I'm Skip Conover, and I'm
going to be leading this Carl Jung Depth Psychology Reading Group.
Tonight is the first session so we have no assignments. What I'm going to do is first of all
talk a little bit about Dr. Jung and his work. and some of his basic ideas, and
talk about what I
plan to do over the next period of time.  I'm
trying to help people understand
the Self and the Deep Unconscious.
Tonight, I'm going to just talk about Dr. Carl Jung a little bit, and about his basic ideas,
some of his basic ideas, and
then
at the [end] of the session I'll provide a
reading assignment
for next week.  Then we can start talking about Dr. Jung's actual thinking.
Dr. Jung was
one of the first people in
psychotherapy with
Sigmund Freud around the turn of the last century.
 
He worked for about 60 years. He wrote
many books. There's 20 books in his Collected Works as they're currently published, and
I'm told that there's going to be a new publication and
That new publication will have at least 26 books. I know that there are ... I
have several books that are outside of the collected works right now.
But the first thing I wanted to do was to talk about some of his basic ideas.
We're talking about Depth Psychology here, so
the purpose of being interested in this at all is
to
understand the meaning of your life, and to get down to the
bottom of what it what it is that you are, and that you're about in your life.
Dr. Jung felt that everyone was somewhat different.
He once joked, "Bring me a normal man
and I will fix him for you." What he meant by that is that we're all normalized in one way or another; we're all
taught to be
good little boys and girls and
eat our spinach, and that sort of thing. And
we rise to a time when we
tend to rebel against such things, and that's when we start to become an individual.
So one of Dr. Jung's basic ideas is the idea of Individuation, which is
how you
learn what it is that you're meant to be. What is the meaning of your life?
You could
discuss it by analogy by saying something like,
"Every oak tree is an oak tree,
but every oak tree is different. Every oak tree and its seed
that starts the tree already has within it everything that it needs to
become that specific oak tree, and
so it is with us as human beings. We
have everything in
ourselves
already
as we are
born, and
We know ... and our Unconscious
knows precisely how to make our brain, how to make our heart, how to make our lungs, how to make them function,
how to make our
blood vessels.
Everything about us is already
in the very first cells that join together in your mother's body, and
that is all done unconsciously and so
Dr.. Jung's purpose, the purpose in
life as he saw it, was to show people how they could
reach the
understanding of what it is that their
particular
 
Self should look like.
 
So he used a number of different
techniques
to get at that.
One of his ideas was the idea of an Archetype. Now an Archetype in
Jungian Psychology means
something that is
instinctual, something that's instinctual, and so
the most Obvious Archetype that we all experience one way or another is the Mother Archetype.
When a
woman has a baby,
she knows what to do. She becomes ... certain things
just emerge in her Psyche that tell her what to do.
We as human beings are very thinking ...
individuals, so we think a lot about what it is and we can read books about Motherhood, and all that sort of thing,
but in the animal world
the female doesn't have any training
doesn't have language with which to
discuss how to become a Mother, but they simply instinctually do.
The first Archetype that any of us really experiences the Archetype of Mother.
There are many many Archetypes
Joseph Campbell followed Dr. Jung in many respects, and
wrote
many books on the topic of mythology. We'll get into how that fits into Jungian  Psychology
at some point here, but
Joseph Campbell in his most famous book
wrote a book called
_The Hero with a Thousand Faces_, and what he meant by that is that there are
thousands, potentially of Archetypes.
You could be a policeman or a fireman or a soldier,
and all of those have certain archetypal things about them. In the United States
a policeman wears a blue shirt,
but just because I'm wearing a blue shirt doesn't mean that I'm a policeman.
But, nonetheless,
the uniform of a policeman would be part of the Archetype of police.
So usually what I'm talking about archetypes, at the very beginning I talk about
typically four (4) that apply to
men, and four (4) that apply to women.
In the men category,
if you're familiar with the
television program "Star Trek," and especially "Star Trek Next Generation,"
you may know of the character Wesley Crusher. Well Wesley was
the Child Archetype in that
program. And
so
when we're young,
before puberty typically,
we are children, and
in males
that normally leads to
what's called the Warrior Archetype, where young men
have a feeling that they want to go out and prove themselves in society.
Now that could be through some sort of initiation;
it can be
by fighting some battle ...  doesn't have to be a military battle ... it can be a
battle of earning a PhD, or something like that, but it's
obviously something that's difficult for that person, and
so that is the Warrior Archetype.
In the next phase that men go through,
typically, and this is also the reason why the warrior archetype is typically very young men,
being in the military as a young man's game.  If you take an aircraft carrier, for example,
typically the Captain of the aircraft carrier is
45 years old, which by most standards is quite young, and yet
that's the oldest person on the aircraft carrier. The average age on an aircraft carrier,
counting all the pilots and everything who are older, is the average age is about 20 years old.
 
Warriors tend to be very young.
People can join the U.S. Marine Corps when they're
17.
 
If they do that then they can, after 20 years, retire
when they're
37, 20 years later . And they're retired and earn half pay for life then.
So that's
the Warrior type, and ...
Hello from Argentina ... this is exciting. I'm glad you decided to check in with us
tonight.
So I'm talking about the archetypes
and I've talked about the
masculine side the Child Archetype, then the Warrior Archetype. The next archetype for men is
the King Archetype, and by that I mean
man
grows into a stage where he becomes a husband; he becomes the leader of his household; or
or at least men think they're the leader of the household,
maybe that's not always true, but
we like to think we are sometimes.
But men assume certain responsibilities around the household and
those are
archetypal and it's natural for a man to be responsible for
bringing in
the livelihood of a family.
Although these archetypes are breaking down in more modern times,
but I'm just trying to give you a sense of what an archetype is all about.
 
So after a man goes through the stage of raising children and all those things which are which are
typically the Mature Male
Archetype, which we call the King Archetype, the next one is the
Hermit Archetype, or the Old Man Archetype, and I might fit into that now
because I'm
older.  My
daughters are
now close to 40 years old, so
I'm ...  if I had a beard I could probably play
Gandalf, or someone like that in the movies. I do have lots of gray hair here/ and
But it's typically the Wise Man Archetype,  the older man who
Is no longer leading a household, but he provides his wisdom to the family. On the female side
also there's the Child
Archetype, of course, but the Child Architect for women very soon leads to
the Venus Archetype, where the woman
wants to feel beautiful, and look beautiful and look very attractive
to men she wants to attract attention of men, and that's a very typical
Aphrodite or Venus Archetype situation.
In
Mythology
we have the images that have been painted of
Aphrodite
rising out of the waves. I'll show you a picture about Aphrodite here in a few minutes, when I talk about
archetypes and art and how
understanding archetypes can actually help you make your art more
successful...
Be more interesting to people.
As a matter of fact,
I'll talk about that in just a minute, as soon as I go through these last two on the women's side; or three.
So first is the
typically is the child, and then the Venus
Archetype for women, who are
attracting a mate, and then the next archetype is a Mother Archetype.
So women
very often have children and
they
the instinctual aspects of being Mother
come into gear, and she becomes a
Mother figure to
whatever her child is. And then she becomes the Queen; she's the head of the household on the female side;
she's her husband's partner; and
together they're raising; or their reining in this kingdom of the household; the family unit.
So that's the very typical instinctual
archetypal
Queen
level. And then finally is the Wise Woman stage, which is like the Wise Man stage.
She becomes an
older woman with grown children, and she has lots of wisdom based on
probably many mistakes that were made during
her lifetime. Obviously the Wise Man has made very man
mistakes too, because that's how we become conscious.
 
Those are the... those are the very typical
tip of the Iceberg type of archetypes that Dr. Jung
talked about.
I want to talk just a minute about Archetype in Art, because this is how I first really got
interested in this.
In Art, I
used to go to adult painting classes, and when I did I was
sort of appalled in a way that
there would be a still life that people were painting in the class and
most of the people in the class would be sitting there trying to make a
photographic image of
the
of the bowl of fruit.
The problem with that is that
we have cameras for that now and
So it's not really necessary in this day and age for people to replicate a bowl of fruit. It
really has very little meaning, and
what's more important perhaps is that the artist represents a
message from
the Unconscious of the artist, who is
saying something about his time or place, or her time or place, and
It's being conveyed to the conscious mind
of the viewer.
 
To give you a few examples,
this
sculpture
is
Aphrodite of Rhodes, and
the thing about this particular sculpture is it's for my family it's also a symbol,
because in the
1950s or late 40s
my father was on a U.S. Navy ship and he  went to Greece,
and he was able to purchase a copy of
this
sculpture in Rhodes. This is Aphrodite of Rhodes. Now, a couple of significant
things in general about Aphrodite of Rhodes are that
she was done
nearly 2,000 years ago. She was found in the 20th century
in the harbor of
Rhodes, Greece.
 
They found about
3,000 sculptures on the Island of Rhodes over the years.
But this is a very famous one,
and so they do sell copies of it. My Father had purchased a copy of it;
brought it back to my Mother, who was then a very young Mother. My brother, I had a brother and a sister
that were younger than me, and my brother was just maybe a year old, so
my Mother would have been perhaps 28 years old. And
my Father gave my Mother this
sculpture
as a
gift from being away for three months on deployment.
The first night that
it was in the house, she put it on a telephone stand in the hallway of our apartment.
My brother crawled over to the telephone stand and shook the table, and
down came Aphrodite of Rhodes and broke into many many pieces.
My Mother was shattered by this experience and
even I who was only perhaps three at the time, I remember the great clamor
about this situation.
My Mother stayed up all night gluing
Aphrodite of Rhodes Back together again.
She put it back on the telephone stand and the very next day
my brother again crawled up to the telephone stand and and pulled on the leg and
down it came again and broke into a thousand pieces.
In terrible shock my Mother
swept it up, and threw it away.
54 years later,
my wife and I were going to visit Athens
at the time of the Athens Olympics in
2004, and I asked my mother if there's anything that she could ...
that I could bring her. And I had forgotten this incident, but she told me about it and told me that story.
She described this
 
sculpture to me as a woman combing her hair
with her hand up like that. That's how she was describing it to me.
So when I was in Athens I looked around and the shopkeeper said, "Well that can only be one
sculpture, and so sure enough he pulled it out and he had
two of them actually. I bought two of both of them, and I brought one home to my Mother,
54 years later.
You can see that in my Unconscious this
is quite emotional for me.
It brings tears to my eyes to even tell this story, but in a case in art
the artist is telling us something about the beauty of the feminine form
two thousand years ago, and so even though he lived 2,000 years [ago] he can express to us today
what he thought of this woman who was his model.
Then the next one is Michelangelo.   Art is ...
Michelangelo did "David" this is the Statue of David in Rome [actually Florence], and
of course I
had to give equal time to the feminine side,
but I remember a humorous photograph I saw once, and in that photograph there is ...
there are four nuns...
Fold this back, so you can see this image.
There were four nuns and
they had have their back to the camera. They're facing David and they're pointing up at
David, and
there's a caption on that photograph that says, "I don't know what it is about him,
but I know what I like."
And that kind of expresses
the idea of the Archetype, actually, because a woman will naturally tend to like,
in most cases, a male
nude, and a male would usually like a female nude.
Obviously, we know there are exceptions to that, but in in the larger sense ... and all of that is archetypal.
If you're ...
If you want to paint a picture that you can sell you might want to think about
painting a picture of David or of Aphrodite.
Okay, now there's a couple of other
interesting aspects of this.
One is
Jackson Pollock, who
I
went to the Boston Museum of Art once, and
I'm not I don't typically get very emotional
going to art galleries. I know a lot of people who
do go to art galleries, and they come out in tears, and they're in tears the whole time
they're there. The reason is that the art is
causing an emotional reaction from the audience.
But that doesn't happen to me very often, but in this particular day
I went to the Boston Museum of Art, and it so happened that there was a Jackson Pollock there.
I
have always seen a picture Jackson Pollock had painted, this is one of his famous
drip paintings, and
looking at it in a photograph like this I
was never very moved by it.
But I saw this particular painting on the wall
Boston Museum of Art, and it's about 20 feet hot wide and 10 feet high, and
I looked at it, and suddenly I just burst into tears, and I don't know why.
But I know that there's something
very significant and archetypal about it.
And it was a message going directly from Jackson Pollock's
Unconscious, because he painted these
in an Unconscious way,
trying to bring up something from his own Unconscious. So it was a message directly from Jackson Pollock's
Unconscious to my Unconscious.
Now, I don't know whether that's good or bad in this case, because
Jackson Pollock had a
very difficult life. He
died in an automobile accident when he was 44 I believe, or 42, and he was an alcoholic and
so
it's not entirely clear whether he was
mentally balanced honestly.
The thing is about this and why I might have reacted to it,
it's either that it was a very beautiful
experience, or it was me
bursting into tears of grief over how
horrible his life was at depth, and I don't know which it is, but it could be either one. And
so I've always thought about that, but it's one of two things that I've ever seen in a museum that
really affected me personally.
The other thing that I
was very affected by was this piece.
I don't know if you can see it well, but this is a this is a table and chairs, ordinary table and chairs,
but it was put together at three times normal size. So you can see the woman
sitting in the chair here, and she looks like a child.
When I saw this at the Baltimore, or at the Boston Museum of Art it
it was by itself in a room, and so you walked into the room, and
immediately you were under the table, and
instantly you felt like you were three years old.
Okay, just instantly the feeling of being a three-year-old and being under your parents table came over you.
I was extremely impressed
by that
experience.
Now
also in poetry there are a lot of archetypal ideas, because
poetry
tends to ... well poetry typically uses
symbolism to express a thought.
It so happens that years ago. I was
reading a book about what women dream.
Women dream archetypal things. That's what happens with dreams ... dreams are messages from your
Unconscious to your conscious mind, and
I had read this book and
the next day I was going to give a poetry reading,
but I sat down and this poem popped out of my mind in 45 minutes, and
It's full of symbolism.
We'll talk about that more next week when we talk about _Man and his Symbols_,
but I'm going to read it to you very briefly here, and you'll see what I mean.
The poem is called "The Whale and the Horse."
Interestingly the next day,
when I
gave my reading, it was at the Martin Luther King Library in
Washington, D.C., and
I didn't know who the audience would be.  In the
... On the day, it turned out that the audience was about 50 homeless
men, mostly Black, and
they were ...  had come in out of the cold and the library had set up chairs in rows
for my reading, and
so I read my poems. And of all my poems
this is the only one that they asked me to reread.
The only change I made to the poem was,  because my audience was
almost all Black, I changed the color of the horse
from white to black. But otherwise
I read it as it is and
These...  as I say these indigent Black men were obviously touched by this, even though what I was
talking about was
archetypally in
women's dreams, typically.
So it's called "The Whale and the Horse."  "I
dreamed I was a mighty whale,/ And you a majestic white horse,/
Who lived on an arid plane so stale/ You couldn't find Loves source?/
My habitat was a bluegreen cove/Where I often swam and dove,/And though our forms were sealed by fate/
We found we could communicate/
You often came to a cliff edge/ Where you could see me swim/
You found a path beyond the ledge/ Where you followed your precious whim/
To step gingerly down the path through thorns to my white sand Beach/
Where you could touch my warm moist bath/
Allowing me to teach/ Of joys of life and joys of love for many years ago/
Beyond the strife of thorns above/ In precious realms below/
but when I looked at your foreleg/
I saw a bloody stream/ Of bright red ooze from thorny peg/ Nightmare within a dream/
I bade you join my moist pleasure/
But you couldn't stand the sting/ I gave the secret of my treasure/ The balm for which men sing/
Your hooves dug deep/ You wouldn't weep/ You found my amber ball/
You stove that in/ Released within/ Its vapor raised the pall./
Now free to run/ And have some fun/ You galloped in the surf/
You ducked your head into the foam/ Then dove into my turf./
We swam and Dove/
Inside my cove/
Until on one deep dive/ We surfaced for breath/
defeating death/ And flew up up alive./ We flew above your arid plain/ And
dripped our splashing waters/ And everywhere our bodies dripped/ the trees gave birth to daughters.
We cavorted nearly every day/ until the plane was lush/ And
then returned unto the bay where we found your belly plush./
With the fruits of loves wisdom/ transcending our kingdom/ of time and space we all know,/ Our
child brought our freedom/ To fathom the wisdom/ Of leaving life's flow to love's glow.
 
One of the reasons that I think this poem is particularly apt is because
the child of the whale and the horse,
obviously in the physical world there can be no such child,
and there never would be,
but
Dr. Jung's work was about the Psyche, and
so in our
Psychic thought we could imagine
that there is such a thing as a
cross between a horse and a whale. And we might think what that would mean. It may be good it might be bad.
I don't know, but
Dr. Jung Spent a lot of time talking about alchemy in his career, and one of the
fundamental ideas of alchemy is to bring two different
substances together. They can't mix for some reason like the whale and the horse, cannot have a child,
but in the Psyche
something new can be born, and
that new thing maybe something wonderful, it may be something devilish, who knows?
But that's what alchemy really was about in terms of
what people were doing
1500 years ago.
They said they were trying to make gold, but the gold that they were trying to make was the gold of
the heart.
They
talked in symbols and different signs, so that they wouldn't be burned at the stake.
About 300 years after the
last alchemy class was taught at a university in Europe,
Dr. Jung
discovered that these were really early psychologists, and they really had a lot of very good ideas and
so that's one of the interesting aspects of Dr. Jung's work.
Now.
before I go into a lot of other ideas, I do want to mention
one thing and that is the famous _Red Book_, which has become very famous
since it was published in in
2009. _The Red Book_
is
this volume. It's quite huge as you can see.
 
Unfortunately for whatever reason my camera seems to be reversing the words,
but
Dr. Jung
kept _The Red Book_. After he broke up with Dr. Freud,
he had a
Psychic event that occurred to him personally, and
So what?
Because he was a psychiatrist himself and knew what was happening,
he decided to note it down and he was able to keep
connection with his own life and
over a period of
16 years he noted down all the things that happened to him during a five-year period
when he had
tremendous visions and what he called his
"Confrontation with the Unconscious"  _The Red Book_ is the produce of that.
He said about it
"The years of which I have spoken to you when I pursued the inner images
Were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this.
It began at that time and the later details hardly matter anymore.
My entire life consisted in
elaborating what had burst forth from the Unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream, and threatened to break me.
That was the stuff and material for more than only one life.
Everything later was merely the outer
classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life.
But the numinous beginning, which contained everything was then."
And I brought along this volume of _The Red Book_ just so I could give you a quick
sense of it.
He wrote in his own calligraphy hand
and so here he's written in German and
all in calligraphy, and then he did all of the paintings that are in this book and the paintings are
available online
if you just put in Carl Jung Red Book
paintings, you can see many of them. But they're very dramatic paintings. So there's one.
Let me see if I can find a couple more that are particularly noteworthy.
These were mandalas that he did and
here's a beautiful mandala that he painted.
Yeah, so he put that in _The Red Book_, and we'll be ... we'll talk about mandalas and what they
mean
at a later time.
 
Here [we] have someone who's been
struck through the heart with a ray of some sort and next to him you can see he's got a snake with him.
The snakes are are very significant in the unconscious and many people have
dreams of snakes,
but then there are dreams like this, which have
Egyptian calligraphy, and that sort of thing in them.  Unfortunately this book is really
too expensive for most people to buy as a first thing,
and
there is
Besides the 200 pages in this that are devoted to the German calligraphy. It's actually a
photographic plate of what Dr. Jung wrote.
There is a terrific introduction in it, about a hundred pages,
and then a full translation of _The Red Book_ into English, so that we can understand what it is.
And so in order for average people to have connection with this
they published a Reader's Edition.
This is only about ... that big book is about $150,
but this book in Amazon is about $25,  so [that] you can get all the words in
English from the main _Red Book_,
but you don't have any of the images in this version.
You see how I read Dr. Jung
I'm often putting tabs on Pages and
I
strictly underline. I haven't done any underlining in the in the main _Red Book_,
but I have done in my Readers Edition.
 
Let's see, I
think, before we get too controversial,
I'm going to talk about the first book that we'll use in this reading room, and that's this book, _Man in His Symbols_, and
so you can get your own copy of _Man and His Symbols_ from
Amazon, or from your local bookstore. Most bookstores carry it. I really prefer the
larger
color plate
edition, which is about this big as opposed to this paperback size,
but the paperback does have the images in it.
Unfortunately, they're all in black and white, so you don't really get an appreciation of what he's talking about necessarily.
But the concepts are there.
Beginning next week we'll start by talking about the Introduction to this book, and about the first
20 pages or so.  I'll start talking about that next week.
The significance of this book is that
late in his life, Dr. Jung
had never really
focused on the general public. He had been a
psychiatrist and psychologist through his life.
He had been taking patients right along and was corresponding with them
right up to the month before he died, when he was 85.
 
The result was that there was not much that he thought was there for the layman. I actually happen to think
differently; that you can read and understand Dr. Jung's work, but it's
not easy, it's something that you have to work at and
... but late in his life, in the late 1950s, the BBC did a
Interview of Dr. Jung, and in that interview,
or after after that interview was broadcast,
Dr. Jung got many letters from average people, and
The result was that Dr. Jung had a dream, and in that dream
he saw himself as
communicating with a great
auditorium of people. He
envisioned something perhaps like the U.N., or something like that, the General Assembly of the U.N., and
he envisioned that he would
be talking to a great throng of people from all over the world, and of course he was too old.
He actually finished his part of this book only 10 days before he died.
But
because of that dream, he envisioned
writing a book that was directed to the layman, and
it so happens that I bought the plated version of the book in about 1990, and
over a period of one year. I read it very slowly at about three or four pages a night,
just before I went to sleep each night, and
at the end of the year I felt as if I had had a year's worth of
psychotherapy, even though I never did have any
psychotherapy.
 
I was very impressed by that, and
 
because he intends ...
Intended this book for the layman, I thought it's the right place to begin a
Carl Jung Reading Group, and I hope you'll follow along with me.
At least for the next few weeks
I'm here at a Buddhist Center in Annapolis, Maryland.
 
I'll be here for a while, in the hopes that I'll actually get a physical person to
come. That hasn't happened tonight, and
so I'm
speaking to my one listener on
Periscope this evening.
I hope this has been an informative time for you
But anyway a little bit more about _Man and His Symbols_, so Dr. Jung wrote
the first section of this book himself, and it's about approaching the Unconscious.
Then
three of his key
followers
also
wrote
passages and they wrote about ...
They wrote about Mythology; they wrote about
the process of Individuation,
which I spoke up spoke of earlier, which is the process of you learning to be what you were intended to be
when you were born.
There was actually programming in you that intended you to be something, and
every living creature whether a plant or an animal
has that rhizome that... that
intention to be something. Every oak. tree is a unique
oak tree, and every human being is a unique human being, and
the purpose of Depth Psychology is for you to learn how to be all you can be.
So that's the process of Individuation.
And then the fourth part is Symbolism in the visual arts and
we've talked a little bit about that tonight, but
we'll talk about it in more detail. There's about 80 pages of this book that's dedicated to
 
symbolism and the Visual Arts. And then
finally there's a section called "Symbols in an Individual Analysis," in which
A Jolande Jacoby, who was one of Dr. Jung's closest disciples,
writes about a specific analysis and takes  us through it, so that we understand what follows
I hope you'll follow along with me and
join me each week for
the Carl Jung Depth Psychology Reading Group.  I intend to be
broadcasting this live on Periscope,
for as
long as I possibly can. I just believe, I'm not a therapist
and I never intend to be one.
This is about using Dr. Jung's work for other things, other than psychotherapy, and
I use it in my
study of American politics. I wrote a book called
_Political Psychology: New Ideas for Activists_, and
you can find that book, which I published in 2014, on Amazon and
Because I Dr. Jung has informed me very well on
what's going on in American politics, that I seem to be one of the few people in the United states who
understands what's happened to us in
2016.
I think that it's important for all of us to understand these things.
So I hope
you'll follow along with this and I look forward to seeing you next Monday night. Next Monday night
we will again convene at
8:15 Eastern Daylight Time
and
Again, [we'll] be here at the Gampopa Center in
Annapolis, Maryland, in Eastport.  If you can
join us live I would love to have the interaction, but if
if
You can't that's why I'm doing this on Periscope. So that you can
follow along with I with the Reading Group and
hopefully, we'll build a
good following over time. Thank you for listening, and thank you for coming to the first session of
the Carl Jung Depth Psychology Reading Group.
Talk to you soon.
