The Taproot Podcast - ⌨️Interview with John Beebe on the MBTI Typology - www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Read More at https://gettherapybirmingham.com/blog/   A popular lecturer in the Jungian world, Beebe has spoken on topics related to the theory and practical applications of Analytical psychology to professional and lay audiences throughout the United States and around the world. He has been especially active in introducing training in Jungian psychology in China. Beebe is the founding editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, now called Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.[2] He was the first American co-editor of the London-based Journal of Analytical Psychology. Beebe has also published in The Chiron Clinical Series, Fort Da, Harvest, The Inner Edge, Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Psychological Perspectives, The Psychoanalytic Review, Quadrant, Spring, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, Theory and Psychology, and Tikkun among others. He has contributed book chapters to The Anne Rice Reader, The Cambridge Companion to Jung, From Tradition to Innovation, House, Humanizing Evil, Initiation, Jungian Perspectives on Clinical Supervision, New Approaches to Dream Interpretation, Post-Jungians Today, Psyche & City, The Psychology of Mature Spirituality, Same-Sex Love, The Soul of Popular Culture, and Teaching Jung. With Donald Sandner, Beebe is the author of "Psychopathology and Analysis",[3] an article on Jungian complex theory used in many training programs, and with Thomas Kirsch and Joe Cambray the author of "What Freudians Can Learn from Jung".[4] He is the author of the book Integrity in Depth, a study of the archetype of integrity, and of Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness. 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, and you're listening to the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast. Today I sat down with Dr. John Beebe and talked about clinical applications of the MBTI, or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. He is one of the foremost scholars on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in the world, and also the originator of the eight-function type model, or the the BB model, which lets you do some things with shadow types. The topic is very broad, and if you're completely unfamiliar with Myers-Briggs typology, this may not be the place to start. But if you're interested in the Myers-Briggs and wondering how to integrate it into your clinical practice or look for it in cases

with your patients, this may be the podcast for you. I will go ahead and roll that interview now. That boy needs therapy. Lie down on the couch. Frontier Psychiatry. Yeah, wonderful. And so I really, really appreciate your time. We're kind of a smaller clinic, and so the podcast is a fun way for me to talk to people that are inspirational and groundbreaking. But then also, you know, you do SEO for this group of therapists.

And then, you know, I grew up listening to your talks, you and Hillman. And why I get this huge folder of Jungian analysts giving talks throughout the, you know, seventies through the nineties and Donald Kohlshed. And the MBTI stuff was really fascinating to me because I could, I could see how it worked. But when I hear you in these meetings with other people, I can tell how much more naturally, you know, they're doing this math in real time where I have to sit down and look at it.

And it makes me feel like I'm in high school or something, you know, trying to do math again. So I told you in the email, I felt a little bit like you know salieri could see how great mozart was and i'm a dance but he didn't have the ability to do it so you know you'll have to be patient with um you know my understanding of it and is is obviously not as much as uh as much as yours uh But the goal of this... I'm just working with any skill you talk to someone

who has been practicing it for a while. Well, I'd love the BB model or the implications of that to be better known. And I think a lot of the new trauma therapists who are looking at personality style and communication analysis, they're using some of these things, you know, and the language of that would be really neat to bring to them. So I know, you know, I don't want to make you walk through all of it, but if you could maybe just give like a little bit of overview of the theory of

the MBTI, because I think it's not very well understood. People see it as like a horoscope or something. Well, I think the problem even MBTI has created for us is, in a way, as so many other things are a problem of language, people have a tendency to talk about personality types. And personality is something that any working therapist has to be interested in. I got interested in types among other things because I found that I had to treat personality disorders as a psychiatrist.

In other words, we had the neurotics and the psychotics, and then we had all the people that were in the middle, and that turned out to be literally all of us. But everyone has some certain oddness to their personality, just as we have an oddness to our fingerprint. And part of that is a certain normal tendency to psychopathology, which under certain circumstances becomes quite abnormal. So it's very tempting to turn typology into a personality theory. And so very frequently, people talk about personality types. But what Jung had in mind, and I think he was, after all, the person who found this model that he created, the typology model that he gave in psychological types, where he eventually, at the very end in chapter 10, makes it very clear that he had eight function types. And then we have to always ask types of what? And they were not types of personality. They were types of consciousness.

They were like, in physics, it's called the brilliant particles, the brilliant particles of consciousness in all of us. And the only question is how they arrange themselves. Now, Jung started with a two-function model. Then by the time he got to psychological types, he had a four-function model, which was quite hard-earned. Try to remember that history. Here's a man who is trying to study what he called, but even this wasn't original, complexes. There was already a man named Theodor Zeehan who had used this term, and that was partly being built on a very famous old psychologist

named Wundt, W-U-N-D-T, who had pretty much established the basis of complex theory. And then Theodor Zeehan, Berlin psychiatrist starts talking about complexes and these were what got translated as feeling toned complexes they're really affect tone complexes and Jung was thought this was the key and his chief boiler he was a young psychiatrist. He got out of medical school. He got a great job as the chief assistant to the greatest psychiatrist in Europe, who was Uwe Bleuler, B-L-E-U-L-E-R, in Zurich. And Bleuler was very interested in learning if there was a possible psychology to the psychoses.

So Jung used the Zien theory and used the word association test to identify complexes because they would be these delayed reaction times. And he began to see that, yes, indeed, people do have different complexes. And he started talking about them. And he said there's a complex of injury. People get excited if they think that someone is trying to hurt them. There's a complex around sexuality. There's a complex around power and so forth and so on. So he started to analyze.

But then he found that trying to experimentally identify through slow reaction times and strange reactions to 100 stimulus words that despite that there were very different kinds of people there was the man that came into the consulting room and he would stand absolutely at attention as if on military drill of course jung was wearing a white coat and using a stopwatch and a galvanometer to see the skin responses, the electrical skin responses. And so the man would step stiffly to attention and look straight ahead and try not to give the exact association to the word. And so that was one kind of person. And then there was the other kind of person who was usually a woman would say, oh, look at that. Oh, you poor man, you've had to be sitting in this hot room all day long. And oh, but you have beautiful salmon color of the test. How lovely, that must make you feel better. So he had this idea that there were two types of people. One was what he called the person who was constantly evaluating and the other kind of person who was rather rigidly trying to think.

And so he had two types. He thought one was extroverted and one was introverted and one was feeling and one was thinking and one was a man and one was a woman. So he had logos and eros and thinking and feeling and extroversion and introversion all mixed up with each other. But he got very excited about that. And so that was the original two types.

Then he realized as he got into it that there were other functions of consciousness. And so it took him almost from the time he first identified a type problem in the way people orient to anything, it took him quite a long time, almost 12 years before he had four functions of consciousness. So one of them, intuition, which was probably his dominant function, had to be made for him by someone else because he didn't think it was even a function of consciousness he thought intuition was the unconscious for a long time and he got and this you know for a long time he thought an archetype and intuition were virtually the same thing so he so finally by 1919 he's got a he's got actually this book and as he's and what he's trying to do is help people realize that we do have two systems,

a conscious and an unconscious, and we have a tendency to become one-sided. So he then wanted to see how we become one-sided. And he said, it's because we use some consciousnesses preferentially, and that puts other consciousnesses as it were in the unconscious. And so he found that very interesting, and he developed this theory of psychological types. And toward the end, he realized that there are four function types and two attitude types. So the four function types were thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition, and two attitude types, extrovert and introvert. Now, that really caught on, the second more than the first.

But what got lost is types of what? The title of his book was Psychological Types. And then when it was published in English, something perhaps more pretentious was added by the English translator H.G. Baines, who later became the first Jungian analyst in England. But for a long time, he was in Zurich as a kind of chief associate or chief assistant to

Jung. And H.G. Baines added the psychology of individuation, psychological types or the psychology of individuation. So Jung felt that and let that title go on his book when it got published in English in 1923, that the development of personality itself depended upon making room for functions of consciousness that were more pushed down into the unconscious, but could become conscious access points between conscious and unconscious. So there's a lot of emphasis, and was a lot of emphasis, on the so-called inferior function, because that was the access point to the unconscious. And then there was an idea that, well, because that was the access point to the unconscious. And then there was an idea that, well, if it's an access point to the unconscious, it's a kind of bridge

to the unconscious. And this came up quite early for Jung in the late development of type, that that would be that inferior function in myself being being a rabid, extroverted, intuitive, that inferior function is an introverted sensation function. You just have to watch me, follow me around as I misplace everything to see that I really do have inferior introverted sensation, despite years of self-awareness and work on the problem, it stays low and inferior. So we have in John Beebe an extroverted intuitive consciousness that loves to pick up on emergent things, particularly in what's happening with other people. Hence, I enjoy and am passionately interested in doing psychotherapy where things emerge all the time. That's what psychotherapy is, a set of emergent phenomena

that Freudian analysts would call it insights. But that constant emergence of awareness is very exciting to me. It's as beautiful as to a gardener watching flowers bloom. And so I am still as in love with it as I was when I decided to be a psychiatrist for sure on my 19th birthday. And so I've been at this now, pursuing this path for a very, very long time. And I found Jung very compatible with what a psychiatrist

who's interested in psychotherapy can do. There aren't a ton of psychiatrists interested in psychotherapy anymore, at least not in Almeida. They've moved away to some degree, although all of them, I think they've become guilty about doing psychotherapy as in their real work. But of course, it is every psychiatrist's work to try to engage with the patient, understand the patient, and see what's emerging. So Jung came up with this very important idea that the inferior function, like the superior function, are both functions of consciousness, not types of people.

But all types are complexes, just as that original work he was doing on complexes taught him. He called them type complexes or function complexes or attitude complexes. These days, thanks to Richard Thompson, we can speak of them as function attitudes. Some people would rather call them attitude functions. It doesn't really matter as long as you get both attitude and function and realize they're the same thing. So we know technically

that there's no thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition in and of itself. It only is extroverted or introverted thinking, feeling, sensation or intuition. But again, what are these? And these are complexes of consciousness. That was really what Jung was. Jung was starting as a psychiatrist to find the complexes of the unconscious. But what he finally learned is that there are also complexes of consciousness.

He did learn early that every, it was always Jung's wonderful ability to see the point of things, to see why, the why of things. So anyone who's been around psychopathology, working with, these days, everyone is interested in traumatic complexes i gather you've done a lot of work with that but there are many many kinds of complexes well i mean i think the mbti though there's you know there's trauma with a capital t but also there's something equalizing about that that you know there's eight modes of thinking well that's where i'm getting is that and we're all bad at thinking a certain way.

We'll have a complex. Exactly, exactly, Joel, when you're thinking a certain way. Now, let's go to... When you develop a complex that seems to be an unconscious hang-up, the Latin word for complex means

not, and it often takes the form of an not something that because it's so touchy you you can't do it like stage fright for example like i will not i mean and i know people who deeply in love would rather not get married because the thought of having to stand in front of an audience of people in the church and say the vows terrifies them so much. So now we think of complexes as something hanging us up and keeping us from doing something. But at the heart of every complex, as everyone who works with it, is that the complex knows something. The complex has a purpose. It has a reason for being. It was Jung who saw point of it, the point of the upset, the point of it. In other words, let's say the person who doesn't want to get married because to get married, you have to stand in front of an audience. Yes, these days, that same person was likely to take propanolol so they can get through the wedding ceremony.

But what about the possibility that the complex is telling the person that marriage not to put the fear of facing the audience but the fear of giving the audience what it wants a happy bride when she's actually deeply ambivalent about marriage itself not necessarily about the man she's marrying but about the institution i have sometimes felt that if we had a completely honest society, just like a pack of cigarettes, the marriage license would say, warning, this ceremony could be harmful to your mental health. Can you imagine if we actually said that? No one would ever say that. It would rain on the complete parade of love, romance, and marriage, and families, and so forth. But in fact, behind that reluctant bride's stage fright might be a lot of concern about the ceremony itself,

and not because of the ceremony and the speech, but because of what it connotes and all the history of marriage and all of the limitations of marriage, that those could be explored profitably. And then you discover, well, the complex was smart. The complex knew something. That doesn't mean that she should never get married. It doesn't mean the complex is the only thing, but one needs to make room for that. And frankly, I think people shouldn't marry until they've explored all the things, all the reasons why they shouldn't marry, if you see what I mean.

And that's where Jung found the purposiveness of any of our complexes. So in the purpose is consciousness. Now, as he got more interested in consciousness, he also got more interested in types. And that's why the 1921 book that everyone was expecting, well, Jung has separated from Freud, and now we're going to get Jung's theory of the unconscious at last,

as opposed to Freud's. And then he comes out with this book, Psychological Types. And he had the wisdom to try to see what normal consciousness is like before he went any further with the exploration of all the abnormal ways in which consciousness hides through these unconscious complexes. And so he was adding to the unconscious complexes the conscious complexes. And he found indeed that all of us have eight of these. And these are the eight function types of consciousness. And it's really on that work that I particularly have built. And there were Jungians before me in

Zurich. There was a man named Meyer and also a woman named Marie-Louise von Franz. And she wrote this amazing book or monograph, you could say, on the inferior function that was paired with an equally amazing work by James Hillman on the feeling function. That book particularly taught me how far you could go with thinking about, in her case, the inferior function from the standpoint of eight types of inferior function, eight types of inferior consciousness, and what its effect was on personality and on functioning. So it's the effect of consciousness on personality rather than types of personality the effects of typology on personality became my uh my goal and to see how far you could get

as a psychiatrist by taking the different types of consciousness seriously, giving them their say, giving them room to see, and then see what pathology is left and how much you yourself may have pathologized perfectly normal consciousness in the person or how much they may have pathologized their own consciousness because in their family or culture or nation or school or business, it wasn't recognized as a valid consciousness, but was already scapegoated and treated as something you don't get into. And so for me, it's all been about how far you can get by understanding the reservoir of consciousness in each of us. And so to do that, you know, I take it as seriously as someone teaching in a music school and a conservatory of music would teach solfege where you have to teach the students do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do.

And so it seems to me that teaching the eight functions of consciousness is the whole point of starting to get into the music of of of of of the personality which is the consciousness personality can evince otherwise the like like without consciousness uh the conscious aspect of the typology the psyche would be sort of like a noise. It would be like someone banging at a piano and producing discordant sounds. But consciousness is a beautiful thing and it can provide for personality.

What the eight notes and provided for the Western music, you getzart and beethoven out of it i mean it's wonderful so that's what so my life's work is to try to see what we can do with with consciousness and what happens to our complexes when we also understand that they're en route to this very consciousness young is talking about. So that's what I've done. Thinking of the types as types of consciousness, thinking of the types of consciousness as brilliant particles and that they have functions, thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition, but they also have attitudes, extroverted or introverted. So you get the function attitudes of consciousness and to try to learn how they arrange themselves, what they are intrinsically and what the place in the psyche in which they happen to develop does to how they express themselves.

That's been my entire work. My model is just an expression of that and there's 15 chapters of my book energies and patterns psychological type are like 15 lights on the subject you could read them in any order most people read read a chapter they like and go to another and you can read the book twice you can read it backwards it it will it's just a, just a series of lights on the subject of what happens when you think that way, when you think in terms of what consciousness is in different people and how it's distributed. And so the eight function model is a self organizing system,

a pattern of, of manifestation of a rather beautiful thing, which is consciousness. And ideally a rather beautiful thing, which is consciousness. And ideally, a good psychotherapy fosters it. And so working on a particular thing that someone is hung up on, or a particular complex, a particular injury, or a particular issue.

And I have written about complexes with Donald Sonder, the book Jungian Analysis, Volume 2. Rather, I shouldn't say volume, I should say in the second edition of Jungian Analysis, which was originally produced in 1981 by Murray Stein. And then in 1995, had a second edition, and Donald Sander, S-A-N-D-E-R-N-I, and Murray Stein's invitation for the first volume, first edition, had written Psychopathology and Analysis,

and I revised it for Don and me. I did the editorial revision of the second version for the second edition of Murray's book. That's the one I hope people will read and buy, and I'm happy to share with you a copy of it, Joel, because there I try to show how typology figures into psychopathology. And I make the link explicitly between complex theory

and typology in there. And I'm using the eight-function attitude model that I've developed there to do that. So I'd like you to know that's where I put as a psychiatrist everything I learned as a psychiatrist and I did co-author a book called Psychiatric Treatment Crisis Clinic and Consultation in 1975 and in

1995 I did a Jungian piece on psychopathology and analysis. So there you'll see precisely how my work as a psychiatrist with patients with complexes that were really causing them lots of trouble is informed by type theory and how a type theory can explain some of what happens to people when functions of consciousness do not support their consciousness, but actually undermine it. So it gets into the entire question of the shadow in Jungian psychology and how the types of the shadow can really bedevil us. And so that's where I made that connection. And I recommend that to anyone who wants to see the link

to clinical work directly. It's implied in all my writing, but it's very explicitly laid out there as an effect, complex theory for clinical work in which typology figures largely. So that I advise anyone who's really interested in studying my work as it's linking to the daily practice of psychotherapist working with difficult things. I think you'll see how I make the link. Yeah, I've read a lot of yours

and a lot of Mark Hunsinger's books. Was that C.A. Meyer, you said, did work with typology? C.A. Meyer, that's right. It's in a book called Personality that he wrote or did you ever encounter karen horn eyes um you know attachment styles i don't know if you ever saw those i think karen horn eye is a wonderful figure and the answer is as far as I know, Karen Horney was an analysis in Berlin, I guess, with Carl Abraham. But he was a psychiatrist who pretty much after Freud and Jung split took over the role that Jung had held of the trusted, that Freud most trusted. psychoanalytic training in the psychoanalytic, how can I put it? Orthodoxy is the simplest way to say it that was reigning in New York psychiatry in the 1950s.

When Karen Horney came to America, she moved strongly away from Abraham's extremely rigid model of psychoanalysis should be practiced and what its theoretical base was. And so she became what was called a neo-Freudian. So the work I know of her is because I had a chance, a woman in China translated her book on conflicts. I want to call it,

Our Neurotic Conflicts, but that's not her title. Let me look and see what her title is. You may know this book. It's just wonderful book. This book should be read by anyone someone in China translated this

and I wrote a forward to it our inner conflicts that book is coming out eventually but this was published as I recall, in 1945. feel like you're right in the consulting room with someone coming to therapy as people come to therapy with a whole set of defenses and a self-organization, which almost they've come to you to get over and to see through. So you probably have done much more work than I,

and I don't know her specific work on attachment styles. But when I read this book, I felt this woman has been in my office. She's a remarkable writer. I mean, she knows what we deal with every day. And in a way that, and whether you're Freudian or Jungian, I think you could benefit or anybody else. There are plenty of Adlerians, whether they know it or not, and many see what we're talking about. And if you see what we're talking about, how amazing that both a false self,

which he's really describing, but also the great internal pressure to get out of that false self and the true self that might emerge can be understood typologically. And what a miracle it is when it happens. In this book, she's more good at showing what it looks like when you're not there as to what it looks like when you start to be there. The typology allows me to say more

clearly what the defensive organization looks like, particularly when the shadow complexes are truly in shadow, that is unconscious, and what it looks like when there's a kind of integration of an authentic self-organization. So what she does is tell all the ways in which that doesn't happen before it does happen, which is what every therapist has to deal with. The final chapter is conclusion of neurotic conflicts. But one of the things she shows is how both extroversion and introversion are used defensively. So she has a chapter called moving toward people. And she has a chapter called moving away from people. She also has a chapter called moving against people.

Those are the three styles, neurosis and human growth. She talks about the origin in childhood. All of those could be understood as what happens when types of consciousness with extroverted or introverted attitudes are used as

defenses of the self rather than as actual emanations and realizations of the self rather than as actual emanations and realizations of the self. And so what I feel my work on shadow complexes, and on the four, we have four types of personality for function types for function attitudes, personality that constitute our dominant, auxiliary, tertiary, and inferior function, and a kind of marvelously seductive sense of wholeness,

which four gives us. But just because of that degree of differentiation of consciousness, we have those same four functions used with the opposite attitude, creating complexes of the unconscious, unless we make them conscious. So that like every other analyst, I'm dealing all the time with what one Jungian analyst called defenses of the self. And I'm trying to help the person be less possessed by defenses of the self, and more adequately able to defend themselves by being themselves by being able to use

their native and natural four functions of consciousness, with full awareness of everything they leave out so that the complexes don't have to constantly compensate from within to restrain them it's almost like our neuroses tend to be like a leash on the dog that wants to run off with it's what it thinks is the right thing to do. The neurosis or the shadow functions that create the neurosis are trying to down boy, restrain us to some degree so that we don't go off the rails. When you make that more conscious and you actually see all the consciousness that's in the unconscious and listen

to it usually the symptoms start to go away and there's a great feeling of wholeness that is not seductive of four but it's the it's the it's the balanced wholeness of four conscious functions and four shadows to that that we heed so that we don't just get too unbalanced. Now, I don't know how much I've done just already to be one-sidedly John Beebe with his extroverted intuition and introverted thinking and his tertiary extroverted feeling and introverted thinking and is tertiary extroverted feeling as inferior introverted sensation. But at least I'm aware that there's another world

that belongs to people who have dominant introverted intuition or that have auxiliary extroverted thinking or that have tertiary introverted feeling or that have inferior extroverted sensation. And that other personality is there too in me. And it's going to give me troubles if I get too caught up in being my supposed self and leave too much of that out. At least I'm aware of it.

I remember you had a talk that I listened to a long time ago about your dream changing. There was a laundromat owned by a Chinese couple that you would visit and dream. A laundrette, a laundrette, not a laundromat. A real laundrette where she actually was there receiving the laundry, washing it, and folding it. That was very important. She represented my introverted sensation. She was a Chinese woman named Peggy Wu, who I lived in real life,

three blocks from the old Victorian I was living in in San Francisco. And for various reasons that say everything about my inferior function, I had a nice house, but I didn't have laundry facilities in it. So I took my laundry. I loved taking my laundry because she would bring it back to me in order. I mean, everything would be very neatly packaged. And

in San Francisco, there are a lot of Asian people and that have coming to America as immigrants, restaurants and laundries were very, very popular and they're very, very relatively inexpensive. So it probably wasn't cost effective and a more practical person would put in a washer and dryer as I now have and I'm my own laundry person now. But she was a critical figure for me because things and objects and were a perfect chaos for this extroverted intuitive man I mean he was just a constant creator of what could be called litter and mess and the idea of taking my laundry to her and having it come back neatly packaged and all folded just for me there was something the only word that you can use is Jung's word numinous n-u-m-i-n-o-u-s which he got from a book called the idea of the holy it has the nod of the god

to it there's something sacred about it. So I found that whole thing of taking my laundry to Peggy Wu. But when I dreamed about her, she was a poor woman. And she was bitter and alone in her room because she didn't have anything. She had a husband who wasn't bringing his money home and he was presumably off gambling or something and doing

and just not being around and so there wasn't even any furniture and she was just alone in a room and she looked unhappy and it was an analysis with a woman at that time. I can say her name, her name was Elizabeth Osterman, O-S-T-E-R-M-A-N and she had once met Jung. She was an American psychiatrist and Jungian analyst

in the Jung Institute of San Francisco. And she was a very, very careful, serious therapist. She had originally been a virologist and then after getting a PhD in that, went on to go to medical school, become a doctor and eventually became a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst because she was so impressed by her own Jungian analysis. she said the one interpretation she really made is that the woman alone in the room was I said is that Chinese laundress Piggy Wu she doesn't have

anything now that comment really meant something to me and then I thought about the man that left her alone and didn't give her furniture. I realized that I was seriously neglecting something in myself, that that man had to be my extroverted intuitive ego and although i was not literally gambling i was constantly pursuing possibilities in the world i

mean you'd have to be an extroverted intuitive if you give an extroverted intuitive a city it's sort of dangerous because i happen to love cities and I wouldn't probably want to live in anything but a city. But San Francisco is a wonderful city and it has many bookstores and so forth and movie theaters and so forth. And I'm talking now about San Francisco of around 1972 when I would have had that dream. And in those days, when I finished my day's work, if I read in the newspaper about a book that had been published, I'd drive across the city to the bookstore to get there before it closed so I could buy the book that day or if I heard about a new movie that had opened I would hurry and go to the new movie and I'm a big movie buff so basically pursuing things that might be interesting was

taking me away from a more introverted use of time that I wasn't working. And not surprisingly, I was developing various somatic symptoms like migraine headaches and so forth, because I was really pushing the envelope of trying to pursue possibilities,

but not knowing very much about, well, you could say, folding them up and packaging them up and containing the day, something I now spend a lot of time doing at the end of every day. I always liked that you used the concept of the psychisoma in your talks.

You don't see a lot of somatic psychology in the Jungian world. And I always liked that you connected. Hillman did that too in Emotion, his first book, but you always connected these complexes to physical manifestations. And I think a lot of times that gets left out. Well, you're absolutely right. And you could talk about that theoretically, or I could talk about that theoretically or i could tell you that as i meditated on that dream

i thought okay this woman is holding the clothes and putting them in order. She doesn't wear makeup. She's rather simple in her presentation. She's extremely efficient. I said, you know, this looks like introverted sensation to me. So I had been reading young and I've been reading all the time in those days. And I said that to my analyst. She said, I couldn't agree more. She said, I think that's my inferior function. That's what she was agreeing about. Then I thought, I'm not giving introvert sensation enough. What is introverted sensation?

Well, I did know it was interested in the efficiency, and I did know that it was very good with detail, like accountants or people who keep track of very, and the folding of the laundry, the way it was put in the whole presentation of Peggy Wu, I'm sure I got her type right. And how, what a hard time I had keeping track of money and accounts. And I mean, there was a, even learning to drive a car was such an achievement for me. I didn't learn until I was 29 years old to drive a car. And I have always had a trouble with sense of direction that could be a problem with extroverted

sensation as well but particularly keeping order was really a problem for me she had the she had that down but when i thought of her as introverted sensation i thought well let's think about that that sensation i have a good thinking function, so I was using my thinking function. Sensation on the inside of the body. So I reasoned to myself on the inside of the body. Well, let's start with breathing, because that surely is an autonomic nervous system function.

And I knew that I had migraine headaches, which suggested a disturbance of the autonomic nervous system. In fact, what I felt in my migraines were part of a general sympathetic nervous system collapse that I would get into where finally my sympathetic nervous system was pulsing and the very arteries were both expanding and contracting because the pressure I was putting on the inside of my body by this constant running around and stuffing in new books

and new ideas and new movies and new books, it was just too much. And it was like, it was like addiction, but not thank heaven drug addiction, but it was a form of, it was an extroverted, intuitive inflation around the emergent world. And a lot was emerging in the early 70s. It was a very exciting time. So it was a lot, including the fact

that was in Jungian analysis, after all, and becoming a Jungian analyst. I picked up on that emerging trend ahead of most people of my generation. And so that was a big deal. But something in me was really out of kilter. And so I began to attend to my breath in the therapeutic hours. And what I noticed was I was doing a lot of Jungian reading,

and I was particularly reading the works of von Franz, and he's a phenomenal associate of Jung's, V-O-N-F-R-A-N-Z, for those who don't know her work. And her collected works are now coming out of Chiron Publications, so they're readily available. In those days, they were coming out as a series of books from spring publications. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, The Problem of the Feminine in Fairy Tales,

a marvelous book on the golden ass of apollos a roman novel a marvelous book in which he analyzes that the problem of the poor eternists that everybody every young in was reading at that time the eternal boy problem and certainly any of the roman stock types of that era, you feel like those are describing MBTI functions, you know? Or any, you know, it seems like you kind of get people who use a different, maybe a more intuitive language to talk about the same MBTI functions. Like Robert Moore towards the end of his life

is doing the four, you know, aspects of the mature masculine or something. Do you see any overlap between the MBTI and other things that people may already be using or familiar with? Well, where I came in was to see that, von Frantz seemed to think that the inferior function was the place, the doorway through which all these different archetypes come. So for me, that inferior function was introverted sensation. So I began to want to sort the archetypes. And that's what I began to do with my type work. So I found it as a very good way to understand where archetypes is where types of consciousness emerge but i wouldn't have gotten there without the work i did on on the interior of my body with

breathing so i'll stay with it for just a little longer so you can see that you sort of i realize i'm taking you through a very particular point, but imagine that I'm taking the thread through the eye of the needle right now. Okay. Put up with this tediousness a little bit. I had to too. I had to sit with my body and I had to realize what I was doing. Now, I was reading Von Franz and I adore dream. And I love to work with dreams. And I trained myself to hear what dreams are saying. And each patient that came in, and of course, people knowing you're

interested in dreams, will certainly give you dreams. That doesn't mean that you're shaping the dreams, but it became a real part of the work i did with so many people and i think to their benefit they i wasn't just laying a union trip on them they really wanted to tell me their dreams people do like to work with dreams and it does and they really help young is right about that and union analysts can get rather good at it if you do anything you do you can get rather good at it. If you do anything you do, you can get rather good at it. If you play baseball, you get good at it. If you do dream analysis all the time, you get good at it.

I mean, and I myself was writing down 30 dreams a week at that time. I was really, you know, very interested in dreams. So, but what was happening to my body when I was working with the dreams is that I was so interested in the images and the archetypes and what all the people in those days were saying. And I and others came out of that wake of all that interest that was already being laid down. I mean, Jungian analysis was just the emergent thing in the early 70s. So there were plenty. And I would write the dreams down that the patient told them. But I would also, as I would listen to dreams, and this was me noticing, taking my own dream about the Chinese laundress not having anything, and my own Jungian analyst woman saying she doesn't have anything, and me saying that's introverted sensation. I've

got to give more attention to it. So I'm paying attention to my breathing now as I'm listening to the patient. And I notice that I'm so excited about the emergent archetypal images and what they mean. And my extrovert intuition is so wrapped with attention that I'm literally listening with bated breath. And that for significant minutes of each day, as I'm in my office working with patients, I'm not even breathing, lest it disturb the thinking about the archetype and the interpretation

I could possibly deliver. So no wonder I had this terrible carbon dioxide poisoning in my body. No wonder I wasn't breathing normally. So I thought, you know, I've got to take care of her. I've got to take care of the introverted sensation anima carrying the inferior function of introverted sensation. This lonely Chinese woman. I had learned the Anima was the archetype of otherness. And so she was certainly other. She was from another part of the world.

And she was obviously different from me in every possible way, female and the opposite type, introverted sensation, or at least the inverse type to extroverted intuition so in a case i'm paying attention to my breathing i notice i'm with beta breasts i thought i am going to have to breathe while i listen and talk i can't just listen with baited breath and then deliver an interpretation i've got to get to. So I started making room for my breathing. And patients noticed.

They could hear me sighing and exhaling and inhaling. And people would comment on it. But what I found is that in that way, and this is something every therapist will find, that by carefully listening to what was going on in my body in the introverted, sensate way, I would be able to locate affects that were quite relevant to what the patient was saying

that were precisely not what was being symbolized in the dreams. Precisely not what we were talking about at the thinking intuitive level, but what was going on at the body. And I could suddenly say things to people like, I can't say why, but I'm just getting the feeling of incredible sadness right now. And the patient would just burst into tears.

And so what I found is every therapist will find that it's not what I could do brilliantly off the top of my absolutely inferior sensation. But if I'm listening to my body, I could get much closer to that, which was just as emergent and just as at the heart of the dream, but not being talked about by the client. So I became a much better therapist, much better therapist. And it was all because I had a dream, told me my introverted sensation didn't have anything. And then I, and so then I could really relate to the dirty laundry and get it cleaned and do my job. And so you can only imagine so when i discovered that i thought well if paying attention to an anima figure carrying a function of consciousness that's inferior what if all the figures that i see in the dreams my dreams and other people's dreams

each of them is holding in archetypal form, a consciousness that needs to be unpacked. And if we did that for everyone, where is it? What is it containing? And from that, I started to really passionately live the eight function model that you see me writing about now. That's where that came from and you so you're absolutely right right through the body well and you said the dream changed then you know you revisited the Peggy Sue and saw that her husband was treating her better after after I started breathing I made room for her she said uh she looked happier and uh it was and And her husband was taking her out now for ice cream. And she looked happier.

But as someone said who I told that dream to, a woman in one of my seminars, she said, well, it's going to take a lot more than ice cream to take care of her. And of course, that's true. And it was so that basically, the way I've taken care of Peggy Wu is very, very interesting. I mean, you know, she was from a very wealthy family in China. But then the Japanese invaded. Her grandfather was the richest man in her town. and he was hung by the Japanese and his body publicly displayed. So the family lost everything

as she came here. But it became a powerful symbol for you that you resonated with? I had lived in China as a child for two years when i 15 1946 and 48 and i went to an american school that was called the hillcrest american school that that had um children from um it's run by missionaries created by missionaries and it was for it was the by missionaries, created by missionaries. And it was, the classes were in English. The people who were there were people who were sons and daughters of ambassadors to China,

first secretaries to China from the diplomatic corps. My father was a military attache or an assistant military attache, and we lived in a big house in Nanking, as we called it nowadays. It would be called Nanjing, but we called it in those days Nanking. I remember walking home from school one day and passing a Chinese girl. She looked at me, this was about 1948 when I was perhaps nine years old, maybe still eight years old. I turned nine that year.

She looked at me in very slow, careful English. She was about 12 years old. She looked at me and said, you are a pig. Well, little did I know that in 1998, I would get the opportunity to be sent by the International Association of Analytical Psychology on a diplomatic mission, not unlike my father's after World War II,

to go and speak at the first International Congress of Analytical Psychology and Chinese Culture, which was organized by a man who had studied in America named Dr. Ho-Yung Shin, S-H-E-N, studied personality psychology in Illinois and gotten to know Murray Stein and had previously invited Murray Stein to come to China with Thomas Kirsch, who was at that time the president of the International Association. Now, when I'm sent, Murray Stein is the president of the organization, and Hoi Anxin is having this conference, and Murray Stein wants me to go because he knows that I'm interested in China, because I lived in China and I happened to have spent a lot of time studying the Chinese book, the I Ching. And Dr. Shen and I met in San Francisco.

Dr. Kirshen was in San Francisco and introduced me. He and I would talk about the I Ching when he was in America. So I was invited. And so I went and I gave the I Ching when he was in America. And then he, so I was invited. And so I went and I gave the keynote address there, the opening address, and also the closing address. That began work that I continue now with. I've been going to China and during the pandemic. Now I just am online. At least 10 hours of my work week is always spent with people in China. And now China has not only Jungian analysts, but it has its own

analytical society of Jungian analysts. And they, this last year in August, were finally granted the right to do their own training. So little did I know that I would one day have a chance to do something for China, and that I could do something about being a pig. And so I was, and here I was in here I was here right here here I had this chance had I and I have been teaching typology in China and it has caught on there as perhaps even nowhere else in the sense that they all learn it and when I talk to people in China or I mean I can have a person in my practice and I can say, well, that particular image in your dream seems like an image of the trickster. Oh, yes, function number seven, he says. They know my model perfectly and they use it all the time in their work on dreams and everything else.

Now, who would have ever thought that? So that that embedded in that dream and in the body problem that I had to solve in that dream was not just introverted sensation, but it turned out to open an avenue to extroverted sensation. All these trips to China, all this work and even my willingness to learn, as many intuitive men of my generation had to learn to use the internet and use it well enough so that i could do teaching both at a distance and able to go there and so um who would ever have believed that all this could come out of the Chinese laundress that didn't have anything that I took seriously

and gave her something. I mean, who knew that it would be like that? But it is like that. And this past year, I was able to do a special issue of this Journal of Analytical Psychology on psychological types. And there's a marvelous article about the correlation between the eight trigrams that are so famous in Asian cultures, that four of them are on the flag of Korea. They're called the eight Gua,

which are the essential units of the I Ching, which is a book of wisdom. And this he has made what for me is the most convincing correlation between the eight Gua and the eight function attitudes of consciousness. His name is Professor Tsai and his Chinese name is Ching Ho. So if we said his name in the English way, it would be Ching Ho Tsai, but because in China the last family name is always first, I know him as Tsai Ching Ho. Tsai Ching Ho published this in the special issue. And so

at last the link between China and typology that began with that dream has actually turned into something that I think could really be helpful, because I see now that the ancient Gua really were the first discovery of the eight billion particles that Jung found entirely differently. Jung often found that his work that came out of a completely Western source had an Asian and particularly a Chinese analog. And through his friendship with Richard Wilhelm, who is the translator, spent 25 years in China of the famous I Ching but now think of my life

there's a doctoral student in London who's been doing the definitive work on Wilhelm's entire contribution and how it fits into analytical psychology and studying Jung history.

And Sonu Shandasani, who translated the Red Book, and he's a graduate student there. And he and I can talk. I've been to Wilhelm's school in China twice. He and I have talked about what Wilhelm did, and he's been able to go into the Wilhelm archive in Leipzig, and I've been able to talk to him about that. He is the person who translated my types book into Chinese for the Chinese to have.

So we have that kind of connection. All of that phenomenal textured richness of actual thinking feeling sensation all coming out as well as my intuition out of taking that chinese wander stream seriously i just think it's amazing how much can come from just that if that isn't consciousness emerging what is i mean that's what i'm talking about that's what i'm hoping to hand like that interpretation she doesn't have anything that's what i'm really trying to do for other people if they read my stuff they'll say wait a minute maybe that could do something with me and who knows what's in that surprise package for those people. But they've also got to make it real by taking it into their own body and also their own spirit and their own soul in their own way.

That's obviously true. So that's why I took you through the eye of the needle, because I wanted you to see the crate. It really like that wonderful, it's mistranslated, but a camel going through the eye of the needle is a wonderful image in the New Testament. It's actually a camel hair, but it turns out to be the slenderest thread

turns out to be the very rope of life. It's just really interesting. It's really interesting. Well, yeah, I think there's kind of a push like in the 80s. It seems like there's a lot of, I don't know if you would call them post-Jungian or what, like models where people leave the institute, they're kind of feel constrained by just pure analysis.

We're familiar with likenold mendel that does the process therapy or sidren house stone i mean they both leave and kind of turn a yugi therapy very excited mind and so forth yeah yeah dream body or something like that his thesis is that the symbol and the dream is the is also corresponds to a place in the body at that level of i mean i would call it the subcortical brain you know is this place in the body that that level of, I mean, I would call it the subcortical brain, you know, is this place where the kind of deep unconscious mind is not cognitive. It's not thinking, you know, it's conscious, but it's not thinking in language.

And that's sort of enmeshed with muscle responses and physicality, you know, at that level of thinking. But you just see a lot of that. And I wonder if it's people wanting to break into the body when they're leaving the institutes in that period and starting these new somatic Jungian models. Well, it's present in Jung, but it gets lost. I don't...

I'll say it this way. One of the shadow problems of Christianity, which became the dominant religion of the West, is its attitude toward the body and it's strange because it depends on how you read Christianity I mean you know St. Thomas Aquinas didn't leave the body out I mean if he talks about how, what does it mean that there's a resurrection? And there's a long, wonderful passages. go up to heaven? Yes, the fingernails go up to heaven. Eyelashes go. He's very clear. It's very almost hilarious

that all the people ask, trying to say, well, surely it's just the spirit that goes up. No, no, no. It's absolutely the body. And of course, the central Christian mystery is the literal resurrection of Jesus. Now, I'm not going to get into whether that's one's belief or not, but what people's, where the bread is the flesh of Christ and the wine is the blood of Christ, taking that into one system in an embodied way. So when I say that there's a bias against the body,

I want to also point out there's also a bias against the part of Christianity that is embodied. So I want to be very clear that I'm not just making a cheap shot, an uninformed shot. At its best, Christianity is, we're told repeatedly who are interested in Christianity and are Christians. They're told repeatedly that if you don't abide in it isn't christianity so that so let's be sure that i i say that but nevertheless there was a certain medieval attitude toward the spirit and even and thomas aquinas had to fight it

then and that and it it's it's a tendency to spiritualize things and ignore the body and certainly that was what was happening to me with it i was certainly was picked up on the spirit of union psychology but i also had to get into the body and in young's mysterium conjunctionis which is a long hard and sometimes boring book to read, but has a brilliant finale. He talks about an alchemist named Dorn, Diorian, and he talks about something that Edward Endger picks up on, which is the conjunction in Latin, coniunctio, the conjunction of psychic opposites,

the coming together of opposites. That's huge with Jung, of course, and the idea of a conjunction. But Dorn talks about a lesser coniunctio. He's a Rosicrucian of approximately the 16th century, a lesser coniunctio and a greater coniuntio. And the lesser coniuntio is what he calls the unio mentalis, the mental union,

the union of spirit and soul. Now, the term spirit and soul, some people think they should be identical. They're not. James Holman did a beautiful essay on the difference between spirit and soul. The essay is called Peaks and Veils. It's one of my favorite of his essays. I heard him give it in person, and it's amazing. I felt like I was listening to one of the great jazz performances of all time, but it was jazz of introverted thinking by this great introverted thinking general way Hellman had. So the union of spirit and soul is the union mentalis.

And that is sort of unfortunately where I was before I had the Chinese laundromat stream, because I was taking soul experiences, feelings, affects, depressions, sadnesses, that kind of thing, and bringing a basically spiritual interpretation of the archetypes, the dreams. And so I had a lot of intellectual insight. I was bringing my mind together. I had a union mentalis, a mental union. So I had a lot of gifts as a young psychiatrist at being able to match up a feeling state with its meaning, which made me quite precocious and very, I mean, it made me

the chief resident of psychiatry at Stanford. And I was accepted into training readily by the Young Eastern San Francisco. I mean, I had a kind of brilliant union mentalis, but I was leaving the other thing out. And that other thing is the body. So that from Dorne, the greater union teo is when you take that union mentalis, the union of spirit and soul, and return it to the body or bring the body into it. And then you have the divine troika of spirit, soul, and body. So when I work with people now, I try to see who they are and notice that there are many other examples of taking two out of the three and trying to pretend that's wholeness. A lot of people who have the spirit and the body, and their bodies are great, and their

spirit is great, the soul is left out. Or then there are people who are very body-soul. They've a body and soul, like great torch singers. They have a great soul and a great body, and they have no room for the spirit the spirit is more likely sometimes called the mind to me they're all parts in a way depends on how you use the word mind but i love that idea that it's of course there are people who have none that people only have one but i'm talking about reasonably developed people people like yourself and myself who are already therapists already aware of things practicing and trying to help

people and helping themselves and developing methods it's amazing how often we choose two out of the three and think we don't even need the other and have a subtle contempt for the other whichever the other is. And is that the unlived life of the parent a lot of the time? I mean, my experience is that the part of self that people minimize is usually the psychic territory mom and dad never mastered, or the culture maybe can function as a parent sometimes. You know, you could say that my father was the spirit and my mother was the soul.

And I was left, the body was dumped on me. And I was the one that was processing the unconscious for all of them. And so that you could say that. And I think you wouldn't be far wrong. I think that's a great idea, Joel, that you have. And you're absolutely right. So, but when you think of the wholeness as you have to sort of, wholeness is something you have to triangulate. You stop being in love with four and you start being in love with three. It's at one place where one wag once said that all Jungians divide things into four and all Freudians divide things into

three. The part that Jung... Yeah, that's interesting numerology. I never thought of that. Or not has three, Jung has four. The one thing Jung lost when he left Freud was Freud had a very lively sense of the body. And I think that Jung was embodied, but sometimes in his theory, a lot of people are using Jungian psychology as if it has no body or as if it's an easy escape from the body, and that's too bad. Well, and it's strange, too, because it wasn't how he practiced. He was pretty experiential, but a lot of times I think analysis, that's too bad. Well, and it's strange too, because it wasn't how he practiced. He was pretty experiential, but a lot of times I think analysis becomes just purely intellectual and analytical in it.

Or, or, you know, mentalis soul and spirit, but, but nobody. Have you ever seen anyone that does that? Uh,

neuro stem or neurofeedback? It's kind of a newer technology. There's a place here. They have the QEG. There's a friend of mine who did biofeedback for years, so I know a lot about that. But I don't know as much about some of the things that I've been hearing about lately that I do know about that some of my clients have gotten into,

which is mapping and EEG. Yeah,eg maps that's it which is the biofeedback is a little bit different um there's a visual um with qeg and so i'm not an mg i mean we're working with a clinic here we've kind of done some experiments where i'll do brain spotting on one of the owners while she has the cap on and then you get to see what it's doing and when her body feels this way and then the body turns into an emotion where the things move which is kind of an interesting um you know learning thing but when you're do you have any idea like where these things are in the brain or what the brain is doing i mean jungians are pretty phenomenological but when they're and the guys are doctors and engineers that have built this thing but you know and again I'm not a doctor. I'm trying to explain, you know, something that's probably above my pay grade.

But there's basically like frequencies, like wavelengths that the brain moves at. And none of them are good or bad. You know, just like a lot of the MBTI functions. It's just when they're unconscious or when they're overrepresented, the people are not flexible. So you wear the cap and then they look at what the brain is doing and they're like okay well the the theta wave is too high and i don't know if this is really what the theta wave is but like one of them they're like you're you're thinking reflexively internally all the time you're very self-conscious you're

wondering if you're coming off well if things are you're thinking about how you appear and people are like yeah yeah that's exactly what my problem is and they're like well you're doing that 90% of the time you need to do it 10 make room for these other frequencies but a lot of them seem like they have a correlation with typology that what they're doing probably know dario nardi's work and he's certainly been doing actual location of the eight function attitudes and he has, he has this book. I, I think he is trying to get to this for us. But my feeling is that I keep wishing that I had learned my neuroanatomy better than I did.

And I feel like as you talk to me, I can almost feel like you know, Moses never got to the promised land. I begin to feel a little like Moses, but even at 83 I'm not afraid to keep learning i think i have some learning to do because i think there is something there i will go back to

something in a dream that young interpreted that you may not know that in 1919 was the first year that young used the term archetype but it was also the year in which Jung published in the Lancet, L-A-N-C-E-T, which is one of the two great scientific medical journals that everyone recognizes. And even then was bad. The other being Nature. If you published in nature or the lancet that means that you have done something for science and so those two those two uh journals are critical well he young published in the lancet that year and what he published was the correlation between in a diagnosis he made on the basis of a dream and a diagnosis that was confirmed,

and the correlation was what was found at autopsy. The dream was of a patient who dreamt that he saw two ancient elephants, I guess they called them mastodons, I wouldn't tell you was not the word, those very ancient elephants, drowning in a pool of, in a lake of water, some kind of lake. They were drowning in a pool of, in a lake of water, some kind of lake.

They were drowning in a lake. I think I've got the dream right. This whole dream has been discussed in great and meticulous detail by Russell Lockhart, but Jung published it in Lancet because on the basis of the dream Jung said this man has a brain tumor and Lockhart has unlocked how and it's it's a brain tumor that's in the region a certain region of the brain well you have to know how Jung got that interpretation. He was particularly, he was so concerned with being a good doctor.

He really overcompensated and used his introverted sensation, which I think was his eighth function, so skillfully that he was still a legend about how much medicine he knew and when later Jung had imagined didn't have the wording that he later had but he imagined he was a sensation type because he paid so much attention to very precise detail there are two organs called the mammillary bodies which which are have that name and they carry memory for the brain. And Jung knew that the word mammillary body comes from the same word as the Latin word for elephant. So he could imagine that if the patient was having a dream that the elephants, that the mammillary bodies must be drowning in cerebrospinal fluid,

and that could only happen if there was some kind of blockage to the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, which therefore would be a tumor. And he made that interpretation, that prediction, and it was published. So there is the best evidence that Jung was willing to think of the archetypal. He always felt dreams were self-portraits of the actual situation in the unconscious, and that would include, in this case, the actual physical situation in the person's brain. So I think that's a very important historical essay, and I advise you to look at it, and if I can find Russell Lockhart's. I googled it after you told me about it last time, and I couldn't find it,

but knowing that it's in The Lancet makes it easier so I can probably find it. I think we should definitely pay attention to the fact that though Jungians have frequently settled for the union mentalis thinking that Jung is the most brilliant way to understand soul experience and try to make it a union of spirit and soul, that that's a lesser conjunction. We really can include the body. And if we do, we will find that in the body of Jung's work, he never really leaves the body out. And I think that if we did nothing else for Jung than to give him full credit for that.

Yeah. I think we'd have done something. This is kind of a weirder question, but I've always kind of been curious about what your thoughts would be on this. You know, with the BB model, a lot of it,

what you're doing is taking the BTI type and using it to predict an internal cosmology. You know what somebody's trickster looks like, what's going to show up as a demon so what very beautifully thank you do you think it's possible to run that algorithm backwards like to try and take the typology of like a cosmology of a of a society's mythological system or of a you know maybe a science fiction author fantasy author and then be able to kind of intuit a typology of a culture almost and and some of the things going on with the cultures you know all the time with film and with politics and with with the presentations of cultures i spend a lot

of time for instance and i've published about this if If you believe, as I do, that the natural dominant of Chinese culture is introverted intuition, the most gigantic achievements, the Daoist Qing, the I Ching, are obvious examples of a tremendous capacity of introverted intuition. I would have to include I Ching there. And if you've ever experienced Chinese people directly,

you have such a distorted idea of what China is, especially when we're in a political countertop with China, which I'm very sad about when that happens. I'm not saying that China hasn't participated in it at a political level, but I really don't like, I really think if China and America could get along, they could civilize the rest of the world because they have that potential. But we've got to first civilize our relationship to China, and that's a very difficult thing. And China's with us, too, of course.

But the experiment in international communication I've been involved in for the last 21 24 years now I mean it's just proves beyond a shadow of a doubt to me what we can have the Chinese extroverted feeling as it's auxiliary I've met such a welcoming affirmingming group of people, such a fine group of people that I have worked with personally. So if you accept that that's an MBTI INFJ presentation, we have to understand that partly because of the way the West tried to colonize China, starting with the opium wars of the British in the 1850s that sit for the last 175 years,

really, the problem of China has not only been to keep China for the Chinese and get the colonizing forces out of it. I mean, there are some really pretty awful stories that take place in the late 19th century. And there's even a terrible photo of a young American soldier grinning as he sits on the emperor's throne in China after the Americans have broken into the forbidden city, something we should all be ashamed of.

It's just terrible. But the effort to get China for the Chinese, which was the goal of Sun Yat-sen and then his two sons, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang Kai-shek eventually lost the civil war and he went to Taiwan. And now you have the so-called two Chinas. But everything was to get China for the Chinese.

And both of those countries are thriving and successful for Taiwan is not entirely a country for various reasons, but it is thriving. And so is China. They're both thriving. China is now for the Chinese. But there's been this massive overcompensation of the inferior function of extroverted cessation, which is a classic Adlerian, Alfred Adler, overcompensation for a sense of inferiority to prove to everyone that China can be cities as gleaming as American cities. And it's true if you're in Guangzhou,

it's one of the most beautifully designed modern cities. And it has everything in terms of advanced designers, Seattle, Washington. It's just a very, very beautifully planned, beautifully laid out city now that was once like Hong Kong, a kind of English colonized city. So when you see the overcompensation of extroverted sensation in China

has all the problems of any overcompensation. It's too much pressure on the inferior function and it's not good. But then we look at our country and here we have a natural country that's extroverted thinking with auxiliary introverted sensation. George Washington was the most introverted sensation of our presidents. You know that I often talk about how the battle of Yorktown, he fights all day leading the general. But before he goes to bed, the night he's won the battle of Yorktown and that kind of 18th century thing that starts at dawn

and goes all day, you can only imagine what it must have been like to win the battle of Yorktown. Before he goes to bed, he takes out his ledger and carefully records every cannonball and every uniform and every expense made for that day so that he doesn't miss the expenses. He's still accounting for everything. He kept the books. So we once had that kind of, we've only had one president in recent years

that was truly introverted sensation, and that was Eisenhower. And of course he wanted to balance the budget. He said, it's going to be a problem in the future if we don't. And nobody wanted to listen to him. And so we have this auxiliary introverted sensation that we should use, but we don we don't instead we've replaced it

repeatedly they did it in the end of the 19th century with the robber barons and we're doing it now with the you know the waltz of the billionaires and we make that we it's this And so we constantly use our greedy Saturn extroverted sensation as if it were our auxiliary. And then we have our famous tertiary, poor, eternus extroverted intuition, our Clinton function. And so we have, I'm a Democrat by the way, but I do see the problems. And so we're pathologically extroverted. I'm a Democrat, by the way, but I do see the problems. So we're pathologically extroverted. We're like a manic episode. We're hypomanic, if not frankly manic.

And, of course, we're irritable. We're angry. And, of course, we have violence because that's what people who get into hypomania and mania get into. Well, like you were describing at the the beginning you going out and buying a new book across town or seeing a new film that's probably pretty helpful to the engine of capitalism if you have everybody doing this i love to spend i love to go shopping and and you know we've when around the time of 9-1-1, someone said that, you know, we've got to prove that we're not going to let them get to us. We've got to shop until we drop.

I remember. Constant conversation about growing the economy as if growth were the... so we really have a lot to learn about the checks and balances within typology itself that if the leading function and this is where isabel briggs myers really contributed to something young wasn't didn't make nearly as clear that he did say the auxiliary function is different in every respect from the dominant, but he didn't seem to mean it. All he seemed to mean was that if the dominant is a rational function, the auxiliary will be an irrational function. He seemed to believe that if you were extroverted, your first three functions were extroverted. If you were introverted,

your first three functions were introverted, and your compensation came through the inferior function. That's the one that would be of the other attitude. I like the idea of the typology as a system of checks and balances. And that has been so helpful to see. So that when I, so that when I see that in people, I also want to see it in cultures. I would like to see China restore its dominant introverted intuition. And I'd like to see America restore its dominant extroverted thinking and do that. And I'd like to keep its excursions into things like extroverted sensation.

I'd like to keep China's excursions into things like extroverted sensation to a more modest place. I think we need to recover our natural typologies and then try to relate to each other that we could do not easy but uh i'm a dreamer but i but i haven't given up well it's an interesting map and you never know who sees that and and you know uses it later did you ever read Lament for the Dead that Sanu Shamdasani and James Hillman have a conversation about the Red Book?

I've read some of it, and I haven't read every word of it. What did you find in it that you found interesting? Well, they kind of hit on an ethics in Jung that's not ever really laid out in what he writes, but I think they are onto something that the unlived life of the parent is an obstacle, but really it's the unlived life of all of the dead. It's our job to go past the places where humanity hasn't gone yet. And the unlived life of our culture is something that we feel. What I feel is that what I got from Sonu I had my own conversation with Sonu which you may not have seen

which was published in Psychological Perspectives I'd be happy to share we had a dialogue about the red book that was published before the Lament of the Dead and I take very seriously Jung's idea that what we owe the dead is to take

up the projects they left unfinished yeah yeah let's tell you that i have felt i've tried to do that i actually felt that young site typology was an unfinished project forward all of us to move forward and I feel that I've followed I've actually taken up that project rather than trying to replace it with my own I see myself as

adding and extending and trying to complete something that I felt that he absolutely didn't quite finish that's how I see it I don't mean to be arrogant about that,

but I also feel with my mother and my father, I've had to carry projects they started. And so I feel that that gets into what my colleague, who grew up as an African-American man in Jackson, Mississippi, and is now a Jungian analyst, and was a past president, like myself, of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and I know his work very well. He speaks of phantom narratives, of course, in literature and by another African-American author, Tony Morrison. Beloved is a perfect example of phantom and complex. It's based on a true story of a woman who, while a slave, killed her babies because she did not want them to have to grow up as slaves.

But then what happens is that she becomes, in Toni Morrison's novel, a woman living during the Reconstruction era who discovers that one of the children returns as a reven but returns as a phantom, she says of her that it's my best thing. means is that the African American would have to not simply repress and forget the memory of slavery, but take it in as something to work with, take that that fate that horrible fate and something to work with as indeed our culture has to take that in bigger culture has to take that in as well but for the idea of african americans taking that on and if the african-american is willing to take that on? Why in the world can't America take on that phantomatic narrative? Taking phantomatic narratives, taking on what

we owe the dead is to stay with the problem they left unsolved and do what we can to solve it. And so I feel like in every... So in that sense, working on the inner is always going to take us to an unsolved psychological problem of our entire culture. You're kind of going through the self, through the parent,

to the culture to find the self. And it's sort of like what is called karma in the West. It's sort of what we have to do. Jung, and I do say all this in my preface to Jung's aspect of the masculine, where he took on his father's unsolved problem of Christian faith. He's a Christian minister who lost his faith just around the same time that Nietzsche was saying God was dead. Nietzsche, the son of a Christian minister. And Jung takes on the whole question of faith. He knew more about the history of faith than most people know.

One of the people that taught for a living, a Dutch scholar, Gilles, G-I-L-L-E-S Quispel, Q-U-I-S-P-E-L told me that he's taught in a university in Holland and his job was to be give

people PhDs in the history of the church fathers which is called in the Christian church, patristics. And he said that Jung was better read in patristics than any graduate student that he ever had. That was Jung's work on his father's faith problem, to study all the Christian father's faith. Jungian psychology, I mean, a lot of that could be seen as this thing to give his problem to study all the Christian father's faith. So that. Yungi in psychology. I mean, a lot of,

a lot of that could be seen as this thing to give his father to try and help him. Have faith in a different way. And give him enough of the history of faith and the context of faith within the history of world religions. So that. Of course, he would be confused. Of course, you would need a bigger picture. And I, so that, of course, you would be confused.

Of course, you would need a bigger picture. And so in that sense, what a wonderful thing to have done, just like what a wonderful thing for me to go back to China and do something about being a pig. I mean, why not? I mean, in other words, why not? And how good it makes you feel. The amazing thing is, I mean, in other words, why not? And how good it makes you feel. The amazing thing is, I mean, Toni Morrison set herself free

by writing Beloved and other books, and what a wonderful achievement. So that's the kind of thing that makes me feel like. So it often will turn out to be a type of consciousness that didn't get a chance to tell its whole story. My ideas of the consciousnesses. It's not finished, and it's not always containable to one life. You have to listen to... What I have to stop is that each consciousness has its own story arc.

My extroverted intuition has the story arc of entertaining. If I'm anything, I'm entertaining when I lecture, and I'm also getting people to entertain ideas. So it starts with entertaining an interesting set of ideas but then it moves toward envisioning and now we're very much there right now because i'm envisioning with you and you are with me thank you what we can do with this but finally it's going even beyond that at the level of the move from the persona of it to the ego of it. But now I want to get to the self of it, meaning the purpose of it.

It's enabling. I want what Isabel Riggs Myers wants. I want the world to understand each other better. So I can't leave her out. And I want what Jung wanted, which is to take up the unsolved problems of the dead, complete the Christian project, the psychological project. In other words, it's very important. And it's good for us to do that, and it probably does good for others as well.

That's what it seems like to me. Well, I think that's why the lament or the dead conversation that they had was interesting to me because I always liked depth psychology and feel like it's a great map. But I also am very interested in the directly experiential kinds of therapy coming out now that are that are more shamanistic i mean brain spotting is that way internal family systems is that way i mean they have a gestalt kind of component to them and um and you know hillman james hillman it was a brilliant guy and also a very good analyst by all accounts, but kind of got grandiose or off in places towards the end of his life. And in the Lament for the Dead book, he's talking and I could kind of feel like, okay, I think that what I'm trying to do is finish your project of archetypal psychology that you never quite figured out a technique for or you never you know and you know i've there was an energy there that just was

was interesting you know um i don't know well yes i think introverted feeling introverted intuition cannot safely leave out an extroverted feeling and and and and you don't obviously so well the intuitive feeler types you know they're a lot of the more effective people have that function but when they go bad they go really bad you know it's like the same personality or the same typology of jesus is also the typology of Hitler, you know? And you look at, you look at the people who, you know, 2020 brought all of these personalities that are on YouTube and whatever, and, you know, talking to younger people and saying all this awful stuff and you look in

their past, almost every one of those guys is a failed comedian, you know? They, you know, they all have that intuitive felt, you know, thing that does come from a pain in childhood that gives you some kind of voice and perspective but if you don't master it i mean it really can eat you alive you don't you don't you don't dare leave that live out the body outside of the body we have to stop now because of time but uh for me i have to call coming in at noon, so I'm going to have to take. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for your presence, Joel. You've been very open to letting me talk, and I got a little hint of where you're coming from.

I want to share with you the Chinese notion of completion. There's an image of the integrity of integrity in the Qing that I love so much. And I wrote about this, I haven't ever published this paper, it's actually a talk that I'm planning to publish. But there are three elements to the image of integrity. And one is sincerity. One is limitation, a sense of limits, and that's important when you mention grandiosity, which

gets to all of us from time to time. And then finally, completion. What Leosa did in completing the projects is one way not to get inflated and there's a sincerity in it and there's a sense of limitation that each life has its limitation but there's also what can be done and what we can do is to complete. So America is an experiment in democracy

that is presently trying to complete itself. And we have to let that completion take place. And that's the task of our lifetime. Well, we also have our typology and our psychology. We have to complete the task of bringing the body and the spirit and the soul together in an adequate theory and practice. And then a technique to apply the theory. Here we are together, and you've taken my work and added it to yours. That makes me very happy.

Well, thank you so much for this, John. I really appreciate it. It's been wonderful and um i'll let you go and um i hope that this brings some new people to your work and um you've got some great books and some great books mark hunsinger you know wrote about you with you and um it's it's exciting thank you thank you for your life thank you wow thank you you're welcome you're welcome have You're very welcome. Have a good one.

Bye. Take care.