How Carl Jung Corrupted Right-Wing Intellectualism

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into Carl Jung’s analytical psychology — explaining the ego, personal unconscious, collective unconscious, archetypes, shadow work, and more. Malcolm (who is openly not a fan) breaks down why Jung’s ideas sound profound but lead to disempowering, unscientific views of the mind that have quietly infected conservative and manosphere thinking (hello, Jordan Peterson fans).

We contrast Jung’s mystical “deep state” model of the psyche with a more pragmatic, first-principles understanding of consciousness, unconscious processing, memory, trauma contextualization, and emotional framing. Learn why repressed memories are mostly myth, how you can choose your emotional reactions (and why that’s empowering), why shadow work can manufacture problems that didn’t exist, and how over-mythologizing the self leads to cognitive abdication.

If you’ve ever felt pressured into “integrating your shadow,” doing dream analysis for growth, or treating archetypes as destiny — this episode will give you the tools to spot the woo and reclaim agency over your mind.

Timestamps below. Like, subscribe, and share if you want more no-BS breakdowns of influential ideas that shape culture.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we’re going to be talking about Jungian psychology, which people know I am not a fan of, but I want to explain what his psychology is, and it’s important to know about because if you are consuming. Manosphere content. What you may not realize or even conservative content more broadly is a lot of conservative intellectuals recycle Jungian theory without telling you that’s what they’re doing.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Famous person for doing this is Jordan Peterson.

Simone Collins: Well, Jordan Peterson talks about young a lot. I think just not that many people necessarily understand how much young has influenced him.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so it’s useful to be able to note, call out when you’re having Jungian BS thrown at you and to understand why it’s wrong, because a lot of it can sound like, oh, shadow work or something like this.

I can see. How this is useful. And it’s fundamentally bad because it leads you to bad conceptualizations of how [00:01:00] your brain works. Mm-hmm. That lead you to psychological places that can be more difficult than they need to be to resolve. So let’s dive in. Hmm. The structure of the psyche, in Young’s perspective is that you have the ego, the center of consciousness, your sense of i identity and everyday awareness.

It is an important part, but not the whole self, and it can become rigid or inflated if it ignores the unconscious. And this is where you talk about people with like. An inflated ego, and we’ll get to more what he means by this, which by the way, and I think a very bad way to think about this phenomenon.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: Then you have the personal unconscious. This contains repressed or forgotten personal experiences, memories, and feeling toned complexes, emotionally charged clusters of ideas like a mother complex or inferiority complex, which we’ll get to a lot at. The other. Really important to him these act asynchronously and can influence behavior strongly.

Now the first thing I need to note, just like [00:02:00] before we go farther. Scientifically speaking to the best of our knowledge in psychology right now. And, and, and, and keep in mind, I am very dubious of psychology as a science, but I am trained enough in it to feel like I have a fairly good understanding of where the BS lies and where where things that we’ve actually pretty much gotten down at this point.

Mm-hmm. And one of the things that it seems pretty reliable at this point is that. Repressed memories are not a real phenomenon. Yeah. You do not forget something. Have it continue to affect you and then have it come back later in life. Yeah. When this happens, it is almost always in the studies that have like looked at this a lot.

One of two phenomenon phenomenon. One is called forgetting Before remembering. So, what happens in is somebody will go to their, their spouse or something like that [00:03:00] and been like, oh my God. I just had this memory that came back to me all of a sudden of my father or uncle sexually, you know, essaying me as a kid.

And this is horrifying. And then the person who they came to is this will be like, oh, oh my God. That is horrifying. Well, secretly being like, actually you talked about that all the time. And causes this phenomenon. Is they’ll remember something like this, but then the context of that memory changes.

Hmm. They might remember their uncle doing something funny with them as a kid or touching them in a way that they thought was silly or weird or made them a little uncomfortable. Yeah. Like

Simone Collins: their uncle was always creepy and like did stuff

Malcolm Collins: like that that, yeah, it did this creepy thing for me, but it wasn’t, you know, grape.

And then one day they’re sitting there and they’re like. That was a grape. Oh my God. But because they hadn’t remembered it with such a charged word, like grape [00:04:00] attached to it. They had forgotten the previous times. They had remembered it. They had forgotten that that was always in their memory because what they’re actually remembering is I had never remembered that as a grape.

I had never remembered my uncle Graped me. I had just remembered my uncle did this funny thing to me. So you get enough of a category change that you forget that you had previously always had this in your memory. The second thing is it’s an implanted memory. This is, when these, these very famous with hypnosis, but also it can happen with psychologists more broadly which is to say it’s very easy for people to conflate fake memories.

People fake memories all the time. Our brain. Constantly makes up memories. The, obviously the famous study that I talk a lot about when I’m talking about ai, when people are like, well, AI makes up how it knows something. And the famous memory blindness studies in humans where you show them pictures of attractive women and then you do sleigh of hand and you go, why did you pick this one?

And they’ll just go on a long rant about why they chose that one. And it was not the one they just chose. Or

Simone Collins: even like, [00:05:00] political ballot choices.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So people will just make up why they made decisions. And, and this, this has a big problem with memories, right? Because if you make up, oh, well, you know, a psychologist walks you through something in a hypnotic suggested state, or they, you, you know, they walk you through, well, do you remember this happening?

You can think back and create that false memory shockingly easily. It is very, very easy for humans to create false memories. And the reason why I’m so against people who push the idea of repetitive memories is because the moment you have this concept and you believe it’s real, then you and any culture that stems from you, your kids, everything like that, that you teach about this are very susceptible to this.

Mm-hmm. And this is really bad because this is the core wedge that things like the urban monoculture and cults like Scientology. Used to drive a wedge between people and their support network, IE your their families. Mm-hmm. So if your kids grow up [00:06:00] believing in suppressed memories, it’s much easier for someone to later te teach them.

Imagine how mortifying that would be if somebody convinced one of your kids that you assayed them and you didn’t. And yet, we know from research, this happens all the time for people who go visit psychologists and stuff like this.

Simone Collins: Well, and this was even an issue in, in the period of this. The Satanic panic.

All these kids were like, yeah, I was involved in this horrible stuff. And everyone’s like, what whatcha you talking about?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this

Simone Collins: never happened.

Malcolm Collins: Then his final layer here, the collective unconscious young’s most distinctive contribution, a deeper universal layer shared by all humans inherited across generations, not personally acquired.

It is like a psychic instinctual reservoir containing primordial images and patterns common to humanity. And he believes that this is like a real physical thing. He’s not talking about like. Pop culture here or something like that which is obviously stupid and woo, and we would immediately call that out as stupid and woo.

But let’s go to the ego. ‘cause I actually think [00:07:00] people might think the ego is the least objective one of these ideas before we get into all the shadow work and everything like that. But I actually think it’s the most wrong of his ideas about how the human brain works. And because it’s the most wrong it can lead to and, and because it doesn’t seem obviously wrong, it can lead to tons and tons and tons of mistakes.

And it is seeped into every aspect of our language. He has a big ego. You know what somebody might say, right? And they’re literally referring to a psychological theory when they say that the ego is the center of the field of consciousness. Your subjective sense of I personal identity will, continuity of time.

It handles everyday awareness, decision making, reality testing, and adaption to the external world. Young saw it as essentially, but limited. It’s like a small island of light. In a vast ocean, a psychic life strengths. It provides focus, stability, and necessity. The center for navigating lives limitations and risks.

The ego is not the whole psyche if it becomes [00:08:00] rigid, clinging too tightly to its current self image or work. It blocks growth. Mm-hmm. It comes inflated identifying with archetypes, collective ideals, or overly grand self concepts. It loses contact with reality and deep psych inflation often feels like godlike certainty or superiority, but it leads to fragility isolation or eventual deflation collapse.

Young warned that an inflated ego can become quote unquote egocentric and incapable of learning from the past. Now,

Simone Collins: wow. These are so many mainstream words. That’s, that’s crazy. Egocentric was a hidden a thing, like a young thing. Oh my gosh. Yeah. When, when I looked him up originally. I, and I’m wondering if this is something that you, that, that is accurate.

My understanding of, of youngian psychology was basically. Trying to take Freudian psychology, but then build it around the hero’s journey and [00:09:00] book style narratives. But is, is that just a misreading of what he did? That’s a

Malcolm Collins: misreading. He did do that, but and obviously Jordan Peterson borrows a lot from that.

No, it, it, it is a, it’s a sort of framework for how people think and how to improve how people think. Mm-hmm. While the framework has its three core components, the ego, the you know, the subconscious and the what is it? The, the, the, the like, super, super, ego, societals, subconscious. The, the core failure is he basically took Freud’s stupidness of, of like you have, you know, the ego in the id.

He re renamed some stuff and he tried to make it like less crazy. Right? And the problem with this is, okay, let’s take out the thing that seems obviously wrong and objectable, which is like this, this collective unconscious, okay. Yeah. The idea of an ego and an unconscious is not how your brain actually works.

Mm-hmm. And believing it’s how your brain actually works can lead to a lot of [00:10:00] mistakes. Mm-hmm. So first, your brain does a lot of thought that you are not consciously aware of.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: This is. Just an objectively true thing in science and neuroscience. We can measure this, we can look at this, we can see thoughts happening before, significantly before they enter your field of awareness.

As we’ve pointed out in other videos on this, it appears from the most cutting edge science that the and you can watch episodes on this, like stop anthrop izing humans that the most cutting that, that these parts of your brain that you do not have conscious access to are likely working with a level of architectural convergence.

Two token predictors. For, for many reasons and more and more studies keep coming out showing this, which is really cool, that like we made this prediction a while ago and since then a number more studies have come out that from different angles seem to be arguing that this is the case. There seem to yeah, provide evidence that this [00:11:00] is the case.

But this unconscious part of your brain then funnels. It, it it, one, it operates in separation from itself. Like it’s fairly regionalized. It’s not like you have a unconscious LLM and then a central LLM. You have a a a dozen bodies of unconscious LLMs, which are interacting with each other, and then send all of that to a centralized workstation, which is what.

That centralized workstation then may be conscious, but it’s probably also mostly unconscious and you’re not aware of it. Then that centralized workstation sends the decision it makes into your conscious mind and where your conscious mind interacts with it is. Predominantly through the way it writes your memories.

Mm-hmm. That appears to be the core focus of the conscious mind, not making decisions, but writing [00:12:00] memories. Mm-hmm. And how the conscious mind ends up writing those memories. The emotional framing that it puts on them, the contextual framing it puts on them can end up shaping a great deal of your personality because those memories are then.

Referenced by the unconscious parts of your mind when they make decisions. Okay? Now this is the reason why I’m, I’m going into all of this, is this unconscious part of your mind is not like some mystical, wooey, whatever. It’s just the parts of your thought process that are happening by components in your brain that are not part of your consciousness and are the predominant part of your brain.

They are also. Not held under some secret influence that you’re unaware of. Mm-hmm. When you talk about like an individual’s unconscious mind in like a frereian sense or something like that, the implication or, [00:13:00] or the Jungian sense is this unconscious part of your mind. Is one completely out of your control.

And it’s going out there and just like creating ideas based on thoughts that are completely like for injected into you by maybe like an advertising campaign or something like that, right? Mm-hmm. Like, that’s, that’s how it’s typically thought of. Like you had something suggested to you because of some.

Advertising campaign. And then your unconscious ended up making a decision based on that because you were tricked and you didn’t even know why you made that decision. When that’s not exactly what’s happening. Mm-hmm. When things like that do happen it’s a lot closer to what I would call a, an an illusion.

Right. Like you. Experience an illusion in real time, like an optical illusion in real time, but you don’t think it’s [00:14:00] like, your eyes influenced by some like magical thing you can’t see. You’re like, oh, that optical illusion happens. Because when my eyes are processing X, they do X in a weird way, and then that hits my brain.

Mm-hmm. So a lot of like advertising related unquote illusions are really just like priming effects. Okay. A priming effect means by the way. Token predictors have priming effects as well. Yes. In case you’re wondering very heavily it means if, if you want to get somebody to act in a certain way, you prime them with something else, like some concept, like you wanna get them to act more morally.

You prime them as the concept of God or something like that. And you can also get like faster response times. Like if you prime them with the concept of red, they’ll like say firetruck faster, right? They’ll, they’ll have an easier time passing through that neural pathway. But there’s nothing like.

I, I, I guess fancy or secretive happening here. Everything in the [00:15:00] output from these parts of your mind, the unconscious mind is fed into your conscious mind. Your conscious mind can. Heavily control your unconscious mind. But it still doesn’t make decisions. By that, what I mean is you completely control your moral and emotional framing of reality through the lens and context you put onto a story with the part of your mind that is sentient If you decide and this is where he gets an element of correctness where he talks about these.

Societal archetypes being really important to people’s egos. Many people will take a societal archetype. Define that societal archetype as a life well lived. Mm-hmm. Right. Within every memory they have. Did I live up to that societal archetype? It’s, it’s one way that they may do it or they may ask, do other people see me as that societal archetype [00:16:00]

Simone Collins: or, or essentially you’re saying that they’re functionally method acting as that archetype.

And so when they behave like that sort of makes their,

Malcolm Collins: this trains their unconscious brain to method act as this archetype.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: Because their conscious brain is labeling things as good or bad, eg. Other people’s perceptions of them, their own actions, their own decisions based on whether or not they conformed with this archetype.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And if they’re trying to work out how to respond to something, the subconscious. Thought process is how would a like tough man respond to this? Versus like, how would a, you know, yes. Fancy, frail, delicate, desired woman respond to this or whatever. Right. That kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, yes, exactly. And this is a genuinely, like when you recognize that you are doing that, or you see somebody who’s doing this, this is a genuinely bad way to live life and it can lead people to.

Fail at their lives when they [00:17:00] over glom onto these archetypes. But to try to over mythologize what they’re doing, can miss the banality of it. They simply found an archetype and decided that archetype was definitionally aspirational. Mm-hmm. And then attempted to. Embody the archetype that they saw.

Mm-hmm. And the moment you, you realize it’s just as simple as that. There is no other fanciness to it. And that the, the, their ability to embody the archetype is more encoded in their memories than in their and that they have control of that. Now, what I mean when you have control of your memories, I’ve talked about this on other shows, but it’s very important to the, the sort of Adams family principle, I guess I’d call it.

If somebody gives you wilted flowers, you know, Gomez and Morticia are like, oh, they’re lovely. Right? And culturally they choose to see them as lovely, right? Culture is in part a choice, but in part we’ll talk about where culture is not a choice. But they like the Adams family very intentionally.

Leads into their family’s unique culture. [00:18:00] And I, I think when the Adams family has done well, they are not monsters, but they are around a normie society that sees them as so culturally different that they are the equivalent of monsters. Yeah. And then they live in a world where monsters also see them as the equivalent of monsters, simply because they’re so culturally deviant from the society around them.

With theor joke behind all of that in. Whenever Adams family has done well, but despite all of that, despite doing things their own way, they are fundamentally more loving. They do have a better sex life. They do have a better relationship with their children despite, you know, inverting and the Adams family that do this rest are the, the full links movies like Adams Family Values from the, the, the 1980s or just God at this

Speaker 2: I hated you. I despised you. I choked him until he lost consciousness and had to be put on a respirator. I tied him to a tree and pulled out four of his permanent teeth when he was [00:19:00] asleep. I opened his skull and removed his brains. You did.

Brother. Brother

Malcolm Collins: and good for this as well.

They can choose. Like when you watch the Adams family yes, there’s like some supernatural stuff and stuff like that, but the vast majority of what they do, you could just decide to do. You could decide to treat your relationship the way that they treat their relationship. You could decide to treat disappointment and death and the macabre as things that are positive to you because it fundamentally.

Other than a few hardcoded things, we get to decide how we react to our experiences and our history, and it matters a lot that you understand and incorporate this into the core of who you are. The reason I [00:20:00] say this is a great study that was done on this, I was actually a series of, I think four studies.

It’s been pretty well replicated at this point. That shows that if you ask somebody about. Whether or not they experienced trauma when they were growing up.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: How much trauma they say they felt growing up is perfectly correlary with all the negative effects of that trauma. What is,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: nearly uncorrelated is whether or not they actually experienced any trauma as a kid.

If you go to the court records and stuff like this, this is, this is not correlated with the effects of trauma. So the effects of trauma are caused by believing. That you had these traumatic experiences, right? Mm-hmm. This is why it matters so much how we encode things. You can choose. There are people who genuinely were heavily abused as a kid, but if they don’t believe, they didn’t interpret that as traumatic which I would be seen as one of those people, right?

Like in the Stephen Mullany debate, he got really into this like, how can you not say that you were in a highly abusive [00:21:00] situation growing up? And I was like, because I choose to not see it that way. Right. I choose to not see that about my childhood. I choose to not believe that about my childhood. I choose to believe the best about any situation that I’m in.

I have been in really terrible situations in my life, and Asim knows I always frame them positively as an opportunity, right? Like we don’t have jobs right now, and yet I frame it as an opportunity to try to build our next thing that I’m excited about. And I’m excited every day I could be moping and worried.

Right. That is a fundamentally a choice. And when you don’t frame it that way, when you frame a, the unconscious as something that is fundamentally outside of your control it it, it leads to cognitive abdication and working on all of these things that don’t really matter and avoiding all these things that don’t really matter.

But now let’s go to what he thinks of the personal unconscious. This layer sits just below the consciousness and contains a material that was once conscious, but has been forgotten, repressed, or never fully noticed. This is not [00:22:00] how your unconscious mind works. You, you’re actually largely aware of most of, at least the consequences of what goes on in your unconscious mind and your decision process.

Mm-hmm. It is personal and shaped by your individual life history experience in the environment. So you can see why I push against this. This is just not the way unconsciousness actually works. Unconsciousness is just like the line of thought takes before it gets to your consciousness. Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: Right. What, what, let me be clear here. What he see, what you’re implying, at least per this language, is that he thinks that there are memories that we don’t remember but that affect our behavior. Whereas in reality, if there’s a memory you don’t remember, or like you, you haven’t retrieved it in a long time, it is not going to be influencing your behavior.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that is correct. This also doesn’t heavily influence things like arousal patterns from the studies that we’ve done on this. Like being spanked as a kid in our study, we couldn’t find good correlation with that in like, anything sexual. So a a lot of people think that a lot of these like [00:23:00] experiences that they’ve had there, there’s been great studies on grape in this.

So, when, people are great girls specifically are griped. In societies where there’s a big stigma around grape grape has a really huge negative effect on their cognition. But in societies like say Islamic society where it’s more common, it does not have a particularly big effect on their cognition.

They like it. Being griped does not psychologically hurt them that much because of how they contextualize it. Grape isn’t bad because of grape. Grape is bad because of how we psychologically contextualize what that means to an individual.

Simone Collins: Great. That’s not the right phrasing. It’s not mentally traumatic or harmful to people.

Yeah. Mentally

Malcolm Collins: aspect of it.

Simone Collins: And, and the same could be said for like experiencing violence as a child or other things like that. And that’s what the research shows. And this is not a, a judgment on the morality or goodness or badness. Of the actions of the trauma that you might experience, be it. Of that sort or just like, you know, [00:24:00] witnessing a terrible accident.

But what matters is the contextualization. If you contextualize it as this horrible thing happened to me, I’m now damaged goods, or I am now traumatized, I’m now never gonna be able to function again as a normal human. That is how it is damaged. And this doesn’t been even more innocuous things. We, we’ve talked about this ad nauseum.

But people who’ve, who’ve undergone formal sleep studies who have had horrible sleep. But don’t know that. And, and they report to researchers, I think, you know, I slept fine. Feel better and perform better throughout the day than people who per actual re research, like, measured sleep, slept really well.

Malcolm Collins: Most of the effects from sleeping differences just by telling someone We measured your sleep last night and you slept well, and then they’ll perform better on a test. Yeah, like, so,

Simone Collins: so really like even, so it could be with something as serious as some form of assault or it could be as something innocuous as.

You know, believing you had a good or bad night of sleep, how you contextualize things is really [00:25:00] important. Someone joked in our comments when we talked about this in, in a recent episode. They were like, man, how do we get like our Fitbits to gaslighting us to thinking we have good health? Which is the legit good question.

Malcolm Collins: No, no. But where this ends up mattering and it explains why if it, like, the more progressive somebody is, the worse their mental health is and the more depressed they are. Mm-hmm. Is in part because. You can choose to contextualize, like there are types of like light essay, right? That may happen as part of like regular life.

And a conservative woman or man or, or, or let’s say discrimination, right? May be affected by one of these things and just rub it off as a normal part of life, right? Whereas a progressive. Because they contextualize it as equivalent to grape or because they contextualize it. Like this incredibly, what they might call a microaggression, but it’s just somebody being like what, what bathroom is the right one for you again?

Mm-hmm. You know, because they contextualize this as an attack, [00:26:00] they feel it as an attack and it has the same effect on them, not just psychologically, but physiologically as an attack. But to continue here he believes in this concept that affects the personal unconscious. We’ll get to a second called autonomous complexes.

So he says, quote, the image of certain psychic situation, which is strongly accented emotionally and is moreover incompatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness. This image has a powerful inner coherence. It has its own wholeness, and in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy so that it has the subject to control the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the fear of consciousness.

So, essentially to word this in another word he sees the unconscious mind. As like a separate mind from your conscious mind that interacts with your conscious mind [00:27:00] instead of a collection of components that is part of the pipe into your conscious mind.

So you can think of your conscious mind. Okay. He basically thinks of the mind as working like two living blobs, right? Whereas a better way to think of the mind is a series of action calls where you have a thought is written by the conscious mind into memory then your unconscious mind like you.

Responds to that it’s like, okay, I, I just had X memory. What do I do next? And it does whatever it wants to do next. And that thing happens in the world and then also enters.

Simone Collins: I think I have a better, I think I have a better analogy. So per young, our conscious mind is the president. And our unconscious mind is the deep state.

So the president [00:28:00] is like, we’re gonna do this. And then the deep state is like, ah, actually for all these rules and other things that you can’t even see and that are super obscure yeah, we’re, we’re gonna actually do this totally differently. And then, you know, things get botched and don’t go according to plan.

And young is trying to say, you must understand the deep state. You must fuel the deep state. You must you know, ride the deep state. Whereas I think n non Youngian people are like, no, let’s just do what the Trump administration does and write a bunch of executive orders and go without all of this nonsense, no baggage.

Malcolm Collins: I, I actually, okay, here’s a better way to describe. Okay. It, it’s not as accurate and a metaphor, but it’s a pretty good one for visualizing. What it actually is, is closer to a train track with light on one section of the track.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Like the light’s only covering 12% of the track. Mm-hmm. Now it’s still all of the same process.

It’s all the same track. Mm-hmm. You know, when the track goes through the part that you have conscious access to it’s then going around the track, but, but you’re seeing the whole train. [00:29:00] Right. Does that work better for you?

Simone Collins: No, I don’t understand that at all, but, you know.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. I’ll continue to go here and because, we’ll, we’ll come back to this in different words and it might make sense to you then.

Yes. In plain terms, complexes are emotionally charged clusters of ideas, memories, and and associations. A mother complex, which might involve intense feelings around nurturing, dependency, or authority figures rooted in early experiences. They have a quote unquote nuclear core often.

Simone Collins: Wait, wait, wait, wait.

So the whole complex, wait. Just the complex, like you have a. Savior complex, like when people say things like that, they’re referring to Jungian psychology.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They’re referring to Youngian psychology. Which is not scientific, by the way. It’s not like there’s not scientific evidence for this. Now, now it is true that we have tropes within our society and some people attempt to embody those tropes, as I’ve said above.

But that attempting to. [00:30:00] Bond to a trope is intentional on behalf of the individual. People are not, not aware that they are doing this. They may contextualize it differently. Like, of course I want to be a good progressive and progressives are good, so I go out and save the environment. You know, they don’t ly ask, well, are they actually good?

Is this actually a good way to structure my life? But they’re not like lying about what they’re doing.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: If that makes sense.

Simone Collins: Yes, absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: I got really lightheaded all of a sudden.

Simone Collins: No. You okay? You need to take a break?

Malcolm Collins: No. Young, young, what was I just saying?

Simone Collins: That when people are putting on an affectation or character, it is known by them and intentional. They’ve intentionally chosen to be, yeah, the JY Barbie girl or the, the high school jock type or the, the

Malcolm Collins: reason why this

is

Simone Collins: important.

Malcolm Collins: Is I, I know they may contextualize, like they may act in a way that you see as the mean [00:31:00] cheerleader when they think that’s how a popular girl acts.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: But this is not and it’s very important the people who are like, oh, this is like, something happened to them when they were a kid and they picked up this unconscious belief in whatever.

It’s really important that you don’t get sucked in by this type of language. Or explanation because it’s, it’s, it’s just wrong. And it is hugely disempowering to the individual in a way that can prevent actual solutions from taking place.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So, so how, how do I explain this? If you buy into his world perspective.

You can easily come to believe something like, oh, my friend does X because they have a mother conflict, which they got in childhood for this just so story. And that’s a bad thing to believe because that’s not why your friend is doing X. Your friend is doing X because they want to be seen in X way because they believe X-ray being seen as [00:32:00] good now.

What’s important is, is once you understand this, now it’s a lot easier to work on helping them, right? Because now all you need to do is explain or break through to them why believing that X thing looks good or makes them look good, is a bad and inefficient idea that is functionally not working. May you be unable to do that because it’s something that happened in their childhood.

Absolutely, you may be unable to do it because of something that happened in their childhood. But that doesn’t, that doesn’t mean that like it’s some secret, magical thing that got stuck in their unconscious. It just means that their framing of those definitions happened in their childhood. Does that make sense, Simone?

I.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. He, when triggered when one of these complexes is triggered, they possess you temporarily. He says you react with disproportionate emotion as if an inner foreign body has taken you over. You might suppress them with willpower, but they return stronger until [00:33:00] integrated and your. Goal is to work through these complexes via analysis, dreams or reflection, released energy and other things can foster growth.

And you can see this is where the woo comes in, right? Like, it’s actually very, very similar to Scientology disbelief that you have, setons that you get because of bad things that happens. This is what Scientologists believes. Bad things that happened to you with the child, which are the souls of Rigo dead, dead aliens.

And they, they attach to you. And this is why, you know, you kids can’t even hear like screaming when they’re born because that may distress them. And then they’ll pick up Theon and the Setons will lead to bad things in their life.

Speaker 9: beings born on this planet have had clusters of Satans attached to their bodies. OT three can run out these clusters and cause them to leave us and reincarnate as individuals.

Speaker 10: After hours of expensive auditing, you are rid of the body thetans attached to you. You may then acquire psychic powers, move objects at a distance, and have out of body experiences. [00:34:00] If you find you can’t, then you must take the course again for another 5,000 pounds.

Malcolm Collins: That’s, that’s basically what young thought. That’s how he thought reality worked.

Theon logic is that, you, you get possessed by these little anima that live within you. Very video gaming actually.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you’re right.

Speaker 12: You can’t be serious now. Come at me. No one’s. What the hell?

Speaker 11: What’s up you? How come get up.

Malcolm Collins: There’s a game called Persona five, where you sort of have these, where you have these like anima inside you. And I think this is influenced by Jungian psychology. The idea that you have these, ideas about what is good that live inside you and can take you over. That’s not really how it works.

Now. You can be like, but sometimes around specific archetypes. I have seen people get triggered. And it’s, yes, sometimes people [00:35:00] are triggered by specific archetypes. This absolutely can happen. But. Sorry, my feet were getting cold. People can get triggered by archetypes but this is just like a, a, a known archetype that they have chosen to incorporate in their self identity.

So how does the flow of emotions actually work? Because we talk about this in the pragmatist Guide to life and it’s really important to understand. So most people like. Are living on autopilot. So the, the sentient part of their brain, the, the like, one little important part is completely on autopilot.

And this sentient part of their brain is so if you, after you get in an argument with somebody you may attempt to model them, right? You’ll, you’ll do something like say like. You’re creating an emulation of them within your mind so you can continue to have that debate that has their characteristics.

Mm-hmm. And stuff like this. And this is called a theory of mind. And I mo believe [00:36:00] that the way that most humans operate is they have one theory of mind in their brains at all time, dedicated to themselves, to the person,

Simone Collins: what they believe themselves.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, they have chosen to be or become. And this theory of mind is referenced by the little sentient inside of them when they’re on autopilot.

So by this what I mean is. They have an idea of who is Malcolm, right? Like what, what is Malcolm like? And they create a model for that. And then the little part of their brain that writes down their emotions with like, are you angry about this? Is this good for you? Is this whatever? It references that theory of mind, which is talking about yourself.

When you are going to experience an emotion, so mm-hmm. Suppose you’re like going through a [00:37:00] breakup like some, somebody’s just texted you and said, I wanna break up with you. Right. Your sentient part of your brain references the part of your brain that’s the Malcolm or Simone theory of mind and says, how do I feel about being broken up with?

And then that theory of mind tells them, Malcolm, the type of person Malcolm is, feels like X or Y when they’re being broken up with. Mm-hmm. That gets encoded. Now you can override this. But. It’s mostly running automatically. And we argue in that book, the core way to change your emotional reaction is both through recontextualization we talked about before, but also chiseling at and working on that theory of mind.

That is you, right? The one that’s constantly referenced by your autopilot. And I note here that this theory of mind can come in one of two forms. And you throughout your life will meet people of both forms in one form. [00:38:00] It’s modeling themselves from their own perspective. These are people who are this is, this is a normal way of doing it for like non-super toxic people.

In the other type of person, it models it from the perspective of outsiders. And these people are very dangerous. So what I mean by that is with suppose somebody has just broken up with it, right? The question that the thing constructing the theory of mind of them is asking is not what type of person am I and how does that type of person react?

Mm-hmm. It what type of person do I want other people to see me as? Yes. And how does this person react?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And so, these, these people are become very performative in this sort of stuff. And the reason why this is so toxic is because they can never really be satisfied, right? Like, they never really are seen enough [00:39:00] as what they want to be like.

But to continue here, the collective unconscious, this is a deeper universal layer beneath personal unconscious. It’s not acquired through personal experiences, but inherited as part of our psychic structure like instincts or biological predispositions, but psychic in nature. This one is really stupid.

I mean, like, obviously it doesn’t exist. If it did exist, we would it, we would see it in like feral children and stuff like that. So, but we’ve seen a lot of children who have been raised outside of families and stuff. We’ve seen art from people who’s been like totally isolated their entire lives.

And it’s just disordered there, there isn’t like some sort of recurring. Thing to it outside of what we biologically inherit from our ancestors. Any thoughts before I go further, Simone?

Simone Collins: No, no, no. But this has been a lot better than the summaries I’ve read, so I appreciate you trying to explain this, at least in terms I can understand.[00:40:00]

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Then within the collective unconscious, you have archetypes. And he sees this as being like primordial images that are not fixed images of, or characters, but underlying forms of potentials that shape human experience appearing in Miss Fairytales, dreams, arts religions. Across cultures.

Okay,

Simone Collins: this is where I got that perception that it was basically just psychology, but with like, some kind of like through the lens of book narratives.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I’ve pointed out the reason I say that this is bad is while it is true that you do get some convergent phenomenon between cultures, especially cultures that are inheriting from each other narrative flows, structures and histories you know, El Revo and all that you, you.

Now that I’m play more stories with reality fabricator, I’m realizing just how much AI chooses El Vos is the name. It chooses it well over half the time which is maybe I play too many sci-fi stories.

Simone Collins: Yeah, [00:41:00] in sci-fi stories, that’s the case. It’s certainly not the case in like historical fiction.

Which I also choose a lot.

Malcolm Collins: So my favorite sci-fi story to play here is I play it with the the new, like build your own one where it like makes up an image concept based on a gist of an idea you have. Yeah. Is I am an ambassador for the Tarn Empire meeting with the the Federation, which are humans who have sort of.

Evolved into this sort of gay space Communism, utopia. And, and my job is to infiltrate and take down these Witless Federation members you know, to, to eradicate their, their colony for, for further expansion of the Tarn Empire. So

Simone Collins: anyway, these archetypes?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. These types, so they include things like the persona, the social mask or role we present to the world, useful for adaptation, but problematic if we identify it completely.

So note here when I talk about persona, like the thing I’m talking about, you can be like, but that’s very similar to a persona and that’s the trick. It sounds similar, but it’s a completely separated concept. [00:42:00] I’m literally just saying. People identify tropes as good and attempt to build them into their self identities.

It’s, it’s not part of a collective unconscious, it’s based on things they saw in their lives and then attempted to model. Okay. When people try to live out the hero’s journey, that’s just because they have seen it that many times in books. Especially in the west. The shadow, and we’ll talk about this one a lot, the repressed disavow aspect of personality.

What we don’t want to be, it includes negative traits, but also hidden strengths in creativity. Anima in men, the inner feminine image, quality, soul, emotion, relatedness, animus. Women, the inner masculine images, quality spirit, logic, assertiveness, and the self, the central archetype of wholeness the regulating center of the entire psyche, not the same as the ego.

It often appears in dreams as madness, wise figures or symbols of unity. The self guides, the processes of becoming who we [00:43:00] truly are. Other common archetypes include the hero, the mother, the child, the trickster, the wise. Old woman, et cetera. And those are not, those are just tropes. They’re just tropes that people see.

And then identify moral value to as to how you should actually build yourself. If you’re like, well, what trope do I choose? Or what trope is really me? And the practice is this guide to life. You should get it. Read it. We argue. First, you decide what has purpose. Then you decide what trope. If you embodied it would best maximize that purpose, then you embodied that trope.

That’s the best way to live because then you can live with maximum efficacious throughout your life in a, in like a, a, a big way, which I’m a big fan of.

Simone Collins: Yeah, absolutely. I also would just argue that the hero’s journey. It’s just kind of a reflection of common life pathways, you know?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: It’s not

Malcolm Collins: growing up being teen, going out, you know, then creating a story of success or a story of challenges and failure.

That’s the [00:44:00] way people like to tell narratives and

Simone Collins: stories. Life happens. You leave home, you face challenges, you grow, you know? That’s profound. Yeah. I mean, it is, but it’s not it’s, don’t overthink it. There’s a lot of overthinking it seems, in young Youngian psychology, which ironically I first heard about when I, I did that internship with the Fake Cult the Jesu Institute as they called it was like all about like Carl Young this and Carl Young that, and I just love that, like aesthetically when a bunch of alternate reality game narrative writers decided that they were going to create.

A cult and try to throw in all these things that like were creepy. So alongside things like human dolphin communication, they threw in a bunch of references to Carl Young, I think goes to show you everything you need to know about just how I. You know, useful and, and, and real world ish is

Malcolm Collins: but the reason this gets to me before we go further with shadow work and the shadow is it’s just not accurate.

It’s an inaccurate view of who [00:45:00] you are. Yeah. And it includes many elements like you know, past events living in your unconscious or something. Yeah. That. Can be used by your ironically real subconscious mind, eeg, the little model that you’ve built of yourself. Mm-hmm. To justify actions that you wouldn’t want, right?

Yeah. If you believe that you have trauma, then you build that trauma into that model of yourself, which determines how you emotionally react to stimuli in your environment,

Simone Collins: leads to suboptimal reactions and less resilience.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Because you’re like, oh, I am someone who is traumatized. It is a very belief in the concept of trauma that makes you susceptible to trauma in the first.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I’m not up for this because I’m traumatized. You know? Instead of I can do this, I’m empowe