion

in the way that some people will say. No. No, in fact, Jung was deadly opposed to this idea. It's funny, the people who loved Jung and the people who hated Jung had the same view about him, which was that he was starting a new religion. That's why people hated and loved him. But both were wrong because he kept saying, no, no, no, no, this is not what I'm doing.

I'm building a psychological bridge to religion. He uses that metaphor, Joel, constantly. When he has the falling out with the priest, right? He was kind of trying to update Christianity. Yeah, yeah. The priest in Britain called Father Victor White. He followed Jung until he published Answer to Job, 1952. He writes a letter to Martin Buber too, where they disagree on religion.

And there was a big falling out with Martin Buber in the Jewish tradition. Did the Pope ever respond? I knew that he wrote a letter to the Pope being like, oh, you're making Catholicism better, good job, this is what it's supposed to be like, and the Pope's like, of course, catholicism right i'm the pope um well that was pope pius the 12th and respond to him or anything who respond to who did the pope write jung back when jung wrote that letter no no he didn't no in fact from that point on Jung got banned by the Vatican. Don't tell the Pope he's doing a good job.

The Vatican is very ambivalent about Jung because one thing that Jung did was, as you said, he returned certain Catholics to Catholicism where they'd abandoned it because they'd become enlightened or intellectually got sick of it. And the Pope actually sent Jung a blessing in, I think 1950 it wasn't the pope who delivered it personally but he passed it on to the catholic archbishop of zurich whose name i can't remember and jung got the blessing from the pope through the archbishop of zurich um i hope they realize that Jung was never even a Catholic. You know, like why he's getting blessed by the Pope was a bit of a strange. Well, they've banned Jung pretty much every decade since he died. It's like too many vocal clergy with podcasts and quills will start to write books about Jung

and then they will come in and say, oh, no, you can't do that. That's right. I mean, there's a huge number of Catholic priests in the world, especially in North America, who have taken Jung very seriously and written books about him. And I think the Vatican has felt very insecure about this. And as you say, about every decade, they come out with a new edict, the Gatesjong.

It's hilarious, actually, because one of these things, anyone listening can Google it. It's called Jesus Christ, the Water of Life. It's online, and it's about 30 pages condemning Jung as a heretic, as a Gnostic, as a blasphemer. It's incredible, considered that the same church blessed him not too long ago. The Catholic Church does that to a lot of people. You know, Meister Eckhart is excommunicated and, you know, sainted.

In fact, Meister Eckhart, historians are now claiming, was murdered by the Vatican army on his way to Rome. He'd left Paris. He'd been called up by the Vatican. But because Eckhart had said that God has to be reborn in the human heart, and that was dangerous for the Catholic Church because there was only one person that was that close to God, and that was his son, Jesus Christ.

And so Eckhart, like all mystics, basically says the whole religious drama is about every person. It's not just about one person. And there's another person I should mention in this context, the German theologian, Eugene Dreverman, D-R-E-W-E-R-M-A-N, Eugene Dreverman, Eugene Dreverman, who's been banished by the Catholic Church. He's written 40 books on Catholicism and Jung,

but only three of them have been translated into English. I've read them all, and they're just absolutely stunning and I wish that somebody would translate the rest of these 40 books but the Catholic Church was up in arms and he got defrocked and he can't practice as a Catholic priest anymore. That's how serious they take the challenge from Jung. So religions are very aware of Jung, but mostly it's this hysterically negative point of view. One of the things that they all have in common is misreading Jung. If I can just give you a quick example, when Jung,, Jung was hugely influenced by Meister Eckhart, the late medieval mystic in the Rhineland, what we call Germany today.

And Jung believes that Eckhart is right about the idea that God needs to be reborn in the human soul. And so that made the authorities in Rome very negative toward Jung. But when Jung uses the word self, this is where a lot of the complication arises. He's actually borrowing the Indian idea of himself, capital S. The Atman. The Atman, yeah. And in Vatican and everywhere else, I've been reading this self as the ego. And so in this long 30-page diatribe against Jung,

they refer to Jung as narcissistic, egotistic, and making some kind of demonic religion out of the ego. Because the idea that we've got something in us that's an addition to the ego is not a Western idea. And it's threatening to the ego. To the hierarchies of that. It's threatening to the ego. But the idea of God being reborn in this capitalist self is, of course, standard in the East.

Hinduism. Buddhism has that, of course, but a slightly different direction because Buddhism doesn't believe in the self and it doesn't believe in God either. Well, if there's not a self you know what is being reincarnated or if there's not there's a lot of or what if there's not a self then how did the bodhisattvas have a self to come now different branches of buddhism sort of become hinduism or jainism again yeah they reintroduced the idea while claiming to not have it so what

in sense what jung is is the east in the the West. And he had such a hard time. He basically had Eastern insights, Eastern intuitions, but in the context of Western science. And Sonu Shamdasani, who's probably the leading scholar on Jung today, he lives in London, works at the University of London, was basically saying that the scientists disregarded Jung for being too religious, and the theologians disregarded Jung for being too mystical.

I have people who call me and they're like, well, I want to come see you, and they schedule. And then they're like, well, I looked on your website and it says you do Jung, so I can't see you because I'm an atheist, or I can't see you because I'm a Christian. So you lose people. I was like, well, you know, I'm wondering what you're taking me using Jungian technique to mean here. That's right.

Yeah. So the problem with Jung now in the universities, you don't find Jung in the universities at all anymore. I think there was a stage back in the 20s and 30s where American universities were very interested in Jung. In fact, Freud and Jung used to go to America. In the 70s, it was everywhere. Yeah. Campbell wasn't too upfront about his influences, though. I mean, he doesn't point people back to where he got a lot of his ideas, which I think is... Campbell. Yeah, I dislike that about Campbell. I mean, most of his ideas are completely borrowed

from Jung. But yet there is an American idea that America is a source country and doesn't like always to acknowledge that many of its so-called original ideas came from Europe. So I think that's a problem. That's part of the American complex is that it is original. And original thinking is important to it. The rugged individualism and that we are the source of culture for the world. Yes, exactly. Which is true in part about the US.

I'm not wishing to be too critical, but I think that Jung's influence on Campbell and Jung's influence on people like Robert Bly and Jordan Peterson, that's another topic, and James Hillman is enormous, but there's a certain reluctance to admit. Mircea Eliade is another one who was very reluctant to admit to the public that he was hugely influenced by Jung. I was wondering, you know, before we get off the topic of religion or take a break from it. If there's an idea you know you're talking about Jung

kind of independently discovering probably a lot like Eckhart you know this eastern idea. Could you say a little bit about the relationship in a Jungian conception between the self, not the ego, but the deep and aware self and God or the reality of God, because there is a relationship that is interesting in the Jungian tradition between those, but it is kind of hard to explain it. It is. Jung's model is completely based on Hinduism, which he was really influenced by. And in Hinduism, the self, as I said before, is called the Atman, A-T-M-A-N. And the Atman is regarded as the place in the human being,

so to speak. I mean, I'm using the word place metaphorically, but the place in the human being, so to speak. I mean, I'm using the word place metaphorically, but the place in the human being which is in touch with Brahma, which is God. So the relationship between Atman and Brahma is very similar in Christianity to relationship between God the Son and God the Father. But in Christianity, of course, the whole idea of the Atman, as it were,

is projected onto the Jesus Christ figure, and only he has this special close relationship to God the Father. So this was never even conceived as a possibility in Hinduism because they always felt that the relationship between the human being and Brahma or God is closer than it gets in Christianity. So there are, of course, Hindu Christians who respect and appreciate the Christian story, but Hinduism itself is really, I guess, it's a form of mysticism. So this is the thing that fascinates me, that the East doesn't need to develop mysticisms

which can complement their orthodoxies, whereas in the West, in both, well, the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in order to get that closeness or proximity between the human and the God, we have to develop mysticisms. So, you know, Jewish Kabbalah, for instance, the Christian mystical tradition and the Islamic tradition of Sufism develop because of the need to compensate the Orthodox traditions, which tend to place the human

and the God far apart. But in both Hinduism and Buddhism, the two major Eastern religions, there is no need to complement the orthodoxies because they're already mysticisms. The path is there, but if you're dealing with Islam or Christianity, you need to build the path to have the direct experience to God because the tradition is there to keep it away from you to give you a hierarchy and a structure and a container and if you hang out there long enough maybe you get bored with the container and you want to crack that open and leave the ego and so then you have to have

you know a mystical pathway that out of the literal interpretation. That's exactly right. But Catholicism has made an interesting breakthrough on this, and particularly from the theologian Karl Rahner, R-A-H-N-E-R, the German Catholic theologian who was very influential in the Vatican II Council in the 1960s. And Vatican II Council plus Karl Rahner said that the future Christian must be a mystical person or won't be at all. So Catholicism almost seemingly in a turnabout, you know, an about face, has this idea that it itself should become more mystical.

That's what it said in Vatican II Council in the early 60s. But, of course, what happened was that most bishops, archbishops and cardinals didn't agree with this radical finding of Vatican II Council, so they kind of protested against it. So we find in the Catholic Church today very few priests who actually believe in this mystical direction. They want to restore the old hierarchy. They want to restore power of the clergy. Because, of course, if individuals have a mystical connection to God, then really the clergy and its hierarchy is irrelevant. If you don't make room for that, the priests leave you know they leave the tradition when you're not allowing uh that mystical pathway to exist simultaneously with the people who need the literalism and the people who need the

so that's right so that's why the catholic church is in a bit of a chaotic state at the moment because in the 60s the vatican ii council was said to be a movement of the Holy Spirit. And in one of the encyclicals called The Word of God, Verbum Deo, it actually says that we want to change Catholicism to being a religion about God, to a religion of God. So they wanted to bring this they could see that that the world especially the western world and educated people no longer wanted this kind of second-hand religion they wanted the first-hand experience and that of course is what Jung was saying all along. So Catholicism said that and then it backtracked fiercely with a huge backlash from conservative bishops. Well, the people who are kind of the most reactionary Catholics, a lot of the time that memorize all the rules and can calculate exactly how much time you spend in purgatory for each crime and sin and all that. They're the converts. But the communities that have been Catholic for a long time,

they tend to develop that transcendental pathway through the saints a lot of the time. And then you get the saints functioning similar to the way that in Hinduism, the different gods function as there is one God, but this is a manifestation of one need for God. Ganesha, the elephant is elephants are construction equipment it will remove the obstacle for you and you see you know different cultural groups have festival the saints start to function that way when you spend time in that world the saints do act as intermediaries i think is the word that we're looking for here and Mary, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Mother of Jesus is of course in Catholicism seen as a mediary, a way if you like. I mean in the beginning Christianity was called

The Way, capital W, and it lost that as hierarchy, dogma and doctrine sort of took over and it became, as you said before, virtually became a way to keep people from God, you know, to protect people from a potentially disorienting direct experience with God. And that's what Jung says in his book, Psychology and Religion, that the West partly feared direct contact with the source of our being because it thought it might be utterly disorienting and even dismembering of people. So... Well, Edinger has that great map and ego and archetype

where, you know, are you familiar with the diagram where he says, like, this is the functioning church and the archetypes are being held by the container, but then when it breaks down, everyone is having a direct experience, but they're not ready for it. And it starts to look like psychosis if you're not ready for it.

And you look at political developments like QAnon or these things where people are engaging you know that aren't quite ready with this archetypal stuff and it's there's a rootlessness there's no container there's no hierarchy there's they're not ready and you know a lot of american certain kinds of american political and religious belief are starting to look just a lot like schizophrenia, you know, in the broad strokes of how they function. No, that's right. And that's why Jung was in two minds about all this. You know, one part of him admired the Christian churches for presenting what he called a bulwark against direct experience. He liked that idea because it protected people. I mean, the American writer Annie Dillard has written extensively about this.

Do you know Annie Dillard? I'm not familiar. No, she's written a number of books. And one of her books, she says, people in churches who ask the Holy Spirit to come down upon them and bless them have no idea what they're asking for. And she says they should wear safety helmets on their heads in case what they're asking for actually does happen. And they should go in with those bicycle helmets hard hats and she's a mystical writer in the United States and I love her work very much teaching a stone to talk as one of her books yeah I have heard that title Yeah, and another book is called, I think it's called Holy Ground, Holy the Ground, something like that. And she obviously is on the same page here as Jung.

And Jung says that Christianity is dying because people aren't having first-hand experiences of the source of their being and that the church is too much of a bulwark and a defensive wall against direct experience. But as you said, people who want direct experience can end up and do end up, schizophrenic. Because we're not used to it, you see. We're not used to it.

We don't have the values. The ego is that organizing principle of the psyche. When you get rid of it entirely, there is no organizing principle. You know, something like Newman talking about centraversion and the process that when when animals are evolving you know into humans there are all these instinctual reactions and there get to be so many there needs to be a central principle that can choose between them and when you just completely just destroy that um you're you're not functioning. So Jung used to say that the West is ahead of the East

with technology and science, but the East is way ahead of the West in terms of religion, mysticism, and the numinous, you know, the experience of the divine. And I think that in the East, in India in particular, and also, of course, Tibet, China's in a different position because it's been officially atheist since Mao Zedong, although I can see a reaction happening quite soon in China as people are not going to be happy with this atheism. But when you go to China and you ask them what their religion is, they're like, well, we're atheists,

and then we're going to burn all this paper money so that our ancestral spirit can have it in the afterlife during the funeral, and then we're going to, and you're like, wait a minute, so you do, no, no, no, we're atheists, we're communists, we're atheists, and they'll continue to tell you about, and I mean, Americans do the same thing. When you turn mythology into something that is scary and of the past, you're blind to how it is Chinese in my city. So it's just under a half a million Chinese in my city alone.

The reason they're here is because the standard of living here is very high. In fact, the standard of living in Australia, if you don't mind me saying, is higher than America. Sure. Because we have free public health. You know, you can go and see the doctor and it all is free. We don't have that fiasco that you had about Obamacare and things like that.

We have a system which is quite similar to Sweden. Health services are free and there's lots of doctors and lots of nurses. And, of course, food here is relatively cheap compared to China where it's expensive. So a lot of Chinese are coming here. But I've met several Chinese. I had quite a few Chinese students when I taught at the university.

And, yes, I'd ask them, do they have a religion? And the first answer was always no because they're supposed to be atheists. But after you talk to them a bit, they say they pray to the deities and that they light incense and candles and have intermediaries that they worship. So it's a kind of a schizophrenic culture, really, or perhaps that's a bit harsh. It's the same as America.

You turn everything into a religion, and then you don't see religion anymore. And so people aren't aware that their politics have become that. Even atheism is like a religion in the United States. When someone becomes an atheist they have to be enlightened and they're superior and they're very freudian and intellectual and it's like your whole life is about this lack of belief in something that is itself a religion you were creating it's a religion in its particularly in its dogmatism and the way it can you know basically shapes your whole life but i've i've found with the the chinese that it's almost like

to use yong in terms the persona versus the soul you know the persona of the chinese is atheist but the soul is not atheist and never has been and so this suggests that china is a very dangerous country because if the persona and the soul are out of whack and they don't actually relate to each other, then the potential for splitting of the personality, the schizophrenia or dissociation is always there. That's happened to my sister. She, like me, was brought up very religious. I had a totally full-on religious

upbringing, and so did my sister. She rejected it intellectually as she became more educated. She read existentialism and Freud and Nietzsche, and she got me reading existentialism when I was about 17, which was probably too young to understand existentialism. But after a while, she clung to this atheist idea and became progressively schizophrenic. And I did speak to her about it, and she thought I was part of the devil because she developed paranoia. But my family uh is irish and the irish are inherently religious you know no two ways about it

um if you say you're atheist in ireland you're basically lying you're trying to be an atheist but your soul is still religious so with my sister she said she was atheist but actually she she was of the same psyche that i had and i can't get rid of religion i can i've tried to but i can't and i don't want to anymore because well i don't know that anyone can it's the are you honest about it and how it is functioning in your life are you conscious of that i mean going back to China, you know, the persona can turn on a dime,

but the soul can't, you know, you have this modernist Marxist cultural project where you come in and say, okay, everybody's atheist. Now this is what you believe. And this is this new way of life. You can do that in 50 years,

but you can't get rid of the history. The, the body, like the, the, that is still this felt rootedness. Thousands of years, thousands of years. Ancestor worship and families. The body, that is still this felt rootedness. Thousands of years.

Thousands of years. Ancestor worship and families. Ancestor worship and Buddhism as well. Apparently, Richard Wilhelm, as we say in English, wrote a book in the 40s called The Soul of China. But, of course, he wrote it before Mao Zedong. And a friend of mine is sending me this book. It's in the mail now.

I can't wait to read it because I think The Soul of China is going to come up again. And when that comes up again, we're going to get a very different China to the one we see today with Xi Jinping as the presiding oligarch over the whole thing, 1.6 billion people, which makes America look small in terms of the population. And as for my country, you know, we have fewer people than you have in California. And so we're sitting at the foot of China.

There's sheep farms in Australia that are the size of Alabama with very few people on them. Well, when I lived in America, they called Australia British Texans. Yeah. We have wide horizons with nothing in them, massive continent. It's the same size as America geographically without Alaska. But we only have 24 million people in this massive country. And so we are, I think, quite afraid of China because it's in an aggressive expansionist mood at the moment.

It's clearly already moved on Hong Kong, taken it back, and it's about to, of course, despite Nancy Pelosi's visits, take Taiwan back that's expressed policy current Chinese political strategy and of course they will probably come closer they took over South Vietnam and of course as you well know America fought that war and lost it and supported america fighting against the communists from the north when there's a lot of building projects and things in africa you know that where they're building hospitals roads bridges for memoir rights and there was a funny twitter exchange a couple months ago where somebody was like the chinese are you know the africans want the chinese to come

they don't want the americans and the british And the saying is when the Chinese come, we get a hospital. When the Americans and the British come, we get a lecture. And a British and an American person responded on the thing. And they said, well, you have to understand there's no such thing as a free lunch. And then an African said, there goes the lecture. That is so funny. That is so true. Australiansians are like americans you know we we happily give out lectures to countries you know like africa african there's i think you give

out a little bit more health care than the states so and the british too give them lectures but america china wants to build hospitals and schools not only only Africa, but this is all the Pacific Islands, like Samoa, Fiji, all these countries in the Pacific. China wants them as strategic bases for their expansionist policy. This expansionist policy is for some reason called the Belt and Road, the Belt and Road policy. road policy and of course naturally america is shaking in its boots because of the world order and and our mythology is under threat that no one can world order is under threat no one can do anything without us approving of it

and and that myth is ending and we do amer Americans resist making a new myth, you know. Yes, the American myth is basically that it rules the world, you know, that it's the policeman of the world. And China's in the process of challenging that and already has outmaneuvered with America in terms of its gross national product and its economic development so australia is one of the very close allies of america um is shaking because we're wondering we're wondering if we've made allies with the wrong country we made allies with america after

the second world war america saved australia the Japanese, just as it saved Europe from Hitler. As well, America did a massive amount of good work in the Second World War, but its Pacific theatre was focused on helping Australia save our country, and they did a marvellous job. But now we're wondering whether we need a better alliance with china so we too feel totally confused about the world order but we're talking politics now the religious thing is bubbling away under the surface, you know, I mean. Always. Always. And it's hard to know what the answer will be about China

on the brink of some kind of religious breakthrough. I used to teach at the Jung Institute in Zurich for quite a few years, actually 10 years, and most of my students were asians um chinese japanese uh thailand taiwan also vietnamese cambodians and koreans were there in huge numbers and i would think to myself you know what's going on in Asia? Why are they so hungry for Jung? And the biggest pop band in the world is called BTS, and their work is all based on Jung.

They've released a series of albums based on the book by Murray Stein called The Map of the Soul. They released an album called The Map of the Soul. They released an album called The Persona and then something called Archetypes and something about soul, and that's the biggest selling band in the world. So there's some very extraordinary things going on in Asia at the moment. And, of course, in Russia there are extraordinary things too. The Russian Orthodox Church has re-bonded

with the Russian government. So there's no connection, disconnect anymore between the Russian Church and the Russian state. So, you know, this is an extraordinary thing um which was unprecedented and we used to think of russia as a secular country and a communist of course based on marx but now i think the marxist stuff's flying away quickly and there's this sort of fundamentalist fusion between religion and the state and Russia is a very dangerous country of course always has been probably always will be so the whole world order is shifting under our feet well it's a dangerous world I mean I think

the bigger through line in our conversation has been the benefits and the risks of direct experience. And I know that you have said that you're not super comfortable talking about clinical realities or therapy. But at the same time, I mean, I don't know why you feel like you know more about therapy than probably most clinicians, at least the ones that send resumes to me. And like the... now now now well people know i'm not and i'm not saying that they're not good clinicians it's that we don't

teach the history of the profession i mean we cognitive behavioral therapy came in in the 80s and and it's just the ego is all there is here's some ego management strategies you know clap your hands and tell the anxiety to stop and i mean what i notice too is like the institutes the union institutes in the 80s become incredibly analytical i mean they're analyzing trauma but they're not treating it and they're you know somebody who's has a dissociative disorder you're telling them about the myth of pericles you know but you're not doing any kind of direct experience there's this distance and then in those out of those institutes a lot of people a lot of union analysts leave of Pericles, you know, but you're not doing any kind of direct experience. There's this distance. And then in those, out of those institutes, a lot of people, a lot of Jungian analysts leave, like Arnold Mendel, and he does process therapy, and Sidra and Hal Stone that do voice dialogue.

And the thing that those have in common is that they're directly experiential, they're not analytical styles, they're based on Jung's map. But then also they're somatic, they're using the body you know can you say anything about that or do you know anything about that the point with the institutes well I think you're right and I think there's been a book recently written about this which I mentioned before Peter Kingsley Not familiar. Catafalque. Catafalque is something to do with the ceremonies in funerals. The book, subtitled the book, is C.G. Jung and the End of Humanity, which is a rather dramatic-sounding title. But I think that the Jungian project is in danger of if not already has lost

its soul actually there's a lot of infighting in the institutes i don't know the politics behind those but there's like three competing ones now where people left and made their own and i mean well in london which i'm very familiar with because I'm often in London there are five competing Jungian institutes it's already a small piece of clinicians are Jungian I mean to be cutting this into fractions seems like a Freud had a wonderful phrase for this he called it the narcissism of minor differences and I'm working for next week i'm actually working for one of the london institutes and they're sort of not friendly with the other yungian institutes so it's just disagreements i mean why do they fight these fighting this fighting indicates the field is fragmented to say the least and they're being fragmented how can it function properly

so I think you're right and a lot of people that get disillusioned with Jungian clinical training for instance I was giving a series of lectures last month in October 2022 and there was a fellow who came on who was studying at the Jung Institute in Zurich, and I was giving contextual lectures about where Jung had come from, what are the major influences on his thinking from Germany and, of course, Switzerland and France, et cetera. And he said at the end that they never get taught that at the Jung Institute.

They just get the kind of, these are the archetypes, this is the shadow, this is the ego. They just get that model taught to them, but they don't get the whole intellectual development. Well, that's why a lot of Jungian clinicians don't know how to apply it they know how to talk about it but I mean it's a map but you need a technique um and I think you just get stuck in analysis forever and you never directly encounter any of these things or if you do it's on accident you know um I mean one maybe good jumping off point into James Hillman in the Red Book is talking about direct experience yeah if I mean if anyone isn't familiar who's listening you know James Hillman is the first what non-provisional director of the institute and he you know by all accounts he's

a very good analyst and a brilliant mind but never really deals with a lot of things going on you know maybe the father wound that brings a ton of male yungians into the yungian lens um he you know has a falling out with the institute develops archetypal theology or archetypal uh what do you call it archetypal psychology which i think no one really ever figured out how to practice it including hillman you know he came up with something that he could talk about but he couldn't even he did not know how to do it because i mean he took the idea of the self and the ego away and i mean everything that i can tell about archetypal psychology is that you basically push people into a pagan religious experience with no

intellect and no sense of self and the symbol becomes reality and i mean i could i don't know what that would do but it doesn't sound helpful and i never really found any accounts of helman even doing that as an adult you you do you know that i worked with helman for three years yeah so that was why we wanted to get your perspective what i'd heard you say before and correct me where i'm wrong here is that you know your institute had sent you to work with hillman and then hillman decided that you didn't know as much as he did and so that you couldn't guest host the radio show but he wanted to analyze you which seems kind of uh arrogant there i mean i mean people who don't have the vocabulary or the learning that i have i'm not bored by they're still interesting conversations.

I mean, that seems strange. So then he said that you should become his patient, basically. Yes. Don't forget, though, the age difference. I started working with Hillman when I was 28. I'm now 70. When I was 28 Hillman was I think 58

so there were 30 years difference so he was a good generation or more older than me and my institution which was funded by New York Harkness Foundation in New York City

wanted me to have conversations with Hillman that might end up in books published about so-called post-Jungian psychology. But Hillman is such a, or was such a controversial figure. He'd been, as you said, he'd been booted out of Zurich because he was too radical. Well, he also slept with a patient. He slept with a patient who happened to be the wife of a clergyman in Switzerland. It scandalized everybody. His analyst, C.A. Meyer, I mean, he was kind of in a fight with his mentor too

which was maybe why he was acting out like that did you know C.A. Meyer or anything about him? no I didn't know he seemed to not be a popular person no I didn't know C.A. Meyer I knew Marie-Louise von Franz and I met Edward Edinger and I met Robert Johnson

and June Singer and all these sorts of people. Those ones are probably more fun to meet. Yeah, Thomas Moore, I think, was one of the best of the lot, actually. Tom Moore, very grounded fellow, excellent man. His writing reminds me of James Hollis. They seem similar. Yes. James Hollis is also a good friend of mine um used to live in Texas I think he lives in Washington DC now yeah beautiful

yeah Thomas Moore used to live close to me in Texas and then he moved up to i think in the boston cambridge area and um but um where were we we were saying we're talking about um just hillman being your mentor and that he was kind of a talented analyst who wanted to develop something that wasn't union that was hillmanian but i don't think he ever found the words for it no you're exactly right i don't know how you know so much about this stuff because you're a young man how do you know so much i've just read everything i mean i think the profession is you should know the history of the profession and then that means that you you read the papers these people publish and you get a sense of their psychology and you get a sense of the things going on in the institutes.

You know as much as I do, so I should be interviewing you. But, you know, you're half my age. But, look, frankly, you're absolutely right. Everything you say is spot on, and that is that Hillman wanted to go beyond Jung, and he bragged about it in a fashion which I thought was a bit offensive actually. Jung was a genius.

You read things like The Soul's Code and he's talking about his discovery but not able to articulate what it is. You know, it's a trope or a truism and he's not ever, he never was really able to I think separate from Jung in a mature way. You know, you have the, this kind of father wound that brings, I mean, and Hillman, really, I wanted to lead into a larger question, which is, I mean, this maybe sounds a little controversial, but I worry for myself. I mean, do you think that male Jungians go nuts at the end of their life? Do all of them do that? Because there seem to be

a lot of people who, you know, they have an over-identified anima, you know, they have heightened intuitive feelings since and probably some pain and they're attracted to this psychology and then they get in it and they start to get to the end of their career and then they're angry like, well, I didn't get to save the world. did everything right i mapped all this stuff out i taught forever but the world is still a mess why am i not the messiah and and you see them i mean helen was yelling on on right wing talk radio at the end of his life about how we'd been doing therapy for 40 years and the world wasn't better so what was the point and it was like these problems have gone on since the bronze age you're not going to fix them but that isn't the reason that we try yeah i think you're right you you know too much

oh i you you know too much i mean i i don't even need to tell you well you were there i mean i'm listening to the recordings of this you know and some torrent that i downloaded in college like a big computer recordings of this, you know, and some torrent that I downloaded in college, like a big computer file of all these Jungian talks and appearances, you know, but I don't. I think a lot of Jungian men do go a bit awry at the end of their careers. They've developed a close, as you say, an identified anima. They've often got strong intuition and feeling their

relationship with reality is often rather tenuous yeah um because they've been which makes them effective when they're young and it makes them yeah errors when they're dying essentially like toward the end of his life hillman i think had a deep father had a deep father wound. A deep father wound. That's why he joined up with Robert Bly, because Robert Bly trades on the father wound. And so did Moore. I mean, all of those guys. I mean, Moore was a little nicer than Bly, but he still had this tendency to be evangelical about the shadow. You mean Robert Moore? Robert Moore.

Yeah, I thought you might talk about Tom Moore. Oh, no, no. Robert Moore would talk about I thought you might talk about Tom Moore. Tom Moore's different. Robert Moore would talk about the shadow like he was an evangelical pastor sometimes. And you know that poor Robert Moore's life ended very tragically. Well, it's funny because I didn't know that when I was reading him, but it was scaring me because he's so gentle and kind. And then he would start talking about, no, but the shadow is 100% evil and black, and if you take a step in there, it will eat you alive, and you integrate it and it was like this is anti-yungian there's something in you that is very dark and very scary and then

i was reading more about him and come to find out i mean there were medical things going on too but you know he does essentially shoot himself and his wife you know at the end of his life yeah it ended his life ended tragically in a suicide murder and um you know what does that say about jungian psychology you know it says how dangerous it is um robert moore i i loved his work but like you i sensed there was something unresolved in it uh he's stuff on the shadow wasn't good um it was like the satanic panic i mean it was wild and just so reactionary and against his against his whole persona i was shocked for years when i found that he'd shot himself in the head after shooting his wife. And it just left me speechless.

These people are supposed to be the guardians of our soul. But if there's things in us that we don't ever directly experience, you know, that we just described, you know, that comes out. And I think that's why psychology is changing and i think that i mean that's kind of the through line of this conversation you can do it in religion politics whatever but um you know you you feel when you read hillman that something's wrong you know that yeah and you feel when you read more that something's wrong you read james hollis and you feel like that person is a lot better actualized and okay.

I feel that James Hollis is quite integrated. Yeah, there's nothing in there that is a red flag. No, but there were red flags in Robert Moore and red flags in Hillman. And they start men's rights movements. All of those guys go kind of right wing and start these men's right movements at the end of their career. I don't know if you've read my essays on Hillman, have you or not? I read The Unmaking of a Psychologist and then I read all the people who were jumping off to critique that with their responses. I used to pay for the Wiley Library and I got so sick of dealing with the Wiley Library.

I would they would send me my login information six months later and I would be like well can I have six months free or refunded no you can't and that's just fine oh so over it well I can send anyone who's listening who wants them I can send them to you for free you know I have the pdf files but I basically said in those essays which by the way I published, I published in Britain, not in America, because I thought there were too many fans of Hillman in America who would object to what I had to say. He was so many Americans' first experience with Jung. You know, that was just the way they knew of it. But the father wound is huge in Hillman, and he enacted it with Jung. You know, he tried to basically say that he'd gone beyond Jung,

he's better than Jung. But I think you nailed it earlier when you said that in his practice, Hillman was still Jungian. I once asked him at the end of a session, I said, Jim, everything that we've done is so Jungian. I'm waiting for the Hillman part. And he just looked at me and he said, I haven't yet developed a practice in line with my theory so that there was a big gap between his practice and his theory. You read him and he's telling everyone how post-Jungian he is, but being in analysis with him as I was,

he was unbelievably orthodox Jungian. I couldn't even tell one bit of the analysis that wasn't purely jungian i heard him yelling about how jungianism resolves you know removes the symbol by analyzing it and you have to go into the symbol and i heard him yelling about archetypal psychology i never heard a case study of him practicing it that i can find anywhere no he didn't he doesn't have even one case study in all of his 24 books, which tells you something, doesn't it? I mean, Jung's work is full of case studies. When you start trying to give other people the medicine you need, you're saying that other people need to have a direct experience. It's one that you haven't had.

And I think he wanted some kind of ego dissolving spiritual transcendental moment that he never he never was able to find or go into he did he did toward the end was aware of what he was missing in fact the red book maybe was that experience for him yes yes very good point the red book but also there's a book called archetypal process i don't know if you've seen it yeah that's one that is on my ebay alerts but it's very expensive so yeah just like your rootlage books if somebody sells one use and they don't know what it's worth i'll buy it but i don't have the money right now it's called archetypal, it was edited by David Ray Griffin. The subtitle of Archetypal Process is Jung, Whitehead and Hillman. And Hillman writes some fascinating stuff in there.

And he admits that his work is missing a whole dimension, which is the metaphysical, the spiritual dimension. He was longing for so much that he almost was trying to like resurrect paganism or something, you know. Exactly. He was trying to resurrect paganism. He hated Christianity, partly because he was Jewish, but he also hated Judaism. He did not like monotheism. He wanted the divine to be broken up into. He didn't like any form of monotheism,

whether his own Judaism or Christianity, and he didn't like Islam either. So he wanted us to go back to the Greek pantheon, the polytheism of the Greeks. I think he would have gone even farther back he wanted us to go back to the mother cult you know to the the venus uh figurines of the of the stone age i don't know if you can hear the torrential rain pounding on my roof here i'm not able to to. Yeah, that's good. So anyway, I think when I was studying with Hillman and being analyzed by him, there's a fellow called Ralph Maud came down from Alberta, Canada. And he asked Hillman a question, which I thought was

completely spot on. He said, how come your work is asking us to go back to the religion of the ancient Greeks before Christianity? You're asking us to basically worship people like Athena and Artemis and Aphrodite. They're all, of course, the female goddesses. He wasn't terribly interested in the male gods except for Hermes I really do think he wanted to go back to the Venus of Willendorf and crawl into a cave of the Great Mother

and anyway this guy from Alberta said why should we go back to the Greek religion when even the Greeks got rid of their own polytheism in favour of Christianity? Because the Greeks were one of the first cultures of the world to convert to Christianity. And he says to Hillman, why did the Greeks lose faith and belief in their own religions, their own many polytheisms? And Hillman couldn't answer it.

So he was just silent. It's a great question. And that didn't happen often with Hillman when he was asked a question. He basically had nothing to say. And I suppose the visitor from Canada basically thought to himself, touche, you know, checkmate. Have you read the Willamette for the Dead that Hellman and Sanu Samshadani wrote? Yes, I reviewed that for a British journal. Oh, I didn't know that you had written a review of it.

I have to look that up. I was impressed. I mean, I'm not wild. I mean, it seemed to be, especially in the beginning, some of the best writing that Hillman did. It's thoughtful and there's a depth to it. I liked it. Yeah, me too.

I liked it as well. And I like anything that Sonu Shamdasani does. I think he's a very balanced. One of the good things about Sonu Shamdasani is that he's a scholar. He's not a clinician. He's an historian of Jung's ideas. And he knows the whole context in which it all occurs and naturally he's of course the editor of the Red Book as well.

He kind of is the reason it was published too. I mean you have Richard Knoll who's attacking Jung so maybe that motivates the family to want to defend him but I mean my understanding was Sanu basically got these copies of where Jung had mailed the Red Book to defend him but i mean my understanding was sonny basically got these copies of where yun had mailed the red book to the publisher but it was not a complete draft and said unless you let me publish the big one i'm going to publish the imperfect one and then the family gave him permission that's right but actually coming back to the red book i think what we can see there is the direct experience of the the god or the gods or the numina or whatever you want to call it. I don't really care.

I'm not attached to a particular language is very disruptive. I mean, Jung's Red Book is basically an analysis of his own psychosis. Yeah, I think he could not find an analyst for him and he tried to basically become that no he tried to analyze himself through his own psychosis and i think it's rather coy and shy of the unions to constantly refer to this phase of his life as his creative encounter with the unconscious you know anyone with half an inkling about psychiatry can see that jung was struggling with a full-blown psychosis and even there's a debate about how much of it was a loss of control and how much was active imagination and you know

what mindset is he in when he's doing this because he was seeing patients i mean he was punching the clock he's peeling the meat off his soul to patients. I mean, he was punching the clock. He's peeling the meat off his soul to talk directly to God and then clocking out and going to the hospital. Don't forget what I said to you about China. I think Jung was a good example of China. His persona was still intact. He was still acting as a respectable psychiatrist with his patients,

but within himself he was a seeding cauldron of psychotic activity, like he's a volcano that had exploded. But he knew it. He wanted to make it conscious and go all the way to the bottom. Yeah, he did, and he went all the way to the bottom. He does say in some of his essays that the psyche is like a volcano which can blow its top at any moment. Well, of course.

And it's in all of us. It's in all of us whether or not we pretend that it isn't there or wish it away or try and cling to the ego. Yeah, he experienced that partly. It's a father wound. Talk about coming back to the father wound. I mean, Jung was terribly wounded by his father, you know, because Jung wanted to help his father understand the interior dimension

of Christianity, but his father wasn't interested in any interior dimension. He basically thought his son was mad. And he had lost his own faith that his father had. So he was refusing the pathway that was being offered to him to try and reconcile some of his persona. I think it's a classic case of healing the Oedipal complex. You know, Jung had outdone his father, but he didn't want to destroy his father like Oedipus did.

He wanted to remake his father. He wanted to redeem his father but he wanted he didn't want to destroy his father like Oedipus did he wanted to remake his father he wanted to redeem his father and of course then the whole thing gets acted out with Freud Freud was and Meyer and then Meyer through Hillman you know and then it's to a certain extent you I would be fascinated to know how much a father came plot can't the father complex came up and what hillman was telling you about your analysis yeah well my it won't surprise you to learn that my analysis was about my father wound yeah we give other people the medicine that we need you know we don't want to take i mean i have had a very big father wound. And I confronted up to Hillman one day. I just said, guess what, Jim? I said, what's happening? I said, my father has decided to come over here and meet you

and talk with me about my analysis. Hillman said, oh, oh, oh, this is getting close. He wasn't so brave anymore. My father just, you know, this is where synchronicity hits the road, you know, the rubber hits the road. I was working on my father complex and my father felt it. It doesn't matter that I was in America and he was 12,000 miles away in Australia. He felt it in the psyche.

It could be through a small gap of communication and inflection of tone. I mean, so much of what we're aware of is not what we're aware of. So coming back to Jung, his break, his split with Freud really totally fragmented him. And a psychosis resulted with Jungians pretend to domesticate at some point. Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about is you don't like the Red Book, whereas I do, most Jungians do. I agree with you that most people, most most they sanitize it and they act like oh he made this beautiful work of art isn't his diary cool doesn't it look alchemical and it was like no this is a deep and profound suffering that is partially reconciled because it is

an unreconcilable pain you know that he's going into and pain huge pain but you think that it hits him trying to be too prophetic or you don't like the presentation of the tone in the book, the persona of the author. I don't like the tone of the book. I was asked to write on it by Murray Stein in Zurich, and I did. But I told Murray, Murray, I don't like the Red Book. I think it's psychotic.

I think that the prophetic tone is too strong. I find it too strident. You know, chapters called Things Which Are To Come or Things Which Have Yet To Come. Or Seven Sermons to the Dead. It's written in the tone of the Bible almost. Well, it's like people scraping their fingernails down a blackboard or something it just got on my nerves and well if he was coming down the mountain with it to bring

it to the masses and starting a cult and treating himself like the prophet and and you know making jordan peterson type youtube videos i think that would be a problem but it was something he chewed on privately which you know i feel like i chew on things privately through art and writing and it doesn't look that good frankly i i think jung had every right to do the red book to save himself from schizophrenia basically but i don't know if we have a right to read it do you you think he would have published it? No. It did go to publishers at one point. He thought about it.

Yeah, but I don't think, I think his better mind would have convinced him not to get it published. And there's rooms in Bollingen that the family is still guarding. No one knows what's in there. No one knows the paintings. There are whole chapters of his autobiography that still haven't been published because they're scandalous. I was sitting on a casket once in Zurich, and the fellow who owned the premises came in.

He said, do you know what you're sitting on? I said, no. He said there are three chapters in there from memories, dreams, reflections that the family has refused to allow to be published. One of the chapters was on his marriage to his wife. Another chapter was on his lifelong affair with his mistress, Tony Wolfe, which the family didn't want to become public. Did they have an arrangement?

I mean, she was traveling with him and Emma at some point, so, I mean, we could hypothesize it was. They had an arrangement, but feminists today would say, bully for you, you know, your bloody arrangement, you know. Why didn't your wife have a lover? Jung basically said, I need my lover because she is my anima well today that just wouldn't wash well there are places where he's strangely conservative you know like you bring up in um the how to read yung book that his theories about anima and anima and his own

writing paved the way for a sexual psychology and politics that he says is not right, but he's opening the door to that. And the implications of what he is saying is that, you know, this is part of us. And I mean, or, you know, and I think they talk about it in the low amount for the dead too,

but there's places where he wants the descent and then the return. He doesn't want anyone to just descend into things. So when the modernist or the transcendentalists go way far into their abstract art he hates it he wants them to go there feel that and then come back and bring it into the world of the ego which is you know that's kind of a conservative position you know not politically but very conservative so jung was a bag of contradictions you know so he he gave us the the entrance into the study of bisexuality in the psyche talking about the anima in men and the animus in women um james hillman blew that out of the water when he said if the anima is an archetype

why should it be limited to men and if the animus is an archetype, why should it be limited to men? And if the animus is an archetype, why should it be limited to women? And so Hillman spoke about anima and animus in men and women, which is one of the ways, by the way, that Hillman was genuinely post-Jungian, because Jungians don't subscribe to that theory. But Hillman used Jung's logic against his own argument. And I agreed with Hillman on that. I thought that was a bit of an advance. But if you read Jung's essay called Women in Europe, which talks about the increasing masculinisation of women,

and he could see right back in the 20s that women were becoming more masculine. They were becoming more like men. And in my country, and I'm sure in yours, women now demand the right to do the same sports that men do. He was relatively culturally conservative too. I mean, there's places that are definitely problematic by today's standards of what is what is okay to say about race but he had this attitude of it's okay to go adventure in india it's okay to go look at yoga but you don't do it you're white you can't do that i mean and i just i'm trying to read him

with some grace but that's in in there. It is in there. And just as I was saying before, his essay, Women in Europe, ends up with this rather deadening sentence. He said, men should remain men and women should remain women. And maybe if there had been a talk radio or something, it would have been Jung who became the crank at the end of his life. Even Campbell was kind of headed that way. I mean, he died pretty early,

but there's some bizarre talks at the end of his life where he's screaming at college students about being Marxist and stuff. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there. No, no. So I don't know what Jung would have said about transsexual operations. I doubt he would have liked that. No. When men becoming women and women becoming men,

he would have been outrageously against it. He would say that if you're a man and you identify with your feminine side, then what happens to your masculine side? He'd say it would fall into the unconscious, become repressed, and then it would come back and haunt you. Well, but if you're not able to hold your anima to the point where you're saying that you need to have a harem because it doesn't fit into your wife, that maybe is, you know, there's maybe something going on in him. Well, he had a mirror. Even Tony Wolfe couldn't deal with the alchemy.

I mean, she basically left because he got too into alchemy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Tony Wolfe, of course, ran with his theory of types. In fact, I think it was Tony Wolfe who suggested the theory of types to Jung and he took it up and developed it, just as it was the other woman that Jung had a big affair with, Sabina Spielrein from Russia. Some people, like he wrote in the book that he had, they made music together or mad, like it was kind of allegorical.

Do you feel like that was a sexual affair? There's disagreements. No. Have you seen the film a dangerous method i do i don't know that i agree with i mean the the snm part of it or whatever um but i don't know what's true and what's not true except it's important to know that the movie conversations between him and freud are almost complete transaction or like they're only they're like complete transcriptions of what he wrote that they had, like the wrap and the bookcase. The director of that film, that Canadian fellow. Is it Fincher?

Fincher, do you know him? I can't remember who it was, but he was a Freudian. So he had an agenda, which was to make Jung look bad. And he certainly did make Jung look bad in A Dangerous Method. And he made Jung look like a beast of sexuality with those scenes with Sabina Spielrein. But anyway, the point I was making was that Sabina Spielrein, who said to Jung

that she felt there was a masculine element in women and a feminine element in men in a conversation during their sexual affair. I don't know if that S&M stuff happened at all. That could be just part of the movie. But Jung said that's a great idea and he ran with it and developed his theory of contrasexuality. So, you know, Jung owed a lot to the women around him

and worked with him, especially Tony Wolfe and Sabina Spiorine. But he didn't always give them the acknowledgement that they deserved. So he was a typical patriarch a man of his time and what kind of an appalling life did emma young have as he went she was the one that paid for all of it i mean it was her time bailed him out yeah when he couldn't have explored any of that without the funding that i got because it was not a profitable endeavor. He was very rich, one of the richest women in Switzerland. And he lost his job. He had to give up his job because he was going psychotic.

That scene in the movie I do love where Freud and Jung are going to the different places on the boat, and Freud is trying to have this father posture and have authority over Jung, and freud is trying to have this father posture and have authority over jung and then jung is going upstairs because his wife has booked him first class and freud is going down into the and he's and jung kind of says oh i'm sorry my wife booked the tickets i didn't do it it's a great scene isn't it yeah i love that moment actually uh it's quite moving because freud was the one without money.

And he was Jewish too. I mean, he dealt with anti-Semitism a lot. Yeah. And Jung had a fortune. So he didn't need to work. He didn't even need to see patients because they had enough money. And his financial situation was very secure. And then, of course, late in life, midlife actually,

a lot of American rich people came over to Switzerland to fund him as well, like the Mellons. Yeah. And, you know, the Mellons who had been funding major universities, I think it was Yale University, and set up the bollingen series with princeton university pres they paid for all of that so that jung's uh german uh writings could all be translated into english and published in in america that he didn't pay for any of that. It was all funded by his benefactors. So he had a dream run when it comes to money. It was never an issue. Not like most of us. Money is

a big issue. And it was for Freud as well. That's the reason taproot therapy existed. We left to start this because I was tired of being forced to kick patients out when they didn't have insurance. And I wanted to be able to... I can remember a famous line that Hillman told me while I was working with him in Texas. And he said, everybody's worried about how to terminate analysis.

When does the transference end? And he said to me and there were others there in the room the transference ends when the client runs out of money i don't i i don't know how you afford to be in analysis for seven years or whatever before you go to zurich and get your you master's degree to get to analytical training. I know. Maybe that's one of the reasons that Jungianism is dying as a pure practice. Well, it's so expensive. That's why it's dying. But there are some analysts who have a social conscience and a sliding scale. So if you don't have enough

money, some analysts will see you anyway and charge you less but um hillman didn't seem to have a sliding scale i paid the standard fee well he knew that he could get the money out of the institute that was sending you over probably he he knew that i was being funded by big money and he wanted to share of that too as he did and i don't begrudge him that because he gave me a lot of time. I saw him twice a week for three years, except when he was in Japan. He was always heading off to Japan. I don't know that part of his life.

I wonder what was interesting to him there. Japanese were very interested in his stuff and the Japanese Jungians today are very much shaped by Hillman's ideas. You know the architect Leon Creer who did Poundberry England and he's an urban

planner, new urbanist, but we interviewed him. Leon Creer, he designed the town Poundberry, England for Prince Charles in England. And then he did some like communities here, the New Orvinus communities like Seaside Falls. Oh, yeah.

He's older. We interviewed him on this about some of the Jungian applications of visual archetypes and architecture. And he had met Hillman. And he told me that Hillman told him when you go to europe the the buildings the arc the eye is pulled up so that you look at heaven and when you go to an american building there's a drop ceiling with a fluorescent light so that you look at hell and i thought that was pretty funny oh dear but look um hellman hasn't made much impression in the United Kingdom.

They don't like him. They see him as a kind of a trickster and an egotistical maniac. He's too much of a rebel. I mean, the British like a kind of authoritarian or traditional thing, and his thing was to blow up every tradition for no reason. Yes, exactly. And the British don't like that. And as for Australia, here, no one in my country has ever heard of Hillman.

And they wonder why I spent so much time with him. Well, he was a major figure. And probably one of the first truly creative Jungians who reached out to a broader audience, particularly that book you mentioned. We've had a thousand years, or no, we've had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world's getting worse. I didn't know, though, that he was on right-wing radio about that.

Is that what you said? Yeah, so a lot of the talks that I have have i don't know when they were recorded i don't know what they are the recording quality is awful and they've been ripped from digital to they've been ripped from basically analog tapes so when i was getting into yung there was like a giant file that somebody had put up on the internet that you shared files on something called bit torrent at that point and so it's just terabytes and terabytes of Jungian talks and so I heard everything Moore, Hillman, Bly all these people said for their entire careers but so you heard it change too because you know they talked you know from the 70s until the 90s a lot of them

Kohlschild and so but one of the appearances was Hillman on the radio kind of having this reactionary he was talking to I don't know the name of the program, but he was saying basically like, therapy is making us weak. We have to be tougher. And it was just the kind of reactionary stuff that seemed silly. Hillman went to a peace conference during the early 1980s in New York and gave this most crazy talk about the need for war and I said to him why did you do that for I mean you're trying hard to make yourself unpopular imagine going to a peace conference and talking

up war. He couldn't help it. It was this unconscious trickster and rebellious boy. He wanted somebody to put him in his place and tell him. Denis Levitov almost smashed him at that conference. I mean, she basically said, how dare you come here and talk about the virtues of war? And then he had the temerity to write a whole book on it called The Need for War or something. Do you know that book?

Is it The Glorious Love of War? That's a different author. Yes. Is that how it is? Yeah, The Glorious Love of War. I mean, what crazy crap was that all about you know i mean anyone with their right mind right i mean like i said you've got these youngians with this wound and the males they over identify with the anima in early life and then they get the only taste of

power that they've had and then they way over identify with the animus and they become, you know, dangerous. It's strange. Dangerous. I was totally against this bullshit about him praising war. And he said, don't worry, David, I have Mars accented strongly in my astrological chart. I said, I don't care what Mars is doing in your chart. I'm more interested in the well-being of the Earth and our future as a civilization.

Yeah, in a time with nukes, you want to talk about, oh, well, Greeks went out in the phalanx and it made men, so we should extinct the planet with radiation. Freud used to complain that Jung was off with the fairies, but I tell you what, Hillman was off with the fairies as well. And this idea that we need to give Mars a prominent place. Well, I mean, the tradition of Western civilization has been one Mars catastrophe after another. The

First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War. Hillman wasn't joining the army i mean he was telling other people to go to war he you know he wasn't signing up for a mercenary company he was sitting in an armchair you know he was in his chair writing about how great war i just said to him this is just bonkers this is crazy stuff um he said um i can't remember what he said but i was so appalled and then the next thing i heard it it linked up robert bly with a men's moon which of course attracted angry men angry young men and it needed help i mean the same thing you know a lot of those people that i mean because that's just those people are dime a dozen on youtube now now. You have to eat more red meat and women are trying to make you weak and all this stuff.

But they get you in the door with self-help. That's just cognitive psychology. It's not, you know, the tips work. But then the prescription after that is that you have to believe all this crazy stuff. I wrote a book denouncing Hillman and bly in regard to this stuff about men you mightn't have seen it but no one just the basic insecurity of it is so obvious i mean i was like i remember people saying stuff like that when i was 13 when i was an angry young man and i was just like no one would say this unless they were deeply insecure yeah but uh robert bligh hated that book i called it remaking men

um i don't think it was even published in the states it was published in london i'd never heard of it no published in melbourne which is where i live and in london it sold quite well but i don't think it even touched ground on the u.s but ro Robert Bly read it, and he wrote me this furious letter about, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He was just so angry. And Hillman was angry too. And, in fact, at the end of his letter, Bly said, I'm going to tell Hillman about all this and blah, blah, blah.

Like he was your dad? Yeah. I'm going to tell your dad how naughty you've been i just imagining grown men you know saying so much he threatened yeah he said i'm gonna i said i'm writing this letter on a plane because i wanted it to be kept secret that's why i wrote it in a book and but anyway i i think that that beware the Jungians. I mean, some of them are brilliant. Tom Moore is brilliant and maintained his brilliance.

And I think we can rely on James Hollis. And Robert Johnson's books are very good, although they're not intellectually oriented. And Robert Johnson's not so good on gender politics. I think he's very, very old fashioned about men and women and gender. The only person that Hellman even worked with for a while without fighting with them was Michael Mead. I mean, Michael Mead was the only person that he actually liked. But Michael Mead is so kind of out there and spacey

that I think they just didn't have enough of an ego to butt heads. But he basically fell out with everyone else. Because Michael Mead was just drumming and chanting, and so there was no ego to threaten Hillman's brilliance. I think Hillman and Tom Moore, I don't think they had a falling out, but I do think that they had some disagreements. I think basically on jealousy. Hillman was so jealous about Tom Moore's success.

Was he of means? I mean, did he want more financial success? Yes. Hillman kept saying to me he had no superannuation and he wanted more money. And there's his student writing millions and millions of copies, Care of the Soul. I think good on Tom.

I think he wrote some terrific stuff. But Hillman wrote basically as an intellectual for intellectuals. You know, you can't read Revisioning Psychology without having studied philosophy, psychology and sociology at university. It doesn't make sense. So Hillman was writing for highly educated people, whereas Tom Moore stepped down the ladder

and basically wrote for a much broader audience and hillman's eukens tend to know way too much i mean because it's like to make those connections you have to know sociology anthropology comparative religion you know ancient history and in order just to get your foot in the door and it's like who has all that that's right no nobody has all that so i mean to read hillman properly you need to be about 40 years old and have at least two or three degrees to make sense of it um that's why i think he he sold himself short when he teamed up with robert bligh you know you got the worst of hillman coming, and the best of Hillman was written in the 70s and 80s. And I think that none of the Hillman fans had the maturity or the education to actually understand early Hillman,

which was the main Hillman. Well, he started to try and write more broad mainstream, but when he got rid of it, he couldn't quite get rid of the intellectual bent and so it was just pretension there was there was no well one of his books became a bestseller i think it was code yeah yeah and i i think he got off on opera the opera show opera winfrey show oh yeah i didn't know he appeared on there and there there was his superannuation nest egg that he'd always wanted so he did um achieve a degree of popular success but i don't think the soul's code is a very interesting book you know it kind of fails conceptually um and it's mainly it's not

really a theory that i don't know i mean there's some interesting and poetic bits of it but it isn't no it's not as good as tom moore tom had the right recipe you know to go public as did robert johnson robert johnson's book sold in millions yeah you know his books he she we uh his other book called Ecstasy. There was another book by him called Inner Work for Harper Collins. Harper Collins made a fortune out of Robert Johnson. He's often not talked about. I think the envy toward Robert Johnson, who lived in San Diego, was so high that the Jungians couldn't stand even reading him well hillman was well known as a speaker and he was well known in different countries that kind of liked him but

so many unions around him were becoming rich i mean clarissa pinkola as does and these people they were just the 70s and 80s was like the union heyday and he could never really articulate what he was doing in a way that grabbed that zeitgeist in any kind of interesting way. Robert Bly made a fortune out of Jung, you know, writing that book Iron John based on Jungian reading of the fairy tale of Iron John. So a lot of people were making massive money. I mean, Josephbell made a fortune

especially with the power of myth you know the tv series which was pure young but he didn't say it was and that's what annoyed me even his talks on schizophrenia and things like he's saying that and it's like this you're you're quoting case studies. You have to attribute this. So I don't think the Jungian heyday is over, by the way, Joel. I think we're going to get more and more of it. It's coming waves. The 80s was a wave, and the early 90s was a wave. You had, as you said, Clarissa Pinkola. I think right now is, too, with younger people.

It's just that they don't have any money you know at least in the u.s like yeah we were opening taproot when i was meeting with the person who was helping you know and then there was a big wave with the red book there was a big wave with that um south korean boy band i mentioned bts the biggest selling album in the history of korea it's just going to go on and on because you're there's something vital in you that uh it has a future freud however is just going to get more and more looking passe out of date yeah i i don't i never or joseph campbell actually has a pretty good quote where he said you know i read jung and i read freud when i was younger and i thought they were both interesting and then i read jung and freud again five years later and i didn't get anything else out of jung out of freud

but jung got hit different and then i read him again five years later and i got something else out of the same jung but i didn't get anything out of freud and finally i just quit rereading freud and only read Jung. It does grow with you over your life in a way that Freud is kind of a one-note. I still read Freud because he's such a great writer. He writes in a beautiful, succinct style. He was. Well, there's just an efficiency to the way he presents information. Yeah, I love the way he presents his ideas, even though I disagree with most of them.

But I still admire Freud as a stylist. I admire Hillman as a stylist and don't always agree with him either. And I tried to reread Hillman's Revisioning Psychology a couple of years ago. It was like grating on me a bit. You know, he was too too flashy he was trying to sort of flash his his credentials around i think he wrote that book in order to get a top-notch job in a 90 league northeast american university but nobody took the bait he did deliver those lectures at Yale University for the Terry lectures. Jung delivered Terry lectures too, which were called Psychology and Religion.

And Hillman, I think there were too many intellectuals that worried about Hillman and worried about his flashy style and well i mean if you want to work in an institution you cannot be the rebel you know this the college does not make this person who wants to blow things up even if they're right you know i i worked in a hospital for a while and there's this attitude of well sarah has a good idea but tiffany has a phd and we sell phds here so do your time and then we'll listen to you i mean hillman eventually took a job at the university of dallas you know which is a catholic university i don't know what he was doing in a catholic university but it was and of course he got he ended up getting sacked yeah because he was a rebel and they didn't want him there the psychology department said you're not a psychologist and the philosophy probably would have agreed with that too

i think he did agree yeah and he's the philosophy department said you're not a philosopher either you know and there was will you cross both of those worlds your career is english and anthropology and psychology and philosophy. Well, it's a bit like Jung. See, if you become too disciplinary, the university system doesn't like you because you don't fit anywhere. Jung didn't fit in psychology and he didn't fit in philosophy, nor did Hillman, nor did he fit anywhere.

So the university these days just don't even bother with you or Hillman. I think I said it's something where if you become too multidisciplinary, the universities think you become undisciplined, literally undisciplined, and you're not following the code of any of the established disciplines. So Hillman was booted out of Dallas University. And by the time I worked with him, he and some of his friends in Texas had formed a new institute called the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, which was formed by Robert Sardello.

Do you know his work? I'm not familiar. Yeah, I think he's written some very fine work in recent years. He's explored the relationship between Jung and Steiner, Rudolf Steiner. Of course, Gail Thomas and Louise and Donald Cowan from the University of Dallas all formed this Dallas Institute.

And my sponsors from New York came down to check it out, but they weren't impressed. They just saw it as some sort of breakaway group that don't fit into the university system. They came down to the Dallas Institute and and they said to me we want you back up northeast and one guy looked at me and he said there's no good can come out of texas and i think he meant it you know a real new yorker and of course i don't know if he was quoting scripture but um you know in the new testament says no there can be no good come out of nazareth

um someone says i think it's someone called nathaniel in the bible i'm not sure if he was quoting or it was just a coincidence but the new york sponsors were not impressed by hillman or the dallas institute but But I fought against them. I said, I'm here and I'm staying here. And so, you know, I really enjoyed my time at the Dallas Institute. I loved my time with Hillman as my analyst. I thought it was fantastic. And he helped me through my father complex.

That's priceless. Yeah. And I didn't even know I had a father complex. Was the analysis, you know, were you confronting things in a directly experiential way or was it a pretty intellectual kind of analysis? No, it was quite experiential. Well, that's good.

Maybe that's what he was trying to figure out a way to do. That's what Newman was good at. But unfortunately, none of that is translated into his writings. Yeah, that's what's missing. It's so strange. He's talking about direct experience, but then he wants to be a detached intellectual. And it's like, it doesn't work. Because in my experience with Jungian analysis it's like i know these complexes

i can feel it and i'm analyzing it and they still have a hold on me you have to be pushed into going into the dark place and yes if he probably was effective at pushing i mean hillman was effective at pushing people yeah i think so i think hillman did a lot of good as an analyst, and I certainly have nothing but praise for him at that level. It's only his career that I'm critical of. I had one analyst. I had another analysis before I went to America with a woman, and that analysis was on my mother complex, and that was very successful.

But I still have a mother complex. I think these things, you don't get rid of them. I still have a father complex, even though I worked on it with Hillman. It's just that I know them better. It's not that I've got rid of them. I know them now. I know my father complex. I know my mother complex.

They're friends of mine close friends and i draw from them and they draw from me too and make demands on me so i don't think this idea that you work on the unconscious in order to go to a higher or better place. I don't subscribe to that at all. I think you just go back to where you started and know the place for the first time, to quote T.S.L. The Fisher King, that you're going back to the same place you were as a child, but you're getting rid of it. I go back to where I began and know it for the first time. And that's got a lovely warm feeling to it.

And I thank Hillman for that. And I thank my first analyst, Janice Dorr, for that too. So I have enormous good feelings. And I'm still in analysis today with someone because he's so good with dreams. I'm not so good with my own dreams. Have you ever tried brain spotting? Have you ever heard of that? Who?

Brain spotting. It's a newer brain-based medicine therapy technique. Oh, I've heard of them. Yes, yes, yes. I've heard of brain spotting, yeah. But no, I haven't. It's wildly psychedelic. You're just looking at a pointer.

I mean, that's it. The person is looking at a spot where your eye dilates but um it digs up really amazingly profound dreams very quickly um you know if you're into dream work i'd recommend and it only takes you know 30 minutes to do it and you're done so i mean i would recommend finding somebody if you're interested in dream work because it's love to know your experience with it right i've been in every kind of therapy that exists or i mean of course not every kind but i don't think you get just get the training i think you actually have to be in it as a patient and jungian analysis is very different well that's the way jungian analysis works yeah and well i but that you know i was in analysis but i also did internal family systems i also did

cognitive behavioral therapy you know i did these things. And 40 minutes of brain spotting, my life was just different. I felt this awful physical feeling. And I realized I'd been trying to run from that and turn that off my whole life. And then just two or three days of wild emotional experiences and prophetic dreams. And it tends to be the experience patients have. I mean, it's growing. I think that's the future of a lot of trauma work. Wow, that's a very good wrap.

Yeah. I think we'd better finish up here. Sure, yeah. I don't want to take any more of your time, but it's fascinating. I'm very happy. You seem to know so much, as I keep saying. It's a great pleasure talking to you. Well, maybe the podcast is just kind of an ongoing thing,

so I'm sure we could talk again on another topic at some point. We've got a lot of stuff about Jung and architecture coming up. One of the British academic is doing a lot of work on Bollingen, so we're trying to find a time to connect. Different things about archetypal applications and architecture is kind of an interest of mine. Is that Lucy Huskinson? No, I emailed her, and then she said Martin Gledhill

was her friend that was doing it, and so I talked to him. I think his name is Martin Gledhill. I don't know if I'm saying that right. I've got two books by Lucy Huskinson on architecture and archetypes. She said she was working on Nietzsche now, so it wasn't a good time to talk about you. She's always working on Nietzsche. She did her PhD on Nietzsche as well.

But she's a very bright woman who lives in Wales and works at the University of North Wales there. And yeah, she does some great work in architecture. But I'm out of my depth with architecture. I can't speak about the topic. Well, yeah, my dad is is an architect so maybe that's a father complex oh well there you go i uh well it's funny the synchronicity like when i wrote i wrote this article on leon career's design and you know he's a big deal that's older and i'm writing on a therapy blog in birmingham alabama so it's like

you don't expect him to see it but i was writing in and then i was like well my dad's an architect and i'm writing about architecture but i'm a social worker so what if people see it and they're like you don't understand architecture good and so you know somebody might see it from think whatever and then leon here sent me an email and was like, this is great. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's great. Well, that's terrific. But you've obviously got a farther connection with architecture like I don't have yet.

So, yeah. What I usually do with the podcast is I put it out on YouTube and then I also put it out on our podcast, the audio of it. Is there anything that you want to promote or point people to go back to? I mean, you have a lot of books. Anything that you want to promote? I should have a website,

but I don't seem to have a website. I'm not too old-fashioned. But yeah, I've done 16 books on the topics that we're talking about. Some of them you've never heard of i can tell that doesn't matter i don't care but i buy them when i can find them but uh there's i've got a couple of years a very good self-promoter you know um i don't promote myself i just think that if people are ready to read my stuff they'll find it but you know i have a lot of it finds a new

life on audible you know that people have these audio books and so somebody who wrote a book 10 20 years ago they do an audio version and then it sales explode so maybe investing in somebody to read them would uh would promote the sales someone kindly wrote me a wikipedia page so if you key in my name a wikipedia but it's not updated unfortunately it hasn't got all of my stuff in it the criticisms of james hillman on his page here mentioned on that wikipedia page too are they yeah on james hillman there's criticisms of him and you're i think they cite it probably is on making of a psychologist i'm not sure what they're citing all right okay some mentions there too i think it was a fellow from norway that did that page for me but i certainly wasn't me or someone that i know i just i'll look one day

no so there's a wikipedia page on it it's sort of like magic. But I don't have a website, as I said, which I should change. I should get into the 21st century. Sure. Well, if you need help, let me know. We built one for work. So it's fairly easy now to get a template and link to your books and different things. It's just kind of like making a Word document at this point.

Anyway, it's been wonderful talking to you thank you so much for your time we ran over and i i appreciate you um making time to sit down with us because it i mean it is fascinating to hear directly from from you you know you read somebody's books you get a sense of who they are but then you still have questions about you know the the way that um you know details about things that you don't know until you ask. So it's fascinating, and I'm sure people will love to hear your insights into all these things. Thank you.

Well, and as I said, I've lived in the States, so I have a taste about what America is like. I saw the good and I saw the bad. I was walking down Washington, one day and this guy came crashing out of this department store with stolen goods and then these police screaming stop or we'll shoot. You know I thought only in America could I see a scene like that you know and I was scared stiff because that doesn't happen in australia we're not gun we're not big on guns here at all you never hear people or police shooting people in australia it

just doesn't happen um and they started firing at this guy and i i was i was just beside myself with terror and sorrow for this guy. I don't know what he stole, but it was certainly not worth him losing his life. You know, he might have stolen some sort of hi-fi or TV or something. But America scares me about the guns there, you know, all those guns. We don't have guns here. It's illegal to carry a gun in my country. But not in yours, I know. You know, it's very different.

The right of Americans to bear arms is in the Constitution. It is. It is a very different culture from a lot of the world, but I think that we've kicked the can down the road on a lot of problems for a long time that we can't kick it anymore. I mean, climate change is a whole other conversation, but, I mean, Australia is maybe the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world.

So there's things creating bigger problems there. I think the world is so tired of waking up and turning on the news and finding there's been yet another american massacre in a shopping center or a school or a movie house you know we're just so tired of it we don't not not to mention you people but we don't even see it anymore. I mean, I had people, patients were calling to be seen for a workplace shooting, and I didn't even hear about it. I didn't even know what it was.

Well, they're so common. You know, they're so common. The states are scary. I'd rather live in my country. You're free here to walk anywhere anywhere and you won't be shot. No one's going to shoot you. A lot of Americans are moving to Australia partly because of this. We're a very different culture.

A lot of people think we're very American, but we are and we aren't. So it's a mixed bag, actually. Anyway, I'm getting hungry. You must be tired. What time is it there for you? It's about 8, 8.30 at night, so I need to get my kids to bed. But I really appreciate your time and just your body of work. It's really nice to meet you and talk to you because, you know,

I've been reading it since college. So thank you so much. I can't thank you enough. to you because you know i've been reading it since college so um it's thank you so much i can't thank you enough thank you very much and um keep in touch yeah we'll uh we'll talk soon uh take care bye