Jungian Approaches to Change - Dr Mark Vernon, PhD

[Music] uh welcome to the summit um for anybody that doesn't know you could you just tell us a bit more about your story and your background and how you got into the work that you're currently doing yeah i actually started my professional career as a clergyman a priest in the church of england and that followed on from a physics degree um so already there was kind of physics and theology in the mix um the the early work uh didn't work out for one reason or another i sort of had a big religious crisis if you like as well as a personal crisis um and so left the church when i was still around around in my 30s perhaps early 30s and then um did a phd on philosophy and the significance of that was it it got me into plato and that was the beginning of a substantial churning point because i realized that working on yourself is absolutely crucial to finding meaning in life um it's very different from the scientific paradigm which just suggests that you can kind of find objective meaning and it doesn't really matter who you are so long as you can understand it um whereas plato and the early philosophers all stressed that your capacity to resonate with the world is absolutely fundamental and so um from that i ended up doing psychotherapy because it felt like psychotherapy was actually much more akin to ancient philosophy than modern philosophy you know modern philosophy sort of models itself on science and so misses out this fundamental part um so i you know when had my own psychotherapy which was very very important to me helped settle things down at last um and also became a psychotherapist and hence you know writing and reading about all these things as well fantastic now i've heard jung say and i might be getting the the quote wrong here but he said something like psychotherapy became popular and actually you know it had a massive growth in popularity alongside the decline of religion in the west is that is that fair to say and why do you think that might be yeah he made this observation that um as the churches across europe were emptying so the psychotherapists consulting rooms seem to be filling up he thought this was particularly so in protestant countries interestingly and because in catholic countries although people may not go to church so much catholicism with its rituals and its saints its pattern of life and its mythology still widely pervades the culture and broadly speaking he thought that psychotherapy has arisen because certainly in protestant europe we've lost the wisdom to deal with inner life um you know we've majored very much on the development of science and technology which of course has its own benefits um but it's been to the detriment of our inner lives and so psychotherapy has kind of rushed in to fill the vacuum um and its ideas you know have become quite pervasive in in culture as well you know everyone speaks about the unconscious everyone speaks about having an ego these are relatively recent uh ways of putting things um and in some ways they are a kind of urzat spirituality that's become a common common currency as we struggle with this side of our lives no that makes a lot of sense and in recent years we've seen a massive resurgence in in the popularity of young and what do you think that might be well he himself said that um if the 20th century was freud's century then maybe his time would come freud was always very very keen to align his work insofar as he could with the dictums of science and you know scientific materialism's great heyday was really through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century um now freud investigated all sorts of other things which of course a lot of uh the scientifically minded would vehemently reject but nonetheless um he wanted to bow to the authority of science now jung um he wasn't not scientific you know in fact in some ways he was much more so than freud he spent the first decade of his life as a psychologist working in a clinic where for example schizophrenia was first diagnosed and he did a lot of experimental work word association tests and so on so it wasn't that he was averse to an evidence base but he always realized the limits i think of science and the um particularly when it comes to the workings of the psyche um that inevitably takes us beyond what science can investigate through the scientific method um you know things like dreams and so on you can't um investigate the meaning of dreams in a laboratory you can perhaps investigate the fact that people do have dreams um and that they might be meaningful but quite what the meaning is is another question entirely so i think that now that we're feeling a bit freer from a strict scientific materialism jung's time might come and he feels um a lot more of now i mean there's some very basic things as well which um young first suggested that have become the norm in psychotherapy so for example freud thought you couldn't really treat anyone over about the age of 35 because by the time you reach that age things were already too set whereas human was always interested in people of all ages and of course now psychotherapy is interested in people of all ages freud thought that you need to have this strict regime of many times a week lying on the couch psychotherapy whereas young always experimented with setting up with telling people to you know go and have a few dreams for a few months and then come back again um and and that that mode that way of working is much more um you know feels much more now too so maybe this this entry will become much more the young century 100 so now i want to get into some of the key ideas of jungian psychology but before we do i'd be curious to ask you mark what do you think jung's most important contribution to our understanding of human nature has been if you had to pick one one thing yeah i mean that's that's fascinating you could suggest lots of things um i mean something that in a way is quite obvious but that comes to mind is that jung was quite clear that what we need to take the next step in life is already right in front of us if only we know how to pay attention to it you know we're very inclined in the modern world to have ideals that imagine how we want to be in 30 years time um or conversely you know we can get very preoccupied with the past and rather stuck in the past and what did and didn't happen and jung was very clear that um what we need is actually present right now and that's really important because to make any kind of change the important thing is the next step you take it's not where you might end up um and uh so he he very much stressed that i mean he wasn't alone in saying that that's quite a norm in say spiritual traditions um but it does require trusting that meaning is in the right here right now you know meaning is to be found right now today um and we're not so good at that in the modern world because we tend to think there might be just meaningless contingencies all around us and that we somehow have to inject meaning into our lives rather than uh discerning the meaning in our lives and so that was a really important point i think um you know so if you go into psychotherapy um you might spend quite a lot of time but first trying to um articulate your dreams go over what happened in the past but eventually a point comes where you realize that what actually happened maybe even that morning on the way to the therapy room has got something really significant to tell you about the step you might take after you leave the therapy room and that is real change because it's happening here and now it's not just mulling over things um so that was one thing he was also very very clear that the psyche is active um he thought that a key dynamic actually is that we try to constantly return to a kind of balance he called it homeostasis um and but that that is just the flip side of saying that the psyche is always on the move so for example he thought actually we probably are dreaming all the time it's just that during the day we don't notice because our waking consciousness a bit like the sun blocks out the stars so our waking consciousness and blots out our dreaming um but the point there is again that you know we're constantly on the move internally and that's good because you can there's always energy there's always dynamism to be tapped into the question is how you kind of navigate um and work with that energy and so that was a key idea of his psychology as well um you know so he doesn't see us for example as static robots that somehow need to download a new source code you know if only we could sort of reprogram ourselves um that that way of thinking is completely averse to him um we're living intelligences and uh again you know feeling yourself to be like that is itself hugely liberating um and then a third idea um is that he thought that the myths really matter and these kind of stories archetypal stories to use his you know well-known word they're really important and again i think they're crucial because the point about myths is that they help illuminate what otherwise might seem quite a trivial detail um you know so um you know how you respond to someone for example whether you respond um openly or whether you respond um bitterly or whether you respond um you know kind of kindly um those little moments they might seem sort of inconsequential what does that matter except you know you just start to read myths and immediately you see that for example you know there might be a myth of someone who was speaking to someone they encountered who they thought was just another human being and it turned out they were an angel and that angel had huge power to bless or curse them um and you know that story illuminates why every moment might count because in its mythological language it says you don't presume to know what's going on um again seize every moment you know the big myth that he's associated with after joseph campbell is the myth of the hero's journey which is another story that tells how it's really important to go on the journey um not just as it were to look for souvenirs from life but to go on the journey that discovers the real treasure and that costs and so that's a myth that tells us that this life is going to be one of suffering and struggle but that is not in itself bad again i think that a lot of modern psychology is very inclined to think that what's a struggle what's suffering is somehow bad and we need to shift to ways of being happier um for example and try and get rid of the downside of life um young would say that's completely mistaken and myths can help us live with struggle and suffering because they give it a much bigger context um and um open us to real transformation not just kind of constantly trying to tweak our lives and to sort of nudge them in what we think is a better direction yeah no those were three powerful insights and then you touched on it briefly there um but this whole young's idea of the archetypes um for anybody that hasn't heard of this concept before how would you provide a simple explanation of how to understand the archetypes yeah he thought that he was very influenced by darwin and evolutionary ideas and he thought that much as i don't know you know we've got um five fingers um because we've inherited the five proto fingers you might say that you find in fish fins for example um so there's a kind of back story to our physiological presence and so too he thought there's a deep backstory to our psychological um presence and that what we're born with is inherited as much as we then try and do things with it in our lives and archetypes are the kind of inherited features or structure or dynamisms of our psyche um you know so um if we've got five fingers because fish have five bones in their fins so for example um we might have an archetype of the maternal figure in our minds not just because we all have mothers but because having a mother is a deep truth about being a human being that goes back across generations so how we experience um the maternal will be shaped um you know in some significant measure by that past as much as by our direct experience and that the way he put that was saying therefore there's an archetype of the mother um there may be actually several archetypes of the mother um you know there may be like the good mother and the bad mother um to put it a bit simply um and fathers of course too um and um but realizing that you have these kind of patterning influences in your mind that you might be relating to quite as much as what's happening immediately in front of you again can be really illuminating and help you to become a bit freer in life as well now that makes a lot of sense and uh i think i think you said this in your your course with us in february that you know the same way that birds come born with the like the program or the the knowledge to build a nest in the same way we come come with these archetypes and one of our other speakers dr kevin he describes an archetype like a jug and that's like kind of the structure the container for for that particular pattern of behavior and what form the behavior text depends on the cultural context so it just it might be expressed um one way in one culture and another way in another culture if that makes sense yeah yeah again um i mean i you know these are all metaphors but i always resist the slightly mechanical metaphors like say programs because you know programming in a computer um strictly determines what the computer does um it's an absolute tight chain of cause and effect whereas archetypes are much more like living ideas they're like stories and the story can be retold and it's pliable um and um you know in a way needs to be retold in order to keep it alive um if it's just written down and then left then it it loses its energy and so archetypes are these living qualities but yeah that's broadly right and what we do with them the form that we in our individual lives make of them um is the crucial thing i'm curious you know you're you're a psychotherapist and this might be a stupid question but i'm going to ask it anyway um is it possible for somebody to be possessed by an archetype like to be possessed by like the hero archetype for example where they overly identify with this um this form of behavior or this this energy is that a possibility for people no for sure um i mean the you know the psychological word is identify and where you lose your sense of yourself and instead think that you're the messiah you're the hero and whatever it might be and that inevitably comes unstuck because you're living ultimately a false life and probably what will happen is that because you can't be the perfect hero or the perfect messiah yourself you'll try to force people around you to treat you in that way you know so you might try and establish yourself as a cult leader for example and so that you have the world around you telling you are this messiah that you think you are but of course that abuses people and probably comes unstuck sooner or later yeah so over identifying another key union word is inflation how the ego can become inflated because it thinks it's semi-divine and instead you've got to recognize your relation in the kind of spiritual ecology if you like you know we have a crucial role to play as human beings and must learn that rather than thinking worth something hundred else now you said there you know we've got a crucial role to play as human beings here what did young see as the purpose of a human life you know why did he think we were here and what what were we up to yeah i think that he thought um drawing a lot on um 19th century um philosophy and psychology and is very influenced by figures like nature and so on um the the task of a human being is to make an individual life to um to thrive as a particular manifestation of soul of spirit of life of humanity so the individual really matters for jung and nietzsche had made this remark that one thing is necessary and you think oh my goodness what's the one thing that's necessary and he says to give style to your character and i think what nietzsche means by that is to become your own person and to be open uh to be um capable of transmitting and channeling and and being translucent to all sorts of dynamics in life but nonetheless to do it in your own particular way you know and you see this with any individual that you admire um i don't know someone that everyone will know of is the dalai lama um very many people will think that the dalai lama is channeling a whole lot but he's also very distinctively an individual person um with his laugh and his look and his cheekiness and all the rest of it and for jung it's the individual that um that brings the universal into being if you like um rather than feeling you've got to somehow be some sort of general human being that's perfect in every respect and that is a disastrous way to go it actually ends up emptying yourself out and leads to all sorts of troubles like identification and inflation um so yeah so the purpose of life is to become um individuated i mean you already said that word that's one of the things he meant by this this notion of individuation um it's to bring together all that has happened to you um in its particularity and make something of it um he famously remarks at one point um the task in life is not to be perfect it's to be complete and i think what he meant by that is that to gather all that's happened and knit it into some sort of a whole um so that everything is uh is operative everything is valued um everything is related to and nothing is kind of cut off or split away that's really interesting and again something you mentioned back in february was about young's view of enlightenment could you maybe expand on that a bit what what did young think about enlightenment well i think he quite you know if you just look at the word i think he thinks bringing everything so insofar as possible to conscious light and so making everything conscious i mean this touches a bit on um one of his key ideas which is the notion of the shadow um and the shadow is a metaphor you know when you're out in the sunshine you have a shadow that follows you around that's just behind you um that looks shadowy but somehow has a sort of vitality in life and he thought that we have shadows in our psyche which similarly you know are absolutely glued to us and they somehow come from us um but we can't quite see what they are and and and it's hard to relate to them um but bringing that to light bringing that to conscious light is a key part of what it is to be enlightened and he thought that when you can bring what is otherwise in darkness and closest to you to light so you know your own personality your own vicissitudes your own likes and dislikes your own fears as well as loves when you can become more and more conscious of that at the same time you start to see that there's more um reaching to further horizons as well um i mean a bit like the sun will light up the whole landscape when it rises and not just what's immediately around you and whilst you may see what's further away less clearly you're certainly more and more aware that it's there and so enlightenment also includes the sense of becoming more and more aware of dynamics lives energies and so on that um that reach out far far beyond you but that you nonetheless can learn how to relate to that too would be a key part of enlightenment for him for sure you mentioned the shadow there how you would um in jungian therapy or jungian analysis how would the analysts go about helping the person start integrating their shadow like what would the process for that actually look like in practical terms well a really um key way of getting to know your shadow is attending to your likes and dislikes particularly in other people you know so if you find yourself falling in love with someone then because you don't actually know that person yet you know it can happen in an instant um probably what's happening is that that person has triggered something inside you that you already love and you've projected that out onto this person and so think you love that person and similarly you know if you meet someone and instantly take a dislike to them which happens all the time you don't know that person so what's probably happened is that person has triggered a part of you that you dislike and you've seen it in them and so disliked them now particularly when it comes to dislikes but also to likes um when they have this quality of sort of overwhelming you or completely shaping your experience for good or ill you're probably dealing with your shadow and um the thing to do is to ask yourself look wait a minute i've only just met this person you know how come i have these overwhelming feelings towards them um what does it remind me of myself can i make some sense of that um and you know the chances are it can be quite difficult can take quite a long time because the psyche is very powerful and particularly these dynamics for periods can be quite overwhelming but sooner or later they kind of quieten down and then it's a good idea to ask yourself you know why did i fall for that person why did i so hate that person why was they envious of another person and that will tell you something about yourself which is active and dynamic in yourself but in the shadow beginning to bring it to light interesting so if just by bringing it to light just by being aware of it by making it conscious then you're less what are the benefits of doing that are you less affected by it benefit by doing that yeah well i mean again in some ways it's all quite simple the aim is to bring things to consciousness to notice things um but consciousness is not just this sort of static passive um thing that we do it's always reflexive always interactive always relating it is alive um and so much like you know when someone walks into the room um you relate to them even to ignore them is to relate to them and they'll feel you ignoring them and so too and with what's going on in our psyches um to relate to them changes things um it incorporates it welcomes it befriends um or it rejects hates loathes um and so noticing is never mere noticing in the psyche um it's not like making a scientific observation um that can pretend at least it doesn't change the situation at all um you know observing being observed the observer what's observed they're always entangled um the trick is they become more skillful in your observation and particularly to learn that often it's what seems subtle and inconsequential that actually turns out to be the most powerful and consequential and so the amplification of what you notice um is is really a key thing for for young and for all psychotherapy actually um so we've touched on a few of them already but what would you say the the key ideas in jungian psychology that we haven't covered yet that people should be aware of going forward yeah well um quite a good one um if you're thinking about how to change your life is um a midlife crisis and this is an idea that originates with jung and he makes this observation that we know that we're mortal and so the first half of our life is going to be felt very differently from the second half of our life um and he made the observation that it's a bit like the morning where you know the sun is still rising in the sky and as it were the day feels full of potential whereas when you start to notice that the sun has passed the zenith and it's beginning to set you know that the day is coming to an end and so it has a very very different feel that time of day you won't as well launch out on new projects you might try and consolidate what's happened during the day or give thanks for it and so similarly he thought that our lives are like kind of single days and the at various points you become particularly aware that you've been given a life and so you want to make something of that life and that might be a moment where you you know try and find a relationship or you try and find work that's meaningful or you try and establish yourself in a particular place by buying a house or whatever it might be these kind of activities that are appropriate to that moment because they're trying to give you a place in the world but there also comes another moment where you realize that you can't just keep on doing that indefinitely um the life is limited and so the question then becomes much more so what is the meaning of all this you know what's this all this activity being about um what can i kind of make sense of maybe what can i pass on transmit um where am i going next um you know am i preparing for that now for the next day um so thinking about the midlife crisis which needn't happen you know at the age of 35 or 40 or 45 it might happen at different moments um you know you might launch out to a career and then halfway through the career start to wonder what that career is really about so it's a kind of mid-life crisis in your career it can happen in different ways and but nonetheless the basic principle is there's a sort of time for everything um and um if you start asking yourself you know what do i think i'm doing in life and it feels like a crisis well there might be something quite good about that because maybe it is saying to you it's time to consolidate to assess rather than to try and establish and build um so the midlife crisis is a really again quite simple idea in a way but can profoundly shape how you approach where you find yourself to be what sense you try and make of it um another one um that he majored on in common with psychotherapy um our dreams um i already mentioned that he wondered whether actually we're dreaming all the time um it's just that during the daytime we don't notice um but certainly he thought that dreams aren't just kind of background noise in our brains but the the images that our psyches conjure and that we notice during the night um they they have meaning they're telling us something so a very typical thing that might happen for example is that someone you saw during the day you dream of at night because of this projection mechanism that somehow they reminded you of saying aspect of your shadow so you have a dream of them during the night where they turn into a monster or they befriend you or something happens in your encounter with them now you're not really dreaming about that person you're dreaming about that aspect of your own psyche that you saw reflected in that person so dreams can be really useful because they illuminate part of this other aspect of yourself and i quite often think of them as just sort of images a bit like you know your suddenly you become a great artist that can make short films or um you know draw pictures you know the psyche is an amazing thing really um and holding on to those images by making a note of them or telling um someone else about them very immediately you start to notice all sorts of things about yourself you know much like looking at a work of art you notice all sorts of things about life and this happens you know every night if you don't have dreams then you can normally start remembering dreams quite easily just by saying i'm gonna write down any dreams i remember um and very commonly people start remembering dreams this is the kind of the gift of the psyche if you like which is throwing up um every day and night and can be really valuable for this expansive work um that jung got on about um so there's a you know a couple of ideas i mean there are lots of others maybe just to throw in one that's a bit more subtle um but was actually crucial um for jung um he was very interested in tension in the psyche and the meaning say of struggle and suffering um and he thought that this is the kind of growth point for us as individuals and you know maybe collectively for a society as well to try and make something of the struggles not just to ameliorate them and try and reduce them but to try and understand them and he thought that it happens by what he called the transcendent function and part of the idea is that um you know if someone comes to you in in for therapy they've probably got themselves and their problem um that they're wrestling with that they can't resolve and one way of approaching that would be a more behavioural approach to try and say well if you try this maybe it eases the tension maybe it makes it a bit better and sometimes that's very valuable because you know problems can really hinder people in life so you have to ease the tension a bit but jung would also say there's something in the tension that's trying to be shown or communicated to you and if you can tolerate the tension you and this other thing then in time a kind of third position or a transcendent position a position by that he just meant that um a sense of things that transcends the immediate situation that will start to show itself and that he thought was the real way to grow you know so for example you know you're i know you're in a relationship you have this repeat argument with your partner about something or other um and you try all sorts of ways to talk more cordially um you know to um you know i don't know find other things to do together so this doesn't constantly throw itself up you know there may be some value in that but you might also ask yourself you know why does this tension keep showing itself up you know and then you realize that actually your partner reminds you of your sibling who you always hated and who bullied you or something like that in life and that's a third position a new element comes into the room the memory of the sibling and by then identifying that that is where the problem lies maybe a whole new dynamic becomes possible with your partner and you grow as well because you've understood something about yourself you've incorporated it included it you know maybe you're able to either in your mind's eye or actually literally befriend and heal what happened with your sibling and so life expands um so that sense of holding on to the tension insofar as possible not masochistically but insofar as it's possible um often these tensions in life are trying to reveal something or show something to us um so that's a crucial part he thought of real growth as well and not just trying to sort of get on with life as you've always known it no that's that's really interesting i've never heard that one before um but going back to dreams so you mentioned you know just just by having the intention of writing down your dreams you're going to have more memorable dreams than that um in jungian therapy how would someone work with their therapist to start understanding your dreams and then using that information to improve their day-to-day life like how would they i don't want to say interpret but how how do they work with the symbols that are presented to them in their dreams to better understand themselves if that makes sense no it does um and the quick answer is that young thought in insofar as is possible don't interpret dreams but actually extends the dream and his phrase for this was active imagination and so um the more jungian therapist for example if a client brings a dream they'll try and create a mood in the therapy room that allows the dream almost to come back to life and then you can start asking the client questions like you know there was a crowd over there did you know who was in the crowd um or um you know what time of day was it or how old were you um just try and amplify what's going on in the dream and then say you know can you tell what happened next or in your mind now what happens if you go up to that person in the dream do you say anything do they say anything back to you so you kind of try and continue the dream in waking consciousness by sorts just slipping into a slightly different state of consciousness where the dream can sort of rise a bit to the surface but your waking mind can interact with it a bit um and the point for young about doing that is that you're working directly with what's unconscious then you're allowing it to unfold um to to you know run with its own energy run with this dynamism um now at some point you might interpret the drink you might say oh well that reminds me of this or that reminds me of that but you don't do that too soon because you could tail this natural unfolding in the dream it's a bit like a story um you know someone wrote a story and wrote the first chapter and then said by the way you know that first chapter was all about um the great difficulties that human beings have with animals um you think oh well i can see that but i want the story you know the story is where the kind of actions like is that is that um and so you know treating our the narratives of our lives as a kind of language that has um its own wisdom and if we can follow um again it's a bit like the myths you know if you can follow the narrative and then that might actually be far more expansive than than too quickly sort of trying to grab the meaning of this or understand the meaning of that that's more the kind of ego function trying to keep control or keep power of things but learning to relate to that which is going on inside ourselves and the world around us can actually be much more productive at the end of the day really interesting so what are some other uh techniques that young unions would use to help people make change make changes in their lives yeah so um this active imagination can be extended in all sorts of ways um not just amplifying dreams but i know art therapies for example um which might encourage you to draw um or to play with sans uh all sorts of things like that again they're trying to find ways where you can explore this semi-conscious state of mind which has this huge influence and power and so they're really important ways in which jung's ideas have been extended um he thought that um places are really important too he thought the places always have a kind of charge or presence that may give us something or may stir something up in us so for example um you know going on walks or going on pilgrimages or visiting different places making your place you know moving the pictures around your room all sorts of little things that you can do like that and ask yourself you know how does that change things for me um uh that too again um in this kind of very interactive dynamic uh sense of life that he had and he famously he had a lot of money he married a very very wealthy woman and actually built a whole castle um and so you know heavily invested in a place uh for himself in order to amplify um his own unconscious life now you know most of us can't afford to do that and if we do we probably go a bit mad um because it's you you need to keep a bit of a check on your fantasies um but nonetheless um we have a lot more scope perhaps for experimenting with these things than we that we might realize you know go go around a museum and don't just learn about the past but ask yourself what does this object conjure up in me now as i look at it and then look at another object and feel how different it is um that these are all ways of amplifying the psyche um another area that jung's got quite well known for um which i think is really fascinating and and is worth paying a lot of attention to are the synchronicities of life that start to occur now um these are the meaningful coincidences that again once you start to notice them you realize they start to happen all the time now people have various ideas about how synchronicities work um and that can be speculated upon almost endlessly um jung himself had this very interesting uh dialogue with um one of the founders of quantum physics um and i'm going to say wolfgang paoli but i might be wrong about that um i quite often get this name wrong and but nonetheless there was a very significant figure um in early quantum physics who was a very troubled man and came to jung for therapy and then they talked a lot about um the new physics and the and the new psychology um so people speculate about that an awful lot um i mean just in parenthesis my sense actually is that physicists like heisenberg like david bowman and so on they reached for spiritual psychological perceptions to understand this new physics because they couldn't really understand the meaning of the new physics even though it was very powerful in terms of making predictions rather than quantum physics suddenly proving the whole of spiritual traditions which is often the way it's talked about now i think it was actually the other way around but anyway that that aside synchronicity's meaningful coincidence has certainly happened and um however you explain them happening um and paying attention to them can be really valuable because they're just like little nudges or um encouragements um or you know sometimes they become much much more meaningful they release whole um surges of energy that enable you to do something you know sometimes novelists will tell you stories about how they had an encounter in the coffee shop and suddenly a whole story started to unfold before their eyes and so you know big or small synchronicities are really worth taking note of um you know the very least it's nice because it tells you that life is active life is dynamic it's worth living um which is such a problem that many people face today fascinating fascinating so in in terms of these synchronicities in your own life have did you notice any around the times that you were making like big changes into psychotherapy or anything did anything show up for you for you yeah i found i noticed synchronicities more in quite seemingly random ways actually um i know one that i remember is stuck in my mind i mean i go through phases and sometimes i keep synchronicity diaries and try and make a note of them again because a bit like dreams this this enables you to see more and more um i'm not doing that at the minute but the last time i kept a synchronicity diary um i remember one quite striking one which was seemingly meaningless i don't know what it meant but it was striking was i just been to a talk about jinns which are these kind of trickster spirits particularly in islamic culture and um as i left the talk um and stepped onto the street a motorbike with a big carrier on the back saying gins sort of sped by you know and then i looked up and there's no delivery company called jinns um so i don't know quite you know it might there might well be another company called gins and but certainly not a delivery company um and uh you know i thought oh and i thought oh well you know i should pay attention to what i've just heard not just forget it and it has helped it stick in my mind um so that you know that sometimes often for me they're just quite trivial um you know when i look back to the big changes in my life um they were in a way they were born much more of collapse than illumination um so you know maybe i just wasn't really aware of the synchronicities at the time and could learn to pay more attention to that going forward so mark before you go just a couple of questions um have you got any sort of key takeaways or concluding points you'd like to make that you think people should uh take take with them from this interview yeah well one is um a maybe a more personal point um that i think these things take time as well um you know if if it's true that our task in life is to become individuated to give style to our character to become a particular incarnational manifestation of this tremendous thing called life then that's going to take all your life um and again a quite uh um ultimately destructive notion i think that does the rounds in psychology quite a lot is that you can do the eight-week program or have the quick idea and that will change everything suddenly you'll be manifest and realized um well no i mean jung said you gotta this is a lifelong undertaking um which is good because it actually gives meaning to the whole of your life rather than just thinking um you know i just need to find that bit of wisdom or implement that idea and suddenly everything will be fine um you know sometimes things do change quite fast i'm not saying they can't change quite fast at times but mostly i think it's worth um thinking about how the present moment what's happening here and now is part of a much bigger picture much bigger story and to enjoy the present moment in the confidence that it's part of this bigger story um that is quite a good thing and then you know that then i think applies to um the times we live in that it feels like we're living through a time of crisis um you know you're you know the crisis of choice is yours whether it be climate change whether it be political trouble um you know we're speaking at the end or what might be the end who knows of the covid crisis who knows who knows how long it's going to go on for um but crises have meaning um for young and for others but certainly for young they're not meaningless they're not just incidental you know maybe by tolerating the struggle that crises precipitate we learn new things that we just wouldn't have anticipated in any other way and because when we're not in crisis we're very inclined just to stick with what we know but a crisis can force us onto that which we've ignored or that which we haven't seen or forgotten you know as long as it doesn't break us of course so we need to be kind to ourselves as well don't be masochistic about these things and but there's a there's a sort of different side to the sense of crisis in the modern world which i think is that it could um presage the birth of a new sense of things um you know whether it be actually in this world or whether it be um in whatever happens next or other aspects other dimensions of our being that are trying to speak down to us you might say in the present moment and that because we live in a secular age we've rather forgotten you know so crises can be born um and they can give birth to new things um so maybe that's a sort of hopeful word for an otherwise quite troubled time definitely definitely are there any books or any resources you'd recommend for someone looking for an introduction to the key ideas of jung yeah well jung he wrote an awful lot and some of his writing is very difficult a bit impenetrable but he also gave talks and the collections of his talks and lectures um i mean one is published as modern man in search of soul um and if you'll forgive the gendered language of the early 20th century um it's got a good um sense of it can give you a good sense of his psychology um uh he wrote uh an autobiographical work too memories dreams and reflections um and uh it's a really good read it's quite a puzzling read at times but nonetheless it's very gripping um and maybe we'll precipitate all sorts of thoughts um there are there are some good introductions to jung's thoughts again probably the best thing to do is to look online or when you can go to a bookshop and pick one that strikes you as interesting because sometimes people write about young in a more clinical way um to do with um human psychology and happiness and so on whereas other times they write about him in a more speculative or spiritual way and so depending on what you're looking for um it'd be good to pick up a book um that chimes with that um and um [Music] you know there's there's quite a lot of talks um there's youtubes um as well as discussions like this which uh you know widely available perhaps um jung lived at a time when television had been born and there's a famous for example interview with him um again that now the name of the interviewer um slips my mind right now but if you google jung live or something like that then some grainy black and white footage might come up before your eyes so you can hit the point is you can hear the man speak himself i think i think the interview is called face to face that's exactly yeah yeah that's the one yeah yeah so yeah go for that it's very fascinating young's great towards the end of his life he journeyed and explored all sorts of things you know that we haven't begun to touch on but by the end of his life because he lived at quite a good old age he had that wisdom where he could say things quite simply and quite clearly but with tremendous authority um so he is worth listening to he became individuated i think you know he became a very particular person instantly recognizable but somehow at the same time channeling so much more um than just his individuality um so yeah it's worth listening to him as well and it's great that we can 100 well mark for anybody that wants to learn more about your work and and your your writing etc where can they find you online yeah thank you so i have a website markvernon.com um i post podcasts youtubes um on a variety of things but often around inner life um i don't know i'm doing a whole series on dante's divine comedy at the minute i have conversations with various people and like rupert sheldrake and other friends and where we try and tease these things out um i write as well as practice as a psychotherapist so i try and kind of bring it all together on that website markvernon.com great um also i would recommend for anybody looking for an introduction to young's key ideas mark actually wrote a series of articles for the guardian i think it was a how long ago was that like 10 years yeah a few years back now yeah but they've been gathered together um you can either buy the gather together version on amazon it's called young i uh how how we how to believe i think but if you just google carl jung and mark vernon it should come up i was reading through him last night really interesting stuff so i highly recommend that there as well for anybody interested in these ideas so mark thank you very much for taking the time i really appreciate it and yeah i guess we'll speak soon okay yeah well just let me say thank you for all you do now because you bring together a great forum um that discusses all sorts of ideas and it's tremendously helpful so i appreciate what you do as well

Channel: The Weekend University

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Length: 50min 42sec (3042 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020