WEBVTT
00:00:01.520 --> 00:00:04.799
Hello everyone and welcome back to Left Hand.
00:00:04.959 --> 00:00:22.160
Today we interrupt our regular programming to bring you a polished audio-only version of the opening remarks and initial responses from our recent AHRC public panel, Does Psyche Matter, Jung and the Unconscious, in 2026.
00:00:22.399 --> 00:00:31.920
Hosted by Bob Langan and joined by Gabriela Sova, Sperlarova, JF Martell, and Christian McMillan, the panel takes up a pointed question.
00:00:32.159 --> 00:00:41.280
Decades into the era of psychotherapy and within a world of deepening crises, is psychology as we've inherited it equal to the challenges we now face?
00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:53.039
It asks whether Jung can be radical or whether his notion of interiority forecloses that from the very start, and whether our conception of the psyche remains too divorced from the material.
00:00:53.280 --> 00:01:00.240
The full version of the panel is available on the Acid Horizon YouTube channel, and I've included a link to it below.
00:01:00.479 --> 00:01:05.760
As you listen, take note that the fall season of AHRC courses begins next week.
00:01:05.920 --> 00:01:31.599
If the contents of this discussion are something you'd like to pursue further, we recommend you enroll in Bob Langan's class, Jung and Spinoza, God, Affect, Destiny, a four-week seminar beginning October 4th on the implicit monism running through both thinkers, the union of knowledge and affect, and the point at which Jung must, in a sense, become himself Spinozist for his psychology to succeed.
00:01:31.840 --> 00:01:38.640
I should also remind you that if you enroll in two classes at AHRC this fall, you'll get a third for free.
00:01:38.879 --> 00:01:44.079
Just navigate to the show notes and find the code for use at the time of enrollment.
00:01:44.319 --> 00:01:52.159
Anyway, let's get this conversation underway and delve into the question of whether or not psyche matters.
00:02:00.959 --> 00:02:03.120
Thank you, Craig, and thanks everyone.
00:02:03.280 --> 00:02:08.240
Thank you for coming to this latest public panel of the Acid Horizon Research Commons.
00:02:08.319 --> 00:02:09.439
I am Bob Langan.
00:02:09.599 --> 00:02:12.000
I have a PhD from University of Essex.
00:02:12.159 --> 00:02:15.199
My book, Young and Spinoza, is available through Rutledge.
00:02:15.599 --> 00:02:22.639
I am the co-runner of the blog concerning depthology, philosophy, art and more, the Substack University Drift.
00:02:22.800 --> 00:02:29.199
And as Craig just kindly reminded you, I'll be teaching a class on Young and Spinoza with the AHRC in the fall.
00:02:29.360 --> 00:02:31.680
Please check it out if you are curious.
00:02:31.919 --> 00:02:36.159
And speaking of Young, our topic today concerns Carl Jung.
00:02:36.560 --> 00:02:38.400
It's called Does Psyche Matter?
00:02:38.560 --> 00:02:41.680
Young and the Unconscious in 2026.
00:02:42.319 --> 00:02:51.520
And the question of whether or not Young and Jungian psychology is equipped to deal with the social, political, and ontological problems of our time.
00:02:51.919 --> 00:02:58.879
Before I introduce each of our panelists, I'm going to give some brief remarks and I'm actually going to open with a quote.
00:02:59.120 --> 00:03:06.080
And this quote is from the correspondence between Jung and his colleague Han Schmid-Gezan from December 1915.
00:03:06.400 --> 00:03:23.360
Schmid-Gezan was talking to Jung about his theory of psychological types, and Han Schmid-Gezan was concerned that Jung was prioritizing the introverted functions of the psyche as opposed to the extroverted attitude and functions.
00:03:23.439 --> 00:03:26.960
He was valorizing the introverted nature of our mind.
00:03:27.439 --> 00:03:34.080
And this disagreement ended somewhat acrimoniously, so Han Schmid Gazan ends his correspondence with this following passage.
00:03:34.479 --> 00:03:43.759
There you are, he's saying to Jung, sitting in a tower on the Obersea, part of Lake Zurich, where Bollingin Jung's famous tower he eventually built.
00:03:44.000 --> 00:04:06.400
Having become Nietzsche's heir, father to none, friend to none, and sufficient unto yourself, vis-a-vis here and there, a few other male and female introverts are living, each in their own tower, loving humankind and those farthest away, thus protecting themselves against the devilish love or their closest neighbors.
00:04:06.960 --> 00:04:17.759
And from time to time they meet in the middle of the lake, each in their own motorboat, and prove to each other the dignity of man with best regards, Han Schmid Gazan.
00:04:18.079 --> 00:04:32.800
Now to me, that sort of it gets to the crux of the issue, which is Jungian psychology, with its emphasis on finding the symbolic in our lives and withdrawing projections to discover archetypal access within.
00:04:33.199 --> 00:04:36.399
A, is this diminishing the outside world too much?
00:04:36.560 --> 00:04:42.000
And B, does this prevent a Jungian perspective from dealing with social and political problems?
00:04:42.160 --> 00:04:45.920
And this is obviously a very old chestnut in the field that many people have worked on.
00:04:46.079 --> 00:04:49.199
I'm not saying anything new in that regard.
00:04:49.439 --> 00:04:52.079
I see Mark Saban is here, which is great.
00:04:52.160 --> 00:05:22.000
Mark Sabon was on my supervisory board for my PhD, and I was going to bring him up regardless, because his book Two Souls Alas, which is from 2019, I believe, one of the best books in the post-Joungian literature, that, in my opinion, where Mark Saban points out that Jung clearly, even how he describes the two sides of his personality, or his number one and number two personality in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, valorizes the number two personality or the inner timeless depths.
00:05:22.240 --> 00:05:30.959
Whereas the other side of himself is more just concerned with career, scientific exploration, more just the mundane world.
00:05:31.040 --> 00:05:40.879
But it's really the retreat within where one discovers the archetypes, the symbolic and the imaginal, all the good stuff that we associate with Jungian thought.
00:05:41.199 --> 00:05:46.720
And in my opinion, for these brief remarks, it's worth pointing out three ways in which is problematic.
00:05:47.040 --> 00:06:02.879
First, quite simply just in terms of theoretical, which is if the whole point of this is to withdraw projections, to withdraw and look within, to find the archetype within that I didn't understand that I was projecting onto someone, what can we even say of the outer world at this point?
00:06:03.120 --> 00:06:23.279
I mean, it's pretty well documented that a lot of the women, clients, and colleagues within Young's life, in some cases, whether he had relationships with them or not, that's really not important here as much as it is to say the ideas he exchanged with them later on, he might talk about in his own texts as if he was talking to just the anima and the outside was reduced.
00:06:23.759 --> 00:06:34.160
And the main takeaway there is that because for Young, most knowledge, true knowledge is routed through within, routed to explore the numinous, you can only access through the self.
00:06:34.399 --> 00:06:37.759
Well, again, how does that let us talk about anything in the outside world?
00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:43.040
Another concern here is just a bias that might be related to economic and material reasons.
00:06:43.279 --> 00:06:54.480
You know, I'd recently just got back from, well, literally just yesterday, a conference on young innovation at UCL that was hosted by the IAJP and the IAP, AAP, excuse me.
00:06:54.639 --> 00:07:08.000
And there was certainly some good material there, and certainly some material of people trying to really critically think about why knowledge gleamed through, say, an LLM is not sufficient as the struggle that one gains through the unconscious.
00:07:08.240 --> 00:07:19.680
But there was also quite a bit of concern about okay, how can we prove that a digital assistant can't hold the same inner space that a true analyst can, and therefore the diet and therapy is safe.
00:07:19.839 --> 00:07:42.240
And while this is an interesting discussion and very interesting research and statistical experiments going on to try to prove that, there was a current concern for me there, which is this is still a very inward-looking way of how do we protect the profession of therapy, which therapy is good and it should be protected, but there's simply a material concern of preserving the field versus can we look outside to do it.
00:07:42.480 --> 00:07:47.920
That was much fewer in regard from what I saw than focusing on maintaining the actual field.
00:07:48.319 --> 00:08:01.920
It's some of this evokes sort of Hillman's point of view of leaving the therapy room to try to treat the world itself, being too restricted to the therapy room and keeping the imaginal within that diet might have some limitations.
00:08:02.240 --> 00:08:10.560
And the last thing I want to bring up with my opening remarks is the more purely psychological reasons that might be holding Jungians back in some respects.
00:08:10.720 --> 00:08:17.439
Back in 1996, the therapist Andrew Samuels wrote an article titled Will the Post-Youngian Survive?
00:08:17.680 --> 00:08:26.720
And he claimed that in more recent times, Jungians have broken into two separate camps, a psychoanalytic camp and a fundamentalist camp.
00:08:26.959 --> 00:08:40.000
The psychoanalytic camp is more concerned with trying to find a way to preserve Young within other psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theories, to almost turn the dial down on the things that we might say make young a bit weird to some extent.
00:08:40.240 --> 00:08:45.279
And then the fundamentalist camp doubles down on the inner, the valorization of the inner world.
00:08:45.360 --> 00:08:48.000
It kind of is a reactionary in that sense.
00:08:48.320 --> 00:08:57.120
The problem with the psychoanalytic camp is that if you turn down the dial to try to even the scales between inner and outer, is are you somehow killing young?
00:08:57.360 --> 00:08:59.679
Are you losing what makes young young?
00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:10.080
So my thinking in all this has been is there a way to abolish the closed inner space of the symbolic and the imaginal can be joined by inner and outer alike.
00:09:10.240 --> 00:09:12.799
And that's where more work needs to be done.
00:09:12.960 --> 00:09:21.440
And with those opening remarks, I'm now going to turn it over to our panelists to see what they think about the questions that led to the creation of this panel.
00:09:21.600 --> 00:09:23.759
And we're going to start with Gabriela.
00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:32.799
Gabriella Sobaspolirova is a postgraduate research student in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.
00:09:33.039 --> 00:09:40.240
Her work lies at the intersection of social psychology and post-Jungian studies with particular focus on individuation and creativity.
00:09:40.480 --> 00:09:45.679
She co-runs a blog and an emerging platform for deaf psychology called University Drift.
00:09:45.919 --> 00:09:50.720
Gabriella, I'm very sorry that we cannot see you, but please take it away.
00:09:51.039 --> 00:09:52.720
I think, Bob, you can see me now.
00:09:52.879 --> 00:09:53.440
I hope so.
00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:55.039
Yes, definitely can.
00:09:55.120 --> 00:09:56.320
That is fantastic.
00:09:56.639 --> 00:09:59.519
Yeah, so thank you so much for such a good intro.
00:09:59.600 --> 00:10:14.080
And I think that I should probably lay out my cards straight away and probably break some of the things that you laid out there so beautifully, because my perspective is from social psychology and social work.
00:10:14.720 --> 00:10:21.919
And I have major issues seeing the psyche as separate from the material and political and social world.
00:10:22.159 --> 00:10:26.320
It is a very difficult thought experiment for me to go in that way.
00:10:26.480 --> 00:10:42.480
It's really interesting, and I would just leave it there as a some sort of anecdotal observation that I have never been challenged on this type of blind spot that I have until I rejoined the Jungian world, which is really fascinating in itself.
00:10:42.639 --> 00:10:49.759
I'm not saying that it's only Jungians who do it, but it is the first time I have encountered that this is being done.
00:10:50.080 --> 00:10:52.480
So let's just leave it there.
00:10:52.720 --> 00:10:59.200
So when I was reading the brief for today's panel, there came a couple of things to my mind.
00:10:59.360 --> 00:11:07.039
And the first thing is what actually happens if we conclude at the end of this evening that psyche actually doesn't matter.
00:11:07.279 --> 00:11:12.080
We go home with uh sort of an idea that okay, it doesn't matter.
00:11:12.320 --> 00:11:13.600
Let's deal with that.
00:11:13.840 --> 00:11:19.759
So, where my thoughts went after that was what is the function of psychology, actually?
00:11:20.159 --> 00:11:29.919
And there are, of course, many functions you can think of, but I thought that there were two that were quite important in this particular context.
00:11:30.240 --> 00:11:39.840
And one of them is a meaning-making tool, psychology as a meaning-making tool, making sense of the world, and the other is therapy.
00:11:40.159 --> 00:11:46.159
And if we decide that psyche doesn't matter, what does it mean in those two contexts?
00:11:46.320 --> 00:11:48.720
Like, does the world lose its meaning?
00:11:49.039 --> 00:11:50.240
Or are we lost?
00:11:50.399 --> 00:11:53.039
Did we just get it wrong at some point?
00:11:53.600 --> 00:12:00.799
Or does it mean that we can't make the world a better place if we can't heal it through therapy?
00:12:01.120 --> 00:12:07.919
So I'll elaborate on it a little bit, but I'll just get you out of the trouble straight away.
00:12:08.080 --> 00:12:20.399
I think that Jungian studies have something to contribute here, but I think that we really need to be cautious about where our limitations are and where the competency is of the discipline.
00:12:20.639 --> 00:12:27.279
And I think that that's something that Jungian studies are not always very good at understanding.
00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:31.360
So I'll go back to the meaning-making situation.
00:12:31.679 --> 00:12:37.120
Like if I use psychology to make sense of the world, we see it all the time.
00:12:37.279 --> 00:12:47.919
There's plenty of evidence to know that people are using psychological talk and psychological way of thinking into understanding what is happening with the world.
00:12:48.159 --> 00:12:52.799
And I would argue is not always the most constructive way to approach the world.
00:12:53.039 --> 00:13:01.279
But I've been recently reminded about where actually Jung started when I got a part-time job in mental health.
00:13:01.519 --> 00:13:14.240
And I think that it is a really interesting thing to bring up at this point because I don't think that Jungian psychology would have happened if Jung wasn't dealing with psychosis.
00:13:14.639 --> 00:13:24.799
And that is the reason why Freudians think differently, because that wasn't the material that was brought to them to on a large part.
00:13:24.879 --> 00:13:30.000
And I think that it is doing something incredibly useful in this context.
00:13:30.159 --> 00:13:50.480
Like if you encounter a person who believes that he is a Jesus, for example, you treat it as an archetype, as a collective cultural, unconscious content that is coming through, which preserves some sort of the part of the being that the part of the human that is actually healthy.
00:13:50.879 --> 00:14:05.840
For example, their need to relations, which are very strongly diminished if they live in this sort of a world, rather than dealing with as delusion that has to be exercised from that person, basically.
00:14:06.159 --> 00:14:09.919
So from this perspective, it makes perfect sense.
00:14:10.080 --> 00:14:13.279
It is a brilliant tool, go for it.
00:14:13.679 --> 00:14:32.320
However, where there are limits to that is, for example, I just had this note, very common in the Jungian circles, dealing with some political issues by assigning, for example, some world leaders saying, Oh, that's a trickster figure.
00:14:32.639 --> 00:14:34.399
So, what is it doing, right?
00:14:34.879 --> 00:14:43.519
Are we legitimizing it because we assign the mythological whatever lore that is behind it?
00:14:43.759 --> 00:14:49.360
Aren't we supposed to just say, okay, that's an evil person who really doesn't mean well?
00:14:49.600 --> 00:14:52.240
Wouldn't that be just more productive?
00:14:52.799 --> 00:15:05.919
And in this sense, what all psychology does, not just unions, is the issue of psychologizing, applying psychology at the issues that are not necessarily psychological.
00:15:06.159 --> 00:15:10.559
And I think that there's something really problematic about that.
00:15:10.879 --> 00:15:12.639
But I'll just leave it for here.
00:15:12.720 --> 00:15:14.559
For now, we get we can come to it.
00:15:14.799 --> 00:15:27.919
The other issue is with therapy, and I think we've talked about it many times, came to my mind when I was reading the brief, when Hillman said that we have had 100 years of therapy and the world is getting worse.
00:15:28.080 --> 00:15:30.000
So, what does it actually mean?
00:15:30.320 --> 00:15:43.360
And I know that he's not applying implying that the therapy made the world worse or that it didn't have an impact, but it has two corollates that are just running together.
00:15:43.679 --> 00:16:03.840
And I think that the therapy is really interesting tool to think about the world, because in one way we have the belief that if, for example, everyone goes to therapy, we'll all have incredibly healthy relationships and we will be so self-aware and the world will become a better place.
00:16:04.320 --> 00:16:11.679
And if psyche doesn't matter, this is just out of the table as a question, and that's not going to happen, right?
00:16:12.080 --> 00:16:19.440
The other point is if the therapy is applied to the world somehow, it will become a better place.
00:16:19.679 --> 00:16:27.840
Again, if psyche doesn't matter, if Jungians can't address those social issues and whatever, then this is just gone.
00:16:28.080 --> 00:16:39.840
And I think that what is really helpful with Hillman is he has shifted the perspective from the therapeutic diet into the world, which is brilliant.
00:16:40.080 --> 00:16:47.360
But I think that what I personally think he got wrong is the method he applied on it.
00:16:47.600 --> 00:16:55.200
I don't think that we should apply therapy to the world, and there are many reasons for that.
00:16:55.440 --> 00:17:01.519
First of all, I don't think that the world necessarily suffers of mental health issues, primarily.
00:17:01.759 --> 00:17:05.279
Second of all, there's always the question: who is the therapist?
00:17:05.519 --> 00:17:08.160
Who decides what needs to be treated?
00:17:08.559 --> 00:17:13.920
There's always an even relationship in that sort of a that sort of a thing.
00:17:14.240 --> 00:17:23.920
There is um a lot of what we don't acknowledge quite often is that therapy has adverse effects as well as positive effects.
00:17:24.240 --> 00:17:28.720
So where do we go with that if we just get it wrong?
00:17:29.039 --> 00:17:31.359
Or are we just wasting our efforts?
00:17:31.519 --> 00:17:33.200
I would be very speculative here.
00:17:33.279 --> 00:17:36.079
It's my perspective that I apply on that.
00:17:36.319 --> 00:17:44.559
I disagree with Hellman, and that's sort that he believes that the psyche is basically very homogeneous and very much the same.
00:17:44.799 --> 00:17:56.400
I think that we have different kinds of psyche, as much as we have different kinds of materials, and the material always informs the process of working with the material.
00:17:56.559 --> 00:18:02.160
Like you can throw a steel rod on a potter wheel, but you will never get a pot out of it.
00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:03.759
It just doesn't matter.
00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:19.119
And you can't bring, I don't know, a psyche of a strawberry in a supermarket or a psyche of a political ideology and apply the same method as if we use in therapeutic room.
00:18:19.279 --> 00:18:26.480
I just think that there's a major disconnect from what it can be done in that sort of a way.
00:18:26.720 --> 00:18:27.359
Whatever.
00:18:27.519 --> 00:18:38.559
I think that Hellman did in his time what was very much on the mind of critical psychology, and that was de-individualizing the psychological issues.
00:18:38.799 --> 00:18:41.039
And he deserves all the credit for that.
00:18:41.200 --> 00:18:51.680
However, that has been 34 years or how long now, I think that it's about time to move on and updated with whatever we know about the psyche today.
00:18:51.920 --> 00:19:14.559
So if I bring it back to the Jungians, I think that wherever Jungian studies sit within the whole psychology situation or psychology, politics, social sciences, whatever you want to put it, I suspect that there is a great tendency towards staying in self-isolation.
00:19:14.799 --> 00:19:35.839
I was thinking about the COVID image in this Dissor, that Jungian studies are still sitting at home in a quarantine and hoping that it can address all the issues of the world, all the issues of the psyche everywhere, but not engaging with other disciplines.
00:19:36.079 --> 00:19:42.400
And I think that there is a major problem with that.
00:19:42.720 --> 00:19:44.880
I think that it would be helpful.
00:19:44.960 --> 00:19:54.160
I think that the Jungian studies have a lot to contribute, but it is really important to know where, with whom, and at what time.
00:19:54.720 --> 00:19:59.359
And that's basically my initial thoughts about whatever we were talking about.
00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:01.039
Thank you, Gabriella.
00:20:01.119 --> 00:20:11.359
Yeah, you've always kept me honest about understanding that some of the introverted bias in psychology didn't start with young, and youngians don't need to take on all the blame for that.
00:20:11.440 --> 00:20:14.319
It is inherently, by its nature, somewhat of an introverted field.
00:20:14.400 --> 00:20:17.839
It's just a question of is there a capacity to change that?
00:20:17.920 --> 00:20:19.680
And if so, why?
00:20:20.799 --> 00:20:21.119
Okay.
00:20:21.599 --> 00:20:24.559
Next to speak is J.F.
00:20:24.720 --> 00:20:25.359
Martell.
00:20:25.759 --> 00:20:26.160
J.F.
00:20:26.240 --> 00:20:29.920
Martell is a Canadian writer, lecturer, and podcaster.
00:20:30.400 --> 00:20:38.000
He is the author of the acclaimed book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice on the Metaphysical Implications of Creative Expression.
00:20:38.559 --> 00:20:46.880
His work has been published in publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, Data Lists, Orbital Studies, Canadian Notes and Queries, and AI.
00:20:47.200 --> 00:20:57.039
With the musicologist Phil Ford, JF hosts Weird Studies, a popular podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of art, philosophy, psyche, and the unexplained.
00:20:57.359 --> 00:20:58.720
JF, you have the floor.
00:20:59.519 --> 00:21:00.559
Thank you, Bob.
00:21:00.799 --> 00:21:02.000
Thank you, Gabriella.
00:21:02.160 --> 00:21:03.200
That was enlightening.
00:21:03.440 --> 00:21:06.480
So I am I'm not a Junion analyst.
00:21:06.880 --> 00:21:09.519
I'm not sure in what capacity I'm speaking today.
00:21:09.839 --> 00:21:15.200
But Jung has certainly been a friend of mine, a frenemy of sorts for a very, very long time.
00:21:15.359 --> 00:21:20.240
So I'm speaking from a very personal place, but I'll try to make these comments relevant.
00:21:20.400 --> 00:21:27.440
So I'm gonna approach two of the questions, maybe three, very, very quickly that Bob shared with us as we prepared for this.
00:21:27.680 --> 00:21:32.480
The first one, does our conception of the psyche remain too introverted, too divorced from the material?
00:21:32.799 --> 00:21:35.279
Or are these actually separate problems?
00:21:35.519 --> 00:21:39.920
So this is of course a problem that both Bob and Gabriella just discussed.
00:21:40.880 --> 00:21:45.279
Is psychology in isolation too introverted, too focused on the inner world?
00:21:45.519 --> 00:21:51.440
Well, yes, but I would argue in the same sense that zoology is too focused on animals.
00:21:51.759 --> 00:21:55.440
It's exclusively focused on that because that's the business of psychology.
00:21:56.240 --> 00:21:58.480
And that's an I think that's an important point.
00:21:58.640 --> 00:21:59.759
It's not just a snarky.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:24.240
A snarky remark because when it comes to Jung, I think it's important to read Jung, at least from my perspective, as being part of a much bigger tradition and to see him as an emissary of a larger, deeper, older tradition, instead of seeing him in isolation as offering one paradigmatic or programmatic model of the psyche to be compared with others.
00:22:24.559 --> 00:22:42.240
Jung, as Peter Kingsley and others have pointed out, is essentially participating in the tradition that goes, if we just follow it back in time through Nietzsche, the German idealists, Spinoza, as Bob explores in his book, through Christianity, all the way back to Neoplatonism.
00:22:42.400 --> 00:22:54.559
There's a whole spiritual tradition in what I'll call, for the sake of simplicity, the West, which I think Jung belongs to, and in light of which we can assess his work.
00:22:54.720 --> 00:23:00.880
And so there's a critique of Jung that can come from, let's say, a radical political materialist position today.
00:23:01.119 --> 00:23:04.880
But there's also a critique of Jung that can come out of that deeper tradition.
00:23:04.960 --> 00:23:11.839
And of course, it's not going to be a pointed critique because that critique itself, that tradition implies a variety of points of view.
00:23:12.079 --> 00:23:30.640
But my point is this it's that I think that part of the political crises that we are experiencing today, and this is something I think Jung would have said and does say in books like The Undiscovered Self and elsewhere, is that we have neglected the interior world in all kinds of ways.
00:23:30.799 --> 00:23:35.680
The capitalism neglects it in its own way, but also socialism neglects it in another way.
00:23:35.759 --> 00:23:43.839
And so there's there could be, in certain respects, something we might want to learn from Jung without taking him personally as an example.
00:23:44.079 --> 00:23:45.440
Was he too introverted?
00:23:45.680 --> 00:23:49.599
Was he literally building his ivory tower to hide from the world?
00:23:49.839 --> 00:23:52.559
All those critiques are fair, and that's perhaps is true.
00:23:52.640 --> 00:24:10.079
But when you read what he writes and you try to filter that through a kind of wider perspective on that includes and gives proper attention to material relations and political realities and so forth, I think he can be very, very useful.
00:24:10.480 --> 00:24:27.359
For instance, just to name a very simple example, his concept of the shadow can be very, very useful for making sense not only, and I would say not even primarily, of other people's political beliefs, but of one's own political beliefs and convictions.
00:24:27.599 --> 00:24:31.599
The idea of an antiodromia, that things tend to reverse into their opposites.
00:24:31.759 --> 00:24:44.880
The idea that often what we're fighting against, verbally, physically, mentally, is not so much an actual other out there, but something inside ourselves or something out there on which we project some aspect of ourselves.
00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:46.240
These are important ideas.
00:24:46.400 --> 00:24:57.359
I don't think that a viable and healthy political movement should be without some consideration of that psychological reality, which has ramifications on a huge scale.
00:24:57.599 --> 00:25:02.720
I also think that um there's something about Jung's emphasis on the self.
00:25:02.880 --> 00:25:04.720
Now I know this is controversial.
00:25:04.880 --> 00:25:13.440
People like James Hillman have challenged it, but I think it's too easy to misunderstand or misread Jung, probably through his own fault, on this point.
00:25:13.680 --> 00:25:18.319
In Aeon, for instance, he says, and I'm gonna read a quick passage here.
00:25:18.640 --> 00:25:20.640
This is on page 23 of the book Aeon.
00:25:20.880 --> 00:25:24.799
He writes, the more numerous, and so he's talking about individuation, right?
00:25:25.119 --> 00:25:26.960
On which I'll say something in a second.
00:25:27.359 --> 00:25:43.039
He writes, quote, the more numerous and the more significant the unconscious contents which are assimilated into the ego, the closer the approximation of the ego to the self, even though this approximation must be a never-ending process.
00:25:43.519 --> 00:25:55.839
And so the idea that Jung posits the self as a transcendent, fixed transcendent object, a kind of template to which the individual should conform is simply misreading Jung.
00:25:56.160 --> 00:26:01.119
For Jung, in my, at least the way I read it, individuation is an ongoing process.
00:26:01.279 --> 00:26:25.359
And so, politically speaking, you could read Jung as a kind of psychoanalytic technology for producing a subject that's adequate to social democracy, that's adequate to a world in which people are expected to express themselves, express their views, share their views, and not simply be subjected to various psychic and or techno-political forces out there.
00:26:25.519 --> 00:26:34.640
There's a kind of utopianism in Jung that I think is a useful way of reading his ideas pertaining to the self.
00:26:34.880 --> 00:26:54.799
And this is, I would argue, this is precisely what Deleuze does with Jung in his writings, where individuation, individuation reinterpreted in a fully kind of imminentist paradigm, becomes the means by which we collectively and individually create ourselves and our world.
00:26:55.119 --> 00:27:04.079
And this don't, I don't think that Deleuze could have, and Guattari could have developed some of their theory of individuation without Jung.
00:27:04.319 --> 00:27:09.920
In fact, as we know, whenever Jung comes up in their work, it tends to be somewhat favorably.
00:27:10.160 --> 00:27:14.079
I will leave it at that and we can explore details as we go.
00:27:14.400 --> 00:27:15.680
That was great, JF.
00:27:15.759 --> 00:27:16.079
Thank you.
00:27:16.160 --> 00:27:23.599
And I do think it's really important to keep in mind that Jung is part of a larger tradition that precedes psychology itself.
00:27:23.680 --> 00:27:27.599
And there is, you know, that's almost more of where he should be compared to some respects as well.
00:27:27.759 --> 00:27:28.799
Thank you for that.
00:27:29.200 --> 00:27:33.839
And next on our panel is my friend Christian McMillan.
00:27:34.160 --> 00:27:44.720
Christian is a lecturer and member of staff at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where he teaches on Young and post-Youngian studies.
00:27:45.039 --> 00:27:53.039
In his doctoral thesis, The Image of Thought in Young's Whole Self, a Critical Study, Christian focused on similarities and differences in the thought of deaf psychologist C.
00:27:53.519 --> 00:27:57.039
Young and French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
00:27:57.519 --> 00:28:12.480
Publications include Young Literature and Aesthetics and Young in Philosophy, Young and Deleuze Enchanted Openings to the Other in the Internal Journal of Youngin' Studies, and Archetypal Intuition Beyond the Human and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society.
00:28:12.720 --> 00:28:14.480
Christian, the floor is yours.
00:28:15.039 --> 00:28:15.279
Thank you.
00:28:15.440 --> 00:28:17.519
Yes, thank you for reminding me of those publications.
00:28:17.680 --> 00:28:19.839
It looks like it's been quite a long time.
00:28:20.160 --> 00:28:30.400
And just to say a quick hello, or it's lovely to see a few people that I know here, like obviously Gabriella and Cassie and Mark, and indeed Nick Langan, I think, is with us as well.
00:28:30.480 --> 00:28:33.119
So it's always lovely to see members of your family joining us.
00:28:33.279 --> 00:28:36.799
So, yes, I've enjoyed very much what the other panelists have said.
00:28:37.119 --> 00:28:54.240
I mean, my own interest in this really comes from trying to mine those areas of Jung's thought where I feel as though there are these kind of pockets, maybe pockets of imminence, as I don't know, I might call them, in which he's reversing the priority of the interior over the exterior.
00:28:54.480 --> 00:29:08.640
So, one example of that, if I was just to go straight to it, would be in his little essay, a short essay, Archaic Man from 1931, in which he problematizes the relationship between the projection and the source of projection.
00:29:08.720 --> 00:29:11.839
If any of you have had the chance to read that essay, it's a really interesting one.
00:29:12.079 --> 00:29:20.960
He kind of goes back on the hypothesis that perhaps we are the source of the material world rather than the material world being the source of our projections.
00:29:21.039 --> 00:29:28.160
We're somehow made up of, we're made up of something, spirits, we're made up of some kind of material forces.
00:29:28.400 --> 00:29:29.920
He refers to mana.
00:29:30.160 --> 00:29:32.960
We're actually composed of this rather than this being a projection.
00:29:33.039 --> 00:29:38.559
And he calls it a thought experiment, I think, or perhaps Paul Bishop does in his book on the archaic past and the present.
00:29:38.720 --> 00:29:41.119
And or he calls it some kind of a hypothesis.
00:29:41.279 --> 00:29:48.880
And I just think this is one of those interesting examples of where he's problematizing that, as I said, that interior-exterior kind of relationship.
00:29:49.039 --> 00:29:54.000
One might also be able to discern this in the in the creation of the concept of the psychoid itself.
00:29:54.079 --> 00:30:05.119
And I use those terms deliberately because I think Jung was an experimenter in the Deleuzean sense, or he, I think he Deleuze would have been complimentary about Jung's ability to create concepts.
00:30:05.200 --> 00:30:07.279
That would destabilizing to habits of thought.
00:30:07.440 --> 00:30:16.319
And the psychoid, although the psychoid has a long history going back to Aristotle, Jung, you know, he doesn't just use the psychoid in the sense that Aristotle used it in the context of Entelershi.
00:30:16.480 --> 00:30:22.799
He doesn't just use it in the sense that Hans Driesch redeveloped it in the period of neo-vitalism at the end of the 19th century.
00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:25.759
He develops his own kind of understanding of what the psychoid is.
00:30:25.839 --> 00:30:39.039
So he he creates this idea, he creates this concept to destabilize what I would call transcendent forms of synthesis or illegitimate forms of synthesis, if we were to borrow the language of Deleuze and Guattari from Antiedipus.
00:30:39.200 --> 00:30:48.880
And I think one way one could read it, if one was perhaps being charitable to this idea of the psychoid as a kind of synthetic power, is that there's it's a distributed form of synthesis.
00:30:48.960 --> 00:30:50.799
There's a passive form of the synthesis.
00:30:50.880 --> 00:30:56.720
It doesn't have a subject, it doesn't have a transcendent source, and from it the actual emerges.
00:30:57.039 --> 00:31:15.680
And within this synthetic power, or within all actual structures, this synthetic power continues, as in Simondonian terms, a kind of metastable source that allows things to transform, that allows categories to transform images of what we take things to be to be transformative rather than become rarefied and static.
00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:22.880
And I think that may be one of the so the psychoid and the essay on archaic man, there are only two examples.
00:31:23.039 --> 00:31:37.599
Perhaps one could also read this into the work on synchronicity, but there are all maybe three examples of where Jung is really problematizing this idea of where are the syntheses from which actual structures emerge and which allow actual structures to transform.
00:31:38.079 --> 00:31:44.799
I I think a lot of post-unions, or some post-unions at least, tend to get either fixated on maybe one side or the other.
00:31:45.039 --> 00:32:05.440
Perhaps a lot of post-unions are sidetracked into what I would call the phenomenological camp, which for me a priori prioritizes some form of a subject or particularly some form of a transcendental subject that then has to do the work of accounting for the possible experience of reality, whether it's possible psychic experience or whether it's possible experience in general.
00:32:05.599 --> 00:32:14.240
And then we lose those elements of Jung's thought in which he's trying to very much problematize where syntheses are actually potentially located.
00:32:14.319 --> 00:32:26.079
So the question about, you know, is psyche relevant anymore, for me is a question about where is this power, this constitutive power, actually to be located, or what is it that this power can actually do?
00:32:26.240 --> 00:32:30.720
And I think what I find useful in Jung's work is that he is problematizing that.
00:32:31.279 --> 00:32:47.119
Perhaps it would be nice if he did it more often than he did in the collected works, but there's a tendency for that to be ignored if it doesn't necessarily fit within a particular kind of post-Jungian paradigm that then tries to codify or define the field as a whole.
00:32:47.359 --> 00:32:52.720
And I think those areas, those moments of immanence in Jung's work have often been neglected.
00:32:52.880 --> 00:33:10.640
So to just kind of go back a little bit to the essay on archaic man, a short essay, a small essay, in which Jung is writing about, of course, in language that would not be particularly palatable to us today, is talking about primitive peoples, and he is referring to history, although he says this kind of mentality exists in the present as well.
00:33:10.960 --> 00:33:24.960
As I said, he's postulating the idea that perhaps uh we don't project spirits or animistic sort of contents into the world, but we are the synthetic products of them, which is a really, really kind of interesting reversal.
00:33:25.440 --> 00:33:40.480
He goes back in the essay and sort of refutes that a little bit later, and he misuses Levey Hul's understanding, the anthropologist Leve-Hul's understanding of participation mystique, in order to try and account for the notion of projection having a source.
00:33:40.640 --> 00:34:05.519
But if one reads participation mystique in the way that Deleuze and Guattari kind of understand polyvosity in their work on the primitive socius in Antiedipus, then I think something richer can come out, something uh you know, more materialist can potentially come out from a fruitful dialogue between those three writers, then is necessarily offered in archaic man, but it may have been another inspiration for Deleuze and Guattari's kind of materialism that emerges in Antiodipus.
00:34:05.839 --> 00:34:17.599
And the way, of course, Jung writes about mana in that essay as a kind of power, forces that actual things are composed of, but that retain in those actual things and allow them to transform.
00:34:17.760 --> 00:34:22.559
Then we have a link to the sort of more Sundonian notion of change that I mentioned earlier.
00:34:22.719 --> 00:34:38.800
And so that there are these material sort of elements in Jung's thinking, but they do tend to get a clouded by that phenomenological and sometimes the right word, empirical apology that Jung makes occasionally, which is that I'm only dealing with the facts of experience.
00:34:38.960 --> 00:34:51.599
And I think when he makes that apology, then that kind of turns one is able to look at turn his work into, perhaps implicitly perhaps, but turn his work into right, we need to account for the conditions of all possible psychic experience.
00:34:51.840 --> 00:35:09.840
And that's where Deleuze's critique of the image of thought can be useful, because the same critique of Kant and the determination or the imminent criteria that Kant used to try and determine what possible experience and what can be leveled, uh the way Jung sometimes refers to archetypes as the possible condition of fantasy production.
00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:16.719
But again, what's glorious about Jung's work is that he will place archetypes in many, many different contexts to experiment with them.
00:35:16.800 --> 00:35:36.320
And this is something we I think we need to remember, or at least I like to remind myself of the collected works are a showcase of an individual with his colleagues to a certain extent, experimenting with a number of different concepts that he is creating and moulding in very, very different environments over a long period of time.
00:35:36.559 --> 00:35:50.400
So there is no consistency, but there is in in the work in the words of someone like Connor Heaney, who's a Deleuzian writer who wrote a great paper called Pursuing Joy with Deleuze in 2018, you know, there is an on there is a pi an epistemological openness.
00:35:50.559 --> 00:36:04.239
But I think the danger today in Jungian studies is that tends to get closed down, and that's where the the perhaps the political, the social and material aspects of what his work can do are being occluded or being somewhat excluded and indeed cancelled.
00:36:04.400 --> 00:36:11.119
There's a lot more, like I think the other two speakers have said, from slightly different perspectives from me, that can be done with Jung's work.
00:36:11.440 --> 00:36:27.760
But I believe the power of all psychotherapy has to start with a critique of the Oedipalized subject or the image of what the human subject is taken to be in the modern period, as if that's some kind of a universal subject.
00:36:28.079 --> 00:36:34.320
Jung is less guilty of reifying an image of the subject than Freud is.
00:36:34.880 --> 00:36:38.880
I personally am confident in making that rather bold statement.
00:36:39.519 --> 00:36:54.079
But it's now up to the job of post-human studies to kind of continue to carry out this challenge, this revolutionary challenge, as I think Deleuze and Quattari would have called it, of continuing to critique the boundaries of the form of the subject.
00:36:54.320 --> 00:36:58.719
And this is why, yeah, again, with a nod to Mark, it's lovely to have Mark here.
00:36:58.960 --> 00:37:09.199
If any of you haven't had the opportunity to read Mark's paper, recent paper in the JAP, Dissolving the Psychological Subject Inside and Outside the Therapeutic Bond, that's a wonderful starting place.
00:37:09.280 --> 00:37:22.800
And by starting place, Mark, I don't mean an easy place, but it's a wonderful starting place to engage with this very notion of dissolving the psychological subject, which so much of Mark's work has been, I think, on a true trajectory towards.
00:37:22.960 --> 00:37:30.960
And Simon and Jung are nicely conjoined in that work for those of you who have never maybe seen a Simon-Joung connection before.
00:37:31.280 --> 00:37:35.840
So I think I'll be quiet now, Bob, but just uh thank you again for having me on.
00:37:36.000 --> 00:37:37.199
Thank you very much, Craig.
00:37:37.360 --> 00:37:40.480
And I hope I can look forward to the questions that are coming.
00:37:40.880 --> 00:37:41.679
That was great.
00:37:41.840 --> 00:37:42.239
Thank you.
00:37:42.400 --> 00:37:45.840
And the thanks again to all our panelists for their thoughts.
00:37:46.159 --> 00:37:48.239
In a little bit, we're going to open up to questions.
00:37:48.480 --> 00:37:56.719
Feel free to put anything in the chat, and either I'll read it for you, or when we get to them, I'll ask if you want to read your thoughts aloud.
00:37:56.960 --> 00:38:03.679
But first, I wanted to turn it to our panelists and see if they had any questions for one another's remarks.
00:38:03.760 --> 00:38:08.639
And I'll ask that before I selfishly ask any questions that I myself might have.
00:38:08.880 --> 00:38:11.280
Then I'll go ahead myself and ask a question.
00:38:11.440 --> 00:38:16.880
You know, this idea of creating concepts was pretty prominent in what you said, Christian.
00:38:16.960 --> 00:38:29.679
And I know JF as well on a relatively recent Substack post, you brought up the same thing as sort of the core motif of Deleuze, the creation of concepts and this sort of productivity.
00:38:29.840 --> 00:38:34.800
And one thing that Christian and I have talked before is how to really look at alchemy in this sense.
00:38:34.960 --> 00:38:52.480
Because alchemy, I think, Christian, is potentially another example of what you were talking about, which is on the one hand, alchemy can just be seen as a mode of representation, just a pure mode of making it something analogous to, oh, this is just like the psychic processes going on within me.
00:38:52.639 --> 00:38:59.920
And the alchemists were just playing out those psychic processes, but projecting it onto the materials that they were working with.
00:39:00.639 --> 00:39:21.119
But there's another way of looking at this too, which Jung, in certain works, such as Mysterium Conuncionis, he starts to maybe appreciate it in this way a bit more, which is what he's really seeing is that there's a sort of productive power common to both human and non-human, sort of beyond both human and non-human that might precede any sense of subjectivity.
00:39:21.360 --> 00:39:37.280
And I was wondering if any of you have any thoughts of being able to look at things, even such as the archetypes this way as well, beyond just a mode of representation and set another concept, if you will, something that is created that precedes and sort of transcends the human itself.
00:39:38.079 --> 00:39:57.360
If I may then I think that I think this emphasis on, I love that what Christian was saying about the experiment of Jung and the way in which his uh collected works are foremost a kind of a series of experiments, explorations.
00:39:57.840 --> 00:40:06.639
And I used to find it extremely frustrating reading Jung to see all these kind of contradictions in the way that he would present the archetype.
00:40:06.960 --> 00:40:12.159
Sometimes it's just like, oh, this is just uh a kind of reflex pattern that evolved over time.
00:40:12.239 --> 00:40:17.920
And sometimes, no, this is a like a literal god that enters into the psyche.
00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:21.760
Or and what I found useful was to read Jung backwards, right?
00:40:21.840 --> 00:40:40.559
To kind of like really start at the end with the psychoid stuff and then kind of assume that that's where he settled metaphysically and then kind of read it all in that light, but also without trying to paper over that creative experimental aspect, which I like the way that you you liken that to alchemy.
00:40:40.719 --> 00:40:46.800
I read medieval alchemy as a kind of a similar sort of experimentation, an ongoing experimentation.
00:40:47.039 --> 00:40:59.119
Alchemy was one of the few cultural practices that really crossed cultural boundaries in the Middle Ages, where you had like Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alchemists sending each other letters.
00:40:59.440 --> 00:41:05.440
This was uh a game, you could say, without trying to diminish it, that people were playing together.
00:41:05.679 --> 00:41:09.199
And there's all been all kinds of theories as to what they were really trying to do.
00:41:09.360 --> 00:41:11.039
Were they trying to tear and land it to goal?
00:41:11.119 --> 00:41:13.599
Were they trying to like transcend the material world?
00:41:13.840 --> 00:41:23.199
I'm not even sure if if they all agreed on what the point was, but there was something about the activity that was productive in itself.
00:41:23.360 --> 00:41:30.000
And and I think the same is true of what Jung is doing, and the same is certainly true of what Dedeuze did in his career.
00:41:30.239 --> 00:41:34.880
And in that Substack post, it was called the One Idea of Gilles Dedeuze.
00:41:34.960 --> 00:41:44.800
My my my argument there, contentiously perhaps, was that Dedeuze's real idea was this con this concept of concept creation.
00:41:45.199 --> 00:41:49.280
But there are implications to that concept if you take it seriously.
00:41:49.599 --> 00:42:04.960
It means that concepts, as important as they are, as useful as they can be, never do the work that certain philosophers have wanted them to do, namely to define reality, to tell us what reality is.
00:42:05.199 --> 00:42:15.119
In a certain sense, Dadoz's philosophy requires you to embrace a kind of, and this is cont I admit this is a bit of a controversial comment I'm making.
00:42:15.280 --> 00:42:26.960
It requires you to embrace a kind of naive realism, a kind of just so self-evident world in which philosophy can be then take place as a creative activity.
00:42:27.280 --> 00:42:31.760
And so there's a political reality that precedes philosophy.
00:42:31.920 --> 00:42:40.320
And that political reality is the kind of the world in which we engage in this or that or the other activity.
00:42:40.719 --> 00:42:50.000
And then the question becomes well, how many of us and to what degree can they engage in creative activity?
00:42:50.159 --> 00:42:56.480
And that's what justifies, I think, a political program of emancipation, liberation, justice, and all that.
00:42:56.639 --> 00:43:03.199
It's to allow as many people as possible to do what people like Jung and Deleuze were able to do.
00:43:03.519 --> 00:43:07.519
Oscar Wilde says this beautifully in The Soul of a Man Under Socialism.
00:43:07.760 --> 00:43:14.400
Essentially, what you want is a society that allows people to play, and but play is the thing.
00:43:14.559 --> 00:43:22.639
And that's that's kind of what I love about if I have to really kind of question myself and ask myself, what is it that I love about Deleuze and Jung?
00:43:22.880 --> 00:43:31.119
I remember a uh a professor at the University of Toronto once literally cornered me at a party and asked me to reconcile my admiration for Deleuze and Jung.
00:43:31.280 --> 00:43:33.440
He said, You have to pick one, you can't take both.
00:43:33.599 --> 00:43:36.559
He was a really, he was quite quite the number this guy.
00:43:36.800 --> 00:43:41.519
And and I just I wished Christian Kerslake had released his book, Young and the Unconscious.
00:43:41.599 --> 00:43:44.239
I could have just handed him a copy, and that would have been the end of it.
00:43:44.320 --> 00:43:49.599
But at the time, he saw this as trying to like he was trying to like smoke out my inner fascist.
00:43:49.920 --> 00:43:54.719
But I think that's where I I find the real value in these thinkers' work.
00:43:54.880 --> 00:43:59.679
It's in how they're performing for us, they're giving us an example of.
00:44:00.320 --> 00:44:07.039
A kind of utopic engagement with being that I think all of us deserve to have a chance at or trying out.
00:44:08.559 --> 00:44:09.280
Any thoughts of that?
00:44:10.239 --> 00:44:12.639
No, I I I enjoyed your comments, Jay.
00:44:12.880 --> 00:44:13.280
I agree.
00:44:13.519 --> 00:44:26.239
That may be the more aspirational end goal of what Jungian psychotherapy could orientate itself towards trying to achieve, which is the creation of sort of a community of experimenters, perhaps.
00:44:26.559 --> 00:44:35.760
But I mean whether it's Jungian Jungian psychotherapy psychology, whatever analytical psychology, or whether it's any other therapy really, I mean it does it doesn't really matter.
00:44:36.000 --> 00:44:39.199
I think that ultimately is the end goal.
00:44:39.280 --> 00:44:54.960
But perhaps if one is to read Jung's works with this not in the direction of recognizing him as someone who was perpetually playing, is a nice way to put it, then it might position Jungian psychology as somewhat the flag shape of that enterprise.
00:44:55.360 --> 00:44:56.320
I think so.
00:44:56.719 --> 00:45:03.679
Yeah, I mean to just go back to the point about experimenting with concepts.
00:45:04.400 --> 00:45:06.400
You know, there are there are good concepts.
00:45:07.440 --> 00:45:09.199
There are not so good concepts.
00:45:09.679 --> 00:45:17.599
Or in what is philosophy, their last joint publication, Deleuze and Guitarino, but also percepts and affects in slightly different contexts.
00:45:18.480 --> 00:45:30.400
It's about what the work of these concepts can do, putting the concepts to work, which of course is very much a different mission from trying to identify what truth is.
00:45:30.880 --> 00:45:36.239
So there is no truth goal in this concept of creation, there's no attempt to try and determine what truth is.
00:45:36.880 --> 00:45:43.840
There is just the uh the capacity to encounter and engage and create with this world.
00:45:44.320 --> 00:45:52.719
And I think again, sometimes it's difficult to perhaps find the evidence in Jung's own thought, given his uh interest in the transcendent.
00:45:52.800 --> 00:45:59.519
But I would also say the transcendental and the two are very, very different, but they do kind of have a common source in a in a way of thinking.
00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:04.159
It's sometimes rather difficult to find the imminent within his thinking.
00:46:04.559 --> 00:46:06.000
But it it it is there.
00:46:06.480 --> 00:46:15.119
But it just tends to get lost under these words like spirit or perhaps psyche, which then looks a little bit like transcendental subject, at least as far as I can tell.
00:46:15.519 --> 00:46:28.239
But Bob, I'm gonna ask you, because you've obviously done a lot of work on this in the book Jung and Spinoza, where you've looked at psyche, spirit, and matter and how spirit sits within a kind of spinest framework.
00:46:28.559 --> 00:46:47.440
I was just wondering if you could you could come back on that, that problematizes the way that perhaps spirit is often regarded by Jungians, post-Jungians, and other people as something belonging to a to the transcendent, or it's otherworldly, or it is an other in the sense of a negative theology.
00:46:47.840 --> 00:46:55.039
But you're considering it in the four as far in terms of it being an imminent productive power, as far as I can tell.
00:46:55.519 --> 00:46:56.559
Yeah, thank you.
00:46:56.880 --> 00:47:11.280
My work on Jung and Spinoza, that was one of the key turning points for me, which is in the work of, say, Harold Abenspacher, who's a physicist and Jungian scholar, and he's very much interested in dual aspect monism.
00:47:11.599 --> 00:47:13.599
So, what is dual aspect monism?
00:47:13.679 --> 00:47:21.440
Very briefly, you could have a version of dualism, such as just pure Cartesian dualism where mind and matter are treated as separate substances.
00:47:21.599 --> 00:47:30.159
You could have materialism where mind is reducible to matter, or an idealism where everything is an idea or idealist.
00:47:30.480 --> 00:47:53.920
And then there's dual aspect monism, which suggests that mind and matter are two aspects of the same ontological one, some underlying neutral substance, and uh is interested in this because he reads this into the dialogue between Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Paulie, which came to be in the later stages of Jung's career and led to their joint publications on synchronicity.
00:47:54.159 --> 00:48:01.280
Synchronicity being an example of something complementary between mind and matter, but it's suggesting something underneath that they're both expressing.
00:48:01.440 --> 00:48:03.440
One can't be reduced to the other.
00:48:03.679 --> 00:48:09.599
And Abenspacher credits Spinoza as the originator and Western thought of this idea of a dual aspect monism.
00:48:09.920 --> 00:48:18.559
But it's a bit curious, you know, for Spinoza, it's not two separate lines that go back to a single one of thought and extension going back to an underlying one.
00:48:19.039 --> 00:48:25.920
It's really an infinity of things, all the different modes of substance being expressed in at least two different ways.
00:48:26.159 --> 00:48:29.440
So therefore, it almost has three factors instead of two.
00:48:29.679 --> 00:48:33.440
What is interesting in the dialogue with Jung and Pauli, Jung says this.
00:48:33.599 --> 00:48:36.159
He disagrees with Pauly on the dual aspect route.
00:48:36.239 --> 00:48:40.639
He says, no, it's not only just psyche and matter, it's psyche, matter, and spirit.
00:48:40.880 --> 00:48:44.480
And spirit and matter are the two aspects, and psyche is what is in between.
00:48:44.559 --> 00:48:48.079
It's the surface between the heights and the depths, essentially.
00:48:48.320 --> 00:48:53.039
And what this does is it eliminates the need to find the hidden source that these things emanate from.
00:48:53.119 --> 00:49:03.599
Instead, you're dealing with something that's purely on the surface, expressed in two different ways, that is composed by those two different things, but you're not tracing back lines that go on forever to find something.
00:49:03.840 --> 00:49:24.239
To me, this is also important because it kind of you can start thinking about instead of just a purely the problem of inner and outer, you're sort of removing that instead talking about things that are purely on that level of psyche and things that might be more in the material or that spiritual realm is said, expressed in two different ways, but all those things are expressed on the same flat line, if you will.
00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:30.559
So when you guys are talking about creating concepts, I look at that as the production of things on that same line.
00:49:30.800 --> 00:49:31.679
It's always open.
00:49:31.840 --> 00:49:33.039
You never find an endpoint.
00:49:33.119 --> 00:49:37.280
There's no totality to it, but it's always sort of this open ontology.
00:49:37.360 --> 00:49:42.559
And I do think there, Young, perhaps unwittingly, not always consciously, was heading in that direction.
00:49:42.639 --> 00:49:45.840
And it's, as JF said, his later writings suggest that.
00:49:45.920 --> 00:49:55.440
I also think some of the stuff in Young's earlier work with complex theory and this disassociative lateral version of the psyche was going in that same direction as well.
00:49:55.679 --> 00:50:04.800
And maybe at times archetypes get too representational in between, and there's that hermitage into the tower in between, but it is spanned by those two aspects elsewhere.
00:50:04.960 --> 00:50:09.199
And personally, that's what I draw it from because I think that's where a lot of interesting things are.
00:00:01.520 --> 00:00:04.799
Hello everyone and welcome back to Left Hand.
00:00:04.959 --> 00:00:22.160
Today we interrupt our regular programming to bring you a polished audio-only version of the opening remarks and initial responses from our recent AHRC public panel, Does Psyche Matter, Jung and the Unconscious, in 2026.
00:00:22.399 --> 00:00:31.920
Hosted by Bob Langan and joined by Gabriela Sova, Sperlarova, JF Martell, and Christian McMillan, the panel takes up a pointed question.
00:00:32.159 --> 00:00:41.280
Decades into the era of psychotherapy and within a world of deepening crises, is psychology as we've inherited it equal to the challenges we now face?
00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:53.039
It asks whether Jung can be radical or whether his notion of interiority forecloses that from the very start, and whether our conception of the psyche remains too divorced from the material.
00:00:53.280 --> 00:01:00.240
The full version of the panel is available on the Acid Horizon YouTube channel, and I've included a link to it below.
00:01:00.479 --> 00:01:05.760
As you listen, take note that the fall season of AHRC courses begins next week.
00:01:05.920 --> 00:01:31.599
If the contents of this discussion are something you'd like to pursue further, we recommend you enroll in Bob Langan's class, Jung and Spinoza, God, Affect, Destiny, a four-week seminar beginning October 4th on the implicit monism running through both thinkers, the union of knowledge and affect, and the point at which Jung must, in a sense, become himself Spinozist for his psychology to succeed.
00:01:31.840 --> 00:01:38.640
I should also remind you that if you enroll in two classes at AHRC this fall, you'll get a third for free.
00:01:38.879 --> 00:01:44.079
Just navigate to the show notes and find the code for use at the time of enrollment.
00:01:44.319 --> 00:01:52.159
Anyway, let's get this conversation underway and delve into the question of whether or not psyche matters.
00:02:00.959 --> 00:02:03.120
Thank you, Craig, and thanks everyone.
00:02:03.280 --> 00:02:08.240
Thank you for coming to this latest public panel of the Acid Horizon Research Commons.
00:02:08.319 --> 00:02:09.439
I am Bob Langan.
00:02:09.599 --> 00:02:12.000
I have a PhD from University of Essex.
00:02:12.159 --> 00:02:15.199
My book, Young and Spinoza, is available through Rutledge.
00:02:15.599 --> 00:02:22.639
I am the co-runner of the blog concerning depthology, philosophy, art and more, the Substack University Drift.
00:02:22.800 --> 00:02:29.199
And as Craig just kindly reminded you, I'll be teaching a class on Young and Spinoza with the AHRC in the fall.
00:02:29.360 --> 00:02:31.680
Please check it out if you are curious.
00:02:31.919 --> 00:02:36.159
And speaking of Young, our topic today concerns Carl Jung.
00:02:36.560 --> 00:02:38.400
It's called Does Psyche Matter?
00:02:38.560 --> 00:02:41.680
Young and the Unconscious in 2026.
00:02:42.319 --> 00:02:51.520
And the question of whether or not Young and Jungian psychology is equipped to deal with the social, political, and ontological problems of our time.
00:02:51.919 --> 00:02:58.879
Before I introduce each of our panelists, I'm going to give some brief remarks and I'm actually going to open with a quote.
00:02:59.120 --> 00:03:06.080
And this quote is from the correspondence between Jung and his colleague Han Schmid-Gezan from December 1915.
00:03:06.400 --> 00:03:23.360
Schmid-Gezan was talking to Jung about his theory of psychological types, and Han Schmid-Gezan was concerned that Jung was prioritizing the introverted functions of the psyche as opposed to the extroverted attitude and functions.
00:03:23.439 --> 00:03:26.960
He was valorizing the introverted nature of our mind.
00:03:27.439 --> 00:03:34.080
And this disagreement ended somewhat acrimoniously, so Han Schmid Gazan ends his correspondence with this following passage.
00:03:34.479 --> 00:03:43.759
There you are, he's saying to Jung, sitting in a tower on the Obersea, part of Lake Zurich, where Bollingin Jung's famous tower he eventually built.
00:03:44.000 --> 00:04:06.400
Having become Nietzsche's heir, father to none, friend to none, and sufficient unto yourself, vis-a-vis here and there, a few other male and female introverts are living, each in their own tower, loving humankind and those farthest away, thus protecting themselves against the devilish love or their closest neighbors.
00:04:06.960 --> 00:04:17.759
And from time to time they meet in the middle of the lake, each in their own motorboat, and prove to each other the dignity of man with best regards, Han Schmid Gazan.
00:04:18.079 --> 00:04:32.800
Now to me, that sort of it gets to the crux of the issue, which is Jungian psychology, with its emphasis on finding the symbolic in our lives and withdrawing projections to discover archetypal access within.
00:04:33.199 --> 00:04:36.399
A, is this diminishing the outside world too much?
00:04:36.560 --> 00:04:42.000
And B, does this prevent a Jungian perspective from dealing with social and political problems?
00:04:42.160 --> 00:04:45.920
And this is obviously a very old chestnut in the field that many people have worked on.
00:04:46.079 --> 00:04:49.199
I'm not saying anything new in that regard.
00:04:49.439 --> 00:04:52.079
I see Mark Saban is here, which is great.
00:04:52.160 --> 00:05:22.000
Mark Sabon was on my supervisory board for my PhD, and I was going to bring him up regardless, because his book Two Souls Alas, which is from 2019, I believe, one of the best books in the post-Joungian literature, that, in my opinion, where Mark Saban points out that Jung clearly, even how he describes the two sides of his personality, or his number one and number two personality in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, valorizes the number two personality or the inner timeless depths.
00:05:22.240 --> 00:05:30.959
Whereas the other side of himself is more just concerned with career, scientific exploration, more just the mundane world.
00:05:31.040 --> 00:05:40.879
But it's really the retreat within where one discovers the archetypes, the symbolic and the imaginal, all the good stuff that we associate with Jungian thought.
00:05:41.199 --> 00:05:46.720
And in my opinion, for these brief remarks, it's worth pointing out three ways in which is problematic.
00:05:47.040 --> 00:06:02.879
First, quite simply just in terms of theoretical, which is if the whole point of this is to withdraw projections, to withdraw and look within, to find the archetype within that I didn't understand that I was projecting onto someone, what can we even say of the outer world at this point?
00:06:03.120 --> 00:06:23.279
I mean, it's pretty well documented that a lot of the women, clients, and colleagues within Young's life, in some cases, whether he had relationships with them or not, that's really not important here as much as it is to say the ideas he exchanged with them later on, he might talk about in his own texts as if he was talking to just the anima and the outside was reduced.
00:06:23.759 --> 00:06:34.160
And the main takeaway there is that because for Young, most knowledge, true knowledge is routed through within, routed to explore the numinous, you can only access through the self.
00:06:34.399 --> 00:06:37.759
Well, again, how does that let us talk about anything in the outside world?
00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:43.040
Another concern here is just a bias that might be related to economic and material reasons.
00:06:43.279 --> 00:06:54.480
You know, I'd recently just got back from, well, literally just yesterday, a conference on young innovation at UCL that was hosted by the IAJP and the IAP, AAP, excuse me.
00:06:54.639 --> 00:07:08.000
And there was certainly some good material there, and certainly some material of people trying to really critically think about why knowledge gleamed through, say, an LLM is not sufficient as the struggle that one gains through the unconscious.
00:07:08.240 --> 00:07:19.680
But there was also quite a bit of concern about okay, how can we prove that a digital assistant can't hold the same inner space that a true analyst can, and therefore the diet and therapy is safe.
00:07:19.839 --> 00:07:42.240
And while this is an interesting discussion and very interesting research and statistical experiments going on to try to prove that, there was a current concern for me there, which is this is still a very inward-looking way of how do we protect the profession of therapy, which therapy is good and it should be protected, but there's simply a material concern of preserving the field versus can we look outside to do it.
00:07:42.480 --> 00:07:47.920
That was much fewer in regard from what I saw than focusing on maintaining the actual field.
00:07:48.319 --> 00:08:01.920
It's some of this evokes sort of Hillman's point of view of leaving the therapy room to try to treat the world itself, being too restricted to the therapy room and keeping the imaginal within that diet might have some limitations.
00:08:02.240 --> 00:08:10.560
And the last thing I want to bring up with my opening remarks is the more purely psychological reasons that might be holding Jungians back in some respects.
00:08:10.720 --> 00:08:17.439
Back in 1996, the therapist Andrew Samuels wrote an article titled Will the Post-Youngian Survive?
00:08:17.680 --> 00:08:26.720
And he claimed that in more recent times, Jungians have broken into two separate camps, a psychoanalytic camp and a fundamentalist camp.
00:08:26.959 --> 00:08:40.000
The psychoanalytic camp is more concerned with trying to find a way to preserve Young within other psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theories, to almost turn the dial down on the things that we might say make young a bit weird to some extent.
00:08:40.240 --> 00:08:45.279
And then the fundamentalist camp doubles down on the inner, the valorization of the inner world.
00:08:45.360 --> 00:08:48.000
It kind of is a reactionary in that sense.
00:08:48.320 --> 00:08:57.120
The problem with the psychoanalytic camp is that if you turn down the dial to try to even the scales between inner and outer, is are you somehow killing young?
00:08:57.360 --> 00:08:59.679
Are you losing what makes young young?
00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:10.080
So my thinking in all this has been is there a way to abolish the closed inner space of the symbolic and the imaginal can be joined by inner and outer alike.
00:09:10.240 --> 00:09:12.799
And that's where more work needs to be done.
00:09:12.960 --> 00:09:21.440
And with those opening remarks, I'm now going to turn it over to our panelists to see what they think about the questions that led to the creation of this panel.
00:09:21.600 --> 00:09:23.759
And we're going to start with Gabriela.
00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:32.799
Gabriella Sobaspolirova is a postgraduate research student in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.
00:09:33.039 --> 00:09:40.240
Her work lies at the intersection of social psychology and post-Jungian studies with particular focus on individuation and creativity.
00:09:40.480 --> 00:09:45.679
She co-runs a blog and an emerging platform for deaf psychology called University Drift.
00:09:45.919 --> 00:09:50.720
Gabriella, I'm very sorry that we cannot see you, but please take it away.
00:09:51.039 --> 00:09:52.720
I think, Bob, you can see me now.
00:09:52.879 --> 00:09:53.440
I hope so.
00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:55.039
Yes, definitely can.
00:09:55.120 --> 00:09:56.320
That is fantastic.
00:09:56.639 --> 00:09:59.519
Yeah, so thank you so much for such a good intro.
00:09:59.600 --> 00:10:14.080
And I think that I should probably lay out my cards straight away and probably break some of the things that you laid out there so beautifully, because my perspective is from social psychology and social work.
00:10:14.720 --> 00:10:21.919
And I have major issues seeing the psyche as separate from the material and political and social world.
00:10:22.159 --> 00:10:26.320
It is a very difficult thought experiment for me to go in that way.
00:10:26.480 --> 00:10:42.480
It's really interesting, and I would just leave it there as a some sort of anecdotal observation that I have never been challenged on this type of blind spot that I have until I rejoined the Jungian world, which is really fascinating in itself.
00:10:42.639 --> 00:10:49.759
I'm not saying that it's only Jungians who do it, but it is the first time I have encountered that this is being done.
00:10:50.080 --> 00:10:52.480
So let's just leave it there.
00:10:52.720 --> 00:10:59.200
So when I was reading the brief for today's panel, there came a couple of things to my mind.
00:10:59.360 --> 00:11:07.039
And the first thing is what actually happens if we conclude at the end of this evening that psyche actually doesn't matter.
00:11:07.279 --> 00:11:12.080
We go home with uh sort of an idea that okay, it doesn't matter.
00:11:12.320 --> 00:11:13.600
Let's deal with that.
00:11:13.840 --> 00:11:19.759
So, where my thoughts went after that was what is the function of psychology, actually?
00:11:20.159 --> 00:11:29.919
And there are, of course, many functions you can think of, but I thought that there were two that were quite important in this particular context.
00:11:30.240 --> 00:11:39.840
And one of them is a meaning-making tool, psychology as a meaning-making tool, making sense of the world, and the other is therapy.
00:11:40.159 --> 00:11:46.159
And if we decide that psyche doesn't matter, what does it mean in those two contexts?
00:11:46.320 --> 00:11:48.720
Like, does the world lose its meaning?
00:11:49.039 --> 00:11:50.240
Or are we lost?
00:11:50.399 --> 00:11:53.039
Did we just get it wrong at some point?
00:11:53.600 --> 00:12:00.799
Or does it mean that we can't make the world a better place if we can't heal it through therapy?
00:12:01.120 --> 00:12:07.919
So I'll elaborate on it a little bit, but I'll just get you out of the trouble straight away.
00:12:08.080 --> 00:12:20.399
I think that Jungian studies have something to contribute here, but I think that we really need to be cautious about where our limitations are and where the competency is of the discipline.
00:12:20.639 --> 00:12:27.279
And I think that that's something that Jungian studies are not always very good at understanding.
00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:31.360
So I'll go back to the meaning-making situation.
00:12:31.679 --> 00:12:37.120
Like if I use psychology to make sense of the world, we see it all the time.
00:12:37.279 --> 00:12:47.919
There's plenty of evidence to know that people are using psychological talk and psychological way of thinking into understanding what is happening with the world.
00:12:48.159 --> 00:12:52.799
And I would argue is not always the most constructive way to approach the world.
00:12:53.039 --> 00:13:01.279
But I've been recently reminded about where actually Jung started when I got a part-time job in mental health.
00:13:01.519 --> 00:13:14.240
And I think that it is a really interesting thing to bring up at this point because I don't think that Jungian psychology would have happened if Jung wasn't dealing with psychosis.
00:13:14.639 --> 00:13:24.799
And that is the reason why Freudians think differently, because that wasn't the material that was brought to them to on a large part.
00:13:24.879 --> 00:13:30.000
And I think that it is doing something incredibly useful in this context.
00:13:30.159 --> 00:13:50.480
Like if you encounter a person who believes that he is a Jesus, for example, you treat it as an archetype, as a collective cultural, unconscious content that is coming through, which preserves some sort of the part of the being that the part of the human that is actually healthy.
00:13:50.879 --> 00:14:05.840
For example, their need to relations, which are very strongly diminished if they live in this sort of a world, rather than dealing with as delusion that has to be exercised from that person, basically.
00:14:06.159 --> 00:14:09.919
So from this perspective, it makes perfect sense.
00:14:10.080 --> 00:14:13.279
It is a brilliant tool, go for it.
00:14:13.679 --> 00:14:32.320
However, where there are limits to that is, for example, I just had this note, very common in the Jungian circles, dealing with some political issues by assigning, for example, some world leaders saying, Oh, that's a trickster figure.
00:14:32.639 --> 00:14:34.399
So, what is it doing, right?
00:14:34.879 --> 00:14:43.519
Are we legitimizing it because we assign the mythological whatever lore that is behind it?
00:14:43.759 --> 00:14:49.360
Aren't we supposed to just say, okay, that's an evil person who really doesn't mean well?
00:14:49.600 --> 00:14:52.240
Wouldn't that be just more productive?
00:14:52.799 --> 00:15:05.919
And in this sense, what all psychology does, not just unions, is the issue of psychologizing, applying psychology at the issues that are not necessarily psychological.
00:15:06.159 --> 00:15:10.559
And I think that there's something really problematic about that.
00:15:10.879 --> 00:15:12.639
But I'll just leave it for here.
00:15:12.720 --> 00:15:14.559
For now, we get we can come to it.
00:15:14.799 --> 00:15:27.919
The other issue is with therapy, and I think we've talked about it many times, came to my mind when I was reading the brief, when Hillman said that we have had 100 years of therapy and the world is getting worse.
00:15:28.080 --> 00:15:30.000
So, what does it actually mean?
00:15:30.320 --> 00:15:43.360
And I know that he's not applying implying that the therapy made the world worse or that it didn't have an impact, but it has two corollates that are just running together.
00:15:43.679 --> 00:16:03.840
And I think that the therapy is really interesting tool to think about the world, because in one way we have the belief that if, for example, everyone goes to therapy, we'll all have incredibly healthy relationships and we will be so self-aware and the world will become a better place.
00:16:04.320 --> 00:16:11.679
And if psyche doesn't matter, this is just out of the table as a question, and that's not going to happen, right?
00:16:12.080 --> 00:16:19.440
The other point is if the therapy is applied to the world somehow, it will become a better place.
00:16:19.679 --> 00:16:27.840
Again, if psyche doesn't matter, if Jungians can't address those social issues and whatever, then this is just gone.
00:16:28.080 --> 00:16:39.840
And I think that what is really helpful with Hillman is he has shifted the perspective from the therapeutic diet into the world, which is brilliant.
00:16:40.080 --> 00:16:47.360
But I think that what I personally think he got wrong is the method he applied on it.
00:16:47.600 --> 00:16:55.200
I don't think that we should apply therapy to the world, and there are many reasons for that.
00:16:55.440 --> 00:17:01.519
First of all, I don't think that the world necessarily suffers of mental health issues, primarily.
00:17:01.759 --> 00:17:05.279
Second of all, there's always the question: who is the therapist?
00:17:05.519 --> 00:17:08.160
Who decides what needs to be treated?
00:17:08.559 --> 00:17:13.920
There's always an even relationship in that sort of a that sort of a thing.
00:17:14.240 --> 00:17:23.920
There is um a lot of what we don't acknowledge quite often is that therapy has adverse effects as well as positive effects.
00:17:24.240 --> 00:17:28.720
So where do we go with that if we just get it wrong?
00:17:29.039 --> 00:17:31.359
Or are we just wasting our efforts?
00:17:31.519 --> 00:17:33.200
I would be very speculative here.
00:17:33.279 --> 00:17:36.079
It's my perspective that I apply on that.
00:17:36.319 --> 00:17:44.559
I disagree with Hellman, and that's sort that he believes that the psyche is basically very homogeneous and very much the same.
00:17:44.799 --> 00:17:56.400
I think that we have different kinds of psyche, as much as we have different kinds of materials, and the material always informs the process of working with the material.
00:17:56.559 --> 00:18:02.160
Like you can throw a steel rod on a potter wheel, but you will never get a pot out of it.
00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:03.759
It just doesn't matter.
00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:19.119
And you can't bring, I don't know, a psyche of a strawberry in a supermarket or a psyche of a political ideology and apply the same method as if we use in therapeutic room.
00:18:19.279 --> 00:18:26.480
I just think that there's a major disconnect from what it can be done in that sort of a way.
00:18:26.720 --> 00:18:27.359
Whatever.
00:18:27.519 --> 00:18:38.559
I think that Hellman did in his time what was very much on the mind of critical psychology, and that was de-individualizing the psychological issues.
00:18:38.799 --> 00:18:41.039
And he deserves all the credit for that.
00:18:41.200 --> 00:18:51.680
However, that has been 34 years or how long now, I think that it's about time to move on and updated with whatever we know about the psyche today.
00:18:51.920 --> 00:19:14.559
So if I bring it back to the Jungians, I think that wherever Jungian studies sit within the whole psychology situation or psychology, politics, social sciences, whatever you want to put it, I suspect that there is a great tendency towards staying in self-isolation.
00:19:14.799 --> 00:19:35.839
I was thinking about the COVID image in this Dissor, that Jungian studies are still sitting at home in a quarantine and hoping that it can address all the issues of the world, all the issues of the psyche everywhere, but not engaging with other disciplines.
00:19:36.079 --> 00:19:42.400
And I think that there is a major problem with that.
00:19:42.720 --> 00:19:44.880
I think that it would be helpful.
00:19:44.960 --> 00:19:54.160
I think that the Jungian studies have a lot to contribute, but it is really important to know where, with whom, and at what time.
00:19:54.720 --> 00:19:59.359
And that's basically my initial thoughts about whatever we were talking about.
00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:01.039
Thank you, Gabriella.
00:20:01.119 --> 00:20:11.359
Yeah, you've always kept me honest about understanding that some of the introverted bias in psychology didn't start with young, and youngians don't need to take on all the blame for that.
00:20:11.440 --> 00:20:14.319
It is inherently, by its nature, somewhat of an introverted field.
00:20:14.400 --> 00:20:17.839
It's just a question of is there a capacity to change that?
00:20:17.920 --> 00:20:19.680
And if so, why?
00:20:20.799 --> 00:20:21.119
Okay.
00:20:21.599 --> 00:20:24.559
Next to speak is J.F.
00:20:24.720 --> 00:20:25.359
Martell.
00:20:25.759 --> 00:20:26.160
J.F.
00:20:26.240 --> 00:20:29.920
Martell is a Canadian writer, lecturer, and podcaster.
00:20:30.400 --> 00:20:38.000
He is the author of the acclaimed book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice on the Metaphysical Implications of Creative Expression.
00:20:38.559 --> 00:20:46.880
His work has been published in publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, Data Lists, Orbital Studies, Canadian Notes and Queries, and AI.
00:20:47.200 --> 00:20:57.039
With the musicologist Phil Ford, JF hosts Weird Studies, a popular podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of art, philosophy, psyche, and the unexplained.
00:20:57.359 --> 00:20:58.720
JF, you have the floor.
00:20:59.519 --> 00:21:00.559
Thank you, Bob.
00:21:00.799 --> 00:21:02.000
Thank you, Gabriella.
00:21:02.160 --> 00:21:03.200
That was enlightening.
00:21:03.440 --> 00:21:06.480
So I am I'm not a Junion analyst.
00:21:06.880 --> 00:21:09.519
I'm not sure in what capacity I'm speaking today.
00:21:09.839 --> 00:21:15.200
But Jung has certainly been a friend of mine, a frenemy of sorts for a very, very long time.
00:21:15.359 --> 00:21:20.240
So I'm speaking from a very personal place, but I'll try to make these comments relevant.
00:21:20.400 --> 00:21:27.440
So I'm gonna approach two of the questions, maybe three, very, very quickly that Bob shared with us as we prepared for this.
00:21:27.680 --> 00:21:32.480
The first one, does our conception of the psyche remain too introverted, too divorced from the material?
00:21:32.799 --> 00:21:35.279
Or are these actually separate problems?
00:21:35.519 --> 00:21:39.920
So this is of course a problem that both Bob and Gabriella just discussed.
00:21:40.880 --> 00:21:45.279
Is psychology in isolation too introverted, too focused on the inner world?
00:21:45.519 --> 00:21:51.440
Well, yes, but I would argue in the same sense that zoology is too focused on animals.
00:21:51.759 --> 00:21:55.440
It's exclusively focused on that because that's the business of psychology.
00:21:56.240 --> 00:21:58.480
And that's an I think that's an important point.
00:21:58.640 --> 00:21:59.759
It's not just a snarky.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:24.240
A snarky remark because when it comes to Jung, I think it's important to read Jung, at least from my perspective, as being part of a much bigger tradition and to see him as an emissary of a larger, deeper, older tradition, instead of seeing him in isolation as offering one paradigmatic or programmatic model of the psyche to be compared with others.
00:22:24.559 --> 00:22:42.240
Jung, as Peter Kingsley and others have pointed out, is essentially participating in the tradition that goes, if we just follow it back in time through Nietzsche, the German idealists, Spinoza, as Bob explores in his book, through Christianity, all the way back to Neoplatonism.
00:22:42.400 --> 00:22:54.559
There's a whole spiritual tradition in what I'll call, for the sake of simplicity, the West, which I think Jung belongs to, and in light of which we can assess his work.
00:22:54.720 --> 00:23:00.880
And so there's a critique of Jung that can come from, let's say, a radical political materialist position today.
00:23:01.119 --> 00:23:04.880
But there's also a critique of Jung that can come out of that deeper tradition.
00:23:04.960 --> 00:23:11.839
And of course, it's not going to be a pointed critique because that critique itself, that tradition implies a variety of points of view.
00:23:12.079 --> 00:23:30.640
But my point is this it's that I think that part of the political crises that we are experiencing today, and this is something I think Jung would have said and does say in books like The Undiscovered Self and elsewhere, is that we have neglected the interior world in all kinds of ways.
00:23:30.799 --> 00:23:35.680
The capitalism neglects it in its own way, but also socialism neglects it in another way.
00:23:35.759 --> 00:23:43.839
And so there's there could be, in certain respects, something we might want to learn from Jung without taking him personally as an example.
00:23:44.079 --> 00:23:45.440
Was he too introverted?
00:23:45.680 --> 00:23:49.599
Was he literally building his ivory tower to hide from the world?
00:23:49.839 --> 00:23:52.559
All those critiques are fair, and that's perhaps is true.
00:23:52.640 --> 00:24:10.079
But when you read what he writes and you try to filter that through a kind of wider perspective on that includes and gives proper attention to material relations and political realities and so forth, I think he can be very, very useful.
00:24:10.480 --> 00:24:27.359
For instance, just to name a very simple example, his concept of the shadow can be very, very useful for making sense not only, and I would say not even primarily, of other people's political beliefs, but of one's own political beliefs and convictions.
00:24:27.599 --> 00:24:31.599
The idea of an antiodromia, that things tend to reverse into their opposites.
00:24:31.759 --> 00:24:44.880
The idea that often what we're fighting against, verbally, physically, mentally, is not so much an actual other out there, but something inside ourselves or something out there on which we project some aspect of ourselves.
00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:46.240
These are important ideas.
00:24:46.400 --> 00:24:57.359
I don't think that a viable and healthy political movement should be without some consideration of that psychological reality, which has ramifications on a huge scale.
00:24:57.599 --> 00:25:02.720
I also think that um there's something about Jung's emphasis on the self.
00:25:02.880 --> 00:25:04.720
Now I know this is controversial.
00:25:04.880 --> 00:25:13.440
People like James Hillman have challenged it, but I think it's too easy to misunderstand or misread Jung, probably through his own fault, on this point.
00:25:13.680 --> 00:25:18.319
In Aeon, for instance, he says, and I'm gonna read a quick passage here.
00:25:18.640 --> 00:25:20.640
This is on page 23 of the book Aeon.
00:25:20.880 --> 00:25:24.799
He writes, the more numerous, and so he's talking about individuation, right?
00:25:25.119 --> 00:25:26.960
On which I'll say something in a second.
00:25:27.359 --> 00:25:43.039
He writes, quote, the more numerous and the more significant the unconscious contents which are assimilated into the ego, the closer the approximation of the ego to the self, even though this approximation must be a never-ending process.
00:25:43.519 --> 00:25:55.839
And so the idea that Jung posits the self as a transcendent, fixed transcendent object, a kind of template to which the individual should conform is simply misreading Jung.
00:25:56.160 --> 00:26:01.119
For Jung, in my, at least the way I read it, individuation is an ongoing process.
00:26:01.279 --> 00:26:25.359
And so, politically speaking, you could read Jung as a kind of psychoanalytic technology for producing a subject that's adequate to social democracy, that's adequate to a world in which people are expected to express themselves, express their views, share their views, and not simply be subjected to various psychic and or techno-political forces out there.
00:26:25.519 --> 00:26:34.640
There's a kind of utopianism in Jung that I think is a useful way of reading his ideas pertaining to the self.
00:26:34.880 --> 00:26:54.799
And this is, I would argue, this is precisely what Deleuze does with Jung in his writings, where individuation, individuation reinterpreted in a fully kind of imminentist paradigm, becomes the means by which we collectively and individually create ourselves and our world.
00:26:55.119 --> 00:27:04.079
And this don't, I don't think that Deleuze could have, and Guattari could have developed some of their theory of individuation without Jung.
00:27:04.319 --> 00:27:09.920
In fact, as we know, whenever Jung comes up in their work, it tends to be somewhat favorably.
00:27:10.160 --> 00:27:14.079
I will leave it at that and we can explore details as we go.
00:27:14.400 --> 00:27:15.680
That was great, JF.
00:27:15.759 --> 00:27:16.079
Thank you.
00:27:16.160 --> 00:27:23.599
And I do think it's really important to keep in mind that Jung is part of a larger tradition that precedes psychology itself.
00:27:23.680 --> 00:27:27.599
And there is, you know, that's almost more of where he should be compared to some respects as well.
00:27:27.759 --> 00:27:28.799
Thank you for that.
00:27:29.200 --> 00:27:33.839
And next on our panel is my friend Christian McMillan.
00:27:34.160 --> 00:27:44.720
Christian is a lecturer and member of staff at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where he teaches on Young and post-Youngian studies.
00:27:45.039 --> 00:27:53.039
In his doctoral thesis, The Image of Thought in Young's Whole Self, a Critical Study, Christian focused on similarities and differences in the thought of deaf psychologist C.
00:27:53.519 --> 00:27:57.039
Young and French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
00:27:57.519 --> 00:28:12.480
Publications include Young Literature and Aesthetics and Young in Philosophy, Young and Deleuze Enchanted Openings to the Other in the Internal Journal of Youngin' Studies, and Archetypal Intuition Beyond the Human and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society.
00:28:12.720 --> 00:28:14.480
Christian, the floor is yours.
00:28:15.039 --> 00:28:15.279
Thank you.
00:28:15.440 --> 00:28:17.519
Yes, thank you for reminding me of those publications.
00:28:17.680 --> 00:28:19.839
It looks like it's been quite a long time.
00:28:20.160 --> 00:28:30.400
And just to say a quick hello, or it's lovely to see a few people that I know here, like obviously Gabriella and Cassie and Mark, and indeed Nick Langan, I think, is with us as well.
00:28:30.480 --> 00:28:33.119
So it's always lovely to see members of your family joining us.
00:28:33.279 --> 00:28:36.799
So, yes, I've enjoyed very much what the other panelists have said.
00:28:37.119 --> 00:28:54.240
I mean, my own interest in this really comes from trying to mine those areas of Jung's thought where I feel as though there are these kind of pockets, maybe pockets of imminence, as I don't know, I might call them, in which he's reversing the priority of the interior over the exterior.
00:28:54.480 --> 00:29:08.640
So, one example of that, if I was just to go straight to it, would be in his little essay, a short essay, Archaic Man from 1931, in which he problematizes the relationship between the projection and the source of projection.
00:29:08.720 --> 00:29:11.839
If any of you have had the chance to read that essay, it's a really interesting one.
00:29:12.079 --> 00:29:20.960
He kind of goes back on the hypothesis that perhaps we are the source of the material world rather than the material world being the source of our projections.
00:29:21.039 --> 00:29:28.160
We're somehow made up of, we're made up of something, spirits, we're made up of some kind of material forces.
00:29:28.400 --> 00:29:29.920
He refers to mana.
00:29:30.160 --> 00:29:32.960
We're actually composed of this rather than this being a projection.
00:29:33.039 --> 00:29:38.559
And he calls it a thought experiment, I think, or perhaps Paul Bishop does in his book on the archaic past and the present.
00:29:38.720 --> 00:29:41.119
And or he calls it some kind of a hypothesis.
00:29:41.279 --> 00:29:48.880
And I just think this is one of those interesting examples of where he's problematizing that, as I said, that interior-exterior kind of relationship.
00:29:49.039 --> 00:29:54.000
One might also be able to discern this in the in the creation of the concept of the psychoid itself.
00:29:54.079 --> 00:30:05.119
And I use those terms deliberately because I think Jung was an experimenter in the Deleuzean sense, or he, I think he Deleuze would have been complimentary about Jung's ability to create concepts.
00:30:05.200 --> 00:30:07.279
That would destabilizing to habits of thought.
00:30:07.440 --> 00:30:16.319
And the psychoid, although the psychoid has a long history going back to Aristotle, Jung, you know, he doesn't just use the psychoid in the sense that Aristotle used it in the context of Entelershi.
00:30:16.480 --> 00:30:22.799
He doesn't just use it in the sense that Hans Driesch redeveloped it in the period of neo-vitalism at the end of the 19th century.
00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:25.759
He develops his own kind of understanding of what the psychoid is.
00:30:25.839 --> 00:30:39.039
So he he creates this idea, he creates this concept to destabilize what I would call transcendent forms of synthesis or illegitimate forms of synthesis, if we were to borrow the language of Deleuze and Guattari from Antiedipus.
00:30:39.200 --> 00:30:48.880
And I think one way one could read it, if one was perhaps being charitable to this idea of the psychoid as a kind of synthetic power, is that there's it's a distributed form of synthesis.
00:30:48.960 --> 00:30:50.799
There's a passive form of the synthesis.
00:30:50.880 --> 00:30:56.720
It doesn't have a subject, it doesn't have a transcendent source, and from it the actual emerges.
00:30:57.039 --> 00:31:15.680
And within this synthetic power, or within all actual structures, this synthetic power continues, as in Simondonian terms, a kind of metastable source that allows things to transform, that allows categories to transform images of what we take things to be to be transformative rather than become rarefied and static.
00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:22.880
And I think that may be one of the so the psychoid and the essay on archaic man, there are only two examples.
00:31:23.039 --> 00:31:37.599
Perhaps one could also read this into the work on synchronicity, but there are all maybe three examples of where Jung is really problematizing this idea of where are the syntheses from which actual structures emerge and which allow actual structures to transform.
00:31:38.079 --> 00:31:44.799
I I think a lot of post-unions, or some post-unions at least, tend to get either fixated on maybe one side or the other.
00:31:45.039 --> 00:32:05.440
Perhaps a lot of post-unions are sidetracked into what I would call the phenomenological camp, which for me a priori prioritizes some form of a subject or particularly some form of a transcendental subject that then has to do the work of accounting for the possible experience of reality, whether it's possible psychic experience or whether it's possible experience in general.
00:32:05.599 --> 00:32:14.240
And then we lose those elements of Jung's thought in which he's trying to very much problematize where syntheses are actually potentially located.
00:32:14.319 --> 00:32:26.079
So the question about, you know, is psyche relevant anymore, for me is a question about where is this power, this constitutive power, actually to be located, or what is it that this power can actually do?
00:32:26.240 --> 00:32:30.720
And I think what I find useful in Jung's work is that he is problematizing that.
00:32:31.279 --> 00:32:47.119
Perhaps it would be nice if he did it more often than he did in the collected works, but there's a tendency for that to be ignored if it doesn't necessarily fit within a particular kind of post-Jungian paradigm that then tries to codify or define the field as a whole.
00:32:47.359 --> 00:32:52.720
And I think those areas, those moments of immanence in Jung's work have often been neglected.
00:32:52.880 --> 00:33:10.640
So to just kind of go back a little bit to the essay on archaic man, a short essay, a small essay, in which Jung is writing about, of course, in language that would not be particularly palatable to us today, is talking about primitive peoples, and he is referring to history, although he says this kind of mentality exists in the present as well.
00:33:10.960 --> 00:33:24.960
As I said, he's postulating the idea that perhaps uh we don't project spirits or animistic sort of contents into the world, but we are the synthetic products of them, which is a really, really kind of interesting reversal.
00:33:25.440 --> 00:33:40.480
He goes back in the essay and sort of refutes that a little bit later, and he misuses Levey Hul's understanding, the anthropologist Leve-Hul's understanding of participation mystique, in order to try and account for the notion of projection having a source.
00:33:40.640 --> 00:34:05.519
But if one reads participation mystique in the way that Deleuze and Guattari kind of understand polyvosity in their work on the primitive socius in Antiedipus, then I think something richer can come out, something uh you know, more materialist can potentially come out from a fruitful dialogue between those three writers, then is necessarily offered in archaic man, but it may have been another inspiration for Deleuze and Guattari's kind of materialism that emerges in Antiodipus.
00:34:05.839 --> 00:34:17.599
And the way, of course, Jung writes about mana in that essay as a kind of power, forces that actual things are composed of, but that retain in those actual things and allow them to transform.
00:34:17.760 --> 00:34:22.559
Then we have a link to the sort of more Sundonian notion of change that I mentioned earlier.
00:34:22.719 --> 00:34:38.800
And so that there are these material sort of elements in Jung's thinking, but they do tend to get a clouded by that phenomenological and sometimes the right word, empirical apology that Jung makes occasionally, which is that I'm only dealing with the facts of experience.
00:34:38.960 --> 00:34:51.599
And I think when he makes that apology, then that kind of turns one is able to look at turn his work into, perhaps implicitly perhaps, but turn his work into right, we need to account for the conditions of all possible psychic experience.
00:34:51.840 --> 00:35:09.840
And that's where Deleuze's critique of the image of thought can be useful, because the same critique of Kant and the determination or the imminent criteria that Kant used to try and determine what possible experience and what can be leveled, uh the way Jung sometimes refers to archetypes as the possible condition of fantasy production.
00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:16.719
But again, what's glorious about Jung's work is that he will place archetypes in many, many different contexts to experiment with them.
00:35:16.800 --> 00:35:36.320
And this is something we I think we need to remember, or at least I like to remind myself of the collected works are a showcase of an individual with his colleagues to a certain extent, experimenting with a number of different concepts that he is creating and moulding in very, very different environments over a long period of time.
00:35:36.559 --> 00:35:50.400
So there is no consistency, but there is in in the work in the words of someone like Connor Heaney, who's a Deleuzian writer who wrote a great paper called Pursuing Joy with Deleuze in 2018, you know, there is an on there is a pi an epistemological openness.
00:35:50.559 --> 00:36:04.239
But I think the danger today in Jungian studies is that tends to get closed down, and that's where the the perhaps the political, the social and material aspects of what his work can do are being occluded or being somewhat excluded and indeed cancelled.
00:36:04.400 --> 00:36:11.119
There's a lot more, like I think the other two speakers have said, from slightly different perspectives from me, that can be done with Jung's work.
00:36:11.440 --> 00:36:27.760
But I believe the power of all psychotherapy has to start with a critique of the Oedipalized subject or the image of what the human subject is taken to be in the modern period, as if that's some kind of a universal subject.
00:36:28.079 --> 00:36:34.320
Jung is less guilty of reifying an image of the subject than Freud is.
00:36:34.880 --> 00:36:38.880
I personally am confident in making that rather bold statement.
00:36:39.519 --> 00:36:54.079
But it's now up to the job of post-human studies to kind of continue to carry out this challenge, this revolutionary challenge, as I think Deleuze and Quattari would have called it, of continuing to critique the boundaries of the form of the subject.
00:36:54.320 --> 00:36:58.719
And this is why, yeah, again, with a nod to Mark, it's lovely to have Mark here.
00:36:58.960 --> 00:37:09.199
If any of you haven't had the opportunity to read Mark's paper, recent paper in the JAP, Dissolving the Psychological Subject Inside and Outside the Therapeutic Bond, that's a wonderful starting place.
00:37:09.280 --> 00:37:22.800
And by starting place, Mark, I don't mean an easy place, but it's a wonderful starting place to engage with this very notion of dissolving the psychological subject, which so much of Mark's work has been, I think, on a true trajectory towards.
00:37:22.960 --> 00:37:30.960
And Simon and Jung are nicely conjoined in that work for those of you who have never maybe seen a Simon-Joung connection before.
00:37:31.280 --> 00:37:35.840
So I think I'll be quiet now, Bob, but just uh thank you again for having me on.
00:37:36.000 --> 00:37:37.199
Thank you very much, Craig.
00:37:37.360 --> 00:37:40.480
And I hope I can look forward to the questions that are coming.
00:37:40.880 --> 00:37:41.679
That was great.
00:37:41.840 --> 00:37:42.239
Thank you.
00:37:42.400 --> 00:37:45.840
And the thanks again to all our panelists for their thoughts.
00:37:46.159 --> 00:37:48.239
In a little bit, we're going to open up to questions.
00:37:48.480 --> 00:37:56.719
Feel free to put anything in the chat, and either I'll read it for you, or when we get to them, I'll ask if you want to read your thoughts aloud.
00:37:56.960 --> 00:38:03.679
But first, I wanted to turn it to our panelists and see if they had any questions for one another's remarks.
00:38:03.760 --> 00:38:08.639
And I'll ask that before I selfishly ask any questions that I myself might have.
00:38:08.880 --> 00:38:11.280
Then I'll go ahead myself and ask a question.
00:38:11.440 --> 00:38:16.880
You know, this idea of creating concepts was pretty prominent in what you said, Christian.
00:38:16.960 --> 00:38:29.679
And I know JF as well on a relatively recent Substack post, you brought up the same thing as sort of the core motif of Deleuze, the creation of concepts and this sort of productivity.
00:38:29.840 --> 00:38:34.800
And one thing that Christian and I have talked before is how to really look at alchemy in this sense.
00:38:34.960 --> 00:38:52.480
Because alchemy, I think, Christian, is potentially another example of what you were talking about, which is on the one hand, alchemy can just be seen as a mode of representation, just a pure mode of making it something analogous to, oh, this is just like the psychic processes going on within me.
00:38:52.639 --> 00:38:59.920
And the alchemists were just playing out those psychic processes, but projecting it onto the materials that they were working with.
00:39:00.639 --> 00:39:21.119
But there's another way of looking at this too, which Jung, in certain works, such as Mysterium Conuncionis, he starts to maybe appreciate it in this way a bit more, which is what he's really seeing is that there's a sort of productive power common to both human and non-human, sort of beyond both human and non-human that might precede any sense of subjectivity.
00:39:21.360 --> 00:39:37.280
And I was wondering if any of you have any thoughts of being able to look at things, even such as the archetypes this way as well, beyond just a mode of representation and set another concept, if you will, something that is created that precedes and sort of transcends the human itself.
00:39:38.079 --> 00:39:57.360
If I may then I think that I think this emphasis on, I love that what Christian was saying about the experiment of Jung and the way in which his uh collected works are foremost a kind of a series of experiments, explorations.
00:39:57.840 --> 00:40:06.639
And I used to find it extremely frustrating reading Jung to see all these kind of contradictions in the way that he would present the archetype.
00:40:06.960 --> 00:40:12.159
Sometimes it's just like, oh, this is just uh a kind of reflex pattern that evolved over time.
00:40:12.239 --> 00:40:17.920
And sometimes, no, this is a like a literal god that enters into the psyche.
00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:21.760
Or and what I found useful was to read Jung backwards, right?
00:40:21.840 --> 00:40:40.559
To kind of like really start at the end with the psychoid stuff and then kind of assume that that's where he settled metaphysically and then kind of read it all in that light, but also without trying to paper over that creative experimental aspect, which I like the way that you you liken that to alchemy.
00:40:40.719 --> 00:40:46.800
I read medieval alchemy as a kind of a similar sort of experimentation, an ongoing experimentation.
00:40:47.039 --> 00:40:59.119
Alchemy was one of the few cultural practices that really crossed cultural boundaries in the Middle Ages, where you had like Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alchemists sending each other letters.
00:40:59.440 --> 00:41:05.440
This was uh a game, you could say, without trying to diminish it, that people were playing together.
00:41:05.679 --> 00:41:09.199
And there's all been all kinds of theories as to what they were really trying to do.
00:41:09.360 --> 00:41:11.039
Were they trying to tear and land it to goal?
00:41:11.119 --> 00:41:13.599
Were they trying to like transcend the material world?
00:41:13.840 --> 00:41:23.199
I'm not even sure if if they all agreed on what the point was, but there was something about the activity that was productive in itself.
00:41:23.360 --> 00:41:30.000
And and I think the same is true of what Jung is doing, and the same is certainly true of what Dedeuze did in his career.
00:41:30.239 --> 00:41:34.880
And in that Substack post, it was called the One Idea of Gilles Dedeuze.
00:41:34.960 --> 00:41:44.800
My my my argument there, contentiously perhaps, was that Dedeuze's real idea was this con this concept of concept creation.
00:41:45.199 --> 00:41:49.280
But there are implications to that concept if you take it seriously.
00:41:49.599 --> 00:42:04.960
It means that concepts, as important as they are, as useful as they can be, never do the work that certain philosophers have wanted them to do, namely to define reality, to tell us what reality is.
00:42:05.199 --> 00:42:15.119
In a certain sense, Dadoz's philosophy requires you to embrace a kind of, and this is cont I admit this is a bit of a controversial comment I'm making.
00:42:15.280 --> 00:42:26.960
It requires you to embrace a kind of naive realism, a kind of just so self-evident world in which philosophy can be then take place as a creative activity.
00:42:27.280 --> 00:42:31.760
And so there's a political reality that precedes philosophy.
00:42:31.920 --> 00:42:40.320
And that political reality is the kind of the world in which we engage in this or that or the other activity.
00:42:40.719 --> 00:42:50.000
And then the question becomes well, how many of us and to what degree can they engage in creative activity?
00:42:50.159 --> 00:42:56.480
And that's what justifies, I think, a political program of emancipation, liberation, justice, and all that.
00:42:56.639 --> 00:43:03.199
It's to allow as many people as possible to do what people like Jung and Deleuze were able to do.
00:43:03.519 --> 00:43:07.519
Oscar Wilde says this beautifully in The Soul of a Man Under Socialism.
00:43:07.760 --> 00:43:14.400
Essentially, what you want is a society that allows people to play, and but play is the thing.
00:43:14.559 --> 00:43:22.639
And that's that's kind of what I love about if I have to really kind of question myself and ask myself, what is it that I love about Deleuze and Jung?
00:43:22.880 --> 00:43:31.119
I remember a uh a professor at the University of Toronto once literally cornered me at a party and asked me to reconcile my admiration for Deleuze and Jung.
00:43:31.280 --> 00:43:33.440
He said, You have to pick one, you can't take both.
00:43:33.599 --> 00:43:36.559
He was a really, he was quite quite the number this guy.
00:43:36.800 --> 00:43:41.519
And and I just I wished Christian Kerslake had released his book, Young and the Unconscious.
00:43:41.599 --> 00:43:44.239
I could have just handed him a copy, and that would have been the end of it.
00:43:44.320 --> 00:43:49.599
But at the time, he saw this as trying to like he was trying to like smoke out my inner fascist.
00:43:49.920 --> 00:43:54.719
But I think that's where I I find the real value in these thinkers' work.
00:43:54.880 --> 00:43:59.679
It's in how they're performing for us, they're giving us an example of.
00:44:00.320 --> 00:44:07.039
A kind of utopic engagement with being that I think all of us deserve to have a chance at or trying out.
00:44:08.559 --> 00:44:09.280
Any thoughts of that?
00:44:10.239 --> 00:44:12.639
No, I I I enjoyed your comments, Jay.
00:44:12.880 --> 00:44:13.280
I agree.
00:44:13.519 --> 00:44:26.239
That may be the more aspirational end goal of what Jungian psychotherapy could orientate itself towards trying to achieve, which is the creation of sort of a community of experimenters, perhaps.
00:44:26.559 --> 00:44:35.760
But I mean whether it's Jungian Jungian psychotherapy psychology, whatever analytical psychology, or whether it's any other therapy really, I mean it does it doesn't really matter.
00:44:36.000 --> 00:44:39.199
I think that ultimately is the end goal.
00:44:39.280 --> 00:44:54.960
But perhaps if one is to read Jung's works with this not in the direction of recognizing him as someone who was perpetually playing, is a nice way to put it, then it might position Jungian psychology as somewhat the flag shape of that enterprise.
00:44:55.360 --> 00:44:56.320
I think so.
00:44:56.719 --> 00:45:03.679
Yeah, I mean to just go back to the point about experimenting with concepts.
00:45:04.400 --> 00:45:06.400
You know, there are there are good concepts.
00:45:07.440 --> 00:45:09.199
There are not so good concepts.
00:45:09.679 --> 00:45:17.599
Or in what is philosophy, their last joint publication, Deleuze and Guitarino, but also percepts and affects in slightly different contexts.
00:45:18.480 --> 00:45:30.400
It's about what the work of these concepts can do, putting the concepts to work, which of course is very much a different mission from trying to identify what truth is.
00:45:30.880 --> 00:45:36.239
So there is no truth goal in this concept of creation, there's no attempt to try and determine what truth is.
00:45:36.880 --> 00:45:43.840
There is just the uh the capacity to encounter and engage and create with this world.
00:45:44.320 --> 00:45:52.719
And I think again, sometimes it's difficult to perhaps find the evidence in Jung's own thought, given his uh interest in the transcendent.
00:45:52.800 --> 00:45:59.519
But I would also say the transcendental and the two are very, very different, but they do kind of have a common source in a in a way of thinking.
00:46:00.000 --> 00:46:04.159
It's sometimes rather difficult to find the imminent within his thinking.
00:46:04.559 --> 00:46:06.000
But it it it is there.
00:46:06.480 --> 00:46:15.119
But it just tends to get lost under these words like spirit or perhaps psyche, which then looks a little bit like transcendental subject, at least as far as I can tell.
00:46:15.519 --> 00:46:28.239
But Bob, I'm gonna ask you, because you've obviously done a lot of work on this in the book Jung and Spinoza, where you've looked at psyche, spirit, and matter and how spirit sits within a kind of spinest framework.
00:46:28.559 --> 00:46:47.440
I was just wondering if you could you could come back on that, that problematizes the way that perhaps spirit is often regarded by Jungians, post-Jungians, and other people as something belonging to a to the transcendent, or it's otherworldly, or it is an other in the sense of a negative theology.
00:46:47.840 --> 00:46:55.039
But you're considering it in the four as far in terms of it being an imminent productive power, as far as I can tell.
00:46:55.519 --> 00:46:56.559
Yeah, thank you.
00:46:56.880 --> 00:47:11.280
My work on Jung and Spinoza, that was one of the key turning points for me, which is in the work of, say, Harold Abenspacher, who's a physicist and Jungian scholar, and he's very much interested in dual aspect monism.
00:47:11.599 --> 00:47:13.599
So, what is dual aspect monism?
00:47:13.679 --> 00:47:21.440
Very briefly, you could have a version of dualism, such as just pure Cartesian dualism where mind and matter are treated as separate substances.
00:47:21.599 --> 00:47:30.159
You could have materialism where mind is reducible to matter, or an idealism where everything is an idea or idealist.
00:47:30.480 --> 00:47:53.920
And then there's dual aspect monism, which suggests that mind and matter are two aspects of the same ontological one, some underlying neutral substance, and uh is interested in this because he reads this into the dialogue between Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Paulie, which came to be in the later stages of Jung's career and led to their joint publications on synchronicity.
00:47:54.159 --> 00:48:01.280
Synchronicity being an example of something complementary between mind and matter, but it's suggesting something underneath that they're both expressing.
00:48:01.440 --> 00:48:03.440
One can't be reduced to the other.
00:48:03.679 --> 00:48:09.599
And Abenspacher credits Spinoza as the originator and Western thought of this idea of a dual aspect monism.
00:48:09.920 --> 00:48:18.559
But it's a bit curious, you know, for Spinoza, it's not two separate lines that go back to a single one of thought and extension going back to an underlying one.
00:48:19.039 --> 00:48:25.920
It's really an infinity of things, all the different modes of substance being expressed in at least two different ways.
00:48:26.159 --> 00:48:29.440
So therefore, it almost has three factors instead of two.
00:48:29.679 --> 00:48:33.440
What is interesting in the dialogue with Jung and Pauli, Jung says this.
00:48:33.599 --> 00:48:36.159
He disagrees with Pauly on the dual aspect route.
00:48:36.239 --> 00:48:40.639
He says, no, it's not only just psyche and matter, it's psyche, matter, and spirit.
00:48:40.880 --> 00:48:44.480
And spirit and matter are the two aspects, and psyche is what is in between.
00:48:44.559 --> 00:48:48.079
It's the surface between the heights and the depths, essentially.
00:48:48.320 --> 00:48:53.039
And what this does is it eliminates the need to find the hidden source that these things emanate from.
00:48:53.119 --> 00:49:03.599
Instead, you're dealing with something that's purely on the surface, expressed in two different ways, that is composed by those two different things, but you're not tracing back lines that go on forever to find something.
00:49:03.840 --> 00:49:24.239
To me, this is also important because it kind of you can start thinking about instead of just a purely the problem of inner and outer, you're sort of removing that instead talking about things that are purely on that level of psyche and things that might be more in the material or that spiritual realm is said, expressed in two different ways, but all those things are expressed on the same flat line, if you will.
00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:30.559
So when you guys are talking about creating concepts, I look at that as the production of things on that same line.
00:49:30.800 --> 00:49:31.679
It's always open.
00:49:31.840 --> 00:49:33.039
You never find an endpoint.
00:49:33.119 --> 00:49:37.280
There's no totality to it, but it's always sort of this open ontology.
00:49:37.360 --> 00:49:42.559
And I do think there, Young, perhaps unwittingly, not always consciously, was heading in that direction.
00:49:42.639 --> 00:49:45.840
And it's, as JF said, his later writings suggest that.
00:49:45.920 --> 00:49:55.440
I also think some of the stuff in Young's earlier work with complex theory and this disassociative lateral version of the psyche was going in that same direction as well.
00:49:55.679 --> 00:50:04.800
And maybe at times archetypes get too representational in between, and there's that hermitage into the tower in between, but it is spanned by those two aspects elsewhere.
00:50:04.960 --> 00:50:09.199
And personally, that's what I draw it from because I think that's where a lot of interesting things are.
