2015 Personality Lecture 07: Depth Psychology: Carl Jung (Part 02)

So here's how to conceptualize yourself in union terms: the part of you that you consider you, roughly speaking, Jung considered the ego. You might think about that as the most individual part of your psycho-physiological being. I mean, the difference between individual and collective in that sense is that you share very many attributes with other people. Obviously, your physical form is very much like that of other people, and then you share attributes with other living creatures way back down the phylogenetic chain. In that regard, there's nothing specifically individual about you, but the part of you that you identify with most completely and that you regard as unique—that's the union ego.

Now, Jung sort of conceptualized your psyche as a place, I suppose, that many spirits could inhabit. You might think about a spirit from the union perspective as a personality that can inhabit the psyche. Like all the psychoanalysts, Jung regarded the psyche as a relatively loose collection of partially integrated personalities. Each of those personalities had their own perspective, their own thoughts, their own way of looking at the world—those would be the perspective, their own thoughts, their own emotions, their own habits, their own actions. Those are roughly aggregated into some sort of unity, and that was the ego.

Now, the ego has a public face, and the public face Jung called the persona. Persona means mask. The persona is both that part of you that you show to other people instead of the part that you hide and then also, to some degree, it might be the form that your ego takes even to you. For example, if you're a naive person, you might think that your public face is all there is of you. The rough difference between the ego and the persona might be conceptualized this way: there are things that you think that you won't say in public, maybe not even in private. Some of those things you're pretty aware of, and those would be thoughts that are relevant to the ego but not the persona. Some of them you don't even really want to be aware of, and Jung would consider those more associated with the shadow.

Now, the shadow—the existence of the shadow. First of all, you might want to remember that the best way to conceptualize Jung's archetypal constructions is in some sense as metaphors. You could say that Jung thought that it was useful to separate up the psyche into persona, ego, and then shadow. It isn't that there aren't other ways that it could be broken up, but breaking it up this way is useful for certain purposes. Jung regarded this terminology as particularly useful from a psychoanalytic perspective and also from a historical perspective. Perhaps the divisions could have been made, could be made otherwise, and there are many ways of looking at archetypes. This is sufficiently useful to progress with.

Now, people's personas are generally somewhat harmless and somewhat socialized. If you don't know how to act in public, you don't have a well-crafted persona. Some of you are going to be the kinds of relatively deep-thinking intellectuals who think that small talk is nonsense. There's some utility in that thinking because, in some sense, from a philosophical sense, obviously it's nonsense. But if you don't know how to make small talk, basically what that means is that you have a poorly developed persona. What that'll mean is that you're not going to do very well, at least at the beginning of social engagements, because you need to be able to convince people that you're basically civilized and social. Before it's even reasonable for them to go beyond pleasantries with you, the ability to exchange pleasantries in a relatively banal way in a variety of different circumstances is part of having a persona.

You don't want to denigrate the utility of that because you need it. As you progress in your careers, for example, you're going to be thrust into situations where you don't really know anyone, and the purpose of the gathering is to familiarize a large number of people with one another. There's a skill that's associated with that—it's somewhat glib social ability. The unions would say, well, if you don't have a persona, you're just a disaster. But by the same token, you shouldn't be only persona because one of the possibilities is that the ego can identify with the persona, and then the person thinks that they are what they show the social world. The problem with that, at least from the union perspective, is that a) people are a lot more than the persona; they're a lot more than the ego; and b) a lot of the things that make them more than mere persona or mere ego are not necessarily things that are acceptable in casual public gatherings.

For example, because of your psychophysiological makeup, you all have the capacity for aggression. Now, a lot of you, especially the ones that are more agreeable, you could say that even it's either that that capacity for aggression has been underdeveloped because you've identified with a certain mode of social being, or you could say perhaps, to the degree that agreeableness is temperamental, that the aggressive tendency isn't as powerful in you as it is in other people. That might lead you to make judgments like—and I'm sure some of you, perhaps some, some of you who had an angry parent or particularly an angry father—have decided at some point in your life that to be aggressive is wrong. To be angry is wrong, for example, or to be aggressive is wrong; it's morally wrong.

One of the things that happens in psychotherapy very frequently, though, is that people come into psychotherapy for a variety of reasons. Some of them are merely practical: they're having problems in adaptation because their lives have got very, very complicated, and they really don't know what to do about it. Sometimes they go into psychotherapy because they have very high levels of negative emotion, and that can be associated with the first problem. But very often, they come into therapy because they're getting pushed around constantly, and they really don't have anything that's a sufficiently well-developed personal identity. Generally, that happens, by the way, most more often with women than it does with men, and that's because women are, by temperament, more agreeable than men, and perhaps also by socialization—temperament certainly plays a big role.

Often then, the goal of therapy is assertiveness training. Assertiveness training, you could think of as the behavioral psychologist's equivalent to incorporating the shadow. You know, you may think, well, it's a necessary part of existence to be nice to other people, and there's some truth in that—not really. It's a very shallow way of looking at the world because nice is not a very sophisticated word. But even if that's the word that you do use, you should also be nice to yourself. Sometimes what that means is that you have to put forward your own wishes and desires in a manner that causes a certain amount of conflict. In order to withstand that conflict, you have to be able to draw on the sources of aggression that, in some sense, are a deep part of your inbuilt set of possibilities.

Now, the reason that's necessary in part from a biological perspective is that people are often afraid of engaging in conflict because they're afraid—because conflict can be real trouble—and anger inhibits fear. So if you don't have a well-developed capacity for, well, we could say rage, then you can't overcome your fear, and then you can't stand up for yourself, and then you're going to get run over. Now, the problem with that is that if you get run over enough, it'll make you resentful, and then that will make you aggressive—except it'll make you aggressive in sneaky, underground, and somewhat unconscious ways that are much less likely to be productive than, you know, a frank exchange of viewpoints and some conscious negotiation.

So one of the things I do in therapy for people who need assertiveness training is I get them to pay attention to their resentment. Resentment is often a good avenue into the shadow because, first of all, resentment is a pretty destructive emotion. It's an extremely useful emotion, but it can be very destructive because it gives rise to, well, first of all, a sense of victimization, and second, then the underground growth of all sorts of ideas of revenge and vengeance, and also a kind of stubborn non-cooperativeness because who wants to cooperate when they feel taken advantage of?

So part of Jung's idea with regards to the shadow is that obviously the social world wants you to be peaceful and predictable and maybe even easy to get along with, but that doesn't necessarily mean that peaceful, predictable, and easy to get along with are the only virtues—because they're certainly not. One thing we know about virtues is that if they're taken to too great an extreme, they become vices. They certainly are not the only virtues. You know, there are what you might call darker virtues, so to speak. They're more dangerous virtues in some sense because they harness forces that can be very destructive if they're not utilized consciously, and aggression is certainly an example of that.

So here's some fundamental rules about the shadow that you might think about as you move forward through your life. A lot of times, you're going to have to negotiate on your own behalf. So what that means from the perspective of agreeableness and aggression is that you should be able to stand up for yourself at least as well as you would stand up for someone that you care for. The problem with the idea of being nice to other people is that it doesn't take you into account, and that's supposed to be an equation, even though, as I said, nice is a pretty weak philosophical term. The fundamental rule is that you should certainly include yourself in the circle of people who deserve respect and care, and that means that you have to be willing to advocate for yourself.

If you're willing to advocate for yourself, and you want to do it, you have to be able to say no. You have to, because otherwise you have to say yes, and then you can't negotiate. In order to say no, you have to have armed yourself with strategies and plans that enable you to say no. You can't be dependent; you can't be afraid of potentially searching out new opportunities, etc. You have to be willing to stand your ground, and it's very difficult to do that without drawing on some of the deeper sources of psychological energy that are part of our psychophysiological heritage.

So Jung would say, well, there's the persona and the ego, and you can identify with your persona, and then you're kind of a shallow puppet of culture. So Pinocchio as the marionette is a persona; Pinocchio himself is an ego, but as a marionette, he's the persona. Anyone who's ideologically possessed, by the way, is a persona, although they're also possessed by the shadow, even though they don't know it. You can tell when someone's ideologically possessed because you can predict whatever they're going to say once you know a few axioms of their particular ideology.

So a given ideology probably has four or five explanatory axioms. Like everything is caused by economic disparity, that might be one, or success is due to hard work, that might be another. Those are broad enough statements, even though they're in opposition to one another—both of those statements are broad enough so you can virtually explain everything with them. The problem with it is that you can predict what the explanation is going to be before you even have to talk to the person, and whenever you're talking to someone and you can predict exactly what they're going to say because they're using some ideologically mediated structure, then you know perfectly well that they've identified with the persona.

You also know that they're likely to be possessed by a pretty vicious shadow because we know that the shadow of ideological possession is repression and death. One of the things that's always interesting about psychoanalysts is that whenever they see something good, they're always looking for the dark side of it, and vice versa, by the way. Whenever they see anything dark, they're looking for the good side of it. They're very unlikely to take anything at face value. If someone comes up to you and says, “I stand for some good thing,” the thing that you ask, if you're psychoanalytically minded, is, “Well, what does that mean that you hate?” Because there's a reasonable probability that even though you think that you're standing for something, a lot of what's motivating you is the desire to be against something.

That's particularly the case when you're dealing with negative emotions because they're more powerful than positive emotions. One of the things George Orwell, who is one of the 20th century's great anti-ideologues, published a book in the 1940s, 30s, 40s, called Road to Wigan Pier where he went to stay with some coal miners in the north of England. Those coal miners, man, they had a hard life. Some of them had to crawl three quarters of a mile to work in tunnels in the morning—in tunnels where they couldn't stand up—just to get to work. Then they'd do their 10-hour shift in the coal mine, digging out coal. After that, they'd have to crawl back three quarters of a mile underground.

So they had very, very hard lives, and Orwell was pretty unimpressed by the conditions in which they were forced to work. He wrote an essay for the English left book club, and they were—so that was a socialist publishing house—but he appended another essay to it where he criticized the socialists who were most likely to read that sort of book as much more oriented towards hating the rich than loving the poor. That's a devastating criticism, and the left book club didn't even want to publish his book. But they ended up publishing it, and it's become a very famous essay. It lays out a general principle: if you have identified with a given persona, which is like a social machine in a sense, and you think you're all good because of what you think, then you might ask, “Well, where'd all the parts of you that aren't good go?”

Unless you think that you're a saint and that everyone who thinks differently than you is Satan himself, then you're missing a chunk of yourself. You're not taking a chunk of yourself into account, and that's the part that is nowhere near as well-behaved or as benevolent as you might think or that you actually have any reason to believe. One of the things that has struck me as a consequence of analyzing 20th-century history, often through a union lens, is that there's not much evidence that the sorts of atrocities that characterize the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were the result of a few extremely corrupt people at the top of the hierarchy forcing everyone down into slavery and then making them do terrible things. I think that's a very weak explanation. In fact, I think it's wrong; I think the historical record is quite clear that it's wrong.

I mean, in East Germany, for example, one third of the people were government informers. So that means if you had a family of six, two of your family members were reporting on you to the government. When you look at human capacity for destructiveness, if you don't regard yourself as one of the agents of that destructiveness—or at least one of the potential agents of that destructiveness—then from the union perspective, at least, there's a high probability that you're part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you should be blamed for it because blame has to come from another person, and it isn't obviously clear that, like, I get to blame you for being potentially violent. That, I think, is a complete mistake.

But if you familiarize yourself with the realm of human capability, and then you regard yourself as human, what that means is that you have to regard yourself as a creature that's capable of what human beings are capable of, and human beings are capable of a lot of things. Some of them are absolutely wonderful. I mean, there's nothing more remarkable than a human being on the planet. I mean, people can do amazing things, but the downside of that is that we can do absolutely horrible things. It's not obvious that it's only the pathological people who do that. In fact, it's not reasonable to assume that.

So the shadow for Jung was a very big deal. He believed, in some sense—and this is where the ideas get archetypal—he believed that the ideas of the evil twin of the king or the evil twin of God, for that matter—so that would be Satan in Christian theology—that was a real representation of the human and transpersonal capacity for evil as there was. He believed that if you look deep enough into your own foul motivations and if you look far enough down, you'd be looking, so to speak, into hell itself, and you'd find the main controller of hell deep inside your psyche. So it was no journey for the timid.

Jung also believed that—and this is what separates him from a new age thinker—because he's often accused of being a new age thinker. New age thinkers tell you things like, “Follow your bliss, and you'll run into utopia.” You're on counter utopia. But that isn't what the unions, especially Jung, said about his process of individuation at all. He said that if you follow what's meaningful and you do it honestly, it will take you somewhere you really do not want to go. Until you go there, you'll never be able to climb up higher on the other side. That provides a real impediment for enlightenment because, for enlightenment, there's a price to be paid.

If you look at archetypal representations of the cost of enlightenment, you often find that the person who becomes enlightened has been damaged in some profound way before it happens. For example, in the ancient Egyptian stories of Horus and Osiris, Horus loses an eye when he has to encounter Seth, who's the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Satan. So it's no joke; it's seriously no joke. One of Jung's propositions, essentially, was that the human race will continue to be plagued by phenomena like the outbreak of the genocidal Nazi and Soviet ideologies until people realize that the Nazis and the Soviets are them—that it isn't someone else's problem, it isn't other people who aren't you, it's you. If you were there, it would have been you.

You might say, “Well, no, I would have been a hero.” It's like, no, probably not, because they were rare. Unless you have real reason to think that you could have done it, then it's safer to think that you couldn't have and wouldn't have. Then there's a responsibility that goes along with that, and the responsibility is to broaden your capacity of who you are so that you have the possibility of controlling the parts of your psyche that are very dark.

Now let me give you some examples of this. There's a philosopher named Rousseau, and most of you are Rousseauians without knowing it. Rousseau basically made the following propositions: he said that human beings were basically good, but they were corrupted by culture. So human essential nature was good, and the corrupting influence was society. Now, that's true, but it's only half-true. There's a philosopher named Hobbes who said exactly the opposite thing. He said, “No, human beings are base and violent and uncontrollable, and unless we have society structuring their interactions—he was more like Freud—structuring their interactions, they would be constantly at one another's throat.”

If you think, well, who's right: Rousseau or Hobbes? First of all, they're both right, even though they say the opposite thing. Second, well, you look around the world, and you tell me whether there are more Hobbesian states or Rousseauian states. The answer is pretty clear. Most countries are disastrous authoritarian dictatorships in which people live and suffer. The places where civilization has become stable enough so that people can live peaceful, relatively peaceful and productive lives are very rare. They're more common than they were in the past, and they seem to be getting more common all the time, thank God. But it's a lot easier to be disorganized and brutal than it is to be organized, productive, and free.

Now, Jung believed that the shadow is something that kind of comes apart when you face it. It's a blurry black mass, and so in a sense, before you start to differentiate it, you can tell what the shadow is, as far as any one of you is concerned, because you can start to notice how you aren't like you act, especially when you act around people that you're trying to impress or people whose opinions you think are important to you. You have to pay attention to it, though, and you'll be able to see that there's a distinction between what you say—because you're saying something in order to make something turn out the way you want it to turn out—and what you actually think.

The shadow's at work in two ways there. One way is that it's convincing you that using your speech and actions to manipulate the world in a conscious manner is a good idea, and it's not. The second is that you'll see that there are counter thoughts to what you think. For example, if you find yourself in the position of being too nice to someone—maybe it's a boss, for example, who's a bit of a tyrant—and you don't feel that you're in a position to say anything in your own defense against his or her bullying tactics, the consequence of that is that you'll think all sorts of dark and dangerous thoughts about that person in your own fantasies when you're not interacting with them.

If you catch a hold of those fantasies and let them play themselves out consciously, you'll see that they take you to very dark places—at least to places that you regard as very dark. Jung's notion essentially is that when you start to uncover those elements of yourself that don't fit comfortably within your ideas about yourself, you discover things about yourself that are also potentially very useful. It's as if you threw the baby out with the bathwater when you were setting up your personality.

So, for example, earlier I talked about people who may have decided very early in their life that they're just not going to get angry. It's like, well, it's not necessarily something that you want to throw away; it might instead be something that you want to bring within the realm of your personality so that it can express itself consciously and in an articulated manner. Because without anger, for example, you don't have any power, which basically means that no one needs to be afraid of you. You might think, well, people shouldn't be afraid of you, and then a union might ask, well, what in the world would ever lead you to believe that?

The distinction between being respected and being feared is not clear, but I would say that you don't respect anyone whom you couldn't imagine fearing if they decided to make that their priority. Without the capacity for aggression, you're not going to get any respect. That doesn't mean that people have to fear you, but it does mean that you have to incorporate your capacity for aggression enough so that they would fear you if you wanted them to. If you think about it, that makes a lot more sense from a moral perspective than the argument that you should be nice to everyone.

If you're nice to everyone because you don't have any choice, because you're weak and ineffectual and harmless, then that's not a virtue; that's just—you just can't do anything else. You're harmless by default. Harmless and virtuous are by no means the same thing. If, by contrast, you're capable of causing all sorts of terrible trouble, and you know it, and you know how, and then you decide not to do it because you can articulate carefully an alternative route, well, then you have the possibility of virtue. Because without the capacity to sin, so to speak, there's no virtue in not doing it.

If you're a young man who feels that sleeping around is wrong but never has the opportunity to do it, then you can hardly attribute that to your virtue. A good union would say, well, you're just making a virtue out of a vice. It's just rationalization; it has nothing to do with virtue. If you are attractive to people and you decide that that attraction should only manifest itself within certain tight boundaries, and that's a voluntary choice, that's a whole different issue.

When Jung claims, for example, that you throw the baby out with the bathwater when you're trying to develop and become a socially acceptable personality, that happens in a different way as far as he's concerned for each of the genders. One of the prices Jung would say that we pay—and this is a very modern idea in some ways—for growing up as a distinctly gendered society is that it's very easy for men to suppress and fail to develop those elements of their character that might be considered classically feminine. It's difficult for women to develop and express those aspects of their personality that might be classically considered masculine.

But Jung believed that nested inside the shadow, in some sense, were the contrasexual capacities. For example, for a man, given what we know about the temperamental difference between men and women, it may be that men could develop the capacity for true compassion and care if they could find that ability within what they've thrown out in the shadow. Women, for example, could find the capacity to be aggressive and assertive because that's part of what they threw out during their stage of their course of development because of its a priori categorization as inappropriate behavior.

Now, that doesn't mean that Jung thought that there was—that people should be raised without any gender identity. That issue never came up for him. He just thought that once you had established a personality that was sufficiently developed to be acceptable socially and functional on the individual level, then you could have the opportunity to expand that personality and to take into yourself elements of perception and thought and behavior that you wouldn't have had the sophistication to handle at an earlier stage of development.

So Jung would say perhaps that if you're a male, you have to become masculine before you could become feminine, and if you were a female, the reverse is true. But if your development only stops with a narrow and categorical gender identity, then there are elements of being that you could draw on that aren't at your disposal and that will make you weak.

So the shadow breaks up into the anima and animus. The anima is the female inside the male, so to speak, and the animus is the male inside the female. Jung believed that he could see those partial spirits manifesting themselves in people's behavior. He talked about a couple of typical behaviors that he thought were associated either with anima possession, so that would be in the case of a man, or animus possession in the case of a woman. He would regard if you ever talk to someone who's female who seems to respond to all of your propositions with nothing but argumentation for the sake of argumentation, you would regard that as a manifestation of possession by the animus.

If you ever talk to a man who is irrationally possessed by rage and futile emotions, then he would regard that as possession by the anima. You can see that if you watch for it, and if you believe in such things, the best thing to do when confronted with someone who's animus possessed is just shut up because you're not going to make any headway. The point of an animus-inspired argument is to get you to argue, not to win, because by getting you to argue, the animus wins.

Behind those two things, the shadow and the anima and the animus, there's a final archetype, which is the archetype of the self. Jung believed that the self was what you were as a totality, and that's a hard thing to understand. But you could think about it this way: you could think about the self as the total of what you are now plus the total of all those things that you could still be. It would be you as a reality plus you as potential, and that's a strange idea, right? Because we don't really know how to understand the idea of potential as modern empirical people because potential, virtually by definition, is not yet manifest and also not a straightforward thing to either measure or conceptualize.

By the same token, everybody acts as if they have potential—unrealized potential. Jung generated a category to account for that, which he felt was expressed in all sorts of symbolic ways. For example, the wise old man, like the wizards in the movies that all of you have seen in the last five years—it's always the same wizard. Sometimes it's even the same actor. That's an archetype of the wise old man, and for Jung, Christ was an archetype of the self as well. I told you why that was, to some degree, and it's partly because the phoenix is also an archetype of the self. The phoenix is something that can die and be reborn, and so the phoenix stands for the part of your personality that can let one thing go—one part of you, which is an alive part can let that go and burn up, so to speak, so that something new can be born.

Because you very seldom gain something before you let something else go. That's partly because what you already assume can be the worst impediment that you have toward learning something new. It's complicated because sometimes what you know worked in the past. You can think about that. Maybe you're a perfectly well-adapted 11-year-old, and you're still acting that way when you're 15. It's like, well, it's hard to let that go because it worked, and you put a lot of effort into it. Unless you let it go, the new personality isn't going to be able to manifest itself. You have to stop being a child before you can be an adult, and there's a sacrifice that goes along with that.

It's also a sacrifice that parents have to make, right? Because in order for a parent to encourage you to adopt the responsibilities of an individual, they have to allow you, as a child, to die so that an adult can manifest itself in that child's place. That's fundamentally, in many ways, the Oedipal complex. Okay, so now I'm going to show you some of these things again because the thing about Jung is that it's not easy to understand what he has to say, and it's not a simple thing to explain it. His books are complicated, although I don't think they're any more complicated than they have to be.

I don't think Jung is obscure; I think he's just difficult, and then beyond difficult, he's actually frightening. There are lots of reasons that people don't like Jung. The fact that he's difficult and frightening are probably the two foremost objections. I think the other thing that happened to Jung that maybe slowed his acceptance as an intellectual was that many of his students were women—like, his primary students and the people who developed his ideas—many of the people who identified, continued to develop his ideas after he died were women. That was perhaps not the most effective way of making headway in the academic world at the time that he was alive.

So let's look at some things. I'm going to show you some things from The Lion King because The Lion King shows you archetypes everywhere. So let's do this first. So, okay, so the first thing that I would like to point out here is that this takes place at daybreak, and daybreak is when the sun re-emerges. From an archetypal perspective, the sun re-emerges from a terrible battle that it had with the thing that devours the sun at night, and it comes up again triumphant in the morning. It's the dawn of consciousness, and that idea that the sun undergoes this battle is associated with the idea that you descend into unconsciousness when you sleep, and magically, we re-emerge from it in the morning, and you do that in accordance with the sun.

For you, darkness is a time of unconsciousness, and there's a tight relationship between unconsciousness and darkness. Jung would say people projected that idea; it was an idea that was in their imagination that unconsciousness and darkness were tightly aligned. They used their imagination to explain the world and conceptualize the sun in those terms of imagination, so that if you analyze the terms of imagination, you can get some understanding of the structure of the imagination. That's one of them: consciousness and light are the same thing—illumination, enlightenment—all of those things, and that's because we're primarily visual creatures and we're conscious during the day.

So this is a new beginning—the new day, which is something that everyone also experiences because sleep washes away the cares of the previous day. It does revitalize you. We know perfectly well that if you deprive people of sleep for any length of time, it's not good for them. It derails them entirely, deranges them entirely. So there is a reason that this movie opens with the dawn of the day.

Okay, so there's another recasting of the same idea, right? Except the lyrics also indicated that there was an association between the dawn of self-consciousness and the emergence of the light because the lyrics were, “When we stepped the day, we stepped onto the planet and stepped out blinking into the light.” There's a transition from unconsciousness to consciousness metaphor underlying that. One of the statements the film is making, or one of the ways the film is trying to set you up to understand this as a story about the emergence of consciousness into the light.

Now, you might say, well, did the filmmakers know all this? The answer to that is a) it depends on what you mean by “know,” which is really a critical factor in this sort of discussion; and b) well, yes. The way they manifested the fact that they knew it is because they knew when things fit together. So, you know, when you're writing a story or something like that or reading a story, you know when the story is going well. You think, “Yeah, that makes sense.” In fact, you don't even notice it, right? You just assume that everything's fine because it makes sense. It doesn't jar you out of the narrative.

People are perfectly capable, especially if they concentrate on it for long periods of time, of assembling a narrative with images that make sense. Now, they may not know why it makes sense. In fact, if they're actually artists, they don't know why it makes sense because they're expanding their capacity to comprehend and explain things while they're producing what they're producing. They have to be moving beyond what they know because otherwise they're just producing propaganda.

There are elements of many Disney films that sink now and then into propaganda—sort of conscious moralizing—but when the films are really working, they're not doing that at all. And when they are consciously moralizing, they're boring very quickly. Plus, they date extremely rapidly. There's far too much.

Okay, so that's a brilliant piece of film editing there because the filmmakers sweep your eye along and then make something appear as a revelation, and they do it at exactly the same time that the music swells to a climax, and that's indicating to you that something of tremendous importance is about to be revealed. So you see two things here. The first thing you see is what's called Pride Rock, which is roughly pyramidal in shape—at least a triangular shape—that emerges in the middle of the landscape that actually serves symbolically as the center of the kingdom.

Now, you can think about that as an Egyptian pyramid, or you could think about it as a dominance hierarchy. It doesn't really matter; it's both of those things. It's also the thing on which the animals are subjugated to stand, right? Because that's where the king is, and the king happens to be a lion. The lion is a solar beast; it's always been a solar beast. It's associated with the sun, and it's the king of beasts because it's an apex predator; it's at the top of the hierarchy.

For whatever reason, although obviously the lions in the animated movie, they're not actually lions. It's important to remember that while you're analyzing the film because it's very easy to just think of them as lions, even though clearly they're not. Now, you also see this little character up in the right-hand corner, left-hand corner, and that's Zazu, right? Zazu is the eye of the king. The king is on top of the pyramid, but the king's eye is free from the king, and the king, Zazu, goes all over the place, even where the pyramid can't see.

That's the eye on the top of the pyramid. You've seen that symbol everywhere, no doubt. It's the symbol that's on the back of the American dollar bill, and there's a reason for it—it's because the eye of the king is not part of the hierarchy. The eye of the king is something that's always free of the hierarchy and can fly over all hierarchies. That's equivalent to the thing that could make its way up any hierarchy, in some sense. It's also the same as Horus, the god of vision in the ancient Egyptian stories.

Okay, so there we've got the king, and we'll see that he's on top of the rock, which is where the king belongs. He's also in full sunlight, even though that's not characteristic of any of the other animals. He's got his little bird there that tells him things because the king is someone who pays attention. The king who doesn't pay attention is a tyrant. Then the wind is blowing through the king's hair because the wind is spirit, and so the king is also something that's associated with the everlasting spirit—pneuma. Pneuma is the breath of air, and it's also the essence of life from an archetypal perspective.

To be inspired is like respiring. To be inspired is to take in spirit, and the kind of spirit that the king takes in is associated with the image of the wind. Now, you've got to look at his face. Remember before I was saying because the animators do a very good job of this—they gave him a very mature face. A mature face is something out of which something is coming instead of something into which something is coming, and you'll see that King Mufasa is always looking like this. He's very intent and focused and intimidating, whereas his son, right up until he becomes initiated, is like this—always.

As soon as he becomes initiated, and I'll show you that in the film, his face hardens. It isn't until his face hardens that he can go back and fight Scar, who's basically a figure of the shadow. Now originally, this character Rafiki was going to be one of those typical sort of Disney sidekick buffoons. That didn't work out so well in the narrative, and he ended up as a symbol of the self instead. Rafiki is obviously a shaman, and he's the part of the psyche that guides its transformation.

Here's another way of looking at the self—it's a very interesting idea. As you go through life, there are going to be triumphs and then catastrophes. When there's a catastrophe, the psyche falls apart, and then maybe it gathers its resources back together and pulls itself together. It's going like this: well, Jung would say the self is what's guiding that process. The ego feels it like this—triumph and catastrophe and triumph and catastrophe, or tragedy and comedy. But the self is the thing that's underneath all of it, allowing those transformations to take place, and that's Rafiki.

That's why he's associated as well with the sun. He's a good king because he's in touch with the self. That makes him not something that's either serving his persona or his ego, but you could say that what he's serving is a manner of ruling that allows for the appropriate amount of stability and transformation to take place in the kingdom so that it remains stable but also adapting to change. The king is guided in that by the little bird who tells him what's going on in those places he can't see.

Now, that's clearly a Madonna and child image, and the reason for that is quite simple. You might think, well, why would the idea of the Madonna and child—which, by the way, is a far older idea than the Christian representation of it—there're lots of figures of Madonnas and Madonna, Adonis, and children in ancient Egyptian art, for example. Now, be isis with Horus. Well, the reason that that's an archetype is because any society that doesn't regard the dyad of mother and infant as something sacred, which would mean of the highest value, is doomed, obviously.

Because without that being held as a value, the society will cease to propagate, and that will be the end of it. If the society isn't structured so that that dyad is up among the highest of values, then the society has become ungovernably corrupt. You see Rafiki there just anointed the little king with something that was orange, and that was something like the sun. The idea that the film is expressing is that there's some sun-like substance that's being associated with this newborn son of the king, and that's a dramatic manifestation of his destiny and an indication that he has to also be encultured because what Rafiki is doing is a cultural act before he's going to be complete.

Now the sand is also an indication that he's mortal. Now watch what happens here because the filmmakers, I think, they just nail this part. They're going to do the sweeping thing again, and the music rises to the ultimate climax of the song. What's happening here is that the self is presenting the sun, and so it's a presentation of the savior fundamentally. That's the thing that has just been born. That's the hero. When the hero is presented and the sun breaks open wide and shines on them, you would call that a synchronous event.

What happens is there's an emotion associated with that which you will feel, and it's at that time that all the animals bow down. They do that spontaneously. The idea is that there's a hierarchy here, and the little boy in the sun is the highest element of the hierarchy. When that manifests itself, and you can see beyond the facade to something that's divine behind it, the consequence of that will be a spontaneous bursting forth of awe. I really think the filmmakers nail that here.

Yeah, so they hit that pretty hard there. So there's also a nuclear family thing going on in the background that you might have noticed because, of course, the little king has a mother and a father, and that's partly because that works better, but also partly because the archetypal hero is the son of culture and nature. Here's a shadow figure here. He's represented here not so much as Simba's shadow, although he's part of Simba's shadow; he's represented as Mufasa's shadow. It's quite a complex idea because what it says is when a king-like organization grows up—which means any organization, anything that's a hierarchy, and that's powerful—there's a shadow element to it that tends towards totalitarianism and tyranny.

That's represented often by the king's evil brother. It's a very common motif in mythologically-based stories, and the king is generally blind to his brother, so often willfully blind, although that doesn't really seem to be the case in The Lion King. It is clearly the case that Mufasa underestimates the danger posed by his usually older and smarter brother. Myths very often make the case that the evil king is the older one and also the one that's more intelligent, and the reason for that is that, as far as I can tell, intelligence is something that can go very wrong if it goes wrong.

One of its big temptations is that it produces models of the world, and then falls in love with the models. When it falls in love with the models, that makes it totalitarian because it believes that its constructions are good enough so that there doesn't need to be anything else. It eliminates the necessity of the transcendent, and that's definitely a characteristic of any totalitarian system. It says this is everything we need, and then, you know, if you happen to suffer or if you happen to openly rebel against the system, then you're regarded as an enemy of truth, and then it's fine to do with you whatever might be done because everything worth doing has already been done.

Now he's got an interesting facial expression, and it's really worth watching facial expressions in animated cartoons because they're not faces. What they are is the consequence of the observations of extremely talented artists about how people's faces configure themselves over very long periods of time. Because these people are high-level artists, they know what they're doing. They're able to distill down certain facial expressions to describe a character. Now, this guy's obviously whiny. He's got this supercilious and arrogant voice. He's arrogant beyond belief, and he is also hard done by and resentful.

That's a really good—maybe he has a reason. He's got a scar; something happened to him that wasn't good. But he's taken on this attitude as a resentful victim who really deserves to rule if only everyone could see how wonderful he was. Then he has all sorts of reasons why the fact that he isn't powerful has nothing to do with his own shortcomings.

“Be king, and you shall never see the light in another day.” “Did your mother ever tell you not to play with your—what do you want? I'm here to announce that King Mufasa's on his way, so you'd better have a good excuse for missing the ceremony this morning. You'll lose more than that when the king gets through with you. He's as mad as a hippo with a hernia. Why quiver with fear now, Scar? Don't look at me that way.”

Well, as we can tell, the eyes of the king and Scar are not friends, and that's because Scar doesn't really want to see what's going on. Now here's an interesting little archetype. That's quite interesting. There are a variety of statements there that are very, very cool. One of them is that the kingdom is a bounded place, and so that's playing off the idea of explored territory versus unexplored territory, or the known versus the unknown, and the proposition there is that whatever the dominance hierarchy happens to be, it has a limited domain—a limited domain of competence.

The domain of competence is defined by everything that the light touches. Now, this is actually something that you can notice in your own life. It's quite interesting. You'll see that if you move into a new place, or a new neighborhood, or if you do anything new at all, that nothing that you haven't attended to is actually yours. It will stay foreign in a sense, and unfamiliar to you, until you interact with it with a substantial amount of attention.

That's partly because while you're attending to it, which is an act of conscious will, you're modifying your perceptions and your thoughts and your actions and your emotions to take it into account as a phenomena, and that means that you're competent there. It takes conscious effort to be competent because you have to practice being competent at a new domain. Until you've practiced being competent in a new domain, it's not yours. So this clip is showing what's basically an eternal truth, which is that your territory is whatever you've mastered, and it's demarcated by everything you haven't mastered.

In this particular representation, that's associated with death. It's also associated in some bizarre sense with paradise because, of course, Simba encounters the elephant's grave in no man's land, so to speak. When he runs away across the desert, he also finds paradise. There's a paradoxical idea there that the unknown contains death and everything you need to make your life worthwhile.

Here comes the anima. That's okay, so you see that he's a cocky little rat here. He's very confident, but that's egotism and also persona. Well, it's no wonder he's confident; he's the son of the king. The fact is that he has a position of dominance that he doesn't deserve merely because he was born into it, and that's made him shallow and arrogant and possessed by a persona. Now, this little figure who is basically an anima figure always knocks him down a peg—continually knocks him down a peg.

How many of you have seen Groundhog Day? You remember in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character is a real—you know, he's a jackass at the beginning. He's very arrogant, and he's very unskilled. Then he gets stuck in the same day, which is pretty funny because that is what happens to you if you're arrogant and unskilled. You end up in the same damn day; that's not fun. In that day, he becomes attracted to this woman who's an anima figure, and for years, as far as the film's concerned, every time he approaches her in his arrogant and clumsy way, she slaps him.

There's one scene in the movie where I think it lasts for about 30 seconds, and it's nothing but clips of her slapping him. Probably 30 times, at that point, you've seen him go through the same day in the continually painful way that he does, and she slaps him in those longer clips. After a while, the filmmaker gets tired of that; it just shows you nothing but the slaps. Eventually, he's brought so far down as a consequence of being stuck in the same day and continually being slapped that he falls completely apart.

Then he tries to kill himself. One of the very comical things about that movie is that that doesn't work either. He just wakes up at the same day again. What that means, in some sense, is that if you're too damn stubborn to change, you will keep running into the same thing over and over, continually, and that's why you're in the same day because you won't let go of it.

That might drive you even to question the value of your own being, but that's also not a very useful adaptive strategy, you know? It is until he starts to take his rejection seriously that he starts to actually build some real character, right? Then he starts paying attention to the day and finds out that there's all sorts of things that he can do during that day to make it rich and meaningful. As soon as he does that enough and becomes an expert at it, poof! He gets out of the the same horrible day.

That same horrible day is also a representation of the tyranny of the state because the state is something that's static. So anyways, Nala, she's—yeah—and while they're not paying attention, they end up in the shadows outside the kingdom.

So here's an image of Scar transforming himself essentially first into Hitler because there's a lot of Nazi imagery in this particular clip, but also into a satanic figure at the end. You'll see he's associated with the crescent moon. He turns into the horned demon of the night, essentially. Now, you can see that's all images of hell, obviously. One of the things that happened to people like Stalin, for example, is Stalin had nothing but contempt for people, and he thought all they ever did was lie.

What happened to Stalin is that he became surrounded by people to whom he could demonstrate contempt and who never did anything to him except lie because the reason for that was they were so terrified of him that they would never tell him the truth about anything. So he got into this spiral, which is kind of the spiral of the paranoid psychopath, where I distrust you so badly and set things up so that you'll be punished so hard if you ever deviate from the appropriate line that you'll do nothing but lie to me.

Then I'm fully justified in my contempt. It's sort of like Peter Pan, in some sense, king of the lost boys. It's like, well, who do you want to be king of? The route that Scar took, which is the negative archetype, the shadow root, means that he's king. But, you know, he's king of hell, and all he's got are these brainless minions. He's not exactly an attainment.

You may remember, or you may not remember, that—or may not know—that Hitler, of course, set up the biggest meeting arena that the world had ever seen for the Nuremberg Nazi party rallies. They were filmed quite brilliantly in a film called Will to Power, I think that's what it's called—Leaning, Riff, and Stalin. What Hitler had arrayed in front of him were blocks of thousands of soldiers everywhere, as far as you can see, in absolutely perfect uniformity. That's the idea because if you're already right, nothing has to be different; everything can be the same as the perfect thing.

The problem with that is you're not right, and things have to change. Hitler was a master of the use of fire as well and also put his displays on at night. He took all the Luftwaffe's aircraft spotting spotlights, which were huge massive lights—maybe they must have been 20 feet across—and he had them all lined up behind him on the stage. They would shine miles up into the sky, and so he would address these thousands and thousands of people in this nighttime ritual with a curtain of light behind him that was several miles high. It was an unbelievably powerful pageant, and the people who made this film are drawing on that to produce these images.

You know, modern people will say things like, “Well, the idea of hell is just a superstition.” But then you watch this, and it makes sense. Then you think, “Well, hell is where Satan himself rules, and nothing happens but the bodies burn in death.” That's exactly what happened during the Holocaust. So thinking that these sorts of archetypal ideas are superstitious is extraordinarily foolish and naive because they represent possibilities of being that continually manifest themselves, and everyone knows about them.

The implicit idea here is that if you take the path that Scar took, which is one of resentment and deceit as well as arrogance, which are three major shadow motivators, then you'll end up at best ruling over hell. It's no joke; it's not a superstition. The stories are trying to tell you something—that that mode of being is the pathway to perdition. The things that happen there are so terrible and so deep that the only way you can really express them is using the kind of imagery that we've come to associate with religious imagery.

In a sense, religious imagery is imagery that cannot be made more powerful. That's what makes it archetypal. It's like a limit; you can't go past it in terms of the representation. When you represent the ultimate destiny of evil as eternal hell, where all the bodies burn forever, and there's nothing there except demonic chatter, that's about as far as you can go in terms of your capacity to represent something.

But it's representing something. You can say, well, it's an eternal place. Well, that's because this possibility is always there; it never goes away. It's always there, and that's also what makes it archetypal. You know that because otherwise you wouldn't be able to understand the story, and everyone knows it; otherwise, this story wouldn't be—I still believe it's one of the top 10 grossing films of all time.

So obviously, it makes sense. Okay, well, I'd like to show you a lot more, but I can't. So we'll see you Thursday. I'm going to post some sample questions on the website very soon—tonight, possibly, tomorrow morning, possibly somewhere around there. So check it out, and you'll get some sense of what the exams will be like.