2016 Personality Lecture 05: Piaget, Segueing into Jung

Okay, so there were a couple of things that I wanted to tell you that were left open in the last lecture. The first one was that I told you that there were two types of games and then I only told you about one type of game, so I know you’ve all been dying of curiosity about that ever since.

So, the first type of game that we talked about was the one where everyone has a particularly shared goal. You might think of that as a structured game. But the second type of game that Piaget was interested in was dramatic or pretend play games. And generally how a pretend play episode works is that—well, a child can always do this by him or herself—but if it’s a group game usually what happens is the kids get together in a little group and they basically script out a little play.

And it’s like—what might you call it? Spontaneous improvisation. You know, and so maybe they’ll play house and they’ll assign, you know, a player to each role and I guess that would normally be mother and father and baby, often, and maybe pet—dog or cat. So, you know, you can be the cat and you can be the mom and you can be the dad. And then they’ll set up a little dramatic arena. Maybe it’s a, you know, like a table covered with blankets, which kids seem to particularly like, and then they’ll run through the game.

Now, in some sense, what they’re doing is imitating their parents or maybe their pet or maybe the baby, but it’s not exactly imitation. This is an important thing to note because imitation would imply—if you’re imitating someone, what you’re essentially doing is duplicating what they just did. Now there are robots, for example, now. If you want to teach the robot how to do something, maybe the robot’s got an arm—in fact, it does—you can grab its arm and you can go like this. And then as long as you put it there, the robot will do exactly that, precisely that.

So you’re teaching it—it has the capability of imitating movements that it’s already done once. But, you know, when you’re a kid and you’re playing house and maybe you’re being the mother, you don’t precisely duplicate with your body exactly the movements that you saw your mother make maybe the last time you saw her or the last time you were watching her. What you seem to be able to do instead is to watch your mother over long periods of time and extract out something that you might describe as her spirit.

And I know that that’s not really a psychological or a scientific word, but it’s a useful word because—or you could perhaps say her personality, but it’s not her personality exactly because it’s her personality as mother, which isn’t really her personality. It’s the mother personality, and that mother personality is something that has been practiced by mothers for who knows how long. And what the child seems to do when she, we’ll say for this example, is watching her mother is extract out what the spirit of motherhood is and then embody that, right?

And so you might think of the spirit of motherhood as those elements of behavior and perception and emotion and cognition, for that matter—but it’s all of those embodied simultaneously—what’s in common across all the instances of acting like a mother. You know, so you can say, “Well, that’s mother-like behavior,” and who knows what that might be. I mean, what you want to do is conjure up the stereotype roughly speaking of the mother. You know, people don’t really like stereotypes, especially in psychology, but almost all your thinking is in stereotypes, so there’s not much difference between a stereotype and a category, you know. Categories are oversimplifications and so are stereotypes.

But anyways, so you take—imagine the stereotype of a mother, and then the child is acting that out. And what they’re trying to do is to become the mother, roughly speaking. So, and why? Well, for obvious reasons. There are obvious reasons why someone would do that. It’s because without mothers there wouldn’t be any human beings, and so if we didn’t have successful mothers that would be the end of us, and so we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.

So, now one of the things that Piaget observed was that this kind of dramatic play was extraordinarily important to children because it helped them learn how to act like they would act maybe when they’re older children or maybe when they’re teenagers or maybe when they’re young adults. It’s a trial run in a relatively safe environment.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is that it’s not that easy to precisely specify the role of the father, but I really believe that one of the things that fathers do, if they do a good job of being fathers, is that they circumscribe a safe space within the house or within the familial environment where the children can play free of interference. And so then, because play is also a very sensitive behavior, by which I mean that it’s easy to disrupt play in children. If there’s anything wrong with the child they won’t play.

So one of the ways that you can tell if your child is doing well is that they’re playing. I mean I suppose you could say the same thing about your dog or maybe even your partner. You know, if they’re in a playful mood, then perhaps there isn’t anything particularly wrong with the relationship at the moment, and all the needs that might be regarded in some sense as more fundamental have been met. And so to get children to play well, you have to circumscribe a safe area and they have to be taken care of.

And then they can experiment with different modes of being, and they do that by themselves, but they also do that in the company of other children. And obviously what they’re doing is practicing for later roles. And, you know, you see this sort of thing in children at multiple levels because not only will they play out being a parent—that’s a very common element of child’s play—but they’ll also often develop sort of fixations on slightly older children, maybe a year older or two years older, and sort of hero-worship them and follow them around, imitating them even more directly than they might imitate a parent.

Now obviously the child has his or her reasons for that, and the reasons are they’re trying to advance to the next stage, so they scan the environment; look for someone who seems to have done that well, whatever that means, who looks competent and is maybe friendly and can tolerate having a, you know, kid trail along behind them; and they act them out. And so play, all the forms of play that we described—the two basic forms—are extremely important to children.

And when you see them pretending, as a parent, one of the things that you should realize is that it’s an extraordinarily important form of activity; it’s how they socialize themselves. Now, the other thing that I didn’t mention—this is concentrating on Piaget as well—is, you know, we talked a little bit in the mythological and shamanic initiation lectures about the idea that human personality evolution is a punctuated, upward development.

So you move ahead and then you encounter something that gets in your way, some sort of severe obstacle, and it either blocks you behaviorally so that you can’t get to your goal using your current behavioral plans or it’s even more complex than that and it disrupts the whole structure that you’re using to integrate your behavior across time. You know, so the difference between that would be roughly the difference between, say, going home to your partner or going on a date with your partner, assuming people still do such things, going out with your partner and them being in an irritable mood.

What that would mean is maybe you smile at them or you tell them a joke and, you know, it falls flat, or they respond in an angry manner, and so you’re going to orient to that; it’s going to cause things to fall apart a little bit; you might say, “Oh, the whole night’s ruined.” You probably don’t say the whole relationship has had it, but if that happens enough times you might. But you might say, “Oh, the whole night’s ruined,” or maybe you’ll—which is probably a bit of an overreaction right off the bat.

Like my impression as a clinician is that when people are being difficult to get along with, you should let them do it three times while you track it because then the third time they do it you can say, “Look, you’ve done this. Here’s what you’re doing.” And they say, “No, I’m not doing that,” and you say, “Ha! Yes, you are because I saw you do it then and then and then.” And then they’re basically screwed; you win right away if you do that.

So, but more seriously, if it’s just one little episode it’s best to let it go. You don’t really have any proof and maybe there’s just some, you know, local thing wrong. Three times, that’s a whole different issue because then you’ve got some credibility and it’s a nice balance between being too impulsively reactive—you know, because you should stand up for yourself, right? Well, does that mean that you should respond to every little slight? Well, you’re going to be reacting all the time if you do that, but you don’t want to be a pushover and let people walk all over you.

So you have to find some balance between being tolerant, so you don’t have unnecessary fights, and being tough so that you don’t have unnecessary fights, and three is a nice number. Anyways, so you’re out with your partner and they’re being annoying, and you know, you can reconstruct your behavior.

Maybe instead of telling jokes you look at your phone and let them calm down or something like that. You haven’t disrupted much of the frame that you’re using to interact with, right? The night, the evening, is still continuing in its planned manner; you can still use the perceptual structures and the expectations that were guiding you. They were modified at a very high resolution, minor level. And then, so that’s going to upset you a little bit because you’re going to think, you know, “What’s going on here?”

Maybe you’ll think, “Is there something wrong with me?”—if you’re self-conscious you’ll do that—or maybe you’ll think that there’s something wrong with them. Whatever. But it’s not that serious. But then, you know, maybe you’re out with your partner and, you know, some person wanders over—you’re in a restaurant—some person wanders over to the table and says, “Hello,” to your partner. “I didn’t know that you had a girlfriend or boyfriend. You, you know, you didn’t tell me that when we went out last week.”

Well, that’s going to be a whole different scenario. Right yeah, and you all laugh about that because you know perfectly well that it’s a different scenario. Right, and you might say, “Well, why is the one scenario more disrupting than the other?” and the answer to that is something like: if your presuppositions about the world are arranged in a hierarchy, in a sense, so that the little actions that you take to do something are at the very bottom of the hierarchy, or they’re the micro-details, and then you continue to abstract up all the way to the top, which might be, “I’m in a committed relationship”—now there are levels of hierarchy going from being in a committed relationship to the little actions that you undertake with one another—the higher up you have to go in the hierarchy, the higher up the disruption occurs in the hierarchical level, the more upset you’re going to be.

So irritable partner, well you can sort of walk around that; unfaithful partner, well, you know, that’s pretty much up at the top of the hierarchy where you have to start rethinking your past and your present and your future, and maybe you are and who they are and who men are and who women are, and it’s like, it’s really a disaster, right? Everything falls apart. Well, then that’s the little trip to the underworld that we talked about. Now Piaget had an idea like that also with regards to children because his stage theory is a punctuated theory.

One of the things he noted about children was that they would construct a structure, and a structure would be—I think again the best way to think about it is a personality because a personality has thoughts and emotions and motivations and actions; it’s all of those at the same time. It’s this little alive subelement of you, and children are conjuring up these little subelements of themselves that have functional utility as they build themselves from their motor systems upwards.

And now and then they run into a situation where the tools that they’ve built—the subpersonalities that they’ve built—aren’t fulfilling the desired function. So maybe that’ll happen when, you know, a three-year-old goes to kindergarten and isn’t making friends easily. Well that’s going to be—a child’s going to come home after that and cry, fall apart, and maybe be angry, and tell their parents, “No one would play with me.” And, you know, they’ll break down; they’ll have tears.

And it’s almost as if they switch from a domain where they’re competent. Like, emotion signifies, especially negative emotions, that you’ve moved from the domain in which you’re competent to the domain in which you’re not competent, and if you’re crying, for example, then that’s often a distress signal. Sometimes it’s anger, but it’s often a distress signal and it means, “I’ve ended up in a situation where what I know is no longer sufficient to produce the outcomes that I desire.” So you cry, and then you get help. People come and say, “Well, what’s the matter?” and they give you a little bat.

And, you know, and they console you and maybe they help you strategize about what you could do to make the situation better or how you could act. Or, if you’re a smart parent, maybe you play with your child and offer them—you know, and upgrade their ability to interact socially. Or you take them on additional playdates or whatever and monitor their behavior and help them reconstruct their little subpersonalities and bring in more information so that it’s more sophisticated.

So that would be the Piagetian—so this is a combination of the Piagetian ideas of the Stage Theory, which is movement upward with a punctuation, and that’s the confusion because the previous structure is no longer well-adapted to the world. And then the idea of assimilation and accommodation. Now Piaget kind of made assimilation and accommodation, in a sense, opposites and it’s not exactly. It’s hard to figure out.

But assimilation, for Piaget, is when you pull information in and the structure—the internal structure that you’re pulling it into—doesn’t really have to change that much. And accommodation is when you pull in a fairly mighty piece of information, often negative, and it’s so disruptive that the structure that you’re using to understand the information has to be reconstructed. Now, Piaget thinks of assimilation or accommodation, but I think it’s much easier to think about it on a continuum with the assimilation occurring at the level of micro-behaviors.

You know, like if you’re trying to pick up a fork, you know, and maybe your hand’s numb, you try to pick up a fork and it doesn’t work a couple of times, then you just change your grip and pick it up. Like it’s a little annoying. You’re going to look at the fork and you’re going to try a couple of routines to pick it up, but, you know, it’s not going to bring your whole damn world to a halt.

You know, so whereas if you find a dead mouse in your soup, well that’s going to be a whole different story, and again it’s a hierarchical issue. And so at the bottom, near the motor structures, I would say it’s easy to assimilate; you just have to make minor changes to the—I like to think about them as maps, really; they’re maps or personalities. I know those don’t sound the same, but they’re very similar. It depends on whether the thing needs a little adjustment or whether you have to toss the whole thing away and build a new one.

You know, it’s the difference between tightening the lug nuts on your car or buying a new car. You can see levels of—you can understand it as levels of difficulty. Another way of thinking about it—you need to know this because you need to understand how it is that you figure out how upset you should get when something goes wrong. It’s a very, very complicated question. If you wake up with an ache in your side, how upset should you be? Well, you don’t know.

It’s like, maybe it’s nothing; maybe you’re going to die of cancer in six months. You don’t know. And so it’s not self-evident how people calibrate their emotions when something goes wrong because the extent of the thing that went wrong is not clearly evident. Your partner’s crabby when you go out for dinner. Does that mean that you’re going to break up in two weeks? Well, it might mean that. So why don’t you just flip out right away because the whole world’s coming to an end?

Well, some people do, right, and those would be people who are higher in negative emotion or higher in trait neuroticism. Because they’re more likely to react as if a small, potentially small, anomaly or uncertainty or threat or discontinuity or unexpected occurrence is catastrophic, where an emotionally stable person, you know, you might have to say, “I’m breaking up with you,” before they’re going to, you know, look upset, and maybe even then it’s not going to bother them that much.

So you think of the motor hierarchy, you know, ranging from micro-behaviors at the bottom to abstractions at the top, and then you can understand how you might compute how upset you get when something goes wrong. Assume that it’s small to begin with. Check at that level. If you can’t fix it at that level, advance one level up. If your car doesn’t work, you don’t buy a new one. The first thing you do is maybe see if the battery is dead, right, because that’s the path that you could take that would cause you the least amount of trouble.

And it’s a really good schema for mental hygiene. It’s like Occam’s razor. You know Occam’s razor in science, right? Does everybody know what Occam’s razor is? How many people know what Occam’s razor is? Okay, how many people don’t know? Oh, that’s amazing. It’s amazing. Okay, well you should know. It’s really too bad that you don’t know. It’s undoubtedly no reflection on you.

Anyways, Occam’s razor is a phrase referring to a principle that was established by an ancient thinker, Occam, and he said, “Does not multiply your explanatory principles beyond necessity.” Okay, and so what he meant was: If you have six reasons why something might have gone wrong and you can rank-order them in terms of complexity, pick the simplest one and then until you disprove that stick with it and then go to the next simplest one and so on.

And it’s often used as a guiding principle in science where the idea is if you have a simple explanation, don’t complicate it up with a bunch of unnecessary assumptions. And it also might be reflective of a deeper underlying truth, which is that it’s unlikely for any set of entities to be in any particular configuration, but it’s particularly unlikely for them to be in an unlikely and complex configuration.

So anyways, hopefully that’s understandable. You can tangle all those ideas together. At the bottom of your personality hierarchy there are actions; at the top there are abstractions—moral abstractions like, “Be a good person.” When you run into something that’s unexpected, the amount you get upset is proportionate to the level in the hierarchy where the damage appears to be taking place.

Now you kind of have to guess at that, and partially you do that with your temperament—so if you’re high in neuroticism you guess catastrophe, and if it’s low in neuroticism you guess irrelevant—and you do that partly because of the way that you perceive your own competence—you know, because if you’ve encountered minor to major problems in the past, say even if you’re a nervous person, and you’ve solved them, you might’ve learned, “Well, yeah, it’s a problem but I can fix problems so it’s not really a problem,” which is a really good way to think of yourself.

You know, that’s a much better way to think of yourself than, “I’m a person with no problems.” It’s like, good luck with that. But, “I’m a person who could successfully address problems if I concentrated on them”: that’s very, very useful. And then the other way that your nervous system sort of decides how upset you should get when something happens is by looking at how other people treat you. And if they treat you like you’re competent, then your nervous system gets less neurotic.

That’s a good way of thinking about it. You produce more serotonin, you react less globally to indications of error. Okay, so anyways, so Piaget: he talks about assimilation. Assimilation is when you have to make a little change, and accommodation is when the whole damn structure has to be reconfigured, and he thought about those, in some sense, as separate types of learning, but they’re not; they’re on a continuum from very simple to very complex.

Have any of you ever heard of the idea of a paradigm shift? How many people have heard of that? Okay, how many people haven’t? Alright, do you know the name Thomas Kuhn? Anybody? No, okay, well Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher of science and he wrote a book in 1962 called “The Nature of Scientific Revolutions,” and Kuhn basically said the same thing about the way knowledge structures proceeded as Piaget said about the progression of knowledge structures within the individual.

So Kuhn was concerned about large-scale transformations in scientific viewpoints. So let me give you an example: so in the late 1890s, physicists were convinced that they were just going to have to shut the whole endeavor down. Why? Well, because the physicists knew everything that there was to know. There wasn’t a single phenomenon, at that point, that physicists could not account for except one, and here’s the one they couldn’t account for: So imagine you’re on a train and it’s going that way at half the speed of light.

And you shine a flashlight—you’re standing on the top of the train, obviously protecting yourself against the wind, and you shine a light going ahead and you measure the speed of light out of your flashlight. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second out of your flashlight. Okay, so now you’re on the ground and you’re watching this train zip by. And the guy’s on top of it shining a flashlight, and light comes out of the front of his flashlight and you measure the speed of it. What’s the speed?

Well, you might think, “Well, obviously it’s the speed of light plus half the speed of light because the train is going half the speed of light and the light is going the speed of light. And so the light coming from the combination of the train and the light is the speed of light plus half the speed of light; that’s what would happen if someone was throwing a ball, right?” But that isn’t right. What happens is it’s the speed of light and no matter how fast you’re going when you shine your flashlight out, the light coming out of your flashlight is going to be going exactly 186,000 miles an hour—I mean a second.

A second, sorry. 186,000 miles a second. It’s not additive. And so if you’re on the train and you’re going backwards and you’re shining your light, and the person measures it, it’s not the speed of light minus half the speed of light, which is what it would be if you were throwing a ball. It’s the speed of light. Well, nobody knew how the hell to account for that. It’s like, that just made no sense at all, but everyone was ignoring it.

Well, it turns out you can’t ignore that and that wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t quite well-laid out at the end of the nineteenth century from the perspective of physics, but it was a big one. And to solve that, Newtonian physics had to be completely overthrown and quantum physics put in its place. And quantum physics is—quantum physics, you might think of it as a box like this and inside that there’s a box that says Newtonian physics.

And so quantum physics can explain everything that Newtonian physics can explain, but it explains some more things beside, and so you would say, because it’s a better theory. Now, I might say, “Well, you’ve just made a personality transformation. Are you a better person than you were before?” and you might say, “Well, how in the world can you make a judgment like that?” And I would say, “Well, if you’re a better personality you can do all the things you could do before, just as well or maybe even a little better, plus there’s a bunch of new things you could do. That’s a better personality.”

It’s another interesting example of how the idea of better, which really is a moral idea in some sense, better versus worse, you can conceptualize it—well, this is one of the things that Piaget is really, really useful for because it gives you a language that’s grounded in observation and in science to start to handle questions that start to border on the moral. So a better personality can do more than the previous personality could, and you certainly see how that would be applicable to your life.

And one of the things I would suggest as a consequence to that is: you know, people always compare themselves to other people, and generally what you do is you compare yourself—you make a little dominance hierarchy out of the people that are right around you. And this is a very annoying propensity because what it means is that no matter how successful you get in your life, you’re still going to be in the middle of the dominance hierarchy.

So you’ll end up, I don’t know, maybe you’ll end up—God I don’t know—maybe you’re CEO of a hundred million dollar company, let’s say. Well, you’d go hang out with a bunch of CEOs and there are ten of them. Three of them are CEOs of a two billion dollar company. It’s like, you’re a pretty little CEO among those people, but who are you going to be comparing yourself to? The guys who pick up your trash? It’s like no. You could, but you won’t; you’ll have your little group around you and you’ll be somewhere in the middle.

And so that’s useful to know because that means that what you have to learn to cope with is the fact that you’re going to be somewhere in the middle. And then you might say, “Well, how do you cope with that because you should be improving and you also want to be very good at something?” Well, I think the best way to do that, and this is especially true when you’re older, is that you don’t compare yourself to other people; you compare yourself to the previous version of you.

It’s a good control, right, because you’ll see, especially by the time you’re about thirty, when you’re young you have to compare yourself to other people because when you’re young you’re a lot like all other people, in some sense. But by the time you’re thirty or older, you’re not very much like other people at all. And so, you know, because the conditions of your life start to become so unique and specific to you.

Well then, comparing yourself to other people isn’t very helpful, but comparing yourself to who you were before: that’s really helpful and you can keep doing that your whole life. And it’s a fair game, right, because the previous you had all the problems and all the opportunities and positive attributes that you have. It’s fair; it’s a fair game and it’ll save you an awful lot of misery.

So, alright so Piaget outlined different forms of games and he talked about different ways that those aided in socializations. And you can understand that—I use this “meta” idea, which was the hierarchy of personality, to sort of explain that. From a Piagetian perspective, you put yourself together from your body upward toward increased abstractions, and as you do that you can do more things with your body, but you can also do more complex things integrating those things that you do with your body across time and with increasing numbers of other people.

Now, Piaget has this really cool idea about what constitutes reality as a consequence of that. So he would say: Alright, so let’s say you can choose Game A or you can choose Game B and you might say, “Well, I want to figure out whether Game A or Game B is a better game because if I’m going to play a game it might as well be a better game.” And he would say, “Okay, so here’s how you can figure out if the game you’re playing is a good one: it’s good for you. Now. It’s good for you now, next week, next month, next year, and ten years from now.

So not only is it good for you now, but if you play it repeatedly, things get better for you.” Okay, so that’s a game where you’re taking the future into account. It’s not an impulsive game. You know, like cocaine is really good for people for about a day, but over a week or six months or five years it’s a degenerating game.

So, and you can’t use your emotion to determine that because cocaine generally suffuses the person who’s using it with a sense of power and possibility. So you can’t just rely on your emotion, no more than you can when you’re tempted to do something impulsive and fun but that might have negative consequences. Okay, so the game should be good now and across the future. And then it should be good for you, and it should be good for your family and it should be good for your social community and so forth, as you spiral outward, and it should be good for all of those things across multiple expanses of time.

And Piaget would call that an “equilibrated game.” Now, there’s another additional idea behind the idea of an equilibrated game which is that if I’m playing a game that’s good for me and it’s good for you and it’s good for you and it’s good for you, then we probably will all be willing to play it voluntarily.

And so that’s also why Piaget believed that, in some sense, a game-like structure—let’s say a social structure—that everybody plays because they want to is much better than a game-like structure where everyone plays because they have to. And so he would say, well that’s in part the technical difference between a tyranny and a democracy. And it’s bloody smart thinking.

You know, I think Piaget got farther with that idea than anyone else had ever in history because you can understand—there’s this old idea. It was Hume—another philosopher. What’s his first name? Hume. David? What’s that? David? David! Yes, you’d think I could remember that. David Hume.

He has this idea that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.” So it’s another one of those principles, like Occam’s razor, and what it means is something like this: No matter how much you know about something that doesn’t mean that you can figure out what you should do about it. So here’s an example: Let’s say, we know AIDS is a problem, we know cancer’s a problem, we know heart disease is a problem, we know poverty’s a problem, etc. There are all these problems.

How do you determine how you would allocate resources to those different problems? Well, it’s a very, very difficult problem to get at from a scientific perspective, and the reason for that is that well, there are all these variables that you would have to equate. Imagine you built a spreadsheet, and so you were thinking, “Okay, which is the most troublesome of these things and, you know, which could we solve with the least amount of money.”

Well, the problem is that to determine whether something is troublesome you still have to make a value judgment. Like, there’s no way you can get to the bottom of the problem without introducing the problem of value judgment, and that’s partly why it’s very difficult to derive an ought—what you should do—from an is—what you know. And that’s why there’s a distinction between science and morality or science and religion, that’s another way of thinking about it: is that they’re different domains.

Now, Piaget, in some sense, has described a way out of that because he does say, “Well look: a theory that’s better than a previous theory is the theory that explains the same amount and more—and you can apply that to your personality—and a game that’s better than a different game is one that benefits you and more people but it also does that over different spans of time.” Now a game like that’s very hard to compute.

You know, when people talk about environmental sustainability what they’re really talking about is a Piagetian equilibrated game where you can live in your family and your family can live in society and society can operate within an economy and the economy can exist within an ecology without having the economy tilt the ecology so that you can’t live and your family can’t live and your society can’t function and the economic system can’t function.

So there is this idea of multilevel balance, but those things are very difficult to compute, you know. So, but it’s still a nice principle. You know, so if you’re thinking—well, if you need a justification for what you’re doing and you want to put yourself on firm moral ground, which is really useful because then people can’t push you around verbally or intellectually or any other way.

Because you’re grounded; you’re standing on something solid. It’s like, you need to know: why is this good for you as if you were someone you were taking care of? Why is it good for you across a long period of time? How does it benefit your family? How does it benefit society? And then, you know, you can keep stepping upward from there.

So, well I can give you one example of someone who’s doing that, I think. You know about that Dutch kid who’s figured out how to get plastic out of the oceans? Well, he’s not just whining about it and parading around with a sign that says, you know, “I don’t like pollution.” It’s like, as if you need to tell people that, you know, because everyone really doesn’t like—“I don’t like pollution and I’m against poverty.” It’s like, “Yeah, well find someone who’s for pollution and poverty.”

Anyways, this kid was about seventeen, something like that, and he was diving around—he’s a diver. I think he was spearfishing and he noticed there was more plastic than fish. This wasn’t a very happy discovery for him. And then so he started thinking about that: How can we get the plastic out of the oceans? And then he was looking at manta rays, and manta rays have these big wings that help them sort of glide through the ocean.

And he thought about that for a while, and then he thought, “Well, maybe I can build this sort of manta ray thing that lies on the surface of the ocean in a triangle and then it could be towed through the ocean and all the plastic would go to the apex of the triangle. And then you could just scoop it up.” But then he did his calculations, and I haven’t got this story quite right but this is basically the story. He did some calculations and found out well, that’s not cost effective because it takes a lot of energy to drag this thing through the water and there’s a lot of water.

And, you know, plus you’re polluting like mad while you’re dragging this thing through the water. And so probably it’s just not that helpful. But then he realized that if you go out into the ocean—there are these massive things called “gyres,” which are like huge water hurricanes—except they’re very, very, very slow moving. But they’re huge; they’re continent-sized.

And so the oceans are already always moving, so he thought, “Ha! Since the ocean is moving, there’s no real reason to have to drag the, you know, the plastic or the plastic-gatherer through the water. You could just nail it to the ocean bed with cables and then just have it sit there. And then the ocean would go through all by itself.” So, he built a prototype, which wasn’t very big, and he gathered up a fair bit of plastic.

All the plastic’s in about the top foot of the ocean, by the way, and it really increases in density as you move up towards the top inch. So then he built a bigger one and he got a bunch of—he went on Kickstarter and then he raised a bunch of money. And then he got a bunch of engineers to look at his idea and they said, “Well, you know, this would probably work.” So then they built a big one—a couple of kilometers long—which is now in place off the shore of Japan.

They also sent a whole flotilla of people from California to Hawaii to do a garbage estimate, to see how much garbage there was in the water, because there’s a big spot in the middle of the Pacific called the “Great Garbage Spot,” which is full of—or the “Great Plastic Spot?” It doesn’t matter—that’s full of plastic. And so they went to estimate how much there was in it.

Anyways, he thinks he can guide this thing to the bottom of the ocean in these big gyres; make it, you know, a hundred kilometers long in a V-shape; put a kind of a collector at the end of it; load all the plastic he collects up on barges; go re-refine that into oil or plastic; and pay for it while he’s doing it. And so you can look him up and I think he’s like nineteen or twenty now.

So, you know, that’s a good equilibrated game, right? That works out really well. He gets to make some money, good for him; he gets to employ a bunch of people, that’s a good thing; everybody’s happy about it because, good, you know, we’re getting rid of the garbage; and like there’s no downside. So, you know, it’s hard to say—it’s hard to come up with an argument for why that isn’t a good thing.

And it’s good because everyone benefits all the way up. So that’s an equilibrated state. It’s a very, very, very smart idea. Okay, now Jung. Experimental psychologists don’t like Jung—well, they don’t like Freud either, and they don’t have much time for clinicians in general. But that’s okay: they’re not trying to solve the same problems.

Now, usually if you take a personality course, you’ll cover Freud before you cover Jung, and the reason for that is that Freud, in some ways, proceeded Jung historically and lots of people, especially the Freudians, like to think of Jung as Freud’s student. And there’s some truth to that because Freud was the first person who really collected up ideas about the unconscious and formalized them, publicized them, and applied them to the problems of pathology and mental health. So good for him.

And Freud was unparalleled at describing pathological families, and there are plenty of those. But Jung was interested in something that was underneath that. I mean, Freud got underneath things a lot, you know. He was also one of the first people to point out just exactly how potent sexual and aggressive motives were in shaping the way that we thought.

But Jung: Jung was more interested—like, in some sense, Jung was more like a Darwinian biologist. He was much more interested in the biological and psychological philosophical history of fundamental human behavioral patterns. And so Jung wasn’t like a behaviorist. A behaviorist would think when you’re born there’s nothing there except the possibility to learn things; you’re a blank slate.

And then everything you learn is a consequence of sensory information that you’re picking up and what you learn as a consequence of that. But Jung, he didn’t think that at all. He thought that there’s a specific human nature, and he set out to understand what that human nature is. Now, a couple of lectures ago I talked to you about the characters that you might imagine making up the world that you inhabit.

So I said, well you can think about the absolute unknown, which is the unknown that’s so unknown that you don’t even know it’s there. That’s something that is really, really shocking if you ever encounter it, and it’s the sort of thing that you’re exposed to, hypothetically, whenever you go to a horror movie that depends on fear. Right, because horror movies that depend on fear confront you with things that do not behave the way they’re supposed to behave, like inanimate objects that move.

You know, if all of a sudden you discover an inanimate object that moves, there’s a lot that’s wrong with your particular model of the world. And you can kind of experience that in a horror movie because things will do things that they’re not supposed to do, like walls will bleed. That’s just not supposed to happen, and so it’s very upsetting to see something like that. But you’re exposing yourself to that in horror movies and trying to—well, you’re trying to develop some courage because God only knows which of your fundamental major assumptions might just turn out to be wrong.

So we talked about representations of the absolute unknown, and I suggested that those were often associated with serpentine predators; and then we talked about representations of culture, because every character has to contend with culture, whether it’s a fictional character or you. You’re stuck with it. You’ve got your culture—and some of that’s positive because here you are: you can talk, you can read, it’s warm, you know, you’ve got a bright future ahead of you.

And then it’s also a destructive tyrant because it’s ruining the world and all those things that you already know about. And then so that’s culture, then there’s nature because you’re stuck with that too. And there’s a benevolent element of nature that’s usually portrayed with feminine symbols—and that’s the Mother Nature that environmentalists know and love—and then there’s, you know, Mother Nature that gives your mother cancer when she’s forty—and that’s the downside of Mother Nature and you’re pretty much stuck with that too.

And then there’s you and, you know, there’s all the useful things about you—the sort of heroic things. Technically, you know, the parts of you that would be able to confront the unknown and to prevail, or to confront the tyrannical part of the culture and to prevail. That’s the positive part, and then there’s the negative part, which is the part of you that you know very, very well that’s always causing trouble for you and other people.

And it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to and is resentful and angry and petty and mean and ignorant and blind and impulsive and rationalizing and all of these lovely things that people are more than capable of doing. Now those are all archetypes. And so they’re archetypes because they’re the fundamental personalities that we use to orient ourselves in life. I guess that’s the best way of thinking about it.

Now, when Jung talked about an archetype it’s kind of complicated because sometimes he talks about them as instincts and sometimes he talks about them as images and sometimes he talks about them as stories. But the best way to contend with that is to understand that they’re all of those at the same time. So, for example, if you go to a romance—which is a kind of archetypal story—you go to a romantic comedy, say, that means, you know, the protagonists have a love affair and it turns out positively. Romantic comedy: an archetypal structure.

Well, what are the characters doing? Well, they’re driven by instinct, obviously, so that’s the instinctive level of the archetype; and then it’s a behavioral pattern because they’re interacting with each other; and it’s a story because someone has selected out the major elements of the events, in the way that would be most engaging to an audience, and portrayed them. So the archetype can be all of those things at the same time. There’s no contradiction; it just makes it a more complex phenomenon.

It’s best again to think of it as a personality. An archetype is a personality, and an archetypal story is the manner in which an archetypal personality manifests itself across time. And there are lots of archetypal stories, and I can give you a couple of fundamental examples. The fundamental archetype of male behavior is the dragon story—is confronting the dragon. And that’s to go out, confront the dragon, which can be all sorts of things—it can be the absolute unknown; it can be the negative element of femininity, which is a dragon that stops men cold all the time—and usually what happens as a consequence is that the person gets a treasure or gets a girl.

Okay, the fundamental female archetype, as far as I’ve been able to tell—it’s a little harder to track down; it took me a long time—is Beauty and the Beast, and the reason I figured that out—there are a bunch of reasons but I only figured it out about two years ago and I thought, “Yeah, of course that’s it.” I read this book by the guys who do data analysis at Google and it’s called “A Billion Wicked Thoughts.” It’s quite an interesting book, and basically what it is, it’s a study of search engine behavior.

And, you know, I think about 18-19% of search engine behavior is sexual in nature, and so then you might think, “Well, what are men doing and what are women doing?” Well, we know what men are doing: they’re looking at pictures of naked women, broadly speaking. What are women doing? Ha! They’re not looking at pictures of naked men; they’re reading about sex. So women’s pornography use is literary.

And so I thought, “Oh that’s interesting. That makes sense,” because actually women read more fiction than men, by the way. Women are more predisposed to reading fiction. Women seem to be more interested in people than in things, a very stable cross-cultural gender difference. Anyways, so women are reading about sex. And you know that if you buy, if you look at—when I was a kid and on holidays, summer holidays, my mom used to pack along like thirty Harlequin romances.

Do you know what a Harlequin romance is? Does everybody know what a Harlequin romance is? Does anybody not know? Okay, most people know? It’s a cheap pulp romance, you know? It’s like deserving young woman meets dashing and somewhat distant guy and he’s already with someone, but she doesn’t deserve him, and then she charms him. And then, you know, he decides that she’s actually the one and then she gets to have him and then everyone lives happily ever after.

So that’s a Harlequin romance. Now, the original Harlequin romance—they published millions of these bloody things—was just that, and it was a pretty plain, G-rated story. But since the 70s Harlequin has exploded and it’s gone from, you know, G-rated stories of the sort I told you to like triple-X versions. And they’re all very popular and those sorts of stories are also reflected in female use of the Internet.

And so what you see is that they look up Beauty and the Beast stories and there are five major protagonists—and this is something that I think is so absolutely comically it just killed me when I first read it. Here are the five major guys in female X-rated pornography: okay, werewolf, yeah; vampire, yeah; surgeon; yeah; billionaire, yeah; pirate. So, isn’t that funny? Man, it just blew me over, but you know, it’s not much different, in some sense, than the male archetypal story of confronting the dragon, right?

Because—and I’ll show you something from Sleeping Beauty that makes this very clear. I’ll show you that today. Because, you know, if you think about it, so these are kind of bad guys. Well, the werewolf and the vampire in particular, right, but the pirate’s sort of up too. And you might think, “Well, why would men like that figure in women’s archetypal sexual narratives?” and the answer to that is: well, what the hell good is a man that can’t be dangerous, right?

Think about that. And, you know, this bloody theme is played out in romantic comedies all the time; think about it. There’s the girl, and she has a friend. He’s a guy. He’s kind of a guy who never grew up. He’s usually—what’s his name? There’s a comedian: Seth Rogan. He’s usually Seth Rogan. You know, and he’s kind of joe everyone and he’s kind of funny and he’s her friend, but he really wants to sleep with her and she knows that.

And she knows that he’s not just her friend, and he isn’t just her friend; he just likes to pretend that. You know, and then there’s the guy who she’s interested in who’s not like Seth Rogan and he’s got an edge to him, you know. And then the story usually plays out—there’s an interplay between those three characters. And, you know, the Seth Rogan guy is always going, “Well, why doesn’t she like me?”

And the answer is: well, just watch him for ten minutes, and you know why. You know, partly because she doesn’t want a friend. She wants someone who’s good for someone, and someone who’s good for something is someone who’s got a powerful edge. And part of what happens in the female archetype is that the female civilizes that, at least in relationship to herself.

Okay, so and then, as far as I’m concerned, that’s not much different, as I said already, than the male hero myth. So, I’m going to show you, first, I’m going to show you something from Sleeping Beauty. So let me just find it here. What’s the universal video player? Yeah, yeah, that’s the one. Thanks. I’ve got to download it because, well they strip this machine every night, and so you have to always download things over and over.

Okay, so let’s talk about the structure of Sleeping Beauty for a minute. So, there’s a king and a queen, and, you know, they live in a kingdom—logically enough. And they’re trying to have a baby, and that doesn’t work out very well. And then all of a sudden, you know, after time passes, they have this baby girl, and her name is Aurora. So that’s sort of a reference to the sky, obviously, right?

And you often see with archetypal characters that they’re affiliated, in some sense, with cosmic phenomena. So, for example, you know, kings and queens have crowns, right? And then divine figures have halos. Well, there’s not much difference between a crown and a halo, and the crown is the sun. The little points on it: those are the rays of the sun.

Or it’s the moon. It depends if the crown is made out of gold or silver because gold is a solar metal and silver is a lunar metal. And so, when something is associated with the cosmos, that means that it’s gone from the purely personal to the impersonal or the transpersonal or the archetypal. And the archetypal would be not your father, but the father as such—like the spirit of the father; not your mother, but the spirit of the mother as such.

And so, when you have the king and the queen, you have the sun and the moon. You have the ruler of the day sky and the ruler of the night sky. You have the ruler over everything that the light touches, and you have the transpersonal figures of mother and father. Okay, so now you see this in lots of movies and hero stories and comic books.

So, the most commonly portrayed pattern is that the hero has two sets of parents, right? Harry Potter: he’s got the Dursleys, and they make him live under the staircase, and then he has his brother/cousin. What’s his name? Dudley. What’s that? Dudley. Dudley! Yeah, it’s the long version of “dud.” And, you know, he’s a bad brother, and so they’re actually the archetypal hostile brothers.

Harry Potter. Hero and adversary. And then he’s got his ordinary parents, and those are the parents that, well they’re real ordinary: they live in an English suburb and they’re extraordinarily conservative and narrow-minded. They don’t want anything to do with anything magic whatsoever. And then he has his Heavenly parents, who are his magic parents.

Right, and they come back in spirit form now and then throughout the movie when he really needs them. So, Superman: he’s got his Earthly parents and his Heavenly parents, right? If you go onto Wikipedia and you look up, “Orphan hero,” I think they have 160 of them listed; same motif over and over. The reason for that is, well first of all, when you’re a teenager, one thing you think is, “Ugh, are these really my parents?”

Right, and so the answer to that is yes and no. And it’s yes, in that well, obviously, from a strict immediate biological perspective they’re your parents. But from an archetypal perspective, it’s like, well you have parents going back three and a half billion years. Your parents are just the latest in a very, very, very long line of parents. And so the reason you call your father “Dad,” or “Father,” or whatever you happen to call him, is because it’s in recognition of the fact that the relationship that you have with him, to some degree, isn’t personal; it’s archetypal. He’s the Father.

He plays that role for you. And, you know, you can even tell when he’s playing it properly because you might tell your friends, you know, “I don’t have a very good father.” It’s like, well how the hell do you know that? You know, it’s sort of like you’ve got this idea in your mind about what a good father would be like, and if he’s not doing that, then it’s not him—you know, subject to your childhood and teenage misinterpretations.

And, you know, “I have an awful mother.” It’s like, well, compared to what? Well, compared to the ideal mother. Well, you might say, “Well, just who is this ideal mother.” Well, you can see her in religious representations all the time. So, in Christianity, for example, you’ll see her represented as the Virgin Mary, who’s the perfect mother. And that’s why she’s a holy figure.

And she’s a holy figure partly—an archetypal figure, let’s say—because any society that doesn’t worship the mother and the infant dies. It has to be sacred because everybody starts—everyone has that relationship, and if the society doesn’t support it properly and value it properly, then, well, there’s something seriously wrong with the society.

So, now Sleeping Beauty. King and Queen. Baby. Okay, so we’ve got the familiar triad going there. So then they decide they’re going to christen her; they’re going to name her, and that’s sort of when she becomes an individual. And they make a mistake when they’re going to christen her. And what’s the mistake? Do you remember?

How many of you have seen Sleeping Beauty? Yes, and how many of you haven’t. Okay, so of those who haven’t, have you seen other Disney movies? Have you seen other Disney movies? Lion King. Lion King. Okay, anything other than that? No. Okay, is there anybody here who’s never seen an animated Disney movie? Okay, fine.

Well, you see how densely—there wasn’t anyone as far as I could tell—you see how densely distributed throughout the culture those stories are, you know, even though they’re very, very old stories, but even in their movie form they’re quite old for movies. Okay, so the mistake they make is they don’t invite the evil queen to the christening. And that’s Maleficent.

Well, obviously there’s a satanic undertone to that, and you know that because she’s got these black horns that she wears and like she’s got this cape that’s basically on fire. I mean, you can tell that she’s an evil person. And so she’s an archetype; she’s the archetype of the negative feminine, actually. And it’s a very, very smart story.

You think, well, why would you invite something like that to your daughter’s christening, especially if you’ve been waiting for her forever and she’s a real princess and everything’s perfect? It’s like, okay here’s another story. So, this is another archetypal story. So there are these kids and their mother gets—their father, I think—gets divorced, or separates, or his wife dies, or whatever.

And so he picks up with this new woman, and she decides she doesn’t really like these kids very much. And that happens a lot by the way. So if you have a step-parent, you are 100 times more likely to be physically abused. So it’s the biggest single risk factor. It’s up there with having a drunk parent.

So, anyways, a nasty little statistic. You know, it’s hard enough to tolerate kids, but when they’re someone else’s kids then it makes it even more difficult. And that’s a Freudian observation and it’s no joke. And people are not that friendly, and there’s terrible jealousy. Like, you know, if a man and a woman start going out and a woman has children and the man is jealous and the children get in the way, especially if they also bother him because maybe they’re not that happy that he’s not actually their father—maybe he’s just a creep, you know, you never know—well, the tension that can build up in a situation like that can rapidly become unbearable and it can last forever.

So, anyways, she tells her new husband, “Take those damn kids out in the bush and see if you can lose them,” and so he’s not very happy with this, but I guess he’s wrapped around the finger of his new wife and not very bright and kind of evil on his own. And so he takes the children out into the forest and leaves them there.

And so this is kind of hard on the children. It’s like they’re out in the wilderness, which is maybe how you feel when your mother dies and, you know, your father goes and marries a new woman. You’re out in the bloody wilderness. And they get lost and then they’re lost and they’re all freaked out because they’re lost. And they’re going to starve, and wolves are going to eat them because this is like medieval Europe forest and it’s full of wolves and they eat people.

So, and they’re wandering around out there and they come across a gingerbread house. Now, if you’re a skeptical person and you’re not naïve, the first thing you think is, “This is too good to be true.” It’s like, yeah a house: okay fine. A shack maybe, or even a lean-to: sure, that could happen, but a house that’s also made out of candy. It’s like, “Nah, there’s something going on there that’s not so good.”

You know the kind of person that’s really nice to you but really isn’t? You remember again the Harry Potter series? Remember that woman? She was a bureaucrat. She had all those plates of kittens. Umbridge, Dolores. Umbridge, Dolores. Dolores means sad, right? Umbridge means to take offense. So she’s the sad woman who takes offense. And she’s got all these pictures of kittens on her plates, right? They’re on ceramic plates.

And so those are like hyper-sentimental. It’s like, “Oh, aren’t they cute? And they’re on plates and everything and we’ll put them on our wall,” and, you know, it’s like really low-end taste. And the sentimentality is a facade. Jung would call that a persona of benevolence. But remember old Dolores Umbridge. She’s not exactly your benevolent type. In fact, you know, let her loose on the world and horrible things happen.

And what’s her name? The woman who wrote Harry Potter. She got that exactly right. It’s one of her best characters, I think. So, she’s got that, you know, fake voice that often hear people who actually don’t like children use when they’re talking to children. “Oh! Aren’t you just the cutest little thing?” It’s like, you know, you can actually talk to children and they actually like that.

And then they don’t think that, you know, you’re possessed by something that they should run away from as fast as possible. Anyways, so Hansel and Gretel. The woman comes out and she’s all nice. And she says, “Oh, children, you’re lost in the forest. Why don’t you come in and have some gingerbread?”

And so then she puts little Hansel in a cage—like a birdcage I think—and she gets Gretel to do all the slavery stuff, you know. So she’s not so nice. And then every day she’s stuffing them well with gingerbread and then she goes and feels little Hansel’s legs so that he’s nice and plump so she can throw him into the stove and eat him. And what that means is: beware of people who are too nice to you because what they’re trying to do is devour you.

And it’s the prime dictum of Freudian psychopathology. If you have a parent—now Freud concentrated mostly on mothers because mothers are more likely to do this. Because for a variety of reasons that we’re not going to talk about—probably because they are oriented towards babies but whatever. If you’re too nice to your child and you do everything for them, what happens to them? Well, then they can’t do anything for themselves.

And so then what happens? Well, then they live in your basement until they’re fifty. You know, and then they get irritated one day and they shoot up Dawson College. So there’s a deep metaphor in the story, and the story is if it’s too damn good to be true it’s probably aiming at your destruction.

Okay, now back to Sleeping Beauty. So, Sleeping Beauty, Aurora, is going to be christened, and they decide not to invite the evil queen to the christening. Now, that’s not a very good idea. One time I had—this is a composite client—so this person, all she wanted to do was sleep. So she’d sleep like sixteen – seventeen hours a day.

And she was doing that partially with sleeping pills, because it’s hard to sleep that much, but left to her own devices she would just sleep. Now, you might say, “Well, why would someone want to do that?” and then you could say, “Well, for the same reason that people drink themselves into unconsciousness and oblivion.” Which is like it’s painful to be conscious, especially when your life isn’t going that well and maybe you’re afraid of things, and so why be awake and suffer when you can be unconscious and not suffer?

And so that was basically her idea. And she was a vegetarian and she was terrified of butcher shops and she was terrified of raw meat. And that was logical because she was sort of terrified of life, and if you’re going to be terrified of life, if you really think about it, it’s the whole bloody raw meat part of life that you’re more or less terrified by.

So that was very concretized in her situation. And so I used to take her to supermarkets through the raw meat section because that’s what you do in psychotherapy. In case any of you want psychotherapy, you have to do the thing you least want to do, and so that’s not particularly fun.

That’s the gateway to enlightenment: you walk through the gate that you least want to. Well, so now you know why people aren’t enlightened; because it’s not all fun and games and follow your bliss and all that nonsense. It’s like figure out what you’re afraid of and avoiding and confront it voluntarily.

So anyways, I got a little background from her and her mother, who I met—who was definitely the evil queen—I mean she yelled at me for like forty-five minutes in my office. It was really quite remarkable. I hadn’t had anyone—I’ve only had one other person yell at me in my office ever, and she was also definitely an evil queen. But this woman, she was just something else.

Like it was just jaw-dropping to watch her perform. And she used to phone up my client all the time, three or four times a day, and tell her how stupid and useless she was. And so if you have parents that phone you up every day and tell you how stupid and useless you are, then it’s perfectly within your rights to not talk to them because that isn’t what they should be telling you.

So then you can say, “Well, how about if I call you, instead of you calling me, and how about if it’s once every two weeks, instead of three times a day, and how about if you say anything nasty I just hang up and then I just don’t talk to you for a month.” And then you might say, “Well, I couldn’t do that to my mother,” and I would say, “Well, that’s because she already won.”

So anyways, this girl, her mother loved her to death when she was little; she was perfect. She was a princess when she was little but then, of course, she hit puberty. You know, and then that’s the end of the whole princess thing because then of course you want to go out and have a life and maybe associate with boys and do all that sort of things that’s not the least bit child-princess-like.

And that’s when everything broke down and started to go in a very, very bad direction. And that was partly because her mom didn’t want to invite the Evil Queen to her little daughter’s life, because the Evil Queen is like the negative part of nature. And like, if you have a little girl, well the probability that she’s going to grow up and be a teenager and then a woman is pretty high unless you do something to seriously interfere with that, which you might. And so you bloody well better be prepared for that when she’s three and not treat her like she’s someone whose feet are never going to touch the earth.

You have to have the whole element of life in there. I had another client. Her parents taught her that adults were angels—and I don’t mean metaphorically; they actually taught her that. And, in doing so, they set her up for serious post-traumatic stress disorder, which she had for about five years, because she ran into someone, who wasn’t an angel—surprise, surprise—and all he did to her, roughly speaking, was look at her like he wanted to kill her.

And you think, “Well, nobody can be traumatized like that.” It’s like, “Well, A, probably no one’s ever looked at you like that, so don’t be so sure; but B, if they did look at you like that AND you thought that adults were angels, then you were pretty much nicely set up to have post-traumatic stress disorder. So, anyways you might think that you’re doing your children a big favor by keeping the Evil Queen out of their nursery, but, you know, you might let them see a glimpse of her now and then so they can get used to the fact that she exists.

You know, and I guess that’s why children have pets in part. Like mice: they don’t last very long. So you have a live mouse for a while and then you have a dead mouse, and that’s not very good. But then there’s some things that you get accustomed to while you’re doing that, and maybe it’s not so good to protect your children from that because they’re going to have to grow up and survive in the awful world.

And your job isn’t to make them happy. Your job is to make them able to survive in the nasty real world. Anyways, okay so that’s what happens with Sleeping Beauty at the beginning; it’s like Hansel and Gretel. And then the Evil Queen shows up anyways, because good luck keeping her out of your house, and she basically says, “Yeah, well that’s all well and good. You know, there’s nothing I can do about it, but come puberty, roughly speaking…”

In the Sleeping Beauty [story], she’s going to prick her finger on a needle on a spinning wheel. So there’s blood involved there so we don’t have to use our imagination too much to imagine what that means. It’s like, “I’m going to come back and then all hell’s going to break loose.” And, of course, then the parents really protect her, which is exactly the wrong thing to do, and well, that’s the Sleeping Beauty story.

Of course, the Prince comes along and he eventually figures out how to solve this problem, right? She needs him; he’s a pretty good guy, then the Evil Queen puts him in a dungeon—it’s like her basement—and then she’s going to keep him there until he’s so old that he can’t even ride, and she’s going to laugh at him as he tries to leave. And then he tries to leave and she turns into a dragon. It’s like, “What the hell? Why is she turning into a dragon?” But you accept that.

It’s no problem. “Of course the Evil Queen turns into a dragon. What else would she do?” And then she, you know, spouts fire at him and he fights her off. And then he has to hack his way through all the thorns and thistles that have gathered around the castle. And then he wakes the girl up and the fountains come back on, and everyone’s happy.

And you all think that’s an excellent story. So, and it is an excellent story, but it’s a weird story because it’s an archetypal story and you understand it at an archetypal level. I mean, let me show you some of it, and then I’ll talk a little bit more about it. So let’s look at the beginning to begin with. Oh yeah. Sorry. This is a class, so I don’t want you to actually enjoy the movie. So I’m going to play around it a bit.

Okay, so tell me about the book. Is it a valuable book or not? How do you know? Gold. Hey! It’s covered with gold and jewels so you can get a hint right there that there’s something valuable about this. Let’s see if I can do this properly. Yeah, that’ll do I guess.

Yeah, it’s a valuable book; it’s got gold and jewels. Why are—why is gold valuable? It’s rare. Yeah, it’s like the sun; looks like the sun. What else? It’s morally pure, gold. Why? It represents wealth? It does. Well, it is wealthy. But it’s morally pure because it won’t mix with other metals. It doesn’t mate with other metals. It’s imperishable and it doesn’t tarnish, so it’s a symbol of purity.

And jewels: why are they beautiful and valuable? Forget about rare. They’re shiny? Yeah, they’re shiny! But even crows can appreciate that. So, like, what does shiny have to do with it do you think? Sun. Sun. Yeah, it reflects light, right? So what do you want a good person to do? Well, maybe you might say that… Shine like the sun. Yeah, yeah. They reflect light.

And the reason—it’s interesting, eh, because the reason that crystals are the way they are, translucent and reflect light, is because their internal structure. A crystal is a lattice of molecules and then that lattice is precisely replicated everywhere in the crystal, so it’s one thing all the way down to the molecular level. And so one of the things that you might think is that if—especially if you think about that hierarchical model that we were talking about—if you were as well put together as you could be, and had maybe been subject to the right amount of heat and pressure, that you would be the same thing at every single level of being.

And then you would be solid and crystalline and you would reflect light. And so anyways, you get a hint right off the bat that this story is valuable. In a faraway land, long ago, lived a King and his fair Queen. Many years had they longed for a child, and finally their wish was granted. A daughter was born and they called her Aurora. Sweet Aurora.

Yes, they named her after the dawn for she filled their lives with sunshine. Then a great holiday was proclaimed throughout the kingdom so that all of high or low estate may pay homage to the infant princess, and our story begins on that most joyful day. On that joyful day. On that joyful day. Joyfully now to our princess we come bringing gifts and all good wishes to re-pledge our loyalty anew.

Hail to the Princess Aurora. All of the sultans and orphans. Hail to the King! Hail to the Queen! Hail to the Princess Aurora! Health to the Princess! Wealth to the Princess! Long live the Princess Aurora! Hail Aurora! A son and heir to Stefan’s child would be betrothed. And so, to her, his gift he brought and looked unknowing on his future brother.

Thou most honored and exalted Excellencies: the three Good Fairies! Mistress Flora… So these are the good elements of the feminine here and they give her various gifts. Sweet Princess, my gift shall be… Why, it’s Maleficent! What does she want here? Well, quite a glittering assemblage, King Stefan. Royalty, nobility, the gentry, and, oh, wow quaint, even the rabble.

I really felt quite distressed at not receiving an invitation. You weren’t wanted. Not wanted? Alright, well we’re out of time. I’ll show you a bunch more of this next class and we’ll see what it means.