The Taproot Podcast - 🎙️📘Interview with Dick Russel on The Life and Ideas of James Hillman 🧠💭

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Dick Russell has published fifteen books on subjects ranging from natural history to the assassination of President Kennedy. Check out Dick's Website: https://dickrussell.org/   Buy his book: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Ideas-James-Hillman-II/dp/195676318X 🎙️📘   Dive into the depths of the human psyche with #DickRussell as he unravels "The Life and Ideas of James Hillman" 🧠💭 Join us for an enlightening conversation on #JungianPsychology, #ArchetypalTherapy, and the journey of self-discovery! 🌌🕳️ Don't miss this insightful exploration into the realms of the mind and soul! 🌟🎧 #JungianPsychology #Schizophrenia #ArchetypalPsychology #shamanism #SchizophreniaSupport #JungianAnalysis #CollectiveUnconscious #SchizophreniaTreatment #DepthPsychology #SchizophreniaRecovery #AnalyticalPsychology #carljung   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.  

So I'm here with Nick Russell, who probably has done more in his life than we can even include in an interview, let alone a preamble. But we're going to talk about two things. One, his new book, the second volume of James Hellman, The Jungian Analyst's Autobiography. And then also some stuff about shamanism, schizophrenia, the deep unconscious and Dick's relationship with his son and the book that he wrote about that. And we may get to some other stuff too, but those are probably pretty big topics. So thank you so much for being here. It's really exciting to talk to you. Hey, Joel, really glad to be with you today

and meet you in person. Yeah, I guess first off, some people have probably are familiar with James Hellman, but we should give a little bit of a preamble about him. You know, he was a Jungian analyst that was very influential, especially in bringing Jungian ideas to America. And it wasn't that the Jungian ideas were not in America. It was that they were brought by kind of the New Age movement and the completely sapped of any meaning or a real connection to Jung, and I think Hillman brought a lot of, like, deaf psychology ideas to the U.S. in a way that was pretty pure and interesting and got, he was a lot of people's first experience with Jung. Kind of a rebel, you know, I think he probably didn't catch on as much in Europe because they're a little bit more uptight, especially British analysts were kind of always suspicious of him.

And volume one of his autobiography came out a while ago, And I didn't realize until I was buying volume two last night that there's a volume three too. So this isn't even really going to be the end of it. I know. Yeah, it's a tome. But you know, I think he's worth it. I mean, he's been called, he was called this in a profile of him by the Connecticut newspaper a few years back. The wisest man you've probably never heard of. Oh, yeah. I saw that article. It's still online.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a great article. And, you know, I didn't ever intend to be his biographer. I'm not a psychologist per se. You know, I read a lot of Jung when I was younger and since. And my extended family had discovered Hillman's work in the 1990s. And we were reading him then at that time. He had just published The Soul's Code.

That was his big claim to fame. He was. He was kind of regretting his career and bemoaning, you know, maybe burning some of the bridges he burned and saying that he didn't have a superannuation, you know, right when Soul's Code got him on the Oprah Winfrey show. That's right. Yeah, Oprah loved that book. And, of course, once you're on Oprah, it became the number one bestselling book in the country. Yeah, she could have had like the 1992 CRX Honda motorcycle guide to maintenance on her show. And it would have sold a million copies.

Exactly. So, so yeah, that, that book made him pretty well known and, and it was, it was only the second book. He kind of,

well, not that his other books weren't popular, but he nominated for a Pulitzer prize for revisioning psychology back in the 1970s when he wrote that. Yeah. But the soul's Code was very accessible. And, you know, I write about it in volume three, actually, which is coming out in a couple of months.

All three volumes are done. And, again, people might ask, what? This is a three-volume biography of this depth psychologist? What's that all about? And I can understand that. But not only do I like to write these kind of in-depth tomes, I've written 15 books altogether, and some of them are pretty damn long, for better or for worse, right? But I feel like he is one of the greatest thinkers that

we've ever had. Thomas More, the theologian and also bestselling author, said that, and he knew Hillman very well. Yeah, it's kind of hard to know where to start. I think I should probably start with how I came to write this book, don't you? I mean, it was a very unusual thing for me to take on. Did he know that you were going to write his autobiography? Did he give you his blessing or permission, or did family do that? that well he did once but but not admit well here's the story initially we we got to know each other and it's not an autobiography by the way it's a biography i mean i interviewed you know dozens of people about him and and he fully called an autobiography i'm sorry i misspoke that's okay you know i mean they're close but uh and and

there's a lot of his writings in the book and letters and all of that which make it almost autobiographical. But I had gotten to know him initially in kind of a strange way. We were reading him, as I say. And one day in the kitchen of my house when I was living in Boston, and the old man had grown up in our extended family, we were talking about Hillman, and he said, oh, my dad knows james hillman

he sells him his organic vegetables in the market in connecticut i said oh wow henry really i did that's uh you think i'd be able to meet him sometime i'm so interested in his ideas and and uh he said so he gave i called his father it was an organic farmer he had a good old friend of mine and uh he said well well, you know, James Hilton's a very private person, you know, so I don't know, but he arranged a lunch anyway. And my wife and I went there and met with him and with my friend, Wayne Hanson, who was the introduction for us. And it kind of began, it was a friendship that began that day. He was 21 years older than I, so we weren't contemporaries really, but we both had common interests, including not in psychology.

We talked about how we both spent time, a lot of time in Africa when we were young, just traveling around. And then he was a big fan of boxing, interestingly, which I had gotten to know Muhammad Ali at one point in my life. And so we kind of just connected on these other levels. And then he visited us in our homes. We had homes in a couple of different parts of the country, a group of people that I've been living with for a long time. And he loved the way we lived. You had a communal living situation for a while, didn't you?

Am I making that up? No, you're not making it up. I still do live that way cool he was very interested in that uh because we've been living together for so long and and and we you know we had these lovely houses we've created a very very successful construction company but it was more the feeling of community that he always uh admired and longed for and was part of in his own life. Collaborations were really hugely important to him. So he and his wife, Margo, visited us a number of times. And then that went on for a few years.

And then at the end of 2004, I think it was, his older sister was visiting in Connecticut. And we went up there. I went up there for a visit over the Christmas holidays and she was telling all these stories about how he was growing up years in Atlantic City right and and the boardwalk when it was the heyday of it of all of that in the 1920s and there was something about Hellman that never got away from the boardwalk I mean he he still was kind of a carnival barker in the way that he brought his personality to the world.

He was a brilliant, brilliant guy. There still was a little bit of kind of almost a grifter type soap with a prize in it language that he probably liked. Well, he did. He grew up in this amazing fantasy world of, you know, of all these performers,

the trapeze artists and so on that performed on the boardwalk. And his family owned a hotel there called The Breakers. And that's where he was born. He was born in a hotel room in 1926, actually. It was a Jewish family. Yes. And one grandfather on the other side of his family was a very famous rabbi, Joseph Krauskopf, a reform rabbi, interestingly. Not conventional at all, just like James Hillman was not conventional.

And he told me, this was all in volume one, but he talked to me about how he used to go down into the basement, right? And he loved hanging out with the workers in the hotel, observing how they did things. And so he grew up in this fascinating milieu and got to know all kinds of interesting people that his parents had. You have these beautiful descriptions in the first volume that are almost would be better served in a novel about, you know, the Africanman contemplating the deep unconscious is probably sitting on the boardwalk watching these nets of of wriggling beasts being writhed out of the depths and he starts wondering what's inside of himself exactly it's a beautiful almost lovecraftian way to to build setting um in a biography which is not what you expect with out of a biography

oh thank you yeah the deep sea net holes they called him right and uh and anyway his sister was talking when she was there in 2004 about those years and growing up in that family and he had three siblings and and uh i told him afterwards i said you know god she's older than he and i think you should really capture these uh on tape while she's still alive because they're great stories and so this this gave him the idea to bring his siblings and as many of his kids as could come together that summer. And a young filmmaker that was also grown up in my family, my extended family, came in and filmed the weekend. An old friend of his, Kenny Donahue, came from Ireland. And it was a marvelous weekend, lots of great food and everything in Connecticut.

And in the course of that, I'm an investigative reporter, right? So I started asking a lot of questions. And afterwards, our wives, Margo and Alice, got together and were having a glass of wine. And I think Alice asked, was James ever going to do a biography? And Margo said, you know, he's never wanted to do that. But anyway, he said, if anybody is going to do it, he'd like me to do it. Partly because I didn't have, I think, because I didn't have an ax to grind. I wasn't a psychologist with, you know, all these ideas and concepts about the field.

And there's not very many people that could write about Hellman in an unbiased way. Yeah, I think so. And because he's really, he's out there, you know, he's a very controversial director. And even in the Jungian world. And so I just dove into it and started going out there and interviewing people. And we, Alice and I went to Ireland, where he'd gone to school at Trinity College in Dublin. And we went there with he and his wife.

And then I went to Zurich and interviewed people at the Jung Institute, where he'd started out and where he met Jung in the 1950s and had known him pretty well. And Jung had then appointed him to be the first director of studies of the Jung Institute, a very prestigious position. Yeah, that was one of the questions that I had. I think your line, if I'm remembering in that book, I read that when my daughter was born. So that was six years ago now. But you said that when Jung died, there was a huge vacuum of a father wound or something that he was a man that kept his opinions close and that did not give out approval very freely, that there was kind of a power vacuum.

And it always, I mean, I kind of read between the lines of a lot of things I knew about the Institute early on that, you know, C.A. Meyer had had kind of a falling out with you uh disagreement and when hellman is appointed to be the provisional director as this upstart i mean i don't think meyer ever really forgave him for that yeah i don't think so either i mean i never knew meyer or interviewed him but because he was dead by the time i was doing the book but uh i got the feeling he wasn't really a nice guy he was very well known uh he was young's uh you know aid to de camp for a while, or at least, you know, a fellow analyst that worked with him. But he got married. Yeah, and he was. And then it got really, I get into this in volume one, it got to be a sticky situation because Hillman was eventually fired as director of studies by the Jung Institute

for having had an affair with one of his patients, and at the same time, Meyer, who was pushing for Hillman's dismissal, turned out was having an affair with Hillman's wife, Kate. Then he called the man that Hillman had an affair with the wife of and said, hey, listen, Hillman did this, and if you want to sue him, I'll pay for the lawyer. Yeah. That's pretty wild it's pretty hypocritical too i just i would say but anyway that's and then when helman confronted him about having an affair with his wife he said oh that's between you and your wife or something like that just missed him completely so yeah anyway but it was well it was an interesting thing that happened because it moved Hillman into a whole new realm that he then fathered along with Rafael Lopez Pedraza and Pat Berry, who was a student of his, not the one he had the affair with the first time it got dismissed but um he also had a relationship with pat eventually and they got married and uh and they they worked together uh with uh raphael to create what's called

archetypal psychology which was very different than the analytical psychology that jung had had created um different in the sense that it was polytheistic. It harkened back to the gods of Greece and then the Renaissance scholars. And Hellman was obsessed with polytheism and really did not like Judaism or Christianity. I mean, I think when I had talked to David Tacey about his analysis with Hellman, he said at one point, Hellman said, quit having dreams about Christianity, start dreaming about Greece. I can believe it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it was all about bringing and introducing a new element, which were the archetypes, you know, and which were myths and imagination and getting people away from, not that it was wrong, but the personalized psychology, the emphasis on the self and Hillman's psychology, which was analytical, And he was he was hearkening back to an earlier time to connect people.

He called it as Keats, the poet, had he called it soul making. And how do you how do you reach the essence of yourself in order to become more of who you are? Well, even though that shocked a lot of people who were like, who just that because i mean i think unionism the early days of the institute it was held back by being tethered to the language of psychoanalysis that it was intellectualizing and thinking and analyzing and not an experience yeah and so i mean he said and i don't know that hillman ever really found out a way to apply archetypal psychology as a technique i mean it was more of a concept you know, that he saw what was wrong with things. But, you know, he was, everyone kind of was reacted with shock when he left the Institute

and did that. But then it was kind of ahead of his time. And that like most of the best models of psychotherapy we have that were coming, you know, trying to fight back against the cognitive revolution during the 80s and CBT and all that. They were Jungian analysts who left the Institutes because they wanted a somatic and an experiential piece, the direct experience. And I mean, you know, Arnie Mandel left and made process therapy. Sidron Halstone left and made voice dialogue.

I mean, a ton of those guys were all Jungian analysts running the institutes who left to do essentially, I mean, they were on the same quest as Hillman, is how do you directly experience this stuff and how do you place it in the body? running the institutes who left to do essentially, I mean, they were on the same quest as Hillman, is how do you directly experience this stuff and how do you place it in the body? And Hillman was the first analyst that I found ever in the history of the institute to say that the archetypes have a somatic component, that you are not feeling the whole image

unless you find it in your body, which is the thing that brought me to him because I was trying to get people to feel an image physically, to feel an emotion physically to heal trauma really early in my career yeah well that's really interesting and and you know it's kind of like there's all these different gods that we incorporate is the way he you know that's the polytheistic way of looking at things and we have we have once he said of himself he said i i uh i i make my way with my hermes opportunism right he loved dionysus uh and he aphrodite he invoked these different gods even with his patients you know as as as ways to connect to those parts of ourselves, I think I would say. So yeah, it was really a fascinating new

approach that gathered all these young people who were searching for something and came to Zurich in search of Jung and led Jung in the early 1970s. Hippies on the road. I did some of that myself. I just hitchhiked all over the place. I'm jealous. It's not the same road that it once was. If you sell your shoes. Unfortunately, I wish it was. I wish that younger people could experience what I did

back then. I wasn't one of those who went to Zurich. A lot of these young people enrolled at the Young Institute. Then Hillman did these amazing nights called Spring House. That's what the name of the place was, right? In Zurich. And all these folks gathered and they would study these esoteric texts like the Picatrix. And that was a medieval text. And magic was very involved with that and and the the uh the uh memory theater of don

camillo and and bringing these things to the light again that had been definitely forgotten you know and i thought about it was they would all drink wine and and get toasted and you know things would happen like uh one night rafael who was a wild man himself, very close to Hellman for years. And he was from Cuba originally. And one night they were talking about one of these, about Dionysus, I think. And suddenly a drunk fell through the window. Yeah. And Raphael said, you see, we constellated.

And they created it right in front of him. Yeah. Hellman was really, his like little posse was very instant constellating gods. That was like the language that they would always use when something manifested. But I mean, they got into those things because they saw them as kind of projections of the deep unconscious. That by looking at these medieval texts, you could see something where somebody who was not aware of the psychology we have now is kind of telling on themselves by projecting these things into pre-scientific sciences like alchemy or into summoning magic, into summoning angels like John Dee, or mythology,

the gods, that when people don't create religion in a vacuum, we have something inside of us and we've projected it out in our early days and that we can go back and look at that to kind of understand who we are. Yeah. And I think that's not always understood. I mean, I think that sometimes people just think that, you know, Jungian therapy equals, you know, Americans a lot of times it like, it just equals therapy plus Jesus or therapy plus they believe in magic and the tarot. And it's like, they see things as pieces of self, you know, and that's something that people who aren't coming from that background don't always get. Yeah, it's so true. And a lot of, a lot of these young people who came then in the early seventies,

well, there was Tom Hapakabasenskas and Robert Hinshaw and Paul Kugler. Lots of these guys then became analysts themselves and brought a lot of these ideas with them, of course, after they left Zurich. Ed Casey, who was... There were a number of these folks that I interviewed and write about in

the biography. Yeah, it was a whole new road, and it was an exciting era you know i mean coming out of the 60s and and uh when the cynics and puer as hillman described in the lecture and then you know book of the same name you know the cynics was the the forces the sort of like the old guard you know among the young but didn't like Hillman very much a lot. They thought he was breaking away from the young versus the Puer, which Hillman described himself as.

You know, always bringing new ideas into the light. But you had to have both. I mean, you had to combine the discipline of the cynics with the inspired vision of the Puer in order to really get somewhere in life. And that was one of the things that he talked about a lot well i think he struggled to reconcile him and you see it in his

books where they're kind of very romantic and idealistic or they're just incredibly intellectual written for intellectuals and then he doesn't know why they're not as successful as thomas moore's books yeah and and i think you know the thing that is interesting to me because i relate a lot to hillman's like worse angels you know like i want to check some of my own impulses. And but, you know, he he is kind of crazy, you know, towards the end of his life. You know, there's all there's a lot of things where he doesn't quite integrate it. And I think, you know, he really was looking for this way of directly experiencing archetypes. He wanted looking his whole career was trying to find a direct access to soul and everything he wrote, you see that hunger. And I wonder,

because I haven't, I'm excited for your book because I haven't really seen a lot of, you know, secondhand accounts of it. But I wonder if when the red book came out, if he saw that and he, if that was what that, if that fulfilled, scratched that itch for him, you know, that, that process of active imagination was pretty similar to archetypal psychology. He didn't know Jung read the Red Book until it was published. It does look a lot like the process that he was trying to make and doesn't ever really do case studies of and doesn't ever really describe techniques for. Yeah, I mean, he was knocked out by that book.

And he realized this is toward the end of his life. And he gave talks on the Red Book at several venues, one of them with Sonu Shandasani and the actress Helen Hunt. Well, then for the dead, after the Red Book, him discussing it, that's probably one of the best things he ever wrote.

It's incredible. And where you get into the dead, the ancestors, which has always been very important to him. He had the pictures on his wall. But yeah, he said to me that he realized that he and Jung were really on the same page in a lot of ways that he had not realized until he saw that book. And he had a dream at that time. I think I write about this in Volume 3. He didn't talk to me about dreams too much.

But he had a dream. He had a number of dreams about Jung through the years. And in one of them, Jung was saying to him about their work. It's beyond human history. Yeah. Which I thought was pretty wonderful. I wonder. See, that's my question. Because when I see Hellman's career, I just see the father wound running rampant.

And I don't even think he would have gone back just to the Greeks. I mean, I think if you let him go, he would have gone back to the mother cult and be going into the cave with the Venus of Willendorf. I mean, he really was trying to go all the way to the bottom of something. And I wonder, you know, he wrote Lament for the Dead, and I see that there. But I'm interested in the biography of when he sees the Red Book. He kind of forgives some of the animosity he had with Jung and finds peace. He does. Absolutely, he does. And you'll read about that in Volume 3, because it was a really important realization that he came to not too long before he died.

He was 85 years old when he died in 2011. And by that point, I had written, well, I never started out to write a three-volume book, right? I was going to do one volume. And I was blessed to have many, many interviews with him in the course of that, all of which, you know, I'd be writing. And I shared with him what I was writing about these aspects of his life. So I never got beyond a certain point in his life,

in turn, before he died, but I was able to sit with him and have him elaborate on these various themes as he read the chapters that I had put together about various periods in his life. And that was, wow, that was amazing. And also to see him give these talks on the Red Book during that period and read the Red Book myself. I mean, I was blown away by it too and by the artistry of Jung's beautiful paintings in the book as well, which I had no idea he was that talented an artist. One of the things that Hellman does, he does that is very original kind of technique is saying that if anima and animus are archetypes, then they're present in both genders.

Men have an animus too. Do you see any of that in the end of his life? Does that play a part in anything that is to come in your story? Yeah, well, I think the anima is always, I mean, he was always in pursuit of the anima, right? But it's interesting that, and we're skipping ahead a bit here, but it is in volume two where I write about his connection to the mythopoetic men's movement.

Yeah. And that was a huge thing for him. We can skip ahead to there, perhaps, and then come back to other things. But, you know, it was a period in his life. He turned 60. He and Pat Berry, who had been married for 20 years, were getting close to splitting up. Aranos, which was this amazing place in Switzerland on Lake Lago Maggiore where he'd been going and meeting these underground giants for

also pretty much 20 years. He starts donning a Casablanca trench coat and fedora during this period of his life too. Yes. And so that's coming to an end for him as well. And that's when he's met Robert Bly, the poet, and he meets this storyteller who uses fairy tales of all things with men named Michael Mead. Yeah, I'm familiar. I think we were going to interview him in September fairy tales of all things with men named Michael Meade. And they formed... Yeah, I'm familiar. Yeah.

I think we were going to interview him in September, and our schedules keep not aligning. Oh, well, that'd be great if you could. And you could, of course, ask him about his relationship with James Hillman because they had a very powerful and not always... Well, it was frayed toward the end, I guess, but they had a lot of amazing... God, I mean, the things that they did with groups of men.

I talk about it now because the anima part, but it was like men have feelings that aren't just feminine feelings. You know, they have feelings that are often, you know, squelched in themselves, not allowed to come to the surface. And they went through just these incredible conversations where they would use, Mead would use a fairy tale. Well, I would read the poetry of Yeats or Rumi or whoever, right? And Hillman would give these intellectual talks. On an Akhmatov, too, he would always, I'm blanking on the poem, but yeah, I've got a lot of those tapes.

It's the recordings of Me me drumming and telling a myth and Helvin chiming in. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they had a great relationship of the three of them as teachers and they would bounce things off each other and they would be a hundred men in a room there for a week in the Redwoods, right? And in Minnesota or Maine california mendocino and you know it was interpreted by the media a lot of this especially as it became more of a

movement quote unquote and there's a lot of publicity about it in the 1990s and it was often dismissed you know as oh it's just these guys out in the woods you know getting off uh dancing with each other and talking bad about their wives and well i think it was viewed too as kind of a misogynist thing you know that women weren't allowed or something and but a lot of it i think they saw the kind of toxic rambo culture of the 80s and they were trying to save men from themselves and try and protect women from men by healing trauma you know so many of those stories are about how do you not take your PTSD? And the myths that Mead is drumming and telling, they're like, how do you not take your PTSD

out on other people? How do you own it and hold it and heal it? Yeah, yeah, exactly. A lot of these guys who came to these events were Vietnam vets. They've been through terrible PTSD experiences. A lot of them, you know, abandoned fathers. That was a big subject. But the effort was to get men beyond those things and explore the soul, really, the depths of themselves with each other in a safe space where, you know, they didn't allow reporters, usually.

And many times, I mean, there's many stories about when they would go home, the wives would say, wow, what happened to you? You know, you're a whole other guy in all kinds of ways. So it was vitally important to, and I interviewed lots of people about this. I mean, there should be a whole book on it in itself. I'm not going to do it, but somebody should. And for Hillman, it was a very important thing because he became really just one of the guys, you know. Yeah. And he was this egghead, you know, that had to kind of do sometimes outrageous things in order to connect to these folks who didn't really trust this erudite guy talking about all these things, which he did.

There's stories I tell in the book about one time Hillman, it's one of the early events, he fashioned some headgear out of ferns and he walked into a group of these men and he said, my name is Fern because he thought you made up names of these things. Another time, just to get his goat, right, some of the men had one of their people walk in without any clothes on and take a seat. And what Hillman did was he just looked at the room and looked at the guy

and he said, would you stand up, please? Introduce yourself. And it endeared him, right? Of course, because he could do these kinds of things and would, because they were sincere. You know, he wasn't making stuff up, although he was a very good actor. I mean, and he loved Shakespeare. I mean, Boardwalk boardwalk city man like yeah

exactly yeah yeah um well i don't i want to be respectful of your time and also get to you know your second book that you wanted to talk about but i mean just as an in-betweener um because a lot of times you know we want to talk talk about the writer's process or the artist's process on these things. And I mean, you're an investigative journalist, but you've written about the environment. You've written about, you know, not conspiracy theories like in a typical way, but kind of the power behind the power. Or maybe what in our own, you know, American mythology mythology maybe we're blind to. Because it is a myth. Nationalism is kind of a myth, just like advertising and pop culture and all these things.

And also shamanism, personal work. It seems like all of those things sort of are in the category of mythology. Would you agree? Or is that what you're doing? I don't want to speak for you, but that's an open-ended question. I mean, yeah, in a way, I guess I am. I'm somebody whose career as a writer, I guess, most everything I've done is about bringing something into the light

that's been in the dark. And I hadn't thought about it until recently, really, in this way. But, you know, I explored the mysteries of the Kennedy assassination and brought that to light in a pathbreaking book. I wrote a book called Black Genius and the American Experience, which was about these incredible African-Americans that my son was biracial. And I kind of wrote the book, is biracial and still around, wrote the book sort of with him in mind of what he should know about some of these figures, you know, in all different fields. Then I wrote a book about this mysterious interaction between whales and humans, where in Mexico...

You may have just made a movie about that one, right? James Cameron. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, there's these great whales in this lagoon in Baja, Mexico, halfway down the peninsula, that mysteriously began coming up to small boats about 30, 40 years ago. And I had this experience. I went down there to write about this salt works that Mitsubishi was planning to build with the Mexican government to wipe out this habitat, basically, where the mother whales brought their young every year after a 5,000-mile migration. And these whales would come up to you and introduce their young. And you're petting whales in the wild. And they like to have their gums rubbed. So I wrote a book about this and followed their migration all the way to Russia. So anyway, various things like that, that I have

explored and been blessed to have an opportunity to look into. And that includes this book that I wrote a few years ago. Again, it's without James Hillman, I never would have written it in a sense, I can't tell you why, but it's called My Mysterious Son, a life-changing passage between schizophrenia and shamanism. Do you mind if we introduce schizophrenia for people who may not be aware of the condition or the different parts of it? Yeah, well, it's a very traumatic, sudden onset illness that happens to thousands of young people around the age of 17, usually 18. Our drum roll period is a little bit

earlier, usually in men than women, but it usually is, you know, kind of late teens for guys and maybe early 20s for women. You know, a couple of things can speed it up or slow down the presentation of it. But a big one that makes the symptoms be fueled a lot is trauma. You know, a couple of things can speed it up or slow down the presentation of it. But a big one that makes the symptoms be fueled a lot is trauma. You know, the genes, you can have 80% of the, and this is kind of me opining, this is maybe a controversial take, but, you know, our genes like inform how we express the trauma, but the trauma is the fuel under the genes. And dopamine disorders like schizophrenia, OCD, manic depressive, and bipolar, like they tend to run in families.

You know, you'll see that. But it is the trauma that sets it off. And a lot of times by treating the trauma, you can bring the symptom down and reduce the need for the medications, which have some pretty severe side effects some of the time, quite a bit. And I think, when was Franklin diagnosed? When was he first going on medication? 17. Or no, what like year, calendar year? Well, 1990s, 1996. Okay. Yeah. So, and there have been like some pretty good advancements since then. One of the things

that we can do now, which not everyone knows about it, I'm mentioning it in case anyone with schizophrenia or someone who knows someone with schizophrenia is listening is, you know, a lot of the antipsychotics have a side effect where they may have a metabolic syndrome where people gain a ton of weight. They don't know when they're full and it changes your personality to gain 200 pounds. It changes a lot of things. Well, now we know that you can prescribe a low dose of an anticonvulsant like topamats and it counteracts lot of things. Um, well now we know that you can prescribe us a low dose of an anticonvulsant like topamats and it counteracts that metabolic syndrome. So if the antipsychotics working for you, you know, you can go to the psychiatrist, not all the psychiatrists know that.

And there's not a ton of research done about schizophrenia because the people who have it generally are not very wealthy. Um, and there's not very many of them. So it's a tiny, it's a rare disorder anyway. And that's what a part of why it's so cool is that, you know, we will research how to make the 30th statin, even though they all work the same, because every old white guy watching the news is going to get high cholesterol. And we can pretend that this one so we dump all this money into it. Whereas things that are really needed, like antibiotics and antipsychotics, we don't have enough. We don't have good ones. And we're not spending any money researching them. They do in some countries with more of a socialized research mentality. So that's sad. I mean, I think that's wrong because that's what we need. We don't need

Quazilla statin. you know. And then also one of the things that is really helpful with the med management now, it's more gentle on the body and it also is just so much easier to help regulate somebody with a thought disorder is there's an injectable medication. So you can get a time release one month to three month, you know, dose of the medication. So if you miss a dose or you're having a lot of stress and the symptoms flare up, you know, you can, you can really stay a lot more stable, you know? So there have been some progress since the nineties, but it still is, it's a hard thing to manage and something we don't spend enough time trying to treat. Yeah. And, and, you know, of course it's marked at the beginning, certainly by, by paranoia and so-called delusional thinking.

And that lasted for a long time with my son. And it was a very tough period, which I describe in the book. But eventually it led me to seek some kind of, not necessarily going off mitigation entirely, but an adjunct to the anesthetic regimen because, God, the side effects were just so severe. And he had put on, just like you described, Franklin had put on 100 pounds. And it was this handsome kid who just suddenly, you know, ballooned up. And it was really, really tough for a long time, but ended up actually through, there

was a man named Maladoma Sommé, who was a shaman from West Africa at Burkina Faso. And he was part of this men's movement that James Hillman founded. And they got to know each other. And when I was looking for an alternative, something, my wife remembered, I interviewed Melodoma, but just on the phone, I'd never met him. He had been at this landmark gathering of, at Buffalo Gap, West Virginia, 50 black men and 50 white men coming together in a room for a week to really get down and talk about their lives and their soul experiences. But anyway, so I contacted Melodoma and went to him for a divination where he spoke about my ancestors and how the ancestors on my side really didn't understand my son. They didn't know who he was.

Of course, they were white. And then the ancestors on Franklin's mother's side were African-American. So I went through a series of rituals. It's a very long story, and I'm not going to be able to tell it all here, but it made a huge difference, especially when we ended up going as a family several years after I first met Maladoma to West Africa, to his village, and spent a month there with a healer that he had. And he prescribed this. We had these big herbal pots that each of us, Franklin's mother and myself, and Franklin would bathe with every day, drink water from. And it was full of these herbs that had been specifically prescribed for us. And we also went

through a series of rituals over there, doing this as a family with a bunch of other people who had come along too, that had their own issues that they were seeking help for. And I tell you, it changed a lot of things. I mean, Franklin went way down on his medication after that. And it's still some years later now, not as much as he was. And he's really so much better than he's been since he had his breakdown at the age of 17. He's living with his mom and doing a lot of great art. We talk all the time. We're way past the very traumatic things that we continued to go through as he was growing up. And he's in his 40s now, and I couldn't be happier about how he's doing. And a lot of that I attribute to, first of all, James Hillman,

and then to what Maladoma did for us. He passed away, unfortunately, a couple of years ago. Well, I think one of the things that's kind of cruel, especially if you're seeing somebody who's very rigidly cognitive therapist or people who are more intellectual not intellectual uh but people who are very into the ego is all that we are is they don't understand the disease and they start to treat it like it's a disease and pathologize it and they debate you that this isn't real this isn't real and i mean these are experiences that yeah we didn't pick the time. Yeah, they're kind of inconvenient. Yeah, it's psychosis, but

they're an opportunity to see our emotional self and our wounds and things that we need to heal. And so a ton of times, you know, somebody who's been on antipsychotics for a long time and needs to stay on antipsychotics to treat the, you know, just have a normal pace of life with schizophrenia when they come to therapy. You know, the psychotic episode's bad. I'm afraid of it and all this stuff. I did all these things I'm embarrassed about. Why did I do that? But then when you say, okay, no, but these, this is symbols, let's treat this more like a dream. You know, what is that telling you? And then all of a sudden it becomes part of me that it's like, oh yeah, you know,

I do need to indulge this part of myself and I do need to be afraid of this thing, or I, this is what I'm longing to create, you know, there. And then it becomes less of a scary thing. Um, but unfortunately so few, uh, medical professionals do that. And, and it is because they don't do it and they debate you and say oh this is irrational or this is a you know there's not a dragon in your basement whatever instead of just sitting with the image and the emotion even if you can't sit with the image or you don't know what it means you must feel so scared that this stuff's going on you know let's sit with we'll sit with that then when when you lean into that kind of cognitive therapy with with a psychosis what

happens is the person isn't going to listen to anything. They go off their medication. And they're not going to listen to anything that you have to say because they know that you're not respecting this part of them. And that's why the outcomes so much of the time are so poor for any kind of psychotic disorder. Yeah, you know, and I wrote about it in that book about James Hillman, what he told me one day.

He was never my therapist, what he told me one day. He was never my therapist, but he tuned in to what was going on with myself and my son back in 2004, I think. And he said, you know, his advice was, hey, you know, because I kept trying, I'd get embarrassed and I'd have things he'd say. And he said, you know, just quit trying to correct him, you know, just go treat him like a normal person. Nobody treats him normally. Of course, he doesn't want to go to therapies and wants to go on medication because he's not treated like a crazy person all the time. So just, you know, tell him about your life. And, and once I tell you, once I started doing that, it changed our relationship completely. So I've always be grateful to James Hillman for that. Just that one day of,

of advice. And I, you know, I want to say for that, just that one day of advice. And, you know, I want to say about this, I mean, what is schizophrenia really? I mean, nobody really knows. And one thing about that I learned from my son is that he's in tune with other worlds. Yeah, it is such a relationship to the unconscious, such a wide gate, that you lose the ability to tell the difference between what's happening right now in the room with me, what I can imagine, what my emotions are symbolizing, and all this old genetic imagery. You can't tell the difference. You're just kind of in this collage of stuff.

And then people are telling you that it's bad, you know, and you're not, you're going to reject and have a negative reaction to that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, all of a sudden he would be drawing these geometric patterns and he would be writing in hieroglyphic symbols and where's

that coming from? It is something very ancient. But they always have such a powerful intuition that is healing them if you get them in touch with it, you know? Exactly. And I think that, thank God, that actually was able to happen. I wouldn't have come to it myself, I don't think. But, you know, because in African cultures, other indigenous cultures, the shaman is often considered, the schizophrenic, so-called, is actually considered a shaman in often considered the schizophrenic so called is actually

considered a shaman in many ways because he can tune in he or she can tune in to things about people and situations that are really connected to ancestral forces, beings

perhaps that really exist that most of us don't acknowledge or see, but they do. And it forces a recognition in that way that, I mean, I'm so grateful for it. You know, it's something that I would never, as a rational investigative journalist, have come to. Well, I think that, like, the difference in more of a shamanic healing instead of the way that we conceive of medicine here,

and it's take a pill, germ theory, if this is wrong, then this is the thing that you do it. The way that shamanic healing works is that somebody who is out of control of their experience, you come in and you don't treat, you don't control, you just hold the experience for them. Yeah. And then they see you holding their experience and then they learn to hold their own experience. And that's and that's empowering.

That's what you need. And I think the people who I've met that have been damaged by being pulled out of the psychosis. It was that they were actually enjoying this thing and it's scary to the people around them, but something has kind of opened up, you know, and they're in this world and they're trying to figure out the experience. And all of a sudden you're pulled out of that, you know, with an antipsychotic, which, you know, has some benefits, too much psychosis. Jung said that the ego becomes perforated, that it can no longer kind of keep the unconscious at bay if it's been submerged too much. You know, now we have some evidence that there is damage to the prefrontal cortex. Too many psychotic breaks, you do start to lose overall functioning, which is why

it's important to recognize the prodromal period and get on the medication early. But, you know, the people who really were trying to heal themselves basically, and then the medication is pulling them out of that and had damage because they're not done, you know, and they feel like something's taken from them and they have this, um, you know, need to go back and confront it and integrate it. Um, and one of the, it's interesting with schizophrenia too. I mean, I'm not advocating for this, but you know, people will kind of heal themselves and age out of it. You know, there's a lot of risk to that. You're not advocating for that, but if you have a lot of wealth and money or you're kind of enabled, you know, John Nash is a, is a case for that. He, if I'm not really right, he never really took the medication.

He just kind of went around, um, you know, his Ivy league school until he slowly was like, oh, okay, I'm all right. And towards the end of his life, he school until he slowly was like oh okay i'm all right and towards the end of his life he said that psychosis was kind of a a retreat and an escape from these overwhelming forces of logic that he was trying to live in and he felt more integrated yeah that took 10 years you know that was that's a great story it's very true and yeah that's happened with with my son too i mean he's in his 40s now, you know. So he is. And James Huffman, too, told me that this often happens, that people age out, you know, not completely.

But I think that I've certainly seen that. And at the same time, Franklin's still very intuitive, you know. And I mean, I was amazed in the past of how he could read my mind, you know, sometimes. They understand. A lot of times, like really heightened intuition, they're not even really listening to what you're saying because they already know what you're thinking better than you do. You know, somebody says, I want this thing, but they know what you need.

And then they end up in therapy and, you know, they end up doing therapy, you know, you end up making this podcast. But yeah, well, it's fascinating. I mean, it's also a very tough road. I will certainly say. And I wrote the book. The Left Hand Path is what Joseph Campbell called that journey. Yeah.

Yeah. And I wrote the book because I wanted people to know, well, who could relate to the painful experience, but also could realize there are other ways of approaching this and other ways to look at it. And also even to find, you know, not necessarily a cure, but something that would be very helpful and useful in the kinds of ways that you're talking about as well. So I hope that that's the case. And yeah, the book, two editions came out, the paperback most recently one tells the whole story of our journey to Burkina Faso and as well as the earlier part. So I hope people will find it. I was always kind of struck when I was doing my early work

in the similarity between people with schizophrenia and people with dementia, different kinds of dementia, because there are, there is this, they're not listening to what you say as much as how you, what you feel. And they don't remember what you say a lot of the time. They remember how you made them feel, you know? So, and it's like, put your jacket on, it's cold. You know, the dementia person just sees this anger and they don't like it. You know, but a patient with dementia, when you're just like, oh, it's okay, I'm putting my jacket on. Do you see that? You know, and then all of a sudden, you're just friends and what they're saying doesn't make any sense. But they're looking and smiling and you're walking and, you know, you can tell that they're going through this thing.

And, and we just treat both of those disorders wrong. You know, you go to like the Netherlands and different countries. And, you know, the places where people with dementia live is it's like, you know, there's a shopping, there's the fake supermarket with the plastic food and you get the card and you go through and you get it. None of it's real, you know, and then, you know, you go to the bed at night and they kind of have a routine. And here it's just like you're put into a cinder block elbow with fluorescent lighting and then you're given drugs because you're not sleeping at the right time and and you're not doing this, and then you're not bathing so people bathe

you. And then just the experience is traumatic, you know, for somebody who cannot advocate for themselves. But when you let them kind of have a more empowered and naturalistic thing, you know, the outcomes are so much better, and there's so much less trauma. And I think we do both of those disorders, just a huge disservice in the way that we treat them in mass here. Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. And, and it's, it's tragic really for lots of families that that's, that's all there is. I mean, in the beginning, I didn't know if there was anything beyond, you know, just more and more medication of different kinds. I had no idea. I mean, that's what they're telling you. And

well, this will help with this and this will help with the, you know, the more and more medication of different kinds. I had no idea. I mean, that's what they're telling you. And, oh, this will help with this. And this will help with the, you know, the depression. And this one will take care of the delusions and the paranoia. And then it just kind of becomes a deadening thing. I mean, because the person itself is trying to break through to something, you know, and to live a life that is connected. And yet they're reduced to that often. And it's, I mean, we went there, you know, and it's very tough.

But there's, I'm just grateful that there's a reward on the other side, which is, you know, I talk, my son calls me all the time. We talk about what he's doing. He's always, you know, he's taking classes in welding and he's, you know, learning how to do's taking classes in welding and he's he's uh you know learning how to do various things with us he loves to work with his hands completely different than me i mean i work with my hands too and i just like so uh but he's he's involved in he has a shop out back where he builds all these unusual sculptures and so i don't always understand what

it's about but i just so appreciate that that's who he's, he's become. Yeah. Well, and that's, that's beautiful. Thank you for, thank you for sharing. Um, I mean, I wish that we had, um, you know, infinite time cause you've written about so many topics, but it seems like the environment is a pretty big one. Um, you read a lot about ecology. Um, I was curious, have you, have you ever read any of the stuff like edge of the Sacred that David Tacey writes about depth psychology and ecology? You all seem similar in that. I have not read David Tacey on that, but I've read other, you know, like eco-psychology came to the fore when Hillman was alive. And he became very involved in it himself and wrote a book, or at least an introduction with Theodore Rozak, who was the scholar who founded that.

So, yeah, he had his own, you know, very vital interest in ecology. And he was a gardener, you know, he was environment on every single issue and did two books on a book and then an updated version about climate change and the big moguls who knew everything about it 30 years ago and wouldn't do anything. Just covered it up. So, again, it's kind of exposing what's been hidden is what my one of my metier is. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a different kind of applied depth psychology, you know, going in and seeing things other people can't see and bringing it out, you know. Yeah. And then I think what Hillman emphasized, too, was to take it personally in the sense of he gave this amazing talk in Italy in 1981 on the anima mundi, the soul of the world.

And he felt that one of the big problems with conventional therapy is that all the emphasis is on yourself and your problems, what your mother did to you or your father. And there's so much wrong in the world that we can get involved in and apply psychological principles to. And let's go there. Let's turn our gaze that direction rather than just taking the inner into the outer and make that the soul's code or the soul's work. So, yeah, and I've tried to do that. I'm very involved in several personal crusades to save a fish, the Atlantic

striped bass. I wrote a book about that. And later in Mexico, the gray whales and this coral reef that was dying, and once you protected it, fish came back. It's not that big a jump. The striped bass came back. They were almost extinct. they were the greatest it was the greatest uh conservation success story in the world so it isn't even that we don't plan for it or understand it it's that we are planning for the problem that we're causing i mean i was reading that you know mitsubishi is designing these huge deep freezers

to keep stuff perfectly intact for basically, you know, more than 50 years so that they can buy these enormous cattle size cuts of salmon. So that when I mean, it's not salmon tuna, so that when the tuna are extinct, you can still auction off million dollar,

you know, blocks of sushi to these restaurants. And it's like, I mean, they're preparing for a fishery to be devastated and an animal to be extinct yeah that you could just not kill you know basically yeah isn't that the ultimate commoditization i mean projecting like that jeez i went to the some years back i was in japan for a whaling conference actually and went to the Skiji fish market where they bring all these, I mean it was one of the most horrible experiences, you know all these amazing beautiful

tuna that have been, were in there frozen up, deep frozen and ah I tell you and there aren't that many left in the water. We were just, it's appalling what we're doing to our our natural environment and the beautiful creatures that inhabit it. It pains me, and I think more people got to get involved. Yeah. Well, I kind of wish Hellman had lived long enough to see something like Brainspotting and also to live long enough to watch James Cameron's Avatar movies. It seems like that kind of paganistic that, that kind of, you know,

paganistic nature worship was something that he would really like the way that this guy could mainstream it in a way that he couldn't. And also the brain spawning is just so much of the direct experience you see Hillman longing for, but kind of failing and getting the techniques to do, you know, archetypal psychology is conceived, but never defined, you know, and not even

really practiced, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's, like you're talking about, applications of the ideas that you're working on, and I'm sure others are too. And I think that's fantastic because that's the future, right? Take the concept that was created that harkens back in time to the Renaissance and the Greeks. And then you move it forward into a way that maybe people in our age can benefit.

Well, you know, and I think, you know, insurance comes in in the 80s and academia gets corporatized and healthcare gets corporatized and they just say, we're not going to mess around with trying to feel anything. We're basically just going to give some people ego management strategies and psycho education and call it cbt and if that doesn't work give them a pill and that that's what we do and now the pendulum is swinging the other way where these companies are like wait a minute maybe paying for band-aids for an entire lifetime is not as good of a strategy as just going and healing the wound and now we're more interested in trauma and somatic psychology and the body brain you know the you know the the beneath language part of us is what is causing trauma so just talking about

and analyzing it is maybe fun or connects you to your therapist or helps you relationally but it doesn't help you get the stuff out of the body and regulate the stuff and cognitive therapy is fine you know it's like sailing a boat but the best person who the best sales person cannot um or not salesperson the best sailor cannot sail a sailboat through a hurricane okay you got to clear the water first before you can build those skills yeah and it's frustrating to me because i mean i'm not kidding it's the same authors it is the same doctors on these research papers that for years are laughing at you and saying none of this is evidence-based and you know cognitive behavioral therapy is the gold standard just which they say that just because it's easy to research it because you can turn every part of it into a number

because there's no room for intuition and there's no trust for the clinician and there's no room for the patient's experience um because you can turn everything into a number they research a lot and then they're like oh wow the only thing we researched looks like it researched pretty well. They're writing these papers about Jung and the unconscious is not real and repressed memory doesn't exist. And this idea of somatic psychotherapy and mindfulness space, whatever is not as effective as medication and that there is no unconscious. And then now they're publishing this stuff to get on them this new academic trend. And they're all like, oh, there's three kinds of memory,

primary, secondary, and tertiary. And secondary and tertiary are beneath the cognitive, or implicit memories inside. It's like, oh, you mean the fucking unconscious. Yeah, really. Right, right. No, that's fantastic fantastic that is great to hear because making the one day i'm gonna drink enough red wine to write them an email but uh i try and

stay off the radar of the people who control the boards in the profession so well that's good i'm glad you can because otherwise you know i mean let's face it who's making money off a lot of these therapies is uh is the pharmaceutical industry that uh you know, I mean, let's face it, who's making money off a lot of these therapies is the pharmaceutical industry that, you know, is making billions of dollars and they don't give a damn. I mean, well, maybe some of them do, but I don't want to totally judge the industry. But in general, it's not right. That's the entire emphasis.

And we need to, I think think what's happening we're beginning to explore making the unconscious conscious you know in new ways and uh and that's going to help a lot of a lot of people get to what's what what they need there's a lot of um one of the things that's like sad to me is there's it happens like in the kind of the the uh not quite new age but a lot of the men's movements and kind of like depth psychology movements in the 80s and then in the 90s about technology um but you go back and you listen to these recordings of people and stuff and they're all like oh the ideas of depth psychology are being permeating culture and it's going to take over politics and there'll be a new political reality and we're going to be able to get you're listening to it in 2020 just like uh i'm so sorry i'm glad you're dead

and then you've got uh you know with uh technology there was all this talk about like well you know the internet um is going to be this big force that's going to bring the truth to everybody because the government controls the news but when the internet you can just log on and get the truth directly then you people will use the truth to make better political decisions and politics will be fixed and it's like no people don't want to change their behavior we are machines built to not to insulate ourselves from change and so what the internet did was it let me log on and look up 500 data points to support anything that I wanted to believe.

You don't know what. Climate change is taking a bit of a stick in the hat. Wherever you want to go, you don't know what to believe anymore. So you go for things that reinforce your own prejudices in the first place. That's not really a thing, you know? Anyway, it's a

pleasure talking to you about all this and finding out more about what's going on today because I haven't been able to keep up with all that. And it sounds good to me what you're doing. Well, what's sad to me is that the people who know the trauma now are in the forefront of that. They don't know Jung. And the people who know jung don't know this so it's like i sound crazy to everybody which is you know probably my mission in life you know when you do color based therapy and eye movement therapy and whatever it's like i'm just kind of leaning into everyone's going to think i'm a crank unless they come in and actually try it but uh you know it's one needs the other you know we have this ability to treat trauma now but we don't we have such a poor ability to conceive it and you know there's so many people that are

excellent practitioners that do brain spawning somatic therapy and they're like i do a video or i do a podcast and they're like the worksheets we have for free on the side and like people are like well yeah but how did you get this? What did this come from? Who trained you in this? And it's just like, this is a hundred years old. You know, this is,

you know, you, you need the gestalt therapy. You need you, you know, to be able to conceive of this stuff because you're now messing around with implicit memory and you have no language for it. You don't know what it is.

Yeah. You're calling it a trigger and trauma response or a, you know, trauma bond or a somatic, whatever. trigger and trauma response or a, you know, trauma bond or a somatic, whatever. And those are just so hollow, you know, it's such a poor description of the thing.

And the people that are like, well, how did you, so many people are like, what is this? What are you doing? And it's like, it's not mine.

Like, I just know how to read, you know, and I'm curious. And I kept reading CBT and being like, this sucks. Like, I don't get it.

You know, like, I don't, I don't get it. You know, I don't know. If people want to buy the book, is there a place that they could buy it that would give you more of a cut? Is there, you know, just Amazon or, you know, any of the places? And we'll definitely include links to everything that you would like us to link to in the show notes, too. Yeah, thanks a lot. I guess Amazon is the place where everybody goes, including me these days, for shopping. So, yeah, it's available on Amazon. All my books are.

Skyhorse has been my publisher for the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years now. And they're really good, and you can order the book from them. Hopefully, you know, you can find it through your local bookstore or certainly order it through a local bookstore. Yeah, so it's The Life and Ideas of James Hillman. There's volume one, two, and three coming up. So, and then My Mysterious Son,

which we've talked about today is available. I would urge people to get the paperback rather than the hardcover because it brings the story up to date if this subject is of interest to them. Do you release your books through Audible? Yeah, the publisher does that, yes. They do? Yeah, that's good. So much of the books that I'd love patients to read, the ones that they end up reading, are always the ones that are available on Audible because everybody is so busy and people, you know, that's just how they get their, their literature. Yeah. You listen in the car, you know, whatever. Well, they're working

all the time. It's, I don't think it's not liking reading. It's just the material reality is that you don't have the time to crack the book. Exactly. Is there anything that we don't get to that you feel like is important? You know, I really thank you so much for sitting down with us. It's wonderful to meet you. And if there's ever anything I can do, reach out. And just I really appreciate it. But is there anywhere that this doesn't go that you think is important or any way you want to? Gosh, I don't know. I mean, I think we've had a really interesting wide-ranging discussion with a lot of things that uh i've been through and are of interest to me and and uh psychology

is certainly one of them depth psychology and and uh you know the diseases that strike people and so um so yeah it's great i really really appreciate it. And maybe we'll do it again at some point. Yeah. Yeah, we'd love to have you on if you want to come on with another topic. You know, you've got a body of work where we could have a whole nother conversation another time. But for now, please check out volume two and volume one if you haven't read it. You know, James Heldman, The Life and Times. Life and Ideas of James Heldman. Life and Ideas. And there are a lot of other books, too. I mean, on Amazon, it's pretty easy to sort by author.

Scroll through and look at it. There's a lot of heart in all of Dick's books. And they can go to my website. I have a website, dickrussell.org. And that has my biography and all that kind of stuff on it. So I don't keep it up as much as I should. But anyway, it's there. Okay.

Well, we'll link to your website, but anyway, it's there. Okay. Well, we'll link to your website and we'll link to your Amazon store. And then I thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking with you. Thanks to you, Joel. Thanks a lot for having me. To fix under cancelling star Hermes and Aphrodite you