>> I am here to talk to you
a little bit about Carl Jung and Jungian psychology. He is somebody
I stumbled across as an undergraduate. One of my undergraduate
professors was very, very interested
in Carl Jung's theory of personal development
and growth, and his wife was
a Jungian analyst. She had private practice
and she treated clients and used the
dream approach. Have any of you heard
anything about Carl Jung? Is the name even-- how many of you
have heard the name? Okay. How many of you have any idea
of what it might all be about? Little bit,
sort of. Well, one of the things
that Jung did was he developed what he
called "analytical psychology." Frequently, people
say that he was-- if you go to Wikipedia,
it'll tell you that he was a student
of Freud's. I kind of take
issue with that, because he was a
practicing psychologist, medical doctor, psychologist,
at the University of Burgholzli in Switzerland
before he and Freud ever heard
of each other. Freud was about
20 years his senior. Jung was born
in 1875. And by 1905, he was
practicing medical doctor, practicing psychiatrist, treating patients at the
University of Burgholzli. And somewhere
around that time, he was acquainted
with Freud's book, "The Interpretation
of Dreams." And because he had
been treating patients that he noticed had... their fantasies or
their hallucinations or their delusions, however
you want to call it, those seemed
to have echoes of very, very
ancient patterns. They reminded him
of ancient stories of gods and goddesses that
he had read as a child. As a child, he had a very
lonely, introverted childhood, as he describes it. He was the only child of
his parents' four children who survived
to adulthood. By the time
Jung was born, his parents had already had
three children who died in infancy and
early childhood. During his first
four years of life, his mother suffered from
a very serious depression and was hospitalized for
this a couple of times. And his father was a pastor in
a rural parish in Switzerland. So he felt he
apparently couldn't cope with raising his
son by himself, so he sent this
little guy to live with his mother's sister,
with his aunt, who was unmarried and there
were no other children there. So this little guy
had a lot of separation in his first
four years of life. And he believed later,
as he looked back on it, that that played a role
in his early development. He described himself
as being lonely, kind of what we would today
probably call a "loner," and very introverted. And he spent a lot of
time after he was returned to living with his father
and had started school, he spent a lot of time
in his father's library, and reading ancient texts
and myths. And so, he was very
well-grounded. Plus, he had a
European education, which, at that time, meant
that you were trained in Latin, Greek, you were
introduced to the classics. And so, this was all part of who
he was as he was growing up. So when he got to his position
at the mental hospital, and students were--
oh, I'm sorry-- not students-- clients, patients,
were telling him, talking to him and he
was trying to help them, and they would tell
some of their fantasies, their beliefs
that they had. He kept recalling-- he
recognized a pattern. He recognized that there
were very similar patterns among some of
these fantasies, these hallucinations,
these delusions that were being
told to him. And rather than
dismissing them, as was typical of the
time, as just nonsense, and, what we might say in
plain language, "crazy talk," he decided to
take it seriously, that maybe, in some way,
these people were trying to communicate
with him. And rather
than dismiss it, he wanted to try to
make sense out of it. So it was somewhere
around this time that Freud released his book,
"The Interpretation of Dreams." Jung immediately read it, was
very, very interested in it because he thought that
Freud was articulating some ideas that he
could possibly use to help his patients
at the hospital, and ideally,
help them improve. So he wrote a letter to
Freud, introducing himself, and started a correspondence
with him. In 1906, he published
his dissertation, which he actually
developed the forerunner of what has become-- what eventually grew into
the lie detector test. He did a word
association test, but he timed how long
it took his subjects to respond to
different words. And he used that
mathematical measure of length of
response time to determine where-- what
words seemed to center around the longest
response time, and he concluded,
or hypothesized, that that area would
be where the issue was that each patient
was dealing with. And so--
(coughing) Excuse me-- he had
published this, and he sent a copy
of it to Freud. So the letter to Freud
about the book and sending his book came
fairly close in time. And Freud wrote
back to him. And they maintained
this relationship of conversation,
dialoging with each other, for several years before
they finally met, at least two
or three years before they finally
met in person. When they first met,
as Jung recalled it, they talked for
13 hours straight. Now, I enjoy talking, but
that's a long marathon session. And what they covered were
all of the implications, the conceptual framework,
the foundation of how Freud saw the
unconscious working and how Jung
saw it working. And Jung took this
as an exchange between a senior colleague
and a junior colleague. There's some evidence
that Freud, however-- because Jung
was a Christian, he was not Jewish,
which was very different from everyone else who was
in Freud's early circle at that time, he saw in Jung
a potential heir to promote the
psychoanalytic movement to the entire world. Up until that time,
it had been viewed as kind of a very
Jewish thing, and Jews were treated as
second-class citizens. One of the reasons that Freud
went into private practice to begin with--
he was a neurologist studying the nervous system
at the university in Vienna, but he could never
rise to the level of becoming a professor
because he was Jewish. So he was relegated to
very ancillary positions, he could do the research, he
could run the research lab, he could run the research
discussion group, but he could never
be a professor. And he wanted
to begin a family and he couldn't
support a family on that wage that
he earned there. So he left
the university and established
a private practice. And because of
his background in studying the
nervous system, he was sent a
lot of patients that others
couldn't help. And at that time, what we're
used to talking about now as more of a psychological
issue or an emotional problem, during the late 1800s,
early 1900s, those were considered
nervous conditions. And so, medical treatment
was prescribed. What Freud discovered
fairly quickly is that-- he initially
tried hypnosis, which later, Jung admitted
he had tried as well for his patients, and he discovered
that he could get the same benefits
for his patients by having them talk,
just free associate. In a sense, Jung was
attracted to that because they were both,
in their own ways, taking what the patients
were saying seriously. Now, after-- their relationship
lasted about six years. And during that time, Freud
made it more and more clear that he expected
Jung to take over the leadership of
psychoanalysis. That was the
name of this. And Jung belonged,
for a few years, to the Psychoanalytic
Society. When their final
falling out came, part of it was the fact
that Jung, conceptually, did not agree with some
of Freud's basic ideas. He felt that
psychoanalysis was focused far
too much on illness. It was focused on
"somebody's broken, "there's something wrong
with this person, "therefore it's up to
psychoanalysis to fix it." And it's up to
the psychoanalyst to tell the patient what's
wrong with him or her, because the patient isn't
obviously gonna be able to figure that
out by himself. Jung objected
to this. And he felt-- it was
a long, slow process before their
final break. But for Freud, he felt
the basic motivating drive, what causes people
to do what we do, can be explained
fundamentally in terms of the
energy drives in the id, which are primarily--
he identified them as primarily sexual
and, later, aggression. Jung fundamentally
disagreed with this because he believed
there was more to people than sex and
aggression. And so, he kept trying to
introduce into Freud's-- into the dialog that he
and Freud were having, he wanted to introduce
the issue that he felt he had seen his
patients dealing with, and that was the issue
of being connected to something
meaningful, something bigger
than themselves. He believed-- and he called
this need "spirituality," but in the sense,
not that it applied to a specific religious
orientation, but rather that it
applied to this idea of the fact that humans
can't possibly know all there is
to know to life. And therefore, there's
always going to be a level of mystery
about human existence. And he believed that
that need of humans to find meaning
in mystery and somehow establish
a connection to that, was really the underlying
motivating force of life. And it didn't always
work out right, or well. But he felt that was
the driving force. Yes, sex was important, yes,
we needed to defend ourselves, yes, Freud
was right. But Freud didn't
go far enough, as far as Jung
was concerned. So that's one of
the reasons that, as Freud and Jung started
to distance themselves from each other, Jung formed what he called
"analytical psychology." He deliberately introduced
the term "psychology," which, at that early time
in the early 20th century, wasn't considered a
highly reputable endeavor. He made a statement--
his statement was, "No. "We need to find out how to
help individuals become healthy. "This is about
personal growth. "It's not about-- if
we only stay focused "on the problems, if we only
stay focused on illness, "then we're never going
to be able to achieve "what we could
potentially achieve "as a human being. "We won't reach the fullness
of it if we stay stuck, "essentially, in
our illnesses." So he proposed instead
that analytical psychology would help individuals
develop themselves and achieve their
own potential. Now, this was a
long, slow process, as far as Jung
was concerned. Initially... if you read things written
about Jung by contemporaries, you get the picture--
one can get the picture, that he might have been
somewhat arrogant and distant. Later, he describes himself
as an introvert and a thinker. He identifies
how people are-- how personalities
can be described as having
different functions. And he identified himself as
being an introverted thinker, which meant that he could
kind of take a problem and look at it
very objectively, and, at the
same time, cut himself off from any
emotional response to it. So some of his
early cohorts would sometimes describe
him as being arrogant. And it's entirely
likely that somebody who operates that way could
very well be perceived as arrogant and be
totally oblivious to the judgments that
anybody was making about him. So... it's almost, from the years of
reading that I've been doing, it's almost
as though there are-- I see it almost
as two different Jungs. There's the early Jung
and his work at the Bergholzi hospital, the relationship with
Freud, the friendship, the development, the
philosophical dialog that took place
between them, and then there was
his private life, which, there was a very
acceptable double standard, in Victorian-- or it
would be Edwardian times-- that he lived, in which
an upstanding person of the community
certainly could have a wife and family,
it was expected, but may also have a mistress
or two, on the side. So in his private life,
he was engaging in things that we probably
wouldn't. According to the writings
of his contemporaries, and himself, over the course
of his life, he had several
mistresses with whom-- they were students as
well as his mistresses. It was always engaged
in this intellectual as well as physical
relationship. And through that,
we learn-- and through his issues in
terms of dealing with that, I think that during the-- I
think it's about 17, 18 years that he wrote what has
become known as "The Red Book." Have any of you heard
of "The Red Book?" I'm going to treat
myself to that as a retirement present, and then I'm gonna sit home and
just read that all day long and see what I
think about it. So I haven't had time
to do that yet. But during that time,
he put together selected writings from
the journals that he kept. He went through a very
serious depression after the break
with Freud. The break with Freud
was about 1912. During that time, he
describes himself as having-- he feared he was having a
mental breakdown himself because he was
dreaming about chaos. He was dreaming about
Europe being awash in blood. And he was almost relieved
when World War I broke out because he realized
that somehow his own conscious was
somehow picking up... energy, messages, we would probably call
them "vibes" today, and he tried to come up
with a logical explanation for why he should be
experiencing this. So he began, then, to--
during this time, World War II, he--
er, World War I, I'm sorry. He couldn't travel. He was drafted
into the Swiss army. Even though Switzerland
was neutral, they maintained
prisoner of war camps. If any soldiers from
the warring nations made it into Switzerland,
they were all interned. They were kept there
till the end of the war and then returned to their
respective countries. So he was drafted
and became the doctor and commandant
of a prison camp. So he had some extra time
on his hands there, too. He couldn't continue the
traveling throughout Europe and to the United States
to give lectures that he had
been doing. So this became
the beginning of a very, very introverted
period for him, where he wound up,
through his journaling, working out major
components of his theory, that we can read
about today, that we kind of
understand now as the foundational
belief system, so to speak, of
Jungian psychology. One of the things
that he introduced that you've probably
all heard about is a collective
unconscious. He deliberately connected the
word "collective" with this because he felt
that Freud's idea of the unconscious was
a personal unconscious. And the personal unconscious
that Freud talked about contained the personal
information from each
individual's life-- memories that
were repressed, memories that
were forgotten, perceptions that maybe
never, ever made it into consciousness
in the first place, past experiences. And those were much
more individual to each person. But beyond that,
Jung believed that there was
another energy field. One of the ways that I
have seen it described-- I did not come up
with this diagram and I don't remember where
I first encountered it, but I am giving credit to
whoever came up with it. It's not my idea. This is one way to think
about describing it. One of the things
that Freud said-- can you all hear me okay,
or am I bouncing in and out? >> Good.
>> Okay. One of the things
that Freud said was that consciousness was
like the tip of the iceberg... that only a very
small portion of it was available to our
rational way of thinking, our awareness. And everything else was part
of the personal unconscious. And this is where the id,
aspects of the superego, even some aspects
of the ego, such as the defense
mechanisms, were located. And not everything,
according to Jung, that was in here was necessarily
negative or traumatic. It was, however,
highly individual. Now, where does the collective
unconscious come in? For Jung, there
is a field... and all of us
have access. These are individual people,
individual icebergs. Now, a two-dimensional
diagram doesn't really give
you the whole thing. I've been racking
my brain, trying to come up
with an example that might make a little
bit more sense to you. So come with me
on this journey. Let's say you've got
a kiddy swimming pool in your back yard,
and it's very deep. Then, you take some
small pieces of PVC, open on both ends. And we'll pretend that
they're weighted on one end so
they'll stay upright instead of tip over
and float. So you put some of
these in the pool. What's happening is,
there's a certain amount of the water that's trapped
inside this container. But at the same time,
that same water is also all around
the container. Does that make sense? Because for Jung, the
collective unconscious is not something that
is inside each of us. It is something that is
somehow outside of us that we have
access to, that we can be
almost embedded in, so that we don't
know which is what. And if you took a little
bit of food coloring and put it inside
one of the containers, depending on how
much you put in, and how long
you left it, some of that may
eventually seep out into the rest of it, while a lot of it would
still stay inside it. What Jung is saying is that
the collective unconscious is like the rest of that
little pool of water and it holds all of
those energy patterns. Some of his theorists who
are more contemporary today and continue his work talk about it as the
evolutionary history. That the collective
unconscious holds the evolutionary psychological
history of human beings. They are present
in the form of... archetypes. Okay,
let me see. I need to make
room here. Of course, I'm going to
do it by dropping things. Okay, I am going to do--
I just heard this this morning so I'm waiting
to use it, I'm going to do
a "Marco Rubio" and I'm going to
disappear from the screen for a moment while
I get my eraser. Okay, I'm back. All righty. We can think, then,
about these archetypes as being present
in here. And when Freud-- er, I'm sorry--
when Jung was once asked, "Well, what's connecting
the archetypes?" he introduced
this concept. Now, he was very
much European, he was very
much influenced by the phenomenologist
philosophers of the time. And so, for him, "being"
was simply a word given to ultimate
existence. One way that I have
found it helpful to think about
"being" is... something that other,
more Eastern philosophies have called things
like "life force, "prana, energy, qi." It is something
that gives life to everything that's
alive in the universe. And that's the
level of mystery that Jung wanted to try
to explain human behavior as trying to achieve
an understanding of whatever
that was. And he used
archetypes. He felt archetypes were not
full-blown, ready-made ideas or personas or
anything like that. They were... potential patterns
of behavior... that were theoretically
accessible to all people, but may or may not be
accessed by all of them. There needed to
somehow be a match between a situation or an environment
and a situation that, at any given
point in time, may trigger an
archetypal response in a given
individual. Now, that probably sounds
about as clear as mud. Anybody got
any questions? Because I'm gonna go on and try
to make it a little clearer. Okay. (sighing) There are certain situations
that all humans experience, in the sense that they're part
of who we are as human beings. Obviously, birth, growth, some
kind of community, recognizing a
committed relationship, whether or not it is
considered marriage in that culture or not
is kind of beside the point. But there's a recognition
that certain things happen. In a sense,
we could consider the major events
of life as archetypal events. And with those
archetypal events, there are also
energy fields. When a child
is born, people are happy. And as a developmental
psychologist, who also worked as a
operating room nurse for a few years,
I can tell you that I've had
firsthand experience at a C-section delivery
birth of a child, where everybody-- they were
usually emergency surgeries, and the baby
came out healthy, the mom came out healthy,
everybody was literally high because we were
tapped in-- you know, if we do it-- if we
explain it physiologically, our endocrines were
going sky high there, endorphins. We were just as psyched
as everybody else who was really
connected to the baby, even though we
didn't know them. What Jung would
say about that is, that's because everybody
that was there had this archetypal
experience at the same time, and this particular
archetypal experience typically brings
with it a lot of joy. So people were able,
in varying degrees, to kind of tap into
that emotional pattern. Does that make sense? Okay. Another example-- and I'm way behind on my
movies, so forgive me. My kids told me if I ever
get into a Jeopardy game, do not pick
"Pop Culture." (laughing)
Because I'm gonna go
nowhere fast with that one. So I'm having-- right now,
I'm having a hard time thinking of a
more recent movie. But... I guess I'm just
gonna have to go back to some old ones. The kind of response when
there's a danger situation-- you guys all think of
something that fits this and shout it
out at me, okay? When there's a
danger situation, what happens
frequently is, people forget about
themselves individually and immediately try to
help who's in danger. We call it-- when
there's a large group and nobody's helping,
in psychology, we call that
"bystander apathy." And we all know that, when there's only
one person around that can
possibly help, that person is going
to attempt to help. And what Jung
would say is, that's because an
archetypal energy pattern has been
activated to that. As humans, we survive because
other people survive with us. We can't survive
in isolation. We have to be part
of a group to survive. So if one member of the
group is threatened, we usually don't sit
and think about whether or not
we're gonna do it. People who are
in the military or who've been in battle,
combat situations, describe that as
almost a given that that's going
to be happening during those times. And you don't
think about, "Is this a good idea
or a bad idea?" So an archetypal
energy pattern is a potential behavior
pattern that we can access if the situation is
appropriate to trigger it. Now, another thing
that Jung tells us, and it's part of
his belief system... is that... we don't ever access
the archetype directly. What we get... are... complexes. And the complexes
contain... cultural and personal
experiences. And so, I'm gonna go
back to an iceberg, make it a little
bit bigger. Down here is the
collective unconscious. Here is
consciousness. And this is the
personal unconscious. It looks kind of dumb
to call it "P.U.," but it's faster. Now, a complex exists, according to Jung, in here, within the
personal unconscious of the individual. But its source is
an archetype here that has been
activated. So it's in the
collective unconscious. We can think of the energy,
the motivation power, moving through the
personal unconscious. As it moves through the
personal unconscious, it acquires... it attracts--
think of it as a magnet. And then, the
different events, different situations,
different cultural experiences in the individual
person's unconscious are like
iron filings that connect to
this magnetic energy. I'm using this
kind of, you know, as a analogy,
not literally. But this magnetic
energy, then, is coming up
through, making its way
to consciousness. And as it does,
it attracts all of these
other experiences, even though they're
unconscious. And it also is influenced
by the culture, because we each come
from cultures that say there are certain things
that are appropriate-- "You may do
these things." There are others
that aren't. So we don't realize how much
those become part of us, too. And so, as this
is happening, eventually it
is the complex that makes its way
to consciousness, and then, has an influence
on the behaviors that the individual
produces. But for Jung, the
archetype itself always remains
untouched. Now, what he did spend a
lot of time talking about were symbols. He believed that... a symbol is... could be a person, place,
thing, or situation, that represents something
more than itself. It stands for something
greater than itself and it is not
arbitrary. One example
might be... in a movie, at
the end of the movie, or even during the movie,
let's say that a character-- one of the main characters--
is dying or dies. What might happen
at that point? >> (indistinct).
>> The movie-- keep going-- because you're gonna
have to fill me in on it. >> (indistinct). >> Okay. Honestly, I haven't
seen the movie. I'm really bad. But what I was
thinking of is, a light goes out,
a candle goes out, Shakespeare uses
that in his plays. It's that kind
of a thing-- that's a symbol of life
ebbing away, kind of thing. I'm gonna have to watch
"Pulp Fiction" now because I'm hooked. That's older--
I should have seen it. But there are
so many movies that I can't tell you, I've
only seen parts of them, because I had to go
put kids to bed or finish grading something.
(laughing) I have a lot of
snippets of movies hanging around
in my head. Okay, but what
a symbol does is creates a response
in a person. One example, for people
in the US was, after 9/11, you couldn't find an
American flag in the stores, because they were
all sold out. The American flag was
seen by many people as a symbol of the people,
of the country. Other cultures
have other symbols that are powerful, that they
have powerful responses to. And what Jung
is saying is if it's
a symbol, it has, in the collective
unconscious, an archetype of some
kind connected to it, and it will
produce an emotion. And that's how you know that an
archetype has been activated. Fred--
uh, Frank? >> The symbol itself is
socially constructed. So the American flag--
>> That's a social construction. >> But then,
according to Jung, powerful symbol,
a meaningful symbol, somehow it has
to connect itself to the collective
unconscious. >> And he would
also say-- because he's kind
of equivocal here-- he would also say that there
are some natural symbols. And those natural symbols
are more powerful than a constructed symbol. >> They emerge as a--
>> Yes, they're spontaneous. They're spontaneous emergence
from the collective unconscious. Any other questions? I am reminded
here of a book. I don't know if any of
you have read it or not. And if not,
I recommend it. It's very short. It's called "Man's
Search for Meaning." It's written by
Viktor Frankl. It is one of the
most powerful books I've ever read
in my life. Frankl was a psychiatrist
in Vienna. He was Jewish. He turned down
an opportunity to escape the
Nazi regime because his parents could
not get visas to leave. So he decided to
stay there with them and try to protect them
as long as he could. Eventually, they
were all interred in concentration camps. And all but Frankl-- every
one of Frankl's family, including his wife, perished in the concentration
camps except Frankl. One would think
that that would just make for some incredibly
bitter person. But what Frankl did
was somehow manage to transcend
that experience. And one of the things
he talked about was staying
connected to nature. That, as long as the
prisoners could see a sunrise, or another
patient saw a tree going through the changes
of the seasons, that that was a symbol
for those individuals of "life is
gonna go on "even if I'm not
gonna be part of it." It was connecting them to
a higher source of meaning. And it had a powerful
emotional connection with it. So for Jung,
a natural symbol, which just emerges
spontaneously, is gonna bring with it
an energy, an emotional impact. And that, when we've got
these two things occurring, we know that an archetype
has been activated. Now, there are
a lot of people-- uh, Jung started talking about
what the archetypes were, and kind of gave
some of them names. Some people have
gotten the impression that we've got this cast of
thousands of characters walking around
inside us. And that's not
exactly accurate. Instead, we have
the potential access to these
energy patterns. And if our culture
allows us-- doesn't forbid contact
with certain kinds of, or expressions of certain
kinds of behavior, then we are going to be
likely to tap into it. And for Jung, these
archetypal images and symbols were frequently
delivered to the people, to individuals,
through dreams. Freud kind of
saw dreams as... I'm totally losing
the word I wanted, which I really hate. It's a bad thing
to do in lectures. "Disguised." As disguised wishes, that the conscious mind
found repulsive and therefore
the dream's job was to turn these
things around and put them in a form
that the conscious mind couldn't really
recognize and so wouldn't know what the unconscious
really wanted. For Jung,
the dream is a little bit more
straightforward. For Jung, the
dream is actually giving us
information that, if we can remember it,
and ponder it, reflect on it, take
the message seriously, it's a potential for helping
us improve our lives. And he also said
that some dreams are just probably
indigestion. (laughing)
Again, the-- so not every
single dream has an earth-shattering
message for us. Again, the clue
that this might be an important
dream is, is there a strong emotional
trace to this when we wake up? With a really
important dream that has a lot of
archetypal content, Jung felt that there was
also an emotional recognition when the dreamer
woke up. They knew it
was important, even if they didn't
have any idea what the
dream meant. Let me just check my
notes here a minute, make sure I'm
covering everything I wanted
to cover. I have a couple of
quotes from Jung, which I have
not memorized. So I'm just going
to read them to you. It's more of his elaboration
on what archetypes are. Quote, "The archetype
is a tendency "to form representations
of a motif, "representations that can
vary a great deal in detail, "without losing their
basic pattern. "There are, for instance,
many representations "of the hostile
brethren. "But the motif itself
remains the same." And so, when you
talk about motifs, you can also use our
perhaps more familiar word of "patterns." And the
"hostile brothers." And you can look in
Egyptian mythology and you find
the story of Set murdering his
brother Osiris. You can go to the
Judeo-Christian Bible and you find the
story of Cain murdering his
brother Abel. You can move a
little further on in the Old Testament
and you find Joseph being sold into slavery
by his brothers. And other cultures
have similar stories. And what he's saying
is that pattern of animosity
between brothers is a collective
archetypal pattern. It's been going on
since human beings started populating
the planet. And that we need
to be aware of it and the stories
tell us-- these stories that have
come down to us intact, tell us what are
the repercussions of such animosities
that are carried out? And that those then become
learning experiences for us. We don't have to,
ideally, go through the experience of
hating one's brother and doing damage
to each other to realize the negativity
that is caused by that. So what Jung
believes is dreams play an important role in the
development of the human being. He really thought
that roughly the first
35 years of life, we spend starting to
get our act together, dealing with
our childhoods, establishing ourselves as an,
more or less, independent adult, and then we get to spend
the rest of our lives figuring out
who we are and improving
ourselves. So, it doesn't look like there's
golden years of rest anywhere, for any of us, if we
believe Jung's ideas. Now, he calls
that process... He calls that process
of developing into who one really is, as the
"process of individuation." And one of the
archetypal patterns that he does talk
about is the Self, with a capital S. And this is where he
has caught some flak from different
theologians. For him, this
Self is a term he uses to represent
the wholeness and fullness
of being. And for some people,
he acknowledges that that might be--
that what is out there as the "fullness
of being" may be what some
people call "God." He didn't take
it that far. He said that
this Self is an image
of wholeness, it's an archetype, that, in a sense,
pulls us to our destiny of becoming a fully
individuated person. And that the reality
is none of us are ever, ever, ever going
to get there completely, where we bring everything
that we have in our unconscious into
complete consciousness. But that's
the goal. It's sort of like striving
toward the impossible dream. And that no matter--
it doesn't matter that we don't
necessarily make it. The point is we're
working towards it. It's more like, "It's
not the destination, "it's the journey." And this journey is
a life-long process of trying to discover who
the real Self really is. And I suggest that a lot
of the medieval legends and other stories
of other cultures, such as the search
for the Grail, is an expression of that
same sort of concept, but in much
different terms and with a different
awareness of consciousness that the medieval period
was able to express, compared to what Jung was able
to express a little later. Okay, I really
think that Jung... became who he was and worked on the
bulk of his theory probably from
about 1914 to probably the late 1920s,
early 1930s. And then, he slowly
started publishing these essays. He kept his own
private journals. The Red Book
does not contain all of the contents
of his journals from that time. There's still some
things that his family has not released
to the public. He has a collected
works volume where he has put together
all of these different ideas, and someone has
tried to help him organize them
according to subject. That's another
of my goals, is to work my
way through, I think there's
23 collected volumes. So I'm going to
be doing that, some time. Probably not while
I'm still teaching. And the approach
that Jungians take is to look at patterns,
to step back, to try to identify
what the patterns are and what can we learn
from the knowledge that our species
has already acquired about similar
patterns? One contemporary
approach is taken by a man named
Dr. Michael Conforti. He was initially trained
as a psychoanalyst. And then, after he was
practicing as a psychoanalyst in New York
for a while, he then entered
the Jungian Institute. I think he was
trained in New York, and he is now
a Jungian analyst. He's been a consultant
to movie makers because they've
called him in to see if their story
plot line fits, archetypally. Of if they're
stuck on something, what might be an archetypal
resolution to this. He has an institute
in Vermont now where he trains
individuals through onsite and
through distance learning, and conference calls
and things like that, personal connections, to
become pattern analysts and to also, then,
sort of like becoming-- you're familiar with coaching--
life coaching experiences? Well, he's preparing
individuals to do it, making use of a
Jungian perspective without necessarily
providing Jungian therapy. So that's one of the
routes that it's going. There are numerous-- I don't-- the closest
Jungian Institute to us in
Grand Rapids is the Jungian Institute
in Chicago. And they, too,
train therapists there. It's a very
long process. They have a large screening
that you go through. And you have to be-- you have
to go through a couple of years of Jungian
analysis yourself before they agree
to accept you into the program
to train you to become a
Jungian analyst. So it's a very,
very involved program. Jung lived until the
age of 86, maybe 85. He died about two weeks
before his 86th birthday, in 1961. There isn't any nice short
little handy-dandy version of his theory that somebody
has all neatly put together. You kind of have to find
it in bits and pieces. But if anybody's
interested, I can give you some
potential sources, books that are not
written by Jung, but that are trying
to clearly explain his theory
and his work. Yes, Frank? >> A couple-- one statement,
one question. The statement is, since
we are fortunate enough to have shared a similar
mentor-- same mentor-- one of the things
that might be useful, and I used this since
the 30 years or so ago in a study group
and since. The value of how
the archetypes inform us about
great art. >> Oh!
>> And the idea that what makes a piece
of art great, whether it's music
or painting, is that it's a
manifestation of the collective
unconscious. And it touches us in a way
which we don't understand because it's communicating
to us something that's bigger
than us. And that really is the
distinguishing feature between just an
average piece of art and a piece of art that
has sustained itself for hundreds or
thousands of years. >> Thank you-- I totally,
totally forgot that piece of information
from Rule. >> Yeah, and that piece has
just always stuck with me. >> I look at-- I'm gonna have to watch
"Pulp Fiction" now. I guess there's just
no way about it. I'm thinking that
there was probably something in that
particular scene that made you
think of it and that you were
responding to that would fit, not necessarily
the whole movie or anything, but just that
particular piece of it. Did it fit with what
Dr. Connor described? >> Maybe that gets
to my second question. That is that,
as an individual on a path towards
individuation, we do come in contact
with a symbol, a person, an experience,
an image, that evokes an emotion.
>> Mmm-hmm. >> We don't know where
it's coming from, but clearly-- and it could
be a dream, certainly. It could be just a
happenstance interaction with somebody
on the street. But we know that it
evokes an emotion. Could you elaborate
on that-- where that's
coming from? What we need
to do with it? >> Well, where it's
coming from is some kind of
archetypal pattern that may not even
have a clear name has been activated
in the unconscious. And I think what we
need to do after that is try to
spend some time thinking about
what exactly-- "Was there a piece of
this that meant more? "How did I feel? "What part of this
did I respond to?" Kind of like
your question about a very
specific thing. What produced a
powerful response? Maybe, if we've got time,
journal about it, or at least
write it down. If possible, talk it
over with someone else who has similar
ideas to you. You don't have to have
a private therapist to be able to discuss
these kinds of things with close friends
that are thinking along the same lines
that you are. I remember one
of the things that our mentor
told me when I was first
teaching and trying to finish my
dissertation, AND dealing
with a newborn, and I was, like, "I am
ready to quit right now "because I can't do this--
I'm not tough enough." And he-- I was talking
about to him about it and he said, "If it's your path,
you'll be able to do it." He used the example of
the sword in the stone. Not the Disney version...
(chuckling) but the story of Arthur
pulling Excalibur out of the stone, that
no one else could do it. And I think that
what I found helpful was using
that image. So I think one
of the things is, if you can try to
connect some story that you know
somewhere to that emotion that
you've experienced, that that becomes one
way of trying to work your way down
the path. Does that make sense? >> I think that
you need to listen to those-- that
general response. We need to pay
attention to it-- >> Yes.
>> Meaning out of it. >> Yes.
>> You might be on
the right path and more than not, we have
deviated from the path and something
is telling us-- >> To get back.
>> To get back. >> Yes. >> (indistinct). >> Actually-- >> (indistinct). >> Jung would definitely
agree with that, yes. And then, what he
also would say is, if you're not paying
attention to the dreams, then you might
just get some of those messages
manifesting in real life. You run into someone
who reminds you of an earlier goal that
you've strayed from, and starts recalling
some of those thing, and then it
helps you get back in the process
of becoming who you are. That would definitely
be one way that he would
look at it. But yeah,
the idea is-- try to figure out
what it means. Now, for those who
are more introverted and who are always
trying to figure out what things mean,
individuation process might actually be
a little easier than it is for a more
extroverted person who looks for-- not
because they're outgoing and talkative, but Jung's
idea of an extrovert was that
it's a person who looks outside of
herself or himself to see what the rest of the
culture or people around him are saying or doing
in order to interpret his own
experiences. Whereas for Jung, an introverted
person was one who took it inside and didn't really
pay much attention to what others
thought about this, but sat with it and
processed it himself. >> (indistinct). >> Yes, thank you! Myers-Briggs Inventory
was developed by... Isabel Myers and her--
actually it was her daughter. I can't remember her--
Katharine, I think, Briggs. They took Jung's idea
of-- first of all-- two basic, basic
personality orientations, that of introversion
and extroversion. It didn't mean "quiet"
and "outgoing," the way it has
come to be used in psychology today. It meant where does
the individual orient herself or
himself to, in terms of figuring
out one's way? And some people are just
very evenly balanced between the two. He also identified
major feeling functions. He himself believed
himself to be a thinker. Thinking was his highest,
most preferred function. He contrasted that with
the function of feeling. Feeling is that an
individual did not-- it was not
irrational, but your first response
to something is, "How do I feel
about that," not, "What do I
think about that?" I guess that's the best
way to describe it. So that's one set--
thinking and feeling. He also talked
about intuition and sensing. And intuition is someone
that just learns to trust the
gut instinct, and relying
on that. And the sensation is
the individual is looking at the pieces
of information that he or she can gather from
their sensory environment. Perception
and judging. Feeling and judging
go together and perception and
sensation go together. Judging is... having to make
a pronouncement that it's good or bad,
right or wrong. Something
cannot just be. It has to be able
to be categorized in a particular way. That is the
judging function. And the feeling function--
opposite that-- is more, you feel what
the value of it is, rather than having to think
about what is it worth? And then, the perception
is more of, again, kind of an
unspoken... non-verbal assessment
of a situation or an encounter. It just kind of-- how
does it appear to you, rather than, what are the
sensory pieces of information that you built this
judgement upon? And so, Myers was
trained in Chicago. What she did was, she--
and then, her daughter-- tried to develop
a measurement scale, they tried to come up
with an instrument that would allow
a therapist to give it to
an individual and identify that particular
person's Jungian type. And they came up with every
possible permutation. And so, in that scale, you can
get 16 different subtypes. Usually... people are recognizing
themselves fairly closely. If the individual
is close on the scores of
matching pairs, what the Myers-Briggs
test says is basically they're
fairly well-balanced. They're using all of
their capabilities in a balanced way. Usually, people
are more one-sided in one area
or another. And when they're more
one-sided in one area, it means that there are
gonna be some weaknesses in their
decision-making process at various times,
if they remain unaware of what their
weaknesses are. Now, lately,
it's undergone some criticism. Some feel it's really not
that clearly effective. For a while-- I don't know
if it still is being used, but for a while, a number
of companies used it as part of their
personnel testing and trying to figure
out if this person would be a good match for
this particular kind of job. I have found it helpful
to periodically, when I'm teaching
senior-level courses, to give it
to my students and then
look it over, and we talk about these
differences and things. And then, I try to
use it to figure out, "Okay, "I'm not having
any success "getting this
concept across here. "How can I switch and
present it in a way "that this person's
personality type "would understand
it more clearly?" And that can be more
or less successful. >> (indistinct). >> Oh, I think that's--
yeah, that's based on that! >> (indistinct). >> Oh, thank you,
thank you. Yeah, because
I know that we have some of those tests available
in our counseling center, but the university
has gotten so big that the psych
department for teach-- the academic department and
the counseling department might as well be
in different places, because there's not a lot
of contact and overlap. But they are
helpful for that. There was a more recent
shortened version of it. I don't think it
was the Keirsey one. I think there was
another one, a revision that they worked on that
Myer's daughter worked on with this other person to try
to enhance its effectiveness. About two years ago,
I was at a conference and it was really
interesting because there was a
person presenting there who taught in
an art institute. He told about
their experiences that this one year,
they had a group of first-year
art students come in who were totally unlike the
students they usually get. And they weren't
connecting. It's, like,
they didn't get what the instructors were
trying to present to them, and the instructors
couldn't figure out what planet these students
had all arrived from. So one of them
had the idea to give the
Myers-Briggs. And they gave it to
all the instructors and they gave it
to the students. And this whole group, most
of them turned out to be-- I don't know the
Keirsey test. Does that still give
you INFP and ENFP? Okay, most of their
students in the past had been INFP
with a few ENFPs. This one whole
first year class were ISTJs. They were just totally
diametrically opposed to
the teachers. So then they went, "Okay. "Now how do we alter
our teaching "so that we are presenting
the information "in a way that
is compatible "with the way these students
process the information?" And I found
that to be one of the most fascinating
presentations at the entire
conference, was that, "Wow, that
makes a lot of sense." And it also-- I know that some
marriage counselors use it as well,
because sometimes, the problems in a
marriage relationship can come from two different
ways of processing. I finally found out
when I gave my sister and her husband
the test why my brother-in-law
and I got along better than my
sister and I did. Because he and I were the
same personality type, and she was our
exact opposite!
(laughing) It was an interesting
experience. >> I think the value, then,
for students to understand, too, the value of
personality, and certainly the
Myers-Briggs being true, and certainly do
the Keirsey/Bates, that you can do
free online if you just search
for "Keirsey/Bates." And it's a pretty accurate--
>> K-E-R-S-E-Y? >> K-I-E-R-S-- >> (indistinct).
>> K-I-E-R-S-- >> E-Y.
>> E-Y. >> Bates. >> You can do an abridged
Myers-Briggs, as well. >> Okay. Is that-- and I'll go
back again to Rule when he gave me
the Myers-Briggs, and then
interpreted it. One of the things
I remember so clearly is that he was
able to predict that I'm just terrible
at remembering names. My personality
profile is such that I can't
remember pieces. >> Ah.
>> I can't remember
street names, but I can tell you
how to go anywhere. But I-- because
my personality, the way I
perceive the world and the way I make
sense out of the world is not different, it's
just what's right for me. >> Mmm-hmm.
>> What's helpful about that, and what's been helpful again
30-plus years afterwards, is that there's not
anything wrong with me because I'm not good
at remembering names. >> Yes.
>> It's simply my personality-- >> It's who I am.
>> Right, it's way in which
I engage in the world. So, while I wish I
could remember names, I also have
other qualities that are valuable
who make me who I am. >> Mmm-hmm. >> So when we think about
these assessment tools, like the Keirsey/Bates
or the Myers-Briggs, is that it helps us be less
judgmental about ourselves because each one of us
have a certain personality and we engage in the
world in a certain way. >> Yes, and
I think that a really important
part of that is... even if you don't
know your own type, so to speak, if you
can just remember that, it can help,
in my experience, parenting. Little kids do not
come into the world as blank slates
waiting for you to just mold them
and paint them in your particular
colors. They're their own
people from day one. And if you can
remember that, "Okay, they're doing
things differently "than I do, but does that
necessarily mean it's wrong?" So it can carry over
into every aspect of life. You don't have
to take the test just to keep your
message in mind. Any other questions? >> (indistinct). >> Oh, I'm sorry! Thank you for bringing
me back to that. And then, I'll get your
question back there. Jung had-- in his
therapy practice, he personally treated
not Bill W., but a person with
whom Bill W. founded AA. And he wasn't getting
anywhere with the therapy and the man's
alcohol abuse problem. And so, he finally-- he wrote
on the prescription pad, "Spiritus Contra
Spiritus," and handed to him
and said, "Basically, you are
not going to deal "with your problem until you
get right with your Lord." The translation
of that is, "You must use the spirit
against the spirits," of alcohol. And then, he carried on
a brief correspondence with Bill W. and answered
some of the questions there and the importance of having
a meaning-based practice, of whatever
that is. One of the things
that AA does is they talk about the god
of your understanding. It is not pushing any
particular religion on anyone. And there are some
people who acknowledge that, for many years, the
god of their understanding turned out to be the information
they got from the group, because their experiences
had pushed them so far away from any kind
of organized religion that they weren't able
to connect to that. So that is the
connection there. It's one step removed
from Bill W. But they did communicate
a few times. They exchanged letters
a few times. >> (indistinct). >> I don't-- we're gonna have
to rely on Dr. Connor. >> Yeah, the Keirsey/Bates
is simply a reorientation of the Myers-Briggs,
but it-- it's free. No, we better come up
with a state profile. I mean, I've taken a
formal Myers-Briggs under the supervision
of a PhD psychologist, and I've taken the
Keirsey/Bates, (indistinct). >> There's a wonderful
little Keirsey/Bates... (indistinct). >> I've researched
that a lot. And where Dr. Portko
was referencing-- there was a book that
came out a few years ago called, I think, "The Abuse
of Personality Tests." What it was talking about was
that this corporate adoption of the personality test as a meaningful way by
which to hire people-- early in my career, I worked
as an industrial psychologist giving personality tests. But I gave them-- we were doing
simultaneous engineering, where you got marketing
and engineering and all of these groups were
having to work together to build a product. And the purpose for it was,
as we're talking about it here, to help people
understand, "You're in marketing
and you got in there "because it probably
fits your personality." This guy who's
doing engineering, or this woman who's running
the manufacturing department, their personalities
don't match with yours. So it's about
acknowledging that for us to do
work together, we have to recognize we
have different personalities and the impact... understand the power of
those things coming together. So like me,
I hate timelines. I mean literally, personally,
I hate timelines. But I work
really well if I have somebody
who's okay with that and they just
keep poking me, because I like
big picture stuff. Well, big pictures
are needed, but if you don't ever
get anything done, it doesn't matter how
big your pictures are. >> (indistinct).
>> What's that? >> (indistinct).
>> INTP. >> Yes? >> How do you find out
what our opposite is? Like, I took the test,
(indistinct). >> Oh, well, one way to figure
out what the opposite is, is to take
the exact-- INFP, the opposite
would be ETSJ. J-- yeah, no. ESTJ. >> So each one
has an opposite. E is the
opposite of I. >> (indistinct). >> Yeah, intuition,
feeling, intuition, is the opposite
of thinking, and it goes down
the line like that. >> If you're opposite, that
doesn't necessarily mean that you won't work
well together? >> No, it does not
mean that at all. >> But you have to accept--
>> The differences. >> Their way of being in
the world is different than your way of
being in it. >> Yeah. Once I told my sister
how this fell out, it totally
explained things, because I tend
to lose details. Like, "Did I turn the
tea kettle on or not?" And more importantly,
"Did I turn it off again?" (audience chuckling)
My brother-in-law actually once caught
their kitchen on fire because he put
the tea kettle on, then remembered he had
to run another errand, and then he went
and did that and came home and the
kitchen was on fire. And my sister was,
you know, annoyed. (audience chuckling) But it explains a
lot about dynamics of even brother-sister
interactions. Yeah, it doesn't mean you
don't belong with him, it just means you
have to work at this in a little bit
different way. And there are downsides,
there are disadvantages to being with someone
who's exactly like you, because then there's a
whole realm of things that aren't
gonna get done... or done well. Okay, well thank
you very much. Are there any
other questions? (applause) If anybody's
got a question, you didn't wanna
holler it out, come and
ask me now.
