The Taproot Podcast - Part 5 A Psychohistory of American Psychology: The Wound that Speaks

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

In Episode 5 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, the host explores a profound and unsettling premise: psychosis, paranoia, and conspiracy theories are not random malfunctions of the brain. Rather, they are the language our culture uses to express its unprocessed, collective trauma. From the animistic voices of the early 1900s to the algorithmic paranoia of the 2020s, this episode traces how the "American Unconscious" absorbs what society refuses to acknowledge—and how the psychiatric establishment has systematically failed to listen. By pathologizing systemic wounds into individual symptoms, modern psychology has left us uniquely vulnerable to cults, conspiracy theories, and an epidemic of isolation. Key Themes & Takeaways 1. The Evolution of Psychosis Psychotic delusions act as a mirror to the cultural environment, adapting their vocabulary to the dominant anxieties of the era: 1910s: Voices tied to nature, ancestry, and the land. 1930s (The Depression): Hungry, pleading voices reflecting profound economic and manufactured inadequacy. 1950s–1970s (The Cold War): Voices of surveillance and persecution, directly mirroring the existential dread of the atomic bomb and the very real operations of the covert state (e.g., MKULTRA, COINTELPRO). 2020s: Algorithmic, technologically driven voices reflecting the reality of digital surveillance and data capture. 2. The Neurology of Meaning Drawing on Paul MacLean's "Triune Brain" model and Jungian psychology, the episode highlights how Western culture aggressively privileges the analytical cortex while dismissing the older, emotional, meaning-making layers of the brain (the paleomammalian layer). When a culture numbs its trauma, it also numbs its intuition, forcing the unconscious to speak through improper channels—like physical exhaustion, hallucinations, or societal panic. 3. The Map is Wrong, but the Wound is Real Conspiracy theories—from the anti-Masonic panics of the labor era to modern QAnon—are framed not as intellectual defects, but as misdirected grief. People accurately perceive that they are being exploited, manipulated, or discarded by a system, but they lack the vocabulary to name the true structural causes. Because the "map" is wrong, their very real rage is directed at scapegoats. 4. The Tragedy of the Satanic Panic The episode examines the 1980s Satanic Panic as a prime example of a culture losing its symbolic language. Both feminists and religious conservatives accurately sensed a massive cultural crisis regarding the sexual exploitation of women and children. However, because modern psychology had abandoned symbolic, mythological language in favor of rigid cognitive-behavioral literalism, this valid cultural terror was forced to express itself as a literal hallucination of underground cults. 5. The Weaponization of Diagnosis The script addresses the dark history of psychology acting as an arm of state control, specifically highlighting how the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia were deliberately altered in the 1960s to pathologize the justified rage of Black civil rights activists. 6. The Algorithmic Shadow Unlike past collective traumas, today's algorithmic feeds deliver highly personalized, individualized "wounds." This has created a fragmented landscape of paranoia where people feel—accurately—that their nervous systems are being manipulated by tech platforms, but incorrectly attribute the manipulation to shadowy cabals rather than engagement-optimized incentive structures. The Core Lesson for Mental Health Therapy was originally designed to listen to the symptom as a form of communication. Today, however, the clinical apparatus has been captured by 15-minute med checks, billing codes, and symptom-reduction protocols. To heal the culture, we must stop arguing with the "hallucination" of the conspiracy theorist and start addressing the legitimate, bleeding wound beneath it. History of Psychology, Carl Jung, Collective Unconscious, Conspiracy Theories, QAnon Psychology, Mental Health System, Satanic Panic, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Trauma, Systemic Abuse, Somatic Experiencing, Psycho-history, Taproot Therapy Collective.

You talk about a strike in 79. I can't taste the factory on the rain the loosens, screws, cold machines, warm ghosts, where humming's your soft, sad, laughing knows you're singing. Hey guys, it's Joel with the Taprate Therapy Collective podcast, and welcome to Part 5 of Psychotherapy on the couch, a psychohistory of American psychology. What psychology can see, what he can't see, and why it has trouble telling the difference. And this will be part five of eight in how long

it's going to be, because I've finished writing it now. Welcome to part five, the wound that speaks. In a psychiatric hospital in 1910, a woman hears voices, and the voices come from the outside window. They come from trees. They come from the river. They come from the ground beneath the hospital, and they speak in the language of her grandmother. And they tell her the name. of her ancestors. They're not pleasant exactly, but they are familiar, and they belong to the land. In the same hospital in 1935, a man hears voices, and the voices are hungry, they ask him for food, they sound like his children, and they're not threatening, and they are pleading. They want the loaf of bread that is in the kitchen, and the job that is not at the mill,

and the money that is not in the bank, and the voices are scared because the country is scared. In 1955, a woman hears voices, and the voices are in the radiator, and they are the government agents, and they are conducting surveillance, and the voices have never been in the radiator before, and this is a new decade. But they are there now, and they will remain there until the radiator is replaced by the television, and the television is replaced by the microwave, and the microwave is replaced by the cell phone, and the voices will not leave, they will simply change vehicle. And by 1985, the voices are

implants. By 2005, they are satellites. And by 2020, they come through the algorithm. And they know what she searched. And they tell her what to buy. And they tell her what to trade. And they know what she bought. And they are targeting her with information

meant to destabilize her. And they are sending her advertisements that are messages about herself. And she's not sure whether the paranoia is the delusion or the infrastructure. And all of this is clinical data. If you go to the archives of American psychiatric hospitals and you track the content of psychotic experience across the 20th century, the content changes in lockstep with the cultural environment. Before the Depression, psychotic voices were animistic, tied to nature and geography, ancestry,

and often benign or encouraging. During the Depression, the voices became fearful, begging for food and services. Compassion and love, and after the war, the voices became antagonistic, persecutory, focused on hierarchical control and surveillance. From the 70s onward, the voices have been technological, electronical, conspiratorial. They speak the language of their time because time is speaking through them. And this is something important. Psychosis is not a content-free malfunction of the brain. It is a malfunction that fills the itself with the fears and the structures of its arrow, because it is the language of the unconscious. The pre-conscious mind is not blank, and then broken, it is full. There's a reservoir, and when the

reservoir cracks, what comes out is whatever was accumulating in it. And the reservoir has a name. Jung called it the collective unconscious, and other traditions have called it other things. But the insight is the same. Below the surface of the individual awareness, there is a deeper layer, where the culture lives in us, and also its shadow lives in our dreams. And it lives in the way that our bodies respond to certain sounds. It lives in the archetypes that keep reappearing across stories that we've never read.

And it lives most urgently in the places where the culture can't bear to look. And this is where I want you to start the episode, you know, the American unconscious that is absorbing what culture can't process. It absorbs the wounds. And it absorbs the broken promises, the things the eye cannot see. And it absorbs the forced forgettings. And when it has absorbed more than it can hold, it speaks. And it speaks through somatic complaint.

It speaks through dream. It speaks through psychosis. And it speaks through the cults that recruit the exhausted and the conspiracy theories that organize the abandoned. And it speaks through everything except direct acknowledgement, because direct acknowledgement is what the apparatus was built to provide. event. And this is what the paranoid style actually is. It's not a defect of reasoning. It's a language. The wound is using, you know, this language when no other language is available. The language of

metaphor. But it's a metaphor that has forgotten. It is a metaphor that has become uncomfortably and painfully literal. And, you know, once you hear it, you can't unhear it. And I think that's what psychology was supposed to be able to do to hear the metaphor. for what American psychology specifically during this period abandoned and what we are paying for now. So, you know, a brief detour back to the architecture of the thing we are examining. Because I don't want this to sound mystical when I'm describing something that is very neurological. You know, Paul McLean proposed in the 1960s what he called the triune brain. And the model is a simplification. Modern neuroscience has complicated it significantly and said that McLean was reducing

something so that it could, you know, be understood better and that there was too much, you know, evolution connecting the places that he had separated. But in the core observation, the lens of how the brain evolved is still useful. And the human brain has these evolutionary older layers. There's this reptilian core that handles arousal, threat, survival. And there's this paleomammalian layer, essentially a limbic system that handles emotion in bonding, memory, meaning. And then there's this neo-mammalian layer, the cortex, that handles languages, analysis, and planning. And there's a lot more bridges between them. They're not as separate, as McLean said. But those layers are sort of the core of the architecture in a way that he felt, even if his neuroscience wasn't perfect. I mean,

modern Western culture, you know, privileges the cortex. It treats the cortex as the seat of the self. And it treats the lower layers as equipment. And you have emotions the way you have tonsils. They sit below the real you. You should just manage them. And this is backwards neurologically. And modern neurology, not McLean neurology. You know, those lower layers developed first.

They run much faster than the cortex. They make most decisions before the cortex is even aware a decision is being made. Or decisions are the wrong word. It's more of a budgeting implicit energy to solve a problem that is anticipating, that will affect. your ability to make a decision. That's what emotion is. To be able to see ahead of time, to get outside of the present and be able to anticipate the future in a way that keeps you alive before you're aware of it. And the philosopher, you know, David Abram, you know, he's in the Jungian tradition. They point at this same thing from different angles. That paleo-mammalian layer,

that limbic emotional layer, is the layer that evolved to experience the world is alive. It experiences meaning before it experiences explanation. It assumes the world is like you. It personifies it, alive like you are. And it experiences threat before it experiences argument. It experiences connection before it experiences category. And this is what animistic cultures were not getting wrong in prehistory. This is what they were attending to.

The experience of the world is an alive thing, as meaningful, as relational. It's not a primitive projection that is laid over a dead material substrate. It is the native mode of the mammalian emotional brain. And the cortex doesn't produce this experience, it just interprets it. And when a culture trains itself to rely on the cortex in the front of the brain, which is really just a filtering mechanism we think now, filtering out this other information, or it's supposed to, we dismiss meaning making of the lower layers of superstition or psychosis. or mental illness. And it doesn't really get rid of that layer when you dismiss them. You can

stop believing in them, but they still believe in you. It just means that you're no longer aware of how they work. And this is still with us. You know, it's not primitive. It's just the architecture. And the architecture is load-bearing. When the culture won't let the lower layers speak through their proper channels, they speak through improper channels. Peter Levin, who developed somatic experiencing, he points out that Trauma and intuition live in the same neurological neighborhood. They both work through the paleo-mammalian brain, and they both run faster than thought.

They both communicate through sensation, image, emotion. You know, rather than the language, they communicate through metaphor. If you shut one down, or you shut down the other, or you take the metaphor literally, it is a sort of high-functioning madness. A culture that numbs itself to its trauma also numbs itself to its intuition, and a person who buries their wound also buries their wisdom. And the American unconscious, I would argue, has been doing this for 130 years, and we have been numbing the

emotional brain through industrial discipline, suburban atomization, pharmaceutical sedation, and now algorithmic capture. And the trauma has not gone anywhere. It's just lost its proper channel. In the early 20th century, the shadow of the industrial transformation came out in the labor movement. The workers of homestead at Lutow, at Lawrence, were correctly perceiving something that official culture refused to name. The system was rigged, and the promises were faults. And the scientific management being administered to them was not scientific. It was not management.

It was extraction of wealth and labor. And resources that were on their land. And the Wobblies named it. They didn't have Jung's vocabulary, but they had the perception. They said capitalism is doing this. And they said this is a class that is benefiting and a class that is being crushed. And the crushing is deliberate. And they were in the main, correct.

Hofstadter would later call this the paranoid style. He would say that movements like the Woblies saw hidden forces, omnipotent conspiracies, demonic enemies. And he wasn't wrong about the rhetoric of the register, but he missed what the register was tracking. The wobblies were paranoid about a real structure. Taylor had literally written that his ideal worker was, and I'm quoting him, more ox than human. And the dehumanization was stated out loud in the founding documents of the behavior's field.

The workers weren't imagining it. And what happened to that perception, you know, psychology pathologized it or helped, or it was co-opted, whatever you want. psychology is not just one guy, but behaviorism reframed the workers' resistance as inefficiency. And the rage was engineered away. The accurate perception was medicalized. And the shadow, the unprocessed grief of what was being done to American labor, didn't disappear. It sank. It became somatic. The epidemic of neurasthenia in the early 20th century, the nervous exhaustion, the mysterious fatigues and fainting spells of the office workers and the factory workers and the women trapped in domestic isolation,

was the body reporting what the culture wouldn't let the mouth say. And the rage that couldn't find its target in the factory owner, because the factory owner had made himself invisible by the abstract language of the market, found other targets. It found immigrants. It found Catholics. It found masons.

It found Jews. It found anarchists. It found, you know, eventually bankers. The first paranoid conspiracy theory of modern America were misfired labor consciousness. They were workers that knew something was being done to them and needed someone to blame. And so they blamed the people that they could see

because they couldn't see the people who were doing the thing. And the shadow of this era, the unprocessed grief of the industrial dispossession, it got passed forward and resolved, and it fed the fascism of the 30s, and it fed the McCarthy paranoia of the 50s, and it fed the militia movements of the 90s,

and the rage and the unnamed force that took something from your grandfather's being monetized today by people who have correctly identified that their audience is wounded and have incorrectly identified that the cause of the wound is now a gay person or a trans person or an immigrant or a coastal elite. The wound is real. The map is wrong. And the map will keep being wrong as long as the real wound goes unspoken. By the 1920s and 30s, the shadow had shifted. And you'll remember from episode two, the Norma and Norman statues, the composite figures built from thousands of American measurements, the statistical idea that no one real person

actually matched, and the Cleveland Plain dealer sponsoring a contest to find the real woman whose body matched enormous proportions. Thousands enter, and no one wins. And this was the birth of a specific American wound, the manufactured inadequacy, the promise of normalcy. That was by design unattainable. And the shadow of this wound was intimate. It was external. It lived in the body. It lived in the mirror, and it lived in the constant low hum of not quite enough that would eventually become the operating system of American consumer life. And psychosis in this period reflected that. The voices became hungry. They begged. They asked for things that the culture could not provide, and they sounded like children who needed to be fed. And the depression had made literal hunger universal.

But the psychotic hunger was older and deeper, and it was the hunger of a collective self that had been told it was inadequate and then told the solution was to buy something. Propaganda by Edward Bernays, published in 1928. Chapter 1. Organizing Chaos The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our taste formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas, and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses

to take towards this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small numbers of persons, a trifling faction of our 120 million, who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. Edward Bernays, who we mentioned before, who was Freud's nephew, understood this perfectly. Bernays had read his uncle, and he knew about repression,

he knew about the unconscious, and he knew that if you could name what people were repressing and then sell them a product that pretended to address it, then they would buy it forever. American psychology watched, as we talked about earlier, and would Bernays invent the cigarette as a sign of women's liberation? And it led him. Even the Depression didn't interrupt advertising.

It just professionalized it. And the technique of unconscious manipulation that Freud's nephew had developed in the 20s, got refined in the 30s, as the only way to move the product in a broken economy. You don't sell the thing. You sell the relief from the culture that has made you feel about yourself, for not having the thing. And that grammar, once it took hold, became the operating language of American consumer life. We still speak it, but it has to change every era so that we don't

recognize it. Advertising from the 50s looks silly, and we're used to advertising of our time. And the conspiracy theories of this era had a specific shape. They were populist. They were anti-elite. They were anti-Semitic. Father Kaufflin on the radio in the 1930s, railing against the Jewish bakers. Huey Long, you know, saying that share our wealth. The American first movement, these were again correctly tracking something. The wealth concentration of the Gilded Age had created a genuine oligarchy, and the Depression was genuinely engineered in part by financial speculation. And the ordinary American, who felt like an invisible force,

even though his labor was moving the country, had been collapsed by these forces. And that metaphorical map was not wrong, but the forces were not a Jewish cabal. They were diffused through an economic system that nobody controlled and everyone served. And because the map was wrong, the rage went to the wrong target. It went to Jews. It went to immigrants. It prepared the ground for the fascism that would almost capture America in the later 30s. And the shadow of this era, the inadequacy, the manufactured wanting did not resolve. It just got passed forward and it became.

the operating logic of post-war advertising. It became the grammar of suburban consumption. It became eventually the infinite scroll. And the curated Instagram grid is the direct descendant of the Norma statue, the same wound, but in higher resolution. And American psychology still will sometimes post about these things, trying to use the same language of the thing it's attacking. But it doesn't really psychoanalyze them.

And it doesn't bring them into, therapy or start to diagnose the effect that they have because they're too normal. And it always has to look at the abnormal, a pathologizing, you know, a pathologizing psychology, never looks at a culture that is pathological. It doesn't feel like it can. And so after this came the bomb. The shadow of the Cold War is different and kind from what became before it. You know, previous wounds were social and economic, and the atomic wound was existential. For the first time in the history of the species, humans possess the capacity to instantly delete themselves. There were children doing duck and cover drills. Like we talked

about before, they knew that the desk wouldn't really save them. And the adults knew too. And the adults knew the children knew. And the drill continued anyway. And this specific injury of the post-war era, it is the injury of performed, reassured. in the face of known catastrophe, sleepwalking into the apocalypse, pretending that you have control over something that you don't, and refusing to acknowledge the self-evident. You know, it's the injury of being told by the institutions responsible for your safety that a wooden desk will save you from a thermonuclear fire

and being required to pretend that you believe it. And the injury is not the bomb. The injury is the lie about the bomb. And the lie told children something that they would carry into a, adulthood. The authorities lie. They lie about the most important things, and they lie with the full weight of their institutional credibility, and that lying is required. But more than that, if you're not lying to yourself, you're crazy. The cultural artifact the best captures this is tension, like we talked about before. In the 60s, in the early 70s, especially in the crying of

lot 49 and gravity's rainbow, they're not paranoid novels. They're novels about paranoia, And specifically, they're novels about what happens when you live in a culture where the official stories are all lying. And the only way to keep your sanity is to assume that there is a truer story underneath. And you have to find the truer story, even if it kills you. Pension would write in Gravity's Rainbow that right now a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death. And some of them even know it. And the paranoia kept being validated. M.K. Ultra turned out to be real.

The CIA had been dosing American citizens with LSD in safe houses in New York and San Francisco, conducting mind control experiments on unwitting subjects. Cointel Pro turned out to be real. The FBI had been infiltrating domestic civil rights organizations and assassinating leaders. The Pentagon Papers turned out to be real. The government had been lying about Vietnam for decades. The church committee revelations were real. The conspiracy theorists of the 60s were not paranoid.

They were perceptive. and the conspiracy was in the ceiling. Even though many of the conspiracy theorists weren't right, big enough conspiracy theories got validated that everybody felt right. And now for the next 30 minutes, as the world turns. And I gave it a great deal of thought, Grandpa. Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.

The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting. This picture has just been transmitted by wire. It is a picture taken just a moment or two before the incident. If you can zoom in with that camera, we can get a closer look at this picture. From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time. 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago. Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to where he has proceeded.

Presumably he will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the 36th president of the United States. And then underneath all of it, JFK and the assassination was the specific moment. the timelines split in American public consciousness. You watched the president die on television, and you watched his assassin die on television two days later, and the official explanation insulted anybody with a pulse.

Whatever actually happened in Dallas, the culture's failure to process what had happened, created a wound that generations would inherit. The Warren Commission papered over something, and the papering was itself, the injury, and everyone knew something was being hidden, and nobody could say, what and the knowledge that could not be spoken became the permanent operating condition of the

American unconscious. No matter what happened to Dallas and no matter why, the timeline changed. Psychosis in this period changed accordingly. The voices became surveillance. The voices became persecution. Cabals. And the voices spoke the language of the real covert operations. The real government was running. And when a patient in 1968 says the CIA is watching her, she's both delusional and on the evidence, underestimating what the CIA is actually doing. Because the CIA was watching people. It was watching a lot of people.

And it had a program for it, and her delusion was tracking a real structure. She had just inserted herself into it in a way that wasn't accurate. And the conspiracy theories of the 60s, 70s, and 80s got some of the biggest ones right. The tobacco companies were lying. The asbestos companies were lying. The sugar industry was paying scientists to blame fat. The pharmaceutical companies were hiding the harms of their own product. Each of these was called a conspiracy theory until it wasn't.

And the paranoid style kept being vindicated, and the mainstream kept being embarrassed. And the credibility of the official institutions kept eroding, and nobody in the institutions seemed to notice that this was happening because of them. And everybody knows. And everybody knows. that the plague is coming. Everybody knows that it's moving fast. Everybody knows that the naked man and woman

but just a shining artifact of the past. However, the wound was not distributed evenly, and black Americans inherited a different order of a share of it. I want to promote Jonathan Metzell's book, The Protest Psychosis Here. But when black Americans, Black Americans began organizing during this time. They began marching and they began demanding rights.

And they expressed rage that had been accumulating for generations. And before the civil rights movement, schizophrenia and American medical literature was described as a disorder of middle-class white women. It was depicted as a docile confusion, a withdrawal, or, you know, a sort of jumping at shadows. It was tragic, but it wasn't threatening. It was a heightened feminine condition, as how most psychologists thought of it. And then schizophrenia was rewritten. The archival record documents that transformation pretty well. In the late 50s and through the 60s, the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia in American

psychiatric literature shifted. Hostility, aggression, paranoia, directed at white authority. And these became the new emblems of the disease. And the diagnosis started getting applied to black men at rates that had no medical justification at all, men who were political active. were committed to state hospitals, and their political rhetoric was entered into the charts as symptoms, and their anger at a racist society was classified as a pathology. Psychology had begun to be the enforcer of the normal on a mass scale, and a normal that

was now, not a norma or a Norman, but a massive bureaucratic system. And this was the shadow of that institution. The American psychiatric establishment when it was confronted with black political consciousness, instead of treating black people as a patient, could not acknowledge what black Americans were actually saying. So it transformed the saying into a symptom. And it transformed the accurate perception of systemic racism into a mental illness. And it treated the illness with antipsychotics and institutionalization with electroshock therapy. And France Fanon had been seeing this coming for a while.

argued that what colonial medicine called insanity in colonized people was usually a rational response to the colonial condition. The psychotic was not delusional about persecution. The persecution was real. The pathology was in the system, not in the patient. And the American psychiatry, which imagined itself as this neutral scientific observer, was in fact an arm of the same system being protested. And so this wound persists. The distrust of men's mental health institutions in black communities is not irrational. Schizophrenia is a real disease. It's a real disease that does not go away with therapy,

does not go away with many forms of treatment other than antipsychotics. And also, racism is real. However, there was a mistrust of treating a very real illness that does affect some people and Africans, Americans at a higher percentage for reasons that are still debated. The water was moneyed here. And there was a distrust that was added to an entire population of people that American psychology was supposed to treat because it would not listen to them. And it would not listen or see them and hear them accurately.

And it never fully reckoned with that fact. Its diagnostic categories have been at multiple points weapons. And the field wants to talk about cultural competency and implicit bias, but it does not want to talk about this archive to this day. The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions. The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew. To eat hog moths confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary, the revolution will not be televised.

And then came Reagan, and the shadow changed again. If the Cold War, Shadow was an external enemy abroad, the bomb, the Kabbal and Langley, the efficiency gospel shadow, was now internal. It was the shadow of responsibility itself. The shadow of having been told that you were in charge of your own life in conditions that systematically prevented you from ever being in charge of your own life and the double bind that that put you in, the shadow of being blamed for outcomes that you did not choose and could not change.

I traced in episode four how Reagan sold Americans on a story where the government was the enemy in the market was the solution. And where the social safety net was oppression and dismantling it was freedom. But what I didn't fully name there was that the psychological cost of that, was that when the culture tells you that every outcome in your life is the product of your own choices, and then it engineers conditions where the outcomes are catastrophic, it has set you up for a particular kind of collapse. Because if the outcome is bad and the outcome is your fault, then you are bad.

and the ideology of the individual responsibility in the absence of collective protection becomes a machine for manufacturing shame. But an enemy for that shame had to be found. And the satanic panic as a cultural event ran roughly from 1980 to the early 1990s and over 12,000 claims of organized satanic ritual abuse. Almost none were ever substantiated. Daycare workers jailed on the testimony of children coached by a therapist, using discredited, recovered memory techniques.

Books like Michelle remembers taken seriously by law enforcement. And for some reason, the author of them was able to keep his license, even though the subject of the book was a patient who he was having sex with while he wrote the book and later left his wife for. I don't know why Canada did that. But, you know, Geraldo Riviera, the Ingram case in Washington, where a police officer, under sustained interrogation

came to believe that he had ritually abused his own children in ceremonies that he could not actually remember in which forensic evidence eventually concluded had never happened. There were hundreds of lives destroyed and the apparatus of moral panic

operating at full capacity wearing the borrowed authority of clinical psychology. And here's the point. The satanic panic was not random. It was not a freak eruption of superstructure. of superstition in a modern country. It was the exact psychological problem

that this episode has been circling, manifesting at the cultural level, at the precise moment when the official psychological apparatus had lost the capacity, handle symbolism, to handle metaphor. Geraldo Riviera would say in clips that are not available online,

in 1995, I am convinced that I was terribly wrong, and that many innocent people have been devastated by this. I want to apologize to this. people and to my viewers for my role in this. I've been a firm believer in this movement, and I've come to realize I and others that we were all terribly wrong. I am so sorry. I have to admit that I was one of the many who fell for it. It was a kind of mass hysteria that I helped fuel. Heraldo had mistaken, as the or a shaman, the emotional forces that he was speaking to and unleashing as truth. And the people who were participating in the mass hysteria mistook the pain

that they were feeling for a literalized symbol, one whose claims were so insane that no serious adult could take it seriously. However, millions and millions had. And like everything else, the seeds of this had been laid much earlier. Second way feminism had by the mid-70s produced this enormous accumulation of accurate testimony about sexual exploitation of women and children. Andrew Dworkin was writing and Catherine McKinnon was writing and Kate Millett had published sexual politics in 1970 and Susan Brownmillers against our will came out in 1975. And for the first time in American history, the actual scale of domestic violence, of incest and the pornographic objectification of women was no longer being sedated by the sedative

of the suburbs. The pain of the suburbs was being brought to light, the unpleasant underbelly under the green grass and the white picket fences and the grills with the hot dogs. It was being named aloud in mainstream discourse, and testimony was overwhelming, was undeniable, and it described a pattern of systemic abuse that the culture had no symbolic language to process anymore. And at the same time, they were Catholics and they were evangelicals who were registering something real. They were registering that the sexual revolution had not liberated everyone, that the pornography industry had exploded in the 70s into this $8 billion enterprise, that something had been lost when the symbolic container that used to surround

sexuality, however imperfect, was dissolved. And they weren't wrong about that. They had their own distortions and their own agenda, but they were not hallucinating the content of what they were naming. The culture was getting worse in ways that they were diagnosing accurately. And children were being sexualized in advertising, something that they had never seen in the 50s or even the 60s. And teenagers were being pulled into pornography. And the broader culture, the atmosphere had changed in ways that the parents of young children found terrifying, and that terror was not paranoid invention. So you had two groups, feminists on one side and religious conservatives on the other, who had under normal circumstances almost nothing in common, especially politically,

but they were registering the same thing. And that sexualization and exploitation and exploitation of women and children had reached a level that the culture was not processing. And so both groups needed language for what they were seeing. Neither group had it. They found a common cause in the satanic pan. And this is where the apparatus fails of American Psyche, because the traditional language for this kind of perception was symbolic. It was religious.

It was mythological. You could talk about the loss of the sacred. You could talk about the violation of the temple of the body. You could talk about evil in the sense that the older traditions meant evil as a structural feature of reality. that the individual ego could be captured by. And the symbolic container held the accurate perception at the right level of the abstraction. It did not require you to believe in a literal conspiracy

or a literal devil. And it required you to understand that something real was happening at the level of the cultural soul. But the symbolic container had been dissolving for 60 years. And the apparatus should have helped people, the American psychology apparatus, should have helped people navigate

what the container could no longer longer hold and what had been actively repressing with symbolic literacy. But American psychology was losing any kind of symbolic or metaphorical literacy. It was taking these things literally and losing a relationship to an unconscious mind. It was transitioning during reganomics to, or the precursors to reganomics, CBT, cognitive and behavioral therapy, therapy where the therapist was a technician, where everything was psychoed education, everything was instruction. And so at this exact moment, when the nuance was stripped out of therapy, and clinicians were being taught to literalize, you know, distorted cognitions, you know, it treating metaphor as an error to be corrected rather than a communication to be received just became normal. And just as the culture needed symbolic language to hold what it was seeing, the official psychology was unlearning symbolic language as fast as it could and throwing the depth and the unconscious traditions out of psych. And so, the perception, which was real, was forced into a literal form. The feelings about sexual exploitation

were accurate, but they got attached to a literal conspiracy theory of millions of Satanists, building tunnels under every single street in America, and broadcasting their intentions through magical spells, put into pop music, it could only be revealed when they were played backwards and scrutinized. This isn't news. This isn't literal reality. This is metaphor. But the culture had lost the ability to understand it, so it took these religious impulses as literal truth. Andrea Dworkin and Jerry Falwell ended up on the same side of the anti-pornography fight in the early 80s, because the symbolic register had collapsed and they were both reaching for whatever remained. When this is the psychological tragedy of the satanic panic, it was a correct perception wearing a false costume.

Something was being done and still is to women and children that the culture was and is not processing. The satanic conspiracy theory was not real, and the underlying wound was. But because the symbolic apparatus failed, the only way the wound could surface was a mass hallucination of literal devil-worshippers, when the metaphor no longer available as a metaphor became a delusion, just as it had in every other phase of American history. The wound speaks. And here is the part that unites all of these threads. I think the late 70s was, in a very real sense, where we were doing some of the best psychotherapy and psychology that America had ever done. You know, before we threw it out, and the satanic panic was the coffin nail.

The feminist testimony was psychology. And the revived interest in Jung through people like James Helmand. And Joseph Campbell was psychology. The early somatics of, you know, bioenergetics and the descendants of Wilhelm Reich. And a lot of them were abusive. A lot of them were bad. I'm saying it was also a very messy and bad period. But there was a lot of good in it.

And that early body-based work that would later become somatic experiencing was psychology. The Eastland synthesis, at its best, was psychology. Gregory Bateson was still writing. R.D. Lang was still practicing. The transpersonal movement was seriously wrestling with what consciousness was

and where we come from as existing creatures. What it meant to be alive. Existentialism, spirituality, hadn't been separated and pruned away from the profession. And there was a genuine flowering of integrative, symbolically literate, body-aware, psychology happening in those years. And it was mixed absolutely with an enormous amount of self-indulgent nonsense, cults, abuse,

conspiracy theories, people who were new-age grifters. And some people who were genuinely mentally ill that were practicing, you know, in claiming to treat mental illness. But the signal and the noise were tangled together in a way that made them nearly impossible to separate from a distance. And the culture confronted with the tangle of those things, eventually just gave up on separating them. And it threw the baby out with the bathwater. It decided that the whole category, symbolic psychology, body-based psychology, depth psychology, any psychology that could hold metaphor was contaminated by the excesses of the era, that it was their fault.

the metaphor speakers that we had had a satanic panic at all. And Reagan and Thatcher arrived with this disinfectant. The efficiency machine was sold as a return to sobriety after decades of excess, rationalism, and this promise of a cure. And it was more sober, it was also flatter, and it was structurally incapable of doing the work that had been abandoned. And the cognitive behavioral turn, the DSM3 checklist, the 15-minute med check, all of it that we'll talk about later

that was offered to the culture had been so burned the culture was hurting so much that by those symbolic excesses of the 70s, they welcomed this reduction, this flattening and this simplification of self. And we would no

longer be doing that weird stuff. We would be doing science. And the price of the promised rigor was that we lost for a generation, the tools to hold the kind of perception that the feminists and the Catholics had both been trying to name and we gave up on trying to treat the wound at all or even in trying to find it and the satanic panic was the last grasp

of a culture that was still trying to speak symbolically about something that it could feel but it couldn't articulate when the panic collapsed around 1992 or 1993 and the false convictions started getting overturned and the recovered memory therapy was exposed as just suggestion and confirmation bias. The conclusion that the culture drew was not that we needed better symbolic tools. The conclusion was that symbolic thinking itself was dangerous. And from now on, we would stick to what could be measured. And psychology went along with this conclusion because psychology was already by that point committed to exactly that program. And we got lost in the moment when the baby went out with the bathwater.

I said that three times, sorry. And we lost the generation of clinicians who would have been able to integrate the body work with the depth work, with the cultural critique. And we lost the institutional spaces where somebody like Jung could have worked in the open. And we lost the willingness to take religious experience seriously as clinical data or transpersonal experience.

Any kind of experience that wasn't quote unquote normal, which I'm sorry is a part of this thing. You know, everything is. that is normal is not psychology, where it's not, psychology doesn't have a target that it's shooting for as much as we tried to make after that point. There isn't a bull's eye of normal. And we lost the interdisciplinary conversation that had been producing real insights at Eastland at the Macy conferences. We lost specifically the capacity to hold the feminist testimony in its full weight, because that testimony required symbolic register to metabolize. And we just declared that the symbolic register

was off limits forever. And the abuse survivors who were accurately reporting what had happened to them got categorized as borderline personality disorder. The ritual abuse hysteria became the pretext for dismissing all recovered memory, including considerable portion of what was describing some actual events. And the clinical apparatus, having panicked about the panic, retreated into pure symptom management and it stayed there. And so when I'm telling you that the wound speaks,

I'm telling you that this is what speaking looks like when the official channels have been closed. The satanic panic was the wound speaking, the only language that remained available to it, which was literalized metaphor, conspiracyism, and the degraded form of mythological thinking. The mass hallucination is the collective unconscious

his last attempt to communicate before the cognitive behavioral ice age set in. And then the self-help industry rose up to monetize what the apparatus would no longer address. You want to make it. difference in life, you want to stop just being concerned with what's important, like what people think of you and what your position is and how much money you got and your posture in the community and what you believe in and all that other stuff that ultimately doesn't make a difference?

You want to play in the realm of difference making, then you need to be willing to take a stand. That was Warner Earhart of E.S.T. Irvin Yalom in his book, Existential Psychology, makes fun of Erhard. And he talks about how a lot of the self-help movement was trying to offer this alternative to the culture that was really just a repackaging of the same thing, that, you know, Erhard and others, you know,

EST and different things, you know, ultimately something like Nexium, would just rearrange the tags on what was rebellion and what was allowed and make you feel like you were doing something that was rebellious by really making you, you know, with, you know, taking a lot of your money, this sort of coercive persuasion to just do the thing that you were doing anyway.

You know, Yoham talks about the hypocrisy of preaching individual growth while demanding obedience to get the individual growth. You're never pointed inward by these guys. You're empowered through them, not through yourself. as American psychology could have stepped up, you know, again, to do. And, you know, Werner-E-Hard's, you know, EST trainings, they started in 71. He was one of the bigger guys.

I don't mean to pick on him. I don't think he's terrible or the worst. I don't even know that he's guilty of the things he got canceled for later. But, you know, he would say, you know, if your life is bad, you chose it. If you want a better life, take responsibility, which in practice meant paying Werner-Hard for a weekend of being screamed at in a hotel ballroom with no bathroom breaks. And EST evolved into Landmark eventually, which is still running.

Same pitch, smoother package. But what's the difference in that in the 80s culture that's telling you that anyway? The reason why it feels liberating is because it's packaged like it's rebellion and this authentic connection, but it's the same thing that the culture was already doing, which is why it's familiar and why it's not threatening to you, why you're willing to pay $15,000 to hear it. And, you know, the darkest version of that logic would become something like Nexium, which is the cult, you know, if people have watched the vow in any of these documentaries,

the true crime people. You know, it, it, NXium is this, you know, heightened, modernized evolution of taking that same vocabulary of self-help and then using it to run what, you know, turns out to be a sex trafficking operation. You know, Keith Reneer, the founder of Nexium or the guy who benefited from it, other people kind of did the work, you know, told his followers that they were in, charge of their reality and that their suffering was a choice and that obedience to him was actually enlightenment and the structure was identical to EST. Nexium was not a deviation from this self-help

model of the way that you have real freedom is that you become a slave and the way that you have real authenticity is that you do what I tell you to. It was this model followed to its logical conclusion. And here's what the important self-help cult does. It takes the woman. It takes the wound of the efficiency gospel, and the shame of being told that you are responsible for outcomes you cannot control, and then it reframes the shame as opportunity. If you're responsible for everything, then you are powerful, and the only thing standing between you and the life that you want is your own inadequacy. And then there is a technique that can fix that inadequacy, and someone's selling it. But ultimately, it's pointing you further and further to be by yourself, to be alone.

and while you're part of a group. And so the cult is the efficiency gospel wearing a therapist coat. And psychology was largely absent, you know, from this niche, which is why that self-help movement in the 80s and the 90s exploded. And the niche that psychotherapy is absent from now is probably kind of the blogger, holistic health manosphere area. But 80s and 90s, this is what it was. And American psychology let the self-help industry take over the territory that it had abandoned.

Again, it ceded more territory. And because the Efficiency Gospel had remade clinical therapy into a six-session symptom reduction protocol, ideally, it never really worked. People came from more than six sessions. There was no space in the clinical hour for this question of meaning, of purpose, of why. And so people went to EST, and they went to Landmark, and people went to Tony Robbins, and people went to eventually people like Jordan Peterson. And the shadow of that era was this shame. It was this exhausted gaslit self-blame of a generation that had been told that the world was fair and that it could feel that it wasn't, though. And it couldn't say why. And so somebody telling you, you're in this

huge group of people, but making you more alone is kind of an addictive thing. And somebody telling you, you're going to have ultimate power, but only through giving your money, and your time and your mind to me felt like an empowering authentic experience. And so the semantic exhaustion of the white-collar worker whose job description kept expanding while their salary stayed flat, who was interchangeable now in this system where they couldn't really have an individual brand. This was incredibly appealing, where the culture would only hire normal. All of the identity stuff went here. And so the suburban opioid, crisis that would explode in the 2000s, killing people who'd followed every rule and

discovered that the rule still didn't work, just became the same thing as Valium. It became the same sedation, and people acted like it was the fault of drug pushers, or it was the fault of, and the psychopharmacological industry does bear a lot of blame for that one. But, you know, the drug was needed because of why. The capacity for the psychopharmological company to make billions and billions of dollars. in that niche was there because what? Why buy the drug?

Why don't we have these epidemics in other countries? And the current era's shadow, I think, what is genuinely new, is not in content, but in architecture of the same stuff. Every prior era's shadow was distorted across a population. People could find each other. The factory worker could meet in a union hall. The suburban housewife could eventually read the feminine mystique. There was a sort of antidote.

that led to the next phase, the next iteration of advertising. And the anti-war protesters could at least march. The collective shadow could find collective expression, even if it was distorted, collective expression. And the algorithm doesn't let you do that. It individuates, and it delivers a personalized shadow to every phone. Your feed is not my feed. The outrage being fed to you is calibrated to your specific vulnerabilities,

and it is different from the outrage being fed to me. And the nature of these phones means that that outrage is not a seminar that you go to when somebody tells you to and ha ha, he-he, this is kind of a cult. I'm just going to go to one meeting. Oops. It felt really good because I watched all of these people in an EST seminar, you know, go through the same thing where they kept saying it's not my fault, it's not my fault, and then, oh, it is my fault. And then I realized that, oh, all these people did that and they kind of overcame this thing and then we felt better. And now I'm really into it. Now that isn't a seminar that.

somebody from your work goes to and that happens. It's a phone that is grafted to your nervous system. It is something that has becoming functionally not separate from your brainstem. And this is why the contemporary conspiracy theories like QAnon and the Manosphere and pastel conspiratuality and the old algorithmic left-wing doom loops, they've left this specific texture that is new. And they're not mass movements in the old sense. their individual

calibrated wounds that speak two hashtags where no one actually ever will understand you. You are more alone and in a room with more people than could ever fit into the analog

rooms. And so two people who believe in QAnon may believe in completely different QAnon's. One of those QAnons may be halfway right or mostly right. The movement isn't a body of belief. It's the shape of a wound filled in by whatever content the algorithm happens to deliver. And the feeling that these people have, that something's being done to them, that their nervous

systems are being manipulated, that the news is lying, that they are being steered towards emotional states that they did not choose. That feeling is accurate. And something is being done to them. The platforms optimized for engagement, which is to say for the neurological responses that keep people scrolling, outrage and fear and comparison and status threat. You know, just the need to be an individual that is expressing something new and finding something in an aesthetic that is individually liberating and empowering. And the tech industry has a quarter century of A-B testing research here on how to capture your attention. And it's invested that research in products designed to do exactly that.

So when a Q&N believer says that they can feel that they're being manipulated, they are right. they are being manipulated. And when they reach for the cabal of democratic pedophiles as the mechanism, they're wrong. And that one of these parties is good and the other's bad or, you know, whatever. I'm not, this isn't a political podcast. All I'm saying is that the answer is not as simple as those movements will diagnose you to believe. And the complexity of the system is not as simple as any of them will tell you. The underlying perception is correct.

they're not paranoid about nothing. They're paranoid about something, and the thing that they are paranoid about is the thing that is actually paranoid making, which is the platform delivering the paranoia. The medium is the disease. And this is the consistent pattern across every era that we've gone through.

People feel that rewiring. The feeling is accurate, and technology is a part of it, but technology is not even really the problem. The attribution is wrong. Labor-era-era workers felt that the industrial, dis-possession, and they attribute it to masons and Catholics. And Depression-era workers felt the economic capture, and they attributed to Jewish bankers,

and Cold War citizens felt the covert state, or they blamed something that somebody was doing in Russia. And they attributed often correctly to the CIA or the FBI, though they sometimes expanded that attribution into territory that the evidence didn't really support. And efficiency-era workers felt the gaslighting of personal responsibility. They attributed it to their own inadequacy. The algorithmic era user, you know, feels the platform capture and they attribute it to

the deep state or, you know, to people who are either so ill-defined that it isn't even a thing or who are so specific that there's no way that those people have the power to do the thing they're being accused of. And the attribution is always culturally available. The feeling is always neurologically accurate. and the apparatus that was supposed to help people distinguish between the accurate feeling and the wrong attribution, that apparatus psychology spent the 20th century making itself unable to do any of that work, to help with any of those problems, or even to see them.

And I want to step back and say, you know, what I think is actually happening is, you know, that we just keep walking through this era. We keep walking through these eras. And I think that the American unconscious has been carrying for over a century, quantity of unprocessed material that exceeds the capacity of the official channels to process. And every era has added to the reservoir and the industrial dispossession, the manufactured inadequacy, the atomic terror, the covert state, the efficiency gaslighting, the algorithmic capture. None of these wounds was ever fully acknowledged. None was ever collectively grieved. And none was ever

integrated, you know, in the Jungian sense of making the unconscious content conscious and letting the conscious self adjust to include it, even if it's bad, this being able to see it as part of the cure. And instead, each wound was medicalized. It was turned into individual symptoms. It was treated with individual interventions. So if you want to take a theory like Carl Jung and turn it into neurology, his phenomenology into neurology, it's just intergenerational trauma plus culture. It's this wound that couldn't be metabolized in one generation getting metabolized badly by the next. And it's what psychology had the tools to address and refuse to use any of those tools for. And the conspiracy theories, the cults, the self-help industries, the mass psychotic content,

all of it is this reservoir overflowing and is the wound speaking because the mouth has been sewn shut. And it is speaking through the body. It's speaking through the dream. It's speaking through the delusion. It's speaking through the retweet. It's speaking through the algorithm now. It's speaking through everything except the one channel that was built to research. receive it, which was psychology, the industry that's supposed to be dealing with.

Because therapy has been captured and optimized and made into this 15-minute med check, or the incentive structure, at least, is pushing it that direction. I don't think it's entirely gone. I know a lot of great therapists. You know, the incentive structure is against them. You know, then there are very few places where we are able to see ourselves in a mirror that could reflect something like this at us anymore. And there were moments where it could have gone differently.

Because I think the conspiracy theories instincts, again, are always correct, or not always, but people are telling you that they're hurt, believe them. Maybe they're wrong about why. You know, the immediate post-war period was this hint that country had demonstrated that collective action worked, rationing worked, national mobilization worked. We could have directed that energy into a collective flourishing, into public health, into genuine community, into a psychological infrastructure that took suffering seriously,

and we chose a suburb. And the 60s were this hinge, you know, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, the human potential movement, all independently arrived at this similar insight, which was individual suffering reflects structural conditions, and structural conditions can change. And psychology could have absorbed that,

and instead it sided with the efficiency revolution, and it pathologized those movements. or it was embarrassed by them because they didn't speak the language of a hard science. And in the early 90s, there was this hinge point. You know, Clinton tried and failed at health care reform. In the moment where mental health parity could have become law, you know, the moment where the managed care revolution could have been regulated instead of legitimized, there always will be a bureaucracy.

We can't get rid of them. I'm not advocating for going back to, you know, Bronze Age mythology. But a lot of influencers do, and I think this is why. I think that's why they're telling people that's more meaningful. I would say I'm a little bit more of a realist. I don't think that's possible. You know, the industry organized effectively in the 90s, but the reformers didn't. And then the window closed.

And then after 2008, there's this other hinge. You had a financial crisis that made visible that systems were producing outcomes that no one voted for. Occupy happened. Whoever you voted for, you did not get, and increasingly don't get what you vote for. And Occupy happened, and the Tea Party happened. both for these responses to the same wound. And one got absorbed by the right-wing populism. Well, both of them got absorbed by right-wing populism.

And one got absorbed by this kind of myth of democratic incrementalism of we're going to do something later, so just kind of believe in us and then later we might do something. Neither produced structural reform. The opportunity passed. I'm not siding with any of those guys. I'm just saying that's kind of where the energy went. And then at the hinge point, you know, at each one,

There was this road that was not taken. And at each hinge point, there was an identifiable people that made, you know, identifiable decisions. But the paranoid theorist who says things are being done to us is, you know, they're correct about that. Things were done. Things continue to be done. But the part of the theorists, the part they get wrong is imagining that there's villains

in a circle that are doing this thing. There's not a room. There's no cabal. Now, what there is is a network of incentive structures, each operating according to its own logic, mandatory localized logic, and each producing outcomes that harm millions of people and benefit very few people, and no single actor is responsible for that aggregate, which is in some ways worse, because what do you do?

Because if there was a cabal, you could overthrow it. But the incentive structure is harder to overthrow. It exists in everyone's daily choices, and it lives in the software, and it lives in these billing codes, and it makes everyone, somehow complicit, even the people who can diagnose the system accurately. And the incentive structure means that there's fewer and fewer of those people. And here's the takeaway. The conspiracy theorists is not really your enemy.

They're the canary in the coal mine, right? You know, they're hurting in a specific way, and they have correctly perceived something that is wrong, and they've misidentified what. And the reason that they've misidentified what is wrong, is that the culture no longer provides any kind of accurate vocabulary for what is wrong. And the institutions that should have now abdicated that responsibility, I would argue. And if you dismiss the people who participate in these movements as stupid, that they need to read more Wikipedia or they need to watch the news that you watch,

you're confirming their suspicion that the mainstream has nothing to offer them. If you engage them on a level of fact-checking, their specific claims, you miss what the claims are actually expressing. The claims are expressing a wound. The wound is real. And the wound is usually not what the claim says it is, but addressing the wound is the only intervention that has a chance here of working.

And this is what therapy has done best. It listens to the symptoms, as communication, it doesn't argue with the hallucination. And asks what the hallucination is trying to say. And the patient who believes the CIA is implanting thoughts is not arguing for a correct theory of mind control. They're telling you that something foreign has entered them and that they cannot expel it and that they do not feel safe in their own head

and that nobody has ever taken them seriously and that they don't feel safe and that's where you start that's where psychology starts you don't have to explain these systems you don't even have to listen to this podcast to be a better therapist just start there at the base of the brain not at the top the fact that they don't feel safe is what's important And the conspiracy theory at this cultural scale is the same phenomenon. It's the closest the collective can come to articulating the wound, given the vocabulary that's available in each decade as the wound changes. And it always will evolve faster than our ability to describe it.

But that's the job of psychology. You know, is to build a better vocabulary, a faster one, because these things are moving at light speed, to offer culture a more accurate language for what has accurate. actually been done to it. That's what I like about what Jung is, and that's why I also think that a lot of Jungian classical Jungian analysis is out of date. And the answer to fixing psychology is not just to hold on to that and make everyone a Jungian analyst. It's to learn from the process of what these people, these early pioneers were doing. They were talking about their culture.

They weren't necessarily talking about ours. We can still learn a lot from them. But I don't know that talking about anima-ananimous and archetypes is really going to fix everybody today. You know, American Psych has done this. You know, they, in this episode, we're looking at why they did it. They did it not because of things that they built in most of these cases, but by territory that they ceded to other industries. And I want to hold this energy like a ghost. I want to name what this episode, you know, has kind of been revolving around

because the last one and this one are the two kind of messy, soft, wide open looser theses before we just get back to the fast-paced history of the first two episodes. Every era, psychology inherits a problem that it doesn't create.

In every era, psychology had tools that might have helped. In every era, psychology chose to use those tools in service of individual adjustment rather than collective understanding. And in every era, because it was afraid of the culture, afraid of the politics, afraid of its own survival,

it gave up. And so we now live inside of this accumulated, compounded interest of all of this unprocessed wound from the last 30 to 70 years. And our bodies feel it and our sleep fills it and our children feel it and the anxiety epidemic is not a mystery. And the loneliness epidemic is not a mystery. And the opioid epidemic is not a mystery. And they're not even really new.

It's just that the old cycle is now happening like 15 times as fast. And the meaning crisis epidemic is not really a mystery either. They are unprocessed collective trauma. And they look like things that you can medicate. But they're not because they're a collective situation. And the wound speaks. Like it always has. And the question has never been.

whether the wound is speaking. The question is whether do we have the apparatus to listen to what it is saying anymore. If we can build something that serves a different purpose, something that might actually be the wall the wound is speaking to.

But in part six, we'll get back to the history of the pace of the first two and three episodes. We're going to look at that wall. History looping through your throat. Cold machines, the wounds your soul.

Bear it through the tangled words. Cold machines, warm. You're singing something in me shakes. I'm holding on to every mistake. Hey, guys. Thank you for listening to the series. I want to point out you can get this in almost every podcast library out there,

including YouTube, Apple Music, all of them. Please subscribe if you enjoy it or go back and listen to the beginning if you're starting. And check out the website, get therapy,pringham.com.