Show Notes
What did Jung mean by ‘The Shadow’? What did he mean by making the Unconscious conscious? What is integrating the shadow so useful for us and our relationships?
In this episode we cover the fascinating topic of Carl Jung’s concept of ‘The Shadow’ in analytic psychology; a term that has become overused in pop psychology and seems to be understood in many different ways depending on who you talk to.
To clarify the mystery, our guest today is one of the worlds most published and respected Jungian analysts, teachers, authors and commentators, Dr James Hollis. After a career teaching literature, he then retrained to become a Jungian analyst, and is still lecturing, writing books and giving psychotherapy at 83. He has written 19 books on Jungian themes, among which ‘Why good people do bad things: understanding our darker selves’ which we’ll touch on today.
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro.
08:00 ‘The Shadow’ according to Jung.
08:30 A Reluctance to face what contradictory, disturbing or challenging.
11:00 4 ways the shadow manifests:
11:10 1) Unconsciously: everyone else deals with the consequences.
11:40 2) Projected onto others: we disown what we don’t accept in ourselves.
12:00 3) Being possessed by the shadow.
13:00 4) Consciously: this takes a lot of work and is a social responsibility.
13:50 Projected onto children: "The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents”, Jung.
16:00 “Why good people do bad things: understanding our darker selves” Hollis’ book on the shadow.
18:30 Being accountable for our actions and their consequences.
19:50 Making the unconscious conscious.
23:00 Making decisions as if we were still 8 years old.
24:50 What am I expecting the other to do, that is mine to address?
26:45 Storification and oversimplified narratives, become complexes.
31:43 Changing our relationship to our complexes.
32:30 We don’t solve these complexes we outgrow them.
35:50 What does your complex make you do or stop you from doing?
36:20 Meaning is the goal of life not happiness.
38:00 “The least of things with meaning, is always greater the the largest of things without meaning” Jung
39:00 An inner sense of purpose and satisfaction, and what to do if it’s not there.
40:20 The role of suffering, failure, and challenges in learning and meaning.
42:30 “Relationship is finding one special person you can annoy for a very long time” Mrs. Hollis.
43:45 The trickster overthrows our expectations: life’s way to force us to look in a new way.
47:00 Life is change, yet our nervous system and ego respond badly to ambiguity and the unknown.
49:30 The Ego’s complex is control - understandable but life rarely collaborates.
50:30 Ageing and mortality: an example of a summons to the ego to let go and go with it.
51:00 The ego is like a wafer thin boat floating on the vast iridescent sea of the unconscious.
52:20 “The unconscious is as vast as nature, you carry the human race inside of you”, J. Hollis.
56:45 Leading a life more examined = asking where I can change, improve and grow.
01:00:00 Most of our habits are protective, but stand in the way of our growth.
01:01:15 ‘Soul Heal’ Joe Enrique Pardo, a film about men being cut off forms their inner life.
References:
James Hollis, “Why good people do bad things: understanding our darker selves”
James Hollis’ 18 other books!
‘Soul Heal’ film, Jose Enrique Pardo, with James Hollis, a film about healing the issues of men
Bernardo Kastrup, Jung’s Metaphysics CC episode
Monika Wikman, Collective Unconscious CC episode
Laura London’s, Speaking of Jung podcast
More from Chasing Consciousness
Do EM fields across and around the body and brain correspond to and contain information about our experience of consciousness? Can resonance help explain how larger and smaller systems with consciousness can harmonise into a single field of consciousness? Does mind evolve as matter evolves? Today we have the possibility that consciousness relates to electromagnetic fields to look into. So, we get into the arguments for why consciousness might be baked into the physical world as panpsychism holds; we compare General Resonance Theory to other electromagnetic theories of consciousness; look at how GRT solves some of the problems of panpsychism like the combination problem and the boundary problem; and how we might use resonance to theorise about consciousness at various levels of existence above and below our single organism subjective experiences; we get into why the hippies were right about vibration, fields and resonance, and also what the hippies got wrong; And we also get into some of modern science that seems to show an alignment between science and spiritual ideas rather than an incompatibility. For this broad range of topics we are fortunate to have the polymath, environmental lawyer, author and philosopher at University of California Santa Barbara, Tamlyn Hunt. He’s written over 40 academic papers and 3 books for the general public, “Eco, Ego, Eros”, “Mind, World, God” ,and his brand new book “The Hippies Were Right”, which we focus on today.
How can we explain vivid, life changing experiences and true perceptions occurring in patients between brain death and resuscitation? What are the implications of true information being anomalously communicated during these experiences? What are the implications of some children being able to access the memories of deceased people? Why do such a high portion of these kids remember a traumatic death?
How have metrics surreptitiously replaced our internal value guidance system? How much nuance is lost when we scale collective counting across contexts? How dangerous is data that at first appears independent, whist in fact having heavy value assumptions baked in from that start? Today we have the worrying topic of value capture to discuss; that is the phenomena of how the majority of our personal values have been outsourced to external generic data sets and measurable scoring systems, often without us realising it. We discuss how, whilst useful in getting the wider picture, these measurables replace our internal lived sense of why things are important, motivating and worthy of goal directed behaviours. We also get into the root of this phenomena in the artificial demotion of the subjective to a lower level of value than the objective; how subjectivity is in fact supertangible and salient rather than intangible; and we get into how data is not neutral and has interests that in turn influence how we collect that data - risking a kind of objectivity laundering. On the other hand we also look at what measurables are good for, and how awareness of the tension between our external and internal value guidance, offers a middle road that gets the best of both worlds. Fortunately to unpack this slippery topic we have the philosopher of games and art at the University of Utah, C. Thi Nguyen. He’s the author of over 70 academic papers and 2 books for the general public. “Games: Agency as Art”, and his brand new book “The Score: How to stop playing somebody else’s game”, that we’ll be focussing on today.
Why were fungi so important to the evolution of life on earth? How do they collaborate with plants to help them communicate? What does the difficulty separating individual fungi from the collective of a mycelial network teach us about collective intelligence and interconnected co-dependence in ecosystems? In this episode we discuss how fungi are a brilliant example of symbiosis in nature. We get into their importance to evolution; how they facilitate plant communication; how they exhibit both collaboration and competition simultaneously; how they can solve problems without brains; and how they confound our ideas of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Fortunately to decode these ideas we have biologist, ecologist, mycologist and award winning author Merlin Sheldrake as our guide. He is a research associate at Oxford University and Vrije University in Amsterdam. He has written 20 scientific papers and his 2020 book “Entangled life - How Fungi make our worlds, change our minds, and shape our futures”, has sold more than a million copies in over 30 languages. The book received the 2021 Royal Society Science book award and the Wainwright prize for writing on Global Conservation. What we discuss: 00:00 Intro 05:00 Entangled Life Book. 06:40 The difference between the plant and fungal kingdoms. 08:00 Mycelium Networks: shapeshifting, sprawling networks. 09:55 Fungi’s symbiotic role in early evolution of land plants. 13:15 Mychorrhizal fungi: plant partners. 14:00 Katie Field - Re-creating early earth conditions in the lab. 15:50 Plant-Fungi electrical and chemical signalling. 19:40 Mutual vs parasitic simbiosis. 22:15 Inherent intelligence in fungi behaviour. 27:15 The skin and gut microbiome. 31:45 The enteric nervous system - possible mood changer. 33:00 The dance of competition and cooperation in evolution. 37:30 Climate Change innovations with fungi - Carbon cycling. 39:50 Writing Fungi into conservation targets with better data. 42:00 Fungal problem solving and distributed intelligence. 46:00 The blurring of self and other - fungi make us reconsider our separateness. 48:00 Individuality is a convenient concept but over emphasised. 50:00 The wood wide web over romanticised concept. 52:00 Fungal communication studies. 55:00 Sound communication in plants & fungi. 58:00 Implications of plant and mushroom memory. References: Merlin Sheldrake, “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures”. Dr. Katie Field, ‘How fungi helped create life as we know it’ article. Justin D. Stewart et al, ‘Global density and biomass of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks’ Paper. Loteto Galvez et al, ‘A travelling-wave strategy for plant–fungal trade’.
How has new research changed the way we see nutritional health? What role do ultra-processed foods, fibre, gut microbes, inflammation and insulin resistance play in the new paradigm? Why does the gut microbiome affect our mental health? How can simply diversifying the quantity of plants in your diet change health outcomes radically? In this episode we have the complex topic of nutrition to get up to date on. There’s been so much research over the last 20 years that has contradicted some of our most deep seated preconceptions about food, so today we clarify science’s new take. We discuss the rise of lifestyle medicine as a solution to western health crises; individualised diet; ultra processed foods; fibre; glycemic index issues; the gut microbiome; inflammation; a variety of foods over restrictive diets; how to support the use of new GPL-1 weight loss drugs; and what the nutritional organisation Zoe is doing to make this all easier for the public to put into practice.