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The Archetypal Brain: Jung from an Evolutionary Perspective · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to This Jungian Life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:14
  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.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: Hello.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: We have something a little different today. Both Deb and
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Joseph were unavailable to record, but we didn't want to
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: miss a week, so the baton was passed to me.
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: And I took this opportunity to invite Gary Clark on
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: the podcast. I read Gary's most recent book. It's called
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences. It came out in
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: the fall of 2024. I read it right after it
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: came out. And everyone I talked to, I said, I'm
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: reading the most fabulous book. And I was so excited
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: to get Gary on. So when we realized we had
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: this slot, I was just really quick to... email him
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: and he's been kind enough to join us from Australia
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: where it is very, very late. So Gary, thank you
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: for staying up for us. Gary Clark is currently a
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: visiting research fellow in the School of Medical Sciences at
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: the University of Adelaide in Australia. Since 2012, he's been
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: a member of the school's Biological Anthropology and Comparative Anatomy Unit.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: His research focus includes the evolution of music, paleoanthropology, and
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: evolutionary approaches to analytical psychology. So thank you so much
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: for joining us. And I wonder if we could start
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: with you just telling us a little bit about your
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: background because it's really interesting.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:03
  Speaker 4: Although the books on evolutionary science and things like that,
• 2:08
  Speaker 4: my original background or my original studies were in literature
• 2:13
  Speaker 4: and poetry. I did my doctorate on Australian poetry. and
• 2:19
  Speaker 4: also music. So I had an interest in the arts,
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: in literature and in music. And also reading Jung gave
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: me a avenue into thinking about the arts and thinking
• 2:36
  Speaker 4: about music from a scientific and empirical and an evolutionary
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: point of view. So when I was studying music and
• 2:46
  Speaker 4: when you're, When you're studying music, I was studying classical guitar.
• 2:51
  Speaker 4: You spend many, many hours a day practicing, particularly leading
• 2:56
  Speaker 4: up to exams. It might be six to seven, eight,
• 2:58
  Speaker 4: sometimes 10 hours a day. And you can, on rare occasions,
• 3:04
  Speaker 4: experience what they call flow states or altered states of consciousness.
• 3:08
  Speaker 4: And there are a few quite special occasions where this happened.
• 3:15
  Speaker 4: what researchers refer to as peak mystical experiences. I didn't
• 3:20
  Speaker 4: quite know what happened when these experiences occurred when I
• 3:24
  Speaker 4: was playing. They were a bit, they weren't something I
• 3:27
  Speaker 4: was familiar with, but when I read up about them,
• 3:31
  Speaker 4: I began to realize that these are things which commonly occur,
• 3:35
  Speaker 4: particularly in indigenous cultures where they're cultivated purposely. And I
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: began reading Jung and I realized that what I experienced
• 3:49
  Speaker 4: through music and art, through what I thought of as
• 3:53
  Speaker 4: aesthetic experiences that Jung spoke about in terms of the
• 3:58
  Speaker 4: numinous and that he had spent a lot of time
• 4:02
  Speaker 4: researching these experiences throughout human history. So that was kind of,
• 4:08
  Speaker 4: I was reading Jung as an undergraduate and neglecting my coursework.
• 4:13
  Speaker 4: that sort of thing, because I gravitated towards this dimension
• 4:19
  Speaker 4: of experience which Jung was so interested in.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: Can I just ask there, because I'm curious if you would,
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: I'm certainly curious about this and I'm thinking our listeners
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: might be too. So just to recap, you're studying music,
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: you have these intense experiences that you can't explain. This
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: leads you to start looking into what the heck was
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: that and you find Jung. And it gives you a
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: way of thinking about it. And the way I understand
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: the big, I mean, there are so many big ideas
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: in your book, but one of the biggest ideas is
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: about this kind of integration between the different brain systems
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: that are characterized by these kinds of experiences. So I'm wondering,
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: would you be able to tell us a little bit
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: about this kind of mystical experience that you had while playing?
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, sure.
• 5:10
  Speaker 4: This was the one, the one that was of pivotal
• 5:13
  Speaker 4: importance was, um, during a recital and the hall that
• 5:17
  Speaker 4: we gave our recitals in was a, um, 19th century, um,
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  Speaker 4: kind of Gothic style hall with very, very high rafters.
• 5:26
  Speaker 4: And it was a 30 minute recital in the halls empty,
• 5:29
  Speaker 4: except for the examiners. So there's a lot of reverb
• 5:32
  Speaker 4: and stuff like that. And there's not any other people
• 5:35
  Speaker 4: there except for three or four people sitting at a table. Um,
• 5:39
  Speaker 4: But there were birds up in the rafters, way up
• 5:43
  Speaker 4: high in the rafters because it's this kind of gothic ceiling,
• 5:45
  Speaker 4: if you like. And about halfway through the recital, my
• 5:49
  Speaker 4: sense of space and time kind of dissolved and I
• 5:53
  Speaker 4: felt like I had entered their souls, if you like,
• 5:58
  Speaker 4: and entered their song. So when they were singing, I
• 6:01
  Speaker 4: felt like I was coextensive with the song that they
• 6:05
  Speaker 4: were making and coextensive with the birds. So the sense
• 6:09
  Speaker 4: of an individualized identity had collapsed basically. And there was
• 6:17
  Speaker 4: really no sense of time, no sense of space, but
• 6:19
  Speaker 4: I was still playing. Like I was on autopilot in
• 6:23
  Speaker 4: this state of kind of transcendent euphoria. And then after
• 6:31
  Speaker 4: the recital, I just had this kind of a deep
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: sense of wellbeing. And so that, That kind of alerted
• 6:39
  Speaker 4: me to this other domain of experience that is not
• 6:45
  Speaker 4: often accessed by people. I was reading literature as well,
• 6:50
  Speaker 4: so I could recognize this stuff in Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality.
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  Speaker 4: This dimension of experience was part of human culture. So
• 7:04
  Speaker 4: that was a crucial experience. I had others performing that
• 7:08
  Speaker 4: were not of such intensity, but that was the crucial one.
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: Go on, sorry.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: No, I was going to say, so you were an
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: undergraduate when that happened?
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: I'm just imagining you're 19, 20 years old, something like that,
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: and that happens. And then I bet one is never
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: quite the same after something like that.
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  Speaker 4: I don't think you are. because it gives you an
• 7:34
  Speaker 4: insight into another dimension of existence. But I was, you know,
• 7:45
  Speaker 4: I went on to do a teaching degree and then
• 7:47
  Speaker 4: I studied literature and stuff like that. So as I
• 7:50
  Speaker 4: write in the book, that experience in many ways kind
• 7:54
  Speaker 4: of fell into the tended to forget about it in
• 8:00
  Speaker 4: many ways. But I still knew that that was there. And,
• 8:08
  Speaker 4: you know, it was only many years later when I
• 8:10
  Speaker 4: started reading David Lewis Williams' book, Deciphering Ancient Minds, that
• 8:17
  Speaker 4: I was able to make the connection between that experience
• 8:20
  Speaker 4: and shamanism amongst, like, the Kung Bushmen in Africa and
• 8:26
  Speaker 4: link it to their.
• 8:28
  Speaker 4: The paintings that they do on the wall to depict
• 8:31
  Speaker 4: states of shamanic trance and things. And he mentions in
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: the book that when a shaman goes into trance, they
• 8:37
  Speaker 4: will say that they become a bird or that they
• 8:39
  Speaker 4: become an animal. And when I read that, that kind
• 8:43
  Speaker 4: of clicked. I thought, this is what's going on. So
• 8:46
  Speaker 4: that led to an interest in shamanism as well. But
• 8:50
  Speaker 4: that was many years later that I, and then I
• 8:54
  Speaker 4: began to seriously investigate these issues from an evolutionary and
• 8:59
  Speaker 4: neurobiological point of view to understand them as a species-typical phenomenon.
• 9:05
  Speaker 4: These are not aberrant experiences, really, although they may be
• 9:09
  Speaker 4: for people in the West. But for the majority of cultures,
• 9:14
  Speaker 4: these are kind of pivotal experiences that are highly valued.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: Have you ever shared the same dream as someone you know?
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: There are numerous accounts across cultures of people experiencing the
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: same dream event. In many non-Western cultures, active communication through
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: dreams is unquestioned and seen as fundamental to understanding the world.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: In New York in the 1960s and 70s, Montague Ullman
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: and Stanley Krippner carried out experiments in dream telepathy. They
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: reported numerous hits, although later researchers struggled to replicate their findings.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: This month, we are launching our own This Jungian life
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: experiment and dream to Each month, one of us will
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: transmit an image we have studied in careful detail. You'll
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: then tune in according to instructions we'll send by email
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: and report back to us what you saw in your dreams.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: If you haven't signed up yet to join our experiment,
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: The link is in the show notes or on our
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: DreamWise book website. We're excited to test the possibilities of
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: dream telepathy, and we hope you'll join us for our
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: first transmission on the 25th of February. And I know
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: you spent some time in Alice Springs, and I'm wondering
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: if you could, where does that fit in to this
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: life narrative and tell us about how that shaped your
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: thinking as well?
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I.
• 10:50
  Speaker 4: When I finished my music degree, or while I was
• 10:53
  Speaker 4: doing my music degree, I was doing literature and music together.
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: And then I went on to do a, I did
• 10:58
  Speaker 4: my honours in music and then a PhD, honours in literature, sorry,
• 11:02
  Speaker 4: and a PhD in literature.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: And I was able.
• 11:07
  Speaker 4: To meet Les Murray, who was a famous Australian poet,
• 11:13
  Speaker 4: recently passed away. But I decided to do my PhD
• 11:17
  Speaker 4: on his work. his poetry and a number of other
• 11:19
  Speaker 4: Australian poets. And there was this tradition in Australian poetry
• 11:25
  Speaker 4: going back to the 1930s where poets of European descent
• 11:31
  Speaker 4: would start to try to link their poetry to the
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: specific nature of our ecology and our weather systems, like Traditionally,
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  Speaker 4: poetry coming from Europe and England, it's based on four
• 11:46
  Speaker 4: seasons and the specific trees, oaks, and all of those
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: sorts of things. When people came to Australia, they tried
• 11:54
  Speaker 4: to impose those aesthetic values on the continent, and it
• 11:59
  Speaker 4: didn't work, mainly because in many parts of the continent,
• 12:03
  Speaker 4: we don't have four seasons. We have a wet and
• 12:05
  Speaker 4: dry season, and it's just a completely different setup in
• 12:09
  Speaker 4: terms of climate and weather and things like that. So
• 12:12
  Speaker 4: there was this group of poets called the Jindy Warabaks,
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  Speaker 4: and that's an Aboriginal word meaning to join together. And
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  Speaker 4: what they wanted to do was join together Euro-Australian forms
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  Speaker 4: of writing and poetry with Indigenous culture and learn from
• 12:29
  Speaker 4: Indigenous culture and the Indigenous attachment to place and spiritual
• 12:34
  Speaker 4: conceptions of the ecology. And Les Murray was kind of
• 12:38
  Speaker 4: a latter-day exponent of that aesthetic. And he'd read a
• 12:42
  Speaker 4: lot of the masterworks in anthropology in Australia by TGH
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  Speaker 4: Strelo and AP Elkin. So I had a deep interest
• 12:52
  Speaker 4: in anthropology while I was doing the PhD because of
• 12:57
  Speaker 4: the importance of anthropology to our.
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: Literary culture.
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  Speaker 4: And When I was finishing the PhD, I said, I
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  Speaker 4: thought to myself, I'm reading a lot about Aboriginal culture
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  Speaker 4: from books, but I'm not really having any firsthand experience.
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  Speaker 4: So I decided to get a teaching diploma and go
• 13:18
  Speaker 4: and teach in Central Australia and live amongst the communities
• 13:22
  Speaker 4: that I was studying. And that led to over a
• 13:25
  Speaker 4: decade of working with Indigenous communities out in the desert
• 13:29
  Speaker 4: and in the city as well. And that's where I
• 13:32
  Speaker 4: learned a lot about the culture and living, probably Alice Springs,
• 13:40
  Speaker 4: if people don't know what Alice Springs is, it's the
• 13:43
  Speaker 4: town in the center of Australia. It's a kind of
• 13:45
  Speaker 4: the administrative hub of surrounding communities that are sometimes six, seven,
• 13:51
  Speaker 4: 800 kilometers away. So I was living deep in the desert,
• 13:54
  Speaker 4: about six or 700 kilometers from Alice Springs. So we
• 13:59
  Speaker 4: would go into Alice Springs of a weekend because that
• 14:03
  Speaker 4: was where the pub was. They didn't have pubs on
• 14:06
  Speaker 4: the communities because the communities are dry. So Alice Springs
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  Speaker 4: sort of became our weekend away, if you like, from
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: communities and a very long drive for a beer, six
• 14:21
  Speaker 4: or seven hours to have a beer. But that's what
• 14:26
  Speaker 4: we did. So I spent a lot of time in
• 14:27
  Speaker 4: Alice Springs and then, You know, the link to Jung
• 14:33
  Speaker 4: is that in Alice Springs around the turn of the
• 14:39
  Speaker 4: 20th century and before World War I, crucial ethnographic work
• 14:45
  Speaker 4: was done by Spencer and Gillen amongst the Urunda people
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: who are the Aboriginal people who live around Alice Springs.
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: And I started to take an interest in this in
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: this kind of cultural exchange between Aboriginal people and the
• 15:02
  Speaker 4: European settlers and how the European settlers began, learned a
• 15:06
  Speaker 4: great deal from the Aboriginal people. And then they produced
• 15:10
  Speaker 4: these seminal anthropological texts that actually influenced the trajectory of
• 15:16
  Speaker 4: European thought. And Spencer and Gillen's work had a deep
• 15:19
  Speaker 4: impact on Ewell's thinking.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of the things that I really, one
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: of the many things I really was struck by in
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: the book is that you really trace how important anthropological
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: thinking was to Jung. And in fact, I know that
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: in Zurich, back in the day, people who were trained
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: in Zurich at least a couple decades ago, one of
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: the strains in training, you know, we learn about dreams
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: and alchemy and archetypal material and fairy tales and psychopathology and,
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: you know, history and development. And in Zurich, at least
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: a couple decades ago, another area of study was anthropology.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: And that is no longer part of the training of
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: many Jungians. But it kind of feels like a missing piece,
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: in a way, in terms of here's how Jung you know, we, we,
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: we sort of trace, Oh, here's how Jung was influenced
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: by Gnosticism. Here's how Jung was influenced by alchemy, but
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: he was really quite influenced by what was known at
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: the time about humans, ancient origins, which was not a lot, but, uh,
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: but what there was, he was really drawing upon. And also, uh, anthropology,
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: especially the work of Spencer and Gillen. So I wasn't
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: aware of that. It was really fascinating to see it.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: It made a lot of sense.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, that's right.
• 16:53
  Speaker 4: And the reason, well, I don't know why you didn't
• 16:57
  Speaker 4: have it pointed out to you as much, but there
• 17:01
  Speaker 4: has been an attempt. What should I say? Early anthropology
• 17:07
  Speaker 4: has been given a bad rap in recent decades. So
• 17:13
  Speaker 4: And sometimes for good reason, it was often the anthropologists,
• 17:22
  Speaker 4: they kind of took on the racist assumptions of the
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: colonial societies of which they were a part. So there's
• 17:29
  Speaker 4: some things about early anthropology that are morally problematic for
• 17:34
  Speaker 4: us today. A lot of the ideas in evolutionary thought
• 17:39
  Speaker 4: and anthropology at the time ranked races according to brain
• 17:43
  Speaker 4: size and intelligence. So there were reasons for people to
• 17:50
  Speaker 4: reject it, but I think they ended up throwing the
• 17:54
  Speaker 4: baby out with the bathwater and felt they wanted to
• 17:58
  Speaker 4: disassociate from this earlier tradition of anthropology. And that was
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: the consensus for decades that within anthropology itself. And I
• 18:12
  Speaker 4: think Jungians were taking note of what was happening within
• 18:15
  Speaker 4: the anthropological profession and thought, well, the anthropologists have decided
• 18:20
  Speaker 4: that this stuff is all racist. Therefore, the anthropological thought
• 18:27
  Speaker 4: that Jung based his ideas on is racist. Therefore, we
• 18:31
  Speaker 4: have to disassociate Jungian psychology from the anthropological theories that
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: Jung read and developed in his own way. I think
• 18:44
  Speaker 4: that's only half the story. There's a few things that
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: are important to note is that amongst the society that
• 18:50
  Speaker 4: they were living in, and particularly Francis Gillan, he was
• 18:53
  Speaker 4: the postmaster at Alice Springs that collected a lot of
• 18:58
  Speaker 4: the data and did a lot of the interviews with
• 19:01
  Speaker 4: the Arundel people, who was working with Spencer, who was
• 19:05
  Speaker 4: the actual academic They were the most progressive members of
• 19:08
  Speaker 4: their own society in a lot of cases, and they
• 19:11
  Speaker 4: did a great deal to advance the cause of Indigenous
• 19:15
  Speaker 4: Australians and to open the world of Indigenous Australians up
• 19:20
  Speaker 4: to the broader Australian community and to the wider world.
• 19:25
  Speaker 4: So there's a case to be made for the importance
• 19:30
  Speaker 4: of their work in terms of them, not all the time,
• 19:33
  Speaker 4: but particularly Francis Gillen, I think that's the case, and
• 19:37
  Speaker 4: many other anthropologists were more progressive than the society around them,
• 19:43
  Speaker 4: and they helped change the society and make it more
• 19:46
  Speaker 4: progressive in terms of sympathy towards individuals. worldviews and things
• 19:51
  Speaker 4: like that. So I think it's– and there's also the
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: issue that if you go back and read these works and,
• 19:59
  Speaker 4: you know, there's people like Howard Murphy. He's one of
• 20:01
  Speaker 4: the anthropologists in Australia at the Australian National University, I
• 20:05
  Speaker 4: think he's at now. And he thinks that these works
• 20:09
  Speaker 4: are valuable and they contain an immense body of data
• 20:16
  Speaker 4: and insight that's borne out by more recent research and
• 20:20
  Speaker 4: that we should not neglect them. So I think on
• 20:25
  Speaker 4: that basis, it's time to reconsider and value the anthropological
• 20:33
  Speaker 4: basis of Jung's work because it's crucial to his theories
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: of human brain evolution.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: Well, and I want to get you to talk about
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: his theories of human brain evolution in just a second,
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: but first I'll just say, you know, there are parts
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: of the collected works that, you know, really, I think
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: we all feel some discomfort with the way Jung kind
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: of uses the term primitive or primitives to describe indigenous people,
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: and There is a little bit of a tone in
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: the way he talks about it, and it sort of
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: can feel like a really ugly word. And yet, I've
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: always been aware that what Jung is saying, on the
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: one hand, he does compare primitives with children, for example.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: That's something that comes up. But if you really listen
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: to the point he's making... It's that indigenous cultures are
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: in contact with something that we have lost contact with.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: And the whole gist of his opus, I think, is
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: about how valuable that thing is and how much we
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: need it. So on the one hand, it does sound
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: very disparaging. And there is undoubted racism in the collected works.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: But I think the underlying idea there is what you describe,
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: or the word that you use that I picked up on,
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: was integration. And it's the idea which I hope we'll
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: get into more as we go further into our discussion
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: about the different brain systems and how newer brain systems
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: can cause us to become disassociated from these more ancient
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: brain structures and how problematic that is. And this is
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: something that... different lines of research, including Jung, have converged upon. So, um,
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: but let's, we'll hold off on that for just a minute.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: I hope we kind of work up to it, but
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: let's go back to what you brought up about, uh, um,
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: sort of the, the evolution of, uh, human consciousness, which
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: of course is related, but what did, what did Jung
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: have to say about that? And what are your thoughts?
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 22:55
  Speaker 4: Well, just to, just to link it to what you
• 22:57
  Speaker 4: said about Jung thinking that the, that, um, so-called primitive
• 23:02
  Speaker 4: cultures are equivalent to children. His point was actually that
• 23:07
  Speaker 4: dream consciousness is associated with affective or emotionally laden or
• 23:17
  Speaker 4: evolutionarily ancient brain systems. And that children remain closer to
• 23:25
  Speaker 4: that mode of consciousness and that indigenous people cultivate it
• 23:32
  Speaker 4: in their rituals and it's like the Australian Aboriginal religious
• 23:39
  Speaker 4: cosmology is called the dreaming and it's called that for
• 23:42
  Speaker 4: a very good reason because they believe that access to
• 23:47
  Speaker 4: this other domain of experience where the ancestors live you
• 23:53
  Speaker 4: can cross over from normal waking life into this other
• 23:57
  Speaker 4: domain through dreams and also through rituals And he objected
• 24:03
  Speaker 4: strongly to the notion that ritual was a regression to
• 24:08
  Speaker 4: an infantile mode of consciousness. He rejected Freud's association of
• 24:15
  Speaker 4: ritual or Freud's analysis of it in terms of the
• 24:19
  Speaker 4: Oedipal complex. And he said that the rituals of primitive
• 24:24
  Speaker 4: man are not those of an erotic child. but the
• 24:29
  Speaker 4: products of the fully grown adult. Now, there's been a
• 24:35
  Speaker 4: lot of talk about Jung associating indigenous cultures or what
• 24:38
  Speaker 4: he called primitive cultures with children, but he explicitly said
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: he rejected the idea. Now, this gets us into the
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: issue of what's called the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny.
• 24:56
  Speaker 4: which was the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. That's an
• 25:03
  Speaker 4: idea that was very popular in 19th century Germany, popularised
• 25:09
  Speaker 4: by Ernst Haeckel specifically. And there's the idea that ontogeny
• 25:15
  Speaker 4: being the development of the individual human and phylogeny being
• 25:20
  Speaker 4: the evolution of the species, And he said that there
• 25:25
  Speaker 4: is a relationship between the two, which was called his
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: biogenetic law. One of the relationships between development or ontogeny
• 25:36
  Speaker 4: and phylogeny or evolution was the theory of recapitulation, that
• 25:42
  Speaker 4: we go through the stages of our ancestors as we
• 25:46
  Speaker 4: mature from an embryo through a child through to an adult.
• 25:50
  Speaker 4: But this was only one manifestation or one aspect of
• 25:57
  Speaker 4: his biogenetic law. Other aspects of it were what's called heterochrony,
• 26:03
  Speaker 4: which is the changing of development. So you can extend
• 26:08
  Speaker 4: development for a longer period of time. For example, you
• 26:12
  Speaker 4: can grow your arms for a longer period of time
• 26:15
  Speaker 4: and have longer arms or longer legs for running relative
• 26:19
  Speaker 4: to other animals. That didn't involve the recapitulation of earlier species,
• 26:27
  Speaker 4: but the extension of the growth trajectories of earlier or
• 26:32
  Speaker 4: ancestral species. And Jung was aware of this. He said
• 26:36
  Speaker 4: that to claim that the rituals of primitive humans were
• 26:41
  Speaker 4: the same as a child, We know that, for example,
• 26:47
  Speaker 4: we go through the stage, apparently, of having gills as
• 26:54
  Speaker 4: an embryo, and that's one of the things that Haeckel noted.
• 26:58
  Speaker 4: But that does not mean that the adult form is
• 27:04
  Speaker 4: the same as the embryonic form, because an adult fish
• 27:08
  Speaker 4: is an adult fish. So when we're in that early stage,
• 27:11
  Speaker 4: we're not like an embryo fish, we're like an adult fish.
• 27:15
  Speaker 4: And he made the similar point about early humans is
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: that while there may be a relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny,
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: early man or early humans were adults. They were not children.
• 27:31
  Speaker 4: They were not stranded at an early stage of development.
• 27:33
  Speaker 4: They were fully grown, which of course means that they're
• 27:38
  Speaker 4: not children and that the idea that he equated primitive
• 27:41
  Speaker 4: cultures with children is actually a misreading of his work.
• 27:45
  Speaker 4: But that idea has found its way into the Jungian scholarship,
• 27:49
  Speaker 4: where Jungian scholars have said Jung thought primitive people were children.
• 27:55
  Speaker 4: He used anthropology, which is racist. All of these ideas
• 27:58
  Speaker 4: are part of the racism inherent in anthropology. Therefore, not
• 28:02
  Speaker 4: only do we have to reject his interest in anthropology,
• 28:06
  Speaker 4: We have to reject his interest in the relationship between
• 28:10
  Speaker 4: ontogeny and phylogeny because that also is racist. But the
• 28:15
  Speaker 4: important thing with more recent research is that those theories,
• 28:19
  Speaker 4: the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny and that tradition in
• 28:23
  Speaker 4: German evolutionary thought, what's called the Naturphilosophon or the nature philosophers,
• 28:29
  Speaker 4: those kinds of ideas, which went back to Goethe and
• 28:32
  Speaker 4: Haeckel developed, they've been confirmed by current research in developmental
• 28:38
  Speaker 4: genetics and what's called evolutionary developmental biology, where researchers have
• 28:45
  Speaker 4: found the genes that actually alter development and can change
• 28:50
  Speaker 4: the rates of growth and the period of growth within
• 28:53
  Speaker 4: a species so that to get from an ancestral species
• 28:57
  Speaker 4: to a descendant species, It's not necessarily genetic mutations, for example,
• 29:03
  Speaker 4: that provide the necessary changes or variation, but you can
• 29:08
  Speaker 4: speed up and slow down development with what are called
• 29:12
  Speaker 4: regulatory genes, and that therefore changes in development or changes
• 29:16
  Speaker 4: in ontogeny can give rise to new species. And this tradition,
• 29:24
  Speaker 4: Evo Devo, or this new research program, Evo Devo, seeks
• 29:28
  Speaker 4: to unite the old German biological tradition that Jung was
• 29:32
  Speaker 4: influenced by with modern developmental genetics and embryology.
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: So there's huge potential.
• 29:40
  Speaker 4: For looking or reconsidering Jung's work in the context of
• 29:45
  Speaker 4: this research and having a more nuanced and subtle approach
• 29:47
  Speaker 4: to these traditions out of which his ideas developed.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: And what do you think some of the implications of
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: that are?
• 29:55
  Speaker 4: Well, it highlights the the degree to which our affinity
• 30:01
  Speaker 4: with other animals. And instead of, for example, the evolution
• 30:08
  Speaker 4: from chimpanzees to humans being the result of very dramatic
• 30:14
  Speaker 4: change or a great deal of new genetic material, it
• 30:18
  Speaker 4: can be a result of altering already existent structures, either
• 30:24
  Speaker 4: anatomically or in the brain.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: So the evolution.
• 30:29
  Speaker 4: Evolution is conservative and it tends to try and work
• 30:34
  Speaker 4: with what's already there. The toolkit that's already there, it
• 30:36
  Speaker 4: will try to work with it and use something which
• 30:39
  Speaker 4: evolved for one purpose and then repurpose it for something else.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: It's called acceptation.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: Acceptation, exactly.
• 30:49
  Speaker 4: So that means that there's a great deal that humans
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: share with other animals and that the term for that
• 30:55
  Speaker 4: in evolutionary biology is homology. means that you have a
• 31:00
  Speaker 4: similar brain structure or limb structure in one species, and
• 31:05
  Speaker 4: you have a very similar structure in a distantly related species.
• 31:10
  Speaker 4: The best example of it is the fins of fish,
• 31:13
  Speaker 4: the wings of birds, and the hands of mammals and humans.
• 31:17
  Speaker 4: All have a similar bone structure, but the length of
• 31:22
  Speaker 4: each bone will be longer or shorter in the different species.
• 31:26
  Speaker 4: So that's, again, the idea of altering development or ontogeny
• 31:32
  Speaker 4: to create different species. But there's fundamental underlying homologies. And
• 31:39
  Speaker 4: we share genes with flies and things like that, but
• 31:44
  Speaker 4: things that have been conserved and conserved over millions and
• 31:48
  Speaker 4: millions of years. That concept of homology, in my view,
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: is really what the concept of archetypes is. And in
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: the 19th century, Goethe was really one of the most
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: famous exponents of the idea of underlying anatomical archetypes that
• 32:09
  Speaker 4: are shared by a diverse range of species. And he
• 32:14
  Speaker 4: developed that notion and then other theorists took it on.
• 32:18
  Speaker 4: And even Darwin was influenced by this idea that there
• 32:22
  Speaker 4: are underlying archetypal structures shared by a diverse range of species.
• 32:30
  Speaker 4: Darwin made the innovation of explaining these shared characteristics as
• 32:34
  Speaker 4: being inherited from a common ancestor, and as the different
• 32:38
  Speaker 4: species evolve, they alter, if you like, that underlying archetypal
• 32:45
  Speaker 4: or homologous pattern. This is basically the fundamental idea at
• 32:50
  Speaker 4: the heart of Jung's thinking. is that there was a
• 32:53
  Speaker 4: relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. And he made the inference
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: from shared anatomical structures in the body to the brain
• 33:06
  Speaker 4: and then to the psyche. But he also emphasized the
• 33:11
  Speaker 4: fact that we bring with us not only the evolutionary
• 33:16
  Speaker 4: history of humankind, but also the history of the primates.
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: And even earlier organisms.
• 33:24
  Speaker 4: And this is based on the idea that we have
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: these basic homologous or archetypal structures that we bring into
• 33:35
  Speaker 4: current life. I've just got a quote here that I
• 33:40
  Speaker 4: quote in the book, and this is from Jung speaking.
• 33:43
  Speaker 4: And he said, we keep forgetting that we are primates
• 33:46
  Speaker 4: and that we have to make allowances for these primitive
• 33:49
  Speaker 4: layers in our psyche. So that is an example of
• 33:57
  Speaker 4: archetypes being not just human, really, but part of our
• 34:01
  Speaker 4: primate and mammalian heritage.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: And again, on a sort of feeling level, what that
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: means is that we are deeply, deeply connected to all
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: other life on the planet in this really kind of
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: fundamental way, which we know. But maybe it has more
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: to do with who we are, even as individuals, than
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: we may think.
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: I think so.
• 34:26
  Speaker 4: There's been a revolution in evolutionary thinking, mainly by France
• 34:30
  Speaker 4: Duval and other people like that, where there was a
• 34:35
  Speaker 4: tendency in evolutionary biology to refrain from attributing human emotions
• 34:43
  Speaker 4: to other species, that it was anthropomorphic. But Duval kind
• 34:47
  Speaker 4: of turned that idea on its head. And he said,
• 34:49
  Speaker 4: the reason we have emotions that are similar to animals.
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: Is because we are animals.
• 34:57
  Speaker 4: And of course, we're going to notice similarities between human
• 35:04
  Speaker 4: emotions and those of animals. And then you look at
• 35:07
  Speaker 4: the work of Yak Panskep, and he was very interested
• 35:11
  Speaker 4: in these homologous brain structures. And he showed that there
• 35:14
  Speaker 4: are very homologous systems associated with maternal care and with
• 35:22
  Speaker 4: pro-social emotions in humans that exist across species. So when
• 35:27
  Speaker 4: I look at an elephant, I have an uncanny sense
• 35:30
  Speaker 4: that this is a very human-like creature that just happens
• 35:34
  Speaker 4: to walk on four legs and has a trunk. And
• 35:37
  Speaker 4: that seems a bit of an odd thing to say,
• 35:39
  Speaker 4: but the brain systems that an elephant elephant possessors are very,
• 35:43
  Speaker 4: very much like our own. So they have very similar
• 35:46
  Speaker 4: systems in terms of social and maternal care. They exploit
• 35:50
  Speaker 4: the similar system like the oxytocin system in maternal bonding.
• 35:55
  Speaker 4: So there are all these things that unite us to
• 35:58
  Speaker 4: the animal kingdom. And I think Jung understood that to
• 36:02
  Speaker 4: his credit.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. Encounters with animals
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: can be so numinous, right? I mean, I think that
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: idea that ascribing human emotions to animals, I think most
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: pet owners know that that's nonsense. Like, you know your
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: dog has feelings. You know that, you know? And I agree.
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: I think it's, I have a, I just have a budgie.
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: And it always strikes me, just, you know, just, I mean,
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: birds have a pretty intense attachment system. I don't know.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: It must be pretty, neurobiologically different from a mammalian attachment
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: system but they you know they have intense pair bonds
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: and there's a period where they're young you know for
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: many species of birds are entirely dependent on them so
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: you know it's like and and that's the basis of
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: the pet relationship right is he's he's kind of bonded
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: to me based on on that and so we we
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: share that and we can sort of delight in each
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: other every morning and it's it's just you know it's
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: it is uh I know what you're talking about. We
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: recognize the sameness, even among such different, I mean, obviously
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: birds aren't even mammals, but there's something similar. There's something
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: homologous there going on.
• 37:17
  Speaker 4: Well, just on the bird thing, we are similar to
• 37:21
  Speaker 4: birds in certain ways, more so than other primates. And
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: that's mainly got to do with vocal learning and musicality.
• 37:30
  Speaker 4: So we have genes that are present in humans associated
• 37:35
  Speaker 4: with vocal learning and musicality and language that are exist
• 37:42
  Speaker 4: in birds, but don't exist in chimpanzees.
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's, I didn't know that. That's really interesting.
• 37:48
  Speaker 4: Birds like, and that's how the young birds learn their song.
• 37:51
  Speaker 4: Like they're not, they're not, they're not fixed action patterns
• 37:53
  Speaker 4: where they just, they have to learn it from the mothers.
• 37:58
  Speaker 4: And they also use singing as a kind of, you know,
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: territorial skill. chorus or for mate.
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: Bonding.
• 38:07
  Speaker 4: Just on that, it's interesting that Darwin proposed the idea
• 38:13
  Speaker 4: that humans developed a form of musical proto-language before language
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: evolved and he based that theory on the idea that
• 38:24
  Speaker 4: birds sing like humans and gibbons sing like humans and
• 38:29
  Speaker 4: that human communication was originally musical. And that makes sense
• 38:35
  Speaker 4: because you see it in young children whose musical abilities
• 38:40
  Speaker 4: in ontogeny develop before their language abilities. And they have
• 38:46
  Speaker 4: very acute rhythm and melodic perception. And we speak to
• 38:50
  Speaker 4: babies differently. We speak to them in a kind of
• 38:53
  Speaker 4: melodic sing-song tone, what's called motherese.
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: Motherese, yeah.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: So....
• 39:00
  Speaker 4: The musical aspect of humans is unique. And that's one
• 39:06
  Speaker 4: of the reasons I I'm interested in the evolution of
• 39:09
  Speaker 4: music is because I, I love music and I think
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: it's been neglected in evolutionary studies.
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: Not so much recently.
• 39:15
  Speaker 4: There's been a resurgence of research into the evolution of music,
• 39:19
  Speaker 4: which is really a fascinating area.
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: Huh?
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: That is, that is really, really interesting. I i want
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: to see um there's let me let me sort of
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: lift up what i what i let's let's go to
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: what i think of as sort of uh one of
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: the maybe overarching ideas in the book this fact that
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: there are there are two different brain systems one is
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: more ancient and the other is uh the neocortex And
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: they kind of work together somewhat uncomfortably. And the neocortex,
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: which is higher brain functions, can get dissociated from the
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: ancestral layer. And, you know, this is something that Jung
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: talks about repeatedly. He says it so clearly that the
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: result of all psychopathology is being disconnected from what he
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: called the two million year old man. the instinctual self.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: He says it over and over and over again in
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: the collected works. And, and, you know, you find that
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: same thing. And again, in these converging lines of research,
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: the effective neuroscience kind of says something similar. You're coming
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: at it also from the evolutionary basis. And then, and
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: then also there's some very interesting work being done around
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: the use of psychedelics, ritual, these things that help essentially
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: reintegrate these two brain structures. So I may have made
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: a hash of that because this is so far above
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: my pay grade, but maybe you can, if I did,
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: you can restate it in a more accurate way.
• 41:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it might be helpful to link this to the
• 41:09
  Speaker 4: idea of ontogeny and phylogeny to give it a broader
• 41:14
  Speaker 4: evolutionary context for Jung's ideas of these two systems that
• 41:20
  Speaker 4: become dissociated, but ritual functions to integrate them. Human development
• 41:28
  Speaker 4: is extended and that humans grow up much more slowly
• 41:34
  Speaker 4: than chimpanzees. For example, we have a childhood period of growth.
• 41:38
  Speaker 4: We have an adolescent period of growth. Chimpanzees start reproducing
• 41:42
  Speaker 4: around eight years of age, whereas for humans it's delayed
• 41:45
  Speaker 4: and average age of reproduction for females is about 18
• 41:50
  Speaker 4: years of age, although obviously pregnancy can occur earlier. But
• 41:56
  Speaker 4: it means that our life history is extended, and that
• 41:59
  Speaker 4: adolescent period of growth and brain development is crucial because
• 42:02
  Speaker 4: that's when you're given knowledge to become a member of
• 42:07
  Speaker 4: your community. It's like a period of apprenticeship where you're
• 42:11
  Speaker 4: taught the skills you need to become a– productive member
• 42:16
  Speaker 4: of your social group. So that's a really important developmental stage.
• 42:24
  Speaker 4: And over evolutionary time, it seems that onset of sexual
• 42:31
  Speaker 4: maturity and also the period of brain development is longer
• 42:35
  Speaker 4: in human infants and children than in chimpanzees. And then
• 42:39
  Speaker 4: sexual maturity occurs much later. So there's an extension of
• 42:44
  Speaker 4: ontogeny or a lengthening of ontogeny. And that's happened over
• 42:49
  Speaker 4: evolutionary time or phylogeny. So we have this development or
• 42:55
  Speaker 4: this extension of development. But what happens is that during development,
• 42:59
  Speaker 4: there seems to be a kind of a transition that
• 43:02
  Speaker 4: occurs during adolescence, a transition from subcortical effect or emotionally
• 43:09
  Speaker 4: based brain systems to higher cortical brain systems as the
• 43:13
  Speaker 4: conscious ego develops and the default mode network and metacognition
• 43:19
  Speaker 4: and prospection and all of these abilities that account for
• 43:24
  Speaker 4: our kind of demographic expansion and success as a species,
• 43:29
  Speaker 4: if you want to use that term.
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 43:32
  Speaker 4: But those kind of... High executive abilities, which enable us to,
• 43:40
  Speaker 4: a theory of mind, we're able to predict what others
• 43:43
  Speaker 4: are thinking and infer what they're thinking. That will help
• 43:46
  Speaker 4: us cooperate in collaborative groups if we're hunting. It'll help
• 43:50
  Speaker 4: us teach the young, you know, young people how to
• 43:53
  Speaker 4: make tools for hunting or how to learn all of
• 43:57
  Speaker 4: these skills necessary for survival. So it produces what might
• 44:01
  Speaker 4: be called a informational commons as the word they use
• 44:07
  Speaker 4: and that you have a culture where you can store
• 44:08
  Speaker 4: information and then pass that on to the next generation
• 44:13
  Speaker 4: from down the generations. But the point is that this transition,
• 44:19
  Speaker 4: as Jung noted, can actually, from what he would call
• 44:23
  Speaker 4: an unconscious form of life to the emergence of consciousness
• 44:27
  Speaker 4: and the ego, it can actually be traumatic or destabilize
• 44:32
  Speaker 4: the psyche and that it can actually be quite dangerous.
• 44:37
  Speaker 4: So this is a period when you have high incidence,
• 44:40
  Speaker 4: adolescence that is, is a period where you have high
• 44:43
  Speaker 4: incidence of mental illness in young people and It seems
• 44:49
  Speaker 4: to be a result of this emerging new brain system
• 44:53
  Speaker 4: out of the more archaic archetypal brain system. What's the
• 44:58
  Speaker 4: interesting or the really interesting thing about this is that
• 45:02
  Speaker 4: we know from comparative primatology and studies of hominin growth
• 45:08
  Speaker 4: and development, hominins being all of our ancestors going back
• 45:12
  Speaker 4: to chimpanzees, Homo erectus, the Australopithecines, the Neanderthals, all of
• 45:17
  Speaker 4: these other human groups or species, is that as this
• 45:21
  Speaker 4: period was extended, then the two brain systems would have
• 45:25
  Speaker 4: possibly become discordant.
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: But it seems that.
• 45:31
  Speaker 4: This process has been noted by cultures across the world,
• 45:35
  Speaker 4: which is why they have adolescent initiation rights. And it
• 45:39
  Speaker 4: seems that the purpose of the initiation rights is to
• 45:43
  Speaker 4: manage this transition and What the initiation rites tend to do,
• 45:49
  Speaker 4: and this is where some of the neuroimaging from the
• 45:52
  Speaker 4: psychedelics research highlights, is that during initiation rites, and particularly
• 45:59
  Speaker 4: those where indigenous cultures use psychedelics, is it seems to
• 46:03
  Speaker 4: deactivate these more recently evolved brain systems associated with metacognition,
• 46:09
  Speaker 4: the default mode network, ego consciousness. lead to a kind
• 46:14
  Speaker 4: of upsurge, if you like, of these more ancient brain systems.
• 46:18
  Speaker 4: And that's when people going through ritual may experience altered
• 46:24
  Speaker 4: state of consciousness. And by allowing these ancient brain systems
• 46:29
  Speaker 4: to come to the surface, the conscious ego is able
• 46:31
  Speaker 4: to reflect upon them and then integrate them, which is
• 46:35
  Speaker 4: the kind of thing that Jung was talking about with individuation.
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: Right. I noted that you... kind of equated this kind
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: of integration with individuation, which I thought was a very,
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: kind of to me, a new way of thinking about individuation.
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: But I think that's essentially what he's talking about. The
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: integration of the unconscious, yeah.
• 46:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
• 46:56
  Speaker 4: And he said that primitive ritual, the rituals of primitive
• 47:01
  Speaker 4: man is the language that he used. He said that
• 47:04
  Speaker 4: they were a primitive form of psychotherapy.
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: Yes, yep, mm-hmm.
• 47:09
  Speaker 4: And I think this is borne out by a lot
• 47:11
  Speaker 4: of the research in psychedelic neuroscience, where we can actually
• 47:13
  Speaker 4: see by making the ego and advanced cognitive structures go offline,
• 47:20
  Speaker 4: if you like, and bringing these more ancient systems into awareness,
• 47:24
  Speaker 4: you can actually improve mental health dramatically.
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: You know, part of my practice is working with parents
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: whose kids are really struggling and usually these are young
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: adult kids. And when I sort of get the history,
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: it's always like, well, I won't say it's always like this,
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: but it's very often like, she was great. She was wonderful.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: Everything was great until 13. You know, some story like that.
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: And it's really impressed upon me in a kind of
• 47:58
  Speaker 2: experiential way, what you were just talking about, how You know,
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: it really is during adolescence that many of these mental
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: health struggles first emerge. And I know there's some kind
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: of speculation that it was the development of the neocortex
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: that kind of left us uniquely susceptible to things like schizophrenia,
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: that you don't really see schizophrenia among primates, among non-human primates.
• 48:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's true. That's kind of the view
• 48:31
  Speaker 4: that I tend to have. And I think it's a tragedy.
• 48:34
  Speaker 4: It's a major tragedy that young people in our culture
• 48:38
  Speaker 4: are not guided through this phase of development.
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: And they may end up having.
• 48:46
  Speaker 4: Excessive and unhealthy forms of cognitive rumination about their identity
• 48:52
  Speaker 4: and about how other people see them and all of
• 48:56
  Speaker 4: these kind of problems associated with self-consciousness, and they may
• 48:59
  Speaker 4: get stuck in those kind of ruminative patterns and negative
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: thought patterns, which can pull them down into depression and
• 49:08
  Speaker 4: all of those sorts of things. And we don't really
• 49:11
  Speaker 4: have a cultural means by which young people can deal
• 49:16
  Speaker 4: with these problems and integrate that self-awareness the more archaic
• 49:21
  Speaker 4: archetypal self. And I think we fail them massively. Indigenous
• 49:28
  Speaker 4: cultures are really adept at doing this.
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I just wanted to lift that up because
• 49:35
  Speaker 2: as I understood it reading your book, and I thought this, yeah,
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: so that the cultural, and I think this is not,
• 49:43
  Speaker 2: I think this is a pretty standard idea among anthropologists,
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: but it was sort of new to me. See, you
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: can tell me if I've got this right, that the cultural,
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: the evolution of a kind of a cultural tool of, say,
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: initiation rituals kind of arose in concert with these neuroanatomical changes,
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: and they kind of need to exist together. In other words,
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: you kind of need to have adolescent rituals of initiation
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: if you're going to have this more developed neocortex that
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: sits on top of the more ancient brain system. So
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: the cultural thing arose in response to the physical changes
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: as a way of kind of managing that and harmonizing it?
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so. But here's the really interesting thing
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: is that standard evolutionary theory and anthropologists generally who adopt
• 50:47
  Speaker 4: an evolutionary perspective, they see ritual as an adaptation so
• 50:54
  Speaker 4: that it's something that merely evolved, there were genes, for
• 50:59
  Speaker 4: ritual that produced endorphins. And when people do rituals like
• 51:03
  Speaker 4: the Kung Bushmen have rituals, the endorphins are released and
• 51:07
  Speaker 4: that produces social bonding. So they argued that it's an adaptation.
• 51:12
  Speaker 4: Robin Dunbar is kind of one of the prime examples
• 51:14
  Speaker 4: of this orthodox conception of ritual. I find problems with
• 51:19
  Speaker 4: that for the reason that rituals, and we know this
• 51:24
  Speaker 4: from indigenous accounts of what they report happens during ritual,
• 51:30
  Speaker 4: and fMRI studies of people taking psychedelics or entering altered
• 51:38
  Speaker 4: states of consciousness. We know that these advanced cognitive brain
• 51:43
  Speaker 4: systems associated with metacognition and all of these sorts of
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: things that were responsible for our evolutionary success as kind
• 51:52
  Speaker 4: of hunter-gatherers and being able to share information and theory
• 51:57
  Speaker 4: of mind, those adaptations go offline. So if ritual is
• 52:04
  Speaker 4: an adaptation, then why are they specifically designed to obviate
• 52:09
  Speaker 4: the very brain systems that are responsible for our evolutionary success?
• 52:13
  Speaker 4: So I find the orthodox explanation for ritual to be unconvincing.
• 52:19
  Speaker 4: But here's the thing, Jung actually provides a better explanation,
• 52:25
  Speaker 4: in my view, because he sees them as an attempt
• 52:29
  Speaker 4: to integrate these two brain systems.
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yes.
• 52:32
  Speaker 4: Which he wasn't actually engaging with modern evolutionary debates about
• 52:39
  Speaker 4: the adaptive significance of ritual, but his idea that they're
• 52:44
  Speaker 4: designed to integrate two potentially antagonistic brain systems actually accounts
• 52:49
  Speaker 4: for the data much better than, for example, Robin Dunbar's
• 52:52
  Speaker 4: explanation and the orthodox adaptationist accounts. So seeing ritual as
• 52:58
  Speaker 4: a form of primitive psychotherapy, I think has a lot
• 53:02
  Speaker 4: of potential to offer evolutionary researchers and neuroscientists and things
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: like that.
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: And again, the treatment is the integration of these two systems.
• 53:16
  Speaker 4: I wonder.
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: If I can just read a quote from Panksepp and
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: Biven that you have in the book that I, it
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: struck me for a couple of reasons. So you start off,
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: as they write, such an approach seeks to illuminate how
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: our most powerful emotional feelings, the primal emotional affects, arise
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: from ancient neural networks situated in brain regions below the
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: neocortical thinking cap. The neocortex is an organ that generates
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: complex cognitive abilities as well as culture, and it is
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: definitively important for complex perceptions, learning, and cognitions. The neocortex
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: is responsible for almost all of the cultural milestones that
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: human beings have been able to achieve. The cortex could
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: achieve nothing without an evolved foundational mind deeper in the brain.
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: Those....
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: Ancient neural territories below the neocortex constitute our ancestral mind,
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: the affective mind, which is evolutionarily specialized and that we
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: share with many other animals. It is archaeological treasure, for
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: it contains the sources of some of our most powerful feelings.
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: Those ancient subcortical brain systems are precious, multi-hued jewels. for
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: anyone wishing to understand the roots of all the basic
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: values we have ever known and will experience in our lives.
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: The affects are the foundations upon which the beauty and
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: ugliness of life has been constructed. So first of all,
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: I mean, and you point this out, it sounds so Jungian,
• 54:59
  Speaker 2: you know, what Panksepp is saying there. And he's really
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: describing an experience of the numinous. that these multi-hued jewels,
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: these profound experiences, that's exactly what Jung, I think, is
• 55:12
  Speaker 2: talking about when he talks about numinosity. And so an
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: experience of the numinous arises from the more ancient ancestral mind.
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: And maybe what's important about a numinous experience, and why
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: Jung said it's the approach to the numinous that heals,
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: is because it is that moment of integration.
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right.
• 55:39
  Speaker 4: If Jung was alive today, I think he could have
• 55:43
  Speaker 4: very well written that. It's very resonant with his thinking.
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: And there's also the metaphors of archaeological treasure, which from
• 55:52
  Speaker 4: Jung's famous dream when he descended the levels of the house,
• 55:55
  Speaker 4: he was going down into different archaeological layers of the site,
• 55:59
  Speaker 4: which he equated with various historical stages. So There's affinities
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: there as well as to like the archaeological layering of
• 56:10
  Speaker 4: the mind. And they're very much of a piece, that
• 56:14
  Speaker 4: comment and Jung's ideas. Panscap did write an article. He
• 56:19
  Speaker 4: passed away recently, but in 2017, he wrote an article
• 56:22
  Speaker 4: with some colleagues saying that Jung's ideas were quite prescient
• 56:28
  Speaker 4: and convergent with modern studies in brain evolution and neuroscience.
• 56:34
  Speaker 2: So I'm going to change tracks a little bit here.
• 56:36
  Speaker 2: Your book covers so much ground, and it's all related
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: in this really fascinating way. There was a quote that
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: you cite in the book from Abigail Tucker, who I
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: guess is a... Is she an anthropologist?
• 56:54
  Speaker 4: I think she's a popular science writer, but she did
• 56:57
  Speaker 4: a lot of reading in the... neurobiology of maternal emotion
• 57:05
  Speaker 4: and attachment. He wrote a book called Mum Genes.
• 57:09
  Speaker 3: Oh, okay. Great.
• 57:11
  Speaker 2: So here's the quote, mother love is the planet's original romance.
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: What does that mean? And how do we understand that
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: in relation to everything else we've been talking about?
• 57:23
  Speaker 4: Yeah, well, there's the idea that the first form of
• 57:28
  Speaker 4: social bonding in mammals is possibly became the basis of
• 57:39
  Speaker 4: other forms of social life particularly in humans and the
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: system that facilitates social bonding in mammals is the oxytocin
• 57:48
  Speaker 4: system and as an infant and you'll find this in gorillas,
• 57:52
  Speaker 4: in elephants, in mice, as the infant suckles at the
• 57:55
  Speaker 4: breast the hypothalamus will release oxytocin in the mother's brain
• 58:00
  Speaker 4: and in the infant's brain, and it's those kind of
• 58:04
  Speaker 4: pleasure producing chemicals that establish the social bond. And we
• 58:09
  Speaker 4: share those brain systems with other mammals, and that's why
• 58:14
  Speaker 4: I think they're, well, biologists would call them homologous, but
• 58:18
  Speaker 4: I would say that we can call them archetypal because
• 58:21
  Speaker 4: they're shared across species and they're shared across human cultures.
• 58:27
  Speaker 4: So that provides a basis for understanding our affinity with
• 58:33
  Speaker 4: other animals. But the difference with humans is we've repurposed
• 58:38
  Speaker 4: those neurobiological substrates in other forms of social bonding. So,
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: for example, during orgasm, males will have higher levels of
• 58:50
  Speaker 4: oxytocin secreted in the brain, which will establish... A bond
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: with the partner that they've been with. And there's experiments
• 59:01
  Speaker 4: in little prairie voles. There are small little mammalian species
• 59:05
  Speaker 4: and the species that is pair bonded has upregulated oxygenation.
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: Receptors.
• 59:11
  Speaker 4: And the species that is solitary, that doesn't, the males
• 59:15
  Speaker 4: don't bond with the females. They don't have that system upregulated.
• 59:19
  Speaker 4: But also fathers, when they interact with their newborns, they
• 59:23
  Speaker 4: will have upregulated oxytocin in their brain. What seems to
• 59:28
  Speaker 4: have occurred is what is essentially maternal nurturant neurobiology or
• 59:36
  Speaker 4: neurochemistry in the human lineage of evolutionary time that's been
• 59:41
  Speaker 4: repurposed to establish paternal attachment to infants or what we
• 59:47
  Speaker 4: would call fatherhood. Now, the interesting thing about looking at Jung,
• 59:52
  Speaker 4: he postulated that the male unconscious was feminine, There was
• 59:57
  Speaker 4: the anima that was below the more differentiated ego consciousness
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 4: of the male and that it was essentially feminine. This
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 4: idea of repurposing the maternal neurobiology in male social psychology
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 4: and male parenting behavior suggests that some kind of support
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 4: for Jung's idea of a of an unconscious feminine component
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 4: in the male psyche. So that's one of the important
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 4: ways I think we can start to think about his work.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 4: And it makes a lot of sense. It's supported by
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 4: empirical data. And, yeah, I think it's a fruitful way
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 4: to approach Jung's ideas.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: So, you know, the idea of anima and animus leading
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 2: in there has– has been a somewhat controversial one in
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: Jungian thought. But you make some points about perhaps a
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: way of thinking about innate differences between males and females
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 2: and what this might mean psychologically. So what do you
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: have to say about anima and animus?
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 4: Well, I think that, like I said, I think there's
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 4: a case to be made for the a feminized kind
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 4: of more nurturant aspect to the male psyche that's evolved,
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 4: which would differentiate us from, say, chimpanzees and bonobos to
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 4: a large degree. I know feminists have been critical of
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 4: Jung's theory of an unconscious male component of the female psyche.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 4: I think there's evidence that Males, often there'll be feminine
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 4: figures in dreams and females, male figures. So there may
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 4: be a sexual attraction component. But the criticisms from feminists
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 4: has been that any woman who seems to have an
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 4: opinion or is a bit forthright is wrong. kind of
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 4: under an animus obsession or possessed by an animus complex
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 4: or something like that. Which I can see their point
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 4: because I think female aggression exists. Evolutionary biologists call it
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 4: lactational aggression. So females will often become aggressive when they
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 4: have newborns and you'll find this in other mammals. And
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 4: that's a different type of aggression to males.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: So to....
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 4: Call female assertiveness or female aggression to call it a
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 4: male behaviour, I'm sort of a bit sceptical of that.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 4: And that's where I kind of concede that I think
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 4: the feminist critique has a point. What I tend to
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 4: do more so is focus on Jung's conception of eros
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 4: and logos, which is the male and female duality. And
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 4: that has been critiqued quite a bit But I think
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 4: the critique is misguided. Jung was interested in differences between
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 4: the sexes and what he called a general observation that
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 4: there are psychological differences between the sexes. Females may be
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 4: more prone to relationship and kind of affective or emotional bonding,
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 4: whereas males may be more involved in systematizing and different
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 4: forms of cognition. This is all supported by most research
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 4: in sex-based differences, experimental psychology, neuroscience. We know that there
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 4: are average differences between the sexes. The distribution is bimodal,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 4: which means you have two bell curves with an average difference.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 4: There are average differences between the sexes, but there are
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 4: areas of overlap, so you'll get a more feminine male,
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 4: for example, and a more masculine female, or they're similar
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 4: to the average of the opposite sex. But that's just
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 4: an observation about variation. The average differences still exist, and
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 4: you can see that in demographic data where they look
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 4: at do psychological testing, job preferences, all of these things.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 4: And then when you look at the anthropological data, like,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 4: All cultures have a sex-based division of labor. They have
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 4: sex-based symbolism in their rituals, in their mythology. All of
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 4: these things occur cross-culturally. And there's been a kind of
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: tendency to attribute the sex binary to Western patriarchy or
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 4: some kind of oppressive system that's developed in the West.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 4: That can't be the case because it exists in indigenous cultures.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: It exists in all the cultures. that we know of.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: It's universal. It's archetypal.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: It's universal and it's archetypal. Yeah.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 4: Um, but I, so basically the social constructionists and the,
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 4: the Jungians who adopt the social, social constructionist, um, perspective
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 4: arguing that the differences that we observe in our culture
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 4: are due to enculturation and, um, internalization of sexist.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 3: Stereotypes, all of that sort of thing.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 4: What they do is they, like, you can have an
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 4: oppressive social system that oppresses women, for example, or that
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 4: has sexist stereotypes. That cultural system may exploit biological differences
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 4: between the sexes, but it did not create them. And
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 4: this is the fundamental error in reasoning that the social
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 4: constructionists make, is that the biological differences differences that are
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 4: bodily based, they're associated with their reproductive biology, they exist
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 4: prior to the cultural meanings that they can be inscribed,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 4: that our bodies are inscribed with. And those cultural meanings
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 4: can be oppressive, but the cultural meanings don't create the
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 4: biological sex differences. And the problem is you have a
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 4: strand of Jungian thought, this social constructionist view of sex differences,
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 4: and they deny any biological basis to differences between male
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 4: and females. And it's a kind of a betrayal of
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 4: Jung's legacy because he sought to ground his ideas in
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 4: evolutionary biology. Modern science knows that there are differences between
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 4: the sexes, but Jungian scholarship has got itself into this
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 4: unusual situation where it thinks that acknowledging biological differences Differences
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 4: between the sexes somehow give sucker to a conservative or
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 4: reactionary ideology and that it's, you know, this is what
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 4: right wing people do. And because they see themselves as
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 4: left wing or progressive, they seek to deny that there
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 4: are any bodily based or biologically based differences between the sexes.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 2: And to pick up on that, you know, you said
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: this sort of, you made this kind of strong assertion
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 2: that it's a betrayal of Jung's legacy. But I think
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: it's true. And I want to say why. It's because
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: one of the underlying ideas in Jung, this idea that
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: goes to the archetypes and the collective unconscious, is that
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 2: there is a universality to human experience. And actually, I
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 2: don't see how you can have a psychology unless you
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: believe that there's a kind of universality to what it
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: means to be human. And in particular, linking it to
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 2: the anthropology and the paleoanthropology is we're acknowledging our relationship
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 2: with our ancestors who came before us, with other animals,
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 2: with other mammals. And this is both, as you've said, true.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 2: But it's also healing. It's this acknowledgement of the universal
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: that often helps us bear suffering, bear loss and grief,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: because we recognize that the experience is universal. There's something extraordinarily,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: deeply comforting about that, because that's the only way we
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: can make meaning out of it. is if we recognize
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 2: that it has a universal aspect to it. So to
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 2: cut that off intellectually really leaves us adrift without being
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 2: able to make these connections and without being able to
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: make meaning.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's true.
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 4: My view is that there are universals, there are these
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 4: sex-based universals, but they manifest themselves differently in different cultures.
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 4: So there is the cultural differences, which we have to acknowledge.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 4: But I think there is, when you get to the
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 4: deeper layers of the psyche, then you're going to find
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 4: more and more affinity. And that's why you tend to
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 4: see in ritual and altered states of consciousness where deeper
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 4: archetypal brain systems seem to come to the surface, the
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 4: imagery seems to be similar and the experiences are similar.
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 4: And for example, the experience of the numinous that is
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 4: cultivated in ritual in indigenous cultures and cross-culturally, is seems
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 4: to be a universal experience. And the only way that
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 4: could exist in geographically isolated areas is if there was
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 4: a shared neurobiology underlying it. So when we talk about universals,
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 4: there's many ways to approach it, but I'm partial to
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 4: approaching it from the point of view of ritual life,
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 4: altered states of consciousness, psychedelic neuroscience and these kinds of things,
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 4: which do show cross-cultural affinities quite plainly. And one of
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 4: the problems with the modern West is we're a kind
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 4: of outlier in terms of cultures globally in that we
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 4: don't tend to cultivate these domains of experience. So there's
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 4: been a kind of splitting in the psychics. And this
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 4: has occurred specifically since the Enlightenment, as Jung argued, that
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 4: the age of reason and the emphasis on rational consciousness
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 4: kind of split us off from these more archaic brain
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 4: systems that were valued in earlier periods of history and
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 4: valued by other cultures. The idea that modernity has kind
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 4: of severed us, if you like, from these more numinous
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 4: archetypal experiences has That was part of his critique of
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 4: the Enlightenment. So he was critiquing the European Enlightenment and
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 4: its overemphasis on reason and rationality. The postmodernists and the
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 4: social constructionists are also critiquing the Western Enlightenment, what they
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 4: call Western modernity, and the growth of science and all
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 4: of those sorts of things. The postmodernists and the social constructionists,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 4: and this applies to the post-Jungians who have been influenced
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 4: by postmodernism, is they take Jung's critique of the Enlightenment
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 4: and they accept that, his critique of Enlightenment rationalism, but
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 4: then they don't accept his interest in science. So they
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 4: reject science and they reject the scientific basis of Jung's thinking.
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: Jung would have disagreed with them.
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 4: Yep.
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: Because Jung... While he was critical.
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 4: Of the Enlightenment and he saw that a kind of
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 4: dissociation occurred between archetypal experience and the rational conscious mind,
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 4: he didn't believe that that means we abandon the Enlightenment project.
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 4: What he wanted to do is he wanted to use
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 4: the tools of science, research in anthropology, research in paleoanthropology,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 4: to provide an evolutionary critique of that very dissociation that
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 4: the Enlightenment and science produced. So there's this kind of
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 4: paradox in Jung's thinking where he was very, very critical
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 4: of the scientific and rationalistic outlook, but he wanted to
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 4: use that same very scientific outlook and approach, an empirically-based
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 4: scientific approach, to critique the dissociation that developed in our culture.
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 4: as a result of the Enlightenment and the consequent history.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 4: So he was very much in favour of science, in
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 4: favour of empiricism, and the attempt of post-Jungians to deconstruct
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 4: this aspect of his thinking and to kind of get
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: rid of it, if you like, I think is a
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 4: betrayal of his legacy. And it also deprives the broader
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 4: community who's interested in evolutionary ideas and our our ancient past,
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 4: it deprives them of having a modern way to think
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 4: about Jung in terms of contemporary research in the evolutionary sciences.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: You know, in fact, in some ways, Jung's whole work
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 2: was about trying to integrate the non-rational and the scientific.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: And he had this sort of moment early in, you know,
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: as a young adult trying to decide what field to
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 2: go in. And he was choosing between medicine and I
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 2: can't remember now what else. But he had the dream
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: of the radiolarian that said, you need to study medicine,
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: you need to study science. And he was always trying
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 2: to be the empiricist to notice what he saw, but
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 2: then sort of see if he could think about it
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 2: scientifically without, as he said, he didn't want to explain
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 2: it away. But he wanted to bring a scientific attitude
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: to it. And of course, one of the most fruitful
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: areas in which that occurred with was his theory of
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: synchronicity and his work with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. So
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 2: this was a lifelong orientation that Jung held of making
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: room both for the scientific and the non-rational.
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 4: And that really is the basis of my attraction to
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 4: Jung because I could see he was making room for poetry.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 4: He was making room for music, for ritual, for aesthetic experience.
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 4: But he was also an evolutionary empiricist. So he kind
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 4: of brought the two sides of our kind of culture
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 4: together and sort of synthesized them.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: I think like.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 4: When you look at the Red Book and he had
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 4: his kind of confrontation with the unconscious, and he was
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 4: doing these paintings and writing these texts out to accompany
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 4: the paintings, he seems to have made a decision to
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 4: not portray his experiences in a mode that was incomprehensible
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 4: to his contemporaries. And his contemporaries understood the language of science.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 4: They understood empirical investigations. So he sought to make room
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 4: for the experiences he had in the Red Book, but
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 4: in terms of the language of modernity. He did not
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 4: want to reject modernity. He did not want to reject
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 4: the Enlightenment. He did not want to reject rationalism. He
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 4: wanted to use those tools to understand the numinous dimensions
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 4: of human experience. And that is really where the strength
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 4: of his work lies, because as researchers now are getting
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 4: a broader conception of human consciousness, looking at Eastern meditative practices,
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 4: looking at indigenous shamanism, and then analyzing altered states of consciousness,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 4: for example, subjects who have been given psychedelic compounds, they're
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 4: able to empirically analyze and understand the deeper unconscious layers
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 4: of the mind but in but in a laboratory setting
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 4: and getting results that are able to be replicated and
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 4: empirically verified and the results are very much in accord
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 4: with um what jung said about the nature of the unconscious.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: Well and of course this approach that we've identified where
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 2: he wanted to um keep hold of modernity and scientific
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 2: inquiry and make room for the other thing is exactly
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 2: sort of put into practice what we've been talking about,
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 2: about the integration of the neocortex and the older affective
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: brain regions. So he was living that.
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think it's extremely important because.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 4: You know, it's not only in academia and in Jungian
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 4: studies that what I'd call the epistemological nihilism of the
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 4: postmodern approach has taken hold, but it's taken hold in
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 4: broader society where people are in many ways justifiably critiquing
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 4: aspects of the West, of colonialism and various forms of
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 4: oppression and things like that, but they're not really looking
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 4: at the positives of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 4: and how that enabled us to have medicine and overcome
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 4: a lot of superstition and things like this. So you've
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 4: got this polarity in the culture more broadly, but Jung's
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 4: ideas provide a way.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 3: In which we can bring these two sides of.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 4: The culture together and have a have a um a
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 4: critical analysis of the enlightenment and ration western modernity and
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 4: enlightenment rationalism while also um utilizing those tools in our
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 4: understanding of um history and culture and all those sorts
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 4: of things.
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 2: So it really is about on a very profound level
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 2: a synthesis.
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 3: I think so, yes, yes.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 4: And not just, when people talk about individuation, they tend
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 4: to talk about individuation as a process that the individual
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 4: goes through, but I see it as a historical project
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 4: and that we are going through a process of individuation
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 4: where science has kind of reached a place where it
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 4: becomes over-rationalistic and then it has to kind of use
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 4: its tools to investigate how we lost those more ancient
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 4: aspects of the mind and reintegrate them culturally into our institutions,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 4: our educational institutions, our academic institutions.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 2: I think we're in the territory of Ian McGilchrist and
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 2: the master and his emissary.
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, very, very much so. I think Ian's work is great.
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 4: I have a lot of sympathy for it. He tends
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 4: to emphasize the hemispheres and I tend to emphasize more
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 4: recent secondary process brain systems and more archetypal processes. But
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 4: the right hemisphere is more linked to subcortical brain systems,
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 4: more involved in music and social emotion. So there is
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 4: a kind of component to the hemisphere theory that Ian
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 4: talks about that I'm talking about in my book. And
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 4: I think they really read together, they would merge quite well.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 4: But they emphasize different aspects of a very similar phenomenon.
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 2: So if it's okay, there's a couple of things that
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 2: are hanging for me that I want to go back
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 2: and pick up on and ask you about. One is,
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: you were talking a minute ago about these kind of
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 2: mystical experiences, ritual, psychedelic experiences, and how they all share
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 2: something in common. And my question to you is, would
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: you put dreaming in a similar category?
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. There's a fair bit of research on this.
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 4: Robin Carhart-Harris, who was doing the neuroimaging with psychedelics and
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 4: developing psychedelic therapies, and also Alan Hobson, who's probably among
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 4: the world's premier dream researchers.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 3: He's a neuroscientist.
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 4: And they both believe that mystical states and dreams are
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 4: both reversions to primary process modes of thinking, which is
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 4: exactly what Jung was saying, is that dream and ritual
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 4: is a kind of regression to phylogenetically or evolutionarily ancient
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 4: brain systems, or what we would now call primary process
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 4: brain systems, as opposed to secondary process systems associated with
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 4: ego consciousness. So I think there's, and there's also some
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 4: people argue that there's a parallel with psychosis, that psychosis
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 4: and dreams and rituals are kind of, represent a similar
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 4: kind of reversion to primary process systems.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 2: Although it's interesting because I remember McGilchrist talks about psychosis
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 2: being very typical of a sort of overly rigid left
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: brain way of seeing the world. But the important thing
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: I think about dreaming as a, as like you said,
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 2: as sort of akin to a mystical experience is that,
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: so we, if we're looking for this way to integrate,
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 2: we have this gift that we wake up with every morning.
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 2: of this kind of experience of this archetypal brain that's
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: been gifted to us in the form of images that
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 2: we can seek to have a relationship with and to
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: bring our neocortical thinking function to these images as a
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: way of possibly bringing about this integration, which I think
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 2: is why DreamWorks is so healing.
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 4: There's really interesting work that ayahuasca is a psychedelic that's
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 4: taken by indigenous people in the Amazon. And when they
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 4: take ayahuasca, it's a psychedelic like LSD or magic mushrooms.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 4: And they have rituals where the shamans sing. And when
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 4: you take the ayahuasca, you experience very, very vivid and
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 4: emotionally potent imagery. And you'll see whole scenes. If a
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 4: person suffered from trauma, for example, they'll often see the
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 4: events that cause the trauma and by seeing them be
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 4: able to process them and that's what brings the healing.
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 4: But researchers have given people ayahuasca and then put them
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 4: under an fMRI doing neuroimaging. And what they've found is
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 4: when people are experiencing these visions under ayahuasca, that the
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 4: posterior part of the brain, which is the visual region
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 4: of the brain, information starts flowing forward from the visual
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 4: region of the brain. And the more ancient subcortical, affective
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 4: or emotionally based regions of the brain, what I would
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 4: call the archetypal regions of the brain, there's information flowing
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 4: upwards into awareness. So you get feed forward from the
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 4: visual cortex and you get feed upwards from these ancient
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 4: emotional brain systems, which results in these emotionally potent forms
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 4: of visual imagery. Now, when you look at Jung's Red Book,
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 4: that's exactly what he's talking about. He's talking about emotionally
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 4: potent forms of imagery. And in the book, I noticed
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 4: the similarities between Jung's Red Book and the paintings of
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 4: indigenous people in Peru, and they show very similar kinds
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 4: of patterns and very similar kinds of material. And I
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 4: think it's because during... And Jung seemed to enter these
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 4: altered states of consciousness naturally. As far as we know,
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 4: I don't think he was taking psychedelics. But his confrontation
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 4: with the unconscious shows deep similarities with these emotionally potent.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 3: Hallucinations.
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 4: Hallucinations is probably the wrong word, but this emotionally potent
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 4: visual imagery that's experienced during trance states.
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 3: So.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, you can go on an ayahuasca quest, you
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 2: can cultivate trance states, or you can just do dream work.
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 2: Or do all of them, but dream work is easily available.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 2: That's a wonderful thing about it. So if I can
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: go back and pick up on one other thing. We
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 2: were talking before about, you know, Anima and Animus, maybe
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 2: the feminist critique of the concept of the animus uh
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 2: has some legitimacy and but you said you know but
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 2: eros and logos really work so could you just talk
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 2: for a minute about um maybe how you see that
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 2: in terms of some of the stuff we've been talking
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 2: about and then how do you operationalize that concept in
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: terms of union psychology.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 4: I see, for example, there's research that's been done by
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 4: Simon Baron-Cohen, who is a researcher. He's actually the brother
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 4: of Sacha Baron-Cohen, who's Ali G.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 3: So Ali G.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 4: 's brother or Bharat's brother. But he's a researcher in
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 4: sex differences and autism research.
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 2: I didn't realize they were brothers. I always thought, oh,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 2: that's an unusual name, but yeah.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 4: Interesting Christmas dinner at that family's house.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 4: So, yeah, so he's got a psychometric measure, which he
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 4: calls the empathy quotient. And females, on average, score much
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 4: higher on the empathy quotient than males. And that would
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 4: correspond to Jung's idea of Eros as being a more feminine,
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 4: tendency associated with emotional relationship. What they found is males
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 4: have a much more systematizing tendency. So they're much better
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 4: at systematizing and they're kind of associated things with maths
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 4: and all of those kinds of kinds of qualities. But
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 4: these are average differences. So it doesn't mean that males
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 4: can only do the systematizing and females can only do
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 4: the empathy. There's a lot of overlap and females can
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 4: do the systematizing, but the males that are good at it,
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 4: there seems to be more of them. So the distribution
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 4: is weighted towards males. And there's also evidence that females
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 4: are just as good at some of these tasks, such
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 4: as mathematics and things like that. They do, often they
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 4: will do as well in school as the boys, but
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 4: their interests are different. So Females tend to have an
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 4: interest for what is called animate objects or animate things,
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 4: and males on average will have a preference for things.
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 4: And this manifests itself in females, for example, in occupational
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 4: situations where females tend to gravitate more towards psychology or
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 4: the life sciences like biology and these kind of fields
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 4: where in the US now in universities, they're They're enrolling
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 4: in these disciplines and far outperforming the males. But you
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 4: get males on average tending more towards IT and engineering
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 4: and these kinds of things. And Eric Newman actually, he
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 4: said that logos is the systematizing power of the male
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 4: brain that led to the evolution of Homo sapiens. And
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 4: he associated it with logos. or masculine consciousness. So I
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 4: think there's a lot of support for these kind of
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 4: average differences, what Jung called general differences. They are generally true.
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 4: And Anthony Stevens said they're statistically valid. in his analysis
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 4: of these tendencies. But again, there's been a tendency in
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 4: Jungian scholarship to reject the notion of eros and logos,
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 4: that these are social constructs of an oppressive hegemonic Western patriarchy,
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 4: and that all of the differences between males and females
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 4: are socially constructed, and to say otherwise means you're a
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 4: reactionary conservative. I don't really accept that. I don't take
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 4: that argument seriously. And I think that the concept of
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 4: Eros and Logos has a lot to recommend itself, particularly
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 4: when you're looking at anthropology of hunter-gatherers because they don't–
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 4: they've not read any Foucault or Judith Butler, so thankfully.
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 4: So they don't see– sex differences between males and females
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 4: as a social construct, they actually structure their kinship systems
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 4: around it. Their symbolism is basically elaborations on biological differences
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 4: between the males. You find a lot of feminine image
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 4: or female-based imagery. For example, menstrual blood is considered to
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 4: be the vital source of life and fertility. People in
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 4: Indigenous cultures will use ochre to paint their bodies to
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 4: symbolise fertility. So the female reproduction and female biology is
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 4: actually elaborated at the symbolic and the ritual level in
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 4: Indigenous cultures. And you find similar kind of themes around
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 4: male hunting and male-specific activities in Indigenous cultures.
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 3: So this idea that.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 4: The concept of Veros and Logos is socially constructed. It's
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 4: an idiosyncratically Western notion, which is ironic given these theorists
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 4: claim to be deconstructing Western hegemony, yet they're just developing
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 4: another Western ideology that other cultures would not share in.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, so I really appreciate all that. And
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 2: maybe one way to sort of summarize it is that
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 2: typically women are going to have easier access to so-called
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 2: eros qualities and men will have easier access to logos.
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 2: And what Jung tells us is that it's very important
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 2: to sort of develop the eros those qualities that are
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 2: not sort of easily accessible. So in terms of coming
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 2: into psychological wholeness, so for men who are typically logos
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 2: systematizing oriented to develop their feeling function, and for women
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 2: who may be more relationally oriented, dystypically to lean into
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 2: the kind of systematizing logos, that sort of thing.
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 3: Exactly, exactly.
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 4: And Jung was at pains to emphasize that these are
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 4: not necessarily qualities that are characteristic of the sexes. They
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 4: are qualities which both sexes have, but they're differentiated to
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 4: different degrees. And like you said, to cultivate the kind
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 4: of contrasexual energies within the unconscious is kind of, part
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 4: of the process of individuation. So for a male to
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 4: become more acquainted with the feminine dimension of existence is
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 4: very important. We can see this in indigenous rituals. Often
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 4: the symbolism of male initiation is that the young boys
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 4: are buried in a kind of hole in the ground
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 4: with leaves on it that represents a uterus and they're
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 4: symbolically reborn from childhood into adulthood as they go through
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 4: the initiation rites. So there's all of this kind of
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 4: female symbolism associated with uterine symbolism and blood symbolism in
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 4: male ritual in indigenous cultures. So there seems to be
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 4: a kind of an attempt to try and bring the
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 4: masculine and feminine together through ritual life, which again, when
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 4: you're looking at this stuff, Jung's ideas, it makes a
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 4: lot of sense of the anthropological fieldwork.
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's certainly not that Jung is saying that
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 2: women are a certain way and should be that way.
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 2: It's not proscriptive. In fact, it's kind of the opposite
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 2: sort of saying, yeah, you might have a tendency to
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 2: be this way. Your psychological task is to retain that,
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 2: don't reject it, but also develop the other thing.
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right. And some women will have more logos
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 4: than some men.
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 4: There will be women who are particularly gender non-conforming. Women
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 4: may identify more with male typical behaviors and social roles
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 4: and same with gender non-conforming males. So there's overlap, but
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 4: these average differences are very pronounced and it's kind of
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 4: anti-intellectual to deny them.
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: And you were mentioning all the kind of cross-cultural research
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 2: just to say, and you mentioned this in your book,
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 2: there's also evidence of these sex differences in primatology.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 2: So again, the chimpanzees and the bonobos are not reading
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 2: Judith Butler.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 3: Exactly. Right.
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 4: Like sex-based differences is part of organic life. Like it's everywhere. Flowers, animals,
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 4: like you have sperm and you have ova. Like there's
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 4: males and there's females.
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 2: Like Yeah, there it is. And it's a good thing
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 2: to start with if we're going to understand some of this. So,
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 2: you know, we've been talking for a while and we've
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 2: really only just scratched the surface. There's so much in
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 2: my notes we didn't even get to, but I feel
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 2: like I should let you go because it's very late
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 2: in Australia. But I just, I want to close by
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 2: saying one of the things that I find really moving
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 2: about your work and your approach is that, so here
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 2: you were, you know, a young man, and you had
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 2: this experience with the birds during your recital. And you
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 2: maybe didn't do anything with it right away, but eventually
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 2: what you've done is you've done exactly what Jung did,
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 2: which is you've taken this mystical experience, you've honored it,
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 2: and then you've brought a scientific understanding to it, not
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 2: in a way to explain it away, or to undo it,
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 2: but to understand it more deeply. So I feel like
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 2: you're really following in Jung's footsteps.
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 4: Well, I learned that lesson from him, that you don't
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 4: reject the culture of modernity. You don't reject the culture
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 4: that you live in. You try to understand these experiences
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 4: in terms of your own culture. And I also want.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 4: Our scientific paradigms to be able to incorporate these dimensions
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 4: of experience into our understanding of human psychology and human evolution.
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 4: I love evolutionary studies, I love paleoanthropology, but I also
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 4: think that the evolutionary sciences, it's getting better, but it
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 4: tends not to acknowledge this domain of experience, what we
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 4: call the numinous. So I think that is a kind
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 4: of oversight of our scientific paradigms. And I would like
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 4: to see them incorporate these kind of aspects of consciousness
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 4: into our understanding of the mind. And I think Jung
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 4: was a, he was 100 years ahead of his time
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 4: in analyzing these kind of phenomena and trying to provide
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 4: an evolutionary explanation of them. And it seems now that
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 4: only science is catching up with him.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 2: Well, and thanks in good measure to you and your
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 2: synthesizing approach. So the book is Carl Jung and the
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 2: Evolutionary Sciences, A New Vision for Analytical Psychology by Gary Clark. Gary,
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 2: is there a place where people can find you if
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 2: they want to learn more about you?
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 3: I have ResearchGate.
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 4: I have a lot of my published articles and the
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 4: book and academia as well. And the books, you know,
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 4: you can buy the book from Routledge or Amazon or whatever.
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it is such a delight. So it's wonderfully meaty,
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 2: but it's also accessible. So I really highly recommend it.
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 2: And I just want to thank you so much for
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 2: joining us.
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 3: No worries.
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. To submit a dream, suggest an episode topic,
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 2: or join our mailing list, visit our website, thisjungianlife.com. If
• 1:38:11
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