So here's how to conceptualize yourself in union terms the part of you that you consider you roughly speaking jung considered the ego and 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 and so 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 as a i would say as a place i suppose that many spirits could inhabit And you might think about a spirit from from the union perspective as a personality that can inhabit the psyche and so like all the psychoanalysts jung regarded the psyche as a relatively loose collection of partially integrated personalities and each of those personalities had their own perspective their own thoughts like their own way of looking
at the world that would be the Perspective their own thoughts their own emotions their own habits their own actions and those are roughly aggregated into some sort of unity and that was the that was the ego now the ego has a public face and the public face young called the persona persona means mask and 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 so for example if
you're a naive person you might think that your public face is all there is of you the the rough difference between the ego and the persona might be conceptualized this way that you know 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 and then 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 so you could say that well jung thought that it was useful to separate up the psyche into persona in 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 and jung regarded this terminology as particularly useful from a psychoanalytic perspective and also from a historical perspective so perhaps the divisions
could have been made could be made otherwise and there are many ways of looking at archetypes but 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 you know some of you are going to be the kinds of relatively deep thinking intellectuals who think that small talk is nonsense and uh 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 and what that'll mean is that you're not going to do very well at least at the beginning of social in 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 and the ability to exchange pleasantries in a relatively banel way in a variety of different circumstances is part of having a persona and you don't want to denigrate the utility of that because you need
it you know 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 and there's a skill that's associated with that that's somewhat glib social ability the unions would say well you shouldn't 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 and the problem with that at least from the union perspective is that um 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 that more than mere ego are not necessarily things that are acceptable in casual public gatherings so 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 if 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 and generally those 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 the goal of therapy is assertiveness training and assertiveness training you could Think of as the behavioral psychologists equivalent to incorporating the shadow so you know you may think well it's 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 And 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 and in order to to withstand that conflict you have to have you have to be able to draw on the the sources of aggression that in some sense are are are are a deep
part of your 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 because 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 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 and 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 and resentment is often a good avenue into the shadow because first of all resentment is a pretty destructive emotion it's extremely useful emotion but it can be very destructive because it gives rise to well first of
all sense of victimization and second then the underground growth Of all sorts of ideas of revenge and vengeance and and also a kind of stubborn non-cooperativeness because who wants to cooperate when they feel taken advantage of and 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 a are the only virtues because they're certainly not and one thing we know about virtues
is that if they're taken to too great and extreme they become vices and b they're certainly not the only virtues you know there are what you might call darker virtues so to speak they're 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 a 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 so a lot of times you're going to have to negotiate on your own behalf
and 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 so 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 it's as i said nice is a pretty weak philosophical term but 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 and if you're willing to advocate to yourself 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 and 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 Young would say well there's the persona and the ego and you can identify with your persona and then your you're 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 so anybody 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 and 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 and 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 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 so one of the things that's always interesting about the 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 and so they're very unlikely to take anything at face value and so 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 that a lot of what's motivating you is the desire to be against something and that's particularly the case when you're dealing
with with negative emotions because they're more powerful than positive emotions so it's 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 and those coal miners man they had a hard life like 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 so and then they
do their like 10 hour shift in the coal mine digging out coal then they'd have to crawl back three quarters of a mile underground you Know so they they had very very hard lives and so you know orwell was pretty um unimpressed by the conditions in which they were forced to work so 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 than loving the poor that's devastating criticism and the left book club didn't even want to publish his book but they ended up publishing it's become a very famous essay but it lays out a general principle it's like if you have identified with a given persona which is like a 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 because 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 you know and so one of the things that That has struck me as a consequence of analyzing 20th century history and and often through a union lens is that there's not much evidence that the sorts of atrocities that characterize the soviet union um and 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 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 so 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's i think is a complete mistake but if you 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 and 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 and it's not obvious that it's only the pathological people who do that in fact it's it's that
it's not reasonable to assume that so the shadow for jung was a very big deal You know and he believed in some sense and this is where the ideas get archetypal he believed that the ideas of of uh the evil twin of the king or the evil twin of god for that matter so that would be satan and christian theology that was a that was as real a representation of the human and transpersonal human capacity for evil as there was and he believed that If you look deep enough into your own foul motivations and if
you look far enough down that 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 and 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 you know 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 and until you go there you'll never be able to climb up higher on the other side and so that provides a real impediment for enlightenment because for enlightenment there's a price to be paid and if you look at archetypal representations of the cost of enlightenment you often find that the person who becomes enlightened has is Damaged in some profound way before it happens so 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 you know and it's you know one of one of young'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 and you might
say well no i would have been a hero it's like No probably not because they were rare and i mean 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 and so 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 so you know there's a
philosopher named russo and most of you are russoians without knowing it and rousseau basically made the following propositions he said that human beings were basically good but they were corrupted by culture so human essential human nature was good and the corrupting influence was was society Now that's true but it's only half true and there's a philosopher named hobbs 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 and then if you think well who's right rousseau or hobbes First of all they're both right even though they say the opposite thing and second well you look around the world and you tell me whether there are more hobbesian states or resilient states an answer that's pretty clear most countries are disastrous authoritarian dictatorships in which people where people live and suffer and the places where civilization has 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 so now jung believed that The the shadow is something that kind of comes apart when you when you face it so it's a blurry black mass and so in in a sense before you start to differentiate it and so you can you can tell what the shadow is as far as any one of you is concerned because you you can start to notice how you aren't
like you act Especially when you act around 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 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 and the shadows 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 and the second is that you'll see that there are counter thoughts to what you think so if you 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 you know and you don't feel that you're in a position to say anything um 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 and if you catch a hold of those fantasies and you Let them play themselves out consciously you'll see that they take you to very dark places now or at least to places that you regard as very dark so 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 is that You discover things about yourself that are also potentially very useful it's as if you threw the baby out with the bath water 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 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 and 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 I mean 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 so 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 and 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 because 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 You're you're harmless by default and 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 articulate a different 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 so if you're a 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 so 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 with virtue
now 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 Now when jung claims for example that you throw the baby out with the bath water 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 and so one of the prices jung would say that we pay and that 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 develop to develop those elements of their character that might be considered classically feminine and it's difficult for women to develop and express those aspects of their personality that might be classically considered masculine and but so jung believed that nested inside the shadow in some sense were the Contrasexual capacities so for example for a man given what we know about the temperamental difference between men and women it may be that men could be more could develop the capacity for true compassion
and care if they they could find that ability within what they've thrown out in the shadow and 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 because of its a priory 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 of perception and thought and behavior that you wouldn't have had the sophistication to be able 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 that if your development only star stops with a narrow and categorical gender identity then there are elements that of of
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 anonymous and the anima is the female inside the male so to speak and the animus is the male inside the female and jung believed that he could see those partial spirits manifesting themselves in people's behavior and so 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 and so 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 and if you ever talk to a man who Is irrationally possessed by rate and futile emotions then he would regard that as possession by the anima so and you can see that if you watch for it and if you believe in such things um 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 because the point of the Argument of an animus inspired argument is to get you to argue not to win because by getting you to argue the animus wins so and then behind those two things behind the shadow and the anima and the animus there's a final archetype which is the archetype of the self and that's jung believed that the self was what you were As a totality and that's a hard thing to understand but but you could think about it this
way you could think about the self as the as the total of what you are now plus the total of all those things that you could still be so 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're they have potential unrealized potential and so jung
generated up a category to account for that Which he felt was expressed in all sorts of symbolic ways so for example the wise old man like like the wizards in 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 it's like that's an archetype of the wise old man and for young christ was an archetype of the Self as well and i i told you why that was to some degree and it's partly because the phoenix is also an archetype of
the self because 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 Because that's partly because what you already assume can be the worst impediment that you have to toward to learning something new and it's complicated because sometimes what you know worked in
the past you know so 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 but unless you let it go the new personality isn't going to be able to manifest itself so 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 and freud's observation on that phenomena was that many parents and he believed this was particularly characteristic of mothers because of their tight bond with their children and the dependency that that implies that it was particularly difficult for a mother to let her child Die so that an adult could manifest itself in that child's place and that's fundamentally in many ways the edible complex okay so now i'm going to show you some
of these things again because the thing about young is that it's not easy to understand what he has to say and it's not a simple thing to explain it and his books are complicated Although i don't think they're any more complicated than they have to be like i don't think jung is obscure i think he's just difficult and then beyond difficult he's actually frightening so there's lots of reasons that people don't like you and 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 and that was perhaps not the most effective way of making headway in the academic world at 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 and 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 and so it's the dawn of consciousness and that 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 so for you darkness is a time of unconsciousness And there's a tight relationship between unconsciousness and darkness and so jung would say people projected that idea it was an idea that was it they're in their imagination that unconsciousness and darkness were tightly aligned and so they use their imagination to explain the world and conceptualize the sun in those in those terms of imagination so that if you analyze the terms of imagination you can get some Understanding into the structure of the imagination and so 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 and 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 and 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 it dera 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 re casting 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 there's a transition from unconsciousness to consciousness metaphor underlying that and so one of the statements the film is making or one of the ways that 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 no which is really a critical factor in this sort of discussion and b well yes and the re 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 and so people are perfectly capable especially if they concentrated 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 they're ex 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 you know and 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 when when they are consciously moralizing they're boring very quickly plus they date extremely rapidly there's far too much [Music] okay so that's a brilliant piece of film editing there because the 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 and so you see two things here the first thing you see is what's called pride rock which is a is a roughly pyramidal 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 thing that the animals are subjugated to stands right because that's where the king is and the king happens to be a lion and 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 and for whatever reason although obviously the Lions in the animated movie are 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 lines 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 and zazu is the eye of the king and so the king is on top of the pyramid but the king's eye is free from the king And the kid go we're all over the place even where the pyramid can't see and 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 can fly over all hierarchies and that's 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 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 because the king who doesn't pay attention is a tyrant and 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 The essence of life from an archetypal perspective so to be inspired is like ris respiring to be inspired as 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 you remember before i was saying because the animators do a very good job of this they gave him a very mature face and a mature face is something Out of which something is coming instead of something into which something is coming and you'll see that the king mufasa is always looking like this he's very intent and focused and and um intimidating whereas his son right up until he becomes um initiated is like this
Always as soon as he becomes initiated and i'll show you that in the film his face hardens and 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 and rafiki is obviously a shaman and he's the part of the psyche that guides its transformation so here's another way of
looking at the self it's very interesting idea so you know as you go through life there's going to be triumphs and then catastrophes and 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 so the ego feels it like this so that's 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 and that's why he's associated as well with the sun So and he's a good king because he's in touch with the self so 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 and 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 i mean 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's lots of figures of madonnas and madonna Adonis and children yeah in ancient egyptian art for example now be isis with horus well the reason that that's an archetype is because any society who doesn't regard the dyad of mother and infant as something sacred which would mean of 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 so if the society isn't structured so That that's that that dyad is up among the highest of values then the society has become ungovernably corrupt so you see rafiki there just anointed the little king with something that was orange and that was something like the sun so the idea that the film is expressing is that there's some sun-like substance that's being Associated with the with this newborn son of the king and that that's
uh a dramatic manifestation of his destiny and an indication that he has to also be in cultured 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 so they're going to do the sweeping thing again and the music rises to the ultimate climax of the song and what's happening here is that the self is presenting this the sun and so it's a it's a presentation of the
savior fundamentally and that's the thing that has just been born that's the hero and when the hero is presented and the sun Breaks open wide and shines on them you would call that a synchronous event and 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 and they do that spontaneously and the idea is that there's a hierarchy here and the little boy in the sun is the highest element of the hierarchy and when that manifests itself and you can see beyond
the facade facade To something that's divine behind it the consequence of that will be a spontaneous bursting forth of awe and i really think the filmmakers nail that here [Music] me [Music] 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 the archetypal hero is the son of culture and nature so okay so here's a here's a shadow
figure here he 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 and so it's quite a complex idea because what it says is when 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 and that's represented often by the king's evil brother it's a very common motif in 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's it is clearly the case that mufasa underestimates the danger posed by his usually older and smarter brother it's and and the 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 is that intelligence is something that can go very wrong if it goes wrong and one of its big temptations is that it produces models of the world and then falls in love
with the models and 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 so 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 right 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 and so they're able to distill down certain facial expressions to describe a character now this guy's obviously he's whiny he's got this super silliest and arrogant voice so he's he's he's arrogant beyond belief and
he is also hard done by and resentful and that's a really good and 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 resentful victim who really deserves to Rule if only everyone could see how wonderful he was and then he has all sorts of reasons why the fact that he isn't powerful has nothing to do with his own shall shortcomings be king and you shall never see the light in another day and you didn't 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 okay so that's quite interesting
there's a variety of statements there that are very very cool so one of them is the 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 of a limited domain of competence and 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 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 it will stay foreign in a sense and unfamiliar to you until you interact with it with a substantial amount of attention and that's partly because while you're attending to it which is an act of conscious will you're you're 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 and it
takes conscious effort to be competent because you have to practice being competent at a new domain and until you've practiced being competent in a new domain it's not yours and 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 and in this particular representation that's associated with with death it's also associated in some bizarre sense with paradise because of course simba encounters the elephant's grave out in no man's land so to speak but When he runs away across the
desert he also finds paradise and so 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 cocky he's a cocky little rat here okay so 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 you know and 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 yeah yeah you remember in groundhog day bill murray's character is a real he's a jackass at the beginning he's very arrogant and he's very unskilled and 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 and then In that day he
becomes attracted to this woman who's an anima figure and for for years as far as the film's concerned every time he approaches her in his arrogant and clumsy way she slaps him so 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 and after a while the filmmaker gets tired of that just shows
you nothing but the slaps you know 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 right 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 and you know 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 and 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 and it is until he starts to take his rejection seriously That he starts to actually build some real character right and 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 and as soon as he does that enough and becomes an expert at it poof
he gets out of the the day the same horrible day and so that horrible day is also a representation of the tyranny of the state because the State is something that's static so anyways nella she's hey yeah and while they're not paying attention they end up in the shadows outside the kingdom so here's here's an image of scar transforming himself essentially first into hitler but because there's a Lot of nazi imagery in this in this particular clip but also into a satanic figure at the end you'll see he's associated with the crescent moon so he
turns into the horned demon of the night essentially now you can see that's all images of hell obviously see one of the things that happened to people like stalin for example is stellan had nothing but contempt for people and he thought all they ever did Was lie well what happened to stalin is that he's he became surrounded by people with 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 them that they would never tell them the truth about anything
and so he got into this spiral which is kind of the spiral of the of a 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 and so then i'm fully justified in my contempt it's sort of it's like peter pan in some sense king of the lost boys it's like well who do you want to be king of well the root 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 and so you know he's king of people he wouldn't want to associate with it's not exactly a it's not exactly an attainment you you you may remember or you may not remember that or may not know that hitler of course set up the work the biggest meeting arena that the world had ever seen for the nuremberg nazi party rallies and there's there's something to See they were filmed quite brilliantly in a film called will to power
i think that's what it's called leaning riff and stall and what hitler has a raid in front of him are blocks of thousands of soldiers everywhere as far as you can see an absolutely perfect uniformity and 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 and hitler he was a master of the use of fire as well and also put his displays on at night and so he took all the
luftwaffes air craft spotting uh 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 and 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 on that to produce these images is saluted [Music] you know and modern people will say things
like well the idea of hell is just a superstition but then you watch this and it makes sense and then you think well hell is where satan himself rules and nothing happens but the bodies burn in death and that's exactly what happened during the holocaust and so thinking that these sorts of archetypal ideas are Superstitious is it's extraordinarily foolish and naive because they represent possibilities of being that continually manifest themselves and everyone knows about them so you know the the 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 motive major major Shadow motivators then you'll end up at best ruling over hell and it's no joke like it's not a superstition the stories are trying to tell you something that that his mode of being is the pathway to perdition and that and that 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 and religious imagery in a sense 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 and so 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 So and 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 and 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 but i can't [Applause] 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
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