Daniel Z. Lieberman is a psychiatrist and the author of Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind. In this episode, he discusses the nature, function, and study of the unconscious, Carl Jung's theories about the unconscious and his ideas around its archetypes and shadows, and how things which are connected to magic and the supernatural, like fairy tales and tarot cards, can be seen as manifestations of the energy from the unconscious. We end our discussion by discussing the quest for individuation, which requires bringing together the conscious and unconscious minds and how to become a kind of magician yourself.
00:09:20.820They raise aphids that produce a sugary liquid that they can get nutrition from.
00:09:25.680He looked at the weaver bird, which weaves these incredibly complex nests.
00:09:29.800And he said, if these animals have such complex instincts, it's just not reasonable to think that human instinct all flows from the simple sex drive.
00:09:40.840And he began exploring human instincts.
00:09:43.500And just as the human brain is far more complicated than animal brains, he found that human instincts are also far more complicated.
00:09:51.680And he realized that the unconscious encompassed so much more than what Freud thought.
00:09:57.960And since then, Freud and Jung, they're looked, I mean, I guess today, they're looked at askance.
00:10:03.320They think, okay, they had some interesting ideas, but it's theoretical.
00:10:07.060It's almost like metaphysical, philosophical.
00:10:51.500And it's very, very helpful to have that data.
00:10:54.020And I included a significant amount of it in the book.
00:10:57.280But the problem is that even today, hundreds of years after Freud and Jung, our ability to study the brain empirically is still extremely primitive.
00:11:08.060People have said that the human brain is probably the most complex structure in the entire universe.
00:11:15.100And so psychiatry as a science is a little bit behind some of the other specialties like cardiology, for example, simply because our organ is so complicated.
00:11:25.500So neuroscience has shed some light on the unconscious, but it's still at a very early stage.
00:11:31.400So how do researchers study the unconscious?
00:11:33.820Because the unconscious, you're not aware of it, right?
00:11:36.280I can see there's studies where you can study the conscious, right?
00:11:40.380Everyone knows like the marshmallow test, which is basically a study in self-control, which is the study of the conscious, right?
00:11:45.220You put a marshmallow in front of a kid and you tell them, well, if you don't eat that marshmallow for a certain amount of time, we'll give you more marshmallows.
00:11:51.580And so you can actually see what's going on.
00:11:53.480But the unconscious, like how do you tell if what's going on in the unconscious when you can't, the person doesn't even know what's going on?
00:12:04.020There's been different ways that it's been approached.
00:12:06.620Often it involves tricking the conscious mind to make it think like the task is something other than is actually being measured.
00:12:15.040And then with the conscious mind doing something else, what you're really measuring is what the unconscious mind is coming up with.
00:12:22.760But they've come up with other ways as well.
00:12:25.340As I mentioned, the conscious mind has a pretty small bandwidth.
00:12:30.020And so another thing that scientists do is they overwhelm the bandwidth of the conscious mind so that only the unconscious is free to work through a problem or a task.
00:12:39.580Are there any studies that stand out to you that can kind of exemplify what they do to look at this unconscious stuff?
00:12:45.920You know, one that comes to mind is what I call the Amsterdam Apartment Study.
00:12:50.880This was a study in which they used the strategy of overwhelming the conscious mind.
00:12:55.980They showed volunteers, I believe it was three or four apartments, and they gave them a whole list of features of each apartment, more than a dozen for each one.
00:13:06.400And then they asked them, which apartment do you think is the best?
00:13:10.800Now, the way that they had set it up was that one was objectively better, one was objectively worse, and the other two were in between.
00:13:20.220And what they did was they divided them up into three groups.
00:13:24.520The first group, they said, okay, read the descriptions, and then bam, make a snap decision right away.
00:25:23.100There are things about the wedding ring that we can understand, but the kinds of feelings it provokes are often things that can't be put into words.
00:25:32.200So, for example, if somebody lost their wedding ring, well, they could just go to the store and buy another one.
00:30:28.920There's an enormous amount of primitive energy in there.
00:30:32.900I told a story about a doctor who became infuriated with a colleague, and that fury enabled him to write a protocol that would prove his colleague was absolutely wrong.
00:30:44.100You know, many of us know about the energy and kind of the joy that can come to breaking the rules.
00:30:50.860You know, if you sneak up on the roof where you're not allowed to be at night to watch the city lights, you're full of energy.
00:31:00.820That kind of thing only comes when you break the rules.
00:31:05.080So, even though the shadow contains a lot of ugliness, it also contains a lot of beneficial stuff, the primitive energy that we can really make use of.
00:31:15.540So, you have this chapter about fairy tales can be used as a way for us to tap into the power of the unconscious.
00:31:24.540So, as I mentioned, when people were trying to make sense of the unconscious, it was so powerful and so alien that they conceived them as supernatural creatures.
00:31:38.540And that's what fairy tales are about.
00:31:40.540Fairy tales are about magic, about creatures that possess superhuman power.
00:31:46.160And what's interesting is that in a lot of cases, these magical creatures are animals.
00:31:53.100And that makes so much sense because the unconscious is the bestial part of the human mind.
00:31:59.820And in many cases, it is the characters in the fairy tales who are able to make friends with the magical animals who win out in the end.
00:32:10.200And a lot of times, these characters are not the smartest, they are certainly not the richest, and they may not even be the strongest.
00:32:18.580But what they are is the most trusting.
00:32:23.600The magical creatures often give them advice that doesn't make any sense.
00:32:26.840But the ones who trust them and do what they say are the ones who win their kingdom in the end.
00:32:33.160Is there a fairy tale in particular that you think really highlights the power of story and helping us kind of confront and manage our unconscious?
00:32:42.020One of the ones I like is The Golden Bird.
00:32:44.500That's a story about three brothers who go off in search of this golden bird that will renew the kingdom.
00:32:51.220And along the way, each of them meets a magical fox that gives them advice.
00:32:57.500The two older brothers are self-sufficient.
00:33:00.000They don't need the advice of the magical help.
00:33:02.380They say, how stupid it would be for me to take advice from a lowly animal.
00:33:07.340But the third brother, who is a little bit weaker, he's the youngest, he's not quite as bright, but he's very kind.
00:33:13.120He says, okay, little fox, you know, let's be friends.
00:33:17.860And what happens is that the fox gives him advice about finding this bird.
00:33:24.060And the boy thinks the advice doesn't make any sense.
00:33:27.960And so he keeps doing the opposite of what the fox says.
00:33:32.220And the fox gets frustrated with him, but the fox doesn't give up.
00:33:35.920The fox keeps trying and trying and trying to establish this trusting relationship.
00:33:41.700Eventually, he does, and then everything goes well.
00:33:45.100And I think that what that tells us is that establishing a working relationship with our unconscious mind is not easy because it's so different from consciousness.
00:34:18.740So I think a lot of the fairy tales are about that.
00:34:20.640And I think in modern times, poets like Robert Bly back in the 80s, like the Iron John thing, it was all about the unconscious becoming integrated with the conscious.
00:34:33.980Jung also explored other ways that people have tried to tap into and to understand the unconscious, often unconsciously, like they don't know they're doing it.
00:34:43.220And that includes things like alchemy and also tarot cards.
00:34:47.240Jungian psychologists, they're also known as depth psychologists, past and present.
00:34:50.980They've used tarot cards to explore archetypes and things like that.
00:34:54.700I also know Jordan Peterson, like he's used tarot to explore psychological concepts and archetypes.
00:35:01.380But I think when most people think of tarot, they think of mystical old ladies telling you your fortune or they think about the occult, but they weren't initially used for that.
00:35:11.300So how can tarot cards be seen as a sometimes unconscious attempt to explore the unconscious?
00:35:27.020There was nothing about the supernatural, but it was created in Italy during the Renaissance and naturally they wanted to make these cards look pretty.
00:35:35.800So what they did was they put philosophical and mystical symbols on them because it was during the Renaissance that the ancient Greek philosophy had been rediscovered in Europe.
00:35:47.720And everybody was very, very excited about it.
00:35:50.000You see these symbols in all kinds of Renaissance art.
00:35:52.980And so the card makers just grabbed these symbols from art and they decorated their cards with it, not really giving it a second thought except to say, it's pretty and it's fun.
00:36:04.040Now, what happened was it turns out that these symbols were actually incredibly powerful and that's why they lasted the thousands of years between the classical period and the Renaissance.
00:36:15.720And the mystical symbols worked on people's unconscious mind over the years, different tarot decks were designed by different people.
00:36:25.480And what they would do is they would retain the things that were psychologically most powerful, throw away the things that didn't work.
00:36:32.320And so it became this crowdsourced work where over the years, little by little, it evolved into something more and more psychologically powerful until finally it started, became so powerful psychologically, people began to think it had magical powers and began using it for divination.
00:36:50.320So what are some examples of the symbols in the tarot?
00:36:52.780All right, so the first card is called the fool and you look at it and it's hard to say why it's a fool.
00:37:57.480It's going to bring him into the world of imperfection.
00:38:00.020It's going to bring him to a point where he is no longer comfortable with that animal side of him.
00:38:04.700He no longer has this easy perfection, but his eyes will be opened.
00:38:09.400And so he will need to seek this unification again on a higher level, on the level of consciousness.
00:38:16.700And so yeah, that card symbolizes this archetype of the fool, right?
00:38:20.220When it's sort of this energy of being naive, but it comes with downsides.
00:38:24.400But also there's like you have, I mean, you have to be a fool sometimes to take on new ventures and to grow.
00:38:30.000Yeah, that's something that Jordan Peterson talks about a lot.
00:38:34.180He says that if you're afraid of being a fool, if you're afraid of embarrassing yourself, of looking like an idiot, you can never start something new.
00:38:41.240Because when you start something new, you're coming in at ground zero.
00:38:45.000And so we need to be comfortable with embarrassment and shame and looking like an idiot.
00:39:03.180That is from one of the most famous alchemical aphorisms, as above, so below.
00:39:08.480And what that meant was that the things in the macrocosm, the universe, the planets, the stars, the gods and the goddesses, those are reflected in the microcosm down on Earth.
00:39:22.380And so they believed that the gods inhabited metals.
00:39:35.940In modern times, we can interpret that as what happens in the unconscious mind eventually makes its way into consciousness and shapes our world.
00:39:45.760And so it's really an acknowledgment that there is this link between what we can see and what we can't see.
00:39:52.580See, a way I've heard described the magician is like scientists are kind of magicians, right?
00:39:57.400They have this idea of theory, and the goal is to hopefully make it concrete through the scientific process.
00:40:03.960And then like the magician's got tools.
00:40:05.640He's got like wands and swords and things he's using, like same sort of thing.
00:40:09.080We might have this idea for a business or what we want, like, I don't know, just some project we want.
00:40:16.260And we see what it looks like in our brain, but the goal is to use our talents and to make it real in the actual world.
00:40:27.040Magic is when the material world is invaded and occupied by things from the spiritual world.
00:40:34.040So, for example, if you've got a magic lamp, well, there's a genie inside of it.
00:40:39.140If you drink a magical potion, it's not just wine or lizard eyes or whatever it is.
00:40:46.060There's some force that's invaded that thing that transforms the human being.
00:40:52.080And in a sense, human beings are magicians exactly as you describe.
00:40:58.540We take these incorporeal thoughts, an idea for a new business.
00:41:04.140And through the magic of the human mind, the human brain, those thoughts are able to influence the material world in terms of our moving our body.
00:41:17.040It may be filling out an application for a bank loan.
00:41:20.260But somehow, the incorporeal ideas in our head are translated to the material world in the form of a new invention, a new business.
00:41:29.980And in a way, that is a form of magic.
00:41:32.700So, Jung, he thought fairy tales, these myths, alchemy, tarot, magic numbers, it's a way for us to understand our unconscious.
00:41:43.360And he thought one of the reasons why we need to kind of deal with or interact with the unconscious is so we can start this process of individuation.
00:44:52.820There's probably an infinite ways to do it.
00:44:54.980Probably everybody does it in their own particular way.
00:44:58.380But there's a few ways that have been developed.
00:45:00.380I think that the starting point is that if you want to develop a relationship with another person, the first thing you want to do is get to know them.
00:45:09.420You meet someone you want to be friends with.
00:45:18.620The first step is simply paying attention to what the unconscious is doing.
00:45:24.020Pay attention to the emotions that happen, to the weird memories of childhood that often pop into our mind, to the funny thoughts that we have that come out of the blue, gut feelings, inspirations, all those kinds of things.
00:45:46.820A lot of these things are going to appear irrational and even random at first.
00:45:51.720And it's going to take a long time before they start to come together in an understandable way.
00:45:58.720Another thing we can do is to read fairy tales and other ancient literature about the supernatural.
00:46:06.260And I don't think we necessarily want to analyze it.
00:46:09.500We don't need to ask, what does this mean?
00:46:12.080How can I understand this in a psychological way?
00:46:15.120I think really we just need to let it work on us.
00:46:18.540Many have had the experience of reading a fairy tale and feeling a little bit off for a few days, feeling maybe a little bit psychologically off balance.
00:46:30.060For some people, it's so intense that they won't read fairy tales, especially the classic fairy tales like the Brothers Grimm that have both the light and the dark of the unconscious.
00:46:56.540Meditation, because it's an exercise in focus and concentration, strengthens the conscious mind.
00:47:03.700That makes the conscious mind stronger, and so it's better able to pay attention to the things that are going on, the kinds of experiences the unconscious is producing inside the head.
00:47:15.980And also, the raw instincts of the unconscious are so powerful that if we're able to strengthen the consciousness through meditation, it makes it a little bit safer to open up the door and have confidence that we won't be overwhelmed.
00:47:31.120Do you, like, you do clinical psychiatry, like, do you do some of this stuff with people you see?
00:47:39.860I recommend meditation to a lot of people, and it seems to help a lot.
00:47:46.180In terms of moving towards individuation, I don't do that with the people that I see.
00:47:51.260And the reason is that the people I see are sick.
00:47:54.120And individuation is a difficult and a very dangerous endeavor.
00:47:58.960However, when you start to open up the channels that separate the conscious from the unconscious, a lot's going to come through there.
00:48:06.020A lot of really good things, but also a lot of really bad things.
00:48:10.220And so I think that individuation is something for healthy people to do, and that sick people need to wait until they get healthy before they start that process.
00:48:18.900Okay, so if you are healthy, just start paying attention to those unconscious things that pop up.
00:48:34.040A lot of those episodes, they kind of make you feel, like, disturbed for a couple of days, and they tap into, like, mother archetypes and, you know, just different stuff like that.
00:48:42.900I think Twilight Zone is another great one for that.