Good morning. I'm Skip Conover and this is
going to be a lecture about
Individuation and Dr. [Carl G.] Jung's work.
Individuation is the central theme of
Dr. Jung's work and it's about how to
reach Meaning in your life; to understand
the Meaning of your life and why it is
important. The U.S. Army adopted a motto
a few years back which was, "Be All You
Can Be," and fundamentally that's what
Individuation is about. But before I get
into discussing it in greater detail, I
want to first say that I've been
studying Jungian Psychology for 29 years,
but I am not a licensed clinical
psychologist, nor am I a certified Jungian
Analyst. I'm simply a layman and so I'm
giving these talks based on what I feel
would be helpful to laymen in
understanding Dr. Jung's work. Dr.
Jung's work is like an elephant, where
no one helps you [describe it].  It's like the [blind] committee
that tries to describe an elephant. One
member of the committee has the trunk,
one has a leg, and one has the tail. And
they're trying to describe an elephant
based on what they're touching.
That's very very difficult to understand,
because Dr. Jung was really talking
about an entire universe--your universe--
the universe that's in the Psyche. And in
order to do that he wrote more than 20
volumes in his Collected Works of
psychological material. And he worked and
studied with many colleagues
for about 50 years when he was actively
doing this work. And so it was actually
more like 60 years that he was actually
doing this work. And so it would be
impossible to express in one video what
his work is about.... What I hope to
do in these lectures is talk about how
it's affected my life; how an individual
layman can get into Dr. Jung's work and
understand it a bit. And so, in order to
get there, I thought that the best way is
to start at the place Dr. Jung really
ended, which was that his work was
essentially about Individuation, and how
an individual person can find the
Meaning of their life, and live a happy
life based on that. Now Individuation
means that your Psyche knows what you
want to be. This is not your Ego. This is
not your conscious mind. This is your
unconscious mind, and in future lectures
I'll talk about the Unconscious, but I'm
sure you will find that many times in
your life things drive you; cause you to
do something.  You fall in love with
someone; you see someone across the room
and instantly that's the person for you.
That's your Unconscious mind
deciding for you what it wants. And so
very often people who have this love at
first sight experience do end up
marrying that person, because
their Unconscious is driving them to
be with that person. And very often it
can be a mistake, because once because
what happens, in the context of Jungian
Psychology, is a projection and what that
is is that your Unconscious mind has a
template of what the perfect other
person will be. And when someone matches
that template, WOW! You fall in love
instantly! And the problem is that that's
you projecting your perfect person; your
perfect life mate on someone else. But it
is not that person. And so the next
secret is to find out what that person
is really like. And, if you're lucky, the
two of you evolve together and learn to
live together; learn to live with the
things that weren't love at first sight;
didn't come out of love at first
sight, and ultimately it's a
process. Now, how does this process work?
Dr. Jung was talking very heavily about
duality in the world. And the reason for
that is that in duality within duality
is everything that we know and do. All
the psychic energy that we know and do
is between the two
extremes of duality. So let's talk about
those extremes: masculine-feminine, man
and woman, Good and Evil, black and white,
night and day. Each one of those is
duality. And in each of our lives we have
many thousands of dualities. And we're
never, or very rarely, are we entirely on
one side or the other. But sometimes
we are. And so during these lectures I'm
going to be talking a bit about
political psychology and neuroses,
because what neurosis is is something
like this. There are two ways of
looking at something and you're
conflicted about which way to go. And you
don't know a way to decide. And in order
to ultimately get to Individuation and
get to the center of your Soul, which Dr.
Jung calls the Self. you have to sort out
all of these dualities in one way or
another. And what happens is that between
the two extremes in a duality their runs
psychic energy back and forth. So if we
look at it in the context of political
psychology in Election 2016, obviously
there's a huge duality in the United
States between the Republican and
Democratic parties. And all of us fall on
some point on the continuum between
extreme Republican and extreme Democrat.
There may be some things that we agree a
little bit with the other side, and that
brings us a across the spectrum somewhat.
And it's only on election day, on the
last day of the election season, that we
see where the mix of all these
spectrum's that are in all of the
American people; where that mix finally
comes down. Think of it as a needle
between Republican and Democrat, and
Republicans are pulling to the right and
Democrats are pulling to the left. And
it's a kind of tug-of-war, and that is
symbolically is what a neurosis is.
You're not happy, because there's some
duality, not like Republicans and
Democrats hopefully, but anyway there's
some duality that's pulling back and
forth, and your Psyche is very much like
the idea of, on all these spectra of
duality, different decisions have to be
made. And so every human being falls at
different places on every duality. So
Individuation is at the center of it and
by that I don't mean the Ego. I don't
mean the persona that you put on at, in a
further future lecture I'll talk about
persona, but think of persona like this:
in the military everybody knows where
people stand in the military. If you saw
a group of a hundred men in formation
naked you would have no idea who's in
charge. But, if they put their uniform
on, then we know precisely who's in
charge, because when we put on that
persona of a military officer or
enlisted man, we are putting on our
persona as a military person. And so on
our shoulders we wear our rank or on our
sleeves,
and on our chest we wear ribbons that
represent the sorts of things that we
have done in our military career. So for
a military person you can look at
another military person and understand
exactly where they fit in the pecking
order, and you can understand what their
career has been like--what kind of
experience this person has. And so, that's
persona, but it isn't the Self. The Self
would be what's left when all the
clothes are off--when that individual is
naked and has nothing to hide where they
truly are. Then it's within each one of
us to know who we are--to know our Self.
And we can't always do that in the
conscious mind. What Dr. Jung indicated
through his career on studying
Individuation, which ultimately his
career began to focus on Individuation, was
that Individuation is the goal of life.
And our Psyche, like other parts of our
body, is telling us what it wants to be--
what its Self is; what its center is. And
it's up to us to listen. It isn't our ego.
And there are many ways of addressing
this. Many of these were discussed
throughout Dr. Jung's long career.
And so we'll be having further
lectures on those, but it isn't the
Ego. You have we have to learn how to pay
attention to what's inside us.
Now inside us, let's give a sense of it.
If you think of the universe and
everything you know about the universe
looking out into space, your Psyche is
like that, and maybe much more, because
there are things in your Psyche,
happening in your Psyche, that you will
never know about; and that scientists
still don't know about. And your body,
your being, is going on every day right
down to the cellular level your cells
are reproducing. They know what to do.
They know how to do it. And that happens
entirely unconsciously. You have no sense
when your cells are dividing and some
are dying, and some are becoming the new
cells, you have no sense of what they are
doing. That's done entirely unconsciously.
When your heart beats, you don't think
about your heart beating unless I talk
about it. Right now you might be thinking
about it, because I raised the topic, but
on a minute-by-minute basis we don't
think about our heartbeat; we don't tell
our heart to beat; it happens entirely
unconsciously, and it happens on an
average of 72 times a minute for our
entire lives. The same with our breathing.
We breathe maybe 12 breaths a minute. We
never think about it, unless I talk about
it, then it comes to your mind. You
weren't thinking about it until I
mentioned it just now, but the breathing
goes on. And there's so much Unconscious!
I can say any word and it will conjure
up some sort of an image in your mind. So,
for example, Dr. Jung made the point that
all of our thinking is done in images.
Now those images might not be pictures.
They might be in the form of
music; or they might be in the form of
ideas that are in a different form than
actual pictures, but they are all
images. [Psychic Facts] So let's try it with five words
perhaps. And we'll start with the word
"yacht."  Now "yacht" in English means a
pleasure boat, probably, to you. And when I
say it, you may imagine a 20-foot boat;
you might imagine a sailboat; or a
motorboat; or you might imagine a boat
like the founders of Microsoft own,
which are hundreds of feet long. That's
a yacht too. And so, when I say "yacht," I have
no idea what image it will bring up in
your mind. But it gives you a certain
sense of something that I'm talking
about. And it's not just the meaning. It's
a symbol for something that is in your
Psyche, and you don't know where it is.
Scientists don't know where these things
are, and scientists haven't been able to
figure out how the Psyche works as yet.
That's research that is still to be done.
But, in any case, it always works and, if I
say another word, "bus", you might think of
a little mini van; or you might think of
a big city bus; or you may think of a
Trailways intercity bus; and there are
many many other buses that you would
think of. And so each one of those words
has a place in our Psyche and they are
symbolic of something that's
known to us, although we're not thinking
about it.
And so, if I say the word "doll" for
example, you weren't thinking about the
word "doll" before I just mentioned it, and
I could not possibly know what dolls
mean to you. And what doll you may be
imagining when I say the word. And so all
of these words are within your inner
Psyche; your inner being. So if I say the
word "chair", I'm sitting in a chair right
now, and you know a chair can mean many
things. It could mean a wheelchair; it
could mean a Barcolounger; hey it could
mean many many things. My point is
that each one of us, as we think about
these things, have to realize that
everyone else--everyone--who is... who we are
meeting has a universe within themselves
of images, and these images are not in
any given location within our body. I
can't say that my yacht image is here.
Nor can science. We just don't know.
We have general ideas. We can do certain
types of scans, electroencephalograph and
so on, where we can say what part of the
brain is being activated. But we couldn't
say where a specific image is. And we can
only get very, so far, I mean so far in
science, we can only get so far in
terms of understanding what that is all
about; what those images are about; where
there are kept; how they interact with
one another; and so on. And let's take one
more example,
let's take a pen. I happen to like to
collect Montblanc pens, so I have this
nice one here with the image of Mount
Blanc on the top of it. And that's pretty
expensive pen and this particular pen is
symbolic of the work of Jules Verne. And
so as a result of that fact, the top of
it is shaped like a deep-sea diving
helmet, and the blue you may not be able
to see it in this video, but the blue in
this pen is wavy. And so it evokes the
sea and refers to Jules Verne's _20,000
Leagues Under the Sea_. On the other hand
you might think of a Bic pen, and I use
Bic pens all the time, because when I
read Dr. Jung's work, I underline
vigorously.  And so I've taken to getting...
from Amazon I get 1.6 millimeter
Bic pens, and those pens allow me to
create a very dark line in my
underlining. And if i find something
that's particularly important to me, I
double underline it. And so as we begin to
talk about these things in lecture form,
we're going to talk about the whole
universe of your Psyche and how it works.
And so there's a problem in Jungian
Psychology, and that is that clinical or
Jungian Analysts, and people who have
studied Jungian Psychology in depth tend
to talk with one another on a
professional level. It's their work and
they don't tend to interact with the
average layman, unless you're their
patient. In which case they'll be happy
to analyze your dreams and tell you what
they think they mean. They may not ever
mention anything about Dr. Jung in that
process of analysis, but they would be
using methods that he developed.
But those people have associations
of their own, they tend to interact with
one another, and they don't tend to bring
Dr. Jung's work out into the general
public. This is a shortcoming I've
seen about how Dr. Jung's work has been
received by the general public and
understood. And another problem is that
laymen who do start to enter Dr. Jung's
work, often get waylaid, because if you
enter any specific part of Dr. Jung's
work, it's like entering Disneyland.
There's so much to think about and so
many images and ideas coming forth that
it's easy to get lost in that. And so
there's a "Golly Gee Whiz" reaction to Dr.
Jung's work often, and people get
sidetracked into some tangent about Dr.
Jung's work without understanding what
it could do for them; not only about
understanding themselves, but
understanding other family members,
understanding what's going on in our
society right now. For example in
Election 2016, we have a psychic epidemic
going on, in fact two psychic epidemics
one following Donald Trump and another
following Bernie Sanders.
And while the media wants you to think
that the duality is between
Republican and Democrat, between left and
right, the duality is actually between
broken government and the people. And so
the people have awakened, many of them,
those who are following either of those
two candidates Bernie Sanders or Donald
Trump, and they're against government, and
against the way that the government
has been operated over the last four
decades let's say, because the result of
that has been that many of us have
suffered financial loss, very
significant financial loss, because of
that, and meanwhile a very few people
have gathered more than half, I think
that the number is now 80 people in the
world now control more wealth than 3.5
billion human beings. Something's wrong
there! And that isn't the way the human
species probably will be best developed
in that way. Who needs more Maseratis?
If you have a Maserati, why do you need
five of them? If you want a yacht, why do
you need a 450 foot long yacht. Okay, maybe
you do, but if you have one then you
don't need two, and bring happiness.
And so Individuation, the process of
Individuation, is to the process of
finding your Self, your Center to know
what the Meaning of your life is and how
you can
best live in life to be happy. And or
maybe not! Maybe the Meaning of your life
is to be unhappy. I can't say. Maybe the
Meaning of your life is to be a warrior
and go out and be killed on the
battlefield. That could be a Meaning of
life, of your life, as well. I have several
friends who lost their lives in defense
of the United States, and the Meaning of
their life is very broadly the fact that
they suffered and died to make sure that
the rest of us can become all we can
become. We can be all we can be. And that
only happens if each of us Individuates. If
each of us finds our Center. And it also,
if we take the national context, a nation
is a being. It's a living breathing being,
a very complicated one. And what the
United States is right now is a being
with the mental health problem, because
we have this neurosis between the left
and the right, which is extremely severe.
But there's good news in that, because
when there's a very severe split like
that, it can't last forever! It eventually
those things tend to pull back,
and I'll give a lecture on this concept
later on in the series, but one of Dr.
Jung's concepts that he used, that came
from Heraclitus, is what he calls
"enantiodromia". And enantiodromia
means the tendency of things to become
their opposite. And so in terms of the
duality, there's psychic energy
pulling back and forth between the two
sides, and if something gets too far over
on this side, it tends to start getting
pulled back the other way. And as I say
we have thousands of these dualities
within our Psyche, and so these things
are always in flux, and what you see is
what you get. In the case of the United
States, we see that we have a mental
health problem right now in terms of the
nation itself, but gradually that's
tending toward the center. And it may
switch over. For example, many Republicans
are very proud about the fact that
Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and
they say it was you Democrats that were
slave owners. Well actually that's not
true, because it's the, because the
opinions of the two sides have switched
back and forth perhaps several times
since the time of Abraham Lincoln. And so
when I was a boy, the bigots in the world
in the United States were largely in the
South of the United States; in former
slave owning States.  But over my
lifetime that switched, and now it's the
Republicans. And so
that switch is because of this concept
of enantiodromia, and the tendency
of things that are opposite to become
their opposite. And so as we think of
Individuation, it's about you and about
what you will be what you will be in
your lifetime. What is the Meaning of
your life? And it's not something that
you can work out logically. You can't
think it out, because you'll know that
very often you end up doing things that
you didn't think you would want to do.
And so you can't always control these
things, but what happens in the Psyche is
your Psyche is always
attempting to bring you to the point
where you will be happiest as your Self.
And so the Psyches way of communicating
with you tends to be through dreams and
visions. Largely your Psyche doesn't
communicate with you. As I said it
doesn't communicate with your Ego. It
doesn't communicate with your conscious
mind, because it has no need to. So your
body functions; your cells reproduce; you
breathe; your heart beats; and all that is
done automatically. And your Psyche is
doing it. It does the necessary every day.
The hairs in your eyebrows grow and you
never think about it. But in terms of
your social environment, your Psyche has
an opinion too. And it's the opinion that
counts for the Meaning of your life. And
so the way it communicates with you
about that every day, for better or for
worse, it's not always for better,
but the way it communicates with you is
through dreams and visions. So you know, I
years ago, 25 years ago maybe now, I used
to have many dreams of being executed.
And they would be different! They'd be by
firing squad, by guillotine, by hanging,
whatever what have you. And I've come to
believe that those dreams were
about the fact that something was out of
whack in my everyday life,
and certainly it was true. I was
unemployed and couldn't find a job so my
Psyche was beside itself. And the way it
communicates is through images, through
metaphor, through sending you pictures or
stories that help you understand what
needs to happen. And so when I was
receiving those very graphic execution
dreams, my Psyche was certainly panicked
about where I was in my life. I've been
speaking now already for 33 minutes
about Individuation, but I think it's
important for me to now summarize what
I've been saying, which is that
Individuation is the central theme of
Dr. Jung's work, and it was where he was
heading throughout his six decades of
writing about human psychology. And
Individuation is about finding the
center of the Meaning of your life. it's...
Dr. Jung called it the Self. By Self he
did not mean the persona, what your ego
presents to the world, but what deep down
inside your Unconscious wants to have
come from your life. What Meaning your
life will have in the long term. And in
terms of my life, one of the Meanings, if
not The Meaning, is to help bring Jungian
Psychology to the general public in a
better way. In a more simple way that
the average layman can pick it up and
get an entrance into Jungian Psychology
and understand where you are, because
it's very easy to get a little taste
from some book... a book of Jung or a book
about Jung, and his ideas. There are many
very good ones, including books written
by the three people that I put on this
title, and I urge you to read them.
But, when you do that, it's like being
thrown overboard from a cruise ship at
sea and not knowing where you are. And so
the purpose of these lectures, and the
purpose of this Jung for Laymen series,
will be to help you have an overview of
Dr. Jung's work, and then to pick and
choose where you would like to put it
into your life. Now, as I said
earlier, I've been studying Dr. Jung's
work for 29 years. It's had many very
important influences on my life over
that time. And it's become a rather
central part of my life and
you can... we talked earlier about
projection, and projection is how we put
something that's in our psyche out into
the world so that it's manifested
outside of us. And this is actually a
projection of my Psyche, as is the
Archetype in Action on website (http://archetypeinaction.com). If you
look at that, which has now been
operating for five and a half years, you
will find an actual representation of my
Psyche as it is developed over the last
five and a half years, because every
article and every video and picture
that's on there, essentially every one,
maybe .5% weren't put there
by me, but most of them have been. And so
when I select an article to put there,
it's because it says something that I
think needs to be said. And by that I
mean my Psyche selects it as something
that I think is important and would be
useful for others. And in that "I", I am
talking about my Psyche, my Self, deciding
that this is something that I want to
say today. And so if you look at the
Archetype in Action website, you will
find that you will find sort of a
statement, a presentation of my Psyche
over the last five and a half years,
whether it's my own writing or the
writing of others. And, of course, when
others are writing, they are projecting
their Psyches, and also saying things
that they think are important, and that
they are presenting to the world as well.
And so we have many common interests and...
so the purpose of this series is to help
average people understand enough so that
they can get into it; get started on what
is inevitably a long journey. I learn
something new from Dr. Jung every day.
And it's very often something that I can
put into my life immediately. And so I
hope that over the period that these
lectures take place, I hope that you can
benefit from that. And so just to
summarize then, Individuation is about
finding the central Meaning of your life;
to find the Self, and once again, as I've
said earlier, I'm not a clinical
psychologist nor am I formally trained
Jungian, and so if you are formally
trained, or whether you are not, if you
have questions or comments please put
them on. It's very likely that I can
learn myself from what you have to say,
and if i'm not saying something exactly
the way it should be said, from your
point of view, I'd like to know that. I
can learn from you, no doubt about it! And
so I urge you to watch these seminars as
I do them, these lectures. This is my
first attempt and when... and this is June
1st, 2016, and over the next few weeks I
hope to be holding live lectures in
Annapolis, Maryland. I'm just waiting for
a venue to be available for that purpose.
But for now
I'm going to be doing these periscope
lectures, and I will be putting them on a
new page on Facebook that I created
called Jung for Laymen. And this will be
the first video from that series. So
that's it. I look forward to having your
comments on this.
