Carl Jung Was a Genius And This Experiment Proves It

Carol Young's psychological theories have been ridiculed as ludicrous and crazy for most of the 20th century and it's understandable he's making Grand claims talking about magical powers inside of your mind and talking about archetypes and all this stuff and it doesn't really have any grounding in solid hard science this is a problem psychology has had overall a lot of people don't take psychology serious for good reason because it's full of a lot of people who are just sitting there smoking their pipes and pontificating about what they think goes on inside of our heads now I've always liked Carol because I'm a little bit of a creative thinker myself but I've been well aware that there's been this problem and this is a big issue among the yian psychology sphere because it's not very scientifically grounded people can just pontificate all they want but in the last couple of years of come across people like Jill Bol Taylor and Ian mcgilchrist who have asserted the Neuroscience on the brain hemispheres and it has made me realize that young was a genius this part of Neuroscience which is discussing the different of the two hemispheres allows you to look through Yung and dismiss an awful lot of the bla and the jargon and see the core parts of what he was saying and realize how on point he was now to illustrate what I'm talking about here I'm going to use an example that young uses in his Works where he is doing therapy with a woman and the way the therapy goes reveals to you an aw lot of the big ideas that Yung is suggesting and also shows you the way to write hemisphere may have been working in his examples now this specific example grounds two parts of yan psychology that a lot of people find quite abstract and weird number one the idea that we have an unconscious that is intelligent and naturally creative and number two the fact that this unconscious produces archetypes and these are these magical symbols that come out of our brains this stuff is all nice and fun to talk about but is it real is it tangible can we actually connect this to any notion of science now the case study I'm going to use comes from a woman who came to young to have therapy she was experiencing depression a midlife crisis she felt generally stuck in life and she had lost her zest for reality she was in a bad place now you can actually read about this in his work the archetypes of the collective unconscious and he actually provides a series of pictures in that book which I'm going to refer to some of them here that illustrates this case so this woman comes in and she says that she's depressed and she's down and out and Carol essentially says that we should do some art therapy together now he says the word that I want you to start to paint now this woman could not paint she had never painted before in her life and she wasn't naturally that creative but Yung said no I want you to paint because what Yung was trying to get her to do is to let the unconscious come out now Yung knew that the unconscious had this way of talking through unorthodox means weird little things like you know writing with your left hand or doing things that you're not really used to doing such as for example making Pottery if you've ever made it before for things that are unorthodox for you will naturally allow the unconscious almost to break through this is just a an understanding that he had developed over the years the unconscious sneaks through novel experiences and even at this early stage we're seeing young intuitively grasp right hemispheric principles your brain is divided into two halves and one of the distinctions between them is that your left hemisphere which is pretty much your ego acts as the thing that deals with routine and habits and order and control and the right hemisphere switches on when you're thrown into positions of novelty when you go for new experiences when you explore things that are new or try things that are new when you go to learn piano it appears that your right hemisphere switches on and helps you figure out the things initially and then as you learn the piano it moves over and the piano becomes an activity you do with your left hemisphere as you become ordered and controlled and it becomes a habit when you go and you travel somewhere you experience childlike Wonder as you're walking around this new place if you stay in that new place for a while you develop routines and habits and then this moves over into your left hemisphere and Things become less magical so the right hemisphere is the beginner it grabs onto chaos and it slowly digests it so it can move it over into order so Yung intuitively knew that if he was going to try to break past somebody's Frozen habitual egotistic habits he needed to throw them into something new so he says to this chick go draw me some pictures this man used to get paid to do this you know she comes in he like I have a crippling depression I like go draw some pictures in the corner leave me alone so this is what Carol Young says to this woman now she has never painted before so this is weird this is unorthodox for her and she says this to Carol and Carol says what I want you to do is to sit down and almost try to feel yourself painting just try to bring out of your mind what your mind wants to draw and she actually does this and describes this experience where when she's painting there's this implicit intuitive need or feeling inside of her mind where she just has to paint and do something that satisfies the eye in the mind this is what she says herself now this again is very right hemispheric and why because our brains are split into two and our brains are not one thing as we might think in fact the hemispheres are split into two giant blobs that are barely connected together and they literally operate as separate personalities and characters and machines basically when they are split in half and this would lead us to suggest that you're not one person but you're actually made up of two people there's two guys living inside of your head and this is something that we've seen when we cut people's brains in half they start acting different their arms will sometimes even fight each other and they will have different personalities and different humors on each side of it it's very very bizarre but it's part of how we work and weirdly when we study the piece that connects it together to Corpus colossum its job is not as much to connect the hemispheres as you might think but its main job is actually to inhib inhibit each site it's like you're driving a car and you you know you're pushing the brake and the accelerator so this thing will turn off one hemisphere to let the other hemisphere do a job so the Corpus kosum is an inhibitor and it realizes or the way it works is that when you come across a task the Corpus kosum your brain is deciding do I let you know Steph right hemisphere Steph left hemisphere do the job here so if I walk up to a piano I've never played piano before my brain will inhibit my left hemisphere and let my right osphere turn on that character that part of me turn on and figure out the problem and when I go to a new place the same thing so there's this weird like breaking turning on and off of these two forces now the reason why this is relevant to this is because of the experience of perception both of these two characters have an Outlook upon the world but the right hemisphere can't talk it doesn't have the capacity to use language in the way that we use it with our left hemispheres so it's there it's paying attention to reality but we don't experience it this way and often times the way you would experience something like this would be very subtle this is the problem in an awful lot of our minds our language dominant conscious left hemisphere kind of bullies out of our attention the right hemisphere we don't really notice it doing its job it's kind of hidden there on the the on our shoulders like a guardian angel It's a very strange State of Affairs going on in here and so when this woman sits down and she's trying to draw a picture she'll have her chatterb brain left him her be like I don't know how to paint I'm depressed I'm I'm in my stuck routines of being a depressed woman woman I'm in this midlife crisis this is stupid what am I you know the selft talk stuff that people talk about but then there there'll be this intuitive hunch this perceptive Voice or or feeling in the back of her mind which we could imagine is the right hemisphere that is telling her yeah that looks right yeah draw the squiggle this way yeah put the the image this way because of course it can deal with images and drawings very good at this type of stuff and so she was experiencing this other Force come in now young would understand this as the unconscious talking and he's actually correct this was the maybe you could say less conscious or unconscious right hemisphere bullying its perception or revealing its perception to this task and so Yung encourages this woman to listen to that Mind's Eye that perception from the right hemisphere the unconscious let the unconscious talk now he doesn't use this jargon he uses the term that she gives him because he doesn't want to interrupt this with left hemispheric Concepts she doesn't want her left hemisphere to show up and be like what what is the what does the unconscious mean no he simply takes the intuitive language she's producing because he's a smart therapist and he tells her yeah just follow that trust that do what that thing tells you and then so what she does is she goes home and then every night she'll sit down she do a bit of painting she'll Vibe with her paintings and She'll follow this Mind's Eye and let it guide her hand and shape what she wants it to do so it's kind of a weird thing you know it's almost like something inside of her is moving through the the the paintbrush and she follows this and she starts to develop this series of paintings that becomes very fascinating so the first painting she produced juices is absolutely atrocious she's not very good at painting but it has form it has something inside of it so she was following this Mind's Eye and she produces this woman who's trapped in a load of rocks this woman that's like trapped in stone and trying to break out and then the next painting after this is This Woman's leaping out of this and then she's jumping up into the air and then the next one is it transforms into this snake and then next it's this snake swimming through the air that morphs into an egg and she's not doing this thing where she's reading about this she's not listening to what Carol tells her to write she's just following her gut following her Mind's Eye and the way this therapy worked is that she would draw this stuff and then she would bring it into Carol and Carol would try to get her to talk about what she was seeing and she'd never analyze stuff she'd never become an art critic of her own art she'd simply just produce it and then when she was with Carol she' he'd start to ask her questions and try to get her to maybe bring in a little bit more understanding of what might be coming out of this so in a very weird sense these paintings were pouring out of her outside of her conscious mind because they had learned to push this out of the way and she was producing this literally symbolic language that was very representative of her situation because of of course she felt stuck she felt like she was imprisoned tethered stuck in a place and then there was this liftoff experience when she started to do this painting and immediately she started to get this new lease of Life the second she started to do this which is of course what Yung was hoping would happen now this is very right hemispheric coded as well although this is slightly more speculative but the right hemisphere does not have the precise language centers that the left hemisphere has Your Capacity to generate language comes from the left side of your brain broker's area Worx area study that stuff read your books my friends but on the right side you do have the ability to generate meaning you can generate information with your right hemisphere but you're going to be much more biased towards symbols you're going to be much more biased towards using images right hemisphere is like some bloke who just talks and riddles he never says Anan straight he's so strange that you might try to have a conversation with him and he'll start go like this and then he'll just pick up a painting and draw a picture of his an answer he's like some Buddhist monk or something like this you're saying to him just say it to me straight man use language and he's like no no we don't do that around here I talk with pictures he makes movies you know you ask him a question he comes back with a two-hour highly produced Hollywood film this is what the right hemisphere tends to do it's symbolic in the way it communicates it generates meaning true images now this is definitely not an inferior way of communicating we all know that a picture says a thousand words your right hemisphere is that dude that autist on Twitter producing memes you know that's what it does it's a meme machine and your left hemisphere is some type of blathering academic Professor trying to be cool trying to be like well this is how this is the problem inside of your brain this is It's a social problem as well the right hemisphere is a shape Rotator and your dominant conscious mind is a word cell now the reason why this is important is because when it is is able to take over perception we can only assume and this is again speculative but we can only assume that the right hemisphere must be able to talk must be able to express its view now remember your dominant left hemisphere is what you consider your conscious mind but you've got this other bloke there on the other side of your head and it can talk and it has its own novel perception of things it sees the world in a different way now how different is your view of the world compared to your your friends or your mothers you're you're the guy down the road or something like that they can have radically different ways of seeing the world you have that same thing going on inside of your head this right hemisphere has been watching everything you do it's a guardian angel in the way it operates and when you let it talk when you do something like this where you subvert the left hemisphere and get it to draw schizophrenic symbols the right hemisphere will use that opportunity to communicate with the outside world and often times with you because weirdly it's quite smart and it knows that you'll be watching this stuff so that's quite weird so when the right hemisphere communicates it's using this symbolic Lang language to articulate its feelings about reality and so for this reason this woman experiences almost the feeling of relief and a really bizarre experience of these symbols being very accurate to how she feels and almost like poetically representative of her situation she did feel like a stuck woman in the rocks and then as she released this part of herself she felt like she was soaring and she was experiencing this new birdlike uh lease of life and she felt this like vital energy rising up inside of her like a snake power now this is where we get into the wacky notion of the archetypes because this right hemisphere is using a symbol language a pictographic language it's almost like hieroglyphs you know snake is representative of Vitality and power power it's like the tarot cards or something like this you know these Grand archetypal symbols it's not like letters it's not like information organized in statements like a left hemisphere would like it's not signs no it's symbols and so the right hemisphere is communicating with this woman is like woman stuck in rock rock feel ground heavy dense tough woman hand over face depressed and then woman launch up into the sky power shoot fire extreme woman morph snake snake power vital energy life snake bite on tail oroborus wrap warp it's this like Primal dreamlike language the language of symbols and Young was well aware that when he studied all of our history he would see this symbolic language arrive and arise over and over again because as people have dug into their right hemispheres over the course of all of human history these seem to be like the super patterns that we've oscillated around and this is something he experienced an awful lot in his career and he saw it here once again with this woman that she had no background knowledge of the archetypes or any of this stuff she was doing this thing where she was channeling this right hemisphere her own conscious and it was producing out of it the Primal images the image of the vital snake the image of the snake entering into the egg all of this stuff began to appear in her works the image of the snake eating its own tail the alchemical symbols you know it all began to show up now again this is very speculative but I do find this a much better grounding to the notion of an archetype than what most yans present because they get lost in the weeds with this a little bit they do get a little bit too speculative and they're very easily dismissed as a consequence of this but here we have a very simp Le notion that there's a half of our brain that operates like the unconscious that is intelligent creatively imaginative and it is able to communicate but it can't use definitive left hemispheric jargon orientated signifying language which is the language that we know it but it can use symbols it is Artistic it is like a poet it can use symbols and there is poetic metaphors that are often reiterated throughout Mankind's history that kind of just make sense as very useful patterns and this is probably the most badass part of this is that they're inside you you don't need to read any books you don't need to study anything you don't need to go and gain knowledge from the outside world there's nothing out in the world that you need it's already inside of you your right hemisphere has this stuff stored up almost instinctively it's like written into your DNA and if you can actually just learn to get that to talk by doing something perhaps artistic like alternate pain or whatever it is if you can get that to communicate it will actually start to generate the super symbols out of your own imagination it's already there inside of you it's quite a powerful notion and so Yung encouraged this process with this woman because he saw that it was healing her he saw that as she was exploring this imaginative world and allowing this symbolic language to come out of her and allowing herself to paint these things and just getting out of her own way and letting the right hemisphere Channel its will these paintings would evolve the symbolic language almost had a story inside of it like a comic book and she would begin to feel much more positive emotions as she was going through this process these things would sort of heal her mind they're magical symbols of healing you know very esoteric Mystic astrology girl stuff but it was tangible and it was real and there may be science to back it up now another thing began to happen here that's quite powerful as well as she went through this process she went from being very bad at painting to getting very very good now she did not get any formal training instead she just followed this desire to satisfy the eye of the mind and and this began to naturally order her behavior so it was almost like her hand was getting Guided by some intuitive feeling like she was doing a Ouija board or something like this this eye of the mind I would say the right hemisphere guiding her hand helping her shape what she was trying to do and her paintings went for being crude blotches and crappy blobs that vaguely have a symbol inside of them to actually transforming into very sophisticated well-ordered and shaped paintings with good use of color and a very original Style now this is very white pilling for mankind as a whole because it suggests that this alternate unconscious right hemisphere is intelligent is capable of learning and is capable of following principles of design and developing creative acts remember this woman was quite frigid and boxy and ordered and like an accountant type girl and she was developing novel capacity for creativity and this is not some postmodern stupid creativity where she was cellot taping a toilet seat to a roof or something like this this is ordered platonic Renaissance style creativity where she's shaping things with balanced form she's using color theory well she's producing things that look beautiful because the right hemisphere has this capacity to do this and when it can take control of a process of creation it actually brings it out of this woman she might have even said to herself I'm not that creative but it seems like she actually was she had this inside of herself this other institution inside of our minds is able to do this and this is based on this assumption that we tend to get stuck in our routined uncreative left hemispheric way of doing things which makes sense this is how you have to live in the world to be precise about your life but over in the other side of your brain there is this institution that is highly creative highly ordered highly capable of making novel ideas that are pregnant and charged with Vivid energy and may even be connected to the constellation of archetypes that are common to mankind and your problem is that you struggle to get out of your own way and let your ordered mind step aside and allow that part of yourself to essentially launch out of you and if you think about it if you dream every single night you've every re reason to believe that you do have a creative impulse inside of yourself if you could just find a way to let that start to speak through the inside of this is also an absolutely wonderful subversion of the postmodern Paradigm that we exist in in modern art because modern art has this suggestion that we can't really generate novel new ideas we can't really create super narratives we're essentially trapped in this fake world of perspectives and all we can really do is be ironic and break things down and deconstruct which leads to absolutely atrocious schizophrenic art that we see all around us but this is suggesting something much more Titanic and Powerful in that we have this magical vital creative impulse inside of ourselves that's naturally ordered that will reach up to the platonic archetypal super narratives that can generate Big Ideas and great forms and style that will reach towards things like Beauty which it understands much better than our conscious mind does and our entire job is actually to get out of the way and to shut off this part of our left brain that you know thinks about art as a postmodernist does and instead for us to allow this Dynamic superpower to blast out of our imaginations into reality and let its natural intuitive order present to us meaningful art now on top of this this woman goes through this process where she's generating these lowquality symbolic pictures of her being trapped in rocks then the story starts in the symbols where she's channeling this bright hemispheric imagination this unconscious mind and it generates the snakes and the eggs and the oroborus and the prime eval egg it's showing all the symbols and young sitting there being like all right keep going keep going and as she goes forward as she goes through this blistering experience of Vitality that reaches up inside of her eventually she starts to settle down and enter into this new way of thinking where she's nice and relaxed and calm and she's in at this new level of Peace you know and all of a sudden the paintings begin to transform into circles into what Yung would call mandalas and they tend to be really ordered circles you know you it have like four parts and there's a logic to them and they look very balanced and ordered and they're just these big circles drawn in the center of the painting and she intuitively hits on this and Carol's like you know looking side the side being like why did you draw that and she says I don't know felt nice it felt like what I wanted to do and he's like very interesting now why would he be snickering like this well of course it's because of the notion of the individuation process we have this unconscious mind according to Young and a primary part of our Lives is learning how to marry to it and integrate with it now this is all very abstract jargon but again think about the right Hemisphere and the piano what is the process of learning the piano you go and you approach this new object and your right hemisphere switches on your Corpus kosum inhibits your left and your right hemisphere is like huh and you start to feel it around and you're like smashing it like The Chimps in Space Odyssey 2001 and then after a while you actually develop this capacity to really understand it and you break down the piano experience into all these little chunks and then the process moves into your left hemisphere and we see this in brain scans and then at that point you become very clunky you become good at sort of playing roughly the things and then the last part of this process is the two hemispheres synthesize together and create a very Dynamic understanding of music and of the piano and this is the final end of it this is where you start to develop things like flow and you start to take the best parts of both sides precision and Order of the left hemisphere with flow and expression and H holistic experiences of the right Hemisphere and this is the completion of the process of learning now that's a psychological process that you go through when you do new things you start off in the chaotic right hemisphere you integrated it into the ordered stiff and frigid left hemisphere and then you synthesize in order to put yourself in a powerful place and of course what Yung was suggesting is that the symbolic representation often used by our right hemisphere our imagination during this moment of synthesis where everything just fits together is the ordered Circle the square the Mandela the fourpoint thing this type of thing that's the end goal and so in this instance this woman goes through a similar process explores the new Act of painting allows this symbolic right atmosphere to come back into her life and slowly she synthesizes and integrates in it and as she's reaching the end of this process as this process has complet it she starts to produce mandalas and while this is happening she's describing feelings of enormous peace and centeredness of Vitality but the calm Vitality of a Buddhist monk this type of thing now I love this because it's so radical on so many levels and it has a very firm grounding in Neuroscience this is a very real set of processes that you can go and look at the studies for and we can see it in the way that people's brains worked and it suggests things that are just absolutely Paradigm shifting for how modern psychology works CU it's no secret to anybody that therapy is a little bit of a mess it's you sitting down with some randomer who's just like painting a constellation of jargon inside of your heads and giving you all these labels to describe various phenomenon that have very little tangible grounding in reality and all of this is made worse by many of the psychological assumptions that exist in our society we don't believe that we have souls people don't say that there's such things as a soul anymore that's not something that's psychologically real we don't believe that we have another part of our mind that is intelligent and capable of producing order that's schizophrenia that's crazy that's not something that anybody can take serious but here we have pretty blunt evidence that something like that is real we do have a creative imagination that is separate from our conscious mind that is intelligent and is capable of communicating to us using symbol that gives us an awful lot more of a soul than the feeling of being a deracinated individual drifting through the modern world so ultimately I think this is a powerful first principle for the psychology of the future that is to come and I hope you enjoyed this story and I'll see you again soon

Channel: Uberboyo

Views: 56,706

Keywords: Carl Jung, Nietzsche, Jordan Peterson

Id: H0xAbjeOomg

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2024