Resolve your Anima & Animus: The Ultimate Guide

Who Are You? When did you begin? [Music]

Look deep into the shadowed maternal cave; therein is your true womb. Hence you came, soon to forget, and yet it shall not forget you. The maternal womb is that inner, outer, or other. What we're hearing is the voice of the platonic mother as the representative of the ancestral psyche, as the biological process of an organism—a human organism being given birth to. As that happens, there is also present the platonic form of the mother, and that initial question, “Who are you?”

If we take an ego perspective, there is no ego at that stage. And if, when we think back along our timeline to when we have this impression of when we first began, then it's not a memory of the moment of our physical birth; it'll be the earliest memory that the ego has access to. But we existed before that time, and so this is the symbol of the presence of the ancestral psyche through the platonic form of the mother. When it asks, as if the mature adult ego is thinking backwards along its timeline and then hears the Voice, “Who are you? When did you begin?” And that’s crucial. We don't begin with our ego consciousness forming. We don't even begin as such with our individual biological birth. We have an ancestral psyche that's imminent from the very beginning.

And if we're going to find out what relating really means, then we can't focus only on the very first psychosocial relationship that we have, which I know is hugely important—obviously, our biological mother, our imprinting upon her for safety. Um, we are born with that genetic anticipation of a whole of life unfolding for us and all of those lessons that have been learned in the past through our biology, but also the anticipations that exist outside of biology and a priority to it through the platonic form. And specifically in the context of this video, the platonic mother is immensely important because that is the imprinter, the prime imprinter for our relating function and our relating system—system—in the world, regardless of whether the child is male or female biologically. Um, so that will set the scene, and that's what's happened here. Those are the first words that are spoken. And of course, that that infant, that newborn infant, cannot hear or understand what the platonic mother says as representation of the ancestral psyche in that moment. What she—she says thereafter indicates that we forget; we forget our ancestral psyche. The ego starts to occupy our attention; it should be outwardly focused. Outward adaptation is where the ego should function, but the inner world is already there; it's prepared, and it's on a—a clock, a developmental maturational clock that's guided by the genome and by the platonic field. And as I say, the prime imprinter and directing force of that is the factor of relating, and that's why we have the kind of psyche that we have. We reconnect with that actually at the other end of life, yeah.

And you've often given the example, Steve, of say, um, a young man who's wounded in battle, and he knows his life is coming to a close, and the difficulty always is relinquishing the ego, but they—knowingly that that young man or those young men nearly always make a connection to the mother and to the maternal womb in that moment, yeah. That sort of—um—per moment when they're on the—yeah—between the cusp of life and death, yeah. And so for me, that—that gives continuity to that concept of the maternal womb at both points—birth and death. So there—there is a continuity, yeah, between those two things. And death doesn't necessarily come with old age; death can come at any point along the lifespan. So it—it is a very deep and profound thing. And it is—it is also possible, as you think you've said before, to—to reconnect um, with the ancestral mother and the ancestral womb through meditative states, by—by going in and making that connection—um—taking the—the carry wave of a back—um—and experiencing—uh—that which has been laid down in—in the genome. And so we need to know that that's a resource; it's a massive resource for us—uh—for us all—men and women. You've raised a very important point there by saying that we're born without an ego and we die without one. Yes, but there is a—a field wrestling continuity, as you say, that goes back through the ancestral psyche, yeah, and goes on beyond the individual death, yes—metaphorically or real—yes—of the—into who knows where. Jung himself pointed that out, didn't he? His understanding of death was not as a final point or a final end. And there is so much that—that's woven into that. And you're also right to say that people have been injured in relationship to the parents, and the imprinting that comes from them can access the ancestral psyche. And then the—the actual parents that we've had—are biological and psychosocial parents—don't matter; that's true. Once we can access that other uh mother and also that other father as well that metaphorically stands at the mouth of the cave, yeah, to receive the child and show them the world; it's hugely important. It was laid down, we would suggest, wouldn't we, in the Paleolithic? Yeah, we still carry that within us. And most of the neuroses that arise in modern people are due to a separation and an alienation of affect and therefore instinct and therefore of the ancestral psyche. So what we understand now as being the anima and the animus in Jungian terms arise to guide our relating, but that relating is ancestral. The preparation for it, the delivery of it, should be on an ancestral template. So overcoming what happens to us uh in relational terms—in other words, the complexes that form around maladaptations to relating—are best dealt with by accessing that which we have forgotten, but as the platonic mother goes on to say, that which has not forgotten us. It's not forgotten us because it's in the genome; the information that's stored in there is waiting release, so long as we can approach it properly. And that requires altered states of consciousness—meditative states as one form; hypnosis, of course, is a very powerful uh means uh of achieving that. And the amount of relief that people who are suffering for whatever reason uh feel, and that you know from solving that problem—the personal collapse of the ego around its complexes—when that is transcended by accessing what Jungians think of as being archetypal—um—but we're getting into the pure platonic level of representation of the essence of being human, and then how that moves on through anticipated meta-instincts that we need to adapt to. It's these platonic forms that guide us and show us how we should adapt. Accessing that is hugely important, but we do forget. The ego only knows itself, um, and we do need to learn how to remember. As Plato said, all knowledge is remembering; it's the anamnesis of the genome and of the species and of the platonic field which generated and sustains all of that. That's what we need to access in order to understand the anima and the animus.

When I experienced that intro with the words that you wrote, Steve, I was very emotionally impacted by it, because the infant that's in there is any infant—all infants—uh—all the way back to the—the uh dawn of the human race, I suppose—probably much further back than that, as you were saying—back in the Paleolithic. And what might it be like—that all of us experienced not having an ego and having a world that doesn't make any sense? It might be, you know, we're not cognitive about it at all; there's just cold threat, you know; there's—there's the wind outside the cave. And to hear a voice like that calling through would be—would be such an element of warmth at one level—that there is something out there. You're not born into this sense of helplessness really; you are at one level physically, but there is something that's already there that's anticipated oneself. If they are the infant grown up now, having been there, and I can feel that at one level. I've heard those words before, if you know what I mean, as if that has happened and will continue to happen. It's a very strange experience. I was impacted immediately by it. I think this idea that we forget—I know I'm repeating myself somewhat here—that the ego forgets because it has to; it's got to adapt to the external world; that's why it's evolved. But the platonic mother does not forget us. I can feel that, like you said, and it's—it's almost bringing me to tears, um, because I know it's not even my emotion; it's not my ego's emotion; it's—it's like the entire ancestry—my personal ancestry is feeling it—and also those in posterity, whether they're biologically descended from—from me or not.

Oh, my mother's spirit! What is the true faith? When will my soul find comfort? One of the—in fact, I think it is the ultimate proof that Jung was onto something with respect to his model of archetypes is in that kind of uh understanding and resonance and feeling—um—the anima and the animus, when taken properly for what they are, which are collapsed representations into reified figures of the function of relating. Because relating is living; if we don't relate, we don't interact; when not truly alive—internally, externally, and then across time—to the past, the present, and the future. And the understanding that they are simultaneously present as a field. If we don't relate like that, we're not truly engaged with life. So that initial figure—that great mother—that platonic form of the mother—and one collapses it into archetype because it's got too many negative associations within pop psychology at the moment—but—but that, I think, proves that Jung was actually onto something. Pretty much all of the other kinds of archetype apart from—from the—the uh platonic mother, platonic father—most of Jung's archetypes can be dismissed quite easily, and they are by the critics of—of Jung—as rarified personalities. But they are so fundamental—so fundamental both to our biology and to our psychology—um—they can't be done away with. And uh that's massively important. The feeling of disappointment that we can get as a—as a personality that matures and grows when our parents don't live up to the platonic form—to the genomic anticipation—is the cause of a massive amount of neurosis uh because our identity imprints on our parents. We received confirmation from them; uh the mother in particular is hugely important because we learn to trust ourselves on the inside that way. The father should help us to trust the outside world; there should be continuity. So the two are superpositioned in a harmonic sense, but if we—we doubt our inner world, we're doubting our psychological and beneath that our biological—we—and I mean biological in the genomic sense, not in the sense of—of a physical mother who gives birth—we're doubting the very substance of ourselves and where we came from. So it's hugely important to—to be able to access that and to understand it uh as a fundamental cause for the—for the cure of uh neurotic adaptations. Um, and that—that primal scene as well is itself meta-instinctive because contained within it are the promises of anticipations to come. You have a biological mother; she should take care of you. If she does not, there is another kind of—of mother and another kind of womb, and she will not forget you. Hugely powerful—that you know I've seen that affect people and bring about a cure in the—the most distressing and fundamental levels of mental illness and distress. So for me, anyway, that—that proves that—that Jung to some extent was on the right track. He overcomplicated it, and uh he processed it—processed it through his own ego; he processed it through his dysfunctional relationship to his own mother, but he still had some contact with that platonic form—understood that as what he called an archetype—and then understood how important that was in generating relationships—relating style—system of relating throughout life. It's that important—that fundamental. Well, it suggests that no matter how damaged you might be by your own personal—that there is, as you say, this resource—this great mother that you can connect with and tap into—um—for healing, yeah. And there's no—there's no doubt—we—we know through our clinical work, as you just rightly said, Steve, but when people do that—when people make that—that connection properly—it's as if neuroses, complexes are just pushed to one side; they—they—they don't stand a chance in the face of that connection—or is completely bypassed, yeah. And you see it even with new mothers who have given birth, and they—they may not have had a very good relationship to their own mother—personal mother—and they may have all sorts of um concerns, say, while they're pregnant about giving birth and uh becoming a mother in that real sense. And then the moment that the child is born, so long as they can make that deep ancestral connection, they're—you know, they're—they're out there straight away—out, you know—and doing—doing the right things instinctively by that child. It's not a cognitive process; it's something which just switches on, yeah. And a lot of women, I think, are quite surprised by that—uh—at how that happened—how could that happened? I had so many concerns and doubts and worries and insecurities while I was pregnant, and now suddenly I am a mother—is a biological fact that I've become a new mother—and I'm getting on with it, and you know I know how to provide comfort; I—I know how to—um—be reassuring—to give succor—to give sustenance—to be responsive—all of those deep ancestral feminine qualities are just—they're just suddenly there if you allow yourself to receive them, yeah. It's—it's actually not a difficult thing to do.

No, it—it is a cast of mind almost; it is. And um it's a dissociative state with respect to the ego, isn't it? Because if we stay locked within the ego, we're also locked within the field of complexes that are identified with or associated to the ego. And uh a lot of issues that women have about pregnancy are based on complexes; they are. And once they've gone through the—the birthing process thereafter, if there are issues uh then that's also due to—to—to complexes—they're not accessed, yeah—the so-called archetypes; that's right—or the platonic form uh properly enough, yeah. But you're right; it's a state of mind, but it's a dissociative state from the ego; this is why the ego forgets, yeah—uh—because it has to deal with more immediate experiences. And in so doing, we acquire learning, which systematizes into complexes, yeah. And that's the key really in what the platonic mother says in that opening scene, yeah—um—that will not forget us; we—but we have to receive it; we have to be capable of receiving it, yeah—um—and then there has to be a transition—um—where the so-called archetypal masculine, which is the basis for the—the animus in Jungian psychology, needs to be able to receive the child and take them over that threshold into the outside world—hugely important. And then how those images operate then throughout life—throughout lifespan development—for both biological sexes. So—so arguably, it's hugely important uh the conditions in which women give birth is—is hugely important and significant too, because whilst it's important that—I mean, because birth can be a traumatic time, and obviously it's important that it's a safe experience as well for all concerned. But the medicalization of—of birth has meant that we've—to some extent—lost that ancestral connection, yeah. And Clarissa Estes talks about—excuse me—that's—still the *Women Who Run With the Wolves* author—um—talks about the certainly the days after birth as being a veiled time, and I—I just—it's—it's an interesting expression really because it ties in with what you said about dissociation. And I think if a mother is allowed space during those few days to—um—to simply bond without too much interference, either through medical processes or through people wanting to come in and see the new baby and all of that—if—if that initial bonding phase is not—not disrupted in that way, then she's more likely to successfully—um—dip into the ancestral psyche uh and find the resources that she needs to make that important transition into becoming a new mother in the most fundamental of ways. So I—I've always remembered that—um—and the word somehow—um—conjure up to me kind of a respect for the process of birth and everything that happens around it. And um we've lost a lot of that along the way, unfortunately, yeah. But uh as you rightly say, it's still a resource even if we—we don't remember it—um—because we don't remember our own birth—um—we can still tap into it, and uh we can get a huge amount of—of succor ourselves from that. It's a very—it's a very strengthening process—a very—a very strengthening process actually; it is, yeah. It is. And those prime imprinting forms—platonic forms—then themselves diffuse out into meta-instinctive scenarios which are anticipated, yeah. So then early relating is the model for later relating, but not in an exact sense. So we're not looking for another mother, but we're looking for something that emerges out from that, yeah—uh—through the increasingly complicated and widely distributed instincts that we have to negotiate with each stage of our maturational developments, yeah. Um, so the—so-called archetypes then, as generally understood by Jungian—are just rarified figures—like actors, yeah—um—within a much wider scenario—a much wider narrative—um—but these prime ones are so important because without them—not only without the mother—not only—and the father—not only can we not be made or created—true as an individual biological organism—our individual ego doesn't develop properly. And of course, that uh imprinting doesn't have to be on the biological mother; it can be on any significant caregiver that helps a person form, yeah—a proper way of relating to life, yeah. There's a biological substrate for it—um—which is given, but it is modifiable. Anthony Stevens uh pointed this out, obviously, but uh other forms of relating and other forms of gender—relating—gender modified or differentially expressed, yeah—they can still meet the same criteria for adaptation. It's the fundamental factor of relating though that's hugely important; it never really goes away. And as you say, people—young men in particular—when they call out for the mother if they think that they're dying, it's not because they want to be babies again or—or suckled or anything like that; if they want to be reborn, yes, of course, they want to start the clock again. The genome is saying we must keep going, and if necessary we will start the clock again. So there's that return back to the cave and then a movement forward. And obviously, sadly, that might not be a movement forward into the kind of biological and psychological life that that person's gone through up to that point; might be into another kind of existence—another kind of consciousness. But that is definitely a factor which is itself innate within people; it can solve everything. And that—that sounds like it's a one-size-fits-all, but it's what it stands for, and this is why I point—I call it the relating function, which is the innate drive to relate. And then the relating system is—is that matures—the ego matures into itself and into its role of relating. That without that there is no exchange of energy and information. So relating can be unconscious, obviously, or it can be conscious, but it's going on all the time; it's as fundamental as uh the observer effect in quantum mechanics—that's relating—that's interacting. So that taken as fundamental—that then defines existence—therefore that which psychologically represents it as an image projected from the genome and behind that from the platonic field—represents the—the essence of what it is to exist; it is that fundamental. Um, so accessing that again in the way that it wants to be received—which is hugely important—to do that so we don't internally project over it—um—it's a transcendent experience beyond the capacity of cognition to put into words. We see it all the time, and we actually—to be direct—we witnessed it today. Look, we can't uh disclose anything obviously, but we work with someone whose intuition delivered that understanding at that level—um—and that happens all the time. And this person's been very, very badly hurt by parents—uh—by substance abuse and by relationships—um—but once he got outside of his ego and felt into it, his consciousness expanded dramatically uh and is showing him the way—that's relating—that's true relating. So if we're not careful, then we will reify the anima and the animus as polarized abstractions uh that fuel neurosis, unfortunately. That's the way Jungians deal with it, and they build up all sorts of fantasies which we're going to discuss this later in the video, obviously. But what we're saying is if you get back to fundamentals, we will find they have not forgotten us; we have forgotten them. And again, from Plato—all knowledge—all true knowledge is remembering. If we can remember the forms as Plato described them—his way of building the—

Representation of what they are. If we can remember them, then that is true knowledge; that's true nosis, and it's not cognitive, it's affective and intuitive, and it will take us through life. It's of huge value to be able to do that. I'm reminded of, um, a from a Kate Bush song, Steve, um, where she sings, "Mother stands for Comfort." Oh yeah, yeah, um, yeah. I didn't—it sounds obvious, doesn't it? But if you allow that to impact you, um, and your own personal mother hasn't provided comfort—sucker emotional comfort—uh, and and nourishment, then you know what it's like not to have it in your own personal experience or within uh the ego's own experience.

Yeah, yes. I think it's still possible, under the conditions that you've just described, to access a kind of comfort from knowing that there is a um a wellspring of comfort that comes with the idea of uh the ancestral psyche and and in particular um the maternal line. That there is a long—there is there—there's there's been some efficient women who have been able to do that, provide comfort and sucker and um uh care sufficiently in all the right ways for us to still be able to tap into that and to experience what that means effectively, not cognitively, but affectively. That there there there's been enough good women, if you like, yeah, um who have done enough of the right things and the right way for us to continue to benefit from—us—even if the women within the our own personal lives have let us down.

Yeah, so it's been conserved; it's almost a reservoir, isn't it, of knowledge and experience that's still available to us. So the past experiences have been conserved? Yes, they have. Yeah. A lot of the critics of Jung say that um there are no innate images, which is absolute nonsense to say that there are none. Because even if we we kind of fast forward through maturation along the the lifespan development trajectory to the point where social psychologists will say there are certain images of men and women that men and women find attractive, and there are others that they do not. Yeah, that is an image which has a resonance with an internal representation; therefore, it's an image. There's something very fundamental about these things which must be represented that way.

Yeah, they're not learned. No. Uh, they can be directed a little and modified under local and personal conditions, but the fundamentals are inborn; they are uh and it's because it's conserved—as conserved within the genome and within its fields, which we would say—Sheldrake and Platonic—yeah, as an extension of one another, which is an important distinction to make, because the Sheldrake allows the uh the modification of the Platonic field, which then updates itself and moves forward. It's a continuous ontology.

So is this why you titled the script for that—that intro section—with the Platonic Mother, the Birthright? Because no matter what happens to somebody, what their life experience is, they still have a Birthright, that even if they don't remember what it is, it remembers them. Yes, it's built in with us—into us—isn't it, that that we have a lifespan. We can't be Peter Pans; we can't stay children. Our biology will not allow it. As our biology matures, our psychology is supposed to cooh with that. Um, experience though sometimes means that that we develop complexes that prevent that from unfolding at the rate that was intended, or there may be some damage in the genome which means it doesn't fully develop as would otherwise have been intended. But the whole field of the organism contains its potential latently, and um that intends itself to be expressed; it must do, else there would be no biological maturation. Biology must be ontological, and uh psychology likewise, because otherwise, again, we would just be so simple as to be updated by the next experience; we wouldn't really need much of a memory. But human beings do have a memory—have a personal memory—a very complicated memory. We would just be conditioned by, as I say, by the next stimulus that came along, and so long as wherever we were conditioned to in the past—recent past—wouldn't delete—as we we would carry on; that would be a very low level of consciousness. Humans are very complicated. We inherit Memories. We inherit the conserved adaptations from the past that include images that are part of the anticipations as we move forward, just as we see uh certain kinds of play being released. Children understand; they know; they spontaneously get together, communicate, and they all know the rules; they not learn them, they know them. There is therefore a representation of those rules based on an anticipation uh but some of the critics of Jung deny even that, which is absolute nonsense. Everything's about object relations; it's formed in the moment; that's an element of it, but that's more the realm of complexes. The cure for complexes is accessing the innate psyche—The ancestral psyche—the Platonic field that gives us everything that we need to adjust to the transitions through the lifespan development stages. The primary one is relating, and therefore it starts with the crossover, if you like, the handover from the Platonic mother to the biological mother, and in between the handover is the individual child—not yet an ego, not yet a self-referencing I, not yet a phenomenological ego—but it's got all of its ancestry all present; it's anticipated this moment—the moments of handover to the biological mother. This is why uh women and mothers are so incredibly important, yeah, and and why it's so sad when we see female met instincts corrupted the way that they are in in the current culture, yeah, because women have such an immensely important role to play in providing comfort um for the Next Generation. Um, and you know, we we undermine that really at our Peril. I mean, how how ignorant really and arrogant is that to think that we can just do that, and and how sick is it that a lot of young women feel it's preferable to be like men than to be their own sex with everything that that that uh brings with it? It's it's such a shame; it's just it's so so important; it's hard to emphasize it's efficient way actually, yeah, but it doesn't forget us, so it's a and we can tap into it; that's part of the challenge of making meaning out of our individual reflective experience. In other words, what is it to have an identity? An identity when we look in in the internal mirror, we recognize who we are; that that that's what—does that actually mean? What's its purpose? Where did it come from? These are the existential questions, but not in a negating nihilistic way—that that they should inspire us to make the most of our life and of our Consciousness through relating. Men of the 20th—this day—we fight not for Rome, but for our soil, our faith, and our brothers in arms. Should we fail, the memory of our sacrifice will be wiped from Men's minds and the pages of History; the true faith in our Lord Jesus Christ driven out from these islands forever. But we're the 20th—the Valiant and Victorious—the last but the best of the best. No pagan God or Heathen Warrior will take this land from us. In the name of God, St Dean and theia VI.

The Platonic mother appears to me when I really feel into it as much as I can. I I was thinking of the term there—unconditional love—but I'm not sure that's 100% what I mean. It's almost like there is an innate value to every individual's existence by Birthright, and that value never forgets the person; it's that—it's it's that memory part, you know, that we can forget, but it never forgets us. I find that really really powerful. Um, and the Platonic father, if I try and feel into that—thinking ahead into the transition from being very very young towards more of an emphasis on psychosocial adaptation—that feels very very distinctly different—um, not—I can't put it into words; it's almost um—big—very large, as you guys have said before—at the mouth of the cave, encouraging—um, it's a completely different feeling tone associated with that image in my mind, and I I don't know how common this experience is—probably quite common—but similarly, I can't remember back in time directly to feel what that would have literally been like for young me. Same thing with the Platonic mother, but if I try and feel into it, it's it's equally as powerful, but in its own way. So I was wondering if you guys wouldn't mind talking a little bit about that transition from the mother to the father, and I suppose I'm most interested in what that feels like in a relational sense for the child who's undergoing that experience.

There's a similar problem with the ego remembering right back to the beginning of its forming experiences—forming for it—knowing that it exists uh with the Platonic father—the representation of the Platonic father—as there is with the Platonic mother. In other words, there'll be glimpses of the father before the child understands what the father actually is—through its ego—but through its instincts and its genome and through the Platonic and Sheldrake field, there will be an understanding which does—doesn't require the ego to know what that is—the understanding is innate—and then the B—the bonding starts at that point, and then the child becomes conscious of it because of how the father confirms the child, so another part of the ego lights up. And when you said the the mouth of the Cave—the way the I Ching would probably put that—the Chinese book of changes would say—the image of the mouth of a cave—the father stands with his hand outstretched towards you as you approach from within—and then it would—it would go into a discourse about the meaning of that configuration of images—so you would see the Father, the mouth of the Cave, the world beyond—the world Beyond is light—that light recedes into the shadow that you're emerging from as you become conscious of the father as receiving you at the Crossing Point from what is within and what is without. That is the so-called archetypal role of the father—to receive the child from the safety of the maternal wound and from the ego's representation of its understanding of the unconscious into an understanding of itself as having significance and a role to play in the outside world. That would be the same for boys and girls; that bit is the substrate. What happens thereafter is different because the the female has the female child has to understand that she is different to her father; she was the same as her mother, just as the boy had to learn he was different to the mother, but somehow the same as the father—already there's a a differentiation occurring that's based on the fundaments of biology and of ancestry. So that's a substrate for both; what happens after that—that's the story of a life and how it unfolds.

But Paul, how would that be from the perspective of a woman—a young woman—a child even—who is forming an understanding of what the masculine is? When I was feeling into that, the thing that stood out for me was what happens before we even get to the mouth of the cave. So that the young infant—the young female infant—if we're talking about the relationship of a daughter to a father—will partly be formed by sense impressions um because you know there will be the biological separation, and then there will be the the psychosocial roles that the mother and father fulfill—even in a Paleolithic context—which will be different from one another. So even at that very uh early stage, I think a young female—female child—in that specific context would probably be aware—for example, of—bearing in mind the you know that time—they would have been hunter-gatherer societies—um the father may feel more distant, more remote to the mother in an affective sense uh his presence will probably uh be felt differently and so much as if if he's been out hunting with other men for food and he comes back and he brings meat back to a cave environment—um this is—this a scent of the meat—he—he may be—his clothes may be blood-stained—all of these things can can be picked up and processed through the senses. So I think a young female infant child will already be um amassing a lot of information about what it means to be female as as opposed to male uh and then eventually as things unfold and that uh child comes to Consciousness more—those psychosocial roles will probably become clearer, and the ego will have a better understanding uh of how mothers—how women are—as opposed to men and fathers. And I think um—now you know in in our time—in an everyday sense—um the the role of the father has been—because of all the cultural change—has been—the importance of the father and his role and and uh a you know helping either a daughter or a son to achieve that transition into the world has been diminished by the culture, unfortunately. But it's such um—it was an important—an incredibly important psychological um transition back then—back in ancient times—it's still that way now, but we've forgotten the importance of the ritual, or it's become overlain or overwritten by layers of of you know woke culture and and forces that would would erode it. The present exaggerated culture would not be adaptive in the past; we can say uh there would be a Darwinian selective pressure which would say this is not the right way to do things.

Yeah, what does emerge in the past is fully adapted to it at an instinctive level. Yes, and it works, and it worked for millions of years actually; we go right back through the different hominid species that have existed uh so that's deeply engrained within us genomically and in a field sense. Yes. And when you were mentioning about how the sensory impressions form uh for a female child as opposed to a male child—that is recognizing difference—yes—not just a transition into the outer world but fundamental difference—yes—whereas the boy is start off feeling different pretty much—yes—at some point as his ego starts to develop very very primitively—it'll be the mother is not like me; I'm like him—yeah—uh so his curiosity will probably move him towards the father a little quicker um but he will sense danger and vulnerability too, so he will still have a slow progression, but the mindset is different—the anticipation—difference—and perhaps then this lays down for—from what you said—in the female child—how they will experience what Jung calls the animus as they pass through puberty and into uh more mature relationships—including reproduction—mate selection—that kind of thing—that internalized image and its resonance with the Platonic form that Jung calls the animus.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true, and um whilst you know now in our modern culture uh we wouldn't necessarily want all men to be Paleolithic in in in that negative sense—nonetheless there there is still um that uh aspect um to the animus uh to the masculine in the female psyche, yeah um and obviously it can take lots of different forms you know in terms of How It's represented culturally—there are a lot of different modifications of that um but of course there's also an awful lot more to the masculine than just that as well there in terms of um how we've evolved yeah um and you know as human beings and um we have to take um we have to take all that into account as well as any kind of personal connections that uh a girl or a young woman might have to the masculine yeah including actually the mother's—the mother's animus—yeah—uh and the way that that has formed within her because—strictly Jungian terms—we're using that terminology at the moment—but how a a mother's relating function has developed because of her experience of her father and maybe grandfather and other uh men within um her psychosocial relationships. So all of that has to be taken into account because it's all—it's all formative—it all formative—yes—it it will all affect how she then goes on to relate to her own children.

So for what you said then, it's quite reasonable to suggest—and it's what we see clinically and empirically—that um the Platonic form itself is not only one thing; it too is on timed release; it's matched with Biology. So the original release of the uh Platonic maternal—Platonic paternal—um will be appropriate for for that initial stage—that imprinting stage—but it also contains all of the other experiences that the genome biologically anticipates and the field understands will happen. But the field is Platonic and Sheldrake, so there's an update going on all the time, but that update can be re-updated again and will be continuously modified, which explains how Sheldrake works in relationship to what we might call the Platonic, but we would argue it's the same thing. Yes, it's the same field, but its dynamics are operating adaptively along timed release and uh adapting locally under different conditions. So we could expect then—predicting from that—that the animus will take the form culturally yeah that it does now because of Sheldrake effects—yes—H—and it will appear to override the past and it will—until it's corrected for again—um and that will have to come out of the wider context of the Platonic yeah which the Jungians would call archetypal, but the fundamentals are there immediately at Birth yeah except in so far as they may be modified by genetic modifications—yes—illnesses or mutations even or whatever—um so that would explain why—what what we're seeing now—why it's diffusing to the extent that it is and also where the resistances to that are coming from. The field itself—is the Platonic field—is dynamic uh the form represents its fundamental State and then it releases itself ideally uh on the same clock as the biology does so that they are coherent, but occasionally there are decoheres as well in the in the life of an individual.

I think that's absolutely true. I I think that we've probably moved too far away from those fundamentals yeah um and without going into the detail of it—we are seeing a correction for that culturally yeah we are because we can't—as you often say—we can't override biology—no matter how much we we might want to—no—no—the there's something amazing going on with it really—that you see the—that principle—fact that you can't override it—but it does have latitude built in yeah and the regulation of that Latitude seems to be outside of biology, but it's not in the culture—the culture—when people identify—it seems to be the suggestion anyway—is that we can override biology and we can make changes—we can alter it—and we we can bring in influence from culture—yeah—biology allows that up to a point and then there's a meta regulatory factor that comes in yeah that I would suggest—we would suggest—obviously—is the Platonic field regulating aberration in the Sheldrake field locally with respect to the viability of biology because they are all really one field uh and they collapse into a specific resolution according to how we look at it. So if we look biologically, we'll see certain things; we look culturally, we see certain things and so on, but they are all interrelated; hence they can be very dynamic and very adaptive, where as you say there are fundamentals that prefer not to change—at least not over the longer term—yeah—it's almost as if they allow a bandwidth of adaptation to be tested—let's say a Sheldrake level—if we're talking about a field—and if that works okay for now—but if you go too far then you will be counterregulated—indeed—and biology operates within that field and then culture emerges out from the expression of biology via psychology, but each of those levels are collapsed States; we need to look at the whole picture uh and there is ontology—a Development Across time—that we can witness, and if we're conscious enough we can access that at its fundamental level to make Corrections in our individual lives and also within the life of a culture.

Well, you know, over time, if we think of it in terms of a a timeline, it's been more the way that you've just described um with respect to uh met instincts and and proper recognition of what they are uh it's been that way for longer than it's not been that way, and so in some regards it's um I'm not suggesting it's an experiment that that human beings have thought up consciously themselves, but it's um it's as if we're being experimented with in a way um arguably by The genome and its fields and culturally we're failing that ship test unfortunately yeah and and we do that at our Peril. Yes indeed. The only form of valid introspection I would say ultimately is to access the Platonic field, because that has the capacity to correct for everything in an individual life and by extension Collective cultural life too uh and that's where the relating factor as function and system—as anima and animus—come in, and it's at that level we need fundamentally.

To understand it and then its cultural representation, whatever form that takes, the so-called archetypal image, we don't then fall into the Trap of associating that to the entire thing in itself. That is to say, the platonic field and its ontology; we see it for what it is: a local representation that we can interact with, but we can also modify. But we have to go to the primary source in order to make that modification.

Take, yeah, or be restored.

Yes, yeah, that's a choice, isn't it?

Yeah, relating is the key. Everything I'm about to say comes directly from the work of my mentors, Steve and Pauline Richards, depth psychologists with 44 years of frontline clinical experience each. This channel you're on right now represents part of the promise which Steve and Pauline both made to Frans, young Carl Jung's only son, in the Jung family home in May of 1992: to bring his father's work, C.G. Jung's work, into the reach of ordinary people.

If you are an autodidact in Jungian psychology, you've probably already come to appreciate why the concepts of the anima and the animus are notoriously viewed as difficult to understand. Jung entrenches his writings in mythology, and his romantic turn of phrase frequently personifies them as inner psychological spirits, beings within of the opposite sex that we can literally speak with. Jungian analysts frequently push this view; they instruct their male patients to integrate an inner woman and their female patients to become more male in order to individuate. For anyone with any ounce of respect for biology, this is clearly an atrocious aberration. Men do not have a minority of female genes, as Jung hypothesized that they do; men are men with male psychology. The reverse is true for women. Any understanding of the anima and animus must respect this; if it doesn't, then it's just a fantasy.

Let it be said, though, Jung was, is not wrong about the concept of the anima and animus; their core is very much real. Unfortunately, and he himself openly admits this, the concept, as has been handed down to us through his collected works, is a description of *his* anima and animus as he, C.G. Jung, was influenced by the significant female figures in his life and his female patients. We'll discuss this in greater detail later on in the video; you can use the time stamps to easily find this if you'd like.

Despite telling his so-called followers to not follow him, they've done so anyway, all the way up to the present day. If you are a man, unless you are C.G. Jung himself, you do not have his anima; you have your own. To grasp the true nature, then, we have to understand what the universal collective core to the concept actually is, with all idiosyncratic elements of Jung's personal myth boiled off. In the early 1980s, Steve and Pauline Richards did exactly this; they pressure-tested the anima and animus right down to their core. The core, which Jung himself states very clearly is crucial, but which Jungian analysis ignores.

Relating, relating as the exchange of energy and information, of course, occurs intrapsychically, the almost exclusive emphasis by Jung, but it also goes far beyond this. Relating is crucial to our social relationships, to our biology, and to the very forces and particles that hold the universe together. Relating is everywhere, all the way up and down the biopsychosocial stack, and within every level, too. We relate in our relationships; we relate to our so-called unconscious; we relate to our past and to our future, and the whole field which defines all of these elements relates to us. The qualia of relating, how we relate, created for Jung the construct of the so-called positive or negative anima or animus, but behind everything idiosyncratic for him is simply relating. Like every complexity of information within our universe, the anima and animus take part in both a wider ontology and teleology. Let's explore this now, from the foundations of the universe all the way up to our individual lives in this very moment. We'll use this quote from Steve Richards as our guide; it's an excellent representation of the process: "Affect is the carrier wave of instinct; instinct is the emissary of its Master, the genome; the genome is the superpositioned intentionality of the platonic field."

To understand this, we need to first get past a blockade which Jung himself places in the way, and by other names, is implicit in virtually all of modern psychology: the psychoid boundary. For Jung, some biological processes were capable of undergoing a process called psychisation, whereby they were transformed into psychological elements capable of then representing themselves to the ego. Thus, there is a distinct limit in Jung's model to how far the ego can metaphorically go into the so-called unconscious; it can potentially access anything that has been psyched, but nothing else. Thus, Jung stated a clear distinction between the archetype in itself, inaccessible to the ego, and the archetypal image, which is accessible to the ego. This model suggests a hard cut-off between biology and the psyche, one we know today does not exist.

We know from Steve and Pauline Richard's informational monism and superposition theory, first formulated by them in 1988, that biology and psychology are both representations of a single fundamental substrate: information. In psychosystems analysis, information is defined as literally that which informs; it is the fundamental substrate of everything. Hence, at the base and outside of this continuum, a continuum of information, is informational monism. Informational monism thus shares similarities with information theory in physics, represented perhaps most famously by John Wheeler's idea of "it from bit," among others, which has become one of the most popular frameworks for understanding the nature of the material world. Metaphorically, beneath matter as its fundamental substrate is simply information. This informational monism is superpositioned across the entire continuum to form the objective waveform of information. Superposition, in this context, describes the simultaneous representation of the same information at different systems levels. For example, if we state that the anima and animus are here within the psyche, then we would be correct, but the information which defines the full bandwidth of the reality behind the concept is superpositioned across the entire continuum. Each system's level is thus simply a different representation out from the objective waveform of the same fundamental information. Thus, when we consider Jung's psychoid boundary, it immediately reveals itself to be an artifact. Discrete systems levels like cells, atoms, and particles cannot cross the psychoid boundary, but information can. There's no psych process needed to turn one discrete thing into another because both categories, psyche and soma, are only seen as such by the ego. In reality, their substrate is information, superpositioned into those two different broad representations. The objective waveform itself, when understood truly as a superpositioned field, is fully capable of representing itself into ego consciousness with no barrier save for one that the ego creates itself. More on this in a moment.

Returning back to the start of our ontology, informational monism is projected, using that word metaphorically, into superposition with the material universe at the resolution of the Planck scale, the smallest dimension of spacetime geometry. This fundamental field of information is called the platonic field. This is the meta-field of the just-mentioned objective waveform, the ontological organizing and informing field of superpositioning information. The platonic field provides the a priori imprint or form for everything in the universe. In other words, the platonic field anticipates everything which is superpositioned out from it. This is why Steve and Pauline gave it that name; it's very similar to Plato's original intuition of the world of forms: that everything in the material world has a superordinate form which acts as the template for its physical properties. Modern physics can certainly be demonstrated to lend credence to this intuition. Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose has stated that mathematics seems to be as if platonic; everything in the material world relies on mathematics for its existence, and yet mathematics is not in the material world; it seems to be as if separate and superordinate to it. Specific mathematical nomenclature is, of course, invented, but the existence of mathematical truths like e, i, π, and Pythagoras's Theorem is discovered, innate, and unchanging. Mathematics is very likely a superpositioned representation of the platonic field. So too are the fundamental properties of the elementary particles, like charge and spin, which seem to simply be innate to the universe; that is, they are very close ontologically to the platonic field.

Out from the platonic field are superpositioned increasing complexities of information, beginning with the elementary particles through to composite particles, atoms, molecules, and so on, moving through physics to chemistry and eventually across phylogenetic or evolutionary time. Darwinian biology—the process herein called Darwin—is simply a metaphor for the innate competition for transtemporal existence between complexities of information. This occurs at the level of the animal, as is frequently known, and so too at the level of the molecule, through their properties defined by the platonic field: thermodynamic stability, electrical charge, etc. Thus, given the platonic settings of our universe, phylogeny inevitably produced the first replicator, which evolved into DNA, and given billions of years, the genome we have today. As Steve Richards has said, Darwin is thus the efficient cause for an ontological process that has its a priori anticipation and thus teleology in the platonic field.

At the same time, superpositioned with the physical fields of information are the Sheldrakean fields, named after the work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Dr. Sheldrake has demonstrated, through observation, deduction, and experiment, that the universe appears to contain a certain type of field responsible for what he calls formative causation; that is, a certain type of cause and effect, not using, for example, Newtonian force to move energy from one place to another, but instead a field relationship that allows for the instantaneous sharing of information irrespective of physical distance between things of the same form. The link between the platonic and Sheldrakean is crucial for our topic at hand: the anima and animus. The platonic field defines the form of everything in the universe, as Steve writes: "It is the foundational and primary causative field which has within it the embedded ontological dynamic that brings the Sheldrakean into being." The Sheldrakean fields, in contrast, are always dynamic and changing; they provide local variability in form across a platonically defined preset bandwidth. Given Steve and Pauline Richard's superpositioning theory, however, the Sheldrakean and platonic are the same information in different representation; thus, both are capable, Sheldrakean and platonic, of dialectically interacting with one another. Ontological feedback from the Sheldrakean updates the platonic, or, in other words, the tendencies of the collective, the habits of us as human beings, eventually become the innate anticipations of our lifespan.

So what does this mean for the anima and animus? As Steve writes: "The ontological feedback updating of the platonic by the Sheldrakean allows for a platonic representation of the relationship between the biological sexes to exist within the platonic field. Similarly, the Sheldrakean fields generate morphic and behavioral representations of these platonic anticipations in local psychosocial representative form." The same thing is true in genomic representation of information, epigenetically, too. This accounts for the representations of the anima and animus as understood by Jung, both as archetype in itself and as archetypal image. Plato's original intuition was his apperception of the field that bears his name as standing behind the directly experienceable form of the senses. His dialectical method was a system of active reasoning that proceeded from intuition to an affect-based nosis of the underpinning reality of the phenomenal world. The cognitive element in the Socratic dialectic of feasting on the forms was and is downstream of the primary intuitive and affective representation of consciousness of the forms. Jung's anima/animus model is very much an iteration of this, as made manifest through Jung's character and personality, but it is entirely congruent with it. Sheldrake offers the potential to understand more of how Plato becomes Jung. However, neither Jung himself nor indeed Sheldrake offer a method of access to and integration of Plato that includes Sheldrake. Dr. informational monism and superpositioning theory do offer both this access and this integration.

You might be wondering how this is the case. The answer is implicit in everything we've just discussed. If we draw out a few key elements Steve mentioned in the quote that Plato came to a nosis of the underpinning reality of the phenomenal world through both intuition and affect, both of these are qualia of consciousness. If we consider the modern evolved human ego, its Miller number—that is, its working memory or phenomenological awareness—is defined by four qualia of ego consciousness: cognition, affect, sensation, and sematic representation. These are the everyday substrate of our awareness. The human ego has its own nested systems level within the psychosystems continuum; thus, it is a superpositioned waveform of information. Specifically for immediate ego consciousness, its waveform is defined by Steve and Pauline Richards as the subjective waveform. We can clearly see then that the subjective waveform is the result of dynamic superpositioning of the objective waveform into the evolved architecture of the ego. So, through our four qualia—cognition, affect, sensation, and sematic representation—we can only ever see, perceive, and apperceive a limited representation of all superpositioning information. The human ego has, as Steve writes, "evolved to meet the adaptive needs of the immediate moment and to generate virtual and retrievable models of potential adaptation to the future." This is its purpose, and its evolved qualia reflect this. In particular, affect is, as Steve writes, "the carrier wave of instinct." Affect allows the ego to understand and relate to the intentionality of the instinctive arc of our lifespan development. Cognition, on the other hand, allows for the creation of cognitive representations of past and future states to be implemented through action in the world.

There is a fifth qualia, however, a special case qualia which does not originate within the ego or is subject to its will or intention; this is intuition. Jung originally described intuition as perception by way of the unconscious. Given Steve and Pauline Richard's informational monism and superpositioning theory, we can see straight away that the concept of the unconscious is simply a collapsed means of viewing all so-called consciousness which is not directly within our immediate ego consciousness. In other words, intuition, as defined in psychosystems analysis, is really perception by way of the objective waveform of information. Information moving into the subjective waveform of the ego on the carrier wave of intuition can never usually represent itself directly as is; instead, it collapses into one of the other four qualia. Intuition is always present, however, outside of the ego, as Steve writes: "It is the manifest condition of ground state consciousness." So to quote, affect processes slightly faster than cognition, but intuition, as its ground state of information, is effectively instant; any delay is the result of biological and then psychological information processing into representation in ego consciousness. When the ego's bandwidth, its operational loading capacity, is increased by coherence with intuition, its Miller number can increase beyond its usual limits. There are constraints, however, and one of these is homeostatic regulation. It is possible to be receptive to intuition as wide-field informational representation, but the ego will need to maintain its primary adaptive role. Affect and intuition thus are the phenomenal linking bridge for all of us down through the superpositioning levels of information. Affect can take us as far as instinct, as Steve writes: "The emissary of its Master, the genome." Intuition, however, has the potential to take us much further, as the groundstate consciousness of the objective waveform itself. There is no reason, say, for an artificial barrier that, under the right conditions, it cannot directly represent the platonic itself.

Moving away from more metaphysical areas for a moment, this creation of artificial barriers, to use a phrase, is very important to understand, especially for such concepts as the anima and animus. One such example was Jung's own construct of the psychoid boundary, something which does not need to exist and yet is very often projected over the living reality of the so-called unconscious. This tendency that we all have as human beings to relate to the so-called inner world as if it were same in kind to the outer world is explained by a psychodynamic introduced by Steve and Pauline Richards: internal projection. The ego always implicitly has a model of what the so-called unconscious is like. For a Freudian, it contains the id and the superego; for a Jungian, it has a shadow, an anima or animus, and a self. If we metaphorically look inside, we will always find what we expect to see through internally projecting our current understanding over the real contents of the unconscious. To mediate the gap between ego and deeper structure psyche, we have evolved the capacity to form deep structure complexes, another psychodynamic introduced by Steve and Pauline Richards. Their purpose is the homeostatic mediation of information between the current adaptive state of the ego, including its maturation, learning, and understanding, and the telic intentionality of lifespan development represented by the meta-instincts. Deep structure complexes always reflect back to the ego what the non-ego psyche thinks about the ego by means of their specific representation; they essentially communicate: "Look, this is what you are like; this is what you are doing to yourself; here's an angle on you." Thus, if someone informed by pop-Jungian theory looks inside or has a dream and sees an evil shadow figure, a radiant anima figure, or a mandala, so-called self, they are very likely seeing a deep structure complex simply mirroring back to the ego what it is from the perspective of the non-ego psyche. In this case, it would be the fact that it is identified with a theory-laden framework saturating the self-concept, which encourages a fantasy escape away from real-world adaptation, something the genome would not see as beneficial whatsoever, and hence it needs to be pointed out to the ego through a deep structure complex. To take this as confirmation of the theory instead is internal projection. Instead, the ego should metaphorically empty its cup, as Steve has said, and instead of falling in love with its own reflection, it should be willing to receive information that is truly non-ego, something it can truly learn from pertaining to its own state and adaptation in the present. This is why it is so very important not to fall for the inductive cultural representations of the anima and animus as being the anima and animus. As soon as we do that, we immediately halt our relating to the reality behind what is otherwise simply a cognitive idea; we will meet with a representation of our own learning on the inside and fall under the false veil of having encountered something real when we haven't. The anima and animus, when distilled from Jung's own personal psychology, are simply the function of relating, relating at every level of the psychosystems continuum, mediating the telic intentionality of the platonic field itself. Through relating properly to the a priori intentionality of our lifespan as laid down in the genome across ancestral time, we become who we are, who we were always literally meant to be. And if so inclined, we can look inside, receiving in and then following where it goes, to perhaps gain a glimpse of the wider teleology we are all embedded within.

As Steve and Pauline Richards has said, this teleology, the intention of the platonic field itself, being the slow and steady ontological progression of consciousness as such itself. There is no creativity without me. How did you discover that relating and creativity weren't just related in some theoretical sense, but were so deeply rooted to each other that when I found so through creative things that I've done before, the more time goes on, the more it appears to be right at the very heart of relating itself, and that mirrors something obviously that you've said in the personal myth guide, which is a sentence always stuck with me because I didn't understand what it meant—"creativity is relating"—and I puzzled on that and orbited around that for a while, um, but it feels so very, very right, and I would wonder how you came to know that.

Well, part of that is really being conscious of your own development, your own maturational processes, isn't it? And, um, how things have emerged out for you and understanding that that is creative; it's given, but it's concealed. The maturational process itself is given; it's innate; it's within our biology, but it's concealed from the ego because it's on release. And being very young, obviously, you find that play is creative, uh, and then you have the urge to create things, to bring things into being. There are symbols that represent other things that are not in your immediate experience, and this gradually builds up, and some people plug into that really powerfully, and the creativity takes off, and that can produce all sorts of things, including neurosis, if we can define a neurosis as a maladaptation to the external world. A creative person is very often very well adapted to that which is seeking to express itself through symbols, but when it comes to external adaptation, there's no real correspondence other than to become neurotic. Um, so to answer directly, for me, that's how it happened for me. I found that I was neurotic in the sense that I was not aligned with external reality, particularly, but representations insisted themselves from within, uh, that had to be represented creatively in an external sense to make a reality out of them. To deepen that a little bit, to explain myself in this context, because it's not as if I were gifted in any sense as, uh, an artist might be gifted with skill that is tangible, um, there was a very high pressure of images and affects which were bursting to come out that I at first had to put into the context of history, of all things I've mentioned before that I became conscious.

I was in single figures, probably a bit about seven, if not earlier actually. Because I can remember my seventh birthday and and what I was like, what my mind was like at that time. It was earlier than that I became conscious that I had no past, but I could anticipate a future. And I was aware of the the atmosphere within my home, the limitations of my parents, but of some kind of compensating drive to bring into relationship things that I have not personally experienced, but were going to be relevant for my future. And yet they were from the past, and it wasn't the personal past, it wasn't my life because I was so young. Um, so history then became the representation of the containment of that which was coming through, and then I had to be creative about history. And I was creative about history through play, um, and that included uh playing with toys: Knights, Romans, Trojans. I had a whole Army of Trojans, various fortifications, making it as real as I could through that, but also relating to my my friends and then the natural environment within which I grew up, which was incredible really.

I mean, Paul, in seen photographs of, haven't well we found some recently, didn't we? That just you did love for, yeah, just very kind of the blue and you know the area where you used to live is very built up now. It's it's gone, yeah, it's gone effectively, literally overridden by um housing and factories and Motorway. And when you grew up there, you you literally grew up in the countryside. It was it was Countryside as far as the eye could see, certainly from um you know the boundary of of your home. Yeah. And as I say, a number of photographs turned up recently for you, yeah, on Facebook, out of the blue. And it was probably quite a shock in a way to, I mean it was it was lovely to be able to to see it again in in that kind of unadulterated form, but it was also a shock to see just how much things had changed. Yeah, how much had been destroyed. Yeah, effectively. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, I had an intuitive feeling for the history of the land, as if it was representing itself to me, and that sounds strange. Uh, my mother, as my early imprinter of uh the anima, we can say in the context of our discussion today, um wasn't an intellectual. That's not being unfair to her at all. She had a medieval mind. She could easily have just walked out the back door into the fields and started picking vegetables and things and being a medieval peasant. That was the level of her conscious discrimination and understanding of that place. Um, but I felt there was more there. There were trees there which were alive to me, they were animated. There were animals there, there was a small River with a a flood Meadow Beyond it, um which flowed from left to right. I now know how significant even that is, rather than right to left. It went from left to right in a Jungian sense, the importance of that and the life that was in that stream, uh and the animals and the bird life and the procession of the seasons. Uh, and I I had an impression that that land had Secrets within it, which of course were the symbolic representation of the place, but also of my own ancestry, my genomic ancestry even Beyond um that which you might regard as being your genealogical ancestry. This was Collective, and I felt that, and that was the the spur of my creativity, uh as it eventually became.

So to answer your question as directly as I can, uh I uncovered the the power of creativity by being neurotic. And it was an incredible experience to see those photographs. So these were other people, other children who lived further along the road from me, uh and I I could recognize it was a very emotional thing, and uh in this Facebook group, it started out like that, just propagated. Everyone had been impacted the same way as I had by that place. There was something very magical about it, but with me it's definitely seeded creativity. With them, it's seeded, it seems, memories, happy memor memories of childhood and a natural environment, but I felt the spirit of the land, and that contained me and directed me. And had I been brought up somewhere else, I may have had a different mind completely, but that was the beginning of the process of understanding the importance of creativity as that emerged out from me. Even me becoming eventually psychotherapist had to do the dream of that place, and we I told that to Fran Young. I told told him in person when he asked me about uh childhood dreams. I told him that particular dream, um and he accepted it, which was again moving and confirming.

Um, so the way creativity emerged out from me in relationship to what Young calls the anima had to do with a natural landscape, uh and a feeling that I didn't have a past, a personal one, but there was a collective one. And that the only way to understand the present and anticipate the future was to understand the past, and to do that I had to uh relate to this incredible force that that was pushing through into me, um and shaping my mind decisively, I would say. So in a way we've got Neurosis to thank for delivering our creativity to us, for for those of us who who have the potential to be creative, which I think is what you're suggesting. See that some of the the young people that you grew up with, for them it was sufficient just to have the experience of being in a natural environment and having happy memories of childhood, but that wasn't enough for yourself. That I mean it's something obviously that you've been able to um draw on to inform your creativity, probably particularly through the writing that you've done in in more recent years, but for other people it's not that it's irrelevant, but it it doesn't insist itself in the way that it does for somebody who has the potential to be creative. So I guess you know we all come to it to some extent and through suffering and and through frustration and and feeling the instinctive pressure that we uh and drive to be more than we believe ourselves to be at any one moment in time along our um yeah personal Journey. So like I said, we have Neurosis to thank for that in in a way. Yeah, and we will all suffer to a greater or lesser extent depending on the degree of that potential. Yeah, I think that's a great Point, Paul, uh because as you know I'm not gifted as an artist in that fine art sense at all. I have no ability, none, zero. Um, it came through in writing and in Psychotherapy for me. They they but for someone else that will come through in a different way. Yeah, but their experience of depth is equal. Oh yeah, it's not diminished by being different. Said it's it's just different.

Yeah, well it probably goes the path of least resistance to some extent at first. And in the broader sense you've always been good at writing, yeah, in the sense you've always been good with the the written word. Yeah, even when it's not been used creatively as in say writing a novel or a screenplay, you've always been good report ring, report Rising. Yes, which appears to bear no relationship to the the two things I've just mentioned, but but there is of course because your ability to express yourself through language, yeah, um and in a way that is coherent uh and and that people can follow if they read it, they're they're all important skills. So that for you was the path probably of least resistance. I don't think it necessarily means that you couldn't have opened up on the uh say the musical front or the artistic front. I mean even now you you sometimes say oh if only I could write music I would know what to write to put to the stories that are I I've been writing screen screen yeah. Um, I mean technology is such now um that you could probably do that. You don't necessarily have to play a musical instrument to have an appreciation of music or to understand how music can you know uh set the scene or generate an atmosphere for a screenplay. And when you were writing your screen plays, we often started with music, by listening to music. Yeah, we did. Yeah, we did. And uh I find the right kind of, I say the right kind, the right kind is that which animates, isn't it? It delivers the affect, the emotion, and therefore the instincts, and the mess instincts are all delivered through that. Yeah, and uh to go back then to the so-called anima or animus and the relating function and system, whatever those four things are, they mediate that, make those connections. We can put a theoretical framework over it, and we can disagree about which, but it doesn't matter at a deep structure level, that is the important thing. And the one thing that comes out overwhelmingly for me is the emotional connection to an entire scenario that wants to push itself through into meaning, because that's what I felt as a child. That's how you and I have developed the model that we have through working with people, um catching the affect relationship, the emotional connection to deeper factors that are coming through. And this is why we developed our version of sandre and the enactments and uh all of the other Creative Media that we use. It's all about that.

Thanks, Stephen. Pauline, um I'm very interested in the link between those different experiences, Steve, you're your writing later in life with the novels and screenplays and that almost imprinting onto the land when presumably dating back to your your very very earliest memories. And I'm wondering what is it besides relating in the in the in the broadest sense that, because I could almost feel it as you were speaking, as if as if there is something in, not literally in the land necessarily, but something attempting to sort of push through that's very similar in tone or the same deep structure to what you said pushes through with creativity within certain representations. And I'm wondering what that is that shared in common between them. We could say perhaps meta-Instinct in that broad sense, but wonder if it'd be okay to go into a little bit more detail on that.

Yeah, I would say that um although we would use the term met instincts and we know what we mean by that, you could exchange that for archetype if you like, if you were taking a a Jungian perspective, um for example, uh my earliest memories are from nine months of age in that place and and being imprinted by the countryside, but it was one enormous tree there, the one I look back now must have been 4 or 500 years old, an oak, uh and the locals called it the Ravens tree because it would be full of Ravens. And we know that there's so much in that alone, there, so many layers of Mythology that follow on from that idea. I was completely unconscious of Odin's Ravens, for example, the clearest example of that, but that was so monolithic, it was like a fixed gaze. I would just look out my bedroom window and it wasn't that far away, um and I just stare at the thing. It dominated the whole Vista, um and knowing that it, or I was told it was that old, um it's like what has it seen, what's passed through it? And it of course it's gone. It was it was it was dug up by when they built the motorway through those fields, uh terrible, but um it's still alive in there and in here, uh and it was alive before I ever saw it in different ways, not just because you know I hadn't seen it, and not just because other people had seen it, but because of what it can represent at a met instinctive, at a field level, which we could say is archetypal. It was as if the tree was there to pull things out, and my mother was somehow connected to the tree. She never went near it in her life, never, but to me she was in, she was a a mediating element, the presence within the home, in the back garden and the fence with the stream, the meadow and this this enormous tree. She mediated the tree. I thought she knew, I thought she understood, probably she didn't. So that wasn't a personal experience of my individual mother, that was the representation of what the maternal means at a platonic level, to give birth to a boy's Consciousness, to his ego, his sense of self and how he relates to the inner world. And I took that forward, and that's how I can work with that kind of symbolism now and have done for 44 years with other people, other men and their relationship to their mother and and to a transpersonal representation of these things, archetypal you could say, but without collapsing into that pop psychology stuff you get out there on the in moment real feeling.

So in that sense then I think it was about accessing representations which have latent within them as a field things that are not obvious to the senses, but are obvious to intuition, that Sheldrake to some extent, it's certainly Jungian, yeah, that that so it seem almost to me that um almost like what that tree has earned, what that tree has done, even though it's not done anything necessarily from the human perspective, but that acts as as an an attractor for human potential to come out. Obviously some people don't have experiences necessarily of something obviously so impressive as as that tree was, but they can still have a resonance with a land, with the land, whether that be the land where they come from, or as you've emphasized before, the land in which they they they come to Consciousness within. Um, is that the same deep structure as the experience with the tree? Oh definitely. I mean I uh I was born in an inner city, um but we moved it when I was nine months, and I came to Consciousness at exactly the same time. Now I would go back and visit my grandparents in the home where I was conceived, and they'd had that that home for 80 or 90 years I think uh at that time, and it was already old when they got it, uh and it was part of a very settled Community. It was a basement, three floors and then a rice angle that went out along the next the next Road. It was quite a big house, were nine children in there uh at one time, uh these are my uncles and aunts on my mother's side. So there was psychology there that that I could relate to, but I didn't personally remember, but as if part of me knew I came from there, but the thing is I as me did not come from there. That was another place, that was before I knew anything, before it was anything that was personal. But when I was in that other place, be very careful here, I'll I'll uh feel things which are beyond my capacity to process. That other place was was much older and wasn't my family. It starred at me and challenged me to do something with it. Live a place was just, that's where my family are from, it's different. Well, subsequently that's probably been a very good thing, because we all have to get outside of our family to some extent and our family constellation, our family complex in order to access or or to make those ancient connections. And you know they're the things that hold us back as well, aren't they, very often? Yeah, those those early relationships, that that early imprinting that might actually move or shift us away from our creativity. So the capacity to go in and to access something which is far more ancient is is so important. It's also important to, because the landscape inevitably changes for people, even if you've you know you've grown up in an area, um it doesn't stop changes happening, um as you rightly say, um you know Meadows being dug up, trees felled, Rivers polluted, all these kinds of things will happen, but no one can destroy or pollute the inner images. So they're still there and they can still be accessed. Yeah, and we've had to help some people clinically with that too, because we've had I know for um for a fact that you've worked with people who you suggested for example that they go and visit certain places in order to um have that Transcendent connection to the place, and they've gone there and they've felt nothing. And it it's not because there's nothing in that place that that can't be experienced, it's because they can't make the inner connection. That's the problem. Yeah, and you've helped a number of people with that. Yes, and some of them have felt that and they have gone on to to make the connection of course, but others have not. But others have not, for the reasons that you say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. That's absolutely true.

Um, it's it's been foundational because before I had ever heard of Jungian psychology, knew anything about it, the forces that support Jung were present anyway, which helped me to believe in it, to believe in Jungian Psychology, because I'd had that empirical experience as a child of coming to Consciousness, being influenced directly by landscape and then being around people who were not affected in that way. So that meant there was probably something wrong with me, was what I meant about being neurotic, um and it was only much later that that when I encountered Jung that it suddenly made sense, um all of that did have a purpose and a meaning that could be utilized productively to help other people and and to be creative. Well, there have been people like you in every age, and there will continue to be people like you in every age. There are thousands, of course. Of course there are, but but but but it is um there is a uniqueness about that too. Not everyone is set that way. No, and and for those people who are, I mean it's it's a shamanistic connection really, isn't it, to to the land? Yeah, and to people, there's a there's an obligation I think of people who are configured that way to share that experience with us and bring on, and as you say, there'll be thousands and thousands of people out there who can do that and and therefore who through relating can share that experience and and help others. Yeah, thanks, Paul. I mean, one creative, uh his name is David Rugen, uh when I encountered his work I felt I I knew, uh in the sense that the he's older than me, um and was older, he's always been older than me, but he did an intro to something that he released I think in 1974 called Pender's Fan, uh but when he it was it was reshown on television there, he was explaining it and I knew, and I knew that he would know because he was talking about the land in the same way. He had that he had that understanding that allowed him to generate that story. And he also did The Go-Between and The Green Knight as well. And uh for a while we collaborated um on Lilith. The reason that it didn't go ahead with with David, I do deeply respect him of course, is that uh I wanted him to direct it and he wanted to write it, and I had to say it's been written, David, you can direct it, but it's been written. And that was, we didn't part company in any unfortunate way or anything like that, it was simply an understanding that you know I'd I'd written it, therefore I am the writer. I I've been entrusted with that uh from that creative field that emerges, um but I but I thought that he would have been a brilliant director. But anyway, uh he he he has that that same connection and understanding, and I felt an immediate resonance. But when I first saw Pender's Fan, I was I was very young at the time, uh that had a huge impact on me, massive. It's it's the connection to the land again and the ancestral psyche. It's important. It's also an example that Steve of how we're connected to our own creativity principle, yeah, that that we can um we can reach out to others and have an appreciation for the creative process. Yeah, but there's something unique about the creative process for each individual person, and that means that you tend to not want to give up on your own creativity in favor of somebody else's, uh and it's as you say, it's not that you don't respect that person or the fact that that they don't have a resonance with you or you with them because you you share the process, but you you tend, there's a tendency to want your own to persist. Yeah, understandable. It insists itself. It does. You kind of, well you will, you you'll pay for it on the inside if if you don't accept that which is coming through. And that's also something you get in the better aspects of Jungian psychology too, that you have to be able to receive what's what's emerging uh in order to have a healing experience of an illness, you know, um in in that sense that the Neurosis becomes its own cure because you release out that which is insisting itself from within. And I

Couldn't have written Panda's fan, and I wouldn't presume to rewrite it. It's as it is, and I wouldn't touch it. I massively respect it and respect his creativity. But um, the little thing came through me; um, I have an obligation of Juicy to it, uh, so I couldn't, couldn't accept that. But yeah, I still have massive respect for him; he's been a huge influence on me. Yes, he, he absolutely has. I, I think it's an important point there, St. it's a bit we've often discussed this about music, um, that when people do cover versions of original pieces of music, whilst I'm sure they absolutely enjoy doing that, enjoy the process of doing it, it's never quite the same, no, as the original piece. So it's just something about the, the fact that it, you know what it is in its original form; it's almost as if it shouldn't be touched somehow.

I can understand people, um, you know, if they admire an artist or particularly inspired by someone wanting to emulate them. I can absolutely understand that, but ultimately it's better if you can be authentic, and then this is the message that we often give about young as well, uh, and Young's insistence himself that you, you know, thank God I'm young and not a young, in, in other words, be yourself. Yeah, you know, if, if you do have to copy someone, make it a kind of a transitional phase whereby you move, shift from that into something which is original and, and which is authentically yours. Yeah, yeah, I 100% agree with that, and of course, Young himself would have done, and did, he would have encouraged it. Yeah, yeah, he would.

So the, the animus that comes through, uh, creativity, they can't not be there because they are relating; they are about relating. And when we collapse them, as we've said before, into, um, a rified inner woman or an inner man, yeah, then we collapse the entire field of what they represent as relating per se, as such, in itself is reduced into that, and then the focus becomes some kind of pseudo-platonic representation of a Freudian drive. You know, that, that is how Young's animal is treated; it's rified, it's, it's pseudo-platonic because it's collapsed, and really it's just a persona for a concealed lust drive at a Freudian level. That's not good; that, that's not how to, to relate per se. Relating per se should connect with that, but not be collapsed into it, and there's an awful lot that could be said about that.

Yeah, well, it, it tends to be what happens, uh, in relationships too, when people come together, say, in intimate relationships at the very start of that relationship, um, where you, there's a strong amount of infatuation present, we, we see that shift from Freud into AR as, as love turns into power. Yeah, and then all the parental complexes come in and muddy the water as well, and over time that relationship, um, lacks its vitality, lacks its animation, and the people concerned, uh, lose, uh, their own, um, authenticity and originality as individuals, and everything becomes homogenized. We get into ideas like pseudo-equilibrium, John des's idea, that which we're going to discuss, we're going to come, come yes, um, you know, these are the things that happen when, um, Freud and Adler are present, uh, and then of course, there, there is no Young as such being actualized at all in that relating experience when, when they are both dominant. So, so relating is a creative process, even at that, in that interpersonal level, because if we take the individuation process notion and put that into a relationship again, as we're to discuss in another section of the video, um, that's creative also. Yes, creativity and relating are intimately linked, and we cannot separate them.

I wanted to ask you guys quickly on the point made earlier about, um, neurosis and how suffering interlinks in with, with creativity, because something you guys have said before as well is, is emphasizing that creativity can be important for, for anybody, that it's not limited to, in the opinions of some academic, to a small elite group of people where it, it becomes almost mythologized into this impossible-to-reach endeavor, so vaguely defined that, well, you should never bother in the first place, you know, which, which robs people of their life force. Seen that with people; it's not, it's not very nice, um, but presumably if someone is connected to their creativity, and, and I'm not sure on this, I guess what level I'm asking the question, but this does suffering on neurosis have to be there for the creative act to come through?

I would say definitely not. Um, the kind of person that you, you mention, or the kind of scenario that, that, that, that you're, well, that you, you've, you've offered to, to lead into this part of the discussion, what you will see is a collapsed personality who is latently or under the direction of their own neurosis to distribute that through suggestion, through other people, um, to suggest; for such a person to suggest then that creativity is, uh, some kind of elite process that only a few people can get involved in, is it a reflection on an inner struggle within that person, within their neurosis? And if it comes out as a cognitive formulation which lacks relating because it's a, it's a collapse state in and of itself, then that's going to be delivered through what appears to be an authority; it's almost like the animal rather than the anime in classic Jungian terms, because we have the power of the word is saying only this can happen under those conditions. And then if you look at such a person and see where they're being creative, they might be creating in terms of volume, a lot of things, but what's the quality of what they're creating? Because by their libido shall ye know them; what they produce will tell you everything you need to know about them, everything, uh, that will include, of course, their ideas, uh, how they can relate broadly, uh, and what is the content and subject of their creativity. So somebody like that is actually broadcasting openly the state of their own psyche, but at the same time trying to distribute that through a process of diffusion into anybody who will listen and allow themselves to be influenced by it, whereas the natural observation will tell you creativity is everywhere, and everybody is capable of it.

Totally agreed with that; you see it as well with, with school obviously, and so many people go through that experience, um, again it's treated, I guess, by, because a lot of the people teaching are not creative themselves or struggle with it themselves, that propagates its way through. So she say, by the libido cha you no, but on the, on the suffering point, is, is the role of that for some people to precipitate the connection to creativity? And then once that served its purpose, that is the neurosis served its de facto purpose, that will lift, and the person then has that connection to presumably the ancestral psyche via those symbols or representations coming out in their creativity. Is that, is that the role for some people of suffering in this?

That's a very good point. Um, suffering per se is not good; it's not good from a biological adaptive standpoint or a psychosocial one, an inas psychic one; it is not good. So if somebody is suffering, the better had be a purpose for it; otherwise it should be removed. Um, so someone who is a genuine artist that is suffering, and that suffering is necessary for them to produce something creative that is of benefit to people beyond themselves, I think that's okay. I, I think that there's a long history of that, but to, uh, elevate the notion of suffering as some kind of abstract value, to say that everybody should, or that it's inevitable, flies in the face of adaptation, and, uh, we should avoid it. What I know of creativity in my own life and working with people is that suffering that's connected to the repression of, um, or suppression of creativity, that suffering does, as you've suggested, go away, uh, and its intensity or its one-sidedness when a person does actualize that which is trying to come from within and then to become what is without, um, but they may get a change in the qualia from suffering to an intensity of the need to express, which is a much more positive form of adaptation to being under creative pressure from within. Um, a creative person who cannot, for whatever reason, create, and that could be because of external factors or a lack of belief in themselves through the suggestion of others, will suffer. However, someone who is free to create will feel the same intrinsic drive, but it will not manifest as suffering; it will manifest perhaps as frustration, and that frustration is the libido to generate the creation, so they have to channel it, and they get very preoccupied in their creativity, and they collapse around it, but they don't suffer in a neurotic sense, uh, but there's too much of this suggestion out there that it's good to suffer somehow, and it's a kind of a virtue, uh, and then to suggest on from that that there's no actual way out of suffering, uh, rather than some horrible hole in the ground, like an abyss of some kind, uh, and that you can't be creative because that's only for an elite; they're terrible negative [Music] suggestions.

Yeah, I think that creativity too, for someone, um, in, in the situation that you've described, Steve, where maybe they, um, they haven't been fortunate enough in terms of, uh, their upbringing or the, the environment they've grown up in to maybe express as much of their creativity as they, they've needed to along the way, and so it's, it's been capped through circumstance, that sometime because of the, um, obviously the, the strong amount of suggestion that comes with that about a person's, um, ability or, or the way that person perceives himself as being on the inside, as being capable of some things but not others, um, for those kinds of people, creativity often comes in stages or, um, in, in maybe not stages, but it kind of pulses throughout their life where maybe they'll overcome some of that, um, negative imprinting and achieve something in the way of creativity, and then they, they're will take them maybe in another direction for a bit, and then circumstances change, and there'll be another pulse of creativity, and so it, it kind of builds incrementally. You, you see that a lot with people who have a lot of, uh, inertia to overcome because of early obstacles and restrictions and so on that have been placed, yeah, on their creativity, and that's absolutely fine. I think you just have to keep, you have to keep on with it until you reach a point that, uh, James suggested whereby you, you have no need for the impediment of a neurosis anymore, and it may be that you come to that very late in life, that, that, that's sometimes sadly the case for some people, but I think so long as you get on with the process, you embark on that journey, then that, that's probably the best any of us can do. I mean, for, for someone who, um, grows up in a family or an environment where these kind of things are encouraged from the get-go, they're probably extremely rare, but also very fortunate to, to have that, um, and, um, no scenario is perfect anyway, is it? Even for people who maybe have a family who are encouraging of their creativity, there may be other things which are difficult, uh, in, in, in some other way, so whatever hand we're dealt, we, we, we have to run with that, even if it takes time, and sometimes it does, for some people. Some people are well passed with life before they suddenly realize, do you know, I wish I'd, you know, I'd written this novel a long time ago, or I wish I'd turned my hand to painting a long time ago, or do you know, I think I, I've actually got some ability to play a musical instrument, but I've never done it, and I'd love to do it now, and you, you have when that impetus ceases, you, you have to go with it, and, um, it doesn't matter, like I say, it has to come out a bit at a time; it will build incrementally, and people do improve over time, whatever form that creativity takes.

Yeah, so you have to relate to the creative medium that you use; you have to relate to your own unfolding personality; you have to relate to other people who may impede you or facilitate things for you, uh, all of this is relating; it is, and the representation of relating in relationship to whoever and whatever. So it's a massive field effect, isn't it? But something tries to mess regulate that and bring it through, and, um, the Jungians might consider that to be the animal or the animus, because they think that you can only relate internally through the medium of the way that they rify that, uh, I would say that's not true at all, um, that's partially because of internal projection, that once we receive the idea that there is this rified inner woman, and I can't access my inner world unless I talk through it, talk to it, and then pass through it. No, the, the, the so-called unconscious is pushing all the time, it's presence all the time in many different qualia of representation; we don't notice. Yeah, it's there; we have to learn to receive. Yeah, once we receive, then we can follow, uh, but if we insist on projecting over, uh, these things, that then everything becomes an idea, it becomes a psychologism, uh, we become skid and don't relate to the outer world at all; the inner world is, is just an inflated holding space of fantasy to try to siphon off our natural energy and libido. Um, so we do need to understand the relating function, and creativity is a great way of doing that. All the impediments we see in other people stopping us, we have on the inside stopping ourselves. Yeah, what is within, so too is without; they are superpositions in relationship to one another, and one of the things that we internalize and then impede ourselves with are these rified ideas that come from Jungian that you have to do things in a certain order, whereas the psyche will communicate and is communicating instantly and all the time.

So true creativity receives that and is then directed to reproduce that in a representational state; that's the creative media that we use, whatever that might be. Then we've completed something inner and outer, a superpositioned and harmonic with one another; they are in coherence and resonance, however, however we want to describe it. But soon as I've got to go through this internal woman, infernal internal woman, who may be, um, dark and destructive, and then there's this other one that's like some kind of platonic form in that distorted sense, uh, which is immediately a polarized neurotic position to take; we are not being natural because we are not receiving the creativity. It's so wasteful, isn't it? I mean, as you said, as sure as you were speaking, Steve, I could just see almost doors closing, you know, all the doors are closing to, to you getting to your creativity, and yet it's, it's ready there, waiting for you to receive it. Why would you do that? Just another series of impediments, isn't it, which complexes will use and say, thank you very much for that, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll generate more nonsense or insinuate more things about why you can't get going with this creative proc, so it will just all be utilized negatively against you.

Yeah, so that important isn't it, is to free ourselves from the, the negative influences of other people and their fantasies, which we then take on board and internally project and repress our own creativity, whereas people who are natural about being creative don't have any of those problems; they might be a bit upset and distressed and neurotic, but only because of their ego's own intrinsic adaptation that has not been influenced by others, not been influenced by pop psychology and pseudorational ideas that, that have been brought down through the legacy analyst tradition. Get rid of all of that, and then you can create, and you'll have a proper relationship to yourself on the inside that's natural; otherwise, you, the process of, of creating or trying to create will, will be filtered through the personality of the person whose ideas are putting the impediments in the way, in the first. Absolutely, and, uh, that's, I think, what James meant when he mentioned the unmentionable, the unnamable academic who is propagating all of this nonsense about the limitations of creativity and is really just, as I say, distributing his own neurosis globally through the medium of the internet. You've got to resist that kind of thing; you do to be offensive to yourself.

Yeah, agreed. I'm, I'm wondering now on the, the difficulty thing that some people find with creativity; you highlighted one of the may obviously these internalized suggestions from, from other people, will the environment we grew up in, early experiences, and stuff like that, that basically suggest one way or another, don't be creative, or you shouldn't be, or you can't be, any variant thereof, but so too it seems that even when those things aren't there or someone's been actively working through them, the, the creative act itself can be intrinsically quite difficult. Is that because of the bandwidth of material sometimes that wants to insist itself through a person, that literally it's almost like something too big, in a sense, bigger than the ego; it's like pushing on it and can be a little bit disorientating affectively or, or otherwise?

Yeah, I would say so. Um, one of the things it's necessary to do to be a creative is to be able to dissociate in a controlled way, so we don't dissociate and fall apart, but we dissociate enough that the ego gets out of its, its own way, uh, and then allows the creative process to come through. An ego identified with complex though can prevent that from happening, because when we try and access creativity and we, we get blocked, say, um, a writer might call it writer's block, the block is intrinsic to the ego and its immediate field of complexes; it won't be from the creative process that wants to come through. So the impediment then will be within the ego and its sphere, the field of complexes that it identifies with; that's where the resistance will be because the ego can't dissociate sufficiently from itself and from those complexes to become the receptacle for the creativity to come through. So creative people need to know how to dissociate properly. Um, I, I find, I'm gonna say this, I have never had writer's block ever, never, uh, and I think the reason for that is that I learned at a very young age how to dissociate in the, in the sense of generating a vessel to receive creativity rather than go in looking for it and trying to, uh, override it with my ego, with my conscious will and intentionality, which I would call an internal projection or a variation on that, uh, so the ego's got to get out of its own way and, uh, then build a vessel to receive, as, as you know, I say, receive, and then follow. Once you receive it, you follow it, and when you follow it, you're in that world. So if you're, you're writing or producing a narrative, you have to follow it once it's comes; you, you have to follow it, and then you're duty bound to do something with what you receive at that point, and it's an affect quality as well, uh, which is super important, and, uh, as a writer, then the scenario writes itself. But if you say, I have to write this, who's the I saying that? It's your ego and its complexes, and a complex might say, I'm not getting enough of a fix or enough attention here; I'm just going to stop this; I'm going to cap it and make the ego think it can't do it, and then I'll direct it to do something which supports me, even if that's only having a belief that he can't do it, he or she can't do it; that feeds the, the complex that keeps it alive and caps the, the creative drive coming through. All of that bad feeling need not ever happen though, if, if we are just simply open and receive.

Once somebody's created something, then, because I'm curious about this in all the different, uh, classical creative media, you know, if you fine arts, music, creative writing, once someone's created something, bearing in mind that, that's an instinctive process, that's, that's not controlled by the ego; the ego is almost like a gate to allow something out, has an involvement obviously in helping to, to shape, is not offline, um, is there also an instinct to have to relate to something one has created themselves, or is the creative process itself simply sufficient for most, if not all people, to relieve the pressure and have fulfilled what's been asked of them? Oh, that's a great question. I would say that we need to look at the origins of creativity, and to do that we have to take a paleoanthropological perspective. Um, when did consciousness of creativity and consciousness of the merge of creativity occur in human evolution? Then we'd see what its original purpose was, and we can look at animals that have patterns of so-called instinctive behavior, like beavers to build dams, other animals to build certain kinds of nests, and so on, and, and Jung talked about this kind of thing, the apologists.

Do as well, uh, and talked about them as being instinctive, as if they were blind and there was no connection to them with a human being. It's I would say different because creativity for a human being started out probably as an intuition that presented itself in consciousness, with a sense of drive and excitement attached to it, to generate a new adaptation to the world. So that was one drive, uh, and that would have led to, you know, stone tool technology and and that kind of thing. But that would also have been embedded within the evolution of of social behavior. And out of those two and the evolving brain would come the first inklings of representational art, whether that was body adornments, making of premis of jewelry, cave art so-call um that kind or those kinds of things. It's an extension of of mind in a representational way that can then feed back. And once that that leap occurs, then so much that that's locked in in uh potential within the human psyche and human genome will start a push to come out for its own sake. And uh, it will reach a point then where we have more than one way of relating to our creative products, one that's more ego identified with. So I relate through my ego to that which I have made, or I know PA said this once: she's she's generated something creative, it's gone, it's out. Yeah, now that is not from her her ego, but her ego has a representation of it that makes sense to her, so doesn't get in the way of it, if you see what I mean.

Um, so there's something about the creativity that the Pauling taps into that wants it to to distribute itself; that's really interesting because that's a benefit to other people. Um, so there's so many things that are super possession that suggest that creativity itself is very very complicated and serves many many different uh purposes simultaneously and would have been like that in a Paleo homonid uh Community. There would have been U the mechanics of an artifact that would allow better hunting or making clothing or building shelters, but that's embedded within other things, and the Creative Drive would fill all of these up simultaneously. And eventually you you would get the cultural narratives, you get the myths and the storytelling, which then becomes a way of storing past Generations' information in a cultural form that can be represented in whatever way. But that cultural representation, that myth or story, has to link in with what's in us anyway; otherwise it won't work. So again, you have super positioning. So uh, creative people respond in different ways to what they do because there are different ways of responding to that fundamental creative drive because it fills up so many things. I would say, yeah, I I think the the kind of um social cohesion that that you're describing that that comes from being creative is important too, because there's, you know, if you're working say sort of to to come bang up to date again, if you're working on a creative project say with other people as well, uh the creativity then becomes greater than the sum of the parts. It's something about working with other people who are also creative that can bring your creativity on as well in ways that maybe you didn't expect. For example, when when we've worked together and you you've come to me with an idea and you said this is how I would like um this section of the screenplay or this character be to be represented, I have to be able to make sense of the way that you those representations are forming in you in order to uh resonate with that and then to produce something which is um that does Justice to whatever that original inspiration was in you. And if we didn't work in that way, I'm I'm sure or if I was just working in a very collapsed way myself, I'm sure the outcome of that creative expression, if it say you know piece of artwork, a drawing or a painting, will be very different. It it would it would almost be diminished by the collapse, if you see what I mean. Absolutely. So something about people coming together socially that that is an important part of that creative process and uh can actually move individual creativity onto something much bigger, yeah um than it was, you know, well the beginning. You've defined a Field Effect, haven't you, that there is a level at which it is the same yeah regardless of the medium, but the collaboration manifests a wider bandwidth of that field yeah. Then for example, I I I can't draw, you can draw and paint so well. I communicate with you and you receive that; we're both operating on the surface but connected to a deeper level. And it's been like that with the musicians we worked with as well.

Yeah, yeah. So like you say, that whatever that original idea or inspiration is, it starts to seed itself in other people and then they find their own um yeah way of of uh resonating with that and and representing it according to their own skill set. Yes, so it's a Field Effect, it's platonic, it's archetypal, it's all of those things, isn't it? And our limited Consciousness, limited individual personalities, tap into a small part of that wider field. Yeah, and if we can collaborate with our different abilities then we can generate something that's very powerful, and that's obviously been um an incredibly important part of building culture, civilization, yeah, that it's, you know, from what you were saying earlier, it's uh it's come from that. Yeah, yeah. Woman, do not be afraid; the fates have brought us together. I, Lord Brian, will be your protector. When I used to read Yung before meeting you guys, because of the way that Yung's core model is is set up, there is this sort of Adventure that people have have to go on, a little story arc in terms of interacting with the unconscious. Uh, first it's the shadow, then for a man it's it's the anima. And I was under the impression for quite a long time that that the anima was not going to be present in relationships at all, including romantic relationships, unless it was as if that kind of Mythic, fictional character, which which be positive or negative, but presumably positive, anima takes the form of in in Yung's model. But if it's the relating function, that means it's not just present or not going to be present in that literal form, because that's a fantasy form; it's going to be present in romantic relationships, but it's also going to be present in every single level of the the social part, yeah, of the biopsychosocial stack, in every form, in the present, in the past that still has an influence on somebody today and anticipating to for the future. The biggest hurdle, and we we've said it many times, to get over of course is that the anima in a man of course is not an inner woman, and the animal in a woman is not an inner man. It includes the anticipations of those relationships in a maturational sense, on timed release from The genome. But if it were the case that we had to wait till puberty before we had any inkling at all about relating, none of us would survive to puberty because we would have no relationship to caregivers or to peers, would be deleted, no relationship to reality. And yet we are relating all the time. Uh, the form that it takes, so to speak, the representational form that it emphasizes even is dependent largely upon lifespan developments uh and then the triggers for for those uh those things to be released. So we have to get away perhaps some unfortunately, because obviously a lot of younger men certainly are going to be interested in the problem of relating to women uh under instinctive pressure from within themselves, and then they'll hook into the fantasies that have uh you know collected in the culture uh and the representations that as they are internalized, that kind of thing. But the real master regulator of all of this is independence of any fantasies about it, and when we can understand that then we can why things come online the way that they do. Yeah, that's hugely important, isn't it?

It is hugely important. I work with the um a lady recently, female patient, and one of her questions to me, because she was on the cusp of um be starting a a new relationship um with a man, and she asked me directly, "How do I relate to him as opposed to say girlfriends?" Uh, the answer to which of course is that why should it be any different, you know, if we think in a humanistic sense, why should it be any different relating to men than it is to women? And the thing about that is that it bypasses everything that you've you've just said in terms of feeling that you have to somehow relate to women or men differently than you know you relate to yeah everybody else in terms of humanistic humanistic values, in terms of humanistic values. Yeah, yeah. Uh, in terms of biological values though, well yeah, obviously you know that biological imperative is still there, but you know hopefully if if people come in at that level and they are still aware of the biology and what their biology might lead to in very obvious terms, uh ultimately surely we're we're all looking to get to a position where it's positive, it's possible to see um you know an oppositely sex person as another human being to whom over time you relate and and incrementally relate better. So I'm not saying that you can remove biology, remove from that situation; that's that's a mature perspective. It is a mature perspective, yeah, uh which can only come when other things have worked themselves through. But if you go back to being a child or say a young boy or a young girl on the cusp of puberty, yeah, then what's about to come so to speak is not that at all um it's having to face uh instinctive imperatives of course which which then Force the psychosocial adaptation yeah to emerge out from the conflict of competition which is innate at the beginning but not not released in its full form. But you do get rehearsals of that because obviously uh children can form attachments um Proto romantic attachments when they're very very young to people of the opposite sex. Yeah, when we've gotten through a lot of that, I think we can look back and say this is what we need yeah because yeah because we can from that perspective yes of course uh but when we're young it's different because we don't have the experience to look back. No uh and we have something pushing from behind us yeah which is going to force us to make an adaptation in the very immediate future. Yeah, I mean obvious that you know that that idea uh isn't an abstraction out from The Wider context of this particular person's background and experience, but even in terms of our Evolution there's a point at which relating becomes more important than reproduction yeah to some extent. I agree it's a kind of um privileged perspective to be able to look back on the process, but but it's it's still a goal in terms of relating and and the way which relationships develop um over time. I think that's a great point from someone like you looking back. If I look at the contemporary culture though, I would see some of those elements active in what it's preventing in a soft way young people from relating to one another for biological and for social purposes that would have been considered normal normal in an evolutionary sense of adapting to perbond forming reproduction because now it's like you're in my friend zone, and that's a kind of modification of the platonic as people understand place to be. Yes, you know, platonic relationship for young people these days is one without sex or certainly yeah that in that direction. Yeah, yeah. Um, so two things can sound the same and be very different, and it's an angle thing isn't it from where you stand, DET ter what you think you say. So looking back as a mature woman now, 62 years old, and looking back, sorry about that, and now looking back over your life, you have that mature perspective also because you're very good at relating to people, and this is in context important: you relate extremely well in a humanistic level to just about anybody uh and and that's that's how you work through your professional role and you find those things, and it it's probably and I'm sure because um I appreciate where you're coming from on this that um that patient you were working with is at a certain phase of our life where what you said is absolutely right within that context. Um, so I'm not uh you know contradicting you in any way at all, but but we're just offering that there are so many different perspectives yeah and some are emphasized in their superpositioning differentially at different times um so that that is not so much a privileged perspective as a mature perspective that that's what amends, and it also includes the unique circumstances of that particular person. Yeah, uh in Broad terms though, I think when we're young, I mean when James said for example that you know think the phrase you use as girls are icky, yeah, I know what he means. I do, even I'm from a completely different generation, you know, I'm 40 years older than him even, so I can I know exactly what he means. Yes, of course, yeah. But neither he when he was young and me when I was young and both ing that view took that view by conscious will or intention; that was the configuration that the genome allowed for yeah at that time before a switch was thrown, and then all sorts of things happen um most of which are not conscious. Consciousness follows from reflexive EG Consciousness is an afterthought to drives that that come online. So um yeah I I obviously um the comment I made like I I said before is is lacking context to some extent, and this actually just happened to be a relatively young woman um rather than someone you know in mid life or or sort of older Life as we are um and th speaks to Al getting its own back there because I said she was 62 as we are. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm 67 anyway. Yeah. Um, I guess the reason that that I I I throw that in there, throw that in the mix, is because because your animus said it well, maybe yeah, there you go. And this is my anim speaking now, so there you go. See, youngest proven to try and get around the problem really of that we have in this current culture where men and women are starting to see one another as the enemy, and and we've talked around these things many many times uh including the role of feminism in that and the idea that somehow um you know women have to have this sort of um hostile perspective towards men at the outset uh and that they have to meet men with a certain mindset in order to get what they want for themselves out of the relationship. So that that was part of my reasoning for saying in that moment um to just step away from that. Yeah, good point, well made. Yeah, because otherwise there is that tendency I I think for not all young women of course not, but for those young women who in the way that we were saying in the early earlier part of this video are fallen for the the suggestion, heavily fallen for the suggestion that men are somehow the enemy and somehow they can just I gu use men as a commodity to to get what they need for themselves in the way of resources that they're prepared to um they're prepared to meet them uh at that level uh in an intimate relationship, and of course that's um arguably Al timately down the line death to any meaningful relationship. So I think it can be useful sometimes just to throw things and even if it results in us um say us as we're having the discussion thinking around it or coming at it from different angles, it it's just a way of introducing another perspective. Sure, as angle would have so yeah effectively have done. You you made your point well, know that there's no no implied criticism at all at all. Um, I'm non taken by the way either. I'll find out I'll find out later. I'll find out later. You know, in classical Youngan terms, you know, the negative animist would be rankled by that and be looking to like you say score points and have a pop shot back, but I don't feel that. I just feel that we've we've opened things out in such a way that maybe we can look at the subjective relating um from different perspective, give ke a chance you mean. Yes, that's a private joke by the way. Yeah, no seriously. Yeah, you made you you you make a very good point, and as you say we're widening it out because it's all about perspective, isn't it? It is. Yeah, and that's the problem with any case study that it's a collapsed perspective. It is; they're very useful, but they are they are that. Yes, they are. Uh, and also being having a general model means that we never see any specific if we're General; that's a problem as well. So it's better probably to proceed from case studies, providers a little context provided which you've done. Yeah, where were we James on last? I took what you said Pauline to be a very important Point; there's an over ampt with the way I can only speak from the man's perspective obviously, but there's there's an over ramped way that that so many young men will relate to women that a little bit more of actually their human beings as well would help, I feel, not on the cognitive level, but to not over adapt with these you there's all these ideas like uh holding frame that people have to I've seen the nicest young men, the most decent young men be pulled into that where you have to stand like this in front in front front of a woman, all women are all weak and pathetic. It's like what the [ __ ] no, stop it. Why are you trying to prove it's it shows this lack of self-esteem in the these guys, so stop it. So I found that challenging from that perspective, to reminded me of that and how much more normal life should be a lot of the time, if you know what I mean. Absolutely. Yes, they did, and there shouldn't be um a competition should it between the Sexes, you see there's so much with feminists where they they think somehow men have it better, like men go out to work and are stimulated by the work environment and men are having sex all over the place. Well, who are they having it with for a start? But you know it's as if somehow that's uh in their universe that's a a a preferable way to live, and yet there are so many men who are bogged down with work would give anything to have an easier time of it and and would probably like to be monogamous. So you know it's it's just a nonsense isn't it? We have to strip these things away uh and not make generalizations about things um it's just so harmful isn't it to relating? I was thinking back to what it was like when I was much much much younger too and how yeah before puberty hits um the perception from a man's perspective of of girls or women, it it shifts as you said Steve, a switch is thrown and suddenly, well for me anyway, it was it was immense fear; it was no longer a sense of icky, it it was now basically run away, cannot look at um anxiety inducing and that kind of thing, and it wasn't my conscious mind kind of kind of doing that, but I suppose to have told younger me going through that the point that you were making Pauline, I think that would have um that would have hum things a lot more and prevented the I suppose really over adaptations to instinctive pressure I guess and complexes in myself, and I know I'm not unique in that that's a very common thing. It would have calmed things down an awful lot that people are human beings before the the Instinct element comes in, but at the same time the Instinct element is immensely important and and and has to be yes grappled with appropriately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, part of the problem is Paleolithic again; that's um in a more primitive and competitive environment those who feel or connect with the Freudian element are going to be more competitive, so they're going to beat the others to the race, so there are adaptive strategies obviously that that can work uh to mitigate that. But I know I remember that growing up uh this this clock where I talk about time release all the time, I had a friend who's three months old with me and he went through everything three months before me and I thought, "Who the hell are you?" You suddenly changed, and I changed, and he changed again, and it's like what the heck. But you can see the clock and the the others because in a school year you have people who maybe uh nine or 10 months gap between them and age uh they're almost a year ahead and their clock fires sooner and they mature quicker uh and they start acting in a way that you you know not familiar with.

With but that's all part of the competition, the biological competition. They're out the gate quicker towards securing relationships with women, but they tended not to relate to them very well. That that was something that I observed too, um, because I was observing and I was taking note of why why these things were happening and um my own adaptation to that, and and this is self-disclosure [Music], was that I kind of stepped back and had a look at what women or girls seemed to be across the bandwidth of their own presentation.

There were some girls who were like those Lads, and they were out the gate quickly. Um, I had a friend, you know who this is, whose sister was um, oh yes, I did yes, she was very mature; age 11, she could have passed for 16. I mean, she was incredibly mature, and then um, by the time she was 12, she was dating 18, 19-year-olds, and I mean dating in every respect, and she was like a mature woman. Uh, and then there were other girls who weren't like that; they were they were closer to the platonic form; they hadn't matured beyond their age, but they were their age and represented potential for for maturity. They hadn't uh progressed them into a Freudian collapse, and they just seemed better people. This is a value judgment, I know, but it's coming out of a a fundamentally clock-driven maturational process um that is competitive to some extent that makes you seek out values and and virtues that the other Lads wouldn't see.

Now those other Lads, people I'm thinking of that I knew, tended to go on to be promiscuous; the ones who were at the gate quickly were promiscuous and didn't form solid relationships. Their impression, their imprinting of the anime at the the stage of puberty was one more based on Freudian gratification. The girls likewise that out the gate quickly uh were like that. Uh, then there was a kind of a more diffuse spand somewhere in between, and then there were the other women who you were or girls who you would think they are more like the platonic form, and I understood them. What that was at that age, I was already into depth psychology, and I understood that's what that is, and for me that became an imprinter; that that that's the that's the kind I want rather than um some of the other kind they rate quickly, should we say.

Uh, so the there different adaptive strategies, and that they all work to a certain extent. Um, so I'm not making a value judgment now; I'm thinking retrospectively about what it was like to be conscious of a process that was uneven in terms of maturation and how biology spread itself out with various amplitude in its waveform across that bandwidth, all within one year of school life with basically a 9 to 10-month gap, nearly 11 actually. It's it was possible; some some of the people in the same class were 11 months older, and under that kind of Developmental pressure that pushes some of them very far ahead. Um, interesting to see, but but that definitely said there is a biological clock and a something is regulating all of this, and uh it's not a disadvantage to be more cautious because there are there there is a different class, A different quality perhaps of relationship that can emerge out from that; that means you don't have to turn yourself into a Paleolithic Freudian Darwinian um hybrid, should we say, of instinctive drives.

You make a very good point there, Steve, because um, well you said you did, you know, um obviously to some extent you're making a value judgment, yeah. Um, what happens now, and we've this this is something which is happening with greater frequency in our clinical work, in that we're we're meeting people, usually young people, who will say to us that the culture itself has now placed a value on relationships. It's almost as if that they've moved away completely from the biological imperative and the importance of that and the fact that that biological imperative could kick in very early in some people, uh, you know, young girls. So EXC excuse me just for clarification, um, when you say biological imperative, yes, do you mean lust or do you mean reproduction? Well, probably both uh in in the the point I'm coming to, maybe start with that work and work back, is the culture now seems to frown on what would have been considered to be normal relationships for us, say in our generation. The idea of, you mentioned the example of the um the 11, 12-year-old girl who was having relationships with much much older, much much older guys. The culture, and I would probably say that that is, you know, that that is wrong; that that is um wrong in this the sense that it's it's immoral uh to be for say the older guy to be having a relationship. We get this an awful lot; we're noticing it coming through more and more and more. Um, and so usually for for those young people who come to us with with what is essentially a Neurosis about it, they're not taking the biological imperative into consideration at all; it's simply what the culture says, yeah, or what the law determines is, you know, ORS to say, which is one of the things that's important isn't because it's down to interpretation, of course, as well. Yeah, in the sense that somebody who um has become divided on the inside by the suggestion from the culture that certain things are are immoral, they will then look to something like the law uh in in a very rigid way in order to harm themselves with the suggestion of that law; they will then as I guess a um a in a Freudian sense, like a a superego, yeah, or or it becomes, you know, um thinking Anthony Stevens, a moral complex, then sit in judgment on them about the way in which they're conducting their relationships, and we we're seeing that progressively more and more and more. Yeah, a lot of it is a complete misunderstanding of law.

Oh yes, it is, and then the weaponizing of the misunderstanding definitely by others, uh, catabolic forces within the culture for sure. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, I mean that not it's not going to name names, but that particular uh person was invisible to a lot of people of my age. I had I had another friend, you know who he is as well, um who um made all sorts of efforts to, should we say, relate to this this, and she was a woman at 12, I tell you yes. Um, just just you know, he was just like it was just like a fly or a gnat, you know, it was like, you know, um, but he he switched on very early, should we say, you know, and I mean he he was chain smoking 60 a day at 11 and uh that kind of thing, yeah. His nickname was Monk because he had a dirty habit, you know, that kind of thing, yeah. That's not his real name by the way. Uh, he's an entertaining individual, yeah, but he had absolutely no chance, but he had no button inside his head or dial to say you have no chance, it's and not only that, as I would have said, dare I say it, this is not even a person you should go near um because there's all sorts of negative, you know, downstream effects potentially if you even get in a relationship with a person like that, yeah. Um, Darwinian ones, for example. So everybody's going through this process and all on different clocks, and different relationships occur, but relating is still occurring. Uh, so the the template for the anima then starts to resolve into specific Focus for an individual, so that's where the relating system then, as we understand it, or Young's anima complex as they uh talk about it, takes on a very individual specific form. It's partially based on experience, which is conditioned by psychosocial factors as you're saying, and it's partly innate, and the innate has the bandwidth, the full bandwidth latent within it, and then it resolves into Focus. So uh yeah, I I thought it was interesting at the time to see how these uh relationships were forming, yeah, but uh but for some young people, the idea, like I say, those kinds of relationship form, form relationships forming at such a young age and with such a um an age differential between the the people concerned, a lot of young people have been persuaded that that is somehow um, word, you know, I do, 11 or 12-year-old is wrong, isn't it, and we'd both agree on that, wouldn't we, 11 or 12-year-old with an 18 or 19-year-old, but but yeah, if it's at the legal age of consent, yeah, within whatever territory, then there is nothing wrong with it legally, and the only moral that should come into it is whether this is consensual or not.

Yeah, yeah, that's how it used to be, yes, and it's it's within that bandwidth of the the age of consent that it seems that a lot of the attacks on young men in our culture are being made at the moment. Oh definitely. So you might get a lad of 17 or 18 who was told you can't have a relationship with a 16-year-old. True. Yeah, you do. Well, we are hearing these stories exactly, and that's nonsense in the UK; that is nonsense. There are states in America where it's younger than that; it's legal, but that is being perverted by a catabolic process, is yeah. 11 or 12 in my view is too young; doesn't matter how you this, when I was young, an old the older generation ahead of me would say if someone was big enough they were old enough. I don't know if that's still said, but it used to be said, and these were old men; these were guys who went through World War II, and he'd say they would try and encourage those young guys and say if they're big enough they're old enough, and I thought no, even then I thought no, that is not the point, you know, that that was my position, but a lot of my contemporaries would would be yeah, you know, and they would take that view. Now that's Darwinian, and that's Paleolithic, and that's minus any of the cultural mores we we have now um or have have had over our social and cultural Evolution, but specifically the age of consent, legal age of consent being conflated in that way seems to be active in two ways: one is that there are a group of women who will exploit that to attack men, weaponize it, and then there are a group of men who will attack their friends competitively, yeah, uh because they're jealous. Yes, they say, oh, you're with a 16-year-old and you're 18 or 19, that that you know, cradle snatching or that makes you a pedophile or whatever it might be. Uh, that's not true, but it's weaponized because those men are competitive amongst themselves, and what they don't see is that the the bond that draws them together, the colleges' attitude of all being young Lads within a roughly same age group, is still competitive, and now they're competing against women who were trying to dial them down and and uh basically wreck their chances of relationship. Eventually they turn on one another, and they then feed into the catabolism that that seems to be very prevalent at the moments as you've said and as I know that you've experienced with people you work with.

Yeah, I mean the the element that's missing uh for me in all of that is if if it's a young girl, for example, at the 12, 12-year-old you mentioned, the role of the mother is so fundamental in us uh in helping that young girl with what is it essentially a precocious sexuality, isn't it? And and we see so again so many examples in the culture that it's, you know, it's men's fault; men take advantage of of these kinds of situations and always have done, and The Feminine is not spoken about at all or the role of the mother in protecting a daughter who is towards the precocious end of things with respect to her sexuality and maybe even her emotional development to some extent. Yeah, so um that to me is the elephant in the room; is is the lack of proper modeling by mothers for their daughters about how to proceed, how to deal with that kind of thing psychosocially. Yeah, the father's got a role as well, of course, and of course that's very often attenuated because of the way that feminism has definitely perverted itself through its various iterations, so you get all of this going on at the same time, yes, but that as you said is cultural, which means it's transitory; it will change, it will, but that doesn't help the people going through the adaptation at the moment that they have to access their own instincts to find out, yeah, to make an assay of them like you would assay out gold, the value, what what what's in this substance that's worth having and what dross and should be excluded. So you need to do this with your instincts and measure that against the culture, but not to comply with the culture necessarily, but to say I understand what the culture is doing, I understand my instincts, and this is the conclusion I come to that will make me adaptive right now uh in order to preserve not only my own viability but also any children I may have and the long-term survival of the culture. So that that's a a question that young men need to answer uh and and that really is ego strength that will produce ego strength, yes. If they start from the position of say I don't have it, then that's self-defeating, yeah; it wouldn't take much more to push them into the waste disposal shoot, and I don't mean that as suicide; I mean in in a a reproductive sense; they would opt out of the reproductive um pool completely and their own self-esteem would tank and and what have you.

Um, we've discussed this before, haven't we, all of the videos about the necessity to develop the enough ego strength to challenge the culture the way that it's going, yeah, and that can come in to your point earlier about the importance of History, really certainly. Um, there's been the importance of history in your own individual life with respect to your creativity; you you've always had a connection to the past and and believed it to be important. Yeah, a lot of young men would get ego strength or certainly um a huge amount of ego strength from understanding the past, yeah, and and the patterns of the past and and and a real sense that this is just transitory as you were saying a moment ago; this the culture that we have now will pass; it will, and we often get young people saying to us, well, you know, wasn't really that different in your day; do you mean you really thought that way and you did those kinds of things and nobody interfered with the way in which you thought and you you know you were free to do you know, ABC, whatever that happens to be, and we said well, yes, absolutely; that is how it was and it and it may well be like that again; may not be exactly the same, but some of the those fundamental uh freedoms that you know have been eroded but will return with time; they will, and that's very ego strengthening. They have to be, one, don't they? Yeah, one back, yeah. One of the problems is that uh it's easy to fall into the toxic masculinity um straw man representation, yeah. So if in say the UK people were to think about their past, young men and then identify with it and you see attempts at this uh and they start to dress up and tattoo themselves and cut their beards in a certain way so they look like actors who actors uh who have represented uh Vikings, you know, toxic masculinity is so easy to throw at a target like that; it is. Um, whereas to understand history isn't to identify with those roles; it's to feel them but not to dress up like them, yes, because that's a Persona, and it's it's very thin; it's brittle; it's fragile, and it draws the bolt; it draws the arrow of attack from those who would say that's toxic masculinity. You have to build it from within your instincts and from that wrestling with them to know these instincts were operational in the past with others uh and then distill out a set of values that you come to accept and understand in yourself as your own; that is a different kind of masculinity; it's not dressed up; it emits from within uh to without, and of course this is the anima as well because it's male psychology; the anima is male psychology; um, it's relating; it's relating to the Past; it's relating to values from the past. So what would happen then is that you will get, I would predict you would get images of the feminine that appear to be in the past, not the present. The reason for that is that they're not in the present; they're not obviously in the present tense, you know, amongst many young women at the moment; the popular representation of the feminine within the man's psyche as he experiences it on the outside is very stereotyped and rather than archetypes, um, and that is a problem. So he needs to to draw the ancestral representation of what women are by accessing what they were like in the past according to the genetic memory we have of what women are like and then pair that with what we should be like as men and then deliver that into the world; that's the most effective remedy that we're going to have because it will work on the level of the individual and then distribute itself out through culture. If we don't do that as men, as young men in particular, then this catabolism will will be a race to the bottom uh to a zero point uh and we've discussed this in our recent videos, the terminal Lucidity and rebirth uh series and uh the recent videos on archetypes and complexes and the collective psychology of the West at the moment, how that's going. Uh, all of those are representatives of the anima and the Animus in real terms. So when these young men look inside and find this fantasy representation of the anima, you have to work the Alchemy on that to make it real, not turn it into a fantasy which is a virtual holding space and you do nothing; you do nothing because the fantasy is all encompassing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, you made the the point when we were talking the other night that you know you can fool the genome for so long with that with the fantasy holding space, yeah, but but not long term. No, the the meta-regulation yeah um that that's involved in anybody's sense of uh adaptation to the outside world will eventually um make itself known, and the genome will respond to that. So the idea of fantasy representations can only ever be temporary and transitory with respect to proper outer adaptation, yeah, because your genome will sus you out eventually; it'll sus you out or flush you out, unfortunately, I'm sorry to uh to put it so crudely, but that is basically what will happen because you failed the Darwinian test or you know um men have been called upon to act, and that doesn't mean by being violent, but it does mean by doing the right things; the right things, what are they? It's whatever the genome will agree with under contemporary conditions. Now if it does go to the point where men have to violently assert themselves, then we know we're in serious trouble as a species because the culture has been so collapsed that it appears to the genome to be the only level of response. Um, we don't want to get into that state, but at the same time, of course, uh the culture is forcing the genome to collapse into that uh which is why what's going on, should we say, in the lvans and in the the Eastern parts of the Eurasian, you know, continents, should we say, at the moments, yeah, uh and the the forces behind that that are emerging in the United States and in the EU and in the UK, the political forces all collaborating with this; the only correction for it will be a reversal, and it's it's how that will manifest, but relating is behind all of this; therefore, the anima and animus are behind all of this, yeah, and and we've managed it before; we've Managed IT uh many times throughout history to to get it right, to get that balance of relating right between men and women, um, you know, even as sort of far back as the fall of the Persian Empire with the assassinate Empire, I think it was 651, yeah, yeah, uh and prior to that, um, you know, there was a an awful lot of so-called equality between the Sexes, but that was it was um it was equality through difference rather than modernization, yeah, so that allowed for the for tolerance at the psychosocial and cultural level, yeah, because men weren't trying to be like women or women trying to be like men per se, yeah um in in those times; obviously it's very it's more fluid now, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that kind of fluidity to with respect to relationships between men and women, women women, men and men, but there was a a a there

Was more, I think there's more value placed on difference too than there is now between biological sex, between biological sexes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, culture is transitory; it is. Biology takes a hell of a long time to change. It does. Yeah. So, in that sense, there's uh, there'll be a reckoning for the way things are going at the moment. Yeah. And the only way we can understand that is is to come to terms with our biology and then the representations of that as they form within the psyche. And without insight, we can't do it. We don't have insight; we're victims to being manipulated internally and externally. We have to have that uh, to resolve these uh, contemporary problems.

Everything that you said is absolutely true. And on that point about, you know, the the state of modern relationships or the state of the collective anima and animus, um, that's that's not a nice thought, but that's a reality assessment that is absolutely what people see. But so too, um, complexes in people would like that idea quite a lot to keep them where they're at and also paradoxically, but not really, contribute to the decline, to being caught up in this collective field. So, for example, the idea that um, all all women are corrupt somehow by this culture is really common, even if the men don't mean it, they say it in the moment, and it's very obviously an excuse based in being burned in the past lots of times, to to withdraw.

Given though that those opportunities for relating are more sparse, what would you recommend perhaps to somebody who perhaps does feel daunted or frightened at the pr perspec of relating to women? Well, that's a difficult one because there are so many variance, and there always have been variations on adaptation. But what I would say is that there are decent girls out there; there are um, they just don't make that much of a noise about it because the pressure on them to conform, so the catabolism is so high through social media and uh, the popularization of social media and those kind of values that they're not up front, you know. So they will be in despair too; fact I know this to be the case at least with some decent girls, that they're in despair as well that they will ever find a decent young man, as if they don't exist either, because they're told that toxic masculinity is everywhere. So the catabolism is basically said to them, um, all men are bad; therefore, you're not going to find a decent one; you may as well be like us; you may as well come on board with us, uh, and that becomes a shell-ringing field effect, of course. So the influence then spreads by field diffusion, but there are still some girls out there who are holding out or are desperately looking and hoping there'll be some kind of decent young man out there for them. Um, so don't give up, if you're the lad; those girls are there; you're just going to have to try. It's always been that case; you you've always had to try to find the ideal partner for you; that that's never changed; the competition's always there. What's different now is the degree of it. I I accept uh, but even worse than that, the the media or the medium of suggestion is amplified massively by social media, the internet, and so forth. So you need to be able to inoculate yourself from that. Yeah, uh, build ego strength first. You have to mature quickly, and unfortunately a lot of young men are not maturing quickly because they're retreating into fantasy. If you mature quickly, you can adapt; if you retreat into fantasy, you you won't adapt at all; it's escapism, but you don't escape; it's it's the opposite of what it seems to be; it's a trap. So you need to mature quickly by developing ego strength, not by becoming a facsimil of toxic masculinity, but as I said earlier, looking inside to find your innate values that your genome would support and get behind. For some of you guys, that unfortunately will be something that looks like toxic masculinity because that's the way you're set up; not criticizing you; that's just a fact of biology. But for a lot of you, it won't be; um, the vast majority that are in the the center of the distribution curve, you're not going to be like that. Um, so you have to find an adaptation that fits for you, but there will be a large number of young girls too who are concealed by the noise; their signal is concealed by by the noise in social media, the the catabolic noise of uh, critical social justice, wokeism, the the present wave or iteration of feminism; what is it, what on now, third or fourth is it even? Question mark. Even fifth actually, depending on how you define it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, those kinds of influences which get bundled together and presented uh, through the suggestion out there on the internet, social media; you have to treat them as if they are an aberration; they are an aberration because it will pass; they are not stronger than the genome. The genome will outlast them; it will it will give you what you need to get through this, but you have to be able to access your genome to find your ancestral psyche and your ancestral spirits. That's what I meant, that the the older representations of the feminine will come through, but don't turn them into a fantasy; don't you have to feel that on the inside? And this is how to use the anima properly in a Jungian way that the Jungians generally don't do, although they say that they do. It is it the representation that will emerge from within, not because you create it as a fantasy and project it inwardly, but emerges out will be your guide to what you want and what you need and what the genome needs, needs and wants. So therefore that image, that representation is a psychopomp, but it fulfills the role of the guide to the uh, the unconscious in a Jungian sense that the anima is supposed to fulfill, but you must learn to receive from within; stop the internal projection, um, you know, which is going to be based on internet gurus and a vicarious or by proxy learning of people like Carl Jung. How Jung was a adept psychologist and psychotherapist. If you listen to what he says, if you listen to his his his taped interviews or if you read his work, you're not in the context that he developed those ideas from; it's vicarious; it's by proxy; it's not real; you have to feel this yourself. So therefore you have to do the same work, not necessarily in the same way. How do you do that? You have to go into yourself, and then you have to relate; you have to test all of those together, and then you will distill out from that process; that's using your anima in a Jungian sense properly. But if you internalize the the model that the Jungians today use of the anima—I'm speaking obviously of the young man here—you're just going to mess with your head; it's all a fantasy; it's not real in that personal sense of engagement with reality. You have to do that, then Jung will come online; I'll have some relevance. But uh, if Jung is just um, borrowed from the internet—we all know who these people are out there; they're dangerous, the way they're messing with young people's minds—if you take that on board, you will harm yourself; don't do that; don't you have it within you? You are not only your ego; Jung himself said that we're not of today; we're of an immense age; we are; that's the genome. So you need to be able to receive what it says, engage with it, test the waters externally, and then adapt to that properly and manifest your own nature truly; others will follow; others will agree with that, and there will be good girls, decent women out there who will respond instinctively to what you are manifesting in your own nature. So that would be my suggestion on that.

Well, when we were young, there was virtually nothing out there in the culture, I'm young, no; you you really really had to dig for it. Yeah, you will look, if you you know, you went to a bookstore and and found the odd book and the you know, the corner of a shelf somewhere. Yeah, and you know, he's been popularized now to such an extent on the internet that that his work is virtually unrecognizable. Yeah, and of course, you know, it it's it's been exploited, and as you say, that the exploitation of his ideas is is damaging people. Yeah, it is; that runs through typology, the shadow, the anima and the animus, the self. Yeah, all of it, all of it; it it needs to be cleaned out completely. Unfortunately, there are people out there who are doing this, who are building towards bringing this out. Yeah, um, we know a lot of them, and we're collaborating with a lot of them as well, um, but it's got to take root wider; it's got to be in this present young generation. You are the future; you are the seeds of the future. If you let yourself shrivel and die, there is no future for the human race; you've got to do it. I mean, even if that means setting social media aside to some extent; I'm not saying people shouldn't engage with it at all, but so many people engage with it excessively as well. Yeah, and it's um, relating becomes prescriptive, yeah, then doesn't it as well, rather than, as you say, Steve, something which is, if you start with yourself, has to do with you and and the enmination of you and who you are as a human being, um, that that will be an attractive; so regardless of you know, whether we're talking about men or women, you yeah, yeah, yeah; absolutely; you've got to manifest your own nature. Think of yourself as a field phenomenon; you exist in many states simultaneously at many different levels; you have a social presence, not just an internet presence, but you have a social network presence; you influence everybody who knows you, even if you haven't seen them for a while; you influence your own mind; you influence your own body; you're a field; you're not just an ego inflated or collapsed or whatever it might be; and not only that, that has a specific function which is to join everything up through relating, uh, and then you can influence other people, but don't go to TikTok; don't go to dating apps; these are mega destructive; they're driving the culture down to a vanishing point; you have to have the strength to avoid that, and if you're a young man, there are girls out there who will want to know you, but they don't believe you exist, just like you don't believe they exist; they do exist, and you exist.

Woman, you asked the impossible of me; I offer you and your children life, yet you expect me to die to save your husband; you asked me to love you more than my own life; only the gods may ask that to mere [Music] mortals.

In the 16th volume of Jung's collected works, there is an essay written in 1946 entitled "The Psychology of the Transference." Within, Jung describes his understanding of the individuation process through reference to a series of woodcut panels from an alchemical treatise from 1550, the Rosarium Philosophorum, or the Rosary of the Philosophers. Jung saw within these images a near perfect representation of the core psychodynamics behind the transference. The transference, for Jung, is a projection of archetypal material that was once imbued into the personal family onto someone in the present. This archetypal material is represented by the anima for a man and the animus for a woman. The Rosarium then shows a means of working this through; it is a representation of the telic psychodynamics behind the classical presentation of transference, showing an arc of psychological completion from beginning to end. It hence shows a certain type of relationship of a very significant level of depth which can be worked through in personal relationships or, as Jung saw and used in certain cases of transference between therapist and patient.

To go through the panels in brief—and we do mean brief, as all the important elements are discussed in the dialectic with Steve and Pauline Richards which soon follows—then the man and woman in question project their anima or animus respectively onto one another. In this context, this is synonymous with the transference; thus, both parties relate to one another unconsciously through the veil of this projection. It is as if the other party is turned into their mother or father or brother or sister. This is thus a fantasy relationship, not real relating at all, but an encounter metaphorically with an unresolved relationship from the past. To resolve this, both parties have to commit themselves to stripping away this veil of illusion and to see each other and themselves for who they really are as the archetypal material constellates yet further. However, sexual fantasies arise, and the pair are drawn closer still to each other. This has an immediate parallel to the archetypal material coming closer into symbolic union with the ego. If the projection of the anima or animus is successfully withdrawn, then the ego drops into a state of metaphorical death, a state of apparent unrelatedness where the animation generated by the projection has completely ceased. It is as if, as Jung writes, the soul itself has left the body, and the person is left dissociated and bombarded by emotions arising from the unconscious. After a period of time, facilitated not through theory but by feeling into those emotions which spontaneously arise from within, the metaphorical soul returns as the anima or animus returns to its proper role, not projected out onto the other person generating a fantasy relationship, but instead, for Jung, as persona of the unconscious. The people thus come out the other side with raised consciousness of themselves as individuals, having matured and dealt with the unresolved stage of life represented by the initial transference. This is a very, very condensed summary of Jung's model as he illustrates via analogy through the Rosarium.

If we take a closer look at the halfway point, panel number five, then we see two representations which Jung terms the a priori image of the conjunctio, a symbol which expresses the so-called archetype of the union of opposites. Jung states fundamentally that this conjunctio image stands for wholeness, for the necessary psychological process required for individuation in symbolic form. Viewed in this way, the two people depicted represent the ego and the unconscious archetype or material that was projected out onto the other person but is now on the verge of being withdrawn. However, and obviously so, it is also a sexual image. Jung himself, in roundabout terms, states this. Given then that the Rosarium is what Jung himself used with his female patients, and it is the method which Jungian analysis as a whole field has used ever since—albeit there are significant nuances there which we will discuss in the dialectic that follows—then we cannot ignore this more Freudian element. To put it bluntly, many first and second-generation Jungians, when analyzing each other's wives, would indulge in sexual infidelities with them and then excuse themselves by simply saying it's what Jung did. No amount of spiritualization of alchemical panels can cover up what is clearly and obviously instinctive indulgence on the part of the therapist. Using Steve and Pauline Richard's Freud- Adler-Jung equation: Freud seeks; Adler conceals; Freud; Jung inflates and falls victim to both the instinctive gratification Freud finds its manifestation through the power gradient, Adler, of the therapeutic relationship which inflates the therapist's ego into believing what it is doing is spiritually; it is not spiritual, however; it is Freudian and Adlerian. So too, as it follows, it is not individuation.

Bearing this in mind and then taking a further step back, we can see that this entire process is highly idiosyncratic; it is representative of Jung's personal so-called anima as configured in his personal relating system, a fascination with Alchemy, an autonomous misbehaving anima construct which can be excused for causing sexual infidelity. Neither of these are human universals; rather, they are deeply Jungian. Like with much of what Jung wrote and described, there is great value in the Rosarium. If we boil off the idiosyncratic elements of his personal myth, to do that we need to understand how Jung came to create his construct of the anima and animus. Why is it that he found justification for his own anima in the Rosarium? To learn this would allow us to use the allegory properly. Let's do this now.

Everything that follows derives from the writings of Steve Richards, either in *Discover Your Personal Myth* or on the Y to Live By Discord server. The links to both of those are in the description. As we discussed earlier in this video, the mother is the prime imprinter of a child's relating function; that is, how the mother relates to the child determines the template for how he or she relates to themselves as a personality in relation to the so-called unconscious. Jung's mother was a paradox to him; she had a depressive dissociative illness marked by cyclothymia; that is, mixed cycling emotions. Jung writes that he could sense two distinct personalities in her, one marked by this confusing state of illness and another of being warm and a good mother in the usual sense of the word. She appeared to a very young Jung to be divided between Christianity and a superstitious, almost pagan cast of mind. So too, when Jung was very young, his mother spent an extended period of time away from him due to illness, most likely depression, which had a profound impact on him. Jung's relating, which stayed with him throughout the entirety of his life, was thus largely informed through imprinting onto this perceived dual nature of his mother. The influence of a mother on a child's relating is by no means permanent; issues of relating can be worked through and fixed after all; dealing with the so-called mother complex or father complex is very often a crucial element in therapy and in personal development. Jung, however, never resolved his mother complex. The late great Dr. Anthony Stevens described Jung as being schizoid, withdrawn from the world, unpleasant to be around, and prone to excessive unrelated introspection. This is very important to note, as Steve Richards has pointed out; this aspect of his relating system was his own personal experience of everyday relating. Thus, what Jung eventually called the anima was a reflexive self-portrait of his own relating; that is, he was deeply divided on the inside, in a state of deep neurosis that eventually became a latent psychosis. As Steve writes, quote: "Thus prefigured, it is possible to understand Jung's approach to the psyche as very much a personal journey. He was at great pains to make this fact very clear; Jungian psychology is first and foremost about Jung; it's a personal statement about a lived life from within the narrative of that life, his personal myth."

Moving forward in time from Jung's mother, we can trace his other significant relationships with women. Steve writes, quote: "In 1903, Jung married 21-year-old Emma Rauschenbach, whom he had first set eyes on when she was aged 14 and he was 21, predicting to a friend that she would be his wife and that he knew it immediately, declaring it to be love at first sight. Emma was from a very wealthy family of Swiss industrialists but fully involved herself with Jung's work at the Burghölzli, becoming his assistant. They lived in at the asylum, occupying a three-roomed flat directly above that of Professor Eugen Bleuler. In Emma, Jung had found not only a companion who wanted to share his life and work but also an heiress of considerable wealth. They were still resident at the Burghölzli when the first three of their five children were born. However, by 1907, Emma had come into her inheritance, and Jung was able to purchase land on Lake Zurich at Kusnacht, commissioning a large architect-designed three-story house which they moved into during 1909. Jung thus found himself in an immensely privileged position through his wife's enormous wealth; he could sustain any lifestyle that he wished; he did not have to deal with most of the everyday pressures of adaptation which the vast majority of people on earth have to face; thus, he could actively choose which patients to work with, principally very wealthy Americans, and he could spend his time voraciously studying his very personal interests, such as religion, mythology, and of course, alchemy."

Steve continues, quote: "Jung had long had difficulty with what he would later refer to as his anima, the specific difficulty being sexual and emotional attraction to women outside of his marriage. He had already embarked on at least one serious emotional affair with a patient, Sabina Spielrein, who was a patient of Jung's and also of Freud's before later becoming a Freudian psychoanalyst. This relationship was featured in the dramatized 2012 movie *A Dangerous Method*, starring Michael Fassbender as Jung, Viggo Mortensen as Freud, and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein. The smoking gun, however, for tracing Jung's creation of the anima construct was his affair with Toni Wolff, who lived in with Jung and his wife Emma from 1909 until her death 44 years later in 1953." Steve writes, quote: "Jung credited, within his circle, the influence of Toni Wolff in developing his concept of the anima and of being his feminine inspiratrice mystica and muse throughout his confrontation with the unconscious; that is, his mental illness which broke out progressively from 1911 and into full force by 1913. Jung convinced Emma that Toni was absolutely essential for his stability; she acquiesced stoically, but..."

Many within Yung's own family have not been so accepting of his behavior, which they see and have commented publicly upon as being an excuse and an indulgence. Followers of Yung tend to gloss over this, which does not help in understanding Yung the man or indeed his work.

Steve continues, "There is no question that he used his relationship to Tony Wolf to explore the contents of his psyche that erupted under pressure of what many Jungians have called his psychosis or even schizophrenia. He fully indulged his interests in religion, mythology, and the Occult that first took shape in his childhood under the influence of his parents and immediate family. His interests in Gnosticism, alchemy, and hermeticism surged during this period, which lasted until at least the East 1919 or 1920. The now famous Red Book and Black Books had their origination at this time—private writings that neither Yung himself or indeed his only son, Franz Yung, ever wished to be published. They have been published and have taken on a cult following which Yung himself would certainly not have wanted or endorsed."

Yung's concept of the anima is seductive, often paralyzingly so for young men in particular who may be exposed to it when facing difficulties in relating to women and to themselves. Reification of the anima to suggest a real inner woman can be dangerous, particularly when fracture lines of suggestion exist in a man, thereby paradoxically demonstrating the reality of the so-called dark pole of the anima as a mythological death demon. Yung's romantic style of writing in the context of the anima is therefore dangerously inductive to vulnerable young men. The unconscious of a man, if it truly were feminine, would mean that his psyche is overwhelmingly female rather than male, as the unconscious is incalculably larger than, e.g., consciousness. Just as with Yung's assertion that men possess a minority of female genes that create the biological substrate for the anima, this is false and without foundation in genetics or neuroscience. Nevertheless, belief in it persists amongst vulnerable young men. Yung was, however, right in some respects, particularly the power of the images that gather around men's experience of women and the innate relational factors that insist on being projected onto women by men. The reverse is true for women who project their so-called animus onto men. The real cause is less romantic—and more Freudian and Adlerian than Jungian. The instincts and drives arise from the genome to impel men to mate and relate, just as they do for women. When Yung abandoned Freud and relegated instinct beneath a facade of what he called archetypes, he indulged his construct of the anima in full, and even though he was fully conscious of doing so, he laid down a legacy that was in large part relevant only to him and his personal myth.

So, returning to the Rosarium, it should now be very clear to partition off what is a valid allegory for a certain kind of relationship away from Yung's personal psychology. Yung himself saw his so-called anima as responsible for his infidelities, including with his patients, meaning, of course, that he as an ego was not responsible; it was all the doing of the anima, split into dual poles of positive and negative, reflecting his own divided state of relating. As stated earlier, many of the first and second-generation Jungians copied his behavior with justification through reference to him and so-called alchemy. This is a huge neurotic alibi for a failure to deal with the Freudian stage of life approach appropriately. Individuation is real, the transference is real, and the so-called archetypal—really instinctive—elements which constellate are also real. What's important, though, is relating. We can use the Rosarium as an allegory, but not a replacement, through the proxy of Yung's example or otherwise, of real-world relating. After all, Yung became himself and told everyone to not copy him. The path of relating for all of us should be worked through and discovered for ourselves.

What follows now is a dialectic with my mentors, Steve and Pauline Richards, on how the Rosarium as a representation can be used in the real world, quickly, effectively, and always personalized to the personal circumstances of the individuals involved as a model for working through transference.

"You guys have previously recommended to all students training at IPSA to read through Young's essay from 1946, 'The Psychology of the Transference,' in which he includes 10 different woodcut panels from a 16th-century alchemical treatise. Yung obviously saw that as an allegory via projection from, as he says, 'the collective unconscious of the alchemists' of the individuation process. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit around that and why you guys have chosen that."

"Certainly, so we can come at this from the two fundamental angles really—one is for non-clinical personal development and individuation, and the other will be from the clinical side, which has overlap with that. Um, so which would you prefer that we start with, James?"

"The individuation side, I feel, because that's that's all-encompassing, really."

"Yeah. The problem, of course, is that Young was—he didn't have two heads, but he wore two hats when it came to this because he had the idea of individuation as a personal development process, but he was a clinician, and everything he did was in both contexts simultaneously. But if we're going to um address this, then we need, I think, first to establish what happens when people find themselves in circumstances within a relationship that this becomes important, because it's not important in every relationship. Most people get along quite fine without touching this material at all. It's only when there's some kind of very deep and powerful unconscious dynamic that's been constellated that this really has any applicability. When it does, I think it's valid to go there, uh, and within a depth psychological psychotherapeutic context, then yes, but for ordinary people, most of them, they never know, they never realize consciously that this is even an issue for them. We can say that the processes are there, but they are completely unconscious. But when we go looking for it because we feel we have to, um, within an ordinary non-psychotherapeutic or depth psychological context, that brings about a lot of challenges to the individual."

"What would you say on that, Paul?"

"Oh, I agree that it's not for everyone, um, not for not for everyone in in the sense that it's uh there's something special about it or elitist about it, but simply not necessary for everyone. And so certainly in the clinical domain, we tend to see people who who want to go through this process, through the process of individuation, are usually in some state of conflict, yeah. Uh, it tends to be that that they they lead with, yeah. Uh, but as you rightly say, that's that's not the case for everyone, nor should it be. So I think because it's not an easy thing to do, um, and arguably not a necessary thing to do either if people are happy in their relationships and happily adapted and just getting on with life. But where that challenge arises from within for someone and they want to go through this process, it's important to understand what it involves, what the idea of alchemy uh means in an allegorical sense, and uh how that can be heard with the journey of individuation. What what what is it um what is represented in the woodcut that uh James described that tells us something about that process and what we need to go through in order to achieve individuation. So it's not for everyone, nor should it be. No. Uh, and of course, it's complicated that one party to a relationship may feel and then may come across the information, yeah, may feel that there's a synchronicity there, I say it, between how they're feeling on the inside and uh the Jungian material seems to represent they wanted, but the partner doesn't, yeah. And that's quite common in a clinical setting which we can come to later, yes. Uh, but it's pretty much the same—the person who generally leads in this process is the person who is most, I'll say it, disturbed by what's emerging from within them. They feel they need a new adaptation, um, and all sorts of uh ideas, fantasies, and representations will constellate within their psyche, will turn up in their dreams, in their fantasies, will disturb and distress their relationships, not just with their actual partner but beyond that, uh, and they may even become physically ill as well, um, which of course would be a somatoform or hysterical conversion reaction in medical terms, but they can become psychologically ill to the point of being depressed, and they may even get uh a psychiatric diagnosis as a result. So any of those things and any combination of them is possible when the right amount of energy is present within someone and they cannot contain it any further and they then have to go through this process, um, but the main difficulty is is the partner willing to undergo it with them. Now if there is no external partner, you can do it on your own—that has its own problems because everything you're doing then is in the realm of fantasy representation and you have to rely on information you're getting, say from internet gurus or from books—then your own beliefs as you formulate those beliefs and as you build those beliefs you internally project them and it's reflected back to you and essentially you collapse and your adaptation to the reality of outer life gradually reduces and perhaps even vanishes. So doing it on your own is difficult and for the sake of adaptation, I would say don't. You need to work this through through a relationship or even a series of relationships, but you have to have that psychosocial element involved. Uh, the risks of doing it on your own, I think from what I've just said, are fairly obvious. You you could bring about a latent psychosis quite easily, um, certainly collapse into a schizoid state where you just break off all the relationship to the outside world or to reality in general, then you might find yourself in a psychotherapist's office or in a psychiatric hospital, um, because that which you constellate by doing this process uh and then invest libido into the imagery associated with it will be too much to contain. That's difficult at the very minimum. If you are in a relationship, you need someone who is supportive of you doing it on your own, even if it means that they live not a separate life but a respectful life at some distance from you whilst you do it because the regard for you is sufficient to allow you to go through it. That's an absolute minimum, but it's still got its risks because once this material is constellated, suddenly the partner you're with may not seem to be the right partner anymore, only because you've gone in and inflated by reference to the material that comes up. Yeah, you would agree on that?"

"I would agree with that wholeheartedly, Steve. The imagery itself is is hugely inductive, yeah, and the kind of um alchemical explanations for things, too, uh are equally inductive. So, for example, if um we were thinking about the nigredo stage, which is you kind of referring to really as as you're speaking, yeah, where there's a lot of—it's even described as a dark and grizzly period, a period of negative animation. I mean, these words are hugely inductive, and then the imagery which is or the representations associated with that stage in the process, such as things like dismemberment and decapitation and so on, uh again can be quite quite shocking. So anyone who comes upon um the alchemical imagery, you know, themselves without necessarily being taken through it through in a uh as a therapeutic process, uh could well be shocked by that, um, and if if they expose themselves to it when they're in that vulnerable state, which they're likely to be if they've fallen into, say, um which was your point about psychosis, into a deep depression, again, you know, you can imagine uh how potentially dangerous that might be. So I think if you're going to do it, you should have a guide of some kind, um, or it should be in the context of a relationship where safeguards can be built in and the individuals concerned understand that it is only an allegory and it is no more than that, and in that sense it's not real, uh, but it's just a way of of uh trying to show that transformative process, yeah, that can take place either for an individual or for a relationship."

"Indeed. I I think that's hugely important because um you may have noticed I I smiled—that was irony—at one point because Jungians will jump on the idea of depression and then allegorize that or mythologize it and call it the night sea journey, yeah. And there's some value in depression and in suffering, yeah. Um, it's incredibly dangerous to suggest that to people because the only defense a person has against that kind of suggestion, and this is a defense, is to move into fantasy, yes, within which they elevate themselves by identification with the suggestion that this elevates them somehow because they're doing something heroic by withdrawing from the world, yeah. Um, but that's only one degree away from collapse, yeah, into psychosis. Yes. And also, too, it might be that, you know, as um the Jungians talking this way that as the image of the other person that you're in relation to becomes blackened by the process, yeah, um you know all um positive feelings are withdrawn and um then you start to uh get into the kind of territory whereby um you know that the couple withdraw from one another, uh the person whose image has been blackened may be seen literally as a betrayer, while the person who is generating this state in the other person and you know that's if a relationship's going to end, that's the point at which it's likely to end, um, because those dark forces that the Jungians describe about uh if if they're fueled will blow that relationship apart, and that might be a relationship that could be saved."

"Oh, definitely. And and we we've we know this because we've worked with couples who have been in this state, yeah, that when they understand what's really going on, they get away from the mythological language, they can actually bring about a resolution, and and that relationship may have a lot of steam left in it, it's just not been given a chance, yeah. So we have to be very very careful, yeah."

"We do. And um, as we're on the the nigredo, there are allegorical um analogies and things like Ash's work for Cinderella, and of course Jungians will pile all of this in and say, look, it's it's in that representational form—they won't use that term, yeah—they'll regard it as an archetype, so therefore it appears on all of these different surface structure representations and myths and fairy tales, each time they say that it's a further reinforcement into a withdrawal from engagement with life, yeah, and then paradoxically they'll say that about the projection of the Shadow, which is an attempt of trying to regulate what you've just said, you know, about the blackening of the other in the relationship. But if somebody is inclined towards a psychotic dissociation, that won't stop that person from doing it because they are elevated by the idea that this is a heroic thing to go through, and of course they talk about the hero's journey, you know. Um, it's an extremely dangerous time, really, yeah. Um, so we need to paradoxically build a vessel of fantasy if we we're doing this on our own, but know that we're doing it—the key is do not identify with that, don't inflate through the the identification, but say this allegory is a fantasy and there's something in there that I can work with that will help me understand myself. That's difficult though, once you're under the influence of high-bandwidth suggestion like this—once that downloads and then we we further internally project that, so we cover the unconscious's attempt at compensation and the split widens, the neurotic split starts, and then the psychosis comes because the psychosis is the attempt at the correction for the neurosis, which is the resistance to the unconscious, and then Jungians say you're having your confrontation with the unconscious which you should never have had because why would you do that? It makes no sense, no adaptive sense at all, all to set up a confrontation with a homeostatic system that's meant to work in harmony. You would have to be in a state where there was no other answer than to do that, yeah, and that would be somebody like Jung, unfortunately, who was on the verge of true psychosis uh and had to generate this to firm up his his ego, his ego um through fantasy. But even he needed his sor mystica uh to guide him through it, you know, he went on about an internal process, but he had Tony Wolf and before that Sabina Spielrein and also his wife on the periphery and several other women as well. Um, without that, he couldn't have done it. I think that much is true. When he uh came up with with the alibi to his wife about why he needed Tony Wolf in his life, he needed a woman to do it, he just didn't need Emma to do it, he he said he needed Tony to do it. Um, so these things are dangerous and we have to be very very careful about how we work with them through the medium of suggestion. And if we put this in a contemporary context, there are internet gurus out there who work with the nigredo through suggestion under another name, you know, they call it 'niche abyss,' they call it suffering, and they become the pied piper of that catabolic descent, that catabasis. They don't support the people that they influence, they simply influence them. It's it's it's hugely dangerous, uh, and really that's a message that we should get across to people. We have to beware of these these false prophet pied piper types out there."

"I mean, we in short we we describe that probably as being pathological Jung, with respect to the Freud-hardly-Junger question that that we use as a structure to understand some of these psychodynamics, yeah. And the problem with that is that whilst as you say, Steve, um there is that suggestion uh that there's virtue in suffering, there is also uh that elevation that somehow because that person is suffering on a spiritual journey and that that's that's massive, that's a massive amount of suggestion—that's what causes the pathological Jungian inflation, and then at that point that person is is caught really uh and because of the strength of it, the strength of the conviction mind, it's going to be very very difficult for them to see or or or resist um the uh the pressure coming through from the unconscious to to continue on that so-called spiritual journey and and and this is what we see, yeah, and this is why then people get persuaded that because it's a spiritual journey, it's going to be it's going to take a long time, it's going to be lifelong in fact, it never ends, and yeah, you know, it goes on in that fashion."

"Absolutely. So the classical legacy analysts um induce that suggestion in people, hence it takes forever, yeah, to work your way through a Jungian analysis, um, but really the process is just Jung's own personal journey literally, yeah. Um, so that's the journey you're going on, yeah, effectively, isn't it? It's not your own. No. Uh, you'd need to have his life, you would you'd need to have his support structures, you'd need to have his wife's wealth, yes. Um, his wife's wealth built the home that he lived in. He had all of that in place and her tolerance for his misdemeanors as well, all of that, yeah."

"Yeah, yeah. It goes with the territory, doesn't it?"

"It does, it does. Hugely inductive, but yeah. Um, given that this this stuff is out there, where did it really come from? In other words, is there a true deep structure, that is to say not on the surface as in Jung's personality and mind or an internet guru or whatever it might be, but is there something real that goes on uh here? And I think we would say there is something real. Uh, you can work with it, but you have to be extremely careful about how you navigate through it, yeah."

"Well, in in another culture, in another um psychological system, and we you've talked about this many times before, say such as Tantra, then you have to navigate things like peaceful and wrathful deities, but within that cult there are the safeguards and and there is the understanding that that the people are going through that process—no, it is not real, yeah—and that's that's the difference very often, uh whereas with something like the Rosarium philosophorum or or the other alchemical texts, it's harder to see that really because it's it's closer to our own cultural roots, so I think we have less resistance to it is what I'm saying, but you would see it clearly in a system, say like Tantra, yeah, for example, yeah."

"Yes. Uh, I totally agree. Now, James, can I bring you in on this from the perspective of your generation who are dealing with the suggestion on a mass scale that's been delivered through the internet about this kind of thing? What would your perception be on the vulnerabilities of young people to this kind of thing?"

"Well, it would take a special—and I don't mean special in like an elitist sense, I just mean a—"

Discreet group of people, um, a special class to be interested in this kind of thing in the first place; the Rosarium, as these alchemical woodcut diagrams, being alchemical, it has enormous crossover with—and I’ve seen this loads and it surprised me first of all—but with a conspiracy, So-Cal conspiracy spheres as well. A lot of people find this like the rerum is where y conspiracies often overlap, which is becoming more and more and more popular. But certainly from my experience being amongst a lot of young people interested in young, um, this kind of thing is treated as real, exactly as you guys have been saying. You’d ask a lot of them, or let’s say me a few years ago, four years ago, five years ago, however long it’s been, um, there’d be an admittance that, no, of course it’s not real. I don’t believe that that’s real; they’re diagrams. Doesn’t matter what someone is cognitively saying, it; people are almost acting as if these these things are uh real forces in ways that they don’t completely understand, can’t articulate properly, that exactly as you said are highly highly inductive and Y obviously talks in this Rosarium tract. He he begins with a big analysis on this this Imago or the archetype of the conjunctio, and what does that mean? What specifically does that mean? I can explain what that means cognitively, you know, I’ve studied what Jung’s said on that. I understand that he sees that there are representations of that in medieval Christianity, in so-called paganism, which the term that he used for pre-Christian European cultures. I understand that there’s representations all over the place, but where it’s vague is where the suggestion can come in. Yes, now with with with the Rosarium, I find probably it would be really useful to explain the core of what Jung is is saying with this, because he titles it the essay on it, the psychology of the transference. So when Jung is talking about transference, what is it that he’s specifically referring to about this special so-called again is a discreet class of relationship, this special kind of scenario? What is it that’s causing the necessity for a Rosarian process in the first place? Because he describes transference as an as a projection out of archaic archetypal material that was once imbued into the family unconsciously by definition, with you with projection, this material is projected out onto the other person and brings with it all kinds of affects, behaviors, and the person doesn’t know that they’re doing it, and they certainly don’t understand it. To expand that aspect of what Jung means by transference there, I feel would give a great grounding for anyone who’s previously been caught up in Jungian images of this exact kind or anything there or thereabouts.

Yeah, thanks James, that was very well articulated. So the transference then, that’s a Freudian construct originally, and essentially what it means from a Freudian perspective is that infantile ways of relating to people and to events, even objects, get carried forward uh and then transferred onto somebody in the present day with the same force of attachments and the same affect charge that was originally projected in an original uh early experience. Um, now Freud did admit to AR remnants within the psyche, and uh he he generated that idea before Jung did, before Jung went on about archetypes, not generally known, but he did uh and his last work also covered it and the importance of it, but he differs from Jung in a lot of ways. Um, we are going into too much depth on that uh I would say that Freud had some distance, a healthy distance from the suggestive power of these archaic remnants, as he called them within his concept text, whereas Jung just jumped in fully with them, and I think what we have there is the story of Jung’s failure to separate himself from the psychology of his own parents, and he even said himself, didn’t he, that um you you you can’t individuate until you do that, you can’t grow at all as a personality until you separate yourself from the psychology of the parents, which implicitly is transferential. Um, his relationship to his mother has has been shown in in the video earlier, the narrated part of the video, um was probably the prime imprinter of his mental illness, his dissociation is split into number one and number two personalities, and it laid the foundation for every subsequent relationship he had with women, but also with his own unconscious, as Po and I have said, and this is part of one of the basic uh tenets of the psychosystems analytical model is that the the original caregiver, female caregiver in particular, confirms in the mind of the child not only that they have value, but that their unconscious itself has value; it’s a kind of another womb; it’s an alternative womb. There’s the external mother, and then there’s the internal womb out from which the personal ego has developed, and that is an ancestral perspective that goes back as far as not only the human species, good, but way back into our remote ancestors. It’s a repeating pattern which is ingrained within the genome, and there’s a sensitivity to that which is latent in all of us. There can be healing, but if the mother does not prepare the child, male or female, um to trust their unconscious, then that unconscious then will continue to be in conflict with the ego as the child develops. And Freud was very focused on on the these early adaptations, and he summed them all up through the notion of the Oedipus complex, Oedipal situation, that was probably too much of a collapse, um it certainly fitted the people he was meeting, but it was it was it was too restrained, too constricted to be generalized out. Nevertheless, he was right that that’s the origin of transference fundamentally, um but Jung would have said that these archaic remnants are so powerful that they spontaneously emerge later in life and direct a person to towards their own completeness and and integration. That’s true, but and this is uh so important to understand that it’s the suggestion of that out of a proper context and the relationship, as you were saying, either to a life partner or to a therapist, if someone is suffering and they they detect that within them, they have no way of dealing with the necessity to adapt to it in order to adapt to the world in a reality-orientated way. So the transference is important, and Jung was trying to heal himself, and he’s tried to heal himself through the allegory of alchemy, and then he tried to heal himself through his relationship to his female patients uh and also to try to heal them through their relationship to him. He saw there was for him anyway an exact correspondence, which is why he incorporated it into his therapy and why Jungians still do that that kind of thing. The truth is that these dynamics emerge anyway, particularly in a clinical setting that goes to any depth. The problem is the motive, the trained motive that a therapist might have for working with that material; that’s something that we can come to later, but it is hugely important. I guess that’s um that’s a reason for why, if nothing else, a working therapist should be at least be familiar with Alchemy, yeah, and the alchemical process and uh the way in which it’s illustrated.

Yeah, as you were speaking I was thinking, for example, what if somebody like that came upon um an image of the alchemical bass with the infant Stone in it, so that it literally looks womb-like, with the infant Stone representing the primal material, the the substrate of the personality that is is about to be heated up in that process of transformation, and that person might just come to you and uh they might be in a um in terms of expressed symptomology in in a a a rage state, a drive state, uh and then they come across an image like that where they see something being heated up literally inside of us, and in alchemy the suggestion there is that that is the heat of inner conflict, and if we encourage that in somebody who was close to the edge, they might just go out and kill someone, they might go out and kill their spouse, a but example. So you know, if if if we think of it in that way, or the um the therapist isn’t prepared for that, doesn’t sufficiently know about those kinds of things themselves, they could just miss that, miss the opportunity to actually help somebody resolve that drive state and and then by inference protect uh any other party involved, but you know it might even extend to children. It does; we see this all the time in everyday terms; we’d say it was a crime of passion maybe, um but we we have to be aware that these things can become destructive very quickly if we don’t handle them correctly. Yeah, so it can range from uh either one party in a relationship becoming depressed, anxious, generating psychosomatic, yes, conditions uh becoming psychotic or or through just simply leaving a relationship that could have been saved; that’s right, to turning against the other, abs uh or even themselves, a retroflect action of self-destruction and self-harm. All of those things are possible when deep instinctive forces are constellated. Yeah, and as you pointed out earlier, there’s an allegory there with how Tantrism deals with the same phenomenon uh but they’re blunt about this; they don’t try and allegorize it; they say rage states are real, yes, instincts are real, yes, and the way that we need to deal with these is to say that they are fuel for transformation, and then they say, say this has been done before for thousands of years; we know how to do it; yeah, we will tell you how to do it; yeah, we will lead you through the process of transformation and not overly allegorize things, because when we leave them in in an allegorical narrative, and if it’s not properly explained, as you say, then the suggestive power latent in the imagery that’s used is there to unpack itself at any at any time. Absolutely. St. So so yeah, in some senses I think Tantrism is light years ahead of um Jungian psychology. I think it’s a lot safer for the reasons that you said, and I think you’re right to say in something like Alchemy there there is a complete undervaluing of instinct; it’s it’s as if somehow um instinctive drives are OB base, they’re animalistic, uh but nonetheless the driving force that that brings people into sexual encounters with other people, but the idea of alchemy is to transcend that, is to get beyond the mere physicality of the body; it has to be transmuted; it has to be transmuted, but there in as you right say lies a danger; it does; it does. Um, not all forms of Tantrism go as far as they should in in in this regard, but there are some which are kinetic tantras, in other words they have a physical movement aspect of what they do, yeah uh and I’ve seen this happen that that when a raw instinct is constellated through imagery, even when there’s a very tight psychological and psychosocial container for that, it can power up and it needs to be moved through action, which is also put within the context of the process that you’re going through, um then it’s it’s used, then it’s cleansed and it’s it’s transformative, but we are physical, yes, and a Jungian analysis is sitting down for years yeah doing nothing other than being cognitive yeah uh and making cognitive virtual representations of information that appears from within and is out in the wider informational field, so they they lack that, they lack a physical connection to the body largely. Jungians, it’s not systematized, so it’s difficult for them to do anything, and when they talk about alchemy as being an allegory and uh they talk for example and say that there were the people they called the puffers, the people who physically try to to to carry out the operations of the alchemical process, the proto who blew themselves up; that’s a bit too much of a criticism; we need physical action; we cannot withdraw from physical action, because then what happens is there’s a there’s a huge compensatory spike from within; we are meant to act in the world, so we have to find a way of acting Alchemy out which is safe and not just treat it as something to effectively meditate upon without being trained properly how to meditate, because when they do active imagination, Jungians are in free fall with respect to the psyche, trapped inside kind of a bubble of their ego, their cognitive ego as it attempts to interpret the world that it’s going into; that’s not necessary; there are better ways of doing it, and it’s potentially dangerous because that bubble can be popped; the forces outside of it will apply far more pressure than the skin of that bubble can contain, so we need to balance the equation, and Jungians do not do that. Thank you for that, because that’s a very important observation that that’s very relevant for people.

Well, there’s a part in the Rosarium where I think it’s towards the end of it where where Jung actually says you need to put aside books, learning, all cognition and just go with feeling, otherwise you will not get past this point. And if Jung himself is actually writing that, but the Jungians themselves are sitting there for for years and years and decades and centuries just being cognitive, they’ve not read the Rosarium, or at the very least conveniently skipped that part to keep fueling something else, but Jung himself is quite clear on that, makes it very clear, and the emphasis too in this process on relatedness as well, a word that he uses quite a lot throughout this and the whole of collected works 16, where where he says you shouldn’t do this alone, um you need to have other people to relate to; there’s the I think he calls it kinship, leido, that people need to have that sense of relation to other people, that we’re not just uh isolated islands and that we can’t move forward without that relating process. So he says it; he does; the Jungians don’t do it; no, they don’t. That’s quite true. You’ve heard me say, and I think some people might even remember me me saying it, um through Discord and through past videos, that in my view you shouldn’t bother with Jungian and you should go to this, you should go to the rerum uh and the reason, or CW work 16 anyway as a as a whole volume, um that’s from a clinician’s perspective, but also from personal developments that if you have the template in place and you treat it properly, then it is the best of Jung’s collected works apart from volumes one and two which are even better in terms of being based and grounded, but it will, if you approach it properly, give you a template for understanding it allegorically, but the action in the world of relating is super important, and there are differences uh in the individuation process for ordinary people uh and then a clinical setting where there’s a relationship issue or where you’re confronted by something which challenges you alchemically and challenges them; these are all different um commonly occurring situations, but the main thing I think the main thrust that we’re saying is do not identify in a fantastical way with this material because it is dangerous if you do.

Yeah, I think one of the more unusual concepts that Jung talks about, it’s also mentioned in John De Sanctis, what coming together, coming apart, is this idea of um psychological incest, and now again this is something that we have to be really really careful about, um because again it’s it’s potentially so inductive, I’m somebody who was a little bit vulnerable uh as to the the culture and the way that we talking about uh earlier, um might use that to harm themselves. So the suggestion in that is that obviously at the beginning of a relationship the the two people concerned are relatively uh unconscious, and that tends to be illustrated in in the reserving by them being dressed in uh conventional clothing and they’re both holding one another’s left hand, so the suggestion is, you know, it’s a left, and uh the idea of the left hand being sinister, not necessarily uh sinister in a in a bad way, but sinister as in um unconscious or unknown. And so when people come together in relationship they bring their transferences with them; we were talking about transference earlier, and because of that it’s very easy for couples to get into a situation where the relationship is being mediated through transference, so all the parental stuff is in there uh and because they’re relating to one another through parental transferences, the sexual side of the relationship falls away because they feel instinctively that they don’t want to have a sexual relationship with somebody who reminds them of their mother or their father, for example. Yeah, and and and this is what’s meant really by the psychological incest, and so I guess you could say it is a positive part of that process to say to people that this is another reason why those factors need to be addressed, and one of the hallmarks of um a positive outcome um to the alchemical process is that the physical side of the relationship is reinstated because the parental transferences have been dealt with uh and that’s the thing that reanimates the relationship. I mean, De Sanctis um confirms this by saying that um the union or the reunion in a psychological sense of the of the two people has to involve the body; it has to involve the physicality of the body as well as there being a psychological and or spiritual connection within that relationship as well. So I I think that’s a useful idea if it’s handled properly, but where people again might come across it and think, oh my God, psychological incest, does that mean I’m some kind of, yeah, I have to say it, perverse? No, it does not mean that; it is meant to be symbolic; it is meant to be allegorical; it does not mean that at all. Also, there’s an element of narcissism that’s latent within the within that because um narcissism is a kind of incest, psychological incest too, and if a person works on their own and not in a relationship, then necessarily it’s narcissistic because you’re looking for, if you follow Jung, if you’re a man, for the image of the inner woman is a kind of pseudo-alchemical lover, and really we we should fit, whoa, no, that’s not what we should be doing; yes, we should be looking for the reality out in the environment, and we should feel that at a gut level; yes, we should; and the paradox is that the the the imagery, if we’re not sharing it with another person, is internal only; yeah, so we have to maintain that reality orientation to the world, and and then if the the partner that we’re we’re with has been blackened through the process of our own nego, um then we find somebody else, and that might be the therapist, exactly; that’s completely inappropriate, and we’ll come to that; we yeah, uh but then again, of course, the intrusion, if I can call it that, uh by a third party, one or more, it can be more than one obviously, uh from outside may have precipitated it anyway because the person was very unconscious of this alchemical process potentially working through them and uh only comes across it when they’re trying to understand it themselves; you say, I feel I’m in a mess, or what’s this, what’s this Alchemy, what’s this Jung, what’s this internet guru saying that I should do, and you can see progressively how incremental suggestion moves them away from a proper understanding, and along the way this new way of being misled, they then acquire uh the ability to fantasize themselves away from relationship to the the partner, the person they probably should be with, yeah, and also away from their own true individuation, because you cannot individuate by maintaining a fantasy; you can only do it by living.

Oh gosh, yes, yes, absolutely. And as you say, you have to, certainly as a clinician, you have to avoid that kind of triangulation at all costs; yeah, you absolutely do; uh, forgive me for saying, you have to be [ __ ] hot about things like that; you do; you do; because what what I mean, if that’s going on, it does go on, believe me; we have people come to us and say, for example, that their their panelist has asked them to go out with them, Moes has made some kind of pass at them; oh yes, it does go on; it does; and and beyond even that, doesn’t it? It; there’s open abuse, and the Jungians, the first and second generation Jungians famously did it; they did; yeah, with one of Jung’s wives who they were analyzing; yeah; and the excuse was, and this is in the public domain, you can find it, is that Jung did it, so therefore it’s okay. Yeah, trailblazed, trailblazed this; yeah. So by the Freud-Arley-Jung equation, none of them have satisfied or adequately negotiated the Freudian stage, true, or the Oedipal stage; they inflated into pathological Jung and then collapsed down through the other two; yeah; so they so you could even argue that they they didn’t proceed through the alchemical process as is laid out; they they got stuck at the conjuncture, most likely; yeah; um, we all, what we should say is, where is Freud? What’s going on? Where where’s Sigmund? What’s he up to? Is silent for fall is always over your left shoulder if you look, and then where’s Adler?

Where's Alfred? What's he up to? He's over the other shoulder, and who's behind both of them? Charles Darwin. If we don't know that, and we don't understand that, then any Jungian level we go to is fake. We have no chance of, uh, actualizing the Platonic, which drives everything, which which Jung knew about, of course. You know, I mean, all all of his terminology was about that, was about achieving that level of transcendence, yes, and integration. But because Freud and Adler had their hand on his respective shoulders and were pulling him back, he, as you rightly say himself, did not actualize it. And now that his first and second-generation students, and a lot of them today as well, are in that state, yeah. So if you're doing that, say that that's that's how your your real outer life is is proceeding, and yet you're talking about concepts such as the mundana, for example, where at that stage you're supposed to have burnt off the Dr. It is literally a purification, and uh, any kind of negative POS projection of the contracep archetype onto your partner has been reintegrated.

Yeah, um, they're nowhere near that, and yet that's that's the goal, really, isn't it? And uh, obviously there are stages on from that as well. Yes, but um, they don't even come close to getting to that point. Like I say, there's still, or as you've said, Steve, there's still stuck at that fuding stage of the conjunctio, which is that's so clearly what it is if you look at, yeah, you know, the illustrations for that particular alchemical stage. That is what it is; it's a physical union; it's sex. It is sex, and they haven't got beyond it. They haven't booked biology. No, but you can't book biology. Freud is always present; there is no endpoint to the alchemical process as uh depicted, because Freud never goes away, ever. And this is a biological fact, and the more that Jungians move away from that, then the more they actually constellate a shadow, if you like, in their their terms, which is purely Freudian.

Yeah, well, that alchemical bath could easily just as be uh today a Jacuzzi with someone, so you're in a Jacuzzi with someone having, yeah, an affair whilst your spouse is doing whatever, yeah. Uh, and you know, if if you're doing that fairly enough, but don't tell yourself that you're doing something spiritual, for God's sake, absolutely not. There. Oh, but it's a gigantic neurotic alibi when it goes that that wrong, yeah, um, in an Adlerian sense. So well, he's Adler now. Guess what isn't just Freud. Where's Adler? Where's the manipulation and corruption of power? And in the Freud-Adler-Jung equation, Freud seeks Adler; Adler conceals Freud. The teleology is that Freud wants Adler to conceal him, or it, as a metaphorical force. Yeah, so the biological drives need to be concealed within social constructs; it becomes economical and easy to deploy. And then as it moves into Jung, then all of the the inflated spiritual neurotic alibis are in place as well, and it appears as if Jung has concealed Adler and Freud. No, not at all. That's when it goes wrong. For the Jungian level to go right, you have to avoid every mistake that Jung made, or if it's human to make those mistakes, you've got to put them right. You have to put them right within yourself, and at that point you can go back, and you can process yourself again through that that that um alchemical process in the rerum. But one way you're not identifying with Jung; you have to burn him off before you can go through it. Any attachment to anything which is false, and that's a lesson that Tantra gives you. You have to understand these are all false attachments and illusions, and you have to shed them in order to be able to go through a process in a clean way.

Thanks, Stephen. Pauline, there was a a lot of value in what you said there. I can sort of see you see these two different elements almost distilling themselves out: one that you mentioned to do with therapists or supposed therapists who misbehave themselves and would spiritualize something that is so obviously, as you say, Freud, that no one in the world would fall for that unless you're part of the club, this card-carrying club where you know, and by covering for other people or whatever, maybe you get an excuse to do it yourself. It's not therapy at that point; it's it's very clearly not. That's just a persona. However, for for people who are say in in a relationship, and this kind of process would be indicated for them, so that there are transferential issues there, and the people are feeling like, on an affective level, really bad, or they suddenly don't like each other, or as you say, there's somezing or whatever it is that's going on, that this process would be indicated in in broad terms, then what would the process involve? Jung obviously describes it as having this this conjunctio archetype or Margo in the center of the process, really, that begins with this projection, and then the projection needs to be the projection being a transference technically for for Jung in this case, that then needs to be withdrawn, and then something on the inside integrated within a full personality, and that then produces the final image, the rather strange images as Jung points out, of the alchemical rebis, which shows this somebody with with two heads of each biological sex, and that's supposed to be a representation of of integration, that's both physical, that being sexual and Freudian, um, and also spiritual at the same time. But in very broad terms, what what is this withdrawal process, as in withdrawal of projection, and then integration process reciprocally from that? Are we speaking in the context of a relationship? Yeah, between two parties. So um, this isn't a focus on a clinical situation necessarily, but very often you get that, you get a clinical situation where people come in and say one therapist or or two, because with couples we always try and work together uh to balance that equation, so it's not a free-for-all triangulation. But you mean just like in everyday life? Yes, wherever this would be indicated for for some people.

Well, basically the the idea of, and Paul will take take up and explain this further obviously, that the concept of the Shadow as Jungians understand it has some relevance here, because what is projected um onto the other in that initial stage does be does originate or belong in the person projecting, and in that sense we can say they are projecting a rejected side of themsel or of their nature that they're unconscious of. So in that very specific context we can say there is something which we could argue is in Shadow, but that's probably closer to, I, you you've said this the other day actually, but it's probably closer to Freud's construct of the Id, yes, more than it is of Jung's concept of the Shadow, yeah, because that which gets projected is very instinctive, would you say? I think very much so. I mean, we're going by looking at Freud in some ways; we're going back to basics again, um, and yet Freud is is is so so important really to to get this right, and you can dress it up as much as you want, yeah, um, but ultimately it comes down to um those it impulses that that that people have, and um, obviously transference of any of those basic instincts onto somebody else um is abusive, but people need to understand how Freud operates and uh what the nature of those instincts are and why they're so important, yeah, and and then obviously we we we, you know, in our own model, we get beyond, don't we? Yes, yeah, um, and we talk about the the importance of human instinct and and of it not being animalistic, which which is very often the reason that people uh or the reason that people give to reject Freud, and um, you don't really want it's it's the same with Jung, isn't it? You don't really want to be paddling around in his unconscious, yeah, or what was his unconscious when you process yourself through something like Jungian individuation? Yes, so neither do you want to do that in the context of an ordinary everyday relationship either, yeah. Do the same rules apply? Yeah, I I totally agree with that, and of course that means it's the same with Freud, because once you constellate the the construct of the Id, you're going to get a very collapsed representation of what's really behind the Id, which has to do with instincts, maturational processes, lifespan development, adaptation, and frustration, yeah. All of those things make sense from within a Freudian context, but they get filtered through Freud, yeah, uh through Freud's clinical model, uh, and then it's easy, as you say, to reject, and yet that's what you see usually when people are in conflict within a relationship. Those elements in conflict have to do with maturation, maturity across the lifespan, development under instinctive pressure, and as you said, everything after that is just dressing it up; it is, and distracting. It is so there'll be very often frustrations about um whether we should have a family or not, uh whether there's enough income coming into the home, uh what the aspirations materially are, uh and then issues of disappointment might come up in one or both of the parties, as you said earlier, that the the sexual relationship may have fallen away because that's animating it; it's as if part of the psyche is saying, "No, don't breed with this person because they're not fulfilling these instinctive categories which my genome anticipates should be there, that they should provide whatever, whether that's uh emotional security, financial security, or whatever." All of these things are in some way compromised; the person feels frustrated, then fantasies emerge as compensation; the fantasies translate into action, and so you might get a couple coming in and one of them has had an affair; they're trying to patch it together, but it's all instinctive; that's the problem, yeah. Uh, what it's sorry, I could just down to that very quickly, what it's not is the kind of things that the Jungians talk about; they talk about the uh the archetypes that you know, arguing with one another, so the archetype of the anima and the animus are having a conflagration, yeah, and um, I mean, Harry Wilmer famously uh talks in that way and talks about the animus cat and dog, but it's what you're saying; it's it's instincts that are um, you know, drawing a line in the sand and saying, "This far, no further," or "I I need this. Instinct has been frustrated; I need to gratify," and so on. It's got nothing to do with warring archetypes; that's for sure. No, the instincts generate the fantasies, yeah. The fantasies then, if they are treated as being literal by a therapist, can become a holding space through suggestion, so you can you can then, if you like, when somebody comes in in this state of instinctive maladaptation, you can say to them, "Well, you know, think of it this way: did you know that you have an anima and an animus?" And of course, at first, people think, "What?" you know, but gradually the suggestion takes root; the expert opinion of the therapist or the therapists directs people to contain their instincts within a fantasy representation that that has built within it an expected trajectory and solution, so "Let's just follow this, and you'll be all right. It'll take you years, but just follow this." Um, what we found is that you can actually compress the time scale down massively by receiving instinctive pressure for what it is and then directing people to the allegory of an alchemical process, but they know it's an allegory; they don't mistake it as being real in a literal sense. A fantasy, it is like this: we will go through something which is like that, but it is not that, uh, and then we can hold it there as a reference point, and we can bounce things off that, but we do not identify with it. The more we elaborate the fantasy, the longer it takes, and the more likely people are to surrender themselves at the ego level to the suggestion and influence of the therapist or of the internet guru or of the book you read or whatever it might be, um, and then they're not actually adjusting at all. The fantasy will reduce instinctive pressure because, in a Freudian sense, it's been confected into it; that's a defense mechanism in Freudian terms; it's not real. They know that. The Jungians do it anyway, believing somehow that it is real because it's an allegory, and allegory for them is real. We would say it's not; it's a representation of reality projected into that form, but it's actually also something else. Now what we do then clinically in this context would be to say that it is all of these things simultaneously; it's one field which collapses as we look at it into a specific representation, but then we look at another part, and it's there, and and it's there, but we know it's all the same thing. We don't get rid of the other representations; they are simultaneously present, and the Alchemy then is processed through the superpositioning field of representation. Then people start to move quickly because there isn't uh an ego then that's that's been turned into a fantastical representation of itself on some mythical hero's journey from an alchemical process; it's a person connecting to the instincts that brought them into the problem in the first place and is taking them to a satisfactory conclusion. Along the way, there are other representations that that will emerge from within them, not be superimposed from without, because we treat it as a complete field, and we would say that that's Alchemy, being able to work with the field as a whole, because each level of that field of analysis, description, explanation, and representation are analogous to elements within an alchemical process. So it's hugely important to do that that way; you don't lose the person you're working with, and you get uh operation, and people learn quickly, very quickly, under those conditions. Then if you use an allegory like Alchemy, it's like, "Oh, yeah, I get that; that is a rep, ah, but this is actually in me, and it's okay." Got that. But if you say, "No, you have to go through this process; you must," that's it; everything slows down, so trial, and the whole thing becomes about transference onto the therapist, but the therapist wants the transference; the therapist's power drive wants the transference; the therapist's own Freudian elements might be getting off on that because if it's a couple in a triangulated relationship, and if it's, for example, a male therapist with a male and a female patient, all three participants are heteronormative for the sake of this uh example, then the woman might start to massively project onto the man in order to get rid of the husband or to to to set him to one side, and the analyst likes that because it it appeals to his narcissism, uh, and then he gets inflated by the very imagery that he is using and he's trying to communicate to the other, and that is a disaster. But Jungians do that; they love it; they do it all the time because they don't know what they're doing with respect to Adler and Freud; they're both there at the same time; they never go away. We have to make sure that we satisfy, in a healthy way, the Freud-Adler-Jung equation, or we cannot do that; that this kind of alchemy, the corrective healing Alchemy, if we go straight to Jung and straight to the fantasy, we are we are made ineffective, and we're made a confounding variable, and we damage ourselves as well as other people. Now that's partially clinical, but um, the clinical emphasis we want to make uh when we we cover this part of the video is different again, because it's about the subjective experience of what happens to a therapist when they're in that state or how they handle the transference when there's only two people in the room rather than a relationship with a free uh but to go back into uh everyday life, then the way to handle the rerum and to make Alchemy work is not to lose sight of the meaning that's within the instincts that you have and that you're sharing, collective commonality with your partner, uh, because they are always there. You have to use them as fuel, and then keep the resarium as something over there that you look at, but you do not identify with. Then you find you go through those stages naturally uh without being contained by them and distorted by them. You guys have said before, and I think we've got a whole video on this actually from a few years ago, that compromise in a relationship is a bad idea, especially it's something that's just recommended willy-nilly, that whatever needs somebody feels important to them that they should just compromise and sacrifice on that, and so should the other party. But I can see with what you're saying a little bit earlier, Stephen, Pauline, about what about the psychodynamics of what goes on at the beginning of a rosarian scenario in which there are complexes at work, there are transferences at work, and the instincts are gearing up that would be generating compensating fantasies. So, in other words, the instincts want certain things, but the very least state-dependent or I guess time-dependent for for that moment in time, they're they're insisting on what they want, and fantasies are being generated as a representation of that. So too, though, if compromise is a bad idea, I can imagine how difficult it can genuinely be for the couple and also for the therapist involved to find a healthy homeostatic scenario that both parties are happy with, where both parties' instincts feel satisfied and agree with a proposed solution that doesn't denigrate one or the other, but finds not so much a transcendent position, but to use that term very very loosely based on Jung, that there has to be another way out of this that doesn't involve arbitrary cognition, if you know what I mean. It's it's the instincts are still happy with the proposed plan forward to imagine how difficult that that could be.

Yeah, should I start on this one, Paul? So do. Um, it arose out of our work with couples, really, didn't it? Compromise was a a word that people didn't want to hear when they were in conflict because it meant they were giving ground. If you know, if one party says, "You're asking me to give up something to compromise, what about you?" And of course, that means they're speaking from instinct; they're both speaking from instinct. Instincts do not want to compromise. What instincts will do, it seems, um, if they understand how we frame it so that it gets through past the ego and its defenses into instinct, is to complement one another, and complementation is a form of collaboration for a common goal, and when it's common, that means you're in a relationship because you have it in common. So if, and I well, we both used to say this to people, if you can forgive the other for being different to you and vice versa, then you can complement one another; you can grow together and not be in conflict. But compromise and conflict are pretty much the same thing. We ask someone to compromise because they're in conflict; that doesn't resolve a conflict; it makes the person feel worse. But if we collaborate, that means we're not fighting anyone. Now, depending on how we arrive at that that possession depends on what can be done next. If the um the therapy has been superficial and it's based on say family or relationship systems approaches, which is a very common way of looking at things; they talk about compromise a lot, um, relationship systems-based therapist, for example, then you you have a difficult from the start because the kind of therapy that you're doing doesn't allow you to do what you can do. If hypnosis has been involved, embedded suggestion, that kind of thing. Now, if though if there has been involved, then you can you can do all sorts of language patterning to embed suggestions and uh change an alter state of perception easily, uh, but if you've only worked with one person in that way, the other one will realize in a different state of communication to that to their partner, and and that can contaminate the process, so you have to be very careful. But ideally, if if you've done something or you've worked with them in such a way that allows you to do it, then you can start to use language patterning to say the compromise is is a bad idea, and and being complimentary and growing together is a good idea because you can embed metaphor and all sorts, and people start to feel this is very reasonable, even though before my sort of veilance, the amplitude of my anger and rage was up there, now it's it's settling out, and I don't feel I've lost anything. So it depends on the initial conditions, but if you have to start with, "I have to kind of talk in an ordinary everyday way to these people," um, which is the norm unfortunately in in relationship therapy, then you have to start in a cognitive way first, but you you're up against instinct, and instinct doesn't want to hear cognition, so you can see how long it can take just to establish some firm ground for communication. So what you do, you don't talk about compromise, or at least embed the suggestion the compromise involves loss; no one is asking either of you to

Lose anything, know, and then you start the process of beginning a hypnotic style embedded suggestion process. So the idea of being complimentary to one another is agreeable. Now, the bridging ground between that, that is to forgive one another for being different; that's the begin of being complimentary—not paying a compliment, but being complimentary processes, not uh, opponent processes which divides people. Complimentary processes bring them together, and the first step is to forgive one another for being different and have no compromise, no loss, but working together.

Now, if you can couch that in the right terms at the right moment, it will be received and it bypasses the instinctive response that is protected because it makes sense at an instinctive level. Now, if you put that into the allegory of alchemy, you're actually going to a certain point in the alchemical process very, very quickly.

Yeah.

Oh, you certainly are. I mean, if if if we think about the uh progression through Alchemy, at at the beginning of the process, at the beginning of being in a relationship to someone, we tend to dial up similarity and dial down difference. And yet, strangely, it it tends to be the people don't see this, or their their ego from the os's perspective, they don't see the fact that actually the thing that's animating them is probably the difference rather than the similarity, and so it gets projected. So um, you know, a person might start to uh abandon interests that they have or things they might like to do and almost expect the other person to do it on their behalf. And obviously, part of the the alchemical process is to, as we said earlier, particularly during the M FAO stage, is to um withdraw those kinds of positive projection—well, negative projections principally—but in in in the reintegrating of the negative, we we release the positive as well because we then see our that probably we've been projecting our own positive potential as well onto that other person. He just become obscured along the way by the the darkening of the image through transference and so on of that other person. But the the secret knowledge, if you like, uh in that is that it's been the positive stuff all along that we've been trying to get to.

Yeah. So what is that? Obviously, you have to um, when you're working uh with couples, you you have to try and get them to realize what that is for themselves. And then there's a very real problem of getting to do something about it. Uh, it it could be anything; it could be a lot of the things that we we've talked about in this video to do with creativity and make reconnecting with that in in such a way that that that reanimation, that re-vitalization comes from within that person because they're they're starting at at long last to hook up with their own genomic potential and they're doing something about it; they're not making it incumbent on the other person to do that for them.

Yeah, good point. Or to uh, yeah, or to ignite that animation; they they they find it from within themselves. And then with that comes a huge amount of ego strength.

Yeah, separation. Yes, but separation doesn't have to mean um separation as in the the end of something; it can be the beginning of a process of uncovering. So that along with what you said, Steve, about forgiving the other person for being different, suddenly that other person is becomes interesting and intriguing again.

Yes, so that's an attractive—it is very attractive. And if you think in in alchemical terms, and that is about blending—yes, it is—to compliment is to blend. It is. Yeah. Uh, and as we found obviously in in working with couples, there was an initial state which we therapists generally tend to—I should have said tend to—um regard as being based on illusion and not reality-based because it's like animation. Yeah. Uh, and then that wears off for some people, sometimes. Uh, and that I think is a mistake too, and I'm saying that because I know that you always said there was a reality at the beginning of the process that has to be reconstituted. That's something I learned from you, and I'm going back back into the 80s, yeah, when we first started working with couples together. You focused on that—that what brings people together isn't necessarily an illus at all; there's an animation which is instinctive; that's where it comes from; that's where the libido comes from, but it doesn't mean that it was false.

No, it doesn't mean it has to be burnt off; it means something else has got in the way. Yes, and the the blackening and the gro can be a response from instincts to do with the person's own need to get beyond their limitations, which then, as you said earlier, gets projected out onto the relationship. Yes, because we always hurt the one we love, the one we shouldn't hurt at all; that old song says, because it's the closest person to us in any kind of real sort of uh relational sense. And when we start to think like this, then suddenly the the allegory uh of the rarum breaks down; it's as if it's not talking about uh relationships in that way. And we can come to this uh, I think because it's—I do feel it's important to really get this across—if people don't misunderstand it. So when a person's in attracted to someone, Freud is involved obviously, Darwin, projection, but there's also Plato; there's the platonic pure platonic form is either projected or it's emitted from the other, and then there's a superposition field wrestle between them, which Jungian call the anima; we would say it's part of the wider relating function which is teleological and drives people into relationship to fulfill biological, social, and eventually um the needs of Consciousness itself to instantiate through relationship. We've discussed this in in past uh videos. So all of that is going on to say that that was an illusion, which the Jungians tend to do uh I think is wrong; it's something seeking the potential for its completion through us as individuals, which is bigger than us; it's part of the intentionality of why we even exist as conscious, sentient beings in a biological form. So we have to satisfy all of that, and and I so I learned from you about when you went back to everything that was positive and was present, and I have to admit that because I've been shaped by Jungian thinking, I used to think—now I have to get—I have to listen to what you're saying, but but ignore it—no, this was a long time ago, you know—I've learned a lesson that's kind of beside the point. The point is they've got to go through this process; they've got to go through it because that's what Jung said, but you kept saying that, and then I was watching how you had the effect on the people that you work with because you were immediately in synchrony with their timeline—what had brought them together. So you're saying what brought them together was something that was real, but they perhaps not fully conscious of what that was. So the introspective process should be to look at what brought you together, not what is apparently separated you, which is frustration of instinct—the instinct being the libido in manifest form—the li as manifest—his instinct is pushing you to go beyond your previous state of adaptation towards W—the final goal which isn't allegorized in alchemy really—the relationship itself is about two people who are separate; they're not bonded together into some androgynous representation without differentiation; homogenization is separation at all; it's not a separation at all. Um, the difference should be there, and this comes back to forgiving people for being different. Yes, means once you've forgiven them for being different, you can find value in difference, and then the relationship which is a field updates you and what you need on the inside and what you have on the outside—the superpositioned—they are coherent; that allows two individuals to be individuals in meaningful relationship to one another. So I think the allegory is is wrong; it runs out in that context. Uh, ultimately, I think the only place it really uh shows itself is in the psychology of the transfer from a clinical perspective where you have a therapist and a patient, and these things are constellated through a shared fantasy field relationship which they have to understand, and the responsibility for understanding that is overwhelmingly on the therapist, not on the uh the patient.

And so what we're getting again is a an indication of the state of Jung's mind; he was drawn so readily to what he could project into those woodcuts and uh find a representation of what he tried to do; the fact they were they were joined—the conjoined together at the end—meant that he couldn't break the bond of attachment to the other—to the third party—enough for them not to be assimilated to him. This was a problem with Toni Wolff; that's why the relationships of Toni Wolff failed ultimately; she refused to go to the final stage of alchemy with him; she actually refused, which left him rum, and he paid her back by not even turning up to her funeral. Know, and then um, as you say, dedicating various things to his wife, which is like, come on, you set her aside; the Alchemy didn't work because she didn't want to be assimilated to you; she wanted to be enough for him.

Yes, probably. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So there's the alre, and now what does that mean for an individual then if they feel drawn to it? Well, first of all, it's a fantasy; get hold of your instincts; there is a platonic element involved at seeking to meet all of the biological imperatives so you can become more conscious, so hopefully can your partner; then your offspring will have a chance of being even more, you know, more conscious, and then Consciousness moves on; that's the solution to this; it is not to become fixed; it's not to become blended in any way like that at all. Um, so the representation of the anima on the inside is an anticipation of a relationship to someone on the outside. So a man should not—should not use the anima to relate in that rarified form internally; they should seek the relationship on the outside that will generate between those two something that will move on—that satisfies Darwin, it satisfies Freud, it satisfies Adler, and it should satisfy Plato in the guise—the guise—the collapsed guise of Jung. So that would be my sort of feeling about that, and uh it was a hard lesson to learn because uh, paan was getting people well and solving relationships in this most sort of uh Jungian way, but but in a Jungian scenario, um, you know, got—I've got to be able to receive this, and that helped me to understand—I have to learn to receive and then to follow before I can understand myself better and understand the process that I'm engaged in and with uh with other people. And that moved through all of the uh the relationship work that we've ever done. Um, I was uh too cognitive and too literal about a union model of what's going on and want to settle down to that. Then we work very effective as a team, and we were able to get people to the conclusion of these so-called processes very quickly—didn't hurry them, but quickly—paradoxically, when you relax you become faster because it's smooth. Uh, the the the drust that needs to be burned off is the fear, atal garbage that is gathered around Jung's personality and his representation of himself and of that process. So young men then they need—when they think of the anima as an internal woman—say, no, this is the anticipation of an external relationship; you're not meant to go in like that; you're meant to act this out in the world in relationship to the other, and then you'll discover your relating function is everywhere, as you said yesterday, James, and operant in all of these different levels, and the image of the feminine or the image of the masculine is only one small part of that that helps to facilitate other things. What I did is, I guess, within the context of our relationship personally and professionally, is that I projected a limitation onto Falling that she didn't have; that is to say, the representation of someone who's more like a counselor, because that's how counselors speak; they talk about these things, and in that way—that's not the way to do it; the way to do it is to get those books off that shelf and compress them and shove them in my my ear and listen to the inner voice of Carl Jung, you know, by proxy, and that obviously wasn't the case because she wasn't being like one of them, and that was erasing at first, and then I had to give in, and then it felt better. That's a truth, and I I don't mind saying it.

No, sure. I think we have to not be threatened by difference as well, exactly, and and see difference with new eyes as being something which is exciting and and interesting and takes you somewhere else. Yeah, and um, at times, as you I think are pains to say, it can be irritating; there there's no—but then if you know—if you're sufficiently um inent with with your own perspective uh and you have your own ego strength, your own integrity as a person, yeah, you don't feel—you don't feel challenged by the fact that somebody is different to you; you say you can—you can exploit complementarity to the full.

Yeah, you can. Yeah, yeah. You always went back to that—something brought you guys together.

Yeah, you always said that. Yes. Yeah. So you didn't start with—you have to compromise—oh, no, never say that. And you weren't like a counselor being superficially nice to people; you actually had the the capacity to feel into the field of relationship independently of a theory and then bring about the symphasis that was necessary through the quality of relating; there was no need for any of this baggage really at all. And um, when it came to the resarium, you or you know, Destiny, you'd often give people the book, uh, but your actual talking through that was minimal; it was all about the quality of relating. So yeah, I learned a lot from that. I think sometimes—and I'm going—it's going to sound like I'm saying so about myself, which is funny in a way—but sometimes the simplest things are the best, in in the same way that you sometimes talk about um hypnotherapy, because when it's done well, it is it is so simple and straightforward and direct and efficient yes, at getting a result—direct with intention—direct with intention for sure—indirect with delivery.

Yes, but field wrence. Yeah, yeah. Well, you you you were like that and demonstrated that as a natural quality of relating with with couples; I would have made a right pig's ear of it all, wasn't I? But there you go; that would have been too rational. It pays to be interested in people; it does. I'm wanting to get solutions yes, for things and to get them quickly if possible, and sometimes that can just be um I can just be the turn of a of a dialing in the Sens; it's just uh sometimes um people have to find a new way of adapting and and reaching um some kind of home stasis, and they can do this outside of the therapy situation; they can do this in ordinary releasing, can't they?

Yeah, yeah. So it is that simple. Yeah, I mean, I don't really want to kind of reduce it to that, but I think at the point of delivery and the point of doing it, it is relatively simple, and this is why we have an unconscious, because the unconscious understands that it does all the work; the ego just needs to know that it has to be natural and simple. Yeah, but the work is being done. Yeah, and uh to an ego that thinks that the world is it and it is the world, then everything is only what it thinks about itself, so it has to make virtual models of everything, and you get this elaborative distortion cognitively, or you get virtual fantasies in the form of, you know, your typical Jungian amplification process, be moving away from things that want to self-regulate themselves ably. So it's uh it's difficult to be simple. Jung said that; I'll give him full qos for it. Yeah, don't think he ever quite managed it himself though, to be honest, but there you go; that's another story.

Yeah. Well, a lot—a lot of the DAT today stuff for people—um, it is moment by moment, isn't it? Spotting complexes, being forensic about them, uh being honest and open about you know where they originate from, yeah, and the potential for harm, for damage within any given relationship as a result of that. And I think if you can start to unpick that—I mean, we see that people who come back to us and um after maybe they've had a consultation and they they tell us how they're employing the ideas in their everyday lives, and it's usually very practical stuff they're doing—oh, I noticed this the other day; I found myself in a particular scenario for the first time; I realized what was happening—and um then it's—once—once they understand that they have to get to grips with spotting complexes and catching them in in mid-flight, they they actually start to enjoy that process. Yeah, and then they start how they react to their partner starts to change because they can no longer be manipulated on a specific complex in the specific way anymore, and that other person then realizes that they can't get away with doing or abusing the other person in that way, and then they're forced into some kind of homeostatic correction as well. So like I said, point of delivery, it is really just teasing these things out, catching them out, and putting the work in in that way; then things do happen very quickly indeed; suddenly people feel like, God, we're getting along, and we're getting along so well. Yeah, it could have been this way all along. Why? Well, I know now because I understand how complexes function.

Jung—Jung don't even bother with them—no lip service—great shame.

Yeah, oh yeah. So there's a lot of uh, we hope, distilled experience in that um about how to be simple about things; that's important. Yeah. So when you guys were saying a moment ago about the the importance of drawing to the attention of the couple involved how they got together in the first place or what brought them together in the first place, what kind of things would you be looking at with that? What kind of superpositioned levels would you be looking at with that or really for the couple to become conscious of? You're mentioning obviously there's there's there's instinct and Freud and Plato, but then there's also those everyday aspects as well; I'm thinking, you know, shared interests or shared creativity or whatever it might be; I'm I'm curious on that—what you'd be looking for.

Yeah. Um, people have a surface structure recall about what drew them to someone, but there's, in my experience, there's usually a field immediately that's constellated uh that suggests things that are not present in a tangible form, but the intuition that people feel is there—is something here. And uh, Jung tend to say, oh, you're just projecting your anima or your animus at that point uh because it's not tangible, but the faculty of intuition picks up the field of the wholeness of a person that are includ their potential. And therefore, if this appears to be a long-term relationship and you met someone suddenly—this is my life unfolding—that need not be just simply projection of uh the anima; that can be a field resonance, harmony which anticipates the future, as you know—that our view is congruent with quantum mechanics here—to say that past, present, and future exists simultaneously to some extent. So the potential in the future, which may even be real from one perspective—in other words, it's actually there—projects itself back into the present and is detected intuitively and then becomes conscious in a representational form which makes a person committed to a particular relationship. That can happen; of course, there are arguments with that, and you could go into many-world hypothesis and say, well, that's all well and good provided you zigzag through this in the right way; you'll reach there; otherwise, you'll zigzag into another a simultaneously existing timeline. You know, there's all of that as well, but the the faculty of intuition seems to be able to receive impressions from a future state that we can say, in general terms, it's potential, and we're drawn to relating to actualize that potential. And yes, it's not just the future; it's as if the past is projecting forward as well, and then people say things like, I feel like I've always known you; I've known you all my life—or maybe I knew you in a past life. And sometimes people will say, if they think they can't have a relationship, well, maybe in in a future lifetime. So there's the trans-temporal dimension in both directions operating in the presence representationally on the basis or on the level of intuition. So all of that's going on as well as shared interest and and all the rest of it, and when that reaches a sufficient uh amplitude, then it spikes in the moments.

And Rel for both parties, and a relationship will unfold. Um, however, it's it's seldom linear, of course. So some people mature or develop in a linear path; some do it like that, and some go backwards and then go forwards. And then it's all about: is this relationship coherent or decoherent at any specific point on their journey together? And some people do separate, and it might be right that they do because the way that it's unfolded hasn't actualized the potential that was in seed when they first met, and it might be better to leave it. But for other people, it's important to get back into coherence and move forward on from that.

You talk me about this again, so I'm going to give you full credit for that.

Well, damn, you're very kind, but this a there is strangely an alchemical, uh, analogy there too, in the sense that the way that the intuition operates. So there there is a um a sense, a feeling that somehow all the ingredients are present at the beginning, and as you rightly said, that doesn't mean necessarily that it's an easy journey; it just means that the there is enough there, I think, embodied in that relationship for there's a potential for longevity, yeah, if everything works out in a kind of a reasonable kind of way along that path. But that you're right to say, I think that that is um that is a field phenomena; that is something which you just sense that the field of relationship between the two people involved is substantial enough for them to continue on, yeah, the the the path or the journey that they're already on, unless, of course, as you say, somebody just says, "No, we don't. I've had enough," and yeah, you know, "I want out." Yeah. But where there is there is a desire to continue, and you know that, you know, having taken a case history, there was there was certainly a sense of that at the start. I think that's worth pursuing.

Yeah, we're always on the side of the relationship, definitely. Yeah, if a couple come to us, yeah, that's the starting point. You have to have a starting point, yeah, and then see if they can recombine, yeah, those elements into a conjoint field. Yeah, sometimes they can't, and sometimes people uh are attracted to constituents in the nature of the other party, but that's not the whole story. There might be something dark in there, something psychopathic, sociopathic, narcissistic, whatever possible. Um, there may be a substance dependency issue; there may be all sorts of confounding factors that sit on top of the base, yes, of that personality that might otherwise be okay. Yes, but it's not possible to correct for those things that have emerged, uh, and then you're best out of it, you know, at that point. But we start with the idea that the relationship, if it's all possible, should be brought back into coherence, uh, and then see what happens. Otherwise, if we're too neutral, we're inert, yeah, at least uh according to what we intend to do. Yeah, you can never interact with a relationship and be inert, really, no matter what you do or if you do anything, anything at all, you're a confounding factor; you may as well embrace that and take responsibility for it.

Thanks, Stephen Pauling. So we spoke there, of course, a lot around relationships and what might be able to be represented as alchemical, sometimes taking place within relationships when they don't go so well. But of course, Jung's original apparent purpose for writing his *Psychology of the Transference* essay, featuring these Rosarium images, was that therapeutic diad between therapist and patient, and specifically the relationship that was taking place was to do with transference; transference from the patient onto the therapist, but also collective unconscious forces, so-called, that are constellated within the therapist and projected onto the patient, producing a very—again, I'll use the word again, I suppose—special, not to try and suggest anything divine about this at all, but a very particular type of relationship that does actually happen and does arise when people work in in depth, as you guys have said before. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more on the Rosarium in that kind of scenario, too.

Yeah, thanks, James. So you are right to say that that basically is the motivation for Jung in writing, um, Collective Works volume 16, specifically, uh, *The Psychology of the Transference*. It was his experience that he had a rather, um, should we say, open boundary or, you know, um, permeable membrane, U when it came to influence from women, uh, some more than others. And we can trace this back through his personal myth, right back to the Rel relationship to his mother. Um, excuses have been made for him to say he was a pioneer, and we subscribe to that to some extent, don't we? Did he did he make pioneer mistakes? But he was also immensely privileged, and uh he was a medical practitioner; he'd taken the Hippocratic oath, uh, therefore there should have been more restraint on him than there was with respect to how he dealt with uh these kinds of transferences, in a Freudian sense, that he was receiving from women. His reciprocal counter-transference was based very much on what he came to feiz as being the collective unconscious, and how that for him collapsed into notions like uh the anima, the animus, the Shadow, the Self, and so forth. So all of that was in him to come out, and that then pulled into the field of relationship uh with the women that he was working with, and reciprocally constellated in them the same constructs. Because he shared these constructs with them, they became a common language that became the field of interaction. So that being understood, what can happen then uh when uh male and female, in an either role, therapist, patient, or whatever, uh meet and start to work in depth, uh and the transference then starts to leak in, uh and it leaks in subliminally, uh and then it will increase in its amplitude, and the boundaries start to fade. Now a therapist who is on the board about this and who understands Jung might try to section that off and say, "This is Jung's alchemical process, and I'll help you understand that; we can go through it, and that will give you a boundary and me a boundary," and and that all sounds great. But the problem is that that's not what the Rosarium is all about; it's about the dissolution of boundaries. This is the problem because it's not about generating a safe therapeutic vessel or container if we follow it properly; it's about the breaking down of that in a therapeutic relationship where the the therapist or the analyst cannot maintain a proper boundary, as I say, is dissolved themselves. This is in the allegory that means there is no therapy being done in a conventional sense at all; there's something else going on. And um there will be sexualized fantasies; they will be there before it moves into this stage because they're Freudian, and because they're Freudian, they're prodromal of Adler, and they're prodromal of the inflation into Jungian ideas. So they're the fuel, anyway, in the Tantric sense; that's the fuel that's already present by the time the Adlerian element comes into the transference. And I don't mean in a simple way that I would normally discuss it, saying it's a power issue in the relationship or it's about social adaptation, but that's more about relating, and in that sense, the the Adlerian element then mediates Freud and allows the the transference to move into the inflated Jungian level, and the patient will feel very special and elevated by that. So they're at the Freudian level, sorry, Jungian level at that point, but they'll also have Adler present that'll be saying, "I have some power in this relationship," and then anything that was being constellated at another, a Freudian level, moves up through them, and that's part of the energy that's going on in that process. But basically, when that happens to that extent, all therapy is ceased; it's a different kind of relationship, so it needs to be wound back to the point where the therapist can talk about uh the allegory of alchemy at a distance and generate a proper boundary so that the the therap the the patient uh generates the fantasies that are latent within the field, but they can't pass that that membrane; it's more like a glass wall, so it can press up against them, against the wall, but it does not cross and doesn't cause the um the the therapist's or the analyst's likely to pollute them. It's dealt with in a holding space that's shared between them that's completely different than the idea of blending and dissolving and conjoining and all the rest of it. Um, so the problem is for therapists who are informed to some extent by Jung, the fantasy will element that's there in the background will utilize the the uh the Rosarium to suggest an inappropriate kind of boundary-breaking experience, should we say, to the therapist and to the patients, and then it's lost; it's gone. Then uh all all sorts of things that can happen that can be inappropriate. So uh therapists, they have to be aware that this can happen, and they have to watch their own boundary, make sure they understand things properly, they know what instincts are, um that they take the idea of a hermetically sealed vas to be a third space, not the alchemical bath, but a third space that the dissolution or whatever can occur within, but to do that, it's closer to a shamanistic process than it is to being an alchemical one the way that Jung indulged it. So the the vas has to be a space within which you are not actually present, but the constellated elements are present; then you're safe, and the other party is safe, but the process has to go towards integration in the subject of the patient; the analyst must not contaminate that process. But if the analyst is ignorant of Freud in themselves—and most Jungians are—and if they're ignorant of Adler—because most Jungians look down on Adlerians; they're like, he's like the other one—it's it's an odd um triangulated relationship, really, because the Freudians look down on everyone, uh the Jungians look down on everybody except the Freudians; they want to be Freudians; the Freudians call them plastic Freudians, and both of them look down on Adler. So Adler's not kind of included; he's a historical thing that that runs around on the side. But without Adler, without Adler going wrong, Freud can't contaminate Jung. So we have to understand that, but also without an understanding of Adler, Freudians don't understand that they are being pulled into Jungian pathology. It's through that relating; it's through the the power principle and the overcompensation, um the neurotic alibis, the guiding fictions; all the things that Adler talks about are that which makes Freudians fall into a Jungian trap, which they don't believe exists anyway because they look down on Jungians, and the reverse process from the Jungians to the Freudians is true. So all of those are vital elements, um but they both look down on the other. Yeah, all three are present. So being able to manage that process is going to be really important, and how therapists can become vulnerable in such situations is the same reason why patients become vulnerable in such situations: that it is artificial. There is no other relationship as artificial as this, and yet it constellates things, doesn't it, from within, uh they're are massively suggestive and symbolic, um and then you you get the dissolution; you get all of that happening. The Nigredo is the rejection of the the therapist's significant other or others, and the same with the patient, only the therapeutic relationship, the the analyst-analysand only, that means anything; that's the most significant thing that can happen; it's inflated beyond all bounds, and it's not based on reality at all.

Sorry, Paul, you're gonna—oh, no, it's okay. Oh, thinking of a a number of things, um and think about the vulnerability of the therapist. In some ways, as a therapist, you're more vulnerable if you don't want it; if you actually don't want to receive transference. I mean, of course you're vulnerable if if you do as well, because that can lead to unforeseen consequences, or maybe foreseen consequences which wouldn't be good for either party. Yeah, but I think for any therapist who's trying to work uh with clean hands and uh would prefer to have this kind of third position whereby the psychological material that's constellated um in the field of relationship between them and and the patient is is kept and kept away so it can be dealt with separately, almost like a a dissociated part of the field in a way, um for those um therapists who who want to work with clean hands, clearly they would prefer to work in in that way and to have that aspect. But it's I think it's difficult, particularly difficult for therapists who find transference unwelcome because it is abusive for sure, uh and um it it just makes everything so much more difficult. It might as well, I think, keep insinuated, bring things to a complete halt, in which case nothing gets done, uh and that's clearly unsatisfactory all around. But it's it's not nice as a therapist if if, for for example, you're in a loving, stable relationship yourself and somebody comes in and and you know this stuff is constellated and they're they're looking for a way to prize you out of your relationships as well; that that can happen; that happens a lot. Um, so as a therapist, as a working therapist, you you have to absolutely have all this in mind; you do, um to be on guard all the time, all the time. Yeah, you you you can't really be off guard for a moment, to be honest. No. So um I I was thinking about that, but I was also thinking too about other forms of therapy, other than Jungian analysis, such as um client-centered therapy with Carl Rogers, and the way in which he abused his patients well into old age—is he still doing it? Yes, it didn't stop him either. So it seems to be whenever there's this kind of um almost tacitly accepted religious element to a process that people are made vulnerable because at that point—I think James was touching on it earlier when he was describing it—we we get into a cult-like phenomena, then we're actually—that is the relationship that's being established; it's like you are are being initiated into a cult; you're not having therapy at all. No. And uh clearly that's uh this is where intuition, instinct can serve you well, because that should be a red flag; if you if you feel at any level of your being instinctively that that's what you're being led into, then you know, get the hell out of there very quickly.

Great, great points, Paul. So um I think it's a particular problem, too, when it's a a conversational form of therapy, yeah, um but the use of things like sand trays or enactments or any kind of creative media that that we use and routinely use; Jungians talk about, but do they ever use anything like that? Yeah, that allows that third space to be generated, and then you can maneuver around it. But yeah, I absolutely agree, and uh the fracture lines in the therapist are that which will be exploited. Oh, definitely. So you need to you need to know what they are in yourself; you need that degree of insight because uh things change very quickly if you're not careful.

Yeah, oh yes, they do. You can suddenly find yourself in quicksand, can't you, as as a therapist? And particular if you're working in person with someone, they they um people are—particularly when they're vulnerable—there's something about intuition tends to be heightened when people are vulnerable, and they'll pick up everything about the state of your field, um and as you say, um they'll either exploit that consciously or unconsciously, as the case may be. Yeah, so you have to be prepared for all of that; you do. You do indeed. So that's that's a really uh really serious issue, uh and Jungians tend to fall flat on their face over that time and time again because their theoretical model doesn't inoculate them from it; it actually encourages them to get involved in it and make it the substance of their process, um and then it's the *imitato Jungi*; they actually imitate him in that sense; they go the full hog and follow that to its conclusion, which is wrong.

What follows now is a narration of an extended series of writings from Steve Richards, originally posted to the Jung To Live By Discord server. Gain access to many thousands more through the link in the description. On starting your relating journey, Steve writes: quote, "A problem with mainstream Jung is that it tends to collapse around specific constructs such as the Shadow or the anima/animus, causing us to ruminate about the distractions they, as ideas, generate. Relating is contextual, so the context is that which reflects back to us what we may need to do. The starting point should be you, as in your ego, and more specifically your self-concept. This is the ongoing self-referent narrative that seems to explain us to us. However, knowing the past is not the first step; rather, it's firming up the present, ready for the future. You can relate why you may not have been able to thus far will have a lot to do with how your self-concept has configured itself. Much of this is tacit, and we only come to know anything about it through affect signals that emerge into consciousness as a vague or pressured internal suggestion that the task is difficult, awkward, or something we are otherwise unprepared for or unmotivated to achieve. So the immediate task then is to firm up our sense of self and our personal boundary, outer and inner. This is the beginning of ego strength. When we relate, we should have two aspects of internal configuration: a connection with meta-instincts appropriate to the task and an ego comfortable with itself sufficiently to relate externally through meta-instincts, which means naturally. Our personal ego is not the all of us; we have an ancestral psyche through which we can represent all of our ancestors and every challenge and task that they have successfully met in their individual lives. Our personal ego could can often regard itself as an abstraction, something without a context, and it's then that every problem becomes too big. This indicates a lack of connection to instinct, which is the summation of all successful adaptations from the past. So the ego needs to define its boundary, become open to instinct and the ancestral psyche, and define itself through action in the world, now with an eye on the future. That is why we have an ego: to be informed by the ancestral instincts but to live adaptively in the present in preparation for the future."

On integrating the unconscious, Steve writes: quote, "One of the first things to understand so that we can hold firm ground from which to gain perspective is that the unconscious cannot be integrated into the ego. The unconscious is already integrated into itself as a field. The ego did not evolve to integrate the unconscious but to be the adaptive interface between the subject of the organism and the extended environment. The evolutionary, modern cognitive ego is too abstracted from this wider field, the extended psyche and wider environment, to be able to participate in an introspective dialectic with the non-ego psyche. The Jungians elevate introspection and the fantasies that emerge as deep structure complexes. This is not the most efficient or effective way to communicate with the psyche. The ego has to learn to receive and then how to follow; generally it doesn't like to do either, as its evolved purpose externally is to take and to lead. These are first principles."

On relationships as whole fields, Steve writes: quote, "You have to engage with the whole field of your relationships, inner and outer. Having a cognitive position can be very useful, but not if we collapse into it for its own sake; that's just inertia and will result in either an increase in compensating internal pressure to resolve it or the creation of a fantasy space or activity to confect the compensating instinctive pressure into. You will know that whilst this is homeostatic, it is only a holding space and not a resolution as such. So don't precipitously collapse into one side of a dualistic polarity; do not generate a fantasy space to displace libido into. Assess yourself by properly assaying your present state of lifespan development and maturation set against your drive to become yourself. Don't use this to fuel either dualistic polarized collapse or fantasy; rather, really do it and see how your relationship externally measures against not only where you are now but where you both can be through a shared journey. One person in a diadic relationship is usually further ahead than the other, although it is sometimes not the obvious one who is further ahead. Once you've honestly assessed where you were at on your own journey, then you can understand your partners much better and perhaps even learn a little from them."

On relating through your ego qualia, Steve writes: quote, "Every structure and its anticipated functions are latently present at the beginning and are time-released by the genome according to its own internal master regulator. The ego evolved for a specific purpose, and across its evolution it has conserved elements of previous adaptive evolutionary stages. Cognition is not very well adapted for insight or introspection; if it were, it would get get in the way of everything else that should not or indeed need not be interfered with. However, the ego often insists on—"

Internalizing itself, that is internally projecting. When this is led by cognition or Jung's thinking function, it cannot understand anything that is either not itself or not represented as itself. Hence, cognition cannot understand the so-called unconscious without being supported by superpositioned representations that are not cognitive.

Affect, which is only partially analogous to Jung's feeling function, is far better adapted to the unconscious; really, the non-ego conscious. Affect is the carrier wave of instinct. Instinct is the emissary of its Master, the genome. Intuition is a synthetic rather than an analytic function. It is also more than a mere ego function. Intuition, under all normal conditions of ego consciousness, does not represent itself as itself; indeed, it cannot. It has to collapse into representation within one or more other qualia of consciousness: inter-receptive and extero-receptive, which is sensing, affect or quasi-feeling, or cognition, thinking, or Jung's rational feeling. These may all be present at different amplitudes, so only one or two may be ego-consciously perceived. However, they are all there, but in this example are just intuition distributed representationally between them.

So how we approach this is dependent upon our understanding. Most people never think about it; rather, they are guided by homeostatic algorithms from within to adapt to without. This works well enough until adaptation becomes an issue that can no longer be addressed this way. Inner potential pressures adaptation to increase its bandwidth and insight; so too does neurosis.

On internal projection versus external projection, Steve writes: "The ego, so long as it still functions with anything at all like its proper purpose, will always interpret inner experiences in terms of its preset adaptations to outer life. This is a core process dynamic in internal projection. External projection is the contamination of the external object through the false superpositioning of internal psychodynamic representations. Internal projection is the reverse: the false superpositioned representation of the inner world by internal projection over it of the outer. Under most conditions, homeostasis ignores both kinds of projection as it's a collateral effect of algorithmic adaptations that are good enough. However, during neurosis, the mix-up between inner and outer through internal and external projection defines the neurosis in terms of conflict between the required reality orientation to the outer and the alien to the ego world of the inner. Add substances and you get perseverations and superpositioned conflicting states that contaminate both inner and outer realities. The psyche, through homeostasis, attempts to correct for this by systematizing representations in ego consciousness that simulate relating through reification into complexes that the ego can attempt to understand. This works sometimes, but often these complexes split off under further associative pressure; that is, through the ego relating to them too widely or too deeply. This is an ecological progression that can form further deep structure complexes that eventually feed into dissociative beliefs that can extend from mild levels of delusion into full-blown psychosis."

Jung's very early work with his colleagues at the Burghölzli demonstrated this clearly. Unfortunately, Jung's later work, as filtered through the fracture lines in his own personality, tended to encourage such dissociation. Hence, we have the state of Jungian psychology and therapy today.

When people lose contact with their ancestral psyche as expressed through the adaptive teleology of their genome, there can be a recourse to pseudo-transpersonal experience and access into transcendent states via chemicals introduced into an otherwise healthy brain. The outcome is the product of disordered brain chemistry, not adaptive homeostasis. There are ways to access transpersonal levels of consciousness that are authentic, substance-free, safe, and natural, but they require work; work that includes a deep commitment to a progressive understanding of relating through intuition.

Steve writes: "Intuition is the qualia of consciousness that cannot represent itself as itself. It always collapses into one or more of the other three qualia: sensing, affect, or cognition. Field-level consciousness always includes intuition as this is the only form of consciousness that emerges into the ego from outside of the other three qualia, but distributes itself between them. Synchronicity is therefore a phenomenon mediated by intuition, even if internal or external events occur initially within one or more of the other three qualia. Meaning is likewise a qualia of intuition that settles into sensing, affect, or cognition. Frequently it is all three, but with cognition lagging behind and then attempting to reconfigure meaning into itself."

On relating in synchronicity, Steve writes: "If you watch our recent videos, 'Resolve Your Archetypes and Meta-Instincts' and the one before it, 'Resolve Your Complexes,' you'll get a feel for how synchronicity is an aspect of superpositioned informational consciousness at a field level. Our self-concept, that is the wider field of our reflexive personal identity as this has accumulated along our timeline, is paradoxically largely unconscious, with only its more immediate representational focus being what we experience as our ego or self through our Miller number. So much of what most motivates us, even through our tacit identification with it, is unconscious. This can cause us to feel divided or in conflict. Whilst this is certainly true sometimes, it is more often a manifestation of our field-wide nature and its homeostatic self-regulation. In such cases, we are meeting several different adaptive needs simultaneously, but given the representational limitations of our immediate awareness, we do not realize this. It is useful to stop considering polarized opposites as a cognitive model of our reflexive experience, as this always leads to conflict. Rather, where synchronicities are concerned, we should test out if there are any personal compensations or adjustments for our present ego attitude or a need for an adaptation to our inner potential that is seeking actualization in the immediate or longer term future."

On synchronicity, past, present, and future, Steve writes: "It is very important to understand that when synchronicities genuinely configure, then the superpositioned informational field is acting trans-temporally, with past, present, and future interacting in our present through the representation of synchronicity within our immediate ego consciousness. Working in depth at a field level necessitates this perspective on relating to personal identity."

Steve writes: "The self-concept in psychosystems analysis is the extended field of the ego that contains within it everything we have ever experienced that has been identified with as being us along our life's journey. Naturally, this includes tacit and implicit incorporates that have become systematized into complexes along the trajectory of the timeline of our life. Given the limitations of the ego's immediate experience, the Miller number, the self-concept remains largely unconscious to the ego as such, but is dynamic and may impress its associations and complexes into ego consciousness or otherwise distribute them as representations into our biology and socio-environmental relationships. Within psychology, the representations achieve some escape from the regulatory scrutiny of the homeostatic self-regulatory function. This occurs via competing algorithms that measure adaptive advantage and disadvantage dynamically in real time and when set against genomic anticipations for future lifespan development. So the ego is only the most currently associated elements of the self-concept, which itself is a whole field of regulated associations that when we ego-consciously look inside, we tacitly identify with, even if the tacit identifications are with complexes."

On relating as field-resonant consciousness, Steve writes: "At bottom, everything is simple, but making it seem so is difficult without an understanding of relating that is not reduced to psychological reifications or, worse still, a philosophical cognitive abstraction. It is indeed difficult to relate with any integrated conscious engagement, both inner and outer, when everything is an idea. We treat ourselves that way too. We invariably start with cognition when we try to understand ourselves. Affect, the felt emotion of a non-ego consciousness that is the carrier wave of instinct, seems fuzzy and without definition that can be put into words without changing the qualia of affect into the language of cognition. This is the origin of much misunderstanding. Our brain's recent evolution has emphasized cognition to the extent that affect is now seen as intrusive. We even convert it into rational and virtual representations, except of course that we don't; it's still there, superpositioned outside of our collapsed and polarized reflexivity. Affect is the carrier wave of instinct. Instinct is the emissary of its Master, the genome. The genome is the superpositioned intentionality of the platonic field consciousness all the way down and back up again. Time to get out of the ego, at least in the right way. When we return, we can afford the luxury of cognition, but this time one informed by that which it is not. Superpositioned field-resonant consciousness is the manifest form of relating."

On the future of psychotherapy, Steve writes: "Not all psychotherapies are the same. Some are easier to understand than others; that is no index on their efficacy. Jungian psychology is notorious for being theory-laden and being rooted in the subjective fantasies of its founder. Depth psychology, at least some of it, is evolving away from psycho-reductionism, as it's clear now more than ever that psychology is an insufficient level of analysis, description, and explanation through which to understand the human condition and its wider embedded domain. The result is that it must change and incorporate areas of knowledge and practical clinical experience that cross into many other disciplines. Hence, it necessarily becomes much deeper and wider than before and requires so much more of the practitioner. None of this troubles psycho-reductive theorists or clinicians, but it should. The work has to be done; the time has to be put in. There are increasing numbers of therapists who are doing just this."

On relating to your unconscious, Steve writes: "Your circumstances at any one time are a field of inter-relationships, most of which are not ego-conscious. If you want to receive a signal outside of the noise, you may need to be less intrusive, by asking directly and take the hints that the psyche is saying that you are perhaps asking at the wrong time or in the wrong way. If you relax away from pushing for answers, then very often they choose to emerge spontaneously."

On the trickster and inflation, Steve writes: "The trickster is necessarily activated when an individual becomes inflated. Inflation is a divergence from the bandwidth of healthy adaptation and is characterized by animation that is self-referred, so that a field-level distribution of its effects can be observed. Jung described inflation by reference to the strength or bandwidth of the constellated elements of it; they had to be bigger than the ego. To the extent that the self-concept, as we model this, is largely taken up by the inflationary identifications of those elements by the self-concept. Typically, he warned of archetypal inflation. In practice, this may not be what happens; complexes can innovate and then invest the self-concept with their own ideation, affect, and even misdirected intuitions. Perceptions, sensing too, can be co-opted to the service of this kind of complex-driven inflation. Complexes that cap or replace instincts can offer an archetypal representation of themselves to the ego's self-concept. An ego that is aware of instinct or meta-instinct can then model the complex as being instinctive or archetypal. In such cases, an ego identified with a complex is paradoxically also unconscious to the ego and its self-concept. The necessary correction then has to come in the form of the trickster function. The trickster function generates external opportunities for correction at the psychosocial level and also at the biological level, where physical symptoms manifest in typically hysterical form. So the biopsychosocial field then becomes distributed by representations of the compensating trickster. Archetypal inflation is very rare in individuals and usually operates at the group level, with a deflation of ego strength within participating individuals. If archetypal-level inflation occurs within an individual, then it's very likely that homeostasis is at risk of collapse into psychosis. Complex-level inflation is usually a result of strangulated homeostasis, as in Freud's concept of strangulated affect. The primary cause is a complex that has become too dominant and is tacitly identified with by the self-concept. Such a complex can emerge directly from the innate character of an individual, in which case it has a concomitant deep structure complex that reinforces identification with the functional complex, which is the tacit incorporate within the self-concept. Other such complexes are acquired through learning and subsequent identification with them. Where archetypal inflation seems to be represented, the underlying failed compensations are always in evidence. From these, it can be deduced if the inflation is indeed archetypal or complex in origin. Adarian compensatory dynamics are common but are always rooted in Freud, resting on a platonic representational form. The transition from Freud through Adler and into Jung, as in the Freud-Adler-Jung equation, we'll see the platonic morphing in representation across all three. As complexes insist on revealing themselves, they will make themselves known. If the individual in this state can consciously correct themselves, then the trickster's intervention will be moderating; if not, then the trickster function will ramp up the intensity and distribution of its effects field-wide."

On relating through extroverted intuition, Steve writes: "Regarding extroverted intuition, if we collapse into a Myers-Briggs typology representation of Jung's psychological type from Collected Works 6, then we have to understand how extroverted intuition actually operates. It leads but is not as reflexively, subjectively conscious as the other functions. Then, to go beyond Jung and the MBTI, the intuition goes out to the object, or the other, or the wider environment and draws the ego of the ENTp to the captured object or other. This capture is a representation of the other as summed up by intuition, but then decisively how that summing up is limited by the collapse of intuition into its limited representation within the ego. This describes how intuition is conscious unto itself but has to collapse into other representational forms to be ego-conscious. This means that someone who is intuitive-dominant in a Jungian sense of an ego function isn't ego-conscious of their intuitions, only of their collapsed representations. More frequently, it's the actual drive state that dominant extroverted intuitives are aware of, and whilst in that state they receive impressions which, as a faculty of information, they have learned to trust, so they accept them. However, because the Miller number of the ego is so very limited, the extroverted intuitive receives far more than they are aware of consciously, with the remainder of the intuitive bandwidth registering outside of the ego's field of consciousness altogether. This is why Jung believed in the unconscious; he really meant the non-ego conscious. Of the unconscious, as so-called, the internalized representation of the other or object has then, in effect, been injected and can unpack within the unconscious. This can lead to an unknowing over-adaptation to the external world and a somatic transduction of hysterical symptoms in the body. It can also fuel new Jungian dissociations and/or feed into existing complexes. To go beyond the Jungian level of understanding, you need to appreciate the superpositioning of object and subject and that intuition is the representation of the field of information far beyond the sensory level of perception. It is also vital to understand that consciousness is not limited to psychology specifically, ego psychology. There is a biological consciousness too, which is the substrate of psychology, and also a psychosocial and environmental consciousness, which is likewise superpositioned with biology and psychology. Intuition links them all. Intuition is not a faculty of ego consciousness per se; it collapses into the ego whilst bypassing it through superpositioning and manifests through representational psychodynamics on the ego's relations to the unconscious."

On the ego's relations to the unconscious, Steve writes: "The ego is supposed to be as free of overloading as is possible. Mark Solms's paper, 'The Conscious Id,' describes how the ego's true role is to become as unconscious as it can as quickly as possible, so that memory consolidation works efficiently. The paradox is that Freud's id, being affect and instinct, is not only more conscious than the ego within its own domain of representation, but is independently conscious as such of the ego. Jung understood this insofar as he describes the independently conscious nature of complexes as partial personalities with a physiology of their own and as he understood the dynamic unconscious. With unconscious being the category error, the unconscious is conscious; it's just not ego-conscious. Jung's psychoid boundary is problematical too. So, as I've mentioned here before, the Greek philosopher, the sophist Protagoras, who declared 'Man is the measure of all things,' his statement should be reconfigured in the context of consciousness as 'The ego is the measure of all things,' except of course that it is not. To collapse consciousness into ego consciousness is the primary category error heard time and time again from philosophers, analysts, psychologists, and neuroscientists. The unthinking use of the term 'unconscious' is partially to blame for this. Jung, despite his insights, overvalued the ego, even so far as to believe that it must integrate the unconscious. Apart from being impossible, it's also the complete reverse of how the brain and the mind actually work. We can extend the role of the ego by understanding the true field nature of consciousness and its homeostatic relationship to the whole nature of being human."

On consciousness outside of the ego, Steve writes: "What it's very important to understand is that the ego is not the only conscious system that there is, in that it falsely regards itself almost exclusively as consciousness de facto. It tends to extend its field of reflexive representation out into the environment by projection and projective identification and internally through internal projection. This is the subjective waveform of egocentric collapse, including by inappropriate extension of its field of self-reference. The reality of the objective waveform, that is everything that is not within the ego's immediate Miller number, its self-concept, etc., remains as it is despite the ego's fictive appropriation of anything or everything that it can model representationally unto itself. Psychology is severely limited in its scope. Most of what passes as psychological does not originate within psychology. Rather, we can experience within the Miller number of the ego a representation of something that is superpositioned within that representation, but also simultaneously within many other states of consciousness as defined in informational monism and superposition theory. The up-and-coming disciplines of code biology and assembly theory are collapsed representations of what is better considered to be informational monism. Likewise, psychology as a discipline and as a level of analysis, description, and explanation is a collapse into the ego's understanding of itself as itself. When what is not psychological but is objective to psychology represents itself within ego consciousness, it takes on a representational form that the ego can receive. This inclines the ego to see things that are not itself as being a property of its own reflexivity. For example, gene expression can appear as a motivational desire delivered by affect, which then registers as conscious, as in neuropsychoanalysis. However, to communicate with what is not psychological, the ego must use representational psychodynamics as a two-way membrane for communication. A useful result of this understanding is reducing the drive states loading on the ego so that it does not try to see itself in everything or as everything. In therapy and in personal development, homeostasis is the superpositioned analog of healing. When we accept this, we get along a lot better with everything that is not the ego."

On humor and the trickster, Steve writes: "Humor changes relating into something transpersonal by reference to a shared instinctive level of consciousness that contains all parties to the field of the humor that is expressed. In this sense, humor bonds at a collective level and serves to unite people and to overcome individual restrictions on personal development, perceived status, and complexes that have been identified with by the subjective ego. Many comedians have said so in their own words. The meta-regulatory function of the trickster needs to be both understood and respected, as it is quite capable of using an individual as an agency for regulating not only the individual at a conscious level but also at that of the unconscious and psychosocially. An inflated comedian who identifies with that which acts through them at cost to their own stability may get used up by the trickster as a resource for the benefits of other people, sometimes quite ruthlessly."

On the coming cultural enantiodromia, Steve writes: "Let's watch carefully as the collective psychodynamics, the underpinning genome, and the decisive field effects work themselves out. There have been some signs of an enantiodromia in various areas of culture for some time now. They're building up, but systems that are too one-sided do not change past a certain point without being forced by a true field reversal. There's a great deal to learn from watching contemporary events."

On finding your complexes, Steve writes: "Any active complex will have its representations, whether we see them or not. Subjectively in ourselves or objectively in others depends on our ability to understand superpositioning. All complex defense mechanisms are superpositionings of the complex with its misrepresentation. Triangulation is appropriate so long as the way we model triangulation isn't too mechanistic. The most efficient and effective complex defenses utilize nuanced distribution of their field so that they can hide in the most unexpected places, including in the therapeutic relationship, the psyche of the therapist, by field dynamics, including unconscious psychological infection, and in relationships to others in the psychosocial world, in beliefs, and even in places, geospatial topography, totem or superstitious objects. Can also be unconscious subliminal foci, attractors wherein complexes hide from relational view."

On finding your personal identity, Steve writes: "Polish your mirror, the internal mirror which is the self-image that reflects you back to you. It accumulates grime if unattended, often through the actions of unwelcome guests whose suggestions leave a film over it. As seen by ourselves, it's your mirror; your care will maintain it for life."

On relating throughout a lived life, Steve writes: "Jung himself said that no one should touch his material until they had first understood Freud and then Adler. He also said no one under the age of 35 would be capable of understanding him. So to start at the end with Jung is only useful if, when you bounce off, you bounce off and..."

Back along the ontology of Yung's work, right back to Freud and Adler, that said Yung's ideas took on the nature of his personality and the times within which he lived. A great deal of it is an anachronism, insufficient given the progress that's been made in the 63 years since his passing. Everyone has to start somewhere. Personal development, if it collapses around the individual without relating to others—Adler—and without an understanding of instinct—Freud—generally inflates by collapse into fantasy, often in the guise of a philosophy. To really learn, we have to pressure test our own humanity and our understanding of it in relationship to other people; people as they really are, and in particular people who are suffering and in need of help. Help without any presupposition that their experience is anything that could be collapsed into a proxy representation of the subjective fantasies of an individual who was born in 1875 and spent the greater part of his life indulging in those fantasies whilst his lifestyle was funded by his wife's inheritance. If you can stand the truth of that, you may just be able to distill out what may be useful about his teaching on the importance of ego strength.

Steve writes: "Ego strength is absolutely the way forward, and this should not be conceived of as configured into an aggressive attitude to life or to yourself or others; rather it should be based upon a sense of integration and relatedness which define the ego's true evolutionary adapted purpose. When the ego is in this state of self-regulation, it can act in the world according to instinct and genomic anticipation for lifespan development."

On discovering the real anima and animus, Steve writes: "Context is everything. The classic Jungian anima and animus can operate towards men who express ideas in a certain way. It's where Jung derived his concept of the power of the word as being both a feature of his model of the Animus and how this would be projected by some women onto men who seem to them to embody it. His observation still stands in some contexts. The reason for this is essentially both ancient and contemporary, the latter in a field sense. We've discussed how the Animus as a constellated field, resonant pattern of relating and adaptation, has persisted in various Jung to live-by videos and Discord posts. If, in the context of a relationship, it seems that such a constellated pattern is active, then it's likely to be unconscious in origin for both parties, who will, to some extent, agree to act it out. Whilst this happens, neither party can be themselves. It's a two-way relational field that is only partially ego-conscious, with the greater part of it being implicit and therefore directed by psychodynamics that are rooted in very ancient adaptations."

To deal with this, it is best to drop classic Jungian theory altogether and look firstly at how your own ego is configuring itself relationally. Within that will be your self-concept and perforce all of its complexes arranged from identified with, implicit incorporates, through aligned orbital but not identified with, to non-aligned unconscious, from the perspective of the ego. Insight will firstly represent itself as deep structure complexes. Ignore concepts such as the shadow. This insight will be firstly a self-confirming mirror held up to show the ego what it is adaptively and how it appears to the rest of the psyche. When you can see this initial deep structure complex for what it is, you have a chance to get past its limitations. This is a narcissistic test and progress on into the deeper part of your whole being. The anima as projected onto your partner is a collapse of the relational field and must not be configured according to Jungian fantasies. It is much more important than that to expand the relating function out so that you can see how your relating system has taken shape; is to see the limits of your present adaptation, including ego fictions as they are at this time. You should find that there are competing developmental pressures within yourself that are overwhelmingly instinctive in nature and are under timed release pressure from your genomes' anticipations for your lifespan development.

If you can drop the fantasy trap of inflating Jungian ideas, you can get a grip on the reality of the maturational process through relating. Your partner ideally should do the same thing. If, for whatever reason, she is not ready, then you have to pace and lead the process, which does not mean dominating through your own understanding of things, but rather do the right things to allow your relationship to harmonize as a resonance field. That way, the relationship will develop with the least inertia or friction. This is not easy, but it is easier if we drop the Jungian fantasies and potential for inflation on transference as a projected self-portrait.

Steve writes: "Our projections and transferences represent the image—the literal representation or configuration in representational form—of the state of our psyche relevant to the adaptive context concerned. We can say that classic Jungian anima animus projections, as these are understood in classic theory, represent a portrait in projective form of the inner state of the person who projects. Same with the transference. Thus they are a representation not only of psychosocial relationships or indeed of complexes acquired over the person's timeline but also of anticipations held innately; that is, of expectations within biology. So the projection and/or transference, when understood, offers an understanding of having 'projected onto their partner the image of their own incomplete development.'"

This is a nuanced appreciation that what is projected or transferred, when this is understood, reveals an extended consciousness of the field as it has configured and then initially collapsed. It is a mirror, so to speak, for us to see our 'own incomplete development'. The instincts to mate and relate are Freudian and Adlerian on a Darwinian base, but having the Platonic potential to reach Jung. So the Adlerian and Jungian squella are downstream of the primary Freudian drive and yet are nevertheless superpositioned together as constituent representational psychodynamics within the whole field of relational attachment. M-familiarity is social and serves Adler, with Adler concealing the underlying Freud. Likewise interesting is both Freud and Adler tied to seeking, in a neuropsychoanalytic sense, both familiarity and interest as intuited in the other, have a telic intentionality to complete a potential Jungian or Platonic goal. Freud, Adler, and Jung always occur together as field dynamics. Their configuration in any relationship at any given moment in time is the representation of that relationship and that of the parties to it.

On repairing a relationship, one Steve writes: "People seldom develop evenly, and this is true all the more so within an intimate relationship wherein the ebb and flow of development can decohere even with the best of starting points and latent potential. If both parties want to become coherent with respect to their waveforms or lifespan development, then it can be achieved with a little insight and commitment to the better outcome for both. Whilst both parties are not only unconscious or non-accommodating of the other but also of themselves, then the respective waveforms of their being decohere to a progressively chaotic extent and may do so completely. This can be remedied if the fundamental will and attachment to one another is still there. A first step is to forgive one another for being different; then, secondly, a confirmation of value in difference; and thirdly, reciprocal confirmation of value in relationship to one another as a shared journey. This allows a dynamic homeostasis to set in and instinct to achieve its adaptive goals, which in turn satisfies the genome, leaving our psychology to sort out the nuances of psychosocial relating."

On repairing a relationship, two Steve writes: "It is very common for one person to be ahead of the other in terms of their psychological development, and this is a usual cause of adaptive or developmental problems. If the relationship is worth having, then shoulder to the wheel and build a vessel between you both that involves the hard work necessary to bring the other person on. If that choice is taken, then the main hurdle is in receiving a projection of that particular kind. It's not reality-based, but it might be a representation of latent potential in either or both of you, even if in exaggerated form. It can be a shocking experience for someone to withdraw their projections and realize that they've not only not seen the reality and humanity of the other but have also been so very unconscious of their own instinctive pressure to develop and, as a result, have projected onto their partner the image of their own incomplete development. To build that vessel, the task is ideally shared between you both. If, however, even that is problematic, then so long as you want the relationship, you will have to take the lead. This will need to be incremental so that you gently pace and then lead the relationship into a mutual journey of personal development. Classical Jungian ideas—anima animus—can help to build a shared vessel, but avoid pop psychology and internet guru stuff and enter into the genuine in-process. Alternatively, if you want the relationship to develop, then you may have to take the lead until such time as your partner's development starts to show through, at which point confirmation of that progress from within the relationship will need to come to the fore. It's hard sometimes to know when to stop leading and accept that we've been caught up with that. That's essential nevertheless for a relationship to grow and mature together."

On the Platonic within biology, Steve writes: "The competition for mate selection and pair bonding for reproduction is so strong that this is an imperative which underpins all higher relational aspirations. The Platonic pulse, with Plato used as a metaphor for the fundamental ontological process beneath Darwin, utilizes Darwin as an Aristotelian efficient cause so that biology and its increasing consciousness is a telic final goal of that selection. Hence Jung or Plato gets projected as the teleological goal that draws everything, including Darwin, to it. It is present, therefore, at the beginning and anticipates its fulfillment, but can only do this through biology. If biological imperatives are met with first, to provide the biological chassis for consciousness whilst it remains imminent within biology."

On the importance of the ego, Steve writes: "It is tough being there for other people, especially when they aren't even there for themselves. The ego is the alpha and omega of adaptation. Jungians undervalue it, and CBT therapists overvalue it, whilst paradoxically having no idea what it really is. Regular people stand on the line between inner and outer without knowing where one begins and the other ends. Jungians pull them away from outer life; CBT therapists pull them away from insight and understanding. Freud got it about right, which is why he can never be dispensed with, whether through pseudo-spirituality or hypertrophied pseudo-rationalism. No matter where we go, his silent footfall and that of his fellow traveler Darwin are always just over our shoulder."

On how Jung discovered the anima, Steve writes: "If you've yet to, quote, 'Jung,' to fulfill the tasks of the first half of life, then your anima—your relating function and system—will configure with great instinctive pressure—meta-instincts around mating and relating—to include all relevant aspects of Freud and Adler. Jung's anima became a conscious problem to him around the age of 35. It had already intruded from an early age due to the peculiarities of his character, but he had not yet sufficiently differentiated himself consciously to understand the adaptive problems of the forthcoming second half of life. So he had to pass through the Freudian and Adlerian instinct and social development stages before, in his own words, the anima became a psychological problem. This is all well and good, but it is Jung's journey, not anybody else's. By the time he began to confront himself properly, he was already in a mess over Ana relationships. He was married to a very wealthy woman who funded his lifestyle; he'd had his children with her, and he had started having sexual and emotional affairs with his female patients. He came to accept that he had not integrated the biological and social aspects of lifespan development consciously. It was then that he insisted that his wife, Emma, had to accept Toni Wolff as a third member of their marriage, in the role of his anima, to act as psychopomp, muse, and soror mystica as he went through his pseudo-psychosis—actually fully indulged his imperfect character. This was the prodromal alibi for him discovering the anima and as it appeared in all of his later writings. In actuality, he never fully integrated the Freudian and Adlerian challenges of the first half of life. He was right that they are the challenges that must be met with or reckoned with before an elevated psychological relationship to a life partner and to personal development can usually start. However, Jung's prescriptive model of progression is only a self-confession on his part of how he wrestled with the problem of being himself, with all of its limitations. It is possible to start with a Jungian level of relationship to a life partner; it's just that it's not easy and it does not do away with Freud and Adler. That said, a certain kind of young man will find himself compelled to start with Jung. Such a young man will either be deeply neurotic, be of higher potential, or more likely both. These issues are covered in our previous video, 'Resolve Your Archetypes and Meta-Instincts.'"

On the difference between character and type, Steve writes: "If we judge someone's character by their personality, then we do not understand them at all. Two INTJs: one is a saint, the other a psychopath. The difference? Character. Don't be taken in at the level of presenting type or personality. Character is the manifestation of the essence of someone's nature. Personality is whatever someone can be bothered to make of its outward appearance. Remember that Jung's type theory was only ever a model of how consciousness habitually organizes itself; in other words, a fixed Jungian type is the clearest indicator of arrested personal development. Jung's types are qualia of consciousness. The unconscious has no type. Rather, the ego is unconscious that all four qualia in both attitudes—introversion and extroversion—exist and function in everyone. Where we are unaware of this, we can be said to be unconscious of them; hence they can be interpreted as appearing to belong to and reinforce the construct of such things as the Shadow or the anima animus. Such constructs become identified with complexes which we happily internalize and project all over the inner world every bit as much as the outer. We even dissociate so much from these suggestion-based injects that we believe that they are real and go so far as to call them subpersonalities, at which point Pierre Janet explains everything you need to know. Why this can happen is the most important thing to understand. This leads to an understanding of what really underpins these complexes and why such representations arise as alternatives for other representations."

On libido and character, Steve writes: "By their libido shall ye know them is an acid test of the motivation of any individual and any relationship. What people do with their life force—free energy, i.e., their libido—tells you where their character operates and to what ends. It is not about Persona as Jungians think of it, or their construct of the Shadow, or even the anima animus. It's far more fundamental. Personality can be changed via the Persona or by genuine attempts at self-improvement. Character, however, cannot. How do we know our character? Not only by a Freudian superego or Jungian moral complexes audit on ourselves, but how our libido manifests as the driving force of our life. Can we change how our libido operates? Yes, absolutely, provided that our character is agreeable to it. By agreeable, I mean that its nature—that is, the character of character—has the bandwidth and the drive to actualize its development into the world via the superficialities of personality. Complexes are quite capable of disturbing the personality directly, thereby inhibiting the unfolding of our true character. Instinct, however, is always in lockstep with character, which is why the energy of character or libido gives us our best objective read on the state of someone's personality and any compensation of character attempting to break through the resistances of that complex-innovated field of personality that most people mistake for the messenger rather than the message. All potential lies in character—the good and the bad—but the distillation of character through the opus of personal development is what we come to know as the most comfortable version of ourselves—one minus complexes and minus the veneer of a constructed personality."

On individuation marriage, Steve writes: "Individuation marriages are rare. That does not make them special, only different amongst a whole range of other different kinds of relationship. They are not just heteronormative; they don't even have to be reproductive or sexual. They are quite simply a kind of relationship, albeit one that, for authenticity, needs to be other than the following: they are not contractual arrangements to meet social or economic needs; they are not enabling structures for narcissism; they are not exploitative of others and are not isolationist. By virtue of being a kind of individuation, such authentic relationships will have in them, from the very beginning, the teleology that confirms the value of the unfolding journey of relating in all of its positive manifestations. There will be a consciousness of a calling beyond the collapse needs of the individuals in that relationship, so that the genuine love between them gives off energy to others. There will be a consciousness—implicitly and explicitly understood—that the only confirmation of an individuation relationship is in the lived experience of it over time—a long time—and those properly on that journey would hold its final confirmation to be at its conclusion, not at its assumed beginning. It should not be held up as a perfect or attained state. It is only one way to live an authentic life; there are many others, and all have equal intrinsic value."

On the anima and relating, Steve writes: "Awareness of the anima as a theoretical construct is not necessary. Only good relating; bad or evil relating does not require theoretical knowledge of the anima either. It's a question of maturation and of character. Where the construct of the anima can help is when it's pressure-tested against the reality of life and, as a result, is found useful or otherwise helpful in optimizing our lived potential. However, when you know what the anima really is, then you have no need of a theoretical model of it. Even Jung himself dispensed with it as he entered late life. The key in youth and in middle years is to understand what is superpositioned with the concept of the anima. When this is examined, it is all relating—inner and outer—and to our biology every bit as much as to our social world. Our psychology is the reflexive representation of what is within and what is without. How we relate to both and find our balance is the reification of the anima. Hence it is sometimes better to have no knowledge, in any theoretical sense, of it at all. Relating is about a lived life and not a theoretical one."

On attachment and relating, Steve writes: "Think of attachment as being an element of relating that provides the widest context from which to get an audit on how things are working through for you. Early attachment can be very important, but it is possible to fixate on those early relationships to the detriment of real-world ongoing relating to both self and others in the here and now. Relating is instinctual in that we're meant to be good enough at it in the various and unfolding scenarios that present to us along the timeline of our lifespan development. Knowing what to look at or for is the first question; then stand firmly on your own ground—ego strength—as you progress. That way you'll be surefooted, adapted, and instinct will come online to guide you."

On the mother and relating, Steve writes: "As the mother or principal female caregiver is the prime imprinter of a male child's trust in the inner world and of his affects and instincts, then that relationship, in all of its interactive relational nuances, must have some significant effect on relating to any significant other. However, despite that primary influence, the relationship to the mother is to a singular example in a specific role rather than to later others. The complexity that arises between meta-instinctual anticipations and lived experience leading to complexes depends very much on the status of the individual self-concept over the timeline of life. A bad mother is understood by the genome and its related fields as part of the anticipated potential experience of a human life. The potential solutions range through innate genomic and field-directed corrections to positive compensating relationships. Jung's narrative representational psychodynamic of the Ana may contain some of these solutions as well as the ancestral traps endured since humans evolved into complex social beings."

On the Platonic form and the anima, Steve writes: "The emphasis is often on what is projected, whereas it's often not that so much as what is emitted. This may be unconscious on the part of the woman as that is conventionally understood, but it can be more than only that too. The form as instantiated in the woman and then received, rather than projected by the man, is an independent dynamic. It can manifest as a waveform and then disappear, leaving an otherwise ordinary canvas which seems to secondarily invite projection on the part of the man as his psyche, his genome, and the contiguous field that all men share seeks to find the Platonic eidos on the surface of the canvas. Such projections are not personal; they belong not to any individual man; they are collective and fulfill Plato's…"

Intuition of the perfect form of the feminine with Freya Lund on pre-production for Lilith: she could instantiate the platonic form when she was in a field resonant state to manifest it; otherwise, she could be very ordinary. What we did notice was that she reacted in sympathetic resonance to the interpersonal field she occupied. In other words, the state of resonance men, or indeed women too, had with the platonic form meant that it appeared, or did not appear, from within her. We saw her react very differently to photo or video sessions where whoever was directing it either had an implicit resonance with the form or did not. In the latter case, howsoever hard she tried through her work-a-day personality, with its gregarious and very helpful nature, the form did not instantiate. The differences show on camera. She was unconscious, psychologically, of the field, but the field certainly was conscious of itself and of those who participated in it.

The phenomena is collective; it is conscious of itself as itself, and it is telic. This is superpositioning independent of the subjective collapse of the informational waveform of any participating individual; it is still present and appears according to the cumulative field strength collectively. That is the platonic form and Yung's intuition of the archetype of the anima on internal projection. One Steve writes: "Freudians see their unconscious according to how they've internalized its representation, and Jungians likewise both look into the unconscious, but instead see their internalized representation of learned, acquired constructs. Freudians never see the Shadow or the Anima; the Jungians never see the Id or the superego. What's really there? Ask what you think is the unconscious, but remember to let it tell you. It may be a surprise that it first shows you a reflection of your own internalized beliefs and then demonstrates that it isn't unconscious at all. If we let it be what it is, it tells us deep structure complexes are always superpositioned between the non-ego conscious, the field of the ego, and the social and natural environment. There are ways of experiencing the non-ego psyche as it really is and separating ourselves from deep structure complexes on internal projection."

To Steve writes: "It is a very ult process separating from The Singularity of a personality like Jung's and from those who immediately followed him. The absolute acid test is the reality of other people's lives as they live them and who have no knowledge of how Jungians believe the psyche and the phenomenology of simply being is supposed to be. If a Freudian looks into their unconscious, they find the Id, the Oedipus complex, the internalization of the superego, sexual fantasies, and all the usual Freudian constructs. If a Jungian looks in, they see the Shadow, the Anima, a whole zoology of archetypes, mythopoetic fantasies, and the reification of a superordinate self as a monotheistic deity. In other words, they look into their respective caves and see their own internal projections cast upon the platonic wall. Freudians do not see Jungian fictions; Jungians do not see Freudian fictions. As for Adler, he sees the reflection of his own organ inferiority and power complex dancing in fire-lit relief on the wall of his personal cave, but at least he had the good sense to leave it and act with social interest in the world. It's better to realize that you're in a cave of your own creation than one based on the fantasies of someone born at the turn of the final quarter of the 19th century. At least then you can retrace your own path out rather than suffer the by-proxy or otherwise vicarious illusions of another personality's schizo withdrawal."

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