Latest / This Jungian Life Podcast / Donald Kalsched – Can running our minds like a democracy save us?

Transcript

Donald Kalsched – Can running our minds like a democracy save us? · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:01
  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
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.
• 0:22
  Speaker 3: I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
• 0:27
  Speaker 4: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: Today we have a wonderful guest that will be joining
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: us for the second time, Don Kalschad. He's going to
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: be talking about inner and outer democracy and the threat
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: of authoritarianism, which are his reflections on the psychological factors
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: at play in this polarized world. You can learn more
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: about these ideas in a book called Cultural Complexes and
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: the Soul of America. Don has a more fulsome essay
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: on this called Wrestling with Angels. And he's also put
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: this forward in a wonderful webinar. And you can find
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: that at aros.org slash wjwebinars. And we'll have those links
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: in the show notes. So for those of you that
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: may just be meeting Don for the first time, we
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: know Don through our wonderful training process. Don has been
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: an extraordinary supporter and contributor and just the leprechaun of
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: our hearts.
• 1:46
  Speaker 5: Throughout the training. So I'll just say a little bit
• 1:52
  Speaker 5: about Don. He was born in Wisconsin and went to
• 1:57
  Speaker 5: the University of Wisconsin and got his first degree in
• 2:01
  Speaker 5: philosophy there. He went to Union Theological Seminary in New York,
• 2:06
  Speaker 5: where he got his M.
• 2:07
  Speaker 4: Div.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: Degree with a specialty in psychology and religion, which, of course,
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: all of those things set him up beautifully to become
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: a Jungian analyst. He was a clinical psychologist, earned that
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: degree at Fordham University, and his Ph.D. studies were done
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: at the C.G. Jung Institute of New York with a
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: specialty in narcissism and its treatment. He's been the head
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: of various institutions. He's facilitated trainings both for psychoanalysts and
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: Jungian analysts. And Don has made a substantial contribution to
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: the way that Jungians conceptualize trauma, how the archetypal dynamics
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: that we all are so interested in as Jungians play
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: a central role in how we survive trauma and what
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: we then need to overcome as a result of that.
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: And so we are, could not be more thrilled to
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: share an hour or so with Don talking about this
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: next topic, which is so important to all of us.
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: So Don, hello.
• 3:25
  Speaker 6: Hello. Good to be here.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: And I just want to say too that when we
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: were in training, Don ran a case control colloquium. That
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: was the prize. If you could get into Don's control colloquium,
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: you were counted among the fortunate. I was not that fortunate,
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: but he was so popular always among the trainees. I'm
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: sure that's still true. So we're delighted to have you.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: And before we launch into the topic, I just want
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: to remind everyone about our Patreon. You can become a
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: patron and support us for a small amount of money
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: each month. And we make little mini episodes every week
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: for you to enjoy. For example, this week, we're going
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: to be talking about a question submitted by a patron.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: about ways to, uh, psychologically heal outside of therapy. Therapy
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: is expensive. It's not available to everyone. So what are
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: some other ways that we can grow into wholeness? So
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: we'll be talking about that in our special episode.
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: So Don, where can we put a first footstep in
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: this topic?
• 4:39
  Speaker 6: Well, let me start us out by just some general reflections. Maybe, um, Obviously,
• 4:45
  Speaker 6: my interest in this question of inner and outer democracy
• 4:48
  Speaker 6: and the threats of polarization has been stimulated by the
• 4:54
  Speaker 6: political situation in our country and in the world, really,
• 4:57
  Speaker 6: since probably the early part of this decade, 2012, 13, 14,
• 5:05
  Speaker 6: and certainly 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. We've
• 5:10
  Speaker 6: seen an increasing extremification of an increasing polarization, an increasing
• 5:20
  Speaker 6: what David Brooks calls mean world, antagonism, denigration of the other,
• 5:28
  Speaker 6: lack of civility, breakdown in those institutions that support our
• 5:33
  Speaker 6: communication with each other, and an increasing reversion really to simplifications, oversimplifications.
• 5:42
  Speaker 6: The problems of our time, in the world and in
• 5:44
  Speaker 6: the nation are extremely complex. And yet our political discourse
• 5:49
  Speaker 6: reduces these very complex and difficult nuanced problems to a
• 5:54
  Speaker 6: bumper sticker or to a Twitter feed. This is the
• 6:00
  Speaker 6: dumbing down really of our conversation. And of course, social
• 6:04
  Speaker 6: media has a lot to do with this because we
• 6:06
  Speaker 6: can all hide or find refuge in our silos of
• 6:10
  Speaker 6: like-minded people and we can be liked for our opinions
• 6:14
  Speaker 6: and for our outrageous videos and our selfies and all
• 6:18
  Speaker 6: the rest of it. So we're in a world right
• 6:21
  Speaker 6: now where the old style, you know, democratic processes of
• 6:27
  Speaker 6: debate and conversation are increasingly rare and on the collective level.
• 6:34
  Speaker 6: And the reason I got particularly interested in this is
• 6:37
  Speaker 6: that back in the 80s, I was working with a
• 6:41
  Speaker 6: had an early trauma history. Now, by that, I mean
• 6:44
  Speaker 6: a history of early violation of the integrity of the child,
• 6:49
  Speaker 6: either through emotional neglect or emotional abuse or physical abuse
• 6:55
  Speaker 6: or sexual abuse. And these injuries and invasions occurred before, say,
• 7:01
  Speaker 6: they were even age three, four, in very early childhood.
• 7:07
  Speaker 6: And the result of that, of those... traumatic experiences, which
• 7:13
  Speaker 6: I began to uncover in the history of some of
• 7:17
  Speaker 6: my patients, much to my surprise, because back in the 80s,
• 7:22
  Speaker 6: we didn't really have an understanding of how pervasive early
• 7:25
  Speaker 6: trauma was or how exquisitely sensitive the personality is to
• 7:30
  Speaker 6: the violation of the integrity of the person, the robbing
• 7:35
  Speaker 6: of innocence, the destruction of the human personality, really. As
• 7:41
  Speaker 6: I began to work with these individuals and like a
• 7:44
  Speaker 6: good Jungian, looking into their dreams, because that's something we
• 7:48
  Speaker 6: do as Jungian analysts, as you know, I began to
• 7:51
  Speaker 6: discover a lot of violence. I was shocked at the
• 7:54
  Speaker 6: amount of violence that I was discovering in the dreams
• 7:57
  Speaker 6: of these patients. Some of them would tell me, I
• 8:01
  Speaker 6: can't come into therapy with you. I can't talk about
• 8:04
  Speaker 6: my dreams. They're all persecutory. They're nightmares. I can't even
• 8:08
  Speaker 6: go to sleep anymore. The other thing I discovered is
• 8:11
  Speaker 6: that a lot of the violence that was coming up
• 8:14
  Speaker 6: in the dreams was directed either at the dream ego,
• 8:19
  Speaker 6: at the person of the patient, or at some young
• 8:23
  Speaker 6: child or even an innocent animal. It was as if
• 8:28
  Speaker 6: violence was attacking vulnerability. This was astounding to me because
• 8:36
  Speaker 6: nothing in my Jungian training prepared me for for the
• 8:41
  Speaker 6: amount of aggression in these dreams directed back at the
• 8:45
  Speaker 6: vulnerable core of the personality and the sort of stupefaction
• 8:50
  Speaker 6: and dissociated state that people ended up in after these dreams.
• 8:58
  Speaker 6: I remember one very, very vivid one where I'd had
• 9:02
  Speaker 6: a very moving session with a patient. She had discovered
• 9:06
  Speaker 6: a film of her two-year-old self Buried in her mother's basement,
• 9:11
  Speaker 6: she was busy cleaning out the house. And there she
• 9:13
  Speaker 6: found these old VCRs of a wedding that her father
• 9:17
  Speaker 6: had taken pictures of the wedding. And she was there
• 9:20
  Speaker 6: as her two-year-old self, running around, trying desperately to get
• 9:24
  Speaker 6: people's attention, you know, grabbing the legs of people standing
• 9:29
  Speaker 6: around at this cocktail party. And nobody would even notice
• 9:33
  Speaker 6: her or pay any attention to her until she was
• 9:35
  Speaker 6: reduced to to falling in the dusty ground and pounding
• 9:40
  Speaker 6: her little fist, wailing and crying. And the father continued
• 9:44
  Speaker 6: to take this picture. And she had seen this and
• 9:48
  Speaker 6: she was in tears as she presented it. And it
• 9:50
  Speaker 6: was unusual for this very uptight, very proper and somewhat
• 9:55
  Speaker 6: depressed woman to feel feelings like this. So I said, well,
• 9:58
  Speaker 6: why don't you bring the movie in and we'll watch
• 10:00
  Speaker 6: it together? And she did. And we watched it together.
• 10:03
  Speaker 6: And I was terribly upset seeing this scene. And she
• 10:08
  Speaker 6: noticed tears in my eyes. And more than the scene
• 10:12
  Speaker 6: and the sharing of the scene was the moment between
• 10:15
  Speaker 6: us when she actually saw that I was moved by
• 10:17
  Speaker 6: this picture. This meant more to her than I was
• 10:22
  Speaker 6: aware that it would mean to her. It was a
• 10:25
  Speaker 6: very spontaneous moment. Anyway, she went home, she wrote in
• 10:29
  Speaker 6: her journal, she stayed up late into the night, deeply moved,
• 10:33
  Speaker 6: wrote poetry to me, to us, said in her journal,
• 10:38
  Speaker 6: you affected him, you affected him, he cares about you. Now,
• 10:43
  Speaker 6: you know, I thought this was all understood in my
• 10:47
  Speaker 6: relationship with this woman, but it wasn't. So she was
• 10:52
  Speaker 6: very moved. She said, I can't tell you how grateful
• 10:54
  Speaker 6: I am. Then she went to bed and she had
• 10:55
  Speaker 6: the following dream. Two women, sisters, long since separated, are
• 11:03
  Speaker 6: about to be reunited in a joyful reunion scene. And
• 11:08
  Speaker 6: she is watching this reunion scene from outside the action.
• 11:13
  Speaker 6: And the action takes place in An old mansion like
• 11:18
  Speaker 6: the one with Gone with the Wind is my association.
• 11:21
  Speaker 6: Those huge balustrades that come up to a balcony. And
• 11:25
  Speaker 6: the one sister is approaching from below dressed in green.
• 11:30
  Speaker 6: The other sister is waiting anxiously and excitedly on the
• 11:35
  Speaker 6: balcony dressed in red. And as the sister who is
• 11:38
  Speaker 6: coming up to join her long lost sister ascends the stairwell,
• 11:43
  Speaker 6: a curtain parts. And a man in black with a
• 11:47
  Speaker 6: shotgun blows her away. And she falls, dying and bleeding
• 11:52
  Speaker 6: down the stairs. And the woman up above is shocked.
• 11:57
  Speaker 6: And the dreamer is shocked. And there is this scene
• 12:00
  Speaker 6: of death and destruction right after this tremendous longing for
• 12:06
  Speaker 6: a reunion. And my patient said, I must be crazy.
• 12:11
  Speaker 6: Who has dreams like this? And I said to her,
• 12:15
  Speaker 6: because I was getting the message by then, people with
• 12:18
  Speaker 6: early trauma have dreams like this. And then I explained
• 12:21
  Speaker 6: to her what has become, what I've become aware of
• 12:25
  Speaker 6: is that there is an authoritarian, tyrannical, fascistic system in
• 12:32
  Speaker 6: the human psyche, especially in the psyche of people who
• 12:36
  Speaker 6: have suffered so much early devastation that they've needed these
• 12:41
  Speaker 6: very powerful aggressive, dissociative defenses to save them. And these
• 12:50
  Speaker 6: dissociative defenses come in to kill the connections with vulnerable
• 12:54
  Speaker 6: feeling and also with creativity and self-expression because they mistake
• 13:01
  Speaker 6: such feelings of vulnerability and self-expression as new additions of
• 13:07
  Speaker 6: what led to the trauma in the first place. And
• 13:09
  Speaker 6: they will not allow the host personality of the patient
• 13:13
  Speaker 6: to experience these very vulnerable opening experience before because they
• 13:20
  Speaker 6: have a memory of how devastating the abuse was that
• 13:25
  Speaker 6: occurred when the child was very young. So in other words,
• 13:30
  Speaker 6: I became acquainted with authoritarianism in the inner world. And
• 13:34
  Speaker 6: so I got very interested in how this played out
• 13:38
  Speaker 6: in the lives of my traumatized patients. I came to
• 13:41
  Speaker 6: adopt an image which many of you have seen me use.
• 13:45
  Speaker 6: It's an image from William Blake. It's an illustration that
• 13:49
  Speaker 6: hangs in the Tate Gallery. And it contains two angels,
• 13:53
  Speaker 6: one dark and one light. And the image is called
• 13:58
  Speaker 6: The Light and Dark Angel. The good and evil angels
• 14:01
  Speaker 6: fight for possession of a child. And there's a child
• 14:04
  Speaker 6: in the image fleeing from the dark angel into the
• 14:06
  Speaker 6: arms of the bright angel. And the dark angel is
• 14:10
  Speaker 6: shackled to the flames of hell, and he's represented as
• 14:13
  Speaker 6: Lucifer in Hades. And the bright angel is up on
• 14:18
  Speaker 6: a cloud, and she's associated more with the spirit world,
• 14:23
  Speaker 6: with compassion and with love and containment. So I came
• 14:30
  Speaker 6: to realize that both those angels are part of a
• 14:33
  Speaker 6: defensive system that comes in in to protect the person
• 14:38
  Speaker 6: from early trauma. And I call this system the self-care system.
• 14:42
  Speaker 6: So as I understand the self-care system, it contains very
• 14:45
  Speaker 6: powerful archetypal defenses. And the two powers that it seems
• 14:49
  Speaker 6: to use in order to dissociate the psyche are violence
• 14:56
  Speaker 6: on the one hand and illusion on the other. The
• 15:00
  Speaker 6: bright angel I see as illusion, necessary illusion. It's up
• 15:06
  Speaker 6: to the bright angel to maintain hope in the presence
• 15:09
  Speaker 6: of devastating realities that the child can't bear. My favorite
• 15:14
  Speaker 6: story about the bright angel is a story that comes
• 15:17
  Speaker 6: to me from my old analyst, Edward Edinger, about this
• 15:21
  Speaker 6: little girl who was told by her mother to take
• 15:24
  Speaker 6: a message to her father who was reading in the study.
• 15:28
  Speaker 6: And the little girl trotted off with the message and
• 15:30
  Speaker 6: returned a couple minutes later and said, Mommy, the angel
• 15:33
  Speaker 6: won't let me go in. And the mother knew that
• 15:35
  Speaker 6: her daughter was very imaginative at this point. And so
• 15:38
  Speaker 6: she said, well, now you just tell the angel that
• 15:40
  Speaker 6: you have to deliver this message to your daddy. Little
• 15:43
  Speaker 6: girl went off again, came back two minutes later, more tears. Mommy, mommy,
• 15:48
  Speaker 6: the angel won't let me go in. So the mother
• 15:51
  Speaker 6: took her daughter by the hand and she said, well,
• 15:54
  Speaker 6: what's going on over there? And so she walked with
• 15:56
  Speaker 6: her daughter over to the threshold of her husband's study.
• 16:00
  Speaker 6: She looked through the door. There was her beloved husband.
• 16:04
  Speaker 6: dead in his chair from a massive heart attack. Mommy,
• 16:08
  Speaker 6: the angel won't let me go in. Now that's the
• 16:11
  Speaker 6: bright angel. It's up to the bright angel to create
• 16:15
  Speaker 6: life-sustaining illusions, alternative realities that provide the child with hope
• 16:23
  Speaker 6: and a symbolic story. It's possible to live in and
• 16:27
  Speaker 6: survive in while living Reality is getting itself together. Hopefully
• 16:32
  Speaker 6: this mother didn't disappear into her own hysteria. It was
• 16:36
  Speaker 6: able to show up for the child, but you get
• 16:39
  Speaker 6: the point. So the two angels represent violence on the
• 16:42
  Speaker 6: one hand that attacks the links with painful experience and
• 16:46
  Speaker 6: illusion on the other. It creates alternative realities within which
• 16:52
  Speaker 6: hope can be sustained. Now the bright angel is an
• 16:56
  Speaker 6: expert at conspiracy theories. because conspiracy theories are illusions that
• 17:01
  Speaker 6: sustain people when they can't face realities. Violence is the
• 17:06
  Speaker 6: angel that attacks the lynx. Both angels are experts at
• 17:12
  Speaker 6: dissociating the child from the realities of its painful feelings
• 17:17
  Speaker 6: that it can't bear. Now, I should say this system
• 17:21
  Speaker 6: is not in place in all people that I work with.
• 17:25
  Speaker 6: In a more healthy individual who hasn't suffered so much trauma,
• 17:29
  Speaker 6: the dark angel will be simply healthy aggression, and the
• 17:34
  Speaker 6: bright angel will be compassion and realistic hope. But when
• 17:39
  Speaker 6: you need those defenses in early life, these angels take
• 17:46
  Speaker 6: the form of violence on the one hand and illusion
• 17:48
  Speaker 6: on the other, which are archetypal binaries. They're extremes, and
• 17:53
  Speaker 6: that's why they're archetypal defenses. The role of violence in
• 17:57
  Speaker 6: American culture today and the role of illusion, disinformation, what
• 18:02
  Speaker 6: Alex Jones calls false flag operations like in Sandy Hook,
• 18:07
  Speaker 6: it didn't really happen. It's all just an illusion. So
• 18:11
  Speaker 6: you can see what I mean when I say that
• 18:14
  Speaker 6: these defenses and these powerful archetypal forces have taken over
• 18:20
  Speaker 6: a great deal of our public discourse and the psyche
• 18:24
  Speaker 6: of the archetypal psyche is plastered all over our politics
• 18:27
  Speaker 6: right now. And it's terrifying because authoritarian personalities, Theodore Adorno
• 18:35
  Speaker 6: wrote a book called The Authoritarian Personality back in the 1950s.
• 18:40
  Speaker 6: And what he discovered is that authoritarianism, the extremes, violence
• 18:46
  Speaker 6: and illusion are features of a personality disorder, really, on
• 18:51
  Speaker 6: both the left and the right politically. Right now, we
• 18:55
  Speaker 6: see it a lot more in American culture on the
• 18:58
  Speaker 6: radical right, but it's also on the left in the hyper-progressive,
• 19:04
  Speaker 6: you know, the cancel culture that goes on in American universities,
• 19:10
  Speaker 6: the so-called safe zones that are necessary for, God forbid,
• 19:14
  Speaker 6: for people that would be traumatized by use of the
• 19:18
  Speaker 6: wrong words. We live in a culture right now where
• 19:22
  Speaker 6: we're you know, the democratic middle where we actually can
• 19:26
  Speaker 6: have conversations about ideas and where feelings can be exchanged
• 19:32
  Speaker 6: and opinions can be exchanged has been taken over by
• 19:37
  Speaker 6: the extremes. You know, it used to be before, I
• 19:39
  Speaker 6: think it was Bill Clinton's administration, there was a thing
• 19:42
  Speaker 6: called the Fairness Doctrine, where the news had to be
• 19:45
  Speaker 6: reported in a standardized form. And we had, some of
• 19:49
  Speaker 6: you are old enough to remember this, we had Walter
• 19:51
  Speaker 6: Cronkite on CBS, and then we had ABC and NBC.
• 19:57
  Speaker 6: We all got our news from a standard source, and
• 20:00
  Speaker 6: they weren't identical. There were different opinions. But when the
• 20:04
  Speaker 6: Fairness Doctrine was canceled, there was a vacuum created that
• 20:09
  Speaker 6: talk radio filled, and Rush Limbaugh on the right, and
• 20:13
  Speaker 6: I don't know who on the left, rushed in to
• 20:14
  Speaker 6: fill that vacuum. And so instead of news, we got opinion.
• 20:19
  Speaker 6: And then when social media flooded and the World Wide
• 20:23
  Speaker 6: Web flooded us, we got more opinion. I'll tell you
• 20:28
  Speaker 6: a little moment. When I was in Santa Fe, we
• 20:30
  Speaker 6: lived in Santa Fe until about three years ago. We
• 20:33
  Speaker 6: now live in Maine. I was on a walk down
• 20:36
  Speaker 6: in an arroyo in town, and I was looking up
• 20:39
  Speaker 6: at some beautiful stellar Jays, a deep azure blue bird
• 20:43
  Speaker 6: that comes down out of the higher elevation sometimes into
• 20:47
  Speaker 6: Santa Fe. And I was looking up and seeing this
• 20:49
  Speaker 6: bird and this lovely young, young old couple with a
• 20:53
  Speaker 6: dog came walking down the Arroyo and they said, ah,
• 20:57
  Speaker 6: looking at them chemtrails, are you? And I said, what?
• 21:03
  Speaker 6: And they said, yeah, them chemtrails. And I said, you
• 21:07
  Speaker 6: mean the, the, the jet contrails in the sky? And
• 21:12
  Speaker 6: they said, oh yeah, but those are chemtrails. That's the
• 21:14
  Speaker 6: government trying to infect our atmosphere. You know, those clouds
• 21:18
  Speaker 6: that be up there, they're not real, just clouds. Those
• 21:22
  Speaker 6: are chemtrails. You can Google it if you want. So
• 21:25
  Speaker 6: they were getting their news through the web. And I
• 21:30
  Speaker 6: did Google it and I went down a rabbit hole
• 21:32
  Speaker 6: that was quite unbelievable. And so this is the conspiratorial
• 21:37
  Speaker 6: thinking about how our innocence is being robbed by forces
• 21:43
  Speaker 6: beyond our control. And if we can gin up, if
• 21:46
  Speaker 6: the bright angel can gin up enough outrage at the
• 21:50
  Speaker 6: violation of our innocence, it feeds into the violent angel
• 21:55
  Speaker 6: on the left. So, you know, the two work in tandem,
• 21:58
  Speaker 6: bright angel and the dark angel work in tandem to
• 22:00
  Speaker 6: create the kind of authoritarian culture of a that we're
• 22:05
  Speaker 6: living in right now. So that's an introduction to these ideas.
• 22:09
  Speaker 4: What I'm picking up on is the difference between someone
• 22:15
  Speaker 4: with early trauma, where the bright and the dark angel
• 22:21
  Speaker 4: are truly emanations from the unconscious, and somebody like Alex Jones,
• 22:30
  Speaker 4: who knows better. his denial of the awful shooting at
• 22:36
  Speaker 4: Sandy Hook. It is out and out conscious intended manipulation.
• 22:44
  Speaker 4: And I'm curious about where that comes from because he's
• 22:48
  Speaker 4: not the only one. There are plenty of people out
• 22:53
  Speaker 4: there in the public arena who are manipulating people for
• 23:00
  Speaker 4: their own to get reelected or elected in the first
• 23:05
  Speaker 4: place or can keep their online or other kind of audience.
• 23:12
  Speaker 6: Or to make money.
• 23:13
  Speaker 4: Or to make money, et cetera, and know very well
• 23:17
  Speaker 4: that that's what they're doing. That's a different dynamic.
• 23:22
  Speaker 6: It's a different dynamic, Deb, and that's a good point
• 23:24
  Speaker 6: that you make because there are people who know better
• 23:28
  Speaker 6: and they are likely– people who are not completely identified
• 23:33
  Speaker 6: with the archetypal powers which flow through them, which is
• 23:38
  Speaker 6: more the case of early trauma victims. And people who
• 23:44
  Speaker 6: are walking around in this culture are by and large
• 23:48
  Speaker 6: mostly sane enough to know that the extremes are not
• 23:55
  Speaker 6: literally true. But as you point out, there's great gain
• 24:01
  Speaker 6: to be made, great self-esteem to be had. And the
• 24:05
  Speaker 6: other thing that drives a lot of this, I think,
• 24:09
  Speaker 6: is fear. You have to remember, trauma is a fear psychology,
• 24:13
  Speaker 6: and the defenses that come to the aid of the
• 24:16
  Speaker 6: trauma victim, violence and illusion, these extreme forms of dissociation,
• 24:22
  Speaker 6: are really based on fear at the core. And not
• 24:27
  Speaker 6: only fear at the core, but If you can generate
• 24:30
  Speaker 6: enough hatred, you immediately cohere the psyche from its fragmentation
• 24:36
  Speaker 6: and you know exactly who you are. And if you
• 24:38
  Speaker 6: can also gin up a story about the extreme situations
• 24:43
  Speaker 6: and how we're all being done to and violated by
• 24:46
  Speaker 6: big bad government or big bad pharma or big bad
• 24:51
  Speaker 6: media or God knows what else, then you get self-esteem.
• 24:56
  Speaker 6: And if you can find a little silo of people
• 24:58
  Speaker 6: who believe as you do, you much prefer to stoke
• 25:03
  Speaker 6: self-esteem in those silos than to struggle. There's one more
• 25:09
  Speaker 6: quote I'll give you. Simone Weil said, false God transforms
• 25:12
  Speaker 6: suffering into violence. The true God transforms violence into suffering. Now,
• 25:17
  Speaker 6: we serve democratic forms of governance and democratic forms of polity,
• 25:23
  Speaker 6: whether it's inwardly or outwardly. serve the true God because
• 25:27
  Speaker 6: it's a matter of transforming violence into suffering. That's what
• 25:31
  Speaker 6: democracy does in its best, at its best. Believe me,
• 25:36
  Speaker 6: democracy has all the authoritarian features in it that authoritarianism does.
• 25:42
  Speaker 6: It is a constant struggle between the extremes. But when
• 25:47
  Speaker 6: it's working, the extremes have a forum and a place
• 25:51
  Speaker 6: inside the psyche that's called an ego, an observing ego.
• 25:56
  Speaker 6: that can hold conflicting affects, love and hate. Those of
• 26:01
  Speaker 6: us who work in this field have had to understand
• 26:05
  Speaker 6: that when we're working with a borderline personality or somebody
• 26:09
  Speaker 6: with a lot of early trauma, we are likely to
• 26:12
  Speaker 6: have to develop some emotional literacy and resilience to handle
• 26:18
  Speaker 6: the love and hate that we're gonna feel in our countertransference.
• 26:22
  Speaker 6: The inner world of the patient split between extremes, is
• 26:27
  Speaker 6: going to find its way into the relationship with us.
• 26:30
  Speaker 6: And then there's a huge danger and a huge opportunity
• 26:35
  Speaker 6: called democracy of the psyche. We have a chance to
• 26:39
  Speaker 6: transform archetypal affects, extremes, into human stories, human stuff.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: Well, and it's almost like the culture right now has
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: borderline personality disorder.
• 26:52
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: And it's not just happening among people who have early
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: trauma histories, but it's almost like our institutions are behaving
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: like someone in that position. And Don, I just, I
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: love this thesis and I feel like I have to
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: chew on it to really wrap my head around it.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: But I love what you said. I'm looking at, you know,
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: the paper that you delivered for the Ukrainian webinar. And
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: you talked about, you know, in a sort of healthy psyche, different,
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: I'm quoting here from your paper, different eye positions can
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: be held in tension. without threatening the integrity of the person.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: And of course, we always talk all the time about
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: holding the tension of the opposites. That's an inner job.
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: And you say, this is what Jung meant by a
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: democracy of the psyche. Another word for it is a
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: conflict psychology, which I guess is Bromberg. And I love that.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: I love that conflict psychology. And you say authoritarianism cannot
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: tolerate inner conflict. So it displaces one pole of the
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: conflict into the world, which of course is projection. So
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: we're talking about these borderline dynamics of splitting and projecting,
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: which we clinicians know very well. And this idea of
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: conflict psychology, I'm thinking about just the person that comes
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: in with the kinds of concerns that bring people into analysis.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: Maybe there's a question of a career change or just
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: a vague sense of malaise or you know, an unhappiness
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: in a relationship. And really what we do is create
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: a field or a container where conflict can be tolerated,
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: where the inner conflict can be held. And we can
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: tell when someone's splitting off at that conflict and resting
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: into certainty. I'm reminded of one of my favorite Jung quotes,
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: that fanaticism is always a sign of a repressed doubt.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: And what we want to do in the analytic container
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: is make room for that ambivalence, give the ambivalence back
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: to the person, tolerate the ambivalence. And we like to
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: say that if you can do that, then the third
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: thing arises and we're in the field of the transcendent function.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: But in the culture now, I mean, you know, so
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: we've all had people come in who cannot tolerate the
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: other side of their conflict, right? And they, you know,
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: that can look different, differently. I mean, I have people
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: that come in and will sort of apologize, apologize for,
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking of someone who maybe comes in with terrible,
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: unacceptable feelings, let's say of resentment toward a sibling. And
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: that feels so frustrating. forbidden that I can tell it's there,
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: it's showing up in the dreams, but I know that
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: I have to be very careful with it because I
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: can tell that it's very forbidden. And when it comes up,
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: the person says, well, I know that sounds terrible to say,
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: and it's wrapped in all these layers of sort of
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: apology and hedging. And, you know, and part of what
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: I think my job is to gently give the person
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: permission to have the full range of experiences and reactions
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: so that we, again, have both sides of the conflict
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: in the room. And this is happening on an outer
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: level where, you know, there is this sense that there's
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: all kinds of things we can't say. There's all kinds
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: of things we can't say in the culture. And we
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: can't have a sort of dialogue about things because we,
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: we risk offending someone or we've been told that, you know,
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: language is literal violence. Uh, but we need to be
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: able to have these conflicts. That is exactly, you're exactly
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: right that that is essential to democracy. So I just,
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: I love these ideas.
• 30:50
  Speaker 6: Well, thank you. Um, let me just tag onto that
• 30:52
  Speaker 6: a little bit. Um, Philip Bromberg, who is deceased now,
• 30:56
  Speaker 6: he died a few years back, but he wrote several books.
• 31:01
  Speaker 6: His first book, which was a collection of his essays,
• 31:03
  Speaker 6: called Standing in the Spaces. And what he meant by
• 31:07
  Speaker 6: the spaces are the spaces created by dissociation, the different
• 31:11
  Speaker 6: parts of the self, what he called self-states, that exist
• 31:16
  Speaker 6: because getting those discrete, dissociated self-states together in an ego
• 31:22
  Speaker 6: is too painful. Right. I mean, your point is certain
• 31:27
  Speaker 6: people can't really entertain the conflict that's inside them yet. Right.
• 31:33
  Speaker 6: Some of my people with early trauma histories have conflicts
• 31:37
  Speaker 6: that they don't even know about yet. In other words,
• 31:41
  Speaker 6: they will have been violated by a father before their memory.
• 31:46
  Speaker 6: And the remnants, the implicit memory of that is in
• 31:51
  Speaker 6: the psyche someplace as a terrifying phenomenon. moment associated to
• 31:56
  Speaker 6: various features of the father. But all they have is
• 32:02
  Speaker 6: flashbacks of something that happened. I know something happened to me,
• 32:06
  Speaker 6: but I don't know what it was. So as the
• 32:09
  Speaker 6: process begins and as dreams unfold and so forth, slowly
• 32:13
  Speaker 6: those scraps of unremembered trauma come up and then they
• 32:18
  Speaker 6: are in terrible conflict. And some of that conflict is grief.
• 32:24
  Speaker 6: A sure sign of conflict, conscious conflict is grief because
• 32:31
  Speaker 6: we have experienced feelings that are so painful that it's
• 32:35
  Speaker 6: hard for us to go there. And we have to
• 32:37
  Speaker 6: grieve the innocent parts of ourselves that want that never
• 32:42
  Speaker 6: to have been the case. And yet it was the case.
• 32:46
  Speaker 6: And we also have to love the people that violated
• 32:50
  Speaker 6: us or find our way eventually to to as much
• 32:55
  Speaker 6: love as we can to entertain both love and hate,
• 32:58
  Speaker 6: which is always the opposite that Jung most talked about.
• 33:04
  Speaker 6: He didn't actually talk about them, but those are the
• 33:06
  Speaker 6: ones he meant. Dissociative psychology versus conflict psychology. Dissociative psychology
• 33:13
  Speaker 6: is authoritarianism.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: And the grief that you're talking about, that's the depressive
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: position where we can- That's.
• 33:19
  Speaker 6: The depressive position. Melanie Klein said, The biggest accomplishment of
• 33:24
  Speaker 6: the child is to love and hate the same parent. And,
• 33:29
  Speaker 6: you know, that was for her the sine qua non
• 33:34
  Speaker 6: of emotional development for a child. To be able to
• 33:38
  Speaker 6: really feel the love and the hate and have it
• 33:43
  Speaker 6: okay and be able to fight with the person you
• 33:46
  Speaker 6: loved and come out of it more whole and more
• 33:50
  Speaker 6: integrated and deeper.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: And then we're not defending against unacceptable feelings and attitudes
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: and thoughts.
• 33:59
  Speaker 6: Yes. Now, I have one other thought, and I'm going
• 34:02
  Speaker 6: to let you guys talk. The current situation in America
• 34:07
  Speaker 6: and in the world, I think the reason that I'm
• 34:12
  Speaker 6: finding a connection between this structure I call the self-care
• 34:16
  Speaker 6: system with its violent and possessively loving sentimental angels I
• 34:24
  Speaker 6: think the reason I'm finding that so applicable to the
• 34:27
  Speaker 6: outer situation is that I think we are in a
• 34:30
  Speaker 6: trauma vortex right now in the world and in the
• 34:34
  Speaker 6: culture and I think one of the reasons we are
• 34:37
  Speaker 6: is that we are being asked to experience things that
• 34:42
  Speaker 6: we can't fully let in we can't.
• 34:46
  Speaker 7: That's interesting like the fact that we are burning up
• 34:49
  Speaker 7: our own world like the fact that violence is so
• 34:54
  Speaker 7: out of control in so many places that we are
• 34:56
  Speaker 7: so helpless in the face of big capitalistic systems, big
• 35:02
  Speaker 7: governmental systems, big corporate systems that we.
• 35:05
  Speaker 6: Don't have any real capacity to affect other than to
• 35:10
  Speaker 6: complain and hopefully to demonstrate. So I think, if I'm
• 35:16
  Speaker 6: not mistaken, one of the reasons that violence is being
• 35:20
  Speaker 6: resorted to and that so much disinformation and fake news
• 35:24
  Speaker 6: is proliferating through our airways right now, which are signs
• 35:28
  Speaker 6: of the light and dark angel, is because we as
• 35:32
  Speaker 6: a people on this planet are having a lot of
• 35:35
  Speaker 6: trouble facing reality. We have a national or an international
• 35:41
  Speaker 6: reality disorder.
• 35:43
  Speaker 4: You know, one of the things that I think we
• 35:47
  Speaker 4: do in our consulting rooms is to sort of reframe
• 35:53
  Speaker 4: the problem. You know, somebody comes in who's having difficulty with,
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: you know, career or relationship, and we broaden it out
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: and get to restate it so that the person can
• 36:08
  Speaker 4: rename it and know that as existing in him or herself. Right.
• 36:17
  Speaker 4: And I'm wondering if that's part of what we're doing
• 36:20
  Speaker 4: this morning that you're doing, Don, is What if we
• 36:24
  Speaker 4: reframe and rephrase this problem, which is we're in a
• 36:30
  Speaker 4: really difficult and sad state in the world to grieve
• 36:37
  Speaker 4: what is happening, for example, with climate, rather than splitting
• 36:43
  Speaker 4: it off and making some people bad or wrong, which
• 36:50
  Speaker 4: would be, I think, the dark angel. And then other people,
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: you know, the bright angel is, oh, the earth goes
• 36:58
  Speaker 4: through all these cycles anyway, and it has for millennia.
• 37:02
  Speaker 4: So it's not a big deal. And people need fossil
• 37:06
  Speaker 4: fuels and so on and so forth. But, you know,
• 37:11
  Speaker 4: if we could let it in, in other words, if
• 37:14
  Speaker 4: we could as a collective develop a conflict psychology.
• 37:19
  Speaker 6: Absolutely. And what we have to keep in mind is
• 37:22
  Speaker 6: even in the face, of all this devastation on the
• 37:26
  Speaker 6: planet and in our country, we are also up against
• 37:30
  Speaker 6: the exquisite and unbearable beauty of the world. And so
• 37:36
  Speaker 6: we have this conflict within us, the ache of our
• 37:43
  Speaker 6: love for this world and the people that we're close
• 37:47
  Speaker 6: to in it, and also the grief of having to
• 37:50
  Speaker 6: face all of the dark side of And so the
• 37:54
  Speaker 6: human condition, if we're going to really embrace it, you know,
• 37:58
  Speaker 6: if we really want to develop some emotional literacy and
• 38:03
  Speaker 6: some affect tolerance, some affect capacity, then we really have
• 38:09
  Speaker 6: to work hard to hold these opposites inside ourselves and
• 38:13
  Speaker 6: to not lose faith or hope that if we do that,
• 38:18
  Speaker 6: We don't know the future. A third will manifest. Consciousness
• 38:22
  Speaker 6: will occur. We don't know the future. And so the
• 38:27
  Speaker 6: naysayers and the yaysayers, we have to hold them both
• 38:31
  Speaker 6: and live through the process, you know, embrace the process.
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: Don, I'd like to ask you to unpack some of
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: the various stages that you were talking about for the
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: listeners so that we can kind of track a little
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: more meticulously. So there was a wonderful sequence that I
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: think is so helpful to understand. So this is a
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: psychology of fear, overwhelming fear, fear at the point where
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: we don't know what to do in a different situation
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: or with a stronger psychology, someone would be able to
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: perhaps regulate the fear. But in an individual, this fear
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: has now created an unbearable state And then the bright
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: angel gins up enough fantasy of the violation of our
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: innocence that it justifies launching into a kind of hate
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: and violence to cohere the psyche. So let's lean into
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: that first part. What makes fear intolerable for one person
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: and perhaps tolerable or workable for another person, how is
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: it that that particular piece happens?
• 39:56
  Speaker 6: Well, the short answer to that, and it's obviously a simplification,
• 40:01
  Speaker 6: but if you've had a co-regulating other as you have
• 40:06
  Speaker 6: evolved as a person in this world, in other words,
• 40:08
  Speaker 6: if you've had an attentive, emotionally attuned partner, parent, mother, caretaker,
• 40:17
  Speaker 6: in the process, of going through your fears, your rages,
• 40:23
  Speaker 6: your possessive loves, all of the extreme archetypal affects that
• 40:30
  Speaker 6: we have, and the terror of an unpredictable world. If
• 40:34
  Speaker 6: you've had someone to help name them, to contain them,
• 40:39
  Speaker 6: to supply mythologies, to provide you with stories that make
• 40:46
  Speaker 6: it tolerable, like Religious stories, mythological stories that make this
• 40:52
  Speaker 6: the hard edges of this reality that you are experiencing
• 40:55
  Speaker 6: as a child, like this premature death of your father,
• 40:58
  Speaker 6: that little girl in that story. If the mother can
• 41:02
  Speaker 6: help metabolize that by telling stories, by joining the stories
• 41:06
  Speaker 6: the little girl has about the angel, this is the
• 41:09
  Speaker 6: way the mythopoetic and the imaginal world supply us with
• 41:13
  Speaker 6: artistic places to live. Symbolic places to live. I mean,
• 41:17
  Speaker 6: Jung said we live in psyche. Psyche isn't in us.
• 41:21
  Speaker 6: We live in psyche like fish live in water. Well,
• 41:25
  Speaker 6: but it's not always easy to get to psyche when
• 41:29
  Speaker 6: you have an experience like that little girl, right? I'm
• 41:32
  Speaker 6: working with a bunch of Ukrainian therapists right now. They're
• 41:37
  Speaker 6: asking me to help them supervise some of their candidate
• 41:42
  Speaker 6: therapists within the Jungian enclave over there. And of course,
• 41:45
  Speaker 6: they're all working in a war zone so that they're
• 41:48
  Speaker 6: doing trauma work while they're in a trauma vortex themselves.
• 41:52
  Speaker 6: But one of the things that I've discovered is that
• 41:55
  Speaker 6: trauma makes everything literal and concrete, organized around survival. What
• 42:00
  Speaker 6: these people are appreciating about our time together is that
• 42:03
  Speaker 6: they get to talk about clients who bring dreams, and
• 42:09
  Speaker 6: they have their own dreams. And so suddenly, Or a
• 42:14
  Speaker 6: client brings a fairy tale or a story that puts
• 42:19
  Speaker 6: something about the traumatic world that they're living in into
• 42:25
  Speaker 6: a narrative, into a story, a mythopoetic story. And what
• 42:30
  Speaker 6: we discover is that when we can move from the
• 42:34
  Speaker 6: literal tension-filled, anxiety-filled, fear-filled trauma of the world into the mythopoetic,
• 42:44
  Speaker 6: We're suddenly in a symbol system that generates hope and
• 42:47
  Speaker 6: containment and human connection because we're all in this together
• 42:52
  Speaker 6: and we know the stories. We live the stories. And
• 42:57
  Speaker 6: so we know the dreams and we participate in the
• 43:00
  Speaker 6: dreaming process. So they've been very grateful just to have
• 43:03
  Speaker 6: a space where they can talk about the psyche instead
• 43:06
  Speaker 6: of the literal. Our patients are like this too. I
• 43:10
  Speaker 6: had one time a patient who used to come up
• 43:12
  Speaker 6: to Katona my little village where I practiced for years
• 43:16
  Speaker 6: in New York State. And he used to ride the
• 43:20
  Speaker 6: train up from, he was a stockbroker. And he said,
• 43:25
  Speaker 6: you know, this train ride and this session is the
• 43:29
  Speaker 6: only time in my week when I consider the inner world.
• 43:36
  Speaker 6: And so I said, thank God you moved out of
• 43:38
  Speaker 6: town so I have a train ride. I can think
• 43:41
  Speaker 6: about my dream and think about what I want to
• 43:43
  Speaker 6: talk about and think about what's happened to me, you know,
• 43:46
  Speaker 6: because we all live such fast-paced lives out there.
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: Well, and just as an aside, I think now that
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: a lot of us are seeing patients on Zoom, there
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: isn't that, you know, 20-minute ride. It's just click into
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: the session.
• 44:00
  Speaker 6: You know, that's really true.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 44:02
  Speaker 6: There isn't waiting room to sit in. You know, we
• 44:04
  Speaker 6: go immediately from our breakfast into our session. And yeah,
• 44:09
  Speaker 6: it's a very different reality.
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: So Don, help us understand what the psyche of someone
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: is like who hasn't had the benefit of that co-regulation,
• 44:22
  Speaker 3: hasn't had the benefit of a containing mythology, a way
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: that the psyche has learned to use metaphor to contain
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: symbol systems. So in that person, they're being provoked by
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: false news or Something has happened and the system is
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: not functioning correctly. Narrate what happens in that person, if
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: you can.
• 44:49
  Speaker 6: Well, in that person, first of all, that person is
• 44:53
  Speaker 6: vigilantly scanning the outer world all the time. That person
• 44:58
  Speaker 6: is not comfortable in the inner world because the threat
• 45:04
  Speaker 6: that they have experienced has come from the outer world.
• 45:06
  Speaker 6: So they're vigilantly scanning the outer world And what they're
• 45:09
  Speaker 6: scanning for is disrespect in people because they're very sensitively
• 45:16
  Speaker 6: attuned to being dissed or disrespected or ignored or dropped or,
• 45:23
  Speaker 6: you know, denigrated by somebody or catastrophes like hurricanes. You know,
• 45:31
  Speaker 6: we live in a culture where, you know, the Weather
• 45:33
  Speaker 6: Channel runs 24-7 something called storm stories. We can't get
• 45:41
  Speaker 6: enough crises. We had a minor windstorm here, the remnants
• 45:46
  Speaker 6: of Hurricane Lee that hit the coast of Maine. And
• 45:50
  Speaker 6: I had several people from California call me and say,
• 45:52
  Speaker 6: are you all right? Because they were finding out that,
• 45:56
  Speaker 6: you know, the news, the weather, the apocalyptic stories. These
• 46:00
  Speaker 6: are trauma stories that appeal to our catastrophizing, to our
• 46:04
  Speaker 6: apocalyptic archetypal tendencies to mythologize. Because we love mythologies. We
• 46:11
  Speaker 6: love extreme stories. We love, you know, extreme sports. We
• 46:14
  Speaker 6: love everything in the extremes because it gives us a boost.
• 46:19
  Speaker 6: It gives us that high. And we become addicted to
• 46:22
  Speaker 6: these highs. So people with a trauma history are very
• 46:24
  Speaker 6: scanning the environment for danger and being dissed. That's one feature.
• 46:30
  Speaker 6: In short, Joseph, this is a fear psychology that's promulgated
• 46:35
  Speaker 6: in the literal worries, the worried mind. takes a trauma
• 46:40
  Speaker 6: survivor into all kinds of scenarios of terror. And so
• 46:45
  Speaker 6: a lot of patients, their worried minds takes them into
• 46:50
  Speaker 6: all kinds of fearful results of this and that. And
• 46:56
  Speaker 6: so a lot of our work is simply to help contextualize,
• 47:00
  Speaker 6: help moderate, help humanize the extremes that the worried mind
• 47:06
  Speaker 6: creates for them. Because the worried mind creates You know, FDR,
• 47:12
  Speaker 6: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the middle of warfare against two
• 47:17
  Speaker 6: major nations, said to the American public, we have nothing
• 47:20
  Speaker 6: to fear but fear itself. You know, fast forward. Now
• 47:26
  Speaker 6: we have dignitaries, presidents, ex-presidents, not the current president, thank God,
• 47:32
  Speaker 6: but our notorious previous president, ginning up as much fear
• 47:37
  Speaker 6: as possible. as much outrage as possible. Immigrants are swarming
• 47:42
  Speaker 6: over our borders. Terrorists are infecting us. This is a very,
• 47:47
  Speaker 6: very different way of proceeding and the lack of leadership
• 47:50
  Speaker 6: at the top who is helping us not to fear
• 47:54
  Speaker 6: what the worried mind fears all the time is appalling
• 47:58
  Speaker 6: to me. We need more fireside chats. We need leaders
• 48:03
  Speaker 6: who have integrated psyches and who have a perspective helping
• 48:08
  Speaker 6: us understand, you know, what is the danger that Putin's
• 48:12
  Speaker 6: going to use nuclear warfare? Is the danger if we
• 48:16
  Speaker 6: give F-16s to Ukraine? What is actually going to happen?
• 48:19
  Speaker 6: Because what's going to happen if we get COVID, you know,
• 48:22
  Speaker 6: or we don't get vaccinated? All these things are now
• 48:27
  Speaker 6: generating a huge amount of worry and anxiety in the
• 48:30
  Speaker 6: general public. And we have very few leaders who are helping.
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: Can I offer a quote?
• 48:36
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: Because it's so great and it's perfect here. We think
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: they were Olympians. Today, they are called phobias, obsessions, and
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: so forth. In a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: become diseases. Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: solar plexus, and provides curious specimens for the doctor's consult.
• 49:20
  Speaker 2: room or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world, which I
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: think is exactly what you were just talking about, Don.
• 49:32
  Speaker 6: It is exactly what I was talking about. And I
• 49:34
  Speaker 6: would just add to that, the gods have become defenses.
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great.
• 49:39
  Speaker 6: You see, because one thing Jung did not talk about
• 49:42
  Speaker 6: so much was the role of dissociative defenses and their
• 49:46
  Speaker 6: archetypal manifestations in the psyche. And so that's where my
• 49:50
  Speaker 6: work comes in, the inner world of trauma and trauma
• 49:53
  Speaker 6: in the soul. I'm trying to help us understand that
• 49:57
  Speaker 6: the dissociation that Jung described and discussed is mostly a
• 50:01
  Speaker 6: conflict psychology dissociation. He talked about dissociation, splitting off the complexes.
• 50:09
  Speaker 6: disagreeable feelings, painful feelings, complexes, and so on. What he
• 50:15
  Speaker 6: didn't talk about, well, he did actually refer to them.
• 50:19
  Speaker 6: He talked about complexes from the collective unconscious. And he said,
• 50:24
  Speaker 6: I don't know really what these are, but they seem
• 50:26
  Speaker 6: to be experiences that were so devastating for the individual
• 50:30
  Speaker 6: that it wiped out their entire life. And Those are
• 50:35
  Speaker 6: what I'm talking about are the more severe forms of
• 50:38
  Speaker 6: dissociation that are a part of very early trauma and
• 50:42
  Speaker 6: that give us these monsters and saviors, these beasts and saviors,
• 50:47
  Speaker 6: which are part of the apocalyptic dimension of archetypal defenses.
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: So Don, let's take the map the next step. So
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: we have the traumatized individual who's hypervigilant and they have
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: scanned and they believe They have found evidence of disrespect.
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: They've been watching terrifying videos. And then the bright angel,
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: who is a defense, gins up enough fantasy that they
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: have been violated, that their innocence has been violated even now,
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: even in this moment, which creates that unholy alliance and
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: entitles them to hatred. So talk about that defense that
• 51:35
  Speaker 3: gins up the fantasy that my innocence has been violated.
• 51:40
  Speaker 3: Because that's the next part of that formulary.
• 51:44
  Speaker 6: Yeah, innocence is a terribly important thing in the human psyche.
• 51:49
  Speaker 6: It's a real thing. But there are two kinds of innocence.
• 51:52
  Speaker 6: There's the generative innocence of origins, the true self, the
• 51:57
  Speaker 6: vital spark of the divine self, what Jung called the
• 52:01
  Speaker 6: divine child in the psyche, the carrier of the human soul.
• 52:05
  Speaker 6: That is a genuine reality. The doctrine of original sin
• 52:10
  Speaker 6: is basically a trauma psychology. The doctrine of original blessing
• 52:15
  Speaker 6: or the fact that we are all born as facets
• 52:20
  Speaker 6: of the great cosmic Godhead and that we are entitled
• 52:24
  Speaker 6: to be here, that we are all equal because we're sacred,
• 52:28
  Speaker 6: that is the basic doctrine of our, of our declaration
• 52:33
  Speaker 6: of independence. I mean, Jefferson got it right. He just
• 52:36
  Speaker 6: left women out. He left slaves out, but he got
• 52:39
  Speaker 6: it right. Humankind is equal. We are all equal. We're demos.
• 52:45
  Speaker 6: We're the people because we're all part of, of the
• 52:50
  Speaker 6: great human experiment where we all suffer that destiny. So Joseph,
• 52:57
  Speaker 6: back to your, your question. Um, But there is an
• 53:01
  Speaker 6: innocence that also can be used. And mind you, innocence
• 53:07
  Speaker 6: is technically not a human category. It's an archetype. It's
• 53:12
  Speaker 6: an extreme, right? I mean, none of us is truly
• 53:15
  Speaker 6: innocent from the moment that we're born, you know, and
• 53:18
  Speaker 6: we're pounding on our mother's breast because it's empty or whatever.
• 53:23
  Speaker 6: You know, you could say we're innocent, but the point is,
• 53:26
  Speaker 6: There's an innocence that's used by the authoritarian and defensive
• 53:30
  Speaker 6: system to justify violence. Christopher Bolas calls that malignant innocence.
• 53:36
  Speaker 6: It's a very interesting fact. And you will find in
• 53:41
  Speaker 6: the MAGA Republican base, for example, an assumption of innocence.
• 53:46
  Speaker 6: Americans are innocent. We have manifest destiny. We are exceptional.
• 53:51
  Speaker 6: We are the shining city on the hill. We are innocent. We...
• 53:56
  Speaker 6: liberated the world from the evil Nazis and the evil communists. Well,
• 54:01
  Speaker 6: guess what? That innocence is a part of the archetypal inheritance,
• 54:06
  Speaker 6: but so is the propensity to do evil. And Jung
• 54:10
  Speaker 6: has this fantastic quote, the evil that has been perpetrated
• 54:16
  Speaker 6: by the white-skinned colonials on the dark-skinned peoples of the
• 54:21
  Speaker 6: earth is truly appalling. He said, and even though Many
• 54:26
  Speaker 6: of us were not there among the slave ships and
• 54:30
  Speaker 6: so forth. We still, as human beings, have the propensity
• 54:34
  Speaker 6: to do that evil at any time. Just the fact
• 54:37
  Speaker 6: that we weren't there at the moment and weren't swept
• 54:40
  Speaker 6: up into the melee doesn't mean that we're innocent. So
• 54:44
  Speaker 6: Jung says we have to have some imagination for evil.
• 54:49
  Speaker 6: And what he means by that is we have to
• 54:50
  Speaker 6: have some imagination about our own evil. Not the fact
• 54:54
  Speaker 6: that we're guilty of hideous and heinous crimes yet, but
• 54:59
  Speaker 6: that we have this openness, this propensity, and violence is
• 55:03
  Speaker 6: a big part of it, to do evil.
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: So link together in this clinical scenario, the malignant innocence
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: inside an individual, that paradigm, and how it comes into
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: union with this primal, aggressive violence in the personality and
• 55:26
  Speaker 3: then convinces them to unleash themselves upon the other. Help
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: us understand how that happens, because I think for many
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: of us, the word innocence and violence, it's hard to
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: imagine how those marry each other.
• 55:45
  Speaker 6: Well, I'll give you an example from a swim I
• 55:50
  Speaker 6: took at a Santa Fe health club.
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: I was.
• 55:54
  Speaker 6: going to this wonderful Olympic swimming pool and swimming most
• 55:58
  Speaker 6: mornings at 9 a.m., then COVID hit. And instead of
• 56:04
  Speaker 6: us being able to report and just swim, we then
• 56:06
  Speaker 6: had to make appointments. So I made an appointment for
• 56:09
  Speaker 6: 9 a.m. for one of three lanes, and I arrived
• 56:13
  Speaker 6: at about five minutes to nine. And there was a
• 56:17
  Speaker 6: young woman swimmer that I knew from previous swims standing
• 56:21
  Speaker 6: outside the door. And I said, well, should we go in?
• 56:24
  Speaker 6: And she said, well, if you want to meet the Gestapo, yes,
• 56:29
  Speaker 6: I'll go in with you. And I said, what? And
• 56:31
  Speaker 6: I looked through the door and there was Barbara standing there.
• 56:34
  Speaker 6: Barbara was a rather rigid, obsessive, compulsive staff member. She
• 56:40
  Speaker 6: wasn't the Gestapo. I said, I know Barbara. That's all right.
• 56:44
  Speaker 6: So I said, come on in. So we went in.
• 56:46
  Speaker 6: Barbara jumps up from behind her desk, comes over to
• 56:50
  Speaker 6: me with both hands out like this. says, no, no, no,
• 56:54
  Speaker 6: you don't belong here. Back out until nine o'clock. We'll
• 56:59
  Speaker 6: let you know when you can come in. There are
• 57:02
  Speaker 6: rules here, you know. Now guess what happened inside me?
• 57:11
  Speaker 6: I had a very vigorous swim that morning. There was
• 57:15
  Speaker 6: steam coming off the water. I was imagining conversations with
• 57:20
  Speaker 6: Barbara that went something like, uh, You've missed your calling, Barbara.
• 57:24
  Speaker 6: You should be a member of the police or something like,
• 57:28
  Speaker 6: you know, you would have fit right into Nazi Germany,
• 57:30
  Speaker 6: you know. And then I got out of the pool.
• 57:37
  Speaker 6: And by that time, some of my steam was gone
• 57:40
  Speaker 6: and I got dressed. And as I got dressed, I
• 57:43
  Speaker 6: said to myself, Kalscheid, what are you doing? And as
• 57:47
  Speaker 6: I tied my shoes, I realized that I had skipped
• 57:49
  Speaker 6: over the most important feeling that I had had in
• 57:53
  Speaker 6: that interchange. And that was a certain sense of violation
• 57:56
  Speaker 6: of my innocence. And I was just simply there to swim,
• 58:01
  Speaker 6: and I was suddenly made to feel bad. I was
• 58:05
  Speaker 6: no longer feeling good. I was feeling bad. And I
• 58:10
  Speaker 6: can't put that on Barbara. She didn't make me feel bad.
• 58:13
  Speaker 6: I already had a propensity to feel bad. I mean,
• 58:16
  Speaker 6: how many times had And I've been scolded and told
• 58:19
  Speaker 6: to stop this or that in my upbringing. But so
• 58:22
  Speaker 6: all that came back. So on my way out, I
• 58:27
  Speaker 6: did a little democracy work. I went to Barbara and
• 58:30
  Speaker 6: I said, listen, you perhaps could sense that I was
• 58:35
  Speaker 6: pretty peeved at the way that morning started at the pool.
• 58:40
  Speaker 6: And I just want to say that I understand you know,
• 58:45
  Speaker 6: I get triggered in these situations. And she said, so
• 58:48
  Speaker 6: do I. And I said, you know, and probably being
• 58:52
  Speaker 6: keeper of the rules, you've had some experiences of people
• 58:55
  Speaker 6: who've broken the rules. And she said, you have no idea.
• 58:58
  Speaker 6: And then she poured out how entitled we members of
• 59:03
  Speaker 6: this pool seem to be, many of us. She says,
• 59:06
  Speaker 6: not you, but let me tell you. And so we
• 59:10
  Speaker 6: both commiserated and we left as friends. And after that event,
• 59:16
  Speaker 6: I had a deeper relationship with Barbara. We had weathered
• 59:22
  Speaker 6: a storm in which both violence and innocence were somehow
• 59:27
  Speaker 6: allowed to work together and And I came to realize
• 59:31
  Speaker 6: I also learned something about myself, how easily my innocence
• 59:36
  Speaker 6: can be used to justify my own violence.
• 59:40
  Speaker 4: But you made a repair.
• 59:43
  Speaker 6: I did make a repair.
• 59:44
  Speaker 4: And that there is some kind of secret sauce that
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: our collective needs desperately, that it's not so much, I mean,
• 59:55
  Speaker 4: in the case of you and Barbara, That's possible, but
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 4: it's not the injury. We're all going to injure each other.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 4: We're going to screw up. We're going to say things
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 4: we didn't mean. We're going to disappoint each other. So
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 4: it's about how can we hold it, you know, the
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 4: way that you did. It's such a great allegory or
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 4: example of make the repair. Make the repair happen. reach
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 4: out and report out, this is how I felt. And
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 4: then that connection between you and Barbara is stronger because
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 4: you engaged in a conflict psychology.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 6: Conflict psychology. And we held it long enough so that
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 6: the repair happened when we could realize the human story
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 6: that we were each involved with. I mean, she was
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 6: involved in a very human story of being the rule
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 6: keeper and I was involved in a human story of
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 6: just seeking water. Once we got to that, then the
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 6: repair happened automatically.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 4: Each of you had been hurt. She'd been hurt by
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 4: disgruntled customers to the pool who didn't treat her with
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 4: respect and she had the job of enforcing the rules.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 4: You were hurt by here's the empty pool. Can't we
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 4: come in a couple of minutes early? And this pushback
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 4: of no.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 6: And, you know, the effect of making one bad, that
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 6: is a trauma issue because the traumatized person is always
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 6: afraid that they're going to be made bad. They have
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 6: had that experience of being shamed. And now they're being
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 6: shamed by someone. the dark angel in the system all
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 6: the time. So they don't feel in touch with their
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 6: own innocence, otherwise they wouldn't always be feeling so bad
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 6: about themselves and ready to be made bad by other people.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 6: I once had a wonderful client who was now an
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 6: analyst and she was in her 60s reporting this and
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 6: she reported a moment from her childhood that was with
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 6: her to this day that made her feel bad even now.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 6: The family had just moved to a new neighborhood. The
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 6: whole family was standing on a sunny porch of the
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 6: new house. The moving van was there. The neighbors had
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 6: come over to greet them. And she, as a four-year-old
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 6: little girl, ran down and picked a bouquet of flowers
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 6: for her mother, ran up the steps and handed them
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 6: to her mother. And the mother did exactly what Barbara
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 6: did with me. there was an innocent gesture of love
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 6: and appreciation, right? Mother said, no, Barbara, how could you
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 6: do that? You pick those flowers from Mrs. So-and-so's yard.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 6: Now you go and apologize to her. And she dragged
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 6: her over, forced an apology out of her. Now that
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 6: was a moment when my patient said, I understood when
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 6: I think about that, what shame is. Because it wasn't
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 6: just that I had done something that I was guilty
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 6: for and that I could atone for. It was that
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 6: I was bad for It was a spontaneous gesture, and
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 6: that's a core gesture. That's a gesture that comes out
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 6: of our innocence. And so if that's what's made bad,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 6: we'll never forget it.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: Don, what I'd like to do is continue in this
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 3: wonderful formula you've given us. And I recognize things are
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: so much more complicated, but it's so helpful for us
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: to at least imagine that there's a sequence of things.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: So there's an individual or a group, maybe they have
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 3: a trauma history, or maybe they're being traumatized by being
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: overexposed in a kind of secondary traumatizing way, but they've
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: been put in a hypervigilant state chronically. They're scanning for disrespect,
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: scanning for shames, scanning for traumatic events that might happen
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 3: to them, and they don't have the calming, co-regulating, mythopoetic
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: defense against that. So they're in the distress. This activates
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: particularly a malignant innocence, the archetype of innocence, that one
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: should be innocent, we're entitled to be innocent, something's wrong
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: if we're not innocent. This is still incredibly painful. The
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 3: malignant innocence... enters into a kind of unholy union, a
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: term I so like that's used in one of your books,
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: with the dark angel, with violence, particularly with hatred, because
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: it gives one sense, a temporary feeling of identity, a
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: temporary feeling of cohesion. And then we have that figure. Now,
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: suppose in an extreme example, This is our wife. This
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: is our husband who now is in that full state.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: They're launched righteously, dangerously, and we're in the crosshairs. Perhaps
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: it's a neighbor who's got us in the crosshairs. Perhaps
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: it's an organization, a group that has stirred up the
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: same kind of sequence in the general community, in a
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 3: group collective. And you or I or someone we love
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 3: is in the crosshairs of that. What does one do?
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: How do we survive that? What's the medicine? What's possible
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: for the person in the crosshairs of it? They're possessed
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 3: by the inner fascist and they're launched now.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 6: Yeah, they're launched and they're on their high horses and
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 6: they're making us Into someone who just doesn't understand them
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 6: or they're making us into someone bad or they're making
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 6: us into someone who just, you know, has never experienced
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 6: anything like this and so on and so forth.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 3: Or someone they have to run away from, go into
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: a fugue state, they have to divorce, they have to
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: menace because if you're around, you're suddenly the problem. You
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: become the scapegoat.
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: People can do this to their own children if they're trapped.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 6: Oh, yeah. And patients can do it to therapists. I mean,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 6: I remember sitting with a man who was an eminent
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 6: analyst who had fired his two previous analysts. And we
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 6: were in an interchange where he was about to fire
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 6: me because I had flared in response to one of
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 6: his angry statements. And he had gotten me. He said,
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 6: you have a lot of shadow work to do, Kelsha.
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 6: You really do. And you're like a lot of the
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 6: other people I've worked with. You know, what's somebody like
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 6: me to do if I want to work with this
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 6: aggression in me? If every time I get a little angry,
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 6: it stimulates the shadow in my partner and, you know,
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 6: essentially the relationship is over. You know, this is useless.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 6: You should be paying me for this session. So... There
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 6: I was.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 3: There we all might be or are or have been
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: many times. So what does one do?
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 6: Well, you know, what you try to do is get
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 6: under the battalion response, the reactive, natural response, rational, angry
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 6: in return, making your point, justifying yourself. standing up for yourself,
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 6: all of that stuff. Sometimes all you can do is
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 6: take a pause, realize that you're triggered, you're complex right now,
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 6: and try to get back to the human, all too
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 6: human vulnerability that was hit, triggered, and try to figure out,
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 6: if you can, where are you right now in your history?
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 6: So in that particular instance, I was able to do that.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 6: I was able to say, well, you know, there's very
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 6: little I could say here that would be helpful to you,
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 6: I think, except maybe to just tell you where I
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 6: am emotionally. I'm feeling very threatened right now and feeling
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 6: like a failure as your therapist. And I don't like
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 6: that feeling. And clearly, you know, you're right that what
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 6: you just got from me was a triggered response. So
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 6: I'm going to try to tell you a little bit
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 6: about the emotional reality. And so I tried to reach
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 6: back and say, you know, this puts me in a
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 6: very familiar place in my life. And I don't know
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 6: where you are. but that's where I am. And that's
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 6: about all I think I can do right now is
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 6: to share, share that human vulnerability underneath, underneath this ping
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 6: pong match that we're in. And he burst into tears.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 4: It's going back inside, reflecting, And putting words to feelings of,
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 4: I'm feeling triggered right now. I'm upset right now. I
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 4: feel blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, of sharing yourself.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 6: Well, yourself, Deb, but you got to share the vulnerable
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 6: side of yourself because you remember, I was having lots
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 6: of feelings, but they weren't very pleasant. And they wouldn't
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 6: have been very pretty if I had voiced those defensive feelings.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 6: I had to get underneath the defense. And that session
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 6: proved to be sort of a talisman for both of us.
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 6: He said, thank you. He said, that's what nobody else
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 6: has done with me. And, of course, then he tested
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 6: me a half a dozen times after that also. I mean,
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 6: it wasn't over.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 6: But at least we got through something in that moment.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 4: It goes back to that co-regulation.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 4: If there is an other who can understand, put words
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 4: to feelings in a non-activated, non-defensive way, it makes a
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 4: huge difference.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 6: It does. And it's something that comes with old age.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 6: I'm here to tell you.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 4: Well, we do it with little kids. I mean, you know,
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 4: when a little kid runs in with a scraped knee, we,
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 4: we say, oh my goodness, it really hurts and look,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 4: it's bleeding. It doesn't cost us anything to be empathic.
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 4: A part of us knows it's a scraped knee and
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 4: it's not a disaster. And another part of us is
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 4: very empathic about how upset this little boy or girl is.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 4: But it's much harder to do as we get older
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 4: when we feel attacked.
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 6: Well, what I was going to say, what I meant
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 6: was is that If this patient who I just described
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 6: to you had seen me 20 years earlier, he would
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 6: have fired me too because I would have been defensive.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 6: You know, you learn over the course of working with
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 6: this material and with your own emotional life, you learn
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 6: what works when you're in the heat of those triggered,
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 6: constellated moments. And so I was lucky. He was lucky
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 6: that he got me when I was in my late 70s.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 3: Don, describe for us that part that must come forward,
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: that in the onslaught, when we're receiving the fire, the projections,
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: the brokenness, the madness, the unholy union of malignant innocence
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 3: and violence, when one is receiving that, there is a
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 3: part of you that you called forward, that you decided
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: to bring forward that you call the vulnerable one, but
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 3: it's the vulnerable one who also will not be destroyed
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: by meeting the reality of the other. How do you
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: evoke that? How do you imagine it? What is it called?
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: How does it show up in mythology? What is that
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 3: part that can withstand the relationship and call it forward
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 3: in the space?
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 6: Well, what you said there I think is really worth repeating,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 6: the vulnerable one who will not be destroyed. The vulnerable
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 6: one is destroyed if it isn't voiced. This is the
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 6: important thing. What we do to give voice to the inaudible,
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 6: voice to the vulnerable parts that have never been spoken
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 6: up for before. When we do that, we somehow redeem
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 6: the unconscious vulnerability and make it conscious. By making it conscious,
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 6: we do something really terribly important because for every child
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 6: that's born in mythology, for every heroic child or redeemer
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 6: child that's born in mythology, there's always the forces of
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 6: the old order, the forces of the authoritarian old order
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 6: that want to kill it. I mean, the classic example
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 6: in our Christian tradition is King Herod and his sending
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 6: his minions out to kill all the children younger than
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 6: two years of age. When he hears that the new
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 6: divine child has been born, the new creative principle, the
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 6: new dispensation, the child, the spark of light born under
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 6: a star in the darkest time of the year. That's
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 6: the vulnerable, what Jesus said, the least of these. He
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 6: is the least of these. The same is true in
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 6: the Isis, Osiris, Horus myth. The child is born, and
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 6: as soon as the child is born, the.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 6: The principle of violence, Seth tries to find him and
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 6: kill him and, and dismembers him. This is age old.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 6: It's in all the mythologies that, that enshrine the fact
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 6: that these archetypal defenses of the vulnerable parts of us
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 6: are activated by new birth, by new life, by expression
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 6: of feeling. And so they're, they're in us all the time. And, um,
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 6: So we have to find ways of representing those parts
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 6: of ourselves. John Bradshaw, many years ago, did a lot
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 6: of wonderful work about this, about the lost inner child.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 6: And it was part of the ACA and, you know,
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 6: Alcoholics Anonymous work. And it's still relevant. Alice Miller brought
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 6: this wounded child into our consciousness, D.W. Winnicott. and all
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 6: the early trauma literature in the object relations field. And Jung,
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 6: in his child, his essay on the divine child, which is,
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 6: I think, still one of the seminal pieces of work
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 6: that Jung ever did, talks about the child archetype and
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 6: the fact that the orphan child, the exiled child, the
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 6: lost child, the banished child, and the innocent child are
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 6: essential to the life of the psyche.
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 3: So if I come back to this question of what
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 3: would I need to access and bring forward to stand
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 3: in the crosshair, stand in the fire of the one
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 3: who is traumatizing and traumatogenic in that moment as well.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 3: So it sounds like you're saying that we earn access
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 3: to our own capacity to suffer and not be annihilated,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 3: to suffer and yet remain one thing, to remain integrated.
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 3: Jung and Ion felt in the evolution of the God
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 3: image from the anthropomorphic, the theriamorphic gods to the image
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 3: of Christ, this evolving archetype of something inside that is
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 3: able to suffer and not be destroyed.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 6: That's right.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 3: Perhaps the precursor of that might have been Prometheus, Dionysus,
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 3: a bit of Osiris, but the first human deity who
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 3: can suffer and not be destroyed, perhaps even the Pieta.
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 6: The humanization of the archetypes. Jung talked about how if
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 6: we really want to do the work of individuation, we
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 6: have to slough off our mythological envelopes. Mm-hmm.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: That's great.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 6: I always love that phrase, sloughing off our mythological envelopes.
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 6: In other words, disidentify from those inflated energies that come
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 6: to our rescue from the archetypal world and give us ready,
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 6: you know, identificatory figures, whether it's the raging bull, you know,
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 6: or the compassionate, sentimental mother of all wounded creatures, you know.
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 6: I had a patient once who was frequently, she would
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 6: rescue all the injured animals that she found on the
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 6: roads of Westchester County, north of New York, and take
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 6: them to the vets. Snakes and bunny rabbits and chipmunks
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 6: and squirrels and God knows what. And yet she was
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 6: a harridan with her husband. I mean, these two archetypal
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 6: identifications were very divided in her. She was the bright
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 6: angel with the animals who didn't object. And she was
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 6: the violent angel when she got into relationship with her husband.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 6: And of course, with me, it was up to me
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 6: to bridge the gap. And I had a lot of
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 6: trouble with that. Once arrived at a session and she said,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 6: I can't have my session because there's an injured pigeon
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 6: down on the stoop of your building. This was 34
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 6: floors down. I made the mistake of saying, you're kidding.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 6: You can't have your session because there's an injured pigeon.
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 6: And then I realized I'd made a terrible mistake. So um,
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 6: I said, well, what, what do we need to do
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 6: to make it possible for you to have your session
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 6: with this injured pigeon? She said, well, we have to
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 6: get a box and some bread and go down there
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 6: and get the pigeon in a box and, and leave
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 6: it with the doorman. That's okay, but we can't carry on.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 6: And so I did that rescued that almost failed analytic
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 6: relationship from, uh, from a crisis. She didn't stay with
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 6: me very long, but at least for that session, I
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 6: always think about that as the pigeon session.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 4: But what does it take? How do, what can we
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 4: maybe lay out for listeners of how do we remember
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 4: or what are the steps in that kind of a
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 4: process to So that the next time we're, you know,
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 4: really set off and we will be, we will be
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 4: about stuff out there that's in the news or stuff
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 4: with our next door neighbor, one of our kids, partner.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 4: How do we rein ourselves back in? What's the inner
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 4: process look like?
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 6: You know, Paul Russell, Boston analyst who's deceased now said,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 6: Trauma is an injury to the capacity to feel. He
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 6: also said that's a discoverable capacity, but it takes a
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 6: lot of work. And it takes work because the tension
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 6: between the opposite feelings, the archetypal affects of possessive, all-consuming
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 6: love on the one hand and annihilating hate on the other,
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 6: are always the sort of bookends between which we have
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 6: to negotiate our human life, right? And we're going to
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 6: hate our spouses. We're going to love our spouses. And
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 6: in between, we have to become sensitive to the vulnerable
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 6: core of the evolving self, that vulnerable core of the
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 6: inner child self, the humble human self that's always going
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 6: to be hurting others, or going to be identified with
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 6: others hurt, and that we need to hold all of
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 6: that together and to find a language to become emotionally
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 6: literate enough to speak for all those parts, the loving,
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 6: the hating, and the struggling person inside who's trying to
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 6: evolve a deeper form of relatedness and a deeper connection
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 6: in intimacy with other people.
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 2: Which, if I may, I mean, what you just said
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 2: calls to mind Cartman's drama triangle, which I think is
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 2: what happens when we engage in splitting. We get identified
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 2: with either the victim or usually the rescue, either the
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 2: victim or the rescuer, and someone else gets projected, our
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: perpetrator gets projected out on someone else. And that's the
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 2: drama triangle. And you can examine your own life. Is
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 2: there any way where you are one of the people
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 2: in that triangle, either the persecutor, the rescuer, or the victim?
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: And usually we are consciously identified with either the victim
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 2: or the rescuer. And what you're saying, Don, is the
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: task is to be able to recognize that we are
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 2: all of those things and not to project things.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 6: That's part of that malignant innocence oftentimes because it turns
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 6: their genuine pain and suffering and hurt into a cause
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 6: celeb in a story, right?
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 2: Yes. And again, this is happening all over the place
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: in the culture. You can find that drama triangle at
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 2: a cultural level in many places.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 6: Absolutely. That's a great example. Whose drama triangle is that?
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 2: It's Karpman. I think it's K-A-R-P-M-A-N. I think it was a...
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 2: What is that, Joseph? Is that transactional analysis, maybe?
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure, but it's something that's used to great
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 3: effect in organizations, in corporate coaching.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 6: Well, you see, there are angels in the inner child
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 6: right there.
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 4: And there's the democracy.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 7: Right.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 6: Democracy is in the middle of struggling with all of
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 6: those parts, all of the parts represented at the same table,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 6: you know, e pluribus unum, out of those many.
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 2: That's great. That is such a psychological statement, isn't it?
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 2: E pluribus am.
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 3: I love that. So I'm left with just a final thought, Don.
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 3: So there are times that we may be carrying a
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 3: kind of inhuman force and delivering it out against a
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 3: person or in one direction or the other. And there's
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 3: a process for us to try to pause and reflect
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 3: and return to our own humanity. There are times when
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 3: we are in the crosshairs of inhuman forces. Someone else,
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 3: an organization is possessed.
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 3: So if we find ourselves in the crosshairs of what
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 3: is inhuman, that it is up to us to fully
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 3: articulate and confess the way that we are affected by
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 3: what is happening.
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 6: That's right. It's a matter of observation, witnessing, and knowing
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 6: when we get taken up by one of those archetypal powers. Like,
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 6: for example, when I was taken up by my rage
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 6: in the swim, I couldn't get to what was happening
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 6: until I stopped the swim, had a moment to reflect
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 6: while I was vulnerable, out of the shower, getting dressed.
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 6: And then I suddenly realized, and I don't think I
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 6: would have if I hadn't been doing this work for
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 6: many years and realizing when complexes get triggered. But yes.
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 3: Yes, for the inhuman to become human.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 6: That's right.
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 3: It brings us full circle to the Simone Weil quote,
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 3: the false God turns suffering into violence, turns the human
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 3: into the inhuman, and the true God, the self, turns
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 3: violence back into suffering. Yeah.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 6: Democracy turns the extremes into violence. human compost, right? It's
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 6: a constantly taking projections and human. It's like you come
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 6: out of a, you know, you come out of an
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 6: election and you've been fighting, you know, as Jung said
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 6: in Switzerland, we've succeeded in introverting war. He said, we
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 6: hate each other within the limits of the law and
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 6: the election. And then we come out of it and
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 6: something new has happened. Like, Any of you who are present,
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 6: say at Mandela's inaugural address in Cape Town or Obama's
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 6: acceptance speech in Grant Park at the end of the
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 6: 2008 election, these are transcendent moments where you've struggled with
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 6: the opposites and something new has happened. And it doesn't
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 6: last long, but It's about freedom. It's what democracy offers us.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 6: It's a transcendent moment. You know, it's a moment when
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 6: the spirit soars. The spirit in authoritarianism doesn't soar. It marches.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 6: So this is a difference. We get to something through
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 6: the agony and ecstasy of a democratic process that is
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 6: truly special. And there have been various enlightened people who
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 6: have known this over the years. And thank God for them.
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 6: Because right now, democracy is on the ropes.
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 2: Inner and outer.
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 4: Inner and outer. Just as you said in your paper,
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 4: and Lisa, you just said, we can all start with
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 4: the inner. That's available to us practically on a daily basis.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 5: Yes.
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and maybe I'll just invoke, in parting, you know, someone,
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 2: Barbara Hanna reports that someone asked Jung in the 1950s,
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: will humanity survive, you know, a nuclear war, or is
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 2: that where we're headed? And Jung said, I think it
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 2: depends on how many people are willing to do the
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 2: inner work.
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 6: And the relational work. You know, that's the one part
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 6: of Jung's psychology that He tended because he was so
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 6: introverted to neglect. It's inner work. It's active imagination. It's
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 6: all of the inner things we do, but it's also relational.
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 6: We get to democracy through relating. It's about demos of, by,
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 6: and for the people. It's relational.
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 2: Well, Don, this has been so rich and really profound,
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 2: I think, and I hope incredibly useful too. I know
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 2: it's been useful to me. I believe it will be
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 2: incredibly useful to our listeners as well.
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 6: Well, it's been fun and thank you for this opportunity.
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 6: It's a rare opportunity for me to get to sort
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 6: of spout off these ideas, which are so important to
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 6: me in a forum in which they're understood and really
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 6: respected and honored. So I appreciate Very much.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 2: Come back and spout any time, Don.
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 3: Please come back.
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 6: Okay.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: You've been listening to This Jungian Life. From our website, thisjungianlife.com,
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: you can follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook,
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: help us produce future episodes by funding us through Patreon,
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: and submit your dreams for possible interpretation on another episode.
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: We'd like to thank our listener who shared a dream
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: for today's show and hope you'll let us know what
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: topics you'd enjoy hearing more about. Until next time, keep
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: living this Jungian life.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 6: Thank you.