This is KZSU Stanford.
In one of the very first episodes of entitled opinions, back in 2005, I talked about the
difference between knowledge and self-knowledge, between an objective understanding of nature
and a subjective understanding of the human psyche.
It dismates me as much today as it did back then that governments and corporations
invest billions upon billions of dollars in scientific research every year,
yet commit only a tiny and diminishing fraction of that to advance the cause of self-knowledge.
In today's show, we're going to discuss the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
So let's hear what he had to say on this topic back in the 40s and 50s.
I quote Jung, "Everything possible had been done for the outside world.
Science has been refined to an almost unimaginable extent.
Technical achievement has reached an almost uncanny degree of perfection."
But what of man who is expected to administer all these blessings in a reasonable way?
No one has stopped to consider that neither morally nor psychologically is he in any way
adapted to such changes.
Man has come to be man's worst enemy.
It is a clash between man and God in which man's luciferian genius
has produced the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient God could.
We must begin to learn more about man until every Jekyll can see his hide.
Another quote, "Nowadays the world hangs by a thin thread and that thin thread is the psyche of man.
We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. But we know nothing about the psyche.
Nothing. Man himself is the greatest threat to man.
For the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics,
which are infinitely more devastating than the worst natural catastrophes."
What has become ever more clear since Jung wrote that is that our failure to know ourselves
impacts our knowledge of as well as our relation to the natural world.
The more we unlock its secrets, the more we detach ourselves from nature,
and the more we detach ourselves from nature, the more ominous becomes the threat of human self-destruction.
Our runaway scientific and technological progress has eradicated what Jung called our bush soul.
That is a soul in us that once connected us to the creaturely world
and that once spoke to stones, springs, plants, and animals alike.
According Jung again, our immediate communication with nature is gone forever
and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious.
This enormous loss is compensated by the symbols of our dreams.
Jung believed that only by delving into the depths of our unconscious and interpreting the symbols
that have sedimented there can become to know and hence come to terms with the psychic forces
that haunt us, that agitate deep within us, and that when excessively repressed can provoke
the world destroying psychic epidemics behind the two world wars, the holocaust, the adamant hydrogen
bombs, and any number of collective catastrophes to come.
On today's show, my colleague Laura Whitman is going to help us think about how and why Carl Jung
felt that it was necessary to undertake a catabassus that is to say a descent into the
underworld of the unconscious in order to confront the buried, darker, and even pre-historical
psychic forces that have accumulated there over long durations.
What is the unconscious? What are its primary symbols and archetypes?
Are dreams the main portals into the self's underworld?
These are questions I will be putting to Laura Whitman, who is a professor of literature in the
Department of French and Italian here at Stanford. Laura is a widely published author whose recent
work has led her into the fields of psychology, mysticism, and the medical humanities.
She has not only been a frequent guest on this show, she is the one who joined me in the very first
episode of entitled opinions back in September 2005. It's a pleasure to welcome her back.
Laura, thanks for joining us again here in the catacombs of KZSU.
Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here again.
I mentioned that Jung really believed in the need for a catabassus or descent.
However, that kind of descent into the unconscious can only be undertaken by the single individual.
I think he believed with the guidance perhaps of the psychotherapist.
I think it's crucial to keep in mind that although Jung is famous for his idea of the collective
unconscious, he was firmly committed to the centrality of the individual in psychotherapy.
There is no such thing as collective therapy for him. Again, if I get him right,
Jung also felt that he could not help his patients get in touch with their own unconscious selves unless
he himself first went to the deepest levels of his own psyche, which he in fact did between the years
1914 and 1930. He really did go all the way down, recording the extended journey and what came to be
known as his the Red Book. The Red Book only got published half a century after his death in 2009.
You and I both think that it occupies a central place in Jung's development. So why don't we
start by putting it in some sort of context? What was going on in Jung's life and career
before 1914 that led him to resolve upon this voluntary descent into what some people view as a
form of madness in fact? Yeah, that's a great question and I think it's important to realize
Jung had been working as a psychotherapist for quite some time and he was working with
mainly schizophrenic patients and he had come to collaborate with a number of people, Jeane and of course
most famously Freud, but in this moment around 1912 or 13, he really became convinced that his
patients ran as it were, contained this powerful symbolic message and that there was a whole
world that was being revealed in what they were saying and that's really what led him to start
thinking about the collective unconscious and how he himself might experience it more directly and I
want to say I think very important is to go back and realize that this was a very transgressive
idea to try to derive meaning from what these patients were saying and at the time what we know
as psychoanalysis and psychotherapy was still very much in the air and it was very dangerous for
Jung to undertake this exploration of what indeed could be considered psychotic material so yeah.
So in other words the assumption that it was all nonsensical gibberish and not in any way
revelatory of some deeper pattern underneath or even the assumption you know I think Freud was
working his way or discussing the whole idea of certain very clear patterns that might be revealed
patterns of repression and repressed material returning and I think Jung felt that this was both
two systematic that everyone would have the same patterns be revealed and to authoritative for
materials that for Jung came from much deeper than where Freud was looking so he was thinking about
prehistoric genetic anthropological elements and so he looked at world religions to
find connections to what his patients were saying so much broader sort of reservoir.
Yeah well we can discuss later I don't want to get into the polemics of my kind of views on whether
this assumption of his that there was something that lent itself to a hermeneusus in this
psychotic discourse of his patients actually bore fruit in terms of legibility of neurosis.
Now as I understand it around this time his relationship to Freud he started getting slowly
disenchanted I don't know if it was a sudden thing or a gradual thing but Freud was also developing
his theory of the unconscious very reductive in some ways to the nuclear family you know mommy and
daddy sexual edible complexes and so forth and I I gather that Jung felt that that was limiting
the very concept of the unconscious and was putting it a little bit of a straight jacket, right?
Absolutely and I think he felt that the it hit we was almost becoming a requirement to fit
dream material for instance into this kind of scenario the sort of early family scenario and
Jung was much more curious about what was going on both with his patients and very quickly in his own
self right this idea that your first approach to the unconscious should really be one of extreme
curiosity as well as caution but an awareness that you truly don't know right that we we have
as you said in your intro gotten in a sense so far away from the instinctive and the irrational
that we have very few tools to approach it except perhaps for this kind of radical openness
you know and then we should talk about how he started to invent techniques for getting more in touch
yes we should talk about that let's go to you know 1912-1914 does he break with Freud before he
decides that he must confront the unconscious I think he has a chapter in memories dreams reflections
and it is about what he did for for those years in which he was taking all these notes for
the red book yeah it's um I would say that that's a hard question to answer because it's all
happening at the same time and you know traditionally people talk about the book symbols and
transformations of the libido that came out in 1913 as this place where he breaks with Freud by
bringing up the importance of religious imagination but in fact a lot of that was added in a later
addition and so it's I think it's gradual and I think it involves Jung not planning to break with
Freud but truly feeling that Freudian theory was not enough and he describes feelings suspended
which I think is this feeling of there's all of this unconscious material he's confronted with
and he doesn't know what to do with it right and so it's it's sort of and Freud isn't
is no longer providing me with the answer of what to do and now I have to figure it out on my own
so it's a moment of personal crisis for himself and I think that's what leads to what we know as
the red book yeah and speaking of religion you mentioned it you know Freud had a very
psychoanalytic interpretation of religion in the future of an illusion it was just kind of
reducing it to kind of glorified father figure in God and Jung I think believed that religions
contained a lot of clues to what you call the unknown or perhaps even unknowable contents of the
unconscious absolutely and he ended up after he had his own experiences sort of searching world
religions and mystical traditions in order to find parallels with his own discoveries so some
of his key encounters that he experienced directly in these visionary states he had he then found
confirmation or corroboration parallelisms in world religions and I think the most basic
one would be that in so many traditions we have a descent into the darkness or into the night
a shamanic journey you could call it but it's very common right that there's this descent
often through death that you have to pass through so it is a for him it was in a recurrent
view of how you go into the darkness of the unconscious and you truly risk your sanity your rational
self your consciousness and hopefully you come out on the other side and that other side I'm
curious whether the other side was a restoration of what we ordinarily understand a sanity
namely that we overcome what could be the the more deleterious potential of the contents of the
deep unconscious and the irrationality and that is coming out on the other side restoration of
rationality in any way or is it some sort of truce between the rational and the irrational
forces of the self I think of it more as a dance than a truce but I don't think it was a
re-establishment of what you had before I think the goal was to find a way to work with the fact that
you are also a very irrational being and that many of your decisions desires life choices ways
to resolve crises have these very deep what we would consider irrational impulses behind them and if
you can learn to work with that instead of against it then I think he felt that you you have a
better you know yourself better to go back to the sense of self knowledge but this self knowledge
can also help you in your dealings with others. So in the red book we have really extraordinary
document I as soon as it came out in 2019 I bought you know the big huge totality because it was
actually being sold at an extreme discount on Amazon for some reason you could get it there for
$80 so I still have this big thing that's heavy enough that I can't even bring it on and off campus
and it's not just textual it's also a lot of artwork full of symbols and recounting of dreams
and I take it that he was actually putting into this ledger his visions his dreams and it's hard
for me to believe that anyone dreams in these kind of traditional or traditional say archaic religious
symbols and I mean I've never dreamt about Dionysus or you know some sort of um you'll hire
Joe yes but he seemed to be a very highly literate erudite dreamer let's put it that way yes no I mean
I think first I want to back up just a little bit and say that before he started having these
visions that we know as the red book which is this beautiful object his first reaction to being in
crisis was to start building something like rock and sandcastles so sort of a thing that he had
done as a child and I think it's important because the the building is very physical and it's very
close to it's finding a reconnection with the earth that you brought up at the beginning
and he described the red book itself as a cathedral so we're progressing in building but it's
still sort of the same image and so the book itself records this long period of time when he would
you know see patients and have regular family life during the day and then descend into this
visionary state at night and he would record the visionary state and then later in transcribing it
added all of these it looks like an illuminated manuscript for people who haven't seen it's very
beautiful it has all of these illustrations but I think a fundamental thing here is that
the visionary state that he entered it wasn't dreaming in the sense that dreaming is relatively
involuntary but it was active imagination so he would seek it out these states and he talks at
various points not as much as I think therapists wishes he did but he does talk about how to achieve
this state and how various religious traditions have techniques for getting there so in particular
there's the visual technique of if you see something that comes sort of unbidden into your mind
instead of sort of ignoring it or pushing it away you try to examine it and focus on it
in this very open-minded kind of way you know what more do you have to tell me and gradually
enter the world of that image right and then the image can expand and talk to you now that said
many therapists have pointed out that there are actually very few people who can who are good at
getting into this particular state yeah it's a kind of lucid dreaming state now a little bit yes
and Jung talks about in a I think an essay that deserves to be read more the transcendent function
so an old essay written I believe as early as 1916 but then reworked in the 50s he talks about how
there are other techniques and he includes things like automatic writing but also making sculptures
or even dancing or physical movement and all these things have since then become tools for various
types of psychotherapy work with the unconscious so he was clearly a very visual you know richly
visual person and then also he was extraordinarily iridite on I think when he read the texts of
religious traditions he was clearly pulled into them in an extraordinary way but what about
patients of his who did not have his erudition and were relatively ignorant about these traditions
symbolic religious and shamanic and so how would you help a patient who dreams in a completely
different manner than the one that seems to promise an entry into the mysteries or the
mysterious of the unconscious well I think that's where there is some system atization to Jung's
thinking so let's just take an example that is more present day where often people go to psychotherapy
when they have a crisis and they have a decision that is very cannot be made rationally right this is
often how it's described so divorce isn't often the example but also things like having a child
where you know you're going to become a different person how can you make a decision in a rational way
and I think Jung in therapy tends to work with whatever medium can work for the patient so it might
be images that appear in dreams it might be try to work on automatic writing which I think works
better for some people than the visualization but the material doesn't have to be biblical you know
it doesn't have to be salome that you encounter but I think Jung uses the categories that he derived
both from his own experience and the tradition so categories like Anima, Shadow and in that sense he
does use those archetype categories to connect to the material that comes from patients
into those yeah and as I mentioned in the intro it's all based on the individual psyche
how can we think the primacy of the individual in Jung's not only a theory of the psyche but also
his social critique that he engages in quite a bit later in life especially in you know the late
40s early 50s very critical and disdainful of mass society and of forms of government that
treat individuals just as part of what today we would call big data and larger patterns and so
forth so very focused on the centrality the individual and yet his most famous concept I think is
out of the collective unconscious so does the individual psyche merely participate in the
collective unconscious is why is it impossible to do a kind of collective therapy and try to get
the society as a whole to understand its own pathologies at the institutional and political levels
and so forth yeah I mean I think we would love the answer to that one but I think Jung's view is that
the unconscious can be collective precisely because it is unconscious and what comes into consciousness
is the realm of the individual right so we as individuals are that fulcrum where the unconscious material
comes into contact with consciousness and I almost think of it as a contact point between
consciousness and the unconscious material and each of us is a different contact point so we will
have different a different experience of what that looks like so in Troy do you have the
the ego is the individual and ego for you no I think the ego is part of the individual he talks about
the self as being much broader much broader has to be much broader than an ego no right the ego is
in a sense the the rational controlling self if you like I think he would just simply say the self
that believes that all it is is the conscious mind right and but you are much more than your
conscious mind and so yourself is broader and a lot of that self is created when unconscious materials
connect with you and you in a sense have this decision point of what you do with those materials
do you reject them or do you learn to work with them and I think the rejection it often comes from
fear yes right and I just wanted to maybe read one of the passages where Jung talks about how this
felt to him when when he first encountered it yeah so at the early in the red book he talks about
meeting the spirit of the depths and this is how he describes it the spirit of the depths have
subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment he took away my belief in science he robbed
me of the joy of explaining and ordering things and he let devotion to the ideas of this time
die out in me he forced me down to the last and simplest things the spirit of the depths
took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable
and paradoxical melting together sense and nonsense which produces the supreme meaning
but the supreme meaning is the path the way and the bridge of what is to come so you can feel
Jung truly not wanting to let go of his rational self and discovering that he needs to make this
bridge between what we might call the ego and the broader self yeah so a few months back we did a
show on Peter Kingsley and the dark places of wisdom and that was more about for many days but
for many days is an archetype of someone who undertakes his journey into the night to meet forces
that are much deeper than that of rationality or logos and Peter Kingsley has a book called the
Catafel which is some people think is like his real masterpiece in which he claims that the red
book of Carl Jung is like one of the most important books of the 20th century because it was a true
descent into irrationality and into madness without any banisters if you want to use that metaphor
and that he has this notion of the insanity of reason and that the only way to do a proper
sort of therapy for the insanity of reason is to go deep into the irrationality of these elements
deep down that is a rather hard sell for me and so far as I think yes on the one hand
rationality does have this tendency to translate itself into completely irrational behaviors
and decisions I mean I'm thinking the World War I as a kind of collective suicide of Europe that
was on the one hand perfectly rational but on the other hand I think it's not by chance that in 1914
he really begins this descent because that's the kind of madness pathological symptoms in political
social reality that an unmastered relationship to the unconscious can bring about
and that wasn't enough and when we got World War II we have all sorts of other things and we're
living in the moment of where you know we have all sorts of forces from the id that are
uninhibitedly taking charge of what was what's supposed to be the controlling rational forces of
the let's say the institutional ego which keeps these forces kind of in containment so
how do you understand that relationship between the rational and the irrational again I'm going
back to the question I asked earlier you called it a dance yeah I said it's a true so yeah I think it's
crucial it is a threshold as you see yeah it's it's really fundamental and I think one part of the
answer is that for you own our situation back at the time of World War I and probably even more
today if you were around to see it is one where we have suppressed the irrational so much that
to get it back we have to take extreme measures right and otherwise its danger has become magnified so
you know this is you know maybe a bit of an aside but to some extent he felt that Christianity
was responsible for developing a religion that was so fixated on only the good and in a sense
eclipsing evil as a category and we can think about how by the 20th century even the existence
of hell even Christians don't believe in hell right this is the sort of thing that Jung would vastly
object to and sort of say we've pretended that evil is a non-existent force and this is how it
becomes empowered is precisely through this pretense so we've kind of backed ourselves into a
corner where the sort of dissent that we see in the red book is necessary now I don't quite agree
with Kingsley that it's a complete abandoning yourself to irrational forces because Jung himself talks
about how you know he had the diurnal life and the nocturnal life and he talked about how the
diurnal life of seeing patients and having a family was his anchor so that he could undertake this
journey and I think it's really important to remember that when we when we think about undergoing
such journeys ourselves right what will our anchor be and I think this then it speaks to this question
of how does this very solitary thing Jung is doing and and suggests that we should all do
how does it connect us to other people I think it it is where we are more honest about our own
nighttime journey and we undertake it with I dare call it something like sincerity truthfulness
we come out and are able to relate to others without projecting so much of our need for rationality
and goodness and control and all these other things on to other people so the two worlds balance
each other out so Laura about the archetypes which is another major kind of milestone in Jungian
psychology is there also the enjoinder to get in touch with the archetypes I mean do the archetypes
in hair in our unconscious or are they merely the sort of condensation of many different figures
in folklore legend mythology religion how do you understand Jung's concept of the archetype well I
think they are this conglomeration in some case so first thing I think we can say that for Jung
they could be potentially and we could always add more archetypes discover more so there's no
limit to what you can find but I think some of them say the anima that we can talk about a little bit
more the shadow the old white the wise old man the magician these are figures that indeed
conglomerate across many traditions and times and places and psychies and so they acquire a kind of
almost a kind of weight and visibility and usefulness in that they seem to be figures that we all
have to encounter at some point right so the anima is often connected with the vulnerable the
irrational the instinctive and the part of oneself that is in a sense shameful especially in a patriarchal
culture where it's important to be strong and associated with the feminine is right right
you know and I think the the magician is an interesting one I think for us to think about today
the magician is sort of a passage that you go through you think that you have mastered the
unconscious you have you've done your work and suddenly you find yourself feeling that you have
more power and that's always a dangerous moment in shamanic journeys or mystical experiences
when you think that you've you know now I now I've got it I'm under control so the magician is
self-deceived well the magician you have to go through that phase of being the magician
but yes to some extent the magician also has to realize that the unconscious still retains its
autonomy its power you you don't control it you you can be in conversation with it but you can't just wave
your hand and have it do what you want right what are some of the other major ones well I think the
concept of shadow is a big one I'm not sure we could it's a very interesting archetype in the
sense that the shadow is what our conscious mind is most loathe to recognize as part of ourselves
so it can be lots of things depending on what aspects of yourself you find most disturbing
so that's another one that's really important just union psychoanalysis involve a lot of
invocation of archetypes I mean I'm curious you know in Italy for example which I know Italian
Roman sighted a lot of people are into union psychoanalysis I have no idea what goes on
in those sessions but I have a feeling that they're not probing you know these archetypes
and connecting you know a particular patient with with his or her you know the archetypes in
the unkind I think it's more a lot of self introspection and a lot of sort of discourse so I'm just
curious what role it's supposed to play in therapy if any yeah I mean I think it's it's the role of
catalyst so you might read the red book and find it inspiring or disturbing or find some of the
figures intriguing and that could catalyze your own imagination but I think Jung was you know a firm
believer in not providing specific figures that you should hope to encounter in your own therapy right so
in a sense the idea is that all of us would develop our own personal mythology so you might encounter
some figures that recur in the mythologies of various traditions but I think he felt that it was
much more valuable if people could develop their own right so I think that's part of what goes on in
analysis so in Freudian psychoanalysis there's a kind of end point there's there's this kind of
promise that if you follows the right trajectory you will end up you know transferring a great
deal onto this and that you will finally cure whatever sort of neurosis comes from the
relation traumatic relations you had with your parents and early childhood or infancy what is the end
point for you I mean he believed in an integrated psyche I think right and that integrated psyche also
had I suppose maintain some kind of opposition you know the coincidence of opposites and so forth
yeah yeah I think that the end point was the point where you yourself would be able to undertake
on a regular basis this reconnection with the unconscious you could do it yourself
I think that was really the end point and we can think about Jung himself after he stopped writing
in the red book or in his black books and then the red book he a few years later started building
what became his home the tower that was a stone initially one stone tower that he built you know with
his own hands which is quite an undertaking and there were four different buildings and then a fifth
one that was a second floor and he described this work as another version of creating the red book
right a trace of his own going into the depths and I think that really speaks to what you were
saying at the beginning about coming into this very visceral contact with the earth yes you know he
he dug stones out of the ground and out of the lake nearby and this was very significant for
his construction and for the way he wanted to live his day to day life yeah you see that aspect of
his thought appeals to me a lot more because I can imagine the problem I have with the unconscious
is that it's something within a human psyche and that it's not the earth it's not in the actual
humus where the dead have been buried where our relation to animals and natural elements it can be
fire water all these things which never become archetypes are in because his archetypes are I think
mostly human personifications but this idea that you could actually rediscover your kinship with the
the creatures of the natural world animate and inanimate that promises a kind of larger
integration of the human and the natural that would maybe indicate a deeper understanding of what
sanity actually consists in. Yeah I agree I mean I think your direction is a very Jungian one in
the sense that he saw the connection we could make by accepting our unconscious selves as a deeper and
deeper connection to the earth to who we are in an embedded in a world right and I think that he talks
about the Anima that we described as you know that if you like your vulnerable self the young woman
the image that we encounter often in Jungian text but he connects it to the Anima Mundi which is I
know something you've thought about a lot and maybe I can read a quote from the very end of his
memories dreams and reflections where I think it comes across the sort of expansiveness
and ultimately optimism about how you know what we will find if we delve into the unconscious
so this is what he writes whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence God is love
the words affirm the complexio positorum of the Godhead so the opposition the
Bunion of opposites of the Godhead in my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and
again been faced with the mystery of love and have never been able to explain what it is
here is the greatest and the smallest the remotest and the nearest the highest and the lowest
and we cannot discuss one side of it without also discussing the other for we are in the deepest
sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic love being a part man cannot grasp the whole
he is at its mercy man can try to name love showering upon it all the names at his command and he
still will involve himself in endless self-deceptions if he possesses a grain of wisdom he will lay
down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown in yotum pet in yotus that is by the name
of God that is a confession of his subjection his imperfection and his dependence but at the same
time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error okay he mentions their God sometimes
it sounds like you was trying to resurrect a traditional notion of God at other times he seems to
suggest that certainly the Judeo Christian notion of a God is not doing justice to all the
different divinities which are kind of multiplied and diversified in and to kind of pantheon of
you know different figures so was he a believer in the traditional religious sense I think he was
a believer in not of in any one specific religion but in the pursuit of as he puts it in the
red book right the the birth of the new god and I think he considered the task of modern humanity
to be to overcome the way institutionalized religions tend to objectify the divine reify it turn
it into an object and he I think wanted the sort of religion that is about you know he uses the
word the way I think I quoted it earlier right so it's about this constant re bridging of the gap
with the Animamundi with the world with others with one's own unconscious with the collective unconscious
so it's a process rather than an object and so the process is going to be different for each person
I'm also very curious about his importance for the counterculture of the 60s and the and he
really is the guru of the psychedelic age and people you know belonging to those traditions
found in him their major spokesperson no what was this connect is it one that is substantial enough
to say that it was like Herbert Marchecoose era of uncivilization he's had a Jungian
Texan spirit and his relation to the psychedelic I mean there's nothing more psychedelic to me than
the red book when you look at that and it's completely psychedelic yeah agreed agreed and I think
even though the red book of course wasn't out and they didn't have access to it they read
memories dreams and reflections which I think you know coming out in 57 was you know perfectly
poised to be ready for the psychedelic movement and it contains a lot of things people have described
the red book as a psychoactive substance right so you take you absorb it and it catalyzes a journey
that is your own journey and I think people found Jung's willingness to use a symbolic language
to describe what was happening to him that is borrowed his eclecticism right his mix of west and east
was very resonant I think with the 60s thinking and so there are certain even images from his work
that have remained fundamental like this dream where he he feels that he is being dreamed by a yogi
who is asleep you know this is a very famous one that has stayed with the psychedelic movement
and I think there are some deep truths in it in the sense that the psychedelic movement itself was
doing something very Jungian in terms of questioning the excesses of rationality that we started off
with right so they were right right this was an era when a lot of the environmental crisis that
we have now for instance was already quite visible and on the radar and no one wanted to see it right
and they were really trying to point the finger so I think that was very much in the spirit of Jung
then of course like any anything that becomes very popular I think some Jungian concept have become
very watered down like you know like the shadow I think is it's hard to say even what that means
anymore at some point but but it's beautiful what they did with Jung I think in general okay so
last question Laura so our show and you don't have to answer it but I am curious would you call
yourself a Jungian if so why yes would I call myself a Jungian well you know he didn't want
disciples but yes I think I would call myself a Jungian and I think I would because I believe we
well because I grew up learning about world religions all of them and watching people
invent their faith it's hard not to when you travel the world and you see how people actually
live out different religions they stop being these systems on paper and they start being
far more irrational but also very effective and I found that I found that absolutely fascinating
and profoundly real I feel like it says something about my own life and how you know I'm always
cobbling together reasons to believe whatever I believe in that are made up of my own
you know my own background my what what I've experienced so I think in that sense I am very much
a Jungian well that's very reassuring because if you're the outcome of a Jungian spirit then
then it's all for the good well I'm honored thank you on a reminder our listeners we've been
speaking with Professor Laura Whitman from my own department of French and Italian here at Stanford
and the very first guest in the very first episode back in 2005 so always a pleasure Laura thanks
for coming on thank you I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions thanks for listening
take the highway to the end of the night you ain't got trying to go right midnight the night and of the night
realms of lives some of them just we did
some of them just we did like some of them to the end of the night
one of them the one of them the one of them the one.
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