From Anima to Reality | The Feminine Instinct in Crisis

Hello again, James. How are you? Hello, Steve. Hello, Pauline.

I'm good. How are you?

Well, we've got a very serious topic today, so I'm going to get all the uh, the levy out of the way now, so I can be serious again later.

I think that's a good idea, don't you? Uh, you know what I'm like when I'm being like that. I can't be serious, but this is a serious topic.

Totally agree. Very serious one. Why you smiling then?

Have no idea. I was wondering, James, what do you think about the current generation, or current iteration, of young women, say under the age of 35, as compared with, say, women of your mother's generation?

That's an extremely good question, because of what we've been speaking about recently before, regarding the anima and what that really is when you strip away the theory. One aspect of that being the anticipations that a man has of relating to a woman. That's the first thing that came to mind. It was that, plus the word disappointing. That's not a value judgment, genuinely; it's a sense that when I was younger, when I was a teenager mostly, I was anticipating relating to, maybe let's say, a fantasy style of woman, this a distilled type of woman that my genome would have experienced over God knows how many thousands of years, summed up perhaps we could, for a moment, in the representation, at least partially, of the anima. That is not what's happening right now, and that does lead to a feeling of disappointment.

Regarding my mother's generation, that would be just after, or is sort of early 1960s, so not in immediately after World War II, but that sense of values would certainly have been there. My maternal grandmother lived in London during the war, so she went through all of that, and there's a deeper sense of duty I feel in the older generation. There's less indulgence; there's less, dare I say, narcissism in the sort of classical sense, and that stands out very, very starkly. I feel that on a personal level, but I also feel that with lots and lots of young men that I've spoken to—it's been hundreds now, since J has started—over texts and over calls, and there is this disconnect between what they've wanted, what they feel that they've always had, put it like that, ancestrally, versus what they're getting. And the projection leads them astray, because when, when they don't get what they're looking for, the projection fires harder, and it blinds them more. And then immediately what comes to mind is your guys's Freud- Adler-Young equation, which we've discussed in previous videos, that if you're blind and you, you, you believe instead of seeing clearly, you can fall victim to the other person, in this case the woman's Adler and Freud, and that leads to a hell of a lot of pain and suffering.

I feel, Pauline, it is probably the biggest problem of this current generation, once men have moved beyond the need for, let's say, internet gurus—replacement internet fathers, in that broad sense—problem of what do you do about your future, your future girlfriend, your wife, whatever comes to mind. And I've seen so many men in despair because of that, so it's not a nice answer, but that's an honest answer for you, Pauline.

Yes, yeah. Well, it's, it's a very good answer, James. Are you able to, maybe in a more of a quantitative sense, uh, say—I mean, you've mentioned narcissism, you, you flag that up which you think or feel to be absent uh in the earlier generations—obviously something has contributed to that, and, and contributed to that perspective. So I mean, maybe if you could just respond on that particular point as to maybe what you feels contributed to that and why it's um, it's less obvious in the previous generations of women.

It's going to be ultimately instinctive, and that's the level I'd always want to go to, rather than anything necessarily cultural. Again, I think of your Freud-Arley-Young equation, and how right at the bottom—I always have an image of it in my mind—there's Charles Darwin smiling up, being responsible, if you like, for the ontology, so shaping it and morphing it at each step. When the culture is at odds with instinct in one way or another, every human being has within them the capacity to not be very nice. It's been conserved in us via evolution quite clearly. Jung would call that the shadow. That's a distraction. You've better frame the shadow before, really, for a lot of cases as being like Freud's Id. Yeah, that's what you're, that's what you're looking at when you come across something that you don't like. You can repress it away or suppress it away; you don't want to see it, you don't want to see that core aspect of human nature, but it's there anyway. So I think the culture at the moment is actively encouraging—but it is very subtle—for women to behave in the way that they are. They don't seem to be particularly interested in the same type of man, at least on the surface, that say my mother's generation would have done. I was raised in the values of not necessarily chivalry, but you know what I mean, being, being a gentleman, being nice and open—open the door for you and all that kind, kind of stuff—but there's a massive response now among younger people, they call it the red pill online, where they're rejecting all of that—thousands and thousands of men—and they'd much rather be much more firm, they call it holding frame, if anyone's watching this who's heard of those fears, you recognize the lexicon immediately, and that, that conflicts with my values, and that conflicts with a lot of young men's values to do that, but it's an adaptive response to avoid being hurt by other people. So I think the culture, whether that's politics, whether that's social media, whether that's the nonsense that is propagated out like this endless cycle from, from Netflix, from Hollywood, from etc., etc.—encouraging women to behave in a certain way and feel like they should behave in a certain way. Feminism is thrown out as this trumpet and call, this sort of banner in this ridiculously bloodshot sky that we've got going on at the moment that serves nobody; it doesn't serve the men, it doesn't serve the women. But this idea that you should be independent, you should take what's yours, and you don't need a man at all, and that's all patriarchy, and having children is wrong and you shouldn't have to have children—that's cult nonsense. It is suggestive programming that is gone into a lot of people, and I don't think it makes them happy either. And from a young man's perspective, that's what men have to deal with; their genome is anticipating something else, and instead they're getting what appears to be, what could be mythologized in a dangerous way, and people shouldn't do it—a negative anima, a death demon. You can't trust women, basically; they feel like they can't trust them. Then what's the alternative? What do you do? So I, I'm, I'm wandering around your point, Pauline, and I know I am, but please pull me on track.

Well, it, you said, James, it's a very open and honest response to what is clearly um, a very complicated situation. Um, would you have anything, Steve, to maybe share or bring in, given that, you know, there's a obviously there's a generational issue too, isn't there, between say yourself and James, even on the masculine side of things?

Well, I think James has uh, really encapsulated it, so I don't think there's uh, there's much to, to, to further comment on in that way. It would have to be a transgenerational perspective, um, or a biological and evolutionary one, and neither of those, taken as abstractions, are going to be very helpful, know, for, for young people who are going through—young men who are going through this at the moment—because from a biological perspective, men need a reason to like women, and that is such an unfortunate thing. If men don't like women, then any drive for production is going to be less than social. Yes, they have to respect women to be social towards them. If men disrespect women, then they would, they become something to control, for the reasons that you said, uh, James. It's happening now; uh, young men have been engineered into a position where they don't trust women, they don't like women. They didn't start out that way in, in recent cultural history, but the way that the culture's moved, uh, it's causing the uh, the biological sexes to divide and to negatively project onto one another, and that will break down the reproductive selective process which has sustained the species forever. And pretty much all of the mythologies that have arisen since earliest times within our species have been built around the idea that men should respect women, but women should be worthy of respect. Once that's in as a baseline, then men can do all of the other things, all of the other unpleasant things the biology is force them to do to adapt to—they're hunting, they're fighting, they're dying—all of that to preserve resources, preserve territory, to ensure the reproduction of the tribe or the group. But once men start believing in that, uh, and reject women, no longer have a reason to like them, so there's no chivalry, it's not rewarded by relationships to women, then we'll see what we're, what we're seeing now. And of course biology has a way of dealing with that, that if within a reproductive pool of a population, the, the men who are residents, should we say, or occupy that niche, bace if they will not do it, then other men will replace them. Uh, and this is such a harsh biological reality, it's, it's not one that's nice to consider, but it's going that way, and it's going that way because it's being regulated by other people at a, at a political level. But even the politics is being regulated, we would propose at a collective genomic level—that's the level that almost nobody looks at—the idea that there is a kind of algorithmic sentience at a field level that connects the whole species, uh, and if the that sentience detects certain patterns occurring, then certain ba behaviors and adaptations become uh, more pronounced in a sheldraean field sense. So what we're seeing now is a Darwinian road crash—slow motion road crash—but it is selective, uh, and it's been awful, but hopefully the anodia which is emerging within the culture at the moment will produce something that is stable enough for the biological sexes to respect one another again. That's the only way we're going to get stability long term. That would be best-case scenario, obviously.

I'm, I'm, I'm reminded of what Trump has said since coming into office about common sense. He's been pushing common sense, not what the, let's say those who oppose him politically want him to be some kind of fascist dictator, which he is not. He started on common sense, even in his inauguration speech. If he maintains that and that's successful, that's a wonderful thing. It's what might come after that. You guys have obviously spoken on this many times before on this channel, um, different ways in which the culture could go. But part of this obviously will have to be consciousness on behalf of women, becoming conscious of their nature, and men too. And one of the important things, I remember you, you, you first, you first revealed this, let's say around Rebirth of the Feminine, I think it was. That video was so much fun to make, by the way, really enjoyed it. I remember the, the, um, remember editing your, or doing graphics over your script, Pauline, being pulled into it—one of the first videos we did with loads of graphics—and it, um, you, you say in there that there's, there's a trap that's hidden just on the edge that many, many people do not see, many men do not see, because they're disappointed by the way that the obvious, um, disappointing women are behaving—those that are overtly loud, political, um, anti-biology—they will turn instinctively, and it is instinctive to do this as a compensation, towards women who appear to be an alternative. There are loads of them on the internet, those who appear to be almost too pure and perfect, and specifically very conservative values, and they get a lot of male attention, and it then becomes that almost becomes codified in spheres of, of, of men: here's what a perfect woman is supposed to look like, and they list it out, cognitive, with a sense of values you pointed out in Rebirth of the Feminine, that that is a huge bloody trap, because that is called the Persona, and behind it is the same Darwinian biology that every other human on earth has. Yes, and because of the instinctive pressure in men to find a mate, that blinds them even further, and they get pulled in. So I like what you said, Steve, about it being a Darwinian road crash, because a lot of men and women are not going to breed. Some will breed, though, in suboptimal situations, through accidents, etc. That will happen, on random one-night stands, and it is like a big, um, it's like a big alchemical soup of what the next generation's going to look like, so there is selection going on, and it's not just for one type of man or one type of woman, it's, it's almost like a big filter to see what makes it through. But what will not make it through ever are people who give up, and people who are passive, and people who give in. It seems that's the filter: can you maintain some level of independence, something like that?

I feel it's good to hear that kind of passion from you, James, as a young man, because there has, there has to be some push back from men towards women, um, obviously none of us want that to be extreme in, in its form or its expression, but I think there has to be something that really lets women know that men cannot be, cannot be abused, and obviously that abuse can take uh, lots of different forms, uh, and that we, we literally cannot, any of us, eliminate biology from the equation, you know, whatever, whatever we intend to do, or however we try and, and relate psychosocially, male and female met instincts will always be there, they will always underpin anything and everything that we do psychosocially, so we ignore them at our peril, uh, and also coming in at that level, that level of relating means that we're more vulnerable to the kind of manipulation that you describe politically, whichever end of the political spectrum, uh, appears to be operating, uh, or even, um, you know, that the, the even people like the, the global elites who are almost neither one thing or another, they're a kind of, um, well they're not left, well they're not left or right, no, they, they, they are a different category altogether, um, but they are, they are, are also so involved, um, politically, uh, in, in this kind of woke movement, they are the new guardians really of woke, in short.

Yeah, it's Darwinian, it is, yes, it is. That's it. So it's pure power, as a Darwinian level, that is not adequately differentiated ours into a bipolar spectrum of politics, it just isn't, that's not going to reveal what's going on. We have to go right down and say who is being gratified behind the power, so from Adler down to Freud and into Darwin: who is benefiting, who benefits from this, and in what way? And then look at where they are unconscious of the fact that they are not the only agents at work in this. Now it's not about psychology, it's about biology, and, and beyond even that as well. What's driving all of this? That's what any true depth psychology, if it wishes to call itself depth psychology, should take into account, even encapsulate, to this very, very elegantly, I feel, with psycho-reductionism and all the problems with that. If something is psycho-reductive—so any school of depth psychology that focuses only on the psyche—you, that's not depth psychology, because you're not actually looking at the unconscious. The unconscious has to be, in all the major schools, it's supposed to be there. There's instinct there, and instinct is evolved, and maybe by design, I don't know, as in phenetic design, we are supposed to be unconscious to some degree of that, so that we can be manipulated by instinct to allow, for example, some reproductive events to happen. I don't know, that's, that's a hypothesis I guess, but we have to look into biology.

I really like that stance from you guys, because it's so zero, yeah, there's no hand-waving around and needing to look at mystical images, like you mentioned myth, Steve. You mentioned myth in a way that we could be informed by it and not be consumed into it. That's very, very important. What Jungians and followers of Jung can do to ground themselves is to understand that what appears within culture in the form of a narrative myth is a superpositioning of something that simultaneously exists in other states. So it's within our psychology, in so far as our consciousness can reach it, uh, it's in our social behavior as well, we interact with the cultural level of representation, but it is a representation of forces which are primarily understood as being, or should be, as a kind of biological consciousness. And there are people who, now quite a long time after us, who are moving in this direction, who are talking about cognition rather than consciousness as such, as existing in all sorts of biological and even non-biological, non-living material and field states. Some of these people are very, very serious scientists and philosophers, and they're moving in the same direction that we more or less constructed over 40 years ago and put together as a form of clinical practice and, and of arranging our understanding of human nature, so we can work with it in depth. One of the problems, for example, that they have is that they are not in the laboratory of the psyche; they're making statements about consciousness abstractly, including by reference to machines, artificial intelligence, um, even molecular models, that kind of thing. But when you work with a human being, you are getting every single layer of organization and representation that has ever existed that has led to us being who we are. Therefore, it's like uh, a Russian doll, if you like; within each of us are several other figures who are embedded, not only the phylogenetic psyche, but also the development of matter itself and down into its own substrates. And where these other people are going at the moment is important, and it's important that they're approaching this from different directions, because they enrich what we've done already by bringing a different perspective, but it's still collapsed if they want to make statements about working with human beings, what it's like to be conscious, what it's like to work with other people and relate to them, then they need to do that; they need to work in depth. And in order to understand consciousness, they need to understand altered states of consciousness and how the representations of those altered states are present in all of us for access, if we do the right things. If they don't know that, then the work that they are doing now will collapse into an abstract philosophy, virtual modeling, which won't be clinically applicable, and other than it being a diversional idea that someone might encounter on the internet, it won't give anybody any kind of real guidance about how to apply that in their own life and their own development. So the myths that are in the culture are superpositioned with other states that are simultaneously there. And here's another important point for the Jungians and followers of Jung to appreciate: Jung and the Jungians have been very careful to say that the archetypal image, as they understand that, is not the archetype in itself. It's, for them, something separate. We would argue that that is not the case; we would say it is the archetype as the archetype settles into occupancy of that level of its representation. Therefore, with a true archetypal image—if we, we use Jungian terminology for now—you can access what they think of as being archetypes through the image. If the image is genuinely a projected representation of the so-called archetype, where it is not, then it's going to be something else, and those something else's that can represent in that way basically form through learning, and then the internal projection of that learning by the ego over the so-called unconscious, which is, of course, very conscious in different ways, which is why we call it the non-o conscious rather than unconscious. But when you project your learning and anticipations over it, you push yourself away from it, and the psyche will react to that homeostatically, and the most um, everyday experience of that is that it will keep us out, basically. There's your fantasy, you've internally projected it, we hold up a mirror, it's reflected back to you: go and play in the sandbox like a child, you can't come in, you can only receive because you don't listen, you don't interact or relate. So the homeostatic process then will deliver things in alternative ways than pure representations that can be dealt with, out of frustration, metaphorically. So we then get high-drive anxiety states, or we get high-drive depression—depression, although it appears to be a low level of uh, drive, is actually a level of drive, it's just internal—so we are reduced down, and the energy that's latent...

Within the economy of the psyche, is distributed in a way which resembles—and we feel as being—depression. Completely different then you can have agitated depression, which is anxiety and depression together. These are hints that are coming out from the psyche that we're not receptive to it in the proper way; hence we have to be kept out, and we can just occupy ourselves of these fantasies that we internalize. So a true cultural representation—true is the thing in itself—as it collapses, and we can use that as a means of communication. But don't expect that representation to not change; the act of engagement will change it. It's on the surface for a reason because it's adapted to that level of representation, but once we start to work internally properly, these things change. And as's a lot of followers of uh, Young who don't expect them to change; they expect them to stay the same, so they do, and in that sense they make no progress.

It's really, really important to grasp these these elemental factors that are so important in personal development. So the what you're saying then, Steve, is with respect to these outer representations that there will be a superos superpositioning of those representations for people within? Yeah, but there has to be a dialectical process between the two sets of representations for any kind of progress or or healing to occur; otherwise people will just stay fixed. And as you say, if if the—and it is—it's just the ego really, isn't it? Because it's it's it's the egocentricity of that perspective, yeah, that that decides that that which is internally projected is the thing in and of itself, and that it should stay fixed and static. Whereas, um, you know, if we take a much more psychodynamic or infodynamics of it, becomes quite clear at that point that things aren't meant to stay that way; that there should be that dialectical process between literally between what is within and what is without.

Yeah, absolutely. There's no point hanging on to myths; they're a starting point, and that includes the hero's journey and all these other constructed representations of natural processes that are popular. When you work with someone who knows nothing about Joseph Campbell's work, but they're in a mess in their life and they are keen to engage with natural processes, you do not get it unfolding in that way. You do if you turn it into a virtual representation, which is an abstraction away from the internal dynamic and the external uh process, which is a mistake. We need to, if we recognize things in the culture that we react to, we have to use those as a starting point for an incremental progressive inner journey. And there are ways of doing this which we could discuss perhaps another time. Um, just while we emphasize the importance of starting in the right place, but if you go off into these um, the the these two structured abstract mythologies representational ones that are put together by academics who have no clinical experience, for example, then uh, that's that's going to lead to no progress at all; just inertia. And over time, the psyche will react to inertia; the genome will react to inertia by obliging, by agreeing that we don't progress any further because as far as we've got, okay, that'll do; we're not going to go any further. If we're going to survive, just bed down; no point releasing potential; just stay as you are, as's maladaptive as you are, and maybe you'll be deleted from the gene pool.

So what, there are other people who have parts of your genome; it's distributed around, but at an algorithmic level that computation will be assessed, and a decision will be made, and an individual will not make any further progress. So we have to leave fantasy behind once we understand what it is; that's hugely important. So mythology does have its its value; literature, movies, all of these these representations have their value, but don't stay in them; it's a starting point. Hugely important, I think, particularly Steve, too, where those fantasies are specifically attached to another human being, such as somebody like Carl Young, for example. Because we run the risk—and we've said this before—that in following um his suggestions about the anima and and how to relate to women, we're we're in danger of internally projecting Young's version of his own anima onto our own unconscious or or non-o consciousness. And I mean, once you do do that, you've almost given up on developing yourself because you you're on somebody else's path; you you're on their journey; you you you you following following them into—unfortunately, if it's somebody like Young—potentially um into either a latent or or maybe even florid psychosis because that's that's the way he went; that was how his psyche was organized. So the last thing that you want to do is is to, as I say, take um something like the concept of of the anima um as outlined by Young and and then to superimpose that onto your own psychology; it's probably about one of the worst things you could possibly do. Or Joseph Campbell for that matter, or or any of the… Yeah, we have to be us; we can't live the fantasized life of Carl Young.

No, if you understand how he came to have what he had materially, what you will get is the immediate understanding that he did not earn it; that he was gifted it; that's important. He was gifted it through a woman, his wife, and there's all sorts of issues around that and about the way he treated his wife and how he brought other women in, etc., that fed into how he developed his concept of the anima. He was explaining himself to himself from within himself; that said, there is something which he was relating to which is universally applicable and universally true. But you do have to drop into biology; you have to be grounded in that in order to build something which will stand pressure testing at the psychological and psychosocial levels. If that's absent, you have only got fantasy left, and that is not the way, if you are a young man, to begin to attempt to relate to women because they have their own psyche, their own conserved highly conserved evolutionary psyche and anticipations about men that that's based on the ancestral psyche collectively, but differentiated into specific form for biological women; in other words, the Animus, as the Jungians like to talk about it. But drop all of the fiction; drop all of the fantasy; start to look at it in biological terms first. You'll then trace the steps of your own ancestors from the past into the present. But if we just start in the present, we're ignoring that we don't know where we've come from; we have no roots; we have no ability to relate except in the moment to the whim of consciousness, e.g., consciousness and its complexes which defines neurosis; that's the state we get in if we cut ourselves off from our ancestral psyche. So there's a lot that can be done, but you have to put the work in.

So if we were to to get really base about this and apply that to Young's context, we might find ourselves asking the question how he felt basically being supported financially or by by his wife. Um, I think you said was she the the second richest heiress in in Switzerland at the time? She was the second richest heiress in Switzerland. Yeah. So in a sense he was a kept man. Well, he was he had a junior psychiatrist; a junior—he wasn't even what would be considered to be a senior consultant in in a British hospital, NHS hospital; he wasn't at that level; he was a junior doctor, a junior psychiatrist. And uh, he fell into that great amount of wealth, which meant that he could build the house of Kusnacht; he could fully indulge himself; he could build his house, his tower at Bollingen, actually have people build it for him. He did contribute to that, but not a great deal; his son, Franc, was involved in the building of that and also planning it as an architect as well or as a trainee architect. So these details which give you a perspective that's not the immediate one that you see through the persona of Young as he's presented on the internet will help to withdraw the projections because they are unhelpful. This is hugely important; it is because we might then argue that psychosocially that doesn't matter that you know he h he had that relationship to his wife, but the minute you drop into biology and you get away from any kind of social psychosocial perspective on things, these things do matter. Yeah, because by and large and for the reasons that that you said earlier that from a biological perspective, biology uh or uh men themselves when it percolates, you know, uh into psychology can start to feel as if they're somehow being robbed of their masculinity by having that kind of relationship to a woman. Yeah, we see this all the time; we do see it all the time, thanks Paul. And we also see the uh resentment and the judgment that can come from women towards men who who can't bring in, yes, you know, the finance. Yes, there's an expectation which is unconscious which nevertheless works itself through and interferes in relationships.

Does, and those things are being manipulated now psychosocially for the dating game, yeah, as we would have called it when we were young. Um, so we're seeing that playing out. So the more we move into fantasy and away from grounded reality, the less we understand the time in which we live and the less we're able to call upon the ancestral psyche to help us to understand why we feel in the mess that we do feel in. Um, so the approach to archetypes must start with biology in order to be grounded; later you can go back; you can go into the Platonic when you've understood the biological. And at that level we can see some value in some of Young's ideas, but if they are launched too prematurely in the psyche of a young man over this so-called anima towards women, only problems will emerge; problems of adaptation will emerge from that. Yeah, and the the same lens has to be applied to men who are looking for relationships with women; that they're not going to—they're not going to understand women by speaking to other men, particularly; uh, they will just get a man's perspective of what it means to be a woman. So men need to understand women, uh, and they also need to understand how women relate to one another, how they feel and think about one another, uh, and what it means to be a biological woman before they think about what it might mean to be something other than a biological woman. You have to start at the bottom basically and work your way up to get a proper um understanding of the the the entire field of what it means to be a a feminine woman in the modern world, basically.

That's a really good point, Paul, because—and we've said this before, haven't we, Jamie?—we shared this on various videos and of course right through the training seminars—that the anima tells you everything about a man's psyche and nothing about that of a woman; the Animus tells you everything about a woman's psyche and nothing about men as they actually are. And this is not difficult to prove through relating; the very fact that you can get a group of men together and get past the the usual stupidness that you get when when men gather together and banter and that kind of thing, eventually they will distill out—if they're asked through different routes; you don't have to say what is the anima because most men haven't a clue what that construct is supposed to be—but you'll get to it; it will emerge because we all have a model of it. But what will happen is that the projection occurs onto the concept of the woman; there's no woman in the room; there's just men, and they're talking about their feelings, their instincts, their anticipations at a genomic level of what women are. And if you bring some women in and they're just themselves, there's nothing like it. And it's the same with women; you get them together talking about men; it's all to do with their imagination, their constructs, their projections. You bring a man in; the man—one man—will suddenly be the victim of all of them; all of the projections will fly at them, and the guy will be thinking, "What the hell? This this isn't me; this isn't any of us." No, because the Animus is feminine psychology; it's the complementarity which Young identified which is meant to relate to one another through these mechanisms; otherwise the two biological sexes might not even like one another. And at the same time it's got to meet fundamental issues of survival and reproduction, and then the ontology, the the latent Platonic ontology which is Jungian in form can come through. And if you get a man living in the early 20th century, has all his material needs met, he's in complete control of his environment, he's got all sorts of female acolytes around him, he lives on a nice lake in Switzerland, he's got his boathouse, and he can dream—can dream whatever dream he likes; he can indulge his Freudian side with those women; he can indulge his Adlerian side, the power drive, with those women and with his male students who are beginning to accrue around him—and you're not really getting a very decent picture of the fundamentals at all; you're getting a very exaggerated one that then becomes systematized as a representational fantasy and a distortion of the underlying factors and forces that work their ways through our developing lives, whether we're biologically male or biologically female. And because of the internet, this is now everywhere, and it's a problem; it's a huge problem.

When we were young—pardon the pun—nobody was talking like this about Carl Jung; he was a specialist; specialist area of knowledge and attention; academia rejected him completely; it largely still does. But the influence of the ideas that he constellates with such an effective emotional charge and the suggestion of transcendence behind it, the people who are lost and have low ego strength are going to be pulled through to engage with those ideas, internalize them, and then generate a fantasy holding space which, if they're not careful, will become a prison for their development; not something that they should want or seek at all. You can get back to Jung; anybody can eventually. But as he said himself, you have to satisfy the demands of the first half of life, which he said were addressed by Freud and by Adler. If we get through them adaptively enough, then we're ready for the better side of Young's ideas which bottom out in a Platonic understanding of the ground state of things. But any impression of that too soon will be resisted by the psyche, resisted by instincts, and the clash of outer reality because we've not met those those necessary uh drives will come and hit us, and we'll just split into neurosis and maladaptation. So there there is good stuff in Jung, but it's not on the surface, and it's not what it appears to be, and you have to go through a lot before you can be ready for it. There are exceptional people, exceptional young people, for whom it is right to go to Jung, even though they may not yet have satisfied Freud and Adler, but they are exceptional, and they will suffer—and not in a fantasy way; they'll suffer genuinely; their whole life will be disrupted; they'll be misfired; they won't be able to get the right occupation; they won't have the right friends; they won't be forming the right relationships; they'll withdraw from them all together or they'll become promiscuous in an attempt unconsciously to satisfy Freud and I wonder what the heck's going on. So in order to understand themselves, they collapse further into an ego which is itself undeveloped and therefore collapsed with respect to the chronological age and where they should be in terms of development, and then it inflates; it inflates with that are bigger than the life experience that they've had and should be retained until after they've had sufficient life experience to understand it. So there's a great deal to understand before it's safe to go near these concepts, which is why we're talking in the way that we are, really, which which is we're trying to be, as I guess, as measured as balanced as we can be and as frank about the reality of of Young's life and his context as we can be, whilst not rejecting those important things that that Young also stood for and continues to stand for. So it's, you know, it's being able to separate out Young the man and his context from anything else that might still be of value to us. And it, you, it's usually uh around the concept of meaning in some way, shape, or form when it comes to Jung.

But just to come back to—just briefly—to this again to to try and get back to a more base on understanding of things, if we if we again if we think about Jung's context and what was going on, and you mentioned um his infidelities, for example, which are are well documented; it's not like it's not something that we're bringing to the table; they are well known about and understood. You know, in a way you could argue that in terms of the power dynamics between him and his wife, Emma, that that would have been a great way of punishing her for looking after him or providing everything that she did materially. There's going to be some kind of compensation in the relationship; there's bound to be where that scenario exists. Can I can I just ask just for clarity? Yeah, the punishment would be from his own Adlerian sense of inferiority; yes, that he hadn't provided all of that for her; that's exactly it. Yeah, and on an instinctive level he would feel diminished, and the overcompensation would drop down to a Freudian level where he would gratify himself at the Adlerian level. So Adler conceals Freud; remember Freud always um seeks out Adler to hide itself within uh, and then he he's he's overcompensated for a sense of inferiority financially and social status in relationship to her, and that's the punishment; it is because he can then have any woman he wants, yeah, and they will—he he would have known that they would gravitate to his intellect, so it wouldn't have been difficult for him to do that. And then also the the were the issues around children because obviously they had a large family together, uh, and whilst obviously Emma had to go through the pregnancies and give birth to the children, he had a somewhat disdaining attitude towards the reproductive side of life. So maybe again, you know, you can see how they might be pushed back on the other side of the equation that, well, if you're going to do that, you you can furnish me with lots of children, and I will indulge myself reproductively in that way. And then you see the kickback from him which is, you know, the sort of the the dreariness of reproductive life to which he—which to which he referred in that way; he did to to Freud in in letters; he said the dreary cycle of biological events. Yeah, that was how he referred to his children; yes, the dreary cycle of biological events. Yeah, and as you say, the the conserved female instincts, once the nest is built on that scale, fill it up with children. Absolutely; my frustrations as a biological woman are being met at the Darwinian, Freudian, and even at the Adlerian level because each one of them is an an annoying reminder, yes, to her husband of the fact that she has power over him because she can produce life. Yeah, and it's her wealth that's provided the house, absolutely, and allowed him to indulge his fantasies. And then later she she became an analyst; she did um in her own right, albeit on Jung's—on Jung's direct control—probably tried to compete with Toni Wolff and the others and uh has never really achieved that level of recognition for doing that. Yeah, so uh you can see the whole dreary cycle of phylogenetic events and ontological events being acted out in Jung's life. It's important to know about these things, but not if you—if you don't have a biological perspective, you won't—you won't see it at all; no, just be blinded by the compensating fantasy. Yeah, whereas at his best he was very clear and would say, you know, "I'm Jung; you're not; go and do your own thing." That's right; individuate your own way; everything I say is part of my personal myth; that's what he said. Um, so it's an invitation to reject him. If you want to live according to Jung's actual way of understanding himself, you must be yourself. So to Jung to live by is not to be like him; Jung to live by is to be yourself; Jung to live by is to understand Freud and Adler first, and then if you want to be a therapist, you have to go out into the world, and you have to work with and for other people, not yourself, which is uh a very different configuration you get with a lot of these elitist analysts of all schools; Jung are probably the second worst after the Lacanians for for being like that. But um, reality, particularly now—now that the culture is where it at with respect to the pressures—and we're on the cusp of a potential anodia, so we…

Could it break down into chaos, or could it reform? Uh, we're moving through that time. Young men now need to adapt more than they've probably ever had to at any stage in their life thus far. You need to rise to the times and engage with them, but do so with your biology as well as with your sees.

Yeah, yeah. And women need to reclaim their femininity through the ancestral psyche, through a proper relationship to the ancestral psyche and better instincts. Otherwise, I'm—I'm looking at James here and his backdrop, and—and the kind of the Event Horizon—they will—they will go over the Event Horizon, and—and they will extinguish themselves. That—that's—that's where women are heading. They will—there'll be some though. Uh, of course, there's always some who will understand instinctively what's going on.

Yes. Uh, there are good women out there, there—that would be understood in the terms of what good meant in previous generations. Yeah, and that would be receptive enough—enough to bring relating through to the extent that male and female biological sexes relate and adjust one another and assist one another to optim and develop through their lifespan developments. But where there's only antagonism, that can't happen. And as you said, James, the young men should not give up. There are decent women out there, and if the men start to select themselves—that is to say, to select relationships with women rather than back off—but do it in the proper way, that will generate a Darwinian stressor which will force women to readjust themselves.

It's obviously not very woke to speak like this, but some of us were born before woke and have an access to the ancestral psyche for which these times within which we're living now is just a mere blink of an eyelid and a very, very long, long life—a life that's lasted millions upon millions of years. So we need to get access into that so we don't fall down into a very collapsed ego that—that lives off fantasy. Need to be reality-orientated.

Is it right if I follow up with you guys on some of the things you were saying earlier to try and dovetail elements and really the fantasy side of things together, um, and also the clinical empiricism side that you're mentioning too? Uh, I guess I'm—I'm going to address this next point to those young or relatively young men in the audience who I share a kindred spirit with, um, and I can sum that up, I suppose, by saying historically have struggled between idealism—but I wouldn't have used that term to be totally fair—you know what I would have said: Dante's Beatrice—that—that an idealist spirit versus the more cold, undeniable realities of existence—trying to sort of wrestle those two things together.

I mean, at the moment we're kind of undergoing a bit of a Platonic Renaissance in the culture, aren't we? Certain spheres on the internet—a lot of quite prominent academics are coming out and not just hypothesizing about Plato, but going full bore: Plato was right 100%. Um, fine. And cycles like that have happened throughout history. We've—we've discussed this before—uh, recently, Steve—off—off air—there was a huge resurgence in this around the time of the Renaissance, and then in the German Romantic Period there was a big Renaissance of this and vitalism and things like that. And it seems that perhaps Jordan Peterson in the public arena sort of kick-started this latest resurgence of interest in form, even though he's not particularly Platonic about it. I mean, you—you've spoken on that before in several videos and in professional training seminars. So it's a phase I feel that we're going through right now, and I find quite a lot of it really bloody annoying, to speak from instinct—the reason being is because most people who speak about Plato and the forms love speaking about the true, the good, and the beautiful, and why wouldn't you? That they're—they're fun, good topics. You'd be interested in those; they resonate with your value set. I very, very rarely hear people who speak on those things go into the darker parts of life, and that's the difference I feel for clinical empiricism and also personal development versus an academic approach.

If you're an academic, you study your data, and you pre-select your data in your topic beforehand based on what interests you, and you're probably going to be studying things that resonate deeply with you. But with clinical empiricism, you cannot deny the suffering you come across—the suffering before you come across any kind of idealism. It's the realities of human nature staring you right in the face. And so too for—for people watching our channel—they've—I've been willing to go—go out on a limb—say, for 99.9% of people, they're here because they were at least once in the past, or currently still are, suffering with something, and they want to authentically work that through. That should, if felt properly, break any dichotomy between this idealism and this everyday reality, because you can come to understand both of those things through your lived life—through the feeling factor. You would have called it feeling factor, I think, literally. But in other words, not just an abstract idea or a fantasy or a distraction into some transcendent realm—something Platonic, something ideal—but no, you're here, you're real. You've got forces that are way older than you pushing through you right now; they want certain things, and that is why you were suffering.

Yeah, that's—that's—that's the core of neurosis. You have two different instincts broadly competing with each other where problems haven't been solved before—either because you were younger or too stressed or whatever—complexes form in that gap and stop you accessing even recognition of the problem properly, and you can't solve it. So you're at war internally with things that want things—you need to access those—what they are—without any kind of fantasy. And you guys emphasize that all the time, and I'd like to emphasize that too, and also to—I suppose—extend for this video's purposes that clinical empiricism side of things to anyone who has or is authentically suffering—that they can find that within themselves too. And you don't need to be an academic to do that; you don't need to have X number of papers to do that; you don't—none of that is important. And when all's said and done, the human spirit will work itself through—not rote phases of up and down—um, ultimately, we will look back and see that a lot of this stuff was de facto part of the Darwinian test. And the internet has a hell of a lot—hell of a lot to answer for, but I don't know—maybe I just feel this way—probably I do—because uh, Nate turned three relatively recently, and he's speaking a lot more, and he's walking around, and he's playing with his cards, and he's doing what three-year-olds do. But when I look at him as a young man in progress, I would be so much happier if he focused on, as you guys phrase it, Freud and Adler first before disappearing off into Jung and Plato and fluff and fluff and fluff and fluff and fluff. No, get your life together, son, is how I feel—but in a warm way towards him—and I didn't anticipate that, you know, but that's—I don't know what that is—working through me per se—but I thought very, very strongly about that: the world is not a friendly place, and for him—you know, my son—that any other men out there who sort of feel the same way about themselves or others—that will bring you through. Drop the fantasies completely; they are a massive, massive problem.

Yeah, I'd say that was the ancestral psyche—the ancestral role of the father—because fathers were neutered progressively uh, through the baby boomer years, um, forced to soften. And I know, of course, a lot of fathers, certainly in my generation, were quite brutal towards young boys from—from—from my generation, and that's obviously too much, and it's too extreme. But a father should be a father, not another mother. And if he is neutered to that extent, then he will not be able to prepare his son properly for the mouth of the cave and the world beyond, uh, and that has all sorts of issues attached to it. And we all—all three—know of an awful lot of people who come through to work with us who've suffered in that way. Obviously, an absent father is a problem, but a present father who is absent in other ways—or—or be he is physically present—is also a problem. The right kind of relationship is important, and really the father should prepare Freud and Adler for—for his son first. And by Freud, I don't mean the sexualization of the child or anything like that, which is going on through woke, of course, um, but other than that, Freud in the sense of having a healthy relationship to what Freud, for us, represents—which is instincts—not the negative, dark side of instincts that—that Freud drew down into his construct of the id—but of all of the healthy instincts—the healthy adaptation to biology—and then the social side, which is the positive side of Adler—what he was striving for—and his model then builds the receptacle of the child who has integrated instincts to move into society as an individual. Only when those needs have been met should we really start to think about the Jungian stuff—and only the Jungian stuff—which in and of itself is not contaminated by the fluff and the other stuff that you were mentioning, you know, which is out there.

Yeah, and any kind of idealistic fantasy, if it has a genuine core to it—something that we could in the culture look at and see as genuinely sort of mythopoetic—and it survived for a long time—that should be aspirational and be held as a standard from within—not to expect it unconsciously in the environment around you and then get, first of all, disappointed, and then—we've seen it many times—people getting overtly depressed over the fact that what they expect and anticipate isn't there. It doesn't mean that the Platonic side isn't real—even in a value sense—and what you expect isn't real, or it's childish, or it's juvenile—it's nothing like that. The world isn't responsive to it right now, but you can hold that inside yourself as your standard. And I—I feel the way to communicate it, I feel, is: don't give that to anybody else; do not let that die. But if you don't attend to the Darwinian stuff or the—the basic adaptation, you lose in that sense—Plato, in that sense, will lose to Darwin in a snapshot of time. Yeah, every single time. It's a cruel reality, but it's reality.

Well, I—I was just thinking about what you said, obviously, from the—the reverse direction, thinking as—as a mother uh, who has a—a now a grown-up son and who's—who's recently married—and just how important it is when that handover occurs—which is, you know, of course, absolutely as it should be uh, and—and natural—that I think from a—a woman—a mother's perspective—the thing that she wants the most for her son from a life partner is someone who will love and care to the same degree or extent as—as she has done uh, throughout her life as her son's been growing up. And—um, you know, that's—of course, that's what we'd want for sons and daughters—but—um, I'm just thinking about that sort of unique relationship or configuration between a mother and a son and the trajectory of that relationship—and at an instinctive—at a biological level really—um, what mothers want for their sons if things proceed, obviously, uh, you know, in a natural and appropriate way. So the idea of there being women out there or life partners um, for their sons who will be appreciative of their son in—in the same way that they've been and continue to be—then, to me, that's—that's the ultimate goal—that's the—the teleology, if you like, of that relationship uh, as understood from a biological perspective and beyond.

I was going to say that—that's—that's really Plato instantiated within—yes—Darwin. It is—so the two are working together—so Darwin becomes the efficient cause of Plato's uh, instantiation into the world. Yeah, um, it's unfortunate—it seems that we need it—we—the way that this universe domain is set up—that we need something like Darwin to bring that about uh, but that's the way it seems that it is. But we can experience in what you've said, for example, where you get Darwin and Plato merging together. Yeah, for one aim—yes—and the ultimate aim is probably purely Platonic—yes—even though the words, if they sound purely Platonic, it—it's wrapped around Darwin. It is. Yeah, um, but later on from that—if that succeeds—that kind of relationship—there is a possibility that the Platonic in and of itself will emerge into the psyche of the—of the now adult—yes—offspring—um, and—uh, who knows what good that will do in the world? Yeah, certainly for consciousness—it will move things on—so yeah, it's—it's a struggle, but it's not necessarily read in two—and Plato—if you can bring the Platonic online with it, it softens it—in the manner that you've just described—because everything you've said could have been said otherwise with a Darwinian and a Freudian emphasis or angle upon it, and it would distort it—the uh, the instantiated ancestral psyche that was speaking through you then has within it and behind it the Platonic intentionality. It does. That's absence when somebody focuses, say, in a Richard Dawkins way, yeah, uh, on something in purely biological—ical—adaptive—reproductive—evolutionary outcomes—so biology is important, but we've got to have play with it. And when you—when we get both, we actually get the best side of Jung emerging naturally out from that, and I think that's the message that—that he was trying to get across when he said: sort out Freud and Adler first, then you're ready—the Platonic will instantiate—yeah—then lots of things will make sense. But if you don't get that right, it will not work.

Yeah, and what you said, I think, in a very direct and natural and real way was to find the form of words and the feeling behind it, which shows what happens when Darwin and Plato work together.

Absolutely, Steve, because again, in just—in very ordinary terms, you know, if a mother finds um, her son's life partner uh, agreeable, shall we say—that—that she feels as if uh, he—she has the right um, values and attitudes towards her son and will be loving and caring of him—that means that the—the mother is free to love the prospective partner or um, wife or whatever that relationship is—and that's more likely to—that's more likely to uh, work as well when it comes to uh, the next generation uh, when it comes to that couple reproducing uh, and—and having children—children—and therefore the mother then becomes the grandmother—then her relationship to them as a couple and to her grandchildren is also assured because the right kinds of—of acknowledgements are being made instinctively um, and also, as you say, uh, at a Platonic level—at the level of meaning—what all those things mean in a very deep and—um—instinctive and conserved way—and—and as we always say, that's for us—that's where the—the transcendent lies in biology—yeah—when—when you feel through those ideas—there—there is a—there is a completeness there—a wholeness to them which is—is—it's very satisfying—yeah—in a Platonic way—yeah—so like you say, the two together—um—absolutely—absolutely—they're inseparable really—yeah—for all the reasons that you've said—and of course, in the real world, it does always run like that—in fact, the starting point's important—you know—what's the state of the parents—and we have to discuss this because a lot of people—ourselves included—had unfortunately less than adequate parenting—absolutely—yeah—and that can hinder you, but it need not stop you—because as we said, there is an ancestral representation which we can describe in biological terms, but we can also describe it in a conjoin superposition way of being Platonic and biological—so the meaning that is latent within the biology is not hidden by the biology—although under normal conditions this is what we see—we can say uh, for example, as we do in the uh, the Darwin—sorry—the Pl—Darwin principle—that Plato seeks Darwin—Darwin can seal Plato—but eventually the soul transcends by uniting them both—now latently they are united—the differentiation occurs—the split occurs in the developing life of an individual that has to meet the demands of an environment over which they have no control when they're a child—so they—they also can't pick their parents—they can't pick their circumstances—so given that they have to be able to adapt to that—and that environment that they are born into will include the psychology of the parents—Jung himself said: no one can individuate until they are free from the psychology of the parents—and this is one of the main reasons why—because if they cannot release what Jung meant by the appropriate archetypes and what Anthony Stevens meant uh, to prevent frustration of archetypal intents—then the complexes that form around a developing child will all be inhibitory to their development. The way out of that is to go back—you have to go in to go back—because ancestral psyche is conserved within—we can meet it through projection in the culture—and that's a valid way so long as we understand what we're meeting—this goes back to what I was saying earlier about mythology and a superpositioning effect—when we relate properly—so this latent Platonic information and representation which is part of our biology—then we can develop properly, and we can overcome things that have happened to us—really horrendous things when we were children—all kinds of abuse—all kinds of internalized beliefs based on parents who were not themselves properly developed or inadequate in some sense—completely absent—wherever the configuration might be—this is possible, and we know this because we've worked with so many people in depth—this is the clinical empiricism that—out from that—we've uncovered the—the reality of it—and someone who has only a philosophical or an abstract scientific model of that kind of thing cannot understand it—they will default back to those ideas with which they identify—those processes of thinking and building virtual models will be the reality that they experience on the inside, and they then project that out onto real people—so this is why we have to drop all of that—and Jung himself again said: set aside all theory—work with people and experience the reality of them—so there is a lot in Jung, but you've got to hack through the nonsense that's out there on the internet to get at it—we cannot assume that it's just there and that we will understand it—it's got to be pressure-tested—that's so important—because life is about pressure-testing—and that should include anything that we internalize or identify with—it includes what we talk about—that should be pressure-tested—yes—really pressure-tested—it's not virtual—it's all about the doing of it—the doing within our own lives—and the doing of it by working with other people—that's where it's all proven—so those people—those academics, if you're like, Steve—who—who talk about Platonic ideas um, may not necessarily have any direct experience—no—of what the Platonic means—and that only really comes, as you say, through what—principally—through working with other people—yeah—obviously, to some extent you can do it through your own personal development—but—but it—it's not sufficient unto itself—you really need that contact with other people to bring it online—you do—otherwise, at best you'll become a philosopher of the very worst kind—one basically who's interested only in themselves and believes that their internal experience and virtual modeling applies to everyone else—if you don't pressure-test it—that is the inevitable result—because pressure-testing means you are pressure-tested—it's not just the ideas, but your own character—everything is pressure-tested through relating—and particularly in that kind of situation—so not CBT—not person-centered so-called superficial psychotherapy or counseling—but true depth—which is no longer, as you were saying, James, earlier—psychologically reductive—it's approaching people as entire fields which are superpositioned together—we—we've explained this before in—in—in other videos—so no need to go into too much detail here and now on that—but without that field understanding that is connected through relating—nothing happens—nothing changes—so that's the sine qua non—and—not without—you have to pressure-test through relating—beyond yourself—with others—okay—wai for a goodbye—bye—oh, bloody hell—you've gone right back to levity again, James—after—after the serious lengthy interlude—I—I say every single episode of this: I hate the goodbyes because I know as soon as we click the stop button you're still there—so I'm lying—I'm lying to myself—I'm lying to the world—I'm lying to you—and that's inconsistent with—with my Platonic values—so goodbye—okay—well, it's—it's goodbye from O—and it's goodbye from him—blessings—see you.

Soon, J. Thank you. Take care. Bye now.