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Did Jung understand gay identity? · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:22
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:27
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: Today, we're really excited to bring on Rob Hopke, who
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: is a licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: in Berkeley, California, but we all know him. Being a
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: prolific writer, he has numerous articles, reviews, books over the
• 0:52
  Speaker 3: last 30 years. His national best-selling book, There Are No Accidents,
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: Synchronicity in the Stories of Our Lives, has been very
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: popular throughout the world. We're bringing him on for a
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: particular expertise. He was one of the first Jungian psychotherapists
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: who explored Jung's relationship to homosexuality. He wrote Jung, Jungians,
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: and Homosexuality, and Men's Dreams, Men's Healing, as well as
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: other texts, but we're coming to him wanting to explore
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: how the formation of gay male identity is understood within
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: a Jungian perspective. context and we expect to have a
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: very free ranging conversation about all kinds of things. So Rob,
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: thank you so much for making time to be here
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: with us.
• 1:45
  Speaker 5: It's great to be here. Thanks so much. Yeah. A
• 1:48
  Speaker 5: topic of perennial interest.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: Yes. And one that has been much requested. So we're
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: really happy to bring you on to help us with
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: this one. And we all appreciate your book so much.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: When we were in training, we, we used, uh, your
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: wonderful book, A Guided Tour of the Collected Works, and
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: still have that one on my shelf along with your others.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: So it's such a delight and an honor to spend
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: time with you. You're one of the elders of the community.
• 2:19
  Speaker 5: Well, I was saying to Joseph, I mean, partly it's because,
• 2:23
  Speaker 5: I mean, I went in to become a psychotherapist right
• 2:28
  Speaker 5: out of undergraduate. So I was 10 to 15 years
• 2:30
  Speaker 5: younger than most of the folks, right? So, you know,
• 2:34
  Speaker 5: because it's a typical kind of second life, second stage
• 2:39
  Speaker 5: of life career for a lot of folks. But for me,
• 2:41
  Speaker 5: it was my first career.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:43
  Speaker 5: So that was that. And so I think that's a
• 2:45
  Speaker 5: little bit why, like, I wrote, you know, Guided Tour
• 2:47
  Speaker 5: of the Collected Works, or I wrote Jung Jung Jung's Homosexuality,
• 2:50
  Speaker 5: and then Jung Jung's institutes or groups would have me
• 2:52
  Speaker 5: come around and they were expecting some 60 or 70
• 2:54
  Speaker 5: year old to get off the plane. And this 29
• 2:57
  Speaker 5: year old gets off the plane. They're like, you're Rob.
• 3:00
  Speaker 5: So now, actually, now that I'm 66 years old, I
• 3:04
  Speaker 5: sort of look the part. But back then, you know,
• 3:06
  Speaker 5: because this book that both of those books guided tour
• 3:09
  Speaker 5: and young young as homosexuality came out in 1989.
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 3:11
  Speaker 5: Right. So they're 35 years old. So that's a little
• 3:15
  Speaker 5: bit sort of funny. I mean, I was sort of
• 3:17
  Speaker 5: the sort of the the enfant terrible of the Jungian
• 3:20
  Speaker 5: world for a decade there. That's great.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: I didn't know that's wonderful.
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: So Rob, jumping into the water, what prompted you to
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: write that first book, Jung Jungians and Homosexuality?
• 3:34
  Speaker 5: What's the backstory there? All right. So the backstory there,
• 3:37
  Speaker 5: interestingly enough, is I have two master's degrees. I came
• 3:40
  Speaker 5: out here to California from the East Coast after being
• 3:44
  Speaker 5: a gay activist at Georgetown University. So I went to Georgetown.
• 3:49
  Speaker 5: I was a French-Italian major at Georgetown. And around 19,
• 3:54
  Speaker 5: I graduated in 1980. Around 1978, you know, it was
• 3:58
  Speaker 5: the height of gay liberation back then. So we got
• 4:01
  Speaker 5: together what we called then the gay people of Georgetown.
• 4:04
  Speaker 5: You know, now we, you know, have an entire alphabet soup.
• 4:07
  Speaker 5: It'd be LGBTQQIAP plus whatever. But we were just the
• 4:10
  Speaker 5: gay people of Georgetown. And I was 19 then. You know,
• 4:14
  Speaker 5: I'd had my first gay relationships in high school, in
• 4:19
  Speaker 5: a certain sense. I wouldn't say that I grew up
• 4:21
  Speaker 5: in necessarily an especially sexually enlightened family, but it wasn't
• 4:25
  Speaker 5: a sexually judgmental family. And I was kind of one
• 4:29
  Speaker 5: of the smart kids in school, in high school. So
• 4:33
  Speaker 5: I got away with a lot. So I had gay
• 4:36
  Speaker 5: relationships in high school. Okay. Talk about with whom, because
• 4:40
  Speaker 5: that might get us into trouble. If any of my
• 4:43
  Speaker 5: high school friends are undoubtedly going to watch this, right?
• 4:46
  Speaker 5: But some of them already know that. No, you have
• 4:48
  Speaker 5: to pay extra for that part of the episode. Yeah, exactly.
• 4:53
  Speaker 5: So when I get to Georgetown, I wouldn't say I
• 4:55
  Speaker 5: was out, but I was definitely experienced at that point.
• 5:00
  Speaker 5: And then, of course, in D.C., it's an urban environment.
• 5:03
  Speaker 5: Get together with a lot of different gay and lesbian folks.
• 5:06
  Speaker 5: It's 1978. It's the height of gay liberation. So we
• 5:09
  Speaker 5: formed Gay People of Georgetown. We go through the Student Senate,
• 5:16
  Speaker 5: which basically gives us permission to be an official club
• 5:20
  Speaker 5: of Georgetown University, which is kind of what the bylaws
• 5:23
  Speaker 5: of the university allow. But of course, for those that
• 5:26
  Speaker 5: don't know, Georgetown is the oldest Roman Catholic university in
• 5:30
  Speaker 5: the United States, founded in 1789. And it's been run
• 5:34
  Speaker 5: by the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, since that point.
• 5:38
  Speaker 5: And of course, this is 1978 in the Roman Catholic Church,
• 5:42
  Speaker 5: which isn't any more necessarily that enlightened about any of
• 5:44
  Speaker 5: these issues currently, and sometimes it may even worse. But
• 5:49
  Speaker 5: back then, when the Jesuits got wind that there was
• 5:52
  Speaker 5: this gay group on campus, they went forward and in
• 5:56
  Speaker 5: contravention to their own bylaws, yanked our official recognition as
• 6:02
  Speaker 5: a club, which was really problematic. It gave the students
• 6:07
  Speaker 5: at Georgetown... most of whom were pretty homophobic, I would say,
• 6:12
  Speaker 5: permission to harass us. We were physically harassed. We, as
• 6:16
  Speaker 5: a student club, had permission to put up a gay
• 6:19
  Speaker 5: history exhibit at the library display case. It was vandalized.
• 6:23
  Speaker 5: Someone urinated and defecated on the materials. When we would
• 6:29
  Speaker 5: call campus security to help us, they would say, you're
• 6:32
  Speaker 5: not an official club. We're not going to help you.
• 6:35
  Speaker 5: You know, posters were pulled down. We had to run
• 6:38
  Speaker 5: a gauntlet to get to the room where we were meeting.
• 6:41
  Speaker 5: It was ugly, right? It was really ugly. And I
• 6:45
  Speaker 5: would say kind of traumatizing to me, too. It took
• 6:49
  Speaker 5: me quite a while in therapy after this to kind
• 6:52
  Speaker 5: of work through that. But nevertheless, because the university had
• 6:56
  Speaker 5: contravened its own bylaws, we contacted the ACLU. And so
• 7:00
  Speaker 5: seven of us sued Georgetown University for official recognition, which
• 7:05
  Speaker 5: is this sort of like, Famous, infamous lawsuit in Roman
• 7:08
  Speaker 5: Catholic circles. A lot of lawsuits of previously Catholic institutions
• 7:14
  Speaker 5: that had become slowly secularized with time, hitting some of the,
• 7:19
  Speaker 5: when I say sort of hard lines of Roman Catholic theology,
• 7:23
  Speaker 5: and I'm having to work it out. So this is one.
• 7:26
  Speaker 5: Here's a Roman Catholic, public Roman Catholic university with a
• 7:29
  Speaker 5: gay group. that they're denying official recognition to on the
• 7:32
  Speaker 5: basis of theology, even though they can't do that. So anyway,
• 7:36
  Speaker 5: I was coming out here to go to Lutheran seminary
• 7:39
  Speaker 5: to explore becoming a Lutheran pastor in Berkeley. After that experience,
• 7:44
  Speaker 5: I was like, you definitely need to get your ass
• 7:46
  Speaker 5: to California. I was like, the Bay Area and participate,
• 7:49
  Speaker 5: let's just go Bay Area. If you want to live
• 7:51
  Speaker 5: as an out free gay man, and if there's any
• 7:53
  Speaker 5: hope of you being an out gay Lutheran minister, it's
• 7:56
  Speaker 5: only going to be in California at that point. This
• 7:59
  Speaker 5: is 1982. So I came out here. That lawsuit's cooking along.
• 8:04
  Speaker 5: I signed off on it when I signed off and
• 8:07
  Speaker 5: withdrew myself once I moved out here in California. We
• 8:11
  Speaker 5: weren't suing for any financial damages. We were just suing
• 8:15
  Speaker 5: for the principal, right? And eventually, you know, fast forward,
• 8:19
  Speaker 5: it got settled. They agreed to allow a gay-straight alliance
• 8:23
  Speaker 5: on campus so that we could have dialogue about it.
• 8:26
  Speaker 5: So that way, it was a little bit of a
• 8:28
  Speaker 5: fig leaf. They weren't approving homosexuality, but they were approving
• 8:32
  Speaker 5: a discussion about homosexuality as a university. So anyway, it's
• 8:37
  Speaker 5: a long story. That's an interesting story, but how did
• 8:40
  Speaker 5: I get here? I got my degree in, so I
• 8:43
  Speaker 5: came here to do an MDiv, decided I did not
• 8:46
  Speaker 5: want to become a minister, but I was very attracted
• 8:49
  Speaker 5: to the pastoral counseling piece. So I got a master's
• 8:51
  Speaker 5: in theology from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and and did
• 8:55
  Speaker 5: all of the coursework I needed to become a marriage
• 8:58
  Speaker 5: and family therapist here in California, which is, at the time,
• 9:00
  Speaker 5: you could do that. You didn't need to have a
• 9:02
  Speaker 5: counseling degree. All you needed to do was have certain
• 9:05
  Speaker 5: courses within a master's degree. You get a degree in biology,
• 9:09
  Speaker 5: you get a degree in education. They've tightened that up now,
• 9:12
  Speaker 5: thank God, and I think that's a wise idea. But
• 9:15
  Speaker 5: I got this degree in theology, and then I went
• 9:17
  Speaker 5: on to do a second master's degree in counseling. Because
• 9:20
  Speaker 5: I felt like my theology degree really wasn't as comprehensive
• 9:24
  Speaker 5: as I wanted it to be. So I went to
• 9:26
  Speaker 5: California State Hayward. Excellent counseling program. And I got assigned,
• 9:32
  Speaker 5: my student advisor, my advisor, my academic advisor was Swiss.
• 9:35
  Speaker 5: So this is how we're getting to Jung. So she
• 9:38
  Speaker 5: was sort of stunned that I had gotten through seminary
• 9:40
  Speaker 5: without reading any Jung. And this is, again, we're talking
• 9:45
  Speaker 5: like 1983. This is sort of pre-Joseph Campbell era. before
• 9:49
  Speaker 5: Jung became super popular in the late 80s, right? So
• 9:53
  Speaker 5: at that time, I'm in my very psychoanalytically, or Freudian psychoanalytically,
• 9:59
  Speaker 5: oriented internship, in which Jung was, you know, again, Freudian
• 10:05
  Speaker 5: prejudice was seen as sort of psychotic. So my Freudian
• 10:10
  Speaker 5: supervisors were not supportive of me reading Jung. I hadn't
• 10:15
  Speaker 5: read it in seminary, weirdly enough, right? It wasn't really,
• 10:18
  Speaker 5: you know, Religion and psychology weren't really close bedfellows at
• 10:23
  Speaker 5: that point either, right? So, my Swiss advisor in my
• 10:26
  Speaker 5: second master's degree said, you need to read Jung. So,
• 10:30
  Speaker 5: what I did with her for two years is I
• 10:32
  Speaker 5: did an independent study. I formally signed up for the
• 10:36
  Speaker 5: courses she was teaching, but I didn't actually attend classes.
• 10:39
  Speaker 5: And instead, what I did was I did a two-year-long
• 10:42
  Speaker 5: independent study in which I read the collected works from
• 10:45
  Speaker 5: volume one to volume 18.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh.
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: Okay?
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: Right on.
• 10:50
  Speaker 5: It was like, I mean, something only is a ridiculous
• 10:53
  Speaker 5: 24 year old. I mean, now I look back on
• 10:57
  Speaker 5: it and I'm like, okay, so you can imagine what
• 11:01
  Speaker 5: the effect of it was. I was like, okay, my,
• 11:04
  Speaker 5: you know, I was having 18 dreams a night and
• 11:07
  Speaker 5: I was like so flooded with archetypal and deep material.
• 11:10
  Speaker 5: I immediately got myself into Jungian analysis. Right. in order
• 11:15
  Speaker 5: to process both the intellectual as well as the psychological
• 11:19
  Speaker 5: part of it. So in the course of doing those
• 11:22
  Speaker 5: two years, in which that's all I did was read
• 11:25
  Speaker 5: Jung from cover to cover, frankly, I went through and
• 11:28
  Speaker 5: I'd sort of marked every time I saw Jung talk
• 11:30
  Speaker 5: about homosexuality, right? Because I had come from, you know,
• 11:34
  Speaker 5: a gay activist perspective. And I was like, and I'm
• 11:38
  Speaker 5: looking in the literature. At that time, 1983, there was
• 11:42
  Speaker 5: nothing in the literature about homosexuality. There was an article
• 11:45
  Speaker 5: or two here or there or a mention. There was
• 11:49
  Speaker 5: certainly not a monograph. So what I expected, you know,
• 11:53
  Speaker 5: naively not being acquainted with Jungian scholarship, I expected to
• 11:58
  Speaker 5: just go to the shelf and read, you know, like
• 12:00
  Speaker 5: what I was reading in the Freudian literature. You know,
• 12:04
  Speaker 5: like there's a whole host of books on in the
• 12:08
  Speaker 5: Freudian literature at that time explaining homosexuality. I mean, many
• 12:11
  Speaker 5: of them negative and homophobic, but nevertheless, there was a literature, right?
• 12:15
  Speaker 5: There was nothing in the Jungian literature. There was one
• 12:18
  Speaker 5: book and I forget what his name is. He's a
• 12:21
  Speaker 5: German writer, Peter Kramer, Peter Scheller. There was one monograph
• 12:28
  Speaker 5: in German on Jungian homosexuality, what Jung had written on homosexuality.
• 12:32
  Speaker 5: There's nothing in English, nothing in English. So I'm ticking
• 12:36
  Speaker 5: off what Jung has said in the course of the
• 12:39
  Speaker 5: collected works on homosexuality with my thought that my thesis
• 12:43
  Speaker 5: is going to be Jung and homosexuality. It's going to
• 12:46
  Speaker 5: be the first comprehensive literature review of what Jung actually
• 12:52
  Speaker 5: said about homosexuality in the course of the 18 volumes
• 12:55
  Speaker 5: of the collected works. I was supported by that because
• 12:58
  Speaker 5: there were two gay analysts here in San Francisco, David
• 13:01
  Speaker 5: Stockford and Michael Steele, a blessed memory. I think they're
• 13:05
  Speaker 5: both passed at this point. In addition to that, John
• 13:07
  Speaker 5: Beebe was the editor of the San Francisco Young Institute
• 13:11
  Speaker 5: Library Journal, right? Also gay. And I actually knew his
• 13:16
  Speaker 5: boyfriend personally from Cal. So I was like, oh, this
• 13:20
  Speaker 5: is great. So there was this little group of us.
• 13:23
  Speaker 5: you know, that were kind of like, yeah, let's get
• 13:26
  Speaker 5: a literature going here. So I wrote Jungian Homosexuality for
• 13:29
  Speaker 5: my thesis for Hayward State with the intention that I
• 13:33
  Speaker 5: was actually going to publish that as a book. So
• 13:35
  Speaker 5: I'm hanging around Berkeley here, which is where I live,
• 13:38
  Speaker 5: have lived since 1980. And I go to the Shambhala
• 13:41
  Speaker 5: bookstore down on Telegraph Avenue. And I'm, you know, looking
• 13:45
  Speaker 5: for Jungian literature there. They had a great Jungian section.
• 13:49
  Speaker 5: And the manager there was an editor of Shambhala. So
• 13:52
  Speaker 5: I get to talking to Kim about the book and
• 13:55
  Speaker 5: she's like, oh yeah, no, definitely Shambhala. What they had published,
• 13:59
  Speaker 5: they had published Linda Leonard's book and it had been
• 14:02
  Speaker 5: an enormous bestseller for them. And so suddenly there was
• 14:06
  Speaker 5: now a Jungian imprint line at Shambhala and they were
• 14:10
  Speaker 5: dying for Jungian literature, right? So they were like, oh,
• 14:13
  Speaker 5: and Jungian homosexuality. They were like, great, let's do that. So,
• 14:17
  Speaker 5: I submitted it to the editor. The editor and I figured, well,
• 14:19
  Speaker 5: it's going to be Jungians and homosexuality. So then I
• 14:22
  Speaker 5: was going to do all of the subsequent secondary literature,
• 14:25
  Speaker 5: anything I could find that Jungians had written about homosexuality.
• 14:29
  Speaker 5: And then I was going to put forward in the
• 14:30
  Speaker 5: third part of the book my own ideas on how
• 14:33
  Speaker 5: Jung psychology could apply, particularly to gay male experience. So
• 14:38
  Speaker 5: that was the book. But in addition to that, Kim said,
• 14:41
  Speaker 5: people are coming here all the time wanting to read Jung.
• 14:44
  Speaker 5: And there really isn't a guide to the collected works.
• 14:47
  Speaker 5: You know, like we have, you know, all 18 of
• 14:49
  Speaker 5: those forbidding black volumes sitting there on the shelf. But like,
• 14:54
  Speaker 5: if you want to read about the shadow, where do
• 14:56
  Speaker 5: you go? And she says, you pull out the index,
• 14:59
  Speaker 5: and there's 18 pages of references to the shadow. So
• 15:04
  Speaker 5: I said, you know, that's funny, because at that point,
• 15:07
  Speaker 5: I was licensed, and I was supervising. And my interns
• 15:11
  Speaker 5: were saying, like, you're Jungian, you know, you were sort
• 15:16
  Speaker 5: of an amalgam of Freudian and Jungian, right? We'd love
• 15:19
  Speaker 5: to read Jung. We've read a lot of Freud. We'd
• 15:20
  Speaker 5: like to read Jung. So I said, you know, I
• 15:22
  Speaker 5: need to write a guided tour of the collected works.
• 15:24
  Speaker 5: So I picked 40 concepts. I wrote my little description.
• 15:28
  Speaker 5: Because I had read the collected works so comprehensively, I
• 15:31
  Speaker 5: knew which pieces, you know, like if Jung was talking
• 15:35
  Speaker 5: about the shadow, which article was the most accessible and
• 15:39
  Speaker 5: which articles were a little bit more complicated, technical or scholarly,
• 15:43
  Speaker 5: So if you wanted to just start easy, you could
• 15:46
  Speaker 5: start easy and then you could go down. And then
• 15:48
  Speaker 5: I referenced all the secondary literature. And so that got
• 15:51
  Speaker 5: published at the same time. It was sort of an
• 15:54
  Speaker 5: interesting thing. I mean, it's one of these things that, again,
• 15:56
  Speaker 5: only when you're 29 are you going to be writing
• 15:58
  Speaker 5: two books at the same time. So that's what happened.
• 16:01
  Speaker 5: Young Junghyun's homosexuality had been more or less two thirds
• 16:06
  Speaker 5: written by the time it got published. So that's how
• 16:09
  Speaker 5: we ended up here. You know, that's it. That's what
• 16:11
  Speaker 5: the guided tour is. And the guided tour. Yeah, I've
• 16:14
  Speaker 5: been really happy with that. I mean, it's sort of like,
• 16:16
  Speaker 5: I guess, a standard book for folks that are. Teaching
• 16:21
  Speaker 5: intro to you. Absolutely. So it's great. And I updated
• 16:24
  Speaker 5: it in 1999. Shambhala came to me and said, you know,
• 16:27
  Speaker 5: it's been a lot of secondary literature that's come out
• 16:30
  Speaker 5: on a lot of these topics in the last 10 years.
• 16:32
  Speaker 5: So let's update it. It could probably stand another updating,
• 16:36
  Speaker 5: but no one's, you know, no one's really contacted me
• 16:40
  Speaker 5: for that. But Jung-Jung is homosexuality. That was good for
• 16:43
  Speaker 5: me because after having read Jung, I really did want
• 16:47
  Speaker 5: to see what subsequent Jungians had said about homosexuality because
• 16:53
  Speaker 5: I knew kind of what Freud had said about homosexuality
• 16:56
  Speaker 5: and what subsequent Freudians had done or not done with
• 17:00
  Speaker 5: the topic. So I was like, okay, that's going to
• 17:02
  Speaker 5: be an interesting thing. So then we'll go... Then we'll
• 17:06
  Speaker 5: go to the sort of official Jungian non-reception of the
• 17:11
  Speaker 5: book is what I'll say. I'm not a Jungian analyst,
• 17:14
  Speaker 5: was not interested in going to a Jung Institute. I
• 17:17
  Speaker 5: already had a practice. I didn't really see any real
• 17:21
  Speaker 5: reason to. And again, as you can probably tell, I'm
• 17:24
  Speaker 5: pretty extroverted. I don't need an institute to create a
• 17:27
  Speaker 5: professional community around me. And then a lot of the
• 17:31
  Speaker 5: Jungian training struck me as interesting. pretty much like going
• 17:34
  Speaker 5: to a Jungian seminary. And so having already gone to
• 17:38
  Speaker 5: a Lutheran seminary, I was like, I know I don't
• 17:40
  Speaker 5: want to go to a Jungian seminary either. You know,
• 17:44
  Speaker 5: so that was that. So I'm sort of like this.
• 17:46
  Speaker 5: And on top of it, not being an analyst, I realized,
• 17:51
  Speaker 5: and this is, again, I'm young, right? I'm not under
• 17:54
  Speaker 5: the collective pressure to sort of fit into a particular
• 17:58
  Speaker 5: set of stuff, right? I have more freedom to as
• 18:02
  Speaker 5: an intellectual, as a writer, as a therapist, if I'm
• 18:04
  Speaker 5: not part of a community. So it was a very
• 18:08
  Speaker 5: intentional decision to not become a union Atlas, right? It
• 18:12
  Speaker 5: wasn't just me being oppositional defiant at age 33. So, um,
• 18:17
  Speaker 5: so that was that. But what that did was of course,
• 18:20
  Speaker 5: I'm not part of the club. So who's this gay
• 18:26
  Speaker 5: 33-year-old dude who wrote this comprehensive scholarly work on homosexuality?
• 18:33
  Speaker 5: So I sent it to James Hillman. James Hillman reads
• 18:37
  Speaker 5: the 275 pages of it and says, yeah, I don't
• 18:41
  Speaker 5: think there's really much to say on that topic. I
• 18:43
  Speaker 5: don't think we're going to publish that. I was like, okay.
• 18:47
  Speaker 5: I sent it to Chiron. Chiron's like, what? Who wants
• 18:52
  Speaker 5: to read about that?
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: Nah.
• 18:54
  Speaker 5: So that's why Sean Paolo published it, really. I tried
• 18:57
  Speaker 5: to get it published, the Jungian thing. I mean, James
• 18:59
  Speaker 5: Hillman did say, boil it down to an article and
• 19:04
  Speaker 5: we'll publish it in spring. So that's what I did.
• 19:07
  Speaker 5: I mean, so sort of a resume of the book
• 19:09
  Speaker 5: got published as a standalone article in spring publications, right?
• 19:13
  Speaker 5: And the same with Chiron. You know, there's a couple of...
• 19:18
  Speaker 5: articles I wrote on men's issues that got published that
• 19:21
  Speaker 5: use the material from it. John Beebe was super supportive
• 19:24
  Speaker 5: out here. So I, I, you know, I, I wrote
• 19:27
  Speaker 5: a ton of articles on, on very, I would use
• 19:30
  Speaker 5: various books to kind of put forward those ideas, but yeah,
• 19:34
  Speaker 5: Jungian is homosexuality got published in Shabala. And so it
• 19:37
  Speaker 5: is the first, and at this point, the only single
• 19:41
  Speaker 5: monograph on homosexuality in the Jungian literature. Oh my gosh.
• 19:48
  Speaker 5: On homosexuality in the sense of what you and Jungians
• 19:50
  Speaker 5: have written about homosexuality, right? I mean, there's other, and
• 19:54
  Speaker 5: we'll get into that. There's a lot of other stuff
• 19:56
  Speaker 5: that's been written since, but that's the primary. I wanted
• 19:58
  Speaker 5: to have a single comprehensive standard scholarly source for everything
• 20:05
  Speaker 5: Jung said. So I'm really happy. I'm really happy with
• 20:08
  Speaker 5: the book because that's what it has served. That served
• 20:10
  Speaker 5: that function.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: So tell us, what did you find? What did Jung
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: have to say about homosexuality and what have Jungians had
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: to say? Can you sort of summarize it for us?
• 20:22
  Speaker 5: Unsurprisingly, I would say, in a way, James Hillman wasn't wrong.
• 20:28
  Speaker 5: Jung didn't really write a whole lot about homosexuality, but
• 20:33
  Speaker 5: Jung didn't write a whole lot about sexuality.
• 20:36
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 20:37
  Speaker 5: There's a lot of ways in which Jung's writing stands
• 20:40
  Speaker 5: in contrast to Freud, right? A lot of what Jung
• 20:44
  Speaker 5: was doing was, I wouldn't say kind of against Freud,
• 20:50
  Speaker 5: but definitely charting his own kind of way forward. And
• 20:53
  Speaker 5: he felt, of course, he felt Freud's almost obsessive concentration
• 20:59
  Speaker 5: on sexuality was out of balance. So Jung didn't, you know,
• 21:04
  Speaker 5: Jung wrote about sexuality, certainly. Certainly wrote about gender, femininity, masculinity,
• 21:10
  Speaker 5: wrote an article on marriage, etc. But what I found
• 21:14
  Speaker 5: is that in the huge 18 volumes of the collected works,
• 21:19
  Speaker 5: Jung mentioned homosexuality maybe 30 times. There were no single
• 21:25
  Speaker 5: articles like there were in the Freudian literature, both from
• 21:30
  Speaker 5: Freud and subsequent Freudians, on homosexuality just as a subject.
• 21:36
  Speaker 5: So Jung was always mentioning homosexuality, Jung always mentions homosexuality
• 21:41
  Speaker 5: in reference to other things he's talking about. So in
• 21:45
  Speaker 5: a weird way, in a weird way, that's a plus
• 21:49
  Speaker 5: and a minus, right? It's a plus in the sense
• 21:53
  Speaker 5: that Jung is not bringing a pathologizing attitude to homosexuality.
• 22:00
  Speaker 5: So he's not he's not falling prey to the idea
• 22:03
  Speaker 5: that somehow this is some big hunking pathological condition that
• 22:07
  Speaker 5: needs to be explained per se. And so like with Freud,
• 22:11
  Speaker 5: you know, he, Freud comes up with 25 different explanations
• 22:14
  Speaker 5: around why people became gay. That didn't trouble Jung. Jung
• 22:19
  Speaker 5: was not interested in explaining, quote unquote, explaining homosexuality. So
• 22:24
  Speaker 5: that's a plus. I felt like, okay, that's an interesting thing.
• 22:28
  Speaker 5: Like Jung just sort of took it as, kind of
• 22:31
  Speaker 5: just one part of human natural phenomena and would discuss
• 22:35
  Speaker 5: it as he saw fit. Right. On the other hand,
• 22:39
  Speaker 5: you have to sort of say too, given the fact
• 22:43
  Speaker 5: that it's, you know, kind of an ongoing part of
• 22:47
  Speaker 5: the human experience, like to not look at it, it's
• 22:50
  Speaker 5: a little strange too, especially since, you know, Jung looked
• 22:54
  Speaker 5: up at a lot of issues around male-female relationships, but
• 22:58
  Speaker 5: didn't really get into it that much. So that's not
• 23:01
  Speaker 5: too surprising, you know, until the advent of a gay
• 23:05
  Speaker 5: affirmative psychotherapy movement and, you know, out gay lesbian literature.
• 23:12
  Speaker 5: You know, I mean, Jung died in 61, right? So
• 23:15
  Speaker 5: I wouldn't expect him to be concentrating on that much.
• 23:20
  Speaker 5: So what I did find, however, was that, number one,
• 23:25
  Speaker 5: he didn't have a very pathologizing attitude toward homosexuality. He
• 23:28
  Speaker 5: didn't really... feel as if this was some sick thing
• 23:32
  Speaker 5: that needed to be explained away and cured. So that
• 23:35
  Speaker 5: was number two. Most, as you might expect too, if
• 23:39
  Speaker 5: those of us that know Jung, number two, most of
• 23:43
  Speaker 5: the times when he referenced homosexuality, he would put it
• 23:47
  Speaker 5: within a larger historical context. Because of his great, you know,
• 23:52
  Speaker 5: acquaintance with classical literature, etc., He had an awareness of
• 23:57
  Speaker 5: the way in which this was an enduring pattern of
• 23:59
  Speaker 5: human behavior, not just some sort of like weird, modern
• 24:04
  Speaker 5: perversion that happened to kind of erupt in the Victorian era.
• 24:08
  Speaker 5: You know, so he would often reference classical literature around homosexuality,
• 24:13
  Speaker 5: which again, I was very, it was very welcome. You know,
• 24:17
  Speaker 5: it's sort of, again, I think... It sort of sold
• 24:22
  Speaker 5: me on Jung. I mean, there's so many things about
• 24:24
  Speaker 5: Jung that I feel so much affinity for, but that
• 24:26
  Speaker 5: was one of them. You know, there's definitely that. Because
• 24:31
  Speaker 5: of the context in which he's writing, number three, because
• 24:34
  Speaker 5: of the context in which he's writing, which is in
• 24:36
  Speaker 5: the early 1900s, right, the early 20th century, he consistently says,
• 24:42
  Speaker 5: I'd say says, consistently says three, four times, he does
• 24:46
  Speaker 5: not think it should be a focus of legal prosecution. Right.
• 24:52
  Speaker 5: He's writing in Switzerland, but, you know, he's right next
• 24:54
  Speaker 5: door to Germany, England. So he's saying that, you know,
• 24:58
  Speaker 5: he does not he if it's if it's anything, it's
• 25:02
  Speaker 5: a psychological disturbance. It's not a moral failing. It's not
• 25:05
  Speaker 5: a legal issue. Now, you know, me reading that in
• 25:11
  Speaker 5: 1989 in the midst of gay liberation, I was like, wow,
• 25:13
  Speaker 5: that's pretty great.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 25:15
  Speaker 5: That particular piece can go in both directions.
• 25:19
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 25:20
  Speaker 5: Which is to say a lot of the early 19,
• 25:23
  Speaker 5: a lot of the psychologists who are, I would say, gay, affirmative,
• 25:27
  Speaker 5: sort of neutral or affirmative psychologists, psychiatrists in the 20th
• 25:33
  Speaker 5: century would use that as an argument. It would use
• 25:37
  Speaker 5: the argument that homosexuality is a sickness that people can't help,
• 25:43
  Speaker 5: so it really shouldn't be considered a crime. I mean,
• 25:46
  Speaker 5: that's essentially how you know, the laws were repealed in
• 25:50
  Speaker 5: England was on that basis of that argument. But that
• 25:54
  Speaker 5: is a sickness, not a crime, right? So I'm like,
• 25:59
  Speaker 5: all right, well, that's a rather ambivalent way to go.
• 26:05
  Speaker 5: But what would you expect from a psychiatrist? Of course,
• 26:07
  Speaker 5: a psychiatrist is going to make, you know, and then
• 26:10
  Speaker 5: what Jung would then do is call for compassion or
• 26:12
  Speaker 5: any of those psychiatrists, Freud, some of the Freudians, etc.,
• 26:16
  Speaker 5: I mean, even the most homophobic Freudians in the 1950s
• 26:19
  Speaker 5: are using that argument, right? We're trying to cure it
• 26:22
  Speaker 5: as a sickness. So really, you shouldn't be sending these
• 26:25
  Speaker 5: people to jail. You shouldn't be prosecuting this, right? It's
• 26:28
  Speaker 5: an illness. So that's a piece of it. Jung didn't
• 26:31
  Speaker 5: land too much on that, as you might expect. I mean,
• 26:34
  Speaker 5: he's not super political. He's not super legal. He's interested
• 26:38
  Speaker 5: in the inner life. So there is that. He stated, however,
• 26:42
  Speaker 5: I think the things that I found the most positive
• 26:46
  Speaker 5: were that he pretty much stated almost every time it
• 26:50
  Speaker 5: came up in the collected works that he felt that
• 26:54
  Speaker 5: homosexuality had a specific individual meaning for the individual that
• 27:00
  Speaker 5: the analyst was obligated to help them explore. And I
• 27:06
  Speaker 5: thought that was pretty great. I was like, yeah, absolutely.
• 27:10
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 27:11
  Speaker 5: I mean, you know, rather than some sort of generalized
• 27:15
  Speaker 5: stereotype of what gay people are, Jung felt he took,
• 27:21
  Speaker 5: as Jung does, right, takes every individual on their own merits.
• 27:25
  Speaker 5: And let's look at that. Sometimes he would say that
• 27:28
  Speaker 5: it was sort of a, it might be a defense
• 27:31
  Speaker 5: against heterosexuality sometimes, you know, so. Sometimes it wasn't. What
• 27:36
  Speaker 5: is the individual meaning? I felt like that was really great.
• 27:39
  Speaker 5: I mean, especially back in 1989, that was not something
• 27:43
  Speaker 5: you were hearing. So that's why I wanted to write
• 27:46
  Speaker 5: the book. I felt like, okay. And then there was
• 27:49
  Speaker 5: a few times that Jung did, you know, so those
• 27:51
  Speaker 5: are the attitudes. I call those attitudes. He brought certain
• 27:54
  Speaker 5: attitudes toward it. And then there were three explanations, I
• 27:58
  Speaker 5: would say. I'd say maybe about three or four times
• 28:03
  Speaker 5: he said that he felt homosexuality was quote-unquote constitutional. In
• 28:08
  Speaker 5: other words, someone's homosexuality was not a result of psychodynamics,
• 28:14
  Speaker 5: it's how they were born. It was constitutional. And he
• 28:18
  Speaker 5: would say because it was constitutional, he mentioned a couple
• 28:21
  Speaker 5: of cases in which people presented themselves to be quote-unquote cured,
• 28:25
  Speaker 5: and that was his reaction. He was like, well, I'm
• 28:28
  Speaker 5: not going to be able to cure that. That's constitutional.
• 28:32
  Speaker 5: The second explanation that I found, and he would say this,
• 28:36
  Speaker 5: he felt that it was an identification with the feminine,
• 28:40
  Speaker 5: quote unquote. We have to wait until we get to
• 28:43
  Speaker 5: Emma Young or Marie-Louise von Franz or any of the
• 28:46
  Speaker 5: first generation Jungians to have anyone talk about female homosexuality.
• 28:52
  Speaker 5: Jung didn't talk about it. So he's talking about male
• 28:54
  Speaker 5: homosexuality almost exclusively, right? couple of mentions of animus ridden
• 29:01
  Speaker 5: women in england you know as feminists looking for suffrage
• 29:07
  Speaker 5: you know women's suffrage etc but not very much a
• 29:11
  Speaker 5: couple of mentions here and there of like you know
• 29:13
  Speaker 5: kind of lesbians but mostly male homosexuals so he's looking
• 29:17
  Speaker 5: at men he's looking at male homosexuals on the basis
• 29:20
  Speaker 5: of his male homosexual clients who are coming to him
• 29:22
  Speaker 5: to be cured And he felt at times, he says
• 29:26
  Speaker 5: in the collected works in various places, he felt that
• 29:29
  Speaker 5: it was an identification with the feminine. These were men
• 29:32
  Speaker 5: who had identified with their anima, as he would say it,
• 29:35
  Speaker 5: or the archetypal feminine for reasons that had developmental implications.
• 29:40
  Speaker 5: connections to how they were brought up, as well as
• 29:43
  Speaker 5: perhaps defensive, you know, sort of defensive uses for their psychodynamic.
• 29:49
  Speaker 5: And then the third mention, which I'm, you know, I still, see,
• 29:53
  Speaker 5: here we are in 2024, I'm still waiting for someone
• 29:56
  Speaker 5: to pick this one up and run with it. And
• 29:59
  Speaker 5: I think the current environment is more likely to have
• 30:03
  Speaker 5: that happen. But the third thing he said was he
• 30:06
  Speaker 5: felt it was an incomplete detachment from the archetype of
• 30:09
  Speaker 5: the hermaphrodite. In other words, it was a form of
• 30:12
  Speaker 5: psychological androgyny. You can sort of see how that sort
• 30:15
  Speaker 5: of flows out of the idea that somehow here we
• 30:20
  Speaker 5: have anatomical biological men who are identified with the feminine.
• 30:24
  Speaker 5: So the result is an androgynous person. What's rich about that,
• 30:30
  Speaker 5: I feel like that's the most powerful piece of, you know,
• 30:34
  Speaker 5: a little hint of a direction to go if you're
• 30:36
  Speaker 5: using Jung, is that, you know, the androgyne is pretty ambivalent, right?
• 30:40
  Speaker 5: It's both sort of a symbol of unity and psychological perfection. It's,
• 30:47
  Speaker 5: you know, the conjunctio oppositorum, you know, it's the goal
• 30:51
  Speaker 5: of all of analysis is to sort of integrate male
• 30:54
  Speaker 5: and female. And to live that out in some kind
• 30:56
  Speaker 5: of easy way. But it's also monstrous. It doesn't exist
• 31:01
  Speaker 5: in the real world. It's an amalgam of two conflictual things, right?
• 31:06
  Speaker 5: So is it a monstrous freak of nature? Or is
• 31:11
  Speaker 5: it the psychological ideal, right? You know, the idea that
• 31:15
  Speaker 5: gay men might be gay because on an archetypal level,
• 31:20
  Speaker 5: they have not.
• 31:24
  Speaker 5: Differentiated themselves from the original hermaphroditic or androgynous, polymorphous, perverse
• 31:32
  Speaker 5: place that we come out of, right? The very early
• 31:35
  Speaker 5: bisexuality in which the human infant is responsive to all
• 31:39
  Speaker 5: stimuli equally, has not differentiated itself into genders or the
• 31:45
  Speaker 5: divisions of gender, you know, is in Jung. Jung says
• 31:50
  Speaker 5: that probably three or four times. And that's characteristic of
• 31:54
  Speaker 5: his later writings, as you might expect, right? So he'd
• 31:58
  Speaker 5: be like, okay, so those are the three explanations. What
• 32:01
  Speaker 5: did Jungians do with it? Jungians completely ignored one and
• 32:06
  Speaker 5: completely ignored three. What Jungians did, as one might expect,
• 32:11
  Speaker 5: was there was, if Jungians wrote about it at all,
• 32:14
  Speaker 5: which was not a lot, I'll just say, I mean,
• 32:18
  Speaker 5: I had to sort of pick through Eric Neumann to
• 32:21
  Speaker 5: try to find references and pick through various first-generation Jungians
• 32:29
  Speaker 5: to try to see if... There's not very much written
• 32:31
  Speaker 5: about homosexuality, period. But if they did write about it
• 32:35
  Speaker 5: at all, it became kind of a cliche to just say,
• 32:39
  Speaker 5: gay men are identified with the feminine. That's kind of...
• 32:42
  Speaker 5: It was just sort of a Jungian... It's a Jungian cliche.
• 32:45
  Speaker 5: At the time I was writing, back in 1989, that
• 32:48
  Speaker 5: was it. And I was like, Okay. Um, there's no question.
• 32:54
  Speaker 5: So my response to that as a 25 year old
• 32:58
  Speaker 5: out gay man living in the, you know, what was
• 33:01
  Speaker 5: then the 20th century, I'm like, how does this jive
• 33:04
  Speaker 5: with my actual lived experience as a gay man? Like
• 33:08
  Speaker 5: some of these things are sort of useful in the sense,
• 33:12
  Speaker 5: some of what Jung and Jungians have written are sort
• 33:14
  Speaker 5: of useful in the sense that again, kind of very
• 33:17
  Speaker 5: characteristic of analytical psychology and Jungians in general. They're not
• 33:21
  Speaker 5: that pathologizing, and they're not that obsessed with etiology. They're
• 33:27
  Speaker 5: not obsessed with kind of explaining things as an illness.
• 33:31
  Speaker 5: They're not pathologists. That's good. But these explanations didn't really land.
• 33:37
  Speaker 5: I mean, there's no question that gay men have a
• 33:39
  Speaker 5: different relationship to the quote-unquote feminine than heterosexual men or
• 33:46
  Speaker 5: bisexual men. You know, I mean, I think in gay
• 33:48
  Speaker 5: male culture, and we'll talk about that some, there are
• 33:51
  Speaker 5: all kinds of manifestations of the way in which, you know,
• 33:54
  Speaker 5: gay men have a pretty easy, non-conflictual, even identification with
• 33:59
  Speaker 5: the feminine. But gay male culture is pretty masculine. I mean,
• 34:04
  Speaker 5: pretty masculine, especially... late 20th century gay male culture, right?
• 34:10
  Speaker 5: I mean, naked men everywhere, cocks and dicks everywhere. Everyone's
• 34:15
  Speaker 5: in leather. It's the village people. It's like really, really male.
• 34:20
  Speaker 5: Like on the ground, my life living, I'm like... Women
• 34:24
  Speaker 5: don't play that much a part in gay male culture,
• 34:27
  Speaker 5: to tell you the truth. If any, there's a certain
• 34:30
  Speaker 5: kind of hostility to women, right? And it's like these,
• 34:33
  Speaker 5: I'm like, I'm going to all male environments all the
• 34:36
  Speaker 5: time as a gay man. And Jungians are like, eh.
• 34:40
  Speaker 5: nothing about the masculine. I'm like, I'm like, okay, that's
• 34:45
  Speaker 5: really not in line with my experience. I'm like, you
• 34:49
  Speaker 5: have two men with two cocks having sex with one another,
• 34:54
  Speaker 5: and we're not going to talk about the masculine. I'm like, okay.
• 34:58
  Speaker 5: So that hit for a few subsequent. So here we
• 35:03
  Speaker 5: now moving into the nineties, right? That kind of, that, weirdness,
• 35:08
  Speaker 5: that conundrum kind of hit a number of different people.
• 35:12
  Speaker 5: I think the most, the person I had the most
• 35:14
  Speaker 5: conversations with was the late Jean Monick. Eugene Monick, who
• 35:18
  Speaker 5: wrote Phallus, Sacred Image of the Masculine, right? So, like,
• 35:22
  Speaker 5: Jean and I were in conversation with this all this time.
• 35:24
  Speaker 5: He's like, yeah, that's why I'm writing this book. I'm like, yes,
• 35:27
  Speaker 5: please write this book about Phallus, right? I mean, Joseph
• 35:31
  Speaker 5: and I were talking yesterday about some of Jung's writings,
• 35:36
  Speaker 5: talks about the phallus, you know, the underground phallus from
• 35:38
  Speaker 5: memory streams and reflections, et cetera, et cetera. But nevertheless,
• 35:42
  Speaker 5: so I was like, okay, so, you know, I wanted
• 35:44
  Speaker 5: to talk about the masculine, but I also felt, and
• 35:48
  Speaker 5: this is, I still feel, to tell you the truth, and,
• 35:51
  Speaker 5: you know, times have sort of caught up with us here.
• 35:54
  Speaker 5: I really kind of feel like the androgynous, the suggestions
• 35:58
  Speaker 5: that homosexuality was an entree into a certain kind of androgyny.
• 36:02
  Speaker 5: was also in line with my experience, right? I mean,
• 36:05
  Speaker 5: I'm running around San Francisco Bay Area, and there's drag
• 36:09
  Speaker 5: queens everywhere doing gender fuck. You know, these guys with
• 36:12
  Speaker 5: beards like mine are pretending to be women. Nowadays, I mean,
• 36:18
  Speaker 5: we actually have a language for it. You know, we're
• 36:20
  Speaker 5: talking about transgender, non-binary identities. Now we have a language
• 36:25
  Speaker 5: for it, and we have a whole panoply of people
• 36:28
  Speaker 5: who are actually living that, right? That's what I would say.
• 36:31
  Speaker 5: So Jung's suggestion that gay men have their finger on
• 36:36
  Speaker 5: a particular kind of androgyny and a particular kind of
• 36:39
  Speaker 5: integration of male and female, I felt was like the
• 36:42
  Speaker 5: most positive and potentially powerful thing he had to say.
• 36:46
  Speaker 5: But no subsequent Jungians have pursued that. June Singer wrote
• 36:52
  Speaker 5: her book on androgyny back in whenever that was. That
• 36:56
  Speaker 5: was quite a while ago. I mean... kind of late 70s,
• 36:58
  Speaker 5: I think, right? 78, 79, 76, maybe. But again, very scholarly,
• 37:04
  Speaker 5: very Jungian, you know, not especially oriented toward a popular audience,
• 37:10
  Speaker 5: you know, enormous amount of material on androgyny and alchemical texts, which,
• 37:17
  Speaker 5: you know, I think, you know, make all of us
• 37:20
  Speaker 5: really excited. It's not exactly like that's the most accessible
• 37:24
  Speaker 5: material to the general public. Great alchemy, right? But nevertheless,
• 37:30
  Speaker 5: really rich and wonderful. But again, not much was sort
• 37:35
  Speaker 5: of picked up around it, I would say. So that's
• 37:38
  Speaker 5: why after Young Union's Homosexuality came out, Scott Worth, out
• 37:42
  Speaker 5: of Gay Analysts, Karn Carrington, lesbian psychotherapist here, at that
• 37:48
  Speaker 5: time a candidate for the Young Institute, the three of
• 37:51
  Speaker 5: us got together and we sort of created sort of
• 37:53
  Speaker 5: a gay unions group here, a sort of a scholarly
• 37:55
  Speaker 5: gay unions group here, you know? Um, and that's why
• 37:59
  Speaker 5: we came out with, um, same sex love, a path
• 38:02
  Speaker 5: to wholeness. Like we collected articles and we wanted to
• 38:06
  Speaker 5: make sure number one, it was gender balanced. So half
• 38:10
  Speaker 5: the articles are men, half the articles are written by women.
• 38:13
  Speaker 5: And we wanted, you know, to actually talk about female
• 38:17
  Speaker 5: experience as well. At that point, Christine Downing comes on
• 38:21
  Speaker 5: the scene with all of her religious studies and Jungian background.
• 38:25
  Speaker 5: And she writes, you know, Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love. Again,
• 38:29
  Speaker 5: as a woman, she wrote an article for our book,
• 38:32
  Speaker 5: Same-Sex Love, Path to Wholeness, really totally wonderful article. I
• 38:36
  Speaker 5: continue to assign and use the journey of a late-life lesbian.
• 38:41
  Speaker 5: She came out as a lesbian later in life. And
• 38:44
  Speaker 5: she talks and, you know, she's such a wonderful writer,
• 38:48
  Speaker 5: you know, she talks in the most evocative poetic way about,
• 38:52
  Speaker 5: you know, how her love for her female partners sort
• 38:56
  Speaker 5: of is part of her fulfillment as a woman. Right.
• 39:00
  Speaker 5: So here we have finally like the burgeoning of a
• 39:03
  Speaker 5: little bit of a literature on women's experience, lesbian experience,
• 39:07
  Speaker 5: same sex love between women from a Jungian point of view.
• 39:11
  Speaker 5: And that's kind of where it stuck. I mean, I
• 39:14
  Speaker 5: would say after Same Sex Love got published in 94, weirdly,
• 39:20
  Speaker 5: I kind of felt like at times the impression I
• 39:23
  Speaker 5: got was that because I had written such a comprehensive book,
• 39:27
  Speaker 5: everyone kind of felt like that's all there was to say.
• 39:30
  Speaker 5: And as I said to Joseph, I was like, I
• 39:33
  Speaker 5: thought that was going to be the first book of
• 39:36
  Speaker 5: an entire literature that would then be created. You know,
• 39:39
  Speaker 5: I didn't expect that was the definitive word. I thought
• 39:42
  Speaker 5: that was the first. First, let's look at the literature review. Then,
• 39:46
  Speaker 5: once that's in place, which was my book, what are
• 39:49
  Speaker 5: we going to do with it? And so that's also
• 39:52
  Speaker 5: kind of, I feel like what I would say, you know,
• 39:55
  Speaker 5: to be fair, frankly, is at the time I was
• 39:58
  Speaker 5: writing that book, there were three out gay analysts at
• 40:02
  Speaker 5: San Francisco, and there were no out gay women, no
• 40:06
  Speaker 5: out lesbian analysts in San Francisco. So I feel like
• 40:09
  Speaker 5: most of what I've seen in the, you know, again,
• 40:12
  Speaker 5: as an outsider, the official outsider, the union, I've seen
• 40:15
  Speaker 5: most of the effort go into actually bringing gay, out gay, bisexual,
• 40:21
  Speaker 5: lesbian analysts into analytic training. So now there's lots of
• 40:27
  Speaker 5: out gay, lesbian, bisexual analysts that I know of here
• 40:31
  Speaker 5: in San Francisco, at least for sure. So it was
• 40:34
  Speaker 5: like the effort didn't go into too much doing the
• 40:36
  Speaker 5: writing or the scholarly. It went into the clinical and
• 40:39
  Speaker 5: the practical, which I think is great. I mean, that's
• 40:41
  Speaker 5: actually going to have much more impact on the culture anyway.
• 40:44
  Speaker 5: But I felt like what then happened was you know,
• 40:47
  Speaker 5: just kind of go through my career around this particular thing.
• 40:51
  Speaker 5: I was invited to be a guest lecturer down at
• 40:54
  Speaker 5: Pacifica Graduate Institute here in Santa Barbara, which pretty much
• 40:58
  Speaker 5: runs its graduate program along Hillmanian lines, right? It's very
• 41:03
  Speaker 5: much kind of in the line of imaginal psychology, right?
• 41:09
  Speaker 5: And they had this.
• 41:12
  Speaker 5: So, in California, you have to do a cross-cultural course
• 41:16
  Speaker 5: in order to get licensed, right? You have to do
• 41:18
  Speaker 5: a cultural sensitivity course. And they're usually horrible. I mean,
• 41:21
  Speaker 5: the courses are usually awful. You know, they're a bunch
• 41:24
  Speaker 5: of racial and ethnic stereotypes sort of shoved in, you know, like,
• 41:29
  Speaker 5: this is what black people are like, and this is
• 41:30
  Speaker 5: what Mexican people are like. They're awful. They're often a
• 41:34
  Speaker 5: reinforcement of racism rather than a deconstruction of racist attitudes, right?
• 41:39
  Speaker 5: But Pacifica does this great thing And I'm totally surprised
• 41:44
  Speaker 5: they still do it. They do that course as a
• 41:47
  Speaker 5: psychology of prejudice. So instead of talking about specific cultures,
• 41:54
  Speaker 5: they look at the psychology of prejudice in general.
• 41:58
  Speaker 2: That's interesting.
• 41:59
  Speaker 5: In which there's an enormous amount of wonderful literature. Why
• 42:04
  Speaker 5: are people racist? Why are people homophobic? Why are people misogynistic?
• 42:10
  Speaker 5: What is it about human psychology that makes people otherize, demonize,
• 42:16
  Speaker 5: stereotype people who are different than they are? And what
• 42:19
  Speaker 5: they do in the psychology of prejudice course is every
• 42:22
  Speaker 5: year they pick a particular prejudice to focus on. So
• 42:27
  Speaker 5: one year they'll pick misogyny or sexism. Next year they'll
• 42:30
  Speaker 5: pick racism. Well, I got invited in when they looked
• 42:34
  Speaker 5: at homophobia. I got invited in as kind of, you know.
• 42:38
  Speaker 5: the gay union, to talk about homophobia, right? And we
• 42:42
  Speaker 5: got a chance to really kind of dig into some
• 42:44
  Speaker 5: of that, right? What parts of the shadow get projected
• 42:51
  Speaker 5: onto gay men and lesbians? What parts of the heterosexual shadow?
• 42:55
  Speaker 5: What parts of the cultural shadow? on and on. Well,
• 43:00
  Speaker 5: it was so great. I mean, it was really great
• 43:02
  Speaker 5: to talk about, and the students got a lot out
• 43:04
  Speaker 5: of it. But it sort of, down there at Pacifica,
• 43:07
  Speaker 5: inspired a lot of gay, lesbian, bisexual, non-binary, transgender students
• 43:12
  Speaker 5: that were getting their PhDs there to start doing, using
• 43:17
  Speaker 5: some of these Jungian concepts and taking them further, applying
• 43:20
  Speaker 5: them to their own experience, right? So, someone did a
• 43:25
  Speaker 5: dissertation on asexuality, someone did a dissertation on the, uh,
• 43:31
  Speaker 5: on actual brother, brother incest, like not symbolic, like actual
• 43:37
  Speaker 5: people who had sex with their siblings, you know, as
• 43:42
  Speaker 5: you know, it was interesting. I'm God bless him. He
• 43:44
  Speaker 5: got enough people to talk to him about that experience. Right.
• 43:48
  Speaker 5: So I got brought in as a, what they call
• 43:50
  Speaker 5: an external reader. Right. I mean, now they had, at
• 43:54
  Speaker 5: the time, they didn't have an out gay faculty member there.
• 43:56
  Speaker 5: Now they do. Doug Thomas is an out gay faculty
• 43:58
  Speaker 5: member there. So Doug, often Christine Downing, and I would
• 44:02
  Speaker 5: be the dissertation committee for this sort of second generation
• 44:07
  Speaker 5: of younger folks that are now taking these Jungian concepts
• 44:11
  Speaker 5: and going further with them. You know, some of the
• 44:14
  Speaker 5: dissertations are really super, just super interesting. I mean, I
• 44:19
  Speaker 5: sat on this dissertation committee for this woman who looked
• 44:23
  Speaker 5: at married couples in which one of the partners had
• 44:29
  Speaker 5: gender transitioned from male to female. So it was a
• 44:33
  Speaker 5: regular heterosexual couple, and what had been the man had
• 44:36
  Speaker 5: transitioned into being a woman, and they stayed married. And
• 44:40
  Speaker 5: so she did this dissertation. She got a dozen couples
• 44:43
  Speaker 5: to talk to her Really kind of incredible. The last one,
• 44:47
  Speaker 5: and we'll talk some about this because I know this
• 44:49
  Speaker 5: is of interest to all of you folks. The last
• 44:51
  Speaker 5: one I did was a man who sort of put
• 44:55
  Speaker 5: forward a revision of the animus concept to make it non-binary.
• 45:02
  Speaker 5: And he calls it the animum. So I was like, okay, super.
• 45:07
  Speaker 5: And he's really going, and that book is actually going
• 45:10
  Speaker 5: to be published by Routledge. next year. I really pushed
• 45:14
  Speaker 5: him to get this published.
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: Rob, let's take a pause for a second and stay
• 45:22
  Speaker 3: circumambulating that topic because most frequently when we do our
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: dream analyses, we stay to pretty traditional interpretive lenses, mostly
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: because we're trying to educate people on corollaries. So we
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: have that story that in a man's psyche, the anima
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: is going to present as female and act as a
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: linking agent between the ego and the collective unconscious. In
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: a woman's psyche, the animus will show up as male
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: and perform a linking function as well of some kind.
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: For many people, that's true. And maybe even for the
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: majority of people, that might be true in terms of
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: their symbolism of their dreams. But we do have people
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: writing in and saying, well, what about the gay, lesbian,
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: and other community? I mean, should we expect those same
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: imagists rules to apply to us? And if so, how
• 46:15
  Speaker 3: do you suggest we orient to this? So let's open
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: up this idea about how anima and animus show up
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: symbolically in the psyches of gay men and also gay women.
• 46:31
  Speaker 5: Well, my sense of it is based on my own
• 46:33
  Speaker 5: experience as well as my clinical experience, right? You know,
• 46:37
  Speaker 5: I guess maybe the first thing I want to sort
• 46:38
  Speaker 5: of say theoretically is I don't I never understood why
• 46:43
  Speaker 5: Jungians think that what I would call largely culturally conditioned
• 46:49
  Speaker 5: gender roles, expectations, and forms should apply to the psyche.
• 46:54
  Speaker 5: The animus can show up as a leopard. I can
• 46:58
  Speaker 5: certainly show up as a man.
• 46:59
  Speaker 6: I'm like, you know, in other words, like our very
• 47:04
  Speaker 6: time-limited gender roles of the late 20th and 21st century
• 47:08
  Speaker 6: don't really apply to something as eternal and as formless,
• 47:12
  Speaker 6: basically formless as the psyche.
• 47:14
  Speaker 5: I mean, the soul figure, so that's where I would go.
• 47:18
  Speaker 5: So instead of kind of getting it very tied to gender,
• 47:21
  Speaker 5: calling it animus or anima or even animum, I just
• 47:25
  Speaker 5: think of it as a soul figure. I mean, the
• 47:27
  Speaker 5: soul figure, and I would say I sort of have
• 47:29
  Speaker 5: warrants for doing that on the basis of James Hillman's
• 47:32
  Speaker 5: work with that particular concept. His work with the concept,
• 47:36
  Speaker 5: I think, has been the most helpful. Anima, Anatomy of
• 47:40
  Speaker 5: a Personified Notion, is kind of the classic text on that. So,
• 47:44
  Speaker 5: the soul figure in the psyche, as you quite rightly
• 47:47
  Speaker 5: just said, provides a kind of connection between the outer world,
• 47:51
  Speaker 5: the inner world, the conscious, the unconscious, etc., Whatever figure
• 47:55
  Speaker 5: serves that function is the soul figure. Might show up
• 47:59
  Speaker 5: as a man, might show up as a woman, might
• 48:01
  Speaker 5: show up as a man for a man, might show
• 48:03
  Speaker 5: up as a woman for a man, might show up
• 48:05
  Speaker 5: as a woman for a woman, might show up for,
• 48:07
  Speaker 5: you know. In other words, what gay and lesbian experience does,
• 48:11
  Speaker 5: I would say, is because I'm primarily oriented toward other
• 48:15
  Speaker 5: men and lesbians are primarily oriented toward other women. Our
• 48:19
  Speaker 5: soul figures often are same sex in our dreams and
• 48:23
  Speaker 5: have always been. So like in Men's Dreams, Men's Healing,
• 48:26
  Speaker 5: that book that you all read that I would look at,
• 48:29
  Speaker 5: I wanted to, I have two chapters. Well, the book
• 48:33
  Speaker 5: is structured so that I'm comparing my work with dreams
• 48:37
  Speaker 5: with a gay man and my work with dreams with
• 48:39
  Speaker 5: a straight man. And I wanted, you know, I sort
• 48:41
  Speaker 5: of alternate those. So I have two clients. I look
• 48:45
  Speaker 5: at them both. Where do their issues intersect because they're
• 48:48
  Speaker 5: men and where do they not? And that's those two
• 48:52
  Speaker 5: chapters in the middle. The anima is definitely male in
• 48:56
  Speaker 5: my gay male clients' dreams. A long, long series of
• 49:02
  Speaker 5: rich dreams. So, that's what I would say. The first
• 49:04
  Speaker 5: thing I would say around that is, like, I think
• 49:07
  Speaker 5: it's pretty easy to just jettison the gender binary around
• 49:12
  Speaker 5: that particular concept and focus more on its function, right?
• 49:16
  Speaker 5: The soul figure connecting or guide complimenting, challenging, aiding the
• 49:25
  Speaker 5: dream ego, the conscious self, right? Sometimes it's a guy,
• 49:29
  Speaker 5: sometimes it's a chick, sometimes it's a tree, sometimes it's
• 49:34
  Speaker 5: a dog, sometimes it's a rock. I'm like, it can
• 49:37
  Speaker 5: be anything. It's the psyche. It's, you know, it's like,
• 49:40
  Speaker 5: I think that's it. What was, I think that concept,
• 49:43
  Speaker 5: I think, kind of grew out of a very 1940s,
• 49:49
  Speaker 5: 1950s sense of gender, which I think we don't really
• 49:53
  Speaker 5: have any longer. So, you know, I guess what's going
• 49:56
  Speaker 5: to be interesting, kind of what's interesting for all of us, frankly,
• 49:59
  Speaker 5: is like, You know, now we're sitting with folks who
• 50:02
  Speaker 5: are either actually transgender or non-binary, identify as non-binary. What's
• 50:09
  Speaker 5: their soul figure going to look like if, in fact,
• 50:12
  Speaker 5: the gender binary doesn't apply to their, or they don't
• 50:14
  Speaker 5: feel like their gender, the gender binary applies to their
• 50:17
  Speaker 5: identity or experience inside or out?
• 50:20
  Speaker 4: How would you define, if that's even the right word,
• 50:25
  Speaker 4: for somebody who, what is a soul figure? Is it consistent?
• 50:31
  Speaker 4: How do you know this rock is my soul figure
• 50:35
  Speaker 4: or animal or anything versus shadow or archetypal or something else?
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: Or an image of the self.
• 50:44
  Speaker 5: Right. Yeah.
• 50:45
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 50:46
  Speaker 5: I would say, and this is what I say to
• 50:48
  Speaker 5: my clients, I look for the juice. Like a figure
• 50:53
  Speaker 5: appears in your dreams or you meet someone and there's
• 50:57
  Speaker 5: this juice that There's this electricity. You're obsessed with them.
• 51:02
  Speaker 5: They're fascinating. They're erotic. They're sensual. You can't get them
• 51:08
  Speaker 5: out of your head. You want to be around them.
• 51:10
  Speaker 5: When you're around them, you feel fulfilled. It's your soul figure, right?
• 51:16
  Speaker 5: It's like my soul figure, my soulmate, so to speak.
• 51:19
  Speaker 5: I think that's sort of the common way people talk
• 51:21
  Speaker 5: about it. We as Jungians attribute that to a number
• 51:25
  Speaker 5: of different things, right? Projection primarily. Like what people are
• 51:30
  Speaker 5: doing is they're projecting certain unconscious qualities of their own
• 51:34
  Speaker 5: psyche onto that person. And of course, we Jungians think
• 51:38
  Speaker 5: that's a very natural and positive dynamic, right? That's how
• 51:43
  Speaker 5: we meet the unconscious primarily, is by projecting it out
• 51:47
  Speaker 5: and meeting it and then pursuing it. I mean, it's important,
• 51:50
  Speaker 5: especially when you're doing couples therapy. To make sure you
• 51:52
  Speaker 5: understand that that's a projection. That's not them. That there's
• 51:56
  Speaker 5: a real person behind that projection. And that person may
• 51:59
  Speaker 5: not actually meet your expectations around any of that. But
• 52:03
  Speaker 5: when you say shadow, that's the aspect of it that's often,
• 52:07
  Speaker 5: at least initially, in the shadow. Like all of that
• 52:11
  Speaker 5: fascination and all of that juice is underneath inside you.
• 52:16
  Speaker 5: You just didn't realize it. So it's in your shadow, right?
• 52:20
  Speaker 5: So that's where sometimes it gets to be dark, right?
• 52:24
  Speaker 5: I mean, you could be stalking this person, you're obsessed
• 52:28
  Speaker 5: with them, you find it disturbing in a certain way, intrusive, etc.
• 52:35
  Speaker 5: But nevertheless, in answer to your question, I would say
• 52:39
  Speaker 5: that the soul figure, one of the primary characteristics of
• 52:43
  Speaker 5: someone's soul figure is that level of energy. That level
• 52:47
  Speaker 5: of energy is what drags people down into trying to
• 52:51
  Speaker 5: examine why and what is so fascinating about that person.
• 52:58
  Speaker 5: Certainly when that person or those figures appear in dreams
• 53:03
  Speaker 5: or fantasies, you definitely know it. And usually there's a
• 53:07
  Speaker 5: level of consistency about it. It's the same type of woman,
• 53:13
  Speaker 5: or it's the same type of man, or it's the
• 53:16
  Speaker 5: same type of energy. that gets kind of consistently presented
• 53:22
  Speaker 5: by the psyche to your awareness. Right. So that's what
• 53:26
  Speaker 5: I would say. A lot of times when I'm talking, just,
• 53:28
  Speaker 5: you know, just talking to my clients, I'm like, everyone's
• 53:30
  Speaker 5: sort of got their type, right? Like what type of
• 53:33
  Speaker 5: guy do you kind of find attractive? What type of
• 53:37
  Speaker 5: woman do you find yourself endlessly fascinated with? And that's
• 53:41
  Speaker 5: another way to kind of trace like, okay, that's, generally,
• 53:45
  Speaker 5: what I would call someone's soul figure, what Jung might
• 53:48
  Speaker 5: call anima or animus, you know, but soul figure.
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: But it is interesting how these categories sort of, they
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: mush together a little bit, because we've, you know, we're
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: talking about projection, and you can project soul, or you
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: can project shadow. And of course, then there's positive shadow?
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: And at what point does that start to look like soul? And,
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: you know, I mean, I think we're all aware that somehow, these,
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: this system of thought doesn't tightly fit together. You know, it's,
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: you know, people, people want it sort of locked down.
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: And Jung was not interested in locking it down. You know,
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: Freud's theories are much more kind of succinct and clear cut,
• 54:37
  Speaker 2: but Jung just said, I just want to notice what is.
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: And so there's a way that some of his ideas
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: work really well. And then some of them, it's like, well, there's, yeah,
• 54:49
  Speaker 2: this is a little tricky. So I've always found the
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: anima animus concept difficult to apply in some ways for
• 54:57
  Speaker 2: exactly the reasons that we've been talking about.
• 55:00
  Speaker 5: Well, I think that's correct. I mean, I would hold
• 55:02
  Speaker 5: all of these concepts lightly. You know, I think because
• 55:05
  Speaker 5: of A, I mean, Jung held all of those concepts
• 55:08
  Speaker 5: pretty lightly too. So I think that's what I'm saying.
• 55:10
  Speaker 5: I think, as you can say, that's in contravention to
• 55:13
  Speaker 5: our culture in which, you know, men are men, women
• 55:16
  Speaker 5: are women. I mean, you know, we live in a
• 55:19
  Speaker 5: culture that wants to lock everything down, right? But that's,
• 55:21
  Speaker 5: I think, why all of us love Jung. Because it's like, okay,
• 55:24
  Speaker 5: this is kind of fluid. And when we get into
• 55:27
  Speaker 5: the psyche... outward definitions are not very clear. I mean,
• 55:32
  Speaker 5: to say a little bit, you know, in response to
• 55:35
  Speaker 5: what you were just talking about, it's the shadow positive
• 55:37
  Speaker 5: is a negative. I sort of say to my clients,
• 55:39
  Speaker 5: a lot of times, it depends on what you're bringing,
• 55:41
  Speaker 5: what kind of groceries you're bringing to the party, right?
• 55:43
  Speaker 5: I mean, if you grew up with a very sexual,
• 55:45
  Speaker 5: and you grew up in a very sexually repressive environment,
• 55:49
  Speaker 5: your soul figure is going to look pretty sexy, pretty seductive,
• 55:53
  Speaker 5: pretty You know, is that positive or negative? Well, it's
• 55:57
  Speaker 5: negative in the sense that it's threatening to the ego.
• 56:00
  Speaker 5: It's definitely threatening to who you see yourself to be.
• 56:04
  Speaker 5: On the other hand, it's a road toward sexual liberation.
• 56:08
  Speaker 5: It's a road toward integration and freedom. You know, for
• 56:11
  Speaker 5: you to get from a sexually repressive environment to get
• 56:14
  Speaker 5: much more in touch with the fullness of your sexuality
• 56:18
  Speaker 5: might be initially threatening, but also very freeing and liberating.
• 56:22
  Speaker 5: Or vice versa. You know, if you come from, and
• 56:25
  Speaker 5: I'm speaking from the gay male community in particular, I mean,
• 56:29
  Speaker 5: gay male community, no questions, hyper-sexualized, right? I mean, gay
• 56:35
  Speaker 5: men are having sex with everyone whenever they can have sex.
• 56:38
  Speaker 5: You know, I live five blocks away from a gay
• 56:40
  Speaker 5: bathhouse here. And, you know, on Sunday afternoon, there's a
• 56:43
  Speaker 5: line around the corner. I mean, sex, I mean, the
• 56:46
  Speaker 5: upside of that is opposed to a puritanical sexual morality
• 56:50
  Speaker 5: in the United States. Gay men have definitely liberated themselves
• 56:53
  Speaker 5: from that. So that's the positive. On the other hand,
• 56:56
  Speaker 5: everything's kind of always sexualized. I even get, I get,
• 56:59
  Speaker 5: you know, especially at age 66, I get kind of
• 57:01
  Speaker 5: tired of it. I'm like, oh my God, really? Seriously.
• 57:04
  Speaker 5: Can I just take a nap? Why do I have
• 57:06
  Speaker 5: to be so great when you're 20 and 30, but
• 57:13
  Speaker 5: you know, your T level declines with age and you're
• 57:16
  Speaker 5: just like, Oh man, get this out of my face.
• 57:18
  Speaker 5: I just want to have a cup of tea and
• 57:20
  Speaker 5: a book anyway. So if you're coming from a very
• 57:24
  Speaker 5: hyper-sexualized environment, your soul figure may look like, um, you know,
• 57:30
  Speaker 5: a conventional monogamous partner. You know, someone really settled. Someone
• 57:35
  Speaker 5: really taped. A librarian. Someone really committed. I'm sorry? A librarian.
• 57:41
  Speaker 5: A librarian, for example, right? So that's why I think,
• 57:44
  Speaker 5: you know, Lisa's great. I mean, I think that's a
• 57:47
  Speaker 5: great thing to bring up, that the shadow, you know,
• 57:50
  Speaker 5: especially for readers or listeners that are actually listening to this, right?
• 57:56
  Speaker 5: Becoming acquainted with Jung. Shadow isn't necessarily a bad thing.
• 57:59
  Speaker 5: You know, sometimes the best qualities of our personalities are
• 58:02
  Speaker 5: in the shadow because we didn't grow up in environments
• 58:05
  Speaker 5: that brought them forward, right? Call it the positive shadow
• 58:07
  Speaker 5: or the bright shadow. So it's good to sort of
• 58:09
  Speaker 5: think that, yeah, initially the soul figure is often in
• 58:13
  Speaker 5: the shadow. It's someone we meet outside or someone we
• 58:15
  Speaker 5: fantasize about meeting outside. But then if we work with it,
• 58:20
  Speaker 5: we see that those characteristics can be parts unlived, undeveloped,
• 58:26
  Speaker 5: as yet undeveloped parts of our own psyche.
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: So leaning into that a little bit, Rob, talking about sexuality,
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: let's talk about the symbolic level of sexuality. Because when
• 58:38
  Speaker 3: we think that these internal images, which are symbolic, are
• 58:43
  Speaker 3: nudging us in various directions to be sexual in certain
• 58:47
  Speaker 3: ways with certain people. So when you're working or writing
• 58:52
  Speaker 3: about this, how do you guide a client That is
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: a super question.
• 59:00
  Speaker 5: I mean, that's just a great question. How I work
• 59:08
  Speaker 5: with it is very much informed. by the cultural matrix
• 59:12
  Speaker 5: that we're living in. Some characteristics of that cultural matrix,
• 59:16
  Speaker 5: which we Jungians know about, is that this is not
• 59:19
  Speaker 5: a culture that encourages people to think or live symbolically.
• 59:26
  Speaker 5: It's a very literal culture. If you don't get paid
• 59:33
  Speaker 5: in dollars, if it doesn't produce a product, it's not
• 59:37
  Speaker 5: valued in this culture. So one of the things we
• 59:41
  Speaker 5: constantly have to do as therapists with our clients is
• 59:46
  Speaker 5: open up the symbolic as opposed to the literal. So
• 59:51
  Speaker 5: that's number one when we're working with sexuality. When somebody's
• 59:56
  Speaker 5: bringing in a sexual issue with me, They're thinking about
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 5: it very much, you know, penis, vagina, breasts, cum, anus, literal.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 5: All of those things that I just mentioned have a
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 5: deep and abiding symbolic meaning that often people don't consider
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 5: when they're enjoying their sexual life. But nevertheless... That's part
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 5: of the power behind someone's sexual life is, in fact,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 5: the deeper symbolic meanings of why this particular physical union
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 5: is so enthralling and fulfilling, right? It's not just the
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 5: release of an orgasm, but it's what that release means
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 5: with regard to who you are. and who you're in
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 5: relationship to. Now, I mean, I have to say, when
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 5: I sit and talk about that with clients, they're like,
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 5: I've never thought about the symbolic aspects of this. I
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 5: was like, I'm like, sometimes dreams are very helpful because
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 5: the dream sort of, you know, again, as dreams drew,
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 5: I sometimes say dreams are ruthless, right? If you haven't
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 5: looked at it, you will look at it in your dreams.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 5: The psyche will present to, right? So there we are.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 5: You're like, she has, enormous breasts and you can't get
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 5: away from them. So what does that mean? How does
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 5: that feel? What does that symbolize? Right? So, you know,
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 5: you can talk, you know, I can be talking to
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 5: this guy who's basically in therapy because he's a quote unquote,
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 5: a pornography addict, and he's jacking off 20 times a
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 5: day to big titty porn. not an uncommon client that
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 5: I kind of see as an out sort of identified
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 5: sex therapist. Right. Then I go to, well, what do
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 5: you think those breasts actually symbolize? Like no one's ever
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 5: asked them that question. Right. I'm like, okay. And now
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 5: we're off to the races. Okay. That's what I would say.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 5: I think that the most powerful thing I do is
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 5: actually the simplest thing, which is, in a cultural matrix
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 5: of literalism, to just have people start thinking about what
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 5: their sexuality means or symbolizes for them. So then we have,
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 5: and then the next step, right, is personalize. You know, again, okay,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 5: so we've had three, four discussions on what these very
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 5: enormous large breasts that got presented to you in the
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 5: dream actually mean. What part of your own psyche do
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 5: you think that represents, right? I'm like, blow your mind, right?
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 5: Oh my God, I've never really considered. that. And so
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 5: one of the clients are like, well, I don't have breasts.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 5: And I'm like, uh, it's your dream. They're in there.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 5: No one else had that dream. I'm like, that's what
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 5: I'm saying. Like, these are not again, you know, the
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 5: step past literalism, right. Instead of literally thinking of them
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 5: as symbolically thinking and then symbolically owning them, like, okay,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 5: what would that be like? I mean, again, something most men,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 5: I would say most men, not all men, but most
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 5: men have never really kind of considered like, okay, what
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 5: part of your own psyche does that actually represent? And,
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 5: and then we go to what is it you're projecting
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 5: onto your sexual partners? Therefore, like, what are you having
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 5: your sexual partners carry for you that you should be
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 5: carrying or that you should at least be integrating or owning, right?
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 5: So that's how I work with it all. I mean,
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 5: it's really just opening up the symbolic aspect of what
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 5: is often sort of seen as physical and literal in
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 5: our culture around sex. And I do that for everyone, right?
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 5: I mean, you know, if I'm talking to a gay
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 5: man and, you know, they're size, as we say, size queens, right?
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 5: Obsessed with large cocks, right? I'm like, okay, like, let's
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 5: talk about what that actually means. Like, why is that
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 5: an obsession? What is that about you? what is it
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 5: you're trying to carry? What is it you're seeking out there?
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 5: What is it you should be seeking?
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 3: That's where Eugene Monick becomes, you know, our guide with fellows.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 5: Right. Well, and it's interesting, too, you know, kind of
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 5: in the modern culture, you know, we go to TikTok
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 5: and you type in BDE, big dick energy, right? And
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 5: you've got like a dozen different representations of like, what
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 5: it could mean, right? These different guys sort of like
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 5: walking around with BDE. So, I'm like, okay. So, that's
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 5: what I'm saying. I think there are a lot of ways, well,
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 5: I think we don't think about, our culture doesn't encourage
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 5: us in a Jungian sense to think about our sexuality symbolically.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 5: And yet, the power of it is because of what
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 5: these things represent. Sure, it's hormonal. Sure, it's physiological. But
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 5: I mean, on the psychological... The psychological part of why
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 5: sexual union is so satisfying has to do with that,
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 5: not just the physical release of an orgasm.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 3: And also, things become mutable when they're translated from the
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: literal to the symbolic, which is where change becomes possible.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: Something you and I spoke about briefly as we were
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: orienting to this interview was sitting down with men who
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: particularly are addicted to pornography. This is something I've done
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 3: for years. Have them show me in the office what
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 3: you're spending hours meditating on and sitting with them and
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 3: asking that question, why that? Or why that theme? Or
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: offering an archetypal amplification? Because this same theme comes back
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: and back. And often, if we can land on that
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 3: in a really useful way, they do feel like the
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: grip opens up a little bit. And they have some
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: fluidity about it. So you have a similar experience treating
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: pornography as archetypal or even as a fairy tale of sorts.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 5: I got a bit of a name for myself as
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 5: somewhat infamous. I became somewhat infamous among the Jung Institutes
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 5: here in the United States because after Jung's Homosexuality got published,
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 5: I got invited to various places, right? And they would
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 5: want me to run, you know, I would do the
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 5: lecture on Friday night and then I would do the workshop, right?
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 5: And so the workshop I oriented around masculine, feminine, and
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 5: the androgyne, but the masculine piece of it, what I
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 5: did was frankly, I would just pick a porn story
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 5: out of a gay male porn mat and I would
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 5: copy it. And I would have, I would have this
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 5: group of like white haired unions, read this pornography as
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 5: if it were a fairy tale, right? We have this
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 5: wonderful methodology and Jung, right? We have this wonderful methodology
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 5: in union and union writing, Taking a fairy tale, right,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 5: and looking at it for what its collective or archetypal
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 5: significance might be. And I mean, like, that's essentially, I mean,
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 5: pornography is not great literature, right? I mean, it's essentially
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 5: a big old fairy tale. It's a fantasy about this, that,
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 5: and the other thing, right? That is really interesting. So,
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 5: this is it. So, let's look at this. And so,
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 5: and of course, you know, I was sort of like
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 5: the bad boy. I was the enfant terrible of Jungian
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 5: psychology for a while, right? The bad boy. I was like, okay,
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 5: I got all these like Jungian grandmas reading like stories
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 5: from Hancho. But we're seriously applying a Jungian methodology to that.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 5: Because I think within that material, right, as you're saying,
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 5: like within the material that your clients are looking at,
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 5: those scenarios, those physical characteristics, those situations, that person, their
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 5: own fantasy of how they're participating in that situation with
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 5: that person for that reason, all of that has a
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 5: rich psychological meaning, right? So if you don't take it
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 5: literally and you're looking at it symbolically, right? What's the
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 5: princess mean? What's the toad mean? What's the glass slipper mean, right?
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 5: What's the big dick mean? What's the locker room mean?
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 5: What does the policeman mean? What is, you know? So
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 5: I feel like that's one of the things, like in
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 5: addition to, as you're quite rightly saying, I would say
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 5: sort of creating a more, at least sex, neutral, if
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 5: not sex positive environment, in which we can talk about
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 5: all of this stuff much more openly, with less shame,
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 5: less inhibition, you know, that's certainly one big piece of it.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 5: Until we do that, we can't really get to what
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 5: does it mean. And I'll say, I think, as you
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 5: do in your therapy, and I have in mine with
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 5: not just men, but women, my non-binary clients too, getting
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 5: to like, oh, my God, I never really thought about
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 5: what I'm looking for. And what it would be like
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 5: if I actually embodied that myself, instead of putting it
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 5: out there and trying to find it at the bathhouse,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 5: or instead of just looking at pornography all the time
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 5: and fantasizing about it, what would it be like if
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 5: I actually were that phallic, if I were that fertile,
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 5: if I were that receptive, if I were that ejaculatory?
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 5: In other words, all of the various sexual qualities have
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 5: these rich, non-literal, symbolic aspects to it that You do
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 5: find in commercial pornography and gay literature, etc. Yeah.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 2: I want to follow up because you talked about doing
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 2: these workshops on the masculine and the feminine and the androgyne.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: And I am curious about what you think. about this
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 2: notion of the masculine as a psychological principle or the
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 2: feminine as a psychological principle, because, you know, I think
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: this is another very difficult area in Jungian thought that
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 2: I don't have a straightforward answer to. But I do
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 2: want to say, you know, there are male people and
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 2: there are female people, and there is a kind of
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: embodied reality to that polarity, to that difference. And I
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: suspect personally, my own feeling is that some of the
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: differences between men and women are innate. I mean, there
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: is evidence to that effect. For example, you know, women
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: tend to be more agreeable than men. And the evidence
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: says that this is cross-cultural, that it is stable across
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 2: the lifespan. You can see some differences between males and
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 2: females and personality-wise, even as neonates or even in primates.
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: So it's impossible to pick apart what part might be cultural,
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 2: but it seems likely that there is a piece of
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 2: it that is innate. And is that what we're reaching
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: toward when we talk about the masculine and the feminine?
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 2: It goes without saying that this is not meant to
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 2: be prescriptive. that women should be this way or that
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 2: men should be that way. But just, you know, this
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: is something I think about a lot. And I'm wondering
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: how you would react to any of that.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 5: Well, we all think about it in psychology a lot,
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 5: because I guess it's one of the major kind of,
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 5: I want to say polarities that constantly talking about. But
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 5: of course, that's derived from the culture in which Jung
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 5: was writing, right? So that's it. The dictum that I
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 5: always use is what you almost hinted at, which is
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 5: I was like, I'm fine with descriptive. I don't know
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 5: if I'm very fine with prescriptive, like descriptive is good.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 5: I'm like, let's describe, right? So when we're describing, what
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 5: we're noticing is sort of a bell curve. So there's
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 5: an entire panoply of characteristics that biologically anatomical women embody. And,
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 5: but that's a bell curve. Some of them embody a
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 5: lot of those characteristics. Some of them don't embody much
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 5: of those characteristics and vice versa. Right? So absolutely biological differences.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 5: I just, one of the things that got me through
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 5: COVID was in our time, you know, Melvin Bragg's BBC podcast.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 5: And just last night I was listening to his podcast
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 5: on hormones and So there's an entire hour-long discussion on hormones,
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 5: like what hormones do and how they act, et cetera.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 5: So there's no question there's hormonal differences. There's actual biological, anatomical,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 5: hormonal differences between men and women, which absolutely influence behavior,
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 5: individual behavior, social behavior, et cetera. And perhaps psychology. And
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 5: therefore psychology, right? And therefore psychology, right? So therefore, I guess...
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 5: holding those concepts lightly, rather than prescriptively, I think is
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 5: really the way forward, so to speak, right? I sometimes
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 5: get into a little bit of it with these Gen
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 5: X and Gen Z folks that I know happen to be,
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 5: you know, 20, 20, 30 years younger than me, right?
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 5: Because they sort of, I guess, they kind of think
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 5: they invented transgender and non-binary. I'm like, sweetie, I have
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 5: I've known transgender people for the last 50 years. You know, like,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 5: this is not something that happened in, you know, the
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 5: year 2005, right? I mean, I'm grateful to the fact
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 5: that they have actually, in a way, pioneered a much
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 5: more useful language about it than we had 50 years ago, right?
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 5: But I feel like that's also a sort of like, like,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 5: in other words, what's now on, what's now in everyone's
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 5: consciousness is that these categories of masculine and feminine are
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 5: not that tight or strict. They're pretty fluid. Now, Jung
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 5: said that in his own way. by introducing the idea
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 5: that there's femininity in male people, right? In his own way.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 5: He didn't have the language. But I will say, like,
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 5: that concept, I mean, you know, we're looking at it
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 5: from 2024. But, you know, imagine being a 1950s guy
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 5: and having Jung tell you that there's an inner woman
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 5: that you need to integrate. Like, what? It was radical. Yeah.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 5: It was a very radical way. So he said it
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 5: in his own way. I mean, that's even what I
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 5: was saying earlier in this talk. Like, in other words,
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 5: there was this, he spent an entire book writing about
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 5: the androgyne. He's talking about non-binary realities, right? As we
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 5: would say it these days. So that's what I would
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 5: say around that. I think like we finally rounded the
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 5: corner in our culture and in the psychology such that
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 5: what's male and what's female, what's masculine, what's feminine is A,
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 5: understood as very culturally conditioned. B, as you just sort
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 5: of rightly said, we have much more research now than
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 5: we did before around what the biological, anatomical, physical contributions
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 5: to what we're calling masculine and feminine happen to be.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 5: And C, we have much more social permission to go
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 5: at it individually rather than prescriptively. Like, this is who
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 5: I am. So I'm going to be, you know, I
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 5: will identify myself as such. Now, of course, you know,
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 5: people make a mockery of that, because I think it
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 5: excites a lot of their insecurities. You know, if you
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 5: happen to be, you know, if you happen to be
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 5: an extroverted thinking type, that's not going to go down
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 5: very well. Being sort of fluid and open and ambiguous
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 5: is not going to go down very well, right? Or Republican,
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 5: for that matter. You know, I think there's a certain
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 5: way of like thinking about these things, right? But nevertheless,
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 5: I think people are giving themselves much, much more permission
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 5: to put together their own individual fruit salad of what
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 5: that looks like, right? So, if a woman wants to
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 5: kind of download a particular set of characteristics, she may
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 5: feel it's helpful to her to define that as masculine,
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 5: or she may feel it's helpful to define that as
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 5: part of her femininity, right? And again, descriptive, not prescriptive
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 5: is the way I go about it. And I feel
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 5: like that's about the only way we can chart our
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 5: way through that thicket of issues. What I'm interested in
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 5: is laying a foundation for people's individuation, right? Like, I
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 5: want people to be individual. Individuation is this concept, right? So,
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 5: the way you put it together and the way I
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 5: put it together are not going to be the same.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 5: We're individuals. You know, as long as it's not prescriptive
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 5: and it's just descriptive, yeah. But then we bump into,
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 5: you know, being able to listen to one another, right?
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 5: And that's not absolutely not a characteristic. You know, like
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 5: everyone wants to talk. No one wants to listen. But,
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 5: you know, we're trained in listening. So that's where I'm
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 5: coming from. I'm like listening to what people are telling
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 5: me is their experience. I'm not telling you what it is.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 5: They're telling me what it is. So that's how I
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 5: would do it. I mean, it's a very hot issue, obviously,
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 5: and will continue to be.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 3: In this environment of educating people around Jungian concepts, because
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 3: we are part of that educational milieu, what we're trying
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 3: to introduce people to is their relationship between the archetypes
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 3: and their individual psyche, because that's really what we're talking about,
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 3: is that the archetypes are eternal. So the archetype of
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 3: the masculine, the archetype of the feminine, and that we
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 3: as humans have access or are influenced by these archetypal dynamics.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 3: And as we become aware of that, there's also often
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 3: a tension arises in the psyche. Well, if I partake
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 3: of the masculine archetype, what does that mean? And does
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 3: that force me into a set of prescriptions? If I
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 3: don't adopt that as a prescription, does that mean I'm
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 3: doing something wrong or am I rejecting that archetypal reality?
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 5: So it's this very.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 3: Difficult dance between archetype and ego, really. Archetype and the
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 3: lived experiences and the profound levels of choice that we
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 3: have at the ego level, at the physical level, more
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 3: than perhaps ever in the history of humanity.
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 5: That's another way to go about it. I mean, if
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 5: we posit, again, to go about it in terms of
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 5: instructing folks with regard to Jungian concepts, right? When we're
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 5: saying something is archetypal, What we mean is it's available
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 5: to all human beings potentially. All human beings potentially.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 3: It's archetypal.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 5: If we posit that masculinity with a capital M and
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 5: femininity with a capital F or androgyny with a capital
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 5: A are archetypal realities, right? They're available to all human
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 5: beings regardless of what their genitalia happens to look like, right?
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 5: and they're available to all human beings as archetypal realities
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 5: in various degrees that have to do specifically with you individually.
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 5: So that's another way to go about it. I mean,
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 5: this is another reason why, you know, you three are
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 5: doing this podcast is to sort of make available to
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 5: people a different way of thinking about it. That's based
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 5: on Jung's ideas of what, what an archetype is and
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 5: what that therefore means. So that's where I would say,
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 5: when you posit it as an archetypal reality, it doesn't
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 5: really matter what your genitalia happens to be. It's available
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 5: to you as a man, as a woman, masculine, feminine, androgyne.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 5: How are you going to put that together? Now, the
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 5: second thing you said, which is what we as clinicians
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 5: consistently have to do, is there is tension built into
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 5: that reality. There's tension between the archetypes, and then there's
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 5: tension between me and the collective. There's tension between who
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 5: I am as an individual and the society and I'm
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 5: running around. There's a tension, right? Now, like most people,
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 5: old people, I would say, who likes to be in
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 5: a state of tension?
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 3: I don't like that very much.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 5: I want that resolved. So I'm just going to pretend
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 5: that one half of that doesn't exist. And I'll live
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 5: over here in this little room. But what we're constantly
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 5: doing as therapists, certainly, is trying to Make the case
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 5: to live inside that tension. Don't resolve it. Both things
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 5: are true. Live in the ambiguity. Live in that tension.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 5: And eventually what you'll find, you know, it'll forge some
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 5: kind of very individual solution for you around those two things.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean, most people want to deny one
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 5: and emphasize the other because it's a state of tension.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 5: So that's what I would say. Like, you know, I
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 5: sometimes say to my clients, I say it almost, one
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 5: of these days, now I'm 66, I'm going to write everything,
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 5: the wit and wisdom of Rob Hopke in the therapy room.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 5: So I have about 12 different buttons I pretend I
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 5: push because I say the same 12 things to eventually
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 5: say them to all clients. And one of them is,
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 5: I'm here to make your life more complex, not simpler.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 5: The reason you're here is you have tried to simplify
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 5: things and you are not simple. So I'm here to
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 5: help you tolerate the complexity of who you are. That's great.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 5: The reason you wanted to just be this, well, you're
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 5: not just this, you're that. And if you continue to
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 5: ignore that, it's going to keep hitting you in the face.
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 5: So we need to make a place for that. And
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 5: believe me, that's uncomfortable. I'm not here to make things simpler.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 5: I'm here to make things more complex, which means it's
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 5: going to disrupt things. But we need to build up
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 5: that tension tolerance muscle if you're going to actually be
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 5: who you are fully, right? Instead of split off, project
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 5: out or deny pieces of you. So that what you
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 5: just said there is super important. And especially for anyone
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 5: listening to this, it's like, yeah, that's a state of tension.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 5: That's a state of tension, right? That's a state of tension.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 5: So let's hold that. Let's hold that. That's what makes
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 5: the fullness. Let's hold it. That's what makes a full
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 5: life is not splitting any of these things off.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 3: And really introducing people to their own complexity and confronting
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 3: the way they've Simplify things into a binary, which is
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 3: actually meant they may not realize is causing them pain
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 3: and is lying.
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 5: Talking to the election year and wish we have a
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 5: two party system. It's pretty easy to like, you know,
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 5: that's what I would say. Like nothing in the culture
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 5: really supports us. That's why as you know, as young
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 5: and wingdings over here have, I think very important things
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 5: to say to the culture. I'm like, yeah, it's not binary,
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 5: not binary. Okay. So yeah, so that's what I would say.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 5: Nothing is. But yeah, it's a state of tension. So
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 5: it's not just a state of tension within oneself, but
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 5: it's also a state of tension between the individual and
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 5: the collective too, right?
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 3: Well, Rob, we're going to come to a pause here
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 3: and then we're going to transition to a dream interpretation.
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 3: But I wanted to give you, just take some last
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 3: minutes if there is any summary statement. You kind of
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 3: came to that really naturally talking about complexity. Well, I
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 3: guess one question I have is, How would you like
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: people to reach out to you if they would like
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 3: for you and what you have to say?
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 5: Well, like everyone, I think I have a website, so robhopkey.com.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 5: It's pretty easy to get to, right? So there's that.
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 5: And the books are all available online with Amazon. If
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 5: people wanted to read any of the books, they're all
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 5: right there. They're all still available.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 2: What I'll share is... Is that we will put a
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 2: link with a book list. We've started doing that on
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 2: all of our episodes. So I will mention, I will
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 2: link all of the books we've discussed, including all of
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 2: your books, Rob. And so you can easily reference those.
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that's, you know, again, as you've read the book, so,
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 5: you know, my voice comes through in a lot of
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 5: these books. This is a little bit like a session
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 5: with me, but yeah, that's one way to get a
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 5: hold of me too. I guess I was wondering, are
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 5: there anything you three wanted to ask that you didn't
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 5: get to? Or is this stuff that you wanted to
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 5: talk about?
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 4: I have so much more that I would love to
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 4: talk to you about. It would take another day and
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 4: a half.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 5: I know, I feel like that too.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 4: But you've given us and our listeners a very, very
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 4: great deal. And turning to your books and these ideas...
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 4: building up that tension and tolerance muscle and really embracing
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 4: our complexity is a really good place that I think
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 4: we can come to a stop on just for today.
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 4: There's so much more here.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 5: I would say those characteristics are at the core of
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 5: what I think Jung's life, work, and writing was really about, right?
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 5: It's sort of, complexity is, you know, in fact, he
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 5: coined the concept of complex, right? I mean, people attribute
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 5: it to Freud, but we know it was his concept. So,
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 5: you know, he, complexity is really at the key as
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 5: of the core of his work. So if I got
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 5: that across, I'm happy.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 4: Absolutely. Get bigger. It's such a wonderful invitation.
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 5: Get bigger.
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 4: Don't shut yourself off into a small room of something
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 4: that is reified and concrete. Get into life.
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 5: And I think when you take that and apply it
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 5: to sexuality in particular, you know, in that area of
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 5: one's life, then that's super interesting, super complicated, very disruptive,
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 5: you know? And that's where I have to say, I
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 5: think like that's, you know, the gist of maybe what
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 5: we talked about today is taking these Jungian concepts and
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 5: applying them to sexual orientation and lived sexuality, ideas of gender,
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 5: ideas of identity. That's what I'm saying to Joseph. I'm like,
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 5: I was really happy to be invited to talk about this.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 5: I don't get to talk about this very much. But
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 5: I just think there's so much in Jung himself, his
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 5: general concepts and the specific concepts around sexuality and gender
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 5: that are just so rich that I use all the time.
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 5: So it's just been a delight to be able to
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 5: talk about them as extensively as I had with such
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 5: a great you know, with such a great crew of
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 5: folks who know what I'm talking about, right. Who do
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 5: it all the time.
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 3: So. Robert, one of the things that you modeled, which
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 3: I think is a meta communication for all of us
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 3: and for the listeners is that you have a devilish
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 3: good humor. There is this sassy smiling, uh, bad boy,
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 3: mercurial dynamism.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 5: And that's part.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 3: Of, of, Yes, part of holding the topic and not
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 3: letting it get too hot, not letting it get too tight.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 3: And this is that wonderful place where humor can give
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 3: us a little bit of breathing room to try on
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 3: things with good humor, whether they're attitudes or behaviors. And
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 3: you just brought that in spades to today's interview. And
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 3: I really appreciate that.
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 5: Well, you know, when I do, I taught human sexuality
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 5: for about 15 years down at the Institute for Transpersonal
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 5: Psychology at Palo Alto. And then, of course, I do
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 5: sex therapy and train sex therapists. Right. And I'm constantly
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 5: saying that to my clients. I'm like, sex is supposed
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 5: to be fun. You know, like sex is fun. This
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 5: is like, God, you know, it's not like it's not this. deep, serious,
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 5: earnest shit. Like you, you should be having fun. If
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 5: you're not having fun, you're not having great sex.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 5: So that's what I want to say. I think when
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 5: we're talking about sexuality like that, yeah, it's life for
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 5: one of my, one of my students actually said, my
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 5: students actually said, you know, she said, I love the
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 5: sexuality class. Cause like sexuality is the origin of life.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 5: Like sexuality is life. It's literally the origin of our lives. Right.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 5: So she's like, and symbolically, this is like sexuality should be,
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 5: So when we're talking about any kind of topic of sexuality,
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 5: I kind of, I don't know, I just have to
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 5: open up because it's like, it's not a serious thing.
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 5: It should be really joyous and wonderful. It should be sacramental.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 5: It should be, it should be thrilling. It should be funny.
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 5: You know, it's the whole human experience kind of rolled
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 5: up in one. You brought that in spades, man. I'm
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 5: glad to hear that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's sort
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 5: of like, you know, that's it. Sort of like my
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 5: long training as a sex therapist.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 2: Let's see if we can apply some of that same
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 2: energy to a dream.
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 5: Absolutely.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 4: Hi, listeners.
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 2: I just want to remind you all that it's really
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 2: helpful to us if you leave us a review, like
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 2: and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. And also consider
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: becoming a patron today. We produce extra episodes every week,
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 2: little mini episodes of dream interpretations or questions, and you
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 2: can submit your dream, get extra chances to get your
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 2: dream interpreted. You can check out our Patreon by going
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 2: to thisunionlife.com, clicking on the podcast page, and you'll see
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 2: a link there for our Patreon page. And I also
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 2: want to let you know that I am running another
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: women's fairy tale and yoga retreat at the end of April.
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: We have a few spots left. So if you think
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 2: that might be something you're interested in, you can look
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 2: on my website for more information. That website is lisamartiano.com.
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 2: So I hope to see some of you there.
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 3: So our dreamer is a 26-year-old male who works as
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 3: a musician. And he writes, There is a war being
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 3: fought between the U.S. and Russia on U.S. soil, specifically
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 3: where my ex-boyfriend lives in Virginia. He lost his life
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 3: in the war. In waking life, I left him a
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 3: few days before this dream took place. I'm hiding out
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 3: in his brother's house. I'm a wanted man. either because
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 3: I'm gay or accused of being a witch. Despite being
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 3: actively persecuted, my ex-brother and sister-in-law allow me to hide
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 3: in their house in a small space under the stairs.
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 3: They are risking everything by doing so. One day, their
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 3: friend came over with her small child. The child was
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 3: playing around the house and wandered into the infrequently trafficked
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 3: area of the house where I was hiding. He noticed me.
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 5: Pointed.
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 3: And announced that I was there. Now that the friend
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 3: knew they were harboring a wanted person, I had to
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 3: leave immediately. At great risk, my ex-brother-in-law went to great
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 3: lengths to help me. He packed me food and supplies
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 3: and drove me to the Appalachian Trail where I could
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 3: travel north on foot with little risk of being seen.
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 3: He accompanied me into the forest and briefly showed me
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 3: the way. Upon returning to the trailhead, to say a
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 3: proper goodbye. We were met by a small group of
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 3: Russian archers with their arrows pointed directly at me. Among
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 3: them was a friend of mine who works with me.
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 3: She was sobbing, but did not lower her bow. I
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 3: had been betrayed by my ex-brother-in-law. I climbed into a
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 3: ditch and started singing a song from a popular Disney
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 3: movie I.
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 5: Grew up with.
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 3: Somehow, I convinced the soldiers to join in. They laid
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 3: down their weapons, and I taught them different parts. Soon
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 3: we were all singing in full harmony. It sounded incredible,
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 3: but more importantly, I was safe. He provides a bit
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 3: of context about the dream. I had just left for
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 3: another seven-month contract as a singer on a cruise ship.
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 3: I broke up with my partner a few days before
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 3: having this dream. I am more free-spirited than he who
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 3: is more traditional, and quite ready to settle down as
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 3: soon as possible, despite being only 25 years old. We
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 3: want very different things right now. I'm excited for this
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 3: opportunity to see the world while doing what I love,
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 3: yet I'm heartbroken, and I feel I've lost my best friend.
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 3: He says his main feelings in the dream were fear,
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 3: being burdensome, gratitude, shock, Betrayal followed by warm and genuine
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 3: human connection and relief. And he offers a bit more
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 3: explanation and writes, My ex rents a room from his brother,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 3: so I would often stay with them in her waking life.
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 3: His brother has always extended a warm welcome to me.
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 2: It's so poignant how the tension, talk about staying in
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 2: the tension here, There's this tension, and the dreamer, he
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 2: does stay with it, and then a song comes. I'd
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 2: be so curious to know what song it was. And
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 2: it's the song that resolves, it brings about this incredibly
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 2: surprising lysis, where there's this kind of joyous song at
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 2: the end, which to me seems to kind of point
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 2: the way forward for this dreamer. There seems to be
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 2: a real sense of telos in that ending. even as
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 2: he's in the midst of heartbreak.
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 4: You know, I went to the ending first also because
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 4: it's so compelling. And I had a slightly different reaction
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 4: from yours because I wasn't quite sure that I altogether
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 4: bought it, that there could be such a quick... happily
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 4: ever after. We all just get together. Just like in
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 4: a Disney movie. Right, exactly.
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 5: Seriously.
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 3: I wonder if the dream is speaking about his general
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 3: relationship to singing. Because one of the things that when
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 3: you're a gay kid, you join the choir. There's a
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 3: way in which you can be safe. And there's plenty
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 3: of straight guys as well. So there's a way in
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 3: which The context provides a.
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 5: Way to co-create with people who are.
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 3: Very different from you, joined together in this mission of
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 3: creating something beautiful and harmonious and a kind of collective project.
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 3: And singing in a choir in and of itself is.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 5: The dream then pokes at that a bit. It's like,
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 5: are you safe or are you hiding out? Right.
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 4: Like Harry Potter under the stairs.
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 5: Right. You know, I'm like, yeah, you're safe. And are
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 5: you going to be protected or are you going to
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 5: be betrayed? Are you really free from attack or are
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 5: you going to be made vulnerable when you're at it?
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 5: You know, like, again, that's where I think the ambivalence
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 5: of what you're talking about is definitely there. I kind
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 5: of felt like this was sort of a bit of a,
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 5: let's say sort of a resume of what was going
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 5: on unconsciously in the relationship all along.
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 2: In the relationship with the boyfriend?
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 5: Yeah, the relationship with the boyfriend. I felt like this
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 5: is a little bit like the sort of internal biography
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 5: of the relationship in a way. You know, what part
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 5: of him, what part of him, well, first of all,
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 5: we start in the middle of a war. So that
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 5: would be the one thing I want to hear about. Like, okay,
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 5: it's already in a war. And it's not just any war,
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 5: but it's Russia having invaded the United States. It's being
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 5: fought on native territory. So like, I don't, I'd be
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 5: interested in hearing like, what does he, what does he
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 5: identify as Russia? Like, what does Russia look like? What
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 5: does it mean symbolically? What's the United States? And then
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 5: he's then, then he's sort of trying to take refuge
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 5: from that tension.
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 5: And he's trying to sort of escape from it, but
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 5: that's not working. And I would like, okay. So that's
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 5: the other thing I'd be like, okay, what parts of
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 5: you did you feel like you needed to hide in
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 5: this relationship all along? Why are you hiding? And why
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 5: are you hiding in this? What's his brother like? Why
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 5: are you hiding in his brother's space? What is it
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 5: that you feel kind of like his brother represents that
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 5: you're hiding in? You know, ultimately they broke up. So
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 5: I feel like that's like what we're doing here. I
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 5: think in the dream is kind of trying to make
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 5: sense of what happened in the course of the relationship
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 5: such that, you know, and that's where I would go
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 5: to where Joseph just ended. All of you've talked about like, okay,
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 5: it's poignant, but like, That's not the way the dream ends.
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 5: The dream ends in the sort of like, you know,
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 5: happy Disney, we're just going to slap on a Disney
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 5: song and everything is great, right? And I'm like, what
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 5: is that about, you know?
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 3: The dream is also about power. As often happens, and
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 3: we're seeing this in geopolitical conflict in the world, these
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 3: powers that are greater than any one person kind of
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 3: swing into motion and, you know, Russia invades Ukraine. The
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 3: people there are doing the best they can to survive,
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 3: to accommodate, to be agile, to do what one can,
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 3: and yet still be subject to these massive forces that
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 3: no one person can control. So there's also a feeling
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 3: of powerlessness against something more vast than ourselves. If I
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 3: were to abstract that, there's also an invitation to talk
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 3: about archetypal dimension of change in our lives. Yes, on
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 3: a horizontal level, you and the boyfriend had whatever conflicts
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 3: of values or other things in the way, but there
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 3: are also mysterious reasons why people come together and why
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 3: they separate. The guy also decide when something has finished
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 3: and when something will begin. And while it's frightening to
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 3: feel like we are being tossed around by these vast
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 3: unconscious forces, it also gives us a sense of sharing
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 3: responsibility because often When a relationship fails, the ego, the
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 3: individual often thinks, oh, what did I do wrong? Or
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 3: it's all that son of a bitch's fault over there.
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 3: But there's a lot of forces pressing upon us that
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 3: oftentimes we are forced to accommodate. So in the face
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 3: of that, in the face of the dream that forces
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 3: him to have to be very subject to his being
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 3: agile and in a sense being a bit of a trickster,
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 3: you know, we're about to kill you. And he's able
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 3: to convince them, hey, let's all sing a song. You know,
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 3: it's very, very trickstery. And then he's able to do
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 3: it almost like he has some kind of magical power.
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 3: Like he throws this dust and everybody thinks they're singing
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 3: in a choir. And then perhaps as he's slowly slinking
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 3: off stage, you know, trying to save his life.
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 5: I would ask him, I mean, that power issue is
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 5: very interesting. I think rather than interpret the dream, I
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 5: guess the dream brings up questions I would ask him, right?
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 5: which would be like, what was the power struggle going
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 5: on between the two of you underneath there, right? Because
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 5: that's what we're talking about. I think that's a very
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 5: salient issue in this dream. Like, what's the power struggle?
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 5: What were you feeling kind of oppressed by or trying
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 5: to hide out from in the relationship? You know, again,
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 5: to sort of bring to consciousness what went wrong.
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 4: He says in the context, the comments, that his partner
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 4: wanted to settle down And he's enjoying his adventurous life
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 4: on a cruise ship.
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 5: But why that would be symbolized as something like a U.S.-Russia
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 5: war is sort of interesting to me. That makes sort
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 5: of sense to me. But why it's symbolized the way
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 5: it's symbolized in such a dramatic way in the dream
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 5: is what I'd be curious to have him reflect on.
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 3: And the Russians have killed his boyfriend. I mean, that's
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 3: how the dream starts.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true.
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 5: So this course greater than that has invaded. He's at
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 5: risk of being killed, right. That's right.
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 3: Invaded the psyche. And it's doing things.
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 4: What I'm thinking about is that our dream ego isn't
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 4: participating in the war. The war just happened. Unfortunately, very sadly,
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 4: the ex-boyfriend was killed. He goes and hides out. Then
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 4: a child kind of outs him. Then he flees with
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 4: the help of his brother-in-law to the Appalachian Trail. And
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 4: then everything ends happily ever after. And I would be
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 4: curious about what part of you is a Russian? What
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 4: part of you aims a bow with arrows at our
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 4: dream ego? And there was a breakup. So presumably there
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 4: was some kind of a, quote, war, unquote.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: Well, and a death.
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 4: And a death, a conflict.
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 3: And the sin he's accused of, or what makes him vulnerable,
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 3: is that he's gay and or accused of being a witch,
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 3: both of which put him in this category of great otherness, uncanny,
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 3: queer otherness.
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 5: Because that's an interesting thing that's gay or in which
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 5: witchiness are being equated here right exactly like okay i
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 5: was thinking that more generally like again because we're talking
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 5: about it within the context of this entire sort of
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 5: podcast here um you know like i would i'd be
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 5: interested in having him talk to me a little bit
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 5: about how he feels this dream applies to his being
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 5: gay not just this particular relationship like is this did
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 5: this relationship bring up things that have to do more
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 5: generally with how he feels about being gay? Because you're right,
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 5: that's one of the first things in my dream, my
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 5: kid is being accused of and persecuted for as being
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 5: gay or a witch. How are those two things equivalent?
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 5: What was his own personal experience around that? That's not here,
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 5: but I would want to hear about that. I have
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 5: a feeling it's less maybe about the specific relationship he
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 5: was in and maybe more about his homosexuality and his
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 5: feelings about homosexuality or experiences being gay men more generally.
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 4: So this really reinforces, highlights, underlines the theme that's run
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 4: through our whole topic today, which is, listen, I'm curious.
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 4: Tell me more. What is this like for you? What
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 4: about that?
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 3: Without having the dreamer here, we often do speculate just
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 3: so we can try to offer frames with which one
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 3: might interpret the dream. And of course, we know that
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 3: we don't know the dreamer. One of the things I'd
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 3: like to suggest is that the symbol of Russia is
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 3: Mother Russia. And it is very substantive, having been to
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 3: East Germany before the wall was pulled down. Mother Russia
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 3: and the mother bear is a thing. So a couple
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 3: of fantasies I'm having is that there's a massive activation
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 3: of the mother complex. And it has invaded the psyche.
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 3: It has killed the lover. And it has persecuted him
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 3: for being the gay kid. And its influence is so
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 3: pervasive that he regresses and becomes a child like Harry Potter,
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 3: living under the stairs, totally dependent upon the goodwill of
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 3: the brother and his wife. So he becomes a child
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 3: in the presence of this overwhelming mother complex. He's identified
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 3: as the scapegoat. I wonder about that in terms of
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 3: the mother-complex relationship. The positive father figure or brother sets
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 3: him out there on the trail, but once again he
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 3: is betrayed. And there is the feminine. The mother is
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 3: coming after him and the archer that he focuses on
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 3: is his female friend. And she's compassionate. She's sobbing. And
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 3: yet she still has the arrow towards him.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 2: She's got a bow, right, pointed right at him.
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 3: One of the compensations that young gay boys feel is
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 3: that charming and delighting their mothers are a refuge. And
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 3: that's a thing. The vivacious singing and dancing, you know,
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 3: high-flying pu-erh is a way to interface with the mother
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 3: by delighting her. And so I wonder if that's also
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 3: a talent that he has, but as Robert's pointing out,
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 3: it may not be adequate because he does seem very
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 3: regressed in the dream. And there may be something more
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 3: dynamic and aggressive that he needs access to, but he's
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 3: a little boy right now in the face of Mother Russia.
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 3: So the task really is, you know, he's surviving. He
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 3: has a coping mechanism in the face of the murderous
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 3: Great Mother. And it'll get him back on his feet,
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 3: back on the cruise ship, singing and dancing, back in
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 3: his life. But the larger question is about initiation. Is
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 3: that really the best or only tool that he has
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 3: to face the incursion of Mother Russia?
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 5: What's interesting about that interpretation is a couple of things.
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 5: I guess I'm borrowing kind of a page from a
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 5: Berkeley analyst here, Gareth Hill, who wrote Masculine and Feminine,
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 5: Flow of the Opposites. So instead of talking about the
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 5: polarities of an archetype as being positive or negative, Gareth
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 5: talks about them as being static or dynamic. So if
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 5: you identify Russia with the Feminine, It's interesting to think
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 5: about the feminine in this circumstance, symbolically, as well as
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 5: in its own experience, as being the static principle. Not
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 5: that hard. I mean, Russia is pretty static, right? But
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 5: that's what I would say. It's sort of very interesting
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 5: to think about the feminine, the mother piece, being something
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 5: this person feels oppressed by, persecuted by, confined by, that
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 5: he has to escape, that it's unfree. He has to
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 5: free himself from it. He broke up with the guy
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 5: who wants to settle down. It's just interesting because you
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 5: don't generally think about the feminine as being sort of
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 5: the static, conventional, oppressive. It's much more like what you
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 5: were talking about, right? You think about the masculine as being,
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 5: you know, the masculine capital M being, you know, the
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 5: principle of conventionality, of stasis, right? of, you know, tradition,
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 5: et cetera. But in this person's psyche, perhaps because he's gay,
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 5: doesn't come at all of these gender experiences from the
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 5: same place most people do. He's experiencing Mother Russia as
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 5: being potentially, as you're just describing, invading him, possibly oppressing him,
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 5: threatening his life. He has to escape from, it's his masculinity.
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 5: It's his gay boy masculinity. It's his gay boy that
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 5: has to kind of escape. And he's using his tricks. He's,
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 5: you know, being charming. He's singing. He's dancing. He's doing
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 5: his gay thing here, you know. And it works. He gets,
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 5: you know, he kind of dances away. You know, he
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 5: doesn't get killed.
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 3: And this is the Cabell Attersmith.
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 4: What I'm appreciating, though, is his access to you know,
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 4: just anatomical reality of men are built for thrusting. And
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 4: off he goes on a cruise ship that is itself
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 4: built for thrusting its way Through the waters of the
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 4: great mother.
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 5: Yeah. Up, but my dear, it's the woman who holds
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 5: the bow and arrow aimed at his heart. It doesn't
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 5: get any more phallic than an arrow.
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 4: That is pretty phallic.
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 5: So I have to say, right?
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 5: And you're like, whoa, okay. And he's the one that's
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 5: sort of on the potentially receptive side of that phallic energy, right?
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 5: But he escapes it. I think that's why I say
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 5: the ambivalence of these issues are just so rich when
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 5: we're delving in.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 3: But the Dianic spirit of the arrow, that Diana is
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 3: basically saying, you're an intruder. You're the outsider and you're
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 3: going to get killed. We're going to shoot an arrow
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 3: in you because you're not, as a man, you're not
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 3: allowed to be here.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 5: Well, we should say a comment for your listeners. What
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 5: you're doing, what Joseph's doing is we call amplification. Yes.
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 5: Like the technical term for what we're doing is amplification.
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 5: Like we're taking associations from other aspects of culture and
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 5: applying them to the dream, Diana, the gods, et cetera.
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 5: So Joseph, for those of you listening, that's Jungian amplification
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 5: in action there.
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 3: And it's also very much a classic Cabell-Attis myth in
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 3: as much as Cabell is the great mother of, Attis
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 3: is her son, but also he expects him to be
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 3: her son, her first priest, and her lover, as often
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 3: happens in these mystical creation myths. Attis falls in love
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 3: with someone else. And the Great Mother says, absolutely not.
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 3: Your primary duty is to serve the Creatrix of all things.
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 3: And in this impossible tension, he flees into the forest,
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 3: castrates himself, is a threat of dying, and Cabal turns
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 3: him into an evergreen tree so that at least some
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 3: portion of him will vegetatively stay alive. So we have
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 3: this incursion of a great mother. We have the death
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 3: of a boy. We have this remaining frightened part of
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 3: the ego who does not want to return to the
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 3: great mother to be the priest and lover, and yet
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 3: does not know how to escape from this. And Neumann
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 3: also talks about this in the evolution of consciousness, that
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 3: the great mother is moving out of the unconscious and
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 3: just becoming fully himself as he is. So as you said,
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 3: that's an amplification. I think the dream is about coping.
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 2: There's so much to do.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 5: So much.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 2: There's so much to do with this dream.
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 5: It's fun.
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: You've been listening to This Jungian Life. From our website, thisjungianlife.com,
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: you can follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook,
• 1:51:36
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• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: and submit your dreams for possible interpretation on another episode.
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: We'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: for today's show and hope you'll let us know what
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: topics you'd enjoy hearing more about. Until next time, keep
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: living this Jungian life.
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 2: Thank you.