The Psychology of Pinocchio | #254

i'm going to show you something from pinocchio now this is an initiation ritual it's a journey to the depths so it's a journey to the underworld it's the consequence of a collapse in previous personality and the disintegration of that previous personality into a chaotic state prime prior to rebirth now what happens in pinocchio which by the way was released at about the same time that world war ii was was brewing and which also contains one of the best representations of of the of the individual motivations for fascism that i've ever seen anywhere that's the scenes that are associated with pleasure island remember all the the puppet is trying to become a real boy right so he's a marionette to begin with something else is pulling his strengths well for jung that's your habitual state of being something else is pulling your strings even the idea that you're autonomous is the consequence of something else pulling your strings and for jung what you needed to do is find out exactly who and what is pulling your strings and decide if that's the direction in which you want to go and that's really what happens to pinocchio because we're going to watch pinocchio part of it in the pinocchio story he starts out as a marionette now he's a marionette made by a good father because geppetto is a good father he's a good craftsman and so on so he's a marionette with a benevolent puppeteer but as soon as he develops some autonomy then he becomes prey to forces that are elements of the demonic archetype in fact the worst bad guy in the entire movie turns into satan himself at one point in the movie he basically has horns and a bright red face and he manifests himself as so terrifying that the coyote coyote wolf fox and the cat that are trying to corrupt pinocchio are terrified because they get a like they're criminals they're petty criminals and deceptive and and so forth but when they get a look at who's pulling their strings it's enough to terrify them and so pinocchio goes through a series of temptations of various sorts including a freudian temptation and the freudian temptation is to remain weak and sickly instead of becoming a real person so it's an eatable problem and another problem that faces pinocchio is that he's offered false celebrity as a way of solving his life's problems so he's offered the opportunity to become an actor and what that means is a deceitful fake who's constructed a persona that makes him appear far more valuable than he really is so the movie outlines two pathological modes of movement towards maturity one being a phony and the other taking the easy way out and and hyper uh valuing all your pathology so that you become dependent so anyways and then another mode of pathological development is offered to pinocchio which is to do nothing but engage in short-term impulsive and destructive play and that's on treasure island but when he pleasure island but when he goes to pleasure island he finds that it's actually ruled by demonic forces with faceless entities who are transforming all the pleasure-seeking marionettes to braying donkeys who are slaves it's like so pinocchio escapes from that and he does it basically by jumping into the unknown and that's where we're going to start our exposure to his initiation okay so now you can imagine what's happened is he was on pleasure island and everything went to hell fundamentally and so he jumped into the water to escape from that and that's equivalent to plunging into chaos and so chaos was an escape from pathological tyranny and now he's tried to go home so this is the psyche in its search for maturation runs into an obstacle which is the tyrannical element of the great father that it cannot cope with and it trots home runs home it's a defeat typical part of a hero story is the initial defeat of the hero when he encounters usually either the terrible great father or the terrible great mother so and so this is a retrogressive jung would call this retrogressive restoration of the persona so it's sort of like maybe you're a well-adapted adolescent and you live at home and you're a happy adolescent and everything's good at home and then you go out to try to be an adult and you fail and then when you come back home you try to act like a happy adolescent again but you're not what you are in fact is an unhappy adult and if you move back to the happy adolescent mode of being then it's it's false and pathological you can't go home again another typical motif in literature now the cricket i can't tell you everything about this story i can tell you a couple of strange things about it one is that the cricket is gemini cricket right and the initials of jiminy cricket are jc and jiminy cricket was a common southern american mild form of uh cursing it's the equivalent of jesus christ and so you might think and of course the cricket is pinocchio's conscience and well so then you might ask yourself why in the world would a pejorative mildly pejorative term for jesus christ be applied to a cricket who's guiding a puppet into the water to rescue his father from a whale why would any of that happen and the answer to that is you know why but you can't say why you can't say why you know or what it is that you know but the mere fact that it makes sense and it does is an indication from a union perspective that you're operating at an archetypal level you understand this and so i could say here's an example of why the cricket is a bug well things bug you right we say that things bug me well you should do something about the things that bug you because that's your conscience calling to you it's it's destiny in some sense manifesting itself as an unconscious impulse that really bugs me means if you can you should do something about it because you think about it man there's a lot of things out there that might bug you but lots of them don't but some of them do well why do those bug you and not the other things well that's a complicated question but one potential answer to it is that there's part of your psyche that's oriented towards further development jung would call that the self and that's like the totality of everything that you could be and it's it's it's it's a it's a strange sort of entity in some sense because it's partly potential and its potential that expands across time but the way that your potential totality calls to you in the present is by placing things in front of you that are your problem and they announce themselves as your problem and they do that by bothering you so then if you pick up the task of fixing the things that bothers you then you find the pathway to further expansion of your personality so and that's what's happening with pinocchio now one of the things that's really interesting about the pinocchio movie that makes it incredibly sophisticated is that despite the fact that the cricket is a avatar of christ so to speak the cricket has things to learn just like pinocchio and so that's very cool because it's so cool it's so sophisticated because it means that you do have a conscience that guides you but until you establish a dialogue with it both you and the conscience are immature you have to establish a conscious dialogue with it and then interact together in a manner that propels your development across time and that'll stop you from being a marionette of forces that would make you a braying donkey who does nothing but slave away in salt mines so okay so pinocchio goes home that doesn't work and that's where we're gonna start here okay so what's happened there well many many things at multiple levels of reality simultaneously and that's the characteristic of an archetypal story so on one level pinocchio's too old to go home he can't go home to his father because in some sense he's already transcended his father so there are things for example that your father can't help you with and the reason for that is that you don't he doesn't know any more about the situation than you do and he can't and so that's where his knowledge limits out so that would be sort of on the personal level and then on the trans-personal level which would be the deeper deeper archetypal level what's happening to pinocchio is exactly what nietzsche described at the end of the 19th century because remember that geppetto is his creator and now he's dead he's gone and so pinocchio is bereft of of placement so to speak he's his soul has been corrupted and he doesn't know what to do about it and when he returns to his family home or when he returns to his tradition what he finds is nothing okay so then what happens well this is another thing that you'll swallow with just no problem whatsoever well this dove comes along that's sort of golden and glowing and drops a note right in front of him now you may remember and perhaps you don't but the star from which the dove comes is a representation of the blue fairy and the blue fairy is the positive element of the unknown in uh pinocchio movie and so what it basically is saying that when you're despairing because your father has died and your tradition has nothing to offer that the positive element of the unknown may provide you with a message about where to go if you pay enough attention that would be an intuition or it would be the automatic attraction of your interest to a new thing by forces that you do not understand so one of the real ways of coming to grips with the idea of the act of unconscious is to understand that you cannot control what you're interested in and so then you might ask well if it's not you what is it and if you think about that problem long enough you'll start to understand what jung was talking about because that is the way that you can understand in your own life that the things that direct you as a being are not things that you consciously choose in fact they're not even things that you can consciously choose they're directed by other forces so anyways the dove drops a message in front of pinocchio and and the cricket now it's the cricket that reads it so it's the same idea as what bugs you so to speak the cricket is the interpreter okay so now what have we found out well we found out that god the father and god the father the creator are not in fact dead which is what nature pronounced but alive in some weird way in this horrible creature at the bottom of the ocean and so what does pinocchio decide to do he decides to go find him that's actually what you're doing at university by the way for all the chaos that you experience when you come to university and all the uncertainty and all the doubt what you're trying to do is to resurrect your dead father from the bottom of the ocean and if you do that you won't be a marionette and if you don't you will be now this is very interesting because the conscience here plays a very dichotomous role so on the one hand pinocchio is often ahead of his conscience so to speak so he's taking the leading role and the dialogue is kind of choppy and neither of them know exactly what they're doing but in this situation it's very paradoxical because you can see pinocchio's being half turned into brain jackass at this point something you might well consider when you remember your adolescence so at in this point that the the cricket his conscience does two things it warns him how horrible this is going to be and how utterly dangerous it is and then at the same time it helps them prepare and goes along with them and so it's quite comical so watch what happens here okay so i've cut this a little bit but what happens in the movie is that he goes to the bottom of the ocean and he starts to ask about monstro and as soon as he asks any of the fish down there the denizens of the sub oceanic world where monster is they just run away and so monstro is he who cannot be named right and i'm sure you've encountered that in your reading before right that's the that's uh the hallmark of in the harry potter series right see now you've done it yeah so this represents something so terrible that it can't even be talked about okay so what happens is pinocchio ends up not only at the bottom of the ocean but he has to go to the deepest part of the bottom of the ocean where the most terrible thing rests and so we're cutting to the point where he does that so now you might ask how did geppetto get in the whale and the answer that is it's never really made that clear in the movie but i can tell you some things about that is that if you conceptualize your historical tradition as a personality like a body of laws and customs say it's not alive it's dead right because it's composed of the past and because it's dead it can't come up with anything new so if it encounters something new it it's stopped and that's what's happened to geppetto is that he's engulfed by this entity that represents the absolute unknown and he cannot figure out how to get out and the reason for that is none of the things he knows so none of the things that history has produced as a body of knowledge are sufficient to deal with the fundamental problem that doesn't mean they're useless it just means that just like the puppet is lost without the father the father is also lost without the puppet and that's the relationship between you and history your history when you study history you think well you're studying a record of events in the past and that's not right what you're studying is the the circumstances that gave rise to you as a as a being and unless you understand your history in every way you possibly can then you're an incomplete creature you you don't know enough to move forward in the same way your culture being composed of dead fathers so to speak can't progress without you because you're its eyes and there's an egyptian story that features the god horus who i've talked to you about before who actually resurrects his father from the dead by giving him an eye so gepetto can't figure out how to get out of this whale without help all right now something very sophisticated happens here so and i have to explain it to you at multiple levels at the same time so now geppetto is hungry and when the whale opens its mouth a lot of fish come in now one of the things i want you to think about you can just put this in the back of your mind is that one of the oldest one of the oldest symbolic representations of christ is a fish and all of his followers were fishermen and so there's this weird relationship between the messianic figure who's at the base of it at least at the base of christian culture and the idea of things that are pulled up from the depths now here's what happens in this part of the movie it's so amazing so gepetto is looking for fish and the reason for that is he doesn't think he can get out of the whale and so he might as well have some fish while he's while he's in there and so he's given up on getting out now what happens is that the whale swallows pinocchio as if he's a fish so pinocchio is put into the same category as fish and it happens it happens to gepetto a couple of times he mistakes pinocchio for a fish you'll see so what that means in some sense is that geppetto can't distinguish between the fish that will feed you for the day and whatever it is that pinocchio represents and so you could think about pinocchio as a fisherman instead of as a fish and so you can think about it this way and here here's a here's a an old saying if you give a man a fish you feed him for one day but if you teach him to fish you feed him forever and so the idea is it's better to develop the skill to acquire something than it is to have the thing now what pinocchio represents is he's like a meta fish i know this is a strange way of thinking about it geppetto's problem isn't that he's hungry his problem is that he can't get out of the whale and so what he's fishing for isn't something to eat it's something that will help him get out of the whale but he can't recognize the difference between the proximate solution which is so that he'll just no longer be hungry so he's got a very short-term outlook and a solution to the much broader problem so what happens is the whale swallows a bunch of fish and pinocchio's in there and geppetto is fishing away and he catches pinocchio and pinocchio announces himself and geppetto says tells him to be quiet because he's interfering with him fishing and then when he turns to hug pinocchio because he wakes up he actually hugs a fish and then he discards the fish so then he figures out that pinocchio's there then geppetto decides that well they're going to have to live inside the whale and it's another idea of his blindness at this point because he's he's composed of the dead past so to speak so what pinocchio does is start to destroy the ship itself which is what they're floating in the whale to start a fire and the fire makes the whale mad enough to spit them out and the whale then transforms itself into a dragon and tries to kill them because it's a fire breathing entity at that point and so part of the understory is it's better to figure out how to fish than to fish or that more profoundly it's better to figure out how to do something than to merely benefit from the thing itself pinocchio represents that which can do new things so he's a hero and he's willing to destroy part of the current order that's the ship in order to produce a new strategy that will actually free them from the whale now he wants to get his father out of there too so that's what happens in the next five minutes i would say okay so now there's a shock here because essentially in some sense the entity that's going to provide the solution to this very complex problem has arrived on the scene but it's quite damaged first of all it's been speaking improperly right so that's an adolescent representation so it braze a lot of nonsense and it's been corrupted in a variety of ways and so you know to to some degree what that means is that as you mature and you're moving away from your mere marionette status your interaction with society like rousseau said corrupts you in all sorts of ways i mean you're participating in that corruption but it still happens but in the representation in the movie the truth of the matter is it doesn't matter if you've been corrupted to some degree as long as you haven't absolutely sacrificed to your capacity for true speech and vision so you know that's a pretty hopeful message because pinocchio is by no means a perfect entity but he might be good enough see that's also an indication there of why people are often unwilling to form a representation with uh so to speak form a relationship with the archetype of the great father because to some degree the archetype is a figure of perfection and the individual in relationship to that archetype is always pathologically flawed and so the embarrassment of that realization which is exactly what's happening to pinocchio right now is often enough to stop people from doing it so what what that would say to say what that means in some sense is that in order for you to mature in in the fullest possible manner you have to understand the the manner in which you're deeply flawed in relationship to the to your your potential as it might be historically determined and that's a very bitter thing to do you know it's much easier and people do this all the time to engage in half-witted formulaic ideological criticisms of the system as a whole it's like you know the probability that the system is more flawed than you is pretty damn low so you might want to start with you know getting rid of your donkey ears and your tail and stop bringing nonsense before you judge the entire you know historical process by which human beings have come into being so anyways that's kind of what that means okay so this is very interesting too because so pinocchio ends up being a master of fire well you can think about that as there is a book written a while back by a primatologist who also wrote demonic males richard rangham and he talked about the origin of fire and as far as rangham is concerned we invented fire about two million years ago and that enabled us to cook food and that enabled us to swap intestinal length for brain so if you look at a chimpanzee you know chimpanzees are like the ultimate in couch potatoes right there they're they're about this high and they're shaped like this they have this huge barrel body and the reason they have that is because they eat leaves and so they have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves they will eat meat if they can get it they have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves and just chewing them over and over because like leaves a they don't want to be eaten so they're pretty tough and inedible and b they don't have any nutritive quality to speak of so the chimpanzee has to spend all of its time chewing which is rather mindless endeavor all things considered whereas human beings two million years ago or thereabouts invented fire and as a consequence of that we could cook meat and meat is incredibly energy uh rich and so and it's easy to digest once it's cooked and so the consequence of the invention of fire was that we're the way we are today we could have a brain instead of a gut and so the idea that pinocchio's mastery of fire and it's as something more than merely a means of cooking that's how it started out right but you can think of our entire technological capacity as stemming from the mastery of fire now the other thing you can think of and this is very much worth considering is that pinocchio masters fire and that turns the whale into a dragon and so the idea there too is that and this is an old idea is that our technological prowess is something that makes nature itself angry and of course you might say well do you believe this and the answer to that is well how many of you have environmentalist leanings and that's exactly the story that you're following because you're still wondering about whether or not mastery of fire was in somehow against the natural order and then it will end up in all of our deaths and you know that's a reasonable thing to worry about but not mastering it was going to end up pretty badly too so what happens is that in the midst of this complete chaos pinocchio has a choice and the choices he can either save himself which is a very very selfish choice and reduces him to an a historical individual because he has no relationship left with his father or he can put his himself at great risk and rescue his father you know finish the process stop his father from drowning and and complete okay so [Music] pinocchio dies and then his father brings him home and so because he's rescued his father the benevolent spirit of nature appears resurrects him and turns him into a real human being so it's pretty funny as far as i'm concerned that the answer to nietzsche's greek question manifested itself in 19 mid-1930s in the forms of an at form of an animated child's movie so you know and that's and that's an example that's an example of a number of things it's an example of how archetypes work it's also an example of how artists are on the edge of discovery all the time and they discover things they don't even understand so we'll see you next tuesday [Applause]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 479,889

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Karl Jung, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson, pinnochio, jordan peterson pinocchio lecture, pinocchio, dissecting pinocchio, understand pinocchio, pinocchio explanation, jordan peterson lecture, jordan peterson toronto, jordan peterson psychology

Id: vGQS4N0cYWQ

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2022