Speaker 2 (00:00)

Brant Evans and Aidan Moran. Welcome to the Explorer Poet Podcast.

 

Speaker 1 (00:05)

Thanks for having us, Josh.

 

Speaker 3 (00:06)

Thank you.

 

Speaker 2 (00:07)

Yeah, so this is actually my first time having a conversation with two people at the same time. So this will be interesting. But you guys have collaborated on a book together and the book is titled, it’s a long one, so I gotta read this, God’s Heroes and Groups Using Mythic Archetypes to Understand Group and Organizational Dynamics. So I wanna get into all the different parts of that and kind of the reason, I don’t know, behind the book and who your intended audience is and all of that.

 

But first, I’d like to start off by just asking people how they got kind of drawn into this world of thinking about archetypes, thinking about gods and heroes. So I don’t know, maybe each of you can just take a minute and talk about it and then we’ll dive into how you two connected.

 

Speaker 3 (00:51)

Yeah, I can jump in first, Brent. That’s all right. I think initially my way into this sort of way of thinking about things, like I just call it symbolic thinking a lot of the time. I don’t think I’ve ever told this piece of the story, but I used to work in a co-working space when I was working in tech, basically.

 

And I worked remotely, so then I would go to like a co-working space in my local city, the workbench it was called, here in Galway, Ireland. And there was a woman there who, you know, she was a regular goer. And she once mentioned in the break room that I should watch, she recommended that I watch The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell.

 

And I was like, all right, I’ll give it a watch. And I watched it and I was like, this is super interesting. I was speaking to me in some way that I didn’t fully understand. And then I ended up buying The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And that blew my mind. And then I kind of went out on the rabbit hole from there, reading Gyeong, influenced by like early Jordan Peterson as well.

 

And just kept going down the young rabbit hole and here I am.

 

Speaker 2 (02:09)

Yeah, I have a lot of very similar influences. I think I started with The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell as well. And then I jumped to The Heroes with A Thousand Faces. And then I read his big long four part series, The Masks of God. Wow. You read it? Yeah, I’ve read all four. I go back and look at it every now and then. But yeah, I would say that what you said, symbolic thinking is also, it’s just so fascinating to me. It really pulls me in. But yeah, what about you, Brent?

 

Speaker 1 (02:35)

For me, it was probably around the wilderness therapy days when I was fresh into that world out of college, probably 2011. There’s one specific therapist, shout out to my buddy, Jeff Scott, who had this just really beautiful way of like bringing myth into the treatment plans and the work he was doing with groups out in the field. And so this is, you know, adolescent boys who didn’t want to be there.

 

at in like a wilderness therapy program. And I had no idea what any of that meant coming, you you go to school for like psychology undergrad and you come out and you’re unfortunately woefully prepared for like applied psychology and actually working with groups, but stepping in and watching him weave in mythic narrative and watching how it would connect with the kids. Like people, the stories that are archetypal just seem to grab people.

 

I also, you know, when I was a young kid for some reason, and I don’t, I don’t really have like a complex adult narrative around this, except for the fact that it just was the way it was. I just was really interested in mythology. Like some of the first books I ever got interested in were like Hercules and Apollo. And I remember being in the second grade and looking up at the library books and like being really excited to grab, like find a new book on Apollo that I hadn’t read yet. So those were like hitting me early.

 

that there was like something really powerful about them. But yeah, in my adult life, just watching how mythic metaphor can be applied in individual psychology. And this was before I had read any Joseph Campbell or been exposed to like Robert Bly or Robert Johnson or any of these authors that ended up being really influential in our work together. But just watching this therapist like bring it to life.

 

and seeing how it connected with clients, just felt like, think the phrase Jordan Peterson used is like hyper real. Like it was, you could watch this like light happen. So I found that really inspiring.

 

Speaker 2 (04:26)

Yeah, yeah, I love, I love, I don’t know the what you call the applying of mythic metaphor. It’s just how I see almost everything now is there’s some myth. But when you were when you were in undergrad, and you’re going through psychology, how much of that was related to myth?

 

Speaker 1 (04:44)

none that I can remember. You know, I went to, Rice university, which was a very, it was a very, I’d say, well, well-designed in terms of like the structure and all this stuff, but it wasn’t like a creative powerhouse program for the, the therapeutic and the psychological side. Like we, the courses that we were looking at much more dealing with, data and theory and

 

You know, especially kind of in the early 2000s, think Freud and Jung were not really seen as like, there weren’t as much in vogue. think Jung has made quite a comeback in the zeitgeist. Like there’s like a lot more interest in some of Jung’s stuff. Freud still gets a lot of shade and people love to hate on Freud’s ideas for some good reasons, of course, but also just, I think it’s like a cultural.

 

stylistic thing, but I think in the early 2000s, especially there really wasn’t much, I didn’t sense as much interest around some of the Jungian ideas at that point, especially in the university system. So really it was after that, that I felt like I got exposed to more of those ideas, you know, passing the way it’s, it was taught was here are these ideas that these guys had and they’re kind of like foundational or whatever, but here’s how we think about it now that we’re so much smarter. And I really do think there’s been.

 

a little bit of a return to that symbolic thinking and the power of that over time.

 

Speaker 2 (06:04)

Yeah, I never took a lot of psychology classes in college. I think I took a Psych 101 and then I took a sociology class and it was similar. It was a lot of data. It was a lot of behavioral science and that kind of thing. But I think in general, there are these different camps of psychology or psychotherapy or whatever it is. it can be difficult for the university to kind of accept this mythological

 

bent on psychology just because it’s very difficult to measure empirically. so they want things to be scientific. it seems like there is a strong divide sometimes between, science and science and biology versus religion, spirituality, philosophy. But I think when you blend these things, like when you blend the myths into it and you start looking at stories and myths just as

 

as the way that people think, it’s like how our operating system works. I think there’s actually a really good crossover between science and spirituality.

 

Speaker 3 (07:02)

Yeah,

 

that’s, that’s, that’s what reminded me of, you know, E. McGilchrist. And that’s, this is what he gets into in, in that book, Matter with Things. It’s like 1500 pages. So like, it’s so in depth, but he basically builds out how the empiricism is one way of knowing. And then he basically argues pretty comprehensively that like science and the scientific way of knowing and empiricism comes out of this narrative mythic symbolic way of thinking.

 

And you just can’t get away from it. I think like one of my favorite quotes from this book that sticks in my mind is like over the temple of science is the quote, you must have faith, something like this. But you reminded me as well of CS Lewis, is this great writer, I’m sure you know him, but CS Lewis wrote a book called Mere Christianity. And in that book, there is a chapter called morality and psychoanalysis.

 

And then he delineates between Freud’s philosophy and Freud’s psychoanalysis, the method and the philosophy. he said, it’s a good method, but it’s a terrible philosophy. And, and, and, yeah, I often wonder is like, is there a project in there to try and figure out, it’s kind of gone off on a tangent, but I wonder if there’s a good project in there to try and figure out how to,

 

how to sort of reground it in a better philosophy, because it is obviously a good method. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how do you, what’s the empirical part of it? Because it clearly does work, psycho dynamic therapy, whatever you want to call it. But what do you think about that?

 

Speaker 2 (08:26)

Thanks

 

Speaker 1 (08:31)

How do

 

Speaker 2 (08:32)

I don’t know if I have much experience in an actual therapeutic setting, because I’m not a therapist. And so the only experience I have is sitting down with, you know, like a cognitive behavioral therapist. I’ve never done union. I’ve never done like a union style analysis. And to be honest, for me, once I came across these guys in book form, like Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, and I’ve read a bunch of a bunch of union books as well.

 

this, for me, just that symbolic thinking was enough to where, where as soon as I stopped reading kind of like self-help style books and started reading myth and story, then I just started connecting a lot of dots myself and, then also kind of integrating my own creative practice. Just, I don’t know, the integration process seemed to kick off at that point. But as far as, as far as, you know, philosophy versus practice,

 

I don’t know. I don’t know if I have deep thoughts about Freudian philosophy versus Freudian methodology. think that talking and working through things, of looking into the unconscious, looking into dreams, looking into memories, revisiting things and kind of releasing the emotion that never got out, you know, if you think of trauma, I think that that’s all very

 

very useful. I think that maybe that’s what you’re speaking to as far as the methodology, but you could correct me. Yeah. As far as the philosophy, I think there are some very specific ideas around Freud that are not only like some of his philosophies are not only incorrect, but can actually be kind of harmful. And again, I don’t have a deep understanding of it, but I’ve read enough Alice Miller to understand this like his

 

what does he call it? The drive theory. And you know, kind of blame it. It’s almost like victim blaming in a sense. the real, the really interesting thing to me about that whole narrative or the story of Freud himself is just how none of us can actually escape stories. And so even Freud himself who was doing all this analysis of others was probably trapped in his own story and unaware of it.

 

Speaker 1 (10:40)

What gets made fun of for like smoking the fat cigar while he’s, you know, telling people that they’re projecting phallic imagery and stuff like that. And his, his early, if we can like steer the conversation into the group world, because that’s obviously a lot of what we’re talking about, but his book on groups, the group psychology and the analysis of the ego gets

 

Speaker 2 (10:50)

Yeah, yeah,

 

Speaker 1 (11:05)

most, almost everything wrong, I would say. and I, I also think there’s just this context for being one of the foundational thinkers. You get some. Creative slack on that stuff. Like, I don’t think that, and you know, who, who invented the game of basketball? can’t remember the guy’s name even, but he’s not, he’s not the best player or anything. You know, he’s not like known for, for, being

 

high level player or anything like that. But, but there is something about like the creativity and building something and, and, and launching this, this like realm in this world. So I really do. And I think of Jung in similar fashion, and this is where I think it probably contemporary people would disagree with me. And we just went and like presented at this small little Jungian conference thing. And everyone there is like really stoked on Jung. And I really would be pretty critical in some of the similar ways that people are critical.

 

of Freud, like some of the ways that Jung was using psychoanalysis, in criminal cases, for example, around word association and like finding people guilty based on their responses to specific words. That is like a wild overreach in my opinion of psycho dynamic principles. It’s like arrogant, it’s overreach. You know, these are the earlier days and these guys were thinking, in ways that have become really, really fascinating and fruitful. And so.

 

Yeah, like Freud’s work with groups, he was real big on this idea that, that it’s like kind of a hoard mentality where there’s one domineering dominant leader that imposes their will on the group. and, know, Wilfrid, beyond, and some others have come along since then and, kind of flip the script on that and said, actually, you know, as much as anything, a leader is tolerated for their ability to actualize the group drive. the unconscious dynamic

 

that are happening in the group will usually nominate or assassinate literally or metaphorically, like knock out a leader. And so if a leader is not actualizing the group drive, like a leader is effectively serving a group drive or they’re discarded, which is polar opposite to kind of Freud’s thinking. And I think it’s a bit more nuanced when we, when we try on that beyond lens.

 

And look at the unconscious things happening in the groups. And then what is tolerated in leadership roles that that’s where like there’s really rich stuff that comes up. and our work is basically looking for confluence between some of those ideas around group unconscious dynamics and how archetypes arise. so we get that, that synthesis of the symbolic thinking archetypes and how those dovetail with modern understanding of group dynamics.

 

Speaker 2 (13:38)

Yeah. It’s funny because it’s not like what you were saying about Freud and Jung. They’re not going to be 100 % correct and anybody who accepts them as some kind of prophet or purveyor of truth, some kind of dogma, you’re just going to fall into some kind of ideology yourself. And it’s not like we look back on Isaac Newton and think he was a moron, even though we’ve disproven his own theory, like disproven his theories.

 

All of these things are just ideas that get built on and nobody’s ever had it 100 % correct. That’s why there’s still a mystery out there. That’s why we’re still searching.

 

Speaker 1 (14:13)

But except for freaking Einstein somehow that stuff is, mean, that’s a whole realm I’m not qualified to like get into, but some of the predictions that that dude made have been wild.

 

Speaker 2 (14:24)

Yeah,

 

Speaker 1 (14:25)

about that like really well.

 

Speaker 2 (14:28)

Yeah, but I think that’s, know, even Einsteinian physics, we’re now moving into trying to explain things even on another level. And obviously, obviously he was right about a lot of things, but there were certain things that were like the idea that the universe is expanding. He didn’t want to accept that because it rubbed him the wrong way from a spiritual perspective. So there are, I don’t know, I just see everything as like this evolving story. And so everything’s going to have a light and a shadow, like a light side and a shadow side. And to look back on anything in history and kind of

 

discounted entirely, I think is a mistake because it’s kind of, it’s how we got to where we are today. Speaking of how we got to where we are today, I do want to jump into your, your kind of interests around groups. And I appreciate you kind of bringing the conversation back around to that. Just really quickly though, what’s the story of you two? Like, how did you, how did you guys come to meet each other? And then how did you realize that you wanted to start writing a book together?

 

Speaker 1 (15:24)

Hey Dan, you wanna get that one?

 

Speaker 3 (15:26)

Yeah, so, Brandt and I met at a group relations conference. And I guess we’ll say a bit about what group relations conferences are. But group relations conferences are a big part of what we talk about in the book. Because it’s like a, I guess it’s a way to experience these group dynamics that we talk about in the book. But basically,

 

Group relations is the study of group dynamics in the here and now. So rather than sort studying it from a theoretical standpoint, you’re actually encouraged to say what’s happening in the room in the here and now in a membership of anywhere from like 20 to 50 people. And there will be consultants in the room calling out dynamics that are happening. Brand, do you want to add anything else there?

 

Speaker 1 (16:14)

I we

 

can give them the rabbit hole of that too. I think just for the sake of tying a quick bow on like the, how we met we, during the pandemic, they were having to do these virtually. And so, you know, we would probably not have met if we hadn’t been in this pandemic situation that was forcing much more international membership through these virtual conferences. Adan and I were assigned to one of the same small groups, which is like a breakout group and one of those group relations conferences and

 

yeah, it was a really rich experience, surprisingly for me, because I thought that group dynamics work needed to be in person. but one thing that the pandemic showed me at least was that those human stories and dynamics and archetypes, they infiltrate a zoom room as well. There’s something, it’s not just the physical proximity. so Adama I met in a virtual conference and, just kept in touch afterwards. We had some shared interests and some of the myths stuff. I think that was really where we, where we like.

 

The conversation went afterwards as mytho dynamic perspective looking.

 

Speaker 3 (17:12)

You sent me Iron John the book.

 

Speaker 1 (17:14)

Yeah,

 

right. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, got to Iron John by Robert Bly, which is my recommendation to anyone that’s like starting to get into this work. That was that was one of my big influences. And you

 

Speaker 3 (17:26)

you had a lot of said John Dandy’s ideas

 

Speaker 1 (17:29)

Yeah. Yeah. So then during that pandemic, I had started like writing out these as a series of informal essays. Effectively, I wanted to advance my understanding of groups. I didn’t find the material that I wanted to read on it. So I started doing independent research and writing and it ended up forming out into these essays. And then as I was coming on, the theme emerged of looking at archetypes and how those arising in the group psychology. And if there’s anything that I feel like we can really

 

make a claim for, you know, don’t, I don’t think either of us would claim to be the most brilliant psychoanalytic, uh, psychology mind in the, in the room a lot of the time necessarily, or, uh, you know, in a lot of these group conferences, we’re not necessarily the most seasoned group practitioners. Like I do have a formal education in it have been doing it for a long time at this point, but there’s a synthesis that these two fields have not been talking to each other. And Adon and I started like kind of keying in on this. like, look, there’s

 

There’s this beautiful world of mytho poetic understanding. And then there’s this beautiful world of looking at the unconscious dynamics in groups. Like, why is there not more of a synthesis between these two? And so that really became the theme and the thing that we offer up. And I would say is fairly a novel little niche. I don’t think there’s much out there in that, in that, you know, combined field.

 

Speaker 2 (18:53)

It seems to me that all of the best ideas come from some, at least in my own experience, when I have an idea that I go like, that feels like an original thought, something I’ve never thought before. It’s this synthesis of very different worlds. Maybe that science side and then maybe that spirituality side and you’re kind of reading into both and then all of a sudden like something clicks and you go, that makes sense. And yeah, it’s interesting to hear you describe it that way. So then, yeah, I’m curious to hear.

 

What is your idea around or what’s the main theme around archetypes and how they arise in social dynamics or social settings? What is the, I guess what’s the main premise?

 

Speaker 1 (19:30)

Yeah, to understand our assertion or our main thesis, you have to first accept this idea that groups have a mind of their own. You can be agnostic. You can be skeptical, I think. But building out this practice, which is really helpful for the group dynamics work, of asking if the group has a mind of its own, what is that entity trying to accomplish? And that’s one of the big aha moments that most

 

folks who have that do group dynamics work is that they start to understand that there’s all these unconscious things happening in the room that, that pull us in these, into these roles, into these different dynamics. so it’s like, often I’ll be in a group and like three days in, like, man, I’m really unhappy with the role I’m taking up in this group. Like I’ve been like pulled into some current that I did not detect. And somehow I had this like psychological Velcro that stuck me to this role, like what happened there. And so.

 

you if we apply like the mythic thinking, any role in a group is effectively like an archetype being actualized in order to do something or ameliorate anxiety in some way for the group. If we’re thinking from the Kleinian perspective of like ameliorating or reducing anxiety as a coping skill, like the group will like pull out archetypal energies from people. I don’t remember how you framed your question exactly, but

 

The main thesis and the main idea is that we can reframe how we think about groups instead of just what feels really dry, like, hey, what roles are emerging in the group? We can reframe that to a more juicy, you know, what characters are being actualized, what architects are being manifested within these members. And that gives you license to then get creative about looking at the actual myths. if, if,

 

If there’s a group that’s embroiled in conflict constantly, know, Wilfred Beyond would call that a fight dynamic where there’s like constantly finding conflict. And that’s one of the ways to either reduce anxiety or deal with like a threatening environment is like a war mentality effectively and like getting into a mode where you’re always fighting. And that’s what some groups will do. And what we’re saying is like, okay, well,

 

who’s being recruited to act as Aries and like lead that be the tip of the spear, so to speak. And then we can look at like myths because, and the actual storylines and the little details that you would do for applying this work to like individual psychology, like can iron John, for example, he goes through like a whole mythic fairy tale and looks at these individual details like in

 

How do I, how do I let me try to tie a bow here on this? If a character in the mythic story or around an Aries, for example, is like doing X, Y, and Z, we can then ask like, okay, is the group also manifesting that in some sense? If we make the assumption that myths are archetypal and that groups are enacting these archetypes somehow, what details should we be paying attention to and how do those match with the group dynamics in the room? And effectively it gives you a lot of

 

Room for creative license and insight to be generated is the main idea.

 

Speaker 2 (22:39)

Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I have some thoughts on it, but hey, Don, did you have anything else that you wanted to add to that?

 

Speaker 3 (22:45)

I guess I think about it just from the side of the story. That’s where I find myself coming at it from a lot of the time. So yeah, I think it’s very helpful to think through stories.

 

Rather than from like an individual sort of, archetype is appearing, I always almost think of it, I don’t know, through a story, but yeah, you can probably cut that piece out.

 

Just…

 

Speaker 1 (23:13)

⁓

 

To try to put a little bit of an example on it, in the book we talk about, there’s one chapter that looks at like groups that actualize their Hercules energy, but more of like in a shadowy way. And that would be what I think a lot of people lazily refer to as toxic masculinity. know, like Hercules is brash. He’s very strong. He’s capable of these like amazing feats, but often if he’s not paying attention and mindful, it’s like somebody’s getting smashed and

 

and dead or he accidentally will murder people. when he’s tricked and when he’s fooled and when he’s not seen clearly, he can like cause massive violence and damage really quickly. But you look at the Greek myth of how his death is handled and he’s when he dies and when he’s burned, he goes up to the to Mount Olympus, which we use as a metaphor for like, you know, transmuting and bringing that material into the conscious realm of the Mount Olympus, which is

 

different from the underworld, for example. And just like, it’s a metaphor for groups that, and the relationship that they have to power and strength. think one of the things that’s become very, very common currently in our culture is almost like a fetishization of weakness or currency around like victimhood on really both sides of the political aisle. This isn’t meant to like target any one group or way of thinking, but

 

this idea of like victimhood, which is a disowned Hercules effectively. And on the flip side, you have groups that really struggle to embody the Persephone energy. This is another Greek myth where groups that struggle with vulnerability, which struggle with nourishing types of energy and don’t have much of a relationship or an ability around expressing that side of like the masculine psyche or the feminine psyche.

 

And so we talk about just like the way of thinking of like, which, you know, which archetypes are estranged in these groups and which archetypes are overly expressed. and that helping us get at just an understanding that feels a little bit more tangible than lobbying a label, like toxic masculinity at, at like a fraternity in a college, right? Like, can we get a little bit more nuanced with that and the myths I think help us to do so.

 

Speaker 3 (25:19)

depersonalize the things as well. Because you’re not dealing with someone’s like individual psychology or story. And that does serve to sort of put a distance in between the person and the action and to talk about it in a different way.

 

Speaker 2 (25:33)

Yeah, so that they don’t have to deal with, I don’t know, some kind of term or label that’s charged currently by the cultural environment or, you know, the current vernacular. But you can just go back and look at a story and through the story, by applying the different aspects of the story or just bringing it up even, even just showing how it works, they could probably start to even maybe unconsciously or consciously begin to recognize the part that they’re playing in the current situation as well.

 

That makes sense to me. One thought that I have, and I’ve shared this a number of times is going back to where you were saying that the group has a mind, like the group has its own mind. When I think about human psychology, I think that it’s fascinating that it seems to operate on the same level, no matter how big or small it goes, right? So the smallest it would be would be a single individual, the psychology in your own experience, in your own psyche, whatever it is. And then,

 

the way that those dynamics work on the inside of you, they work the same way all the way up to actually the entire species on the entire planet. And so the way that you describe stories and archetypes manifesting themselves through groups, it’s the same way that it manifests on the individual level. And I think about this all the time because aside from perhaps the individual and the entire species,

 

everything else is just layers of groups that we’ve decided on or that we’ve settled upon. And so that might be families, could be like schools, it could be cities, it could be churches, it could be all these sports teams, businesses, they’re all these groups of people that have come together and when they come together, they form that kind of shared consciousness, that collective. And the other thing I think about, and these are ideas that came to me a while back because

 

When I grew up, I grew up in a very strict religious setting. I grew up LDS or Mormon. And so we were very, not only like very serious about our religion, but everything was treated very literal. So all of the myths were very literalized and they like, you had to behave as if they were absolutely true. And part of that myth was this idea that God, similar to the Old Testament, God would choose somebody to lead the church, say a prophet. And going back to what you had said about

 

leaders being authorities over groups. What I came to see is that in the kind of authoritarian setting that I was in, what was actually happening is similar to what you were saying was that the message is portrayed as if the authority is pushing it down to the group. But what’s really happening is the group is influencing the authority of the leader, right? And so I think of it almost as in terms of evolutionary principles.

 

adaptation within an environment. And so when you see a group, sometimes, sometimes, so this probably, I mean, it works in business as well as in religions and teams, say sports teams, where when individuals behave in such a way where they add to the strength of the group, then they are kind of promoted within the group. And when they behave in ways that are detrimental to the group, the group will find a way to kick them out of the group, to exit them out.

 

And it’s just like evolutionary principles where if you adapt, you survive and then the group or the species or whatever it is, the collective becomes even more, it becomes more strong in its ideas and its ability to cooperate in its ability to survive. But if you don’t adapt, if you can’t find one of those roles to play, if you can’t, you know, fill,

 

the form of an archetype that the group sees as necessary, then they’ll find a way to kick you out.

 

Speaker 1 (29:18)

There’s, there’s one caveat I would add. And that was, that was awesome. so the way that we talk about it, which is applied beyond thinking is that the group will have an active unconscious drive. so logically and reasonably, you would think that it’s like you said, is it, is this member helping the group reach the goal that we all have, or is this help, is this member making the group stronger?

 

Sometimes though that can get inverted and the unconscious drive of the group might be tied to an identity of victimhood or tied to, I think of some of these like, you know, there are like parasitic NGOs out there, for example, that have to like demonstrate increasing need year over year to like draw the tax money in, right? And so it’s like, if they go,

 

under budget, if they manage everything super effectively, or if they, God forbid, solve the problem that they’re trying, they claim to be working on, you know, members that are moving toward them towards those metrics are probably not going to be tolerated when the unconscious, unspoken group drive is that we need to remain dependent on our source of survival effectively. And so there can be these weird, what seemed like irrational, irrational inversions of those values.

 

And that that’s somewhat common, you know, another, just like simple example is in these group relations conferences, a lot of the time, like everyone’s there to study and learn about groups. That’s the explicit stated thing that everyone comes there with. like, well, I’m really curious about groups. but be aware of being the member that offers like, an inconvenient truth or is like, curious about exposing a dynamic. The group.

 

does these things as a way to cope with anxiety. And if you threaten those, it becomes very defensive and potentially malicious towards those members. And so on the surface, you’d think that any member that is helping with getting deeper into the questioning and exposing some of the dynamics going on, that that’s like, well, that’s what we’re here for. No, like there’s crazy defense mechanisms that come up, people push back. so there’s

 

I think what I’m saying is that yes, what to what you’re saying, but there’s this wrinkle where these like values get inverted and you have to be able to ask the question of like, here’s the stated goal of what the group is saying, like the mission statement, but here’s the actual, unstated contracts that everyone signed onto the way that the group is managing its anxiety. even though that’s not been said out loud, everyone kind of keys in on it it’s really good at detecting that stuff.

 

Speaker 3 (31:48)

It’s like that’s the second category that the group relations is really focusing on. Trying to get at what is it that’s taking groups off task. It’s that layer that’s being tuned in on.

 

Speaker 2 (32:01)

Mm-hmm.

 

Speaker 1 (32:03)

And the other thing you mentioned, you know, the church and business groups and organizations, there’s all these, all these different, you know, Russian dolls of groups stacked on each other in any of our lives right now. Like we’re a group and, know, when I’m off of this zoom call, it’s like I’m back in the house with my wife and like, we’re a small group and we’re in Tucson and there’s a community there. There’s all these, uh, different like layers of group identity that we have all the time. Um, what I also find fascinating is just.

 

how little it takes to trigger the group mentality. And this has been called the minimum viable group phenomenon. But you know, like you don’t necessarily think of yourself as a group with the people you’re riding on a city bus with, for example, but it is a group. There’s shared interdependent goals happening, even if it’s not being said. Like everyone wants to arrive safely. Hey Don, I sent you that little blurb.

 

this Twitter post that showed it was not meant to like prove our point or anything, but it was somebody’s story about being on a bus and they’d been riding this bus like every day for whatever months. And so they see all the same faces. And when they fell asleep one day, everyone rallied around like waking them up. The bus drivers like, wait, isn’t somebody supposed to be getting off here? And like, without having stated any of this, they were acting as a group to like help this member out. And, you know, when did that group become a group? It’s like, it doesn’t take much.

 

both to trigger some of those dynamics and those roles to emerge, but also to trigger the defense mechanisms. So people can become extremely judgmental of what they see as the out group very, very quickly based on very arbitrary things. The group instinct is extremely strong in people.

 

Speaker 2 (33:44)

Yeah, and that makes sense given, you know, what makes us as a species so effective is that we can cooperate, that we can work together. And none of us would survive well on our own, you know, without the help of others. I can really understand though what you’re saying about the kind of unconscious drives of a group versus the stated goal because

 

Because it really, I mean, even when you think about evolutionary theory, a lot of times when you look at a situation, it’s not readily intuitive why a certain adaptation was advantageous. And so a lot of people who push back on the idea of evolution, they kind of point out things that don’t make a lot of sense right off the bat. But when you think about the survival

 

The survival is actually not about the individuals, it’s about the group. And so it’s an interesting idea that a group can have a stated idea, but then behave contrary to that stated idea because of the unconscious dynamics that have arisen.

 

Speaker 1 (34:51)

Yeah, it’s fascinating. I think that stuff is in, it is, I think one of the, I don’t know, pains or double binds of like being a human is what you said. Like we don’t survive alone. There’s a reason why that, that show alone is popular. It’s like, how long can people go by themselves in the wilderness? And it’s not that long, even like really highly trained survival professionals and

 

Speaker 2 (35:18)

Yeah, I think on that show it’s like 60 days on average. It’s not that long.

 

Speaker 1 (35:21)

Yeah,

 

it’s something it’s not, you know, it’s not a lot like good luck trying to survive in a harsh winter environment by yourself. and there’s this, there’s double bind for people where you have to, you have to group. That’s like a fundamental human need, even outside of the shelter and like the tangible things, there’s an emotionally, an emotional component, which I think is, beyond as Keaton on.

 

but it’s largely missing from like Maslow’s hierarchy and some of that other, some of the other like needs based thinking, is that we have a need to group, like being a member in a group is part of how you maintain like emotional hygiene. It is very, very important. The other, risk though, is that if you become too enmeshed with groups, that’s when like atrocities happen. That’s when the Salem witch hunt happens. That’s when, you know, I mentioned that like minimum viable group phenomenon and

 

like the Stanford prison experiments, think are extremely interesting in part because some of those are some of the most intelligent people. And you get to see them swept into their roles so effectively that the guards, the fake guards in the Stanford experiment, if, if people, if listeners aren’t aware of that, should just Google it and look it up. But it’s like a famous psychological experiment where you like assign randomly the students to either be a guard or a prisoner.

 

And like eventually pretty quickly, actually, I think they become like borderline abusive to each other. and some of the clients have trauma or some of the students had trauma from that. And this was before trauma was like super popular to own. You could watch the videos of how they were interacting afterwards. There’s real resentment between some of the students and that is the, know, there’s like this continuum. there’s two, there’s two risks. You don’t want to be alienated from your group. So you have to preserve some.

 

so you have to like join the group at some level to survive, but you don’t want to be completely enmeshed in the group. or if you don’t have your own individuality still intact, if you haven’t balanced that we as humans are capable of really, really dark things when we get swept up in the group identity. And it is, it is not, you don’t have to reach far into historical past to see the scale of the damage that that can cause. And it is, you know, wild. And so

 

Every human every day is having to balance this question of, what is the appropriate level of joining here? And how do I do that while preserving some of my own values and my own identity? And like, what happens when the group that you’re a part of is demanding things to conflict with who you think of yourself as? I’ve seen that wreck people who go to group relations conferences. get pulled into these roles that really don’t.

 

that aren’t congruent with some of the ways that they think of themselves. And that’s a very, very hard pill to swallow in the aftermath.

 

Speaker 3 (38:01)

Yeah, it’s kind of wild that it’s only been like 70 years basically of this kind of study. like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty wild. Because it’s so insightful. And so yeah.

 

Speaker 2 (38:11)

Yeah, I I’ve read the rise and fall of the Third Reich and I’ve read the Gulag Archipelago and it’s just, when you talk about atrocities that groups can commit, it’s pretty interesting. It’s pretty terrifying actually. But even in my own personal life, knowing people who, they don’t have a big effect on the greater outer world, but just because they’re committed to a certain set of ideas that are held by a group, they just do such damage to their own interpersonal relationships.

 

and they think that they’re being moral because of it. And they just destroy relationships because they mistreat people, because they judge people. And it’s, yeah, it’s very unconscious and it’s painful to watch. So earlier, Brent, you were talking about the group having an anxiety, the group feeling some kind of anxiousness. And then that’s why some of the unconscious behaviors occur. It struck me to ask what you think causes that

 

unconsciousness and is it that at some level the group understands that maybe there’s some deviation from truth or from, I don’t know, what do you guys think causes those anxieties within a group?

 

Speaker 1 (39:22)

Yeah. mean, anxieties are going to be, when the specter of not having your needs met, rises. So groups that fear for survival or specific, you know, whatever emotional, but also more tangible needs being met, you’ll watch the anxiety rise. I think I mentioned wilderness therapy earlier. I don’t know if you guys are aware, but that’s a really embattled little industry. It’s a small little group of programs at this point, but they’ve been attacked.

 

probably with some valid points, like there have been things that have gone wrong in that world, but like the internet has ripped them a new one. and as, at least this is according to me, at least that being somewhat of an insider in the world there and having a lot of friends and family who are at least, connected in that world of as therapists or have been staff at these programs. you watch.

 

groups like hunker down and become more bounded and more suspicious and more like when a group faces a threat effectively, they become like more cohesive and they become more ingrained as like an in-group. And that’s when you can see some of those funkier behaviors start to, that’s one way that some of those funkier behaviors can start to be exhibited. So when groups feel like their back is against the wall, it doesn’t always have to be like a credible, tangible threat when they feel a threat.

 

But then anxiety is basically going to be, this is like applied Kleinian thinking where as an infant, you know, when your needs aren’t met, that these anxieties come up and these tears come up. And that’s when we start to split and, and, project. And, that’s really the birth of a lot of these emotional, psychodynamic processes. I guess.

 

Speaker 3 (40:56)

It’s worth mentioning that the kind of individual valence part of it as well. When people are joining groups, everyone has their own topographical sort of psychology where they get pulled in certain directions and they react in certain ways to authority. And group relations is centered around a lot around authority and how you react. Because a central part of it is

 

And this is on purpose, it’s Beyonce sat in his groups and he would not say anything. And he wouldn’t say anything because he wanted to see what would happen when there was no explicit leadership or direction in a group. What happens? Who takes leadership? Where does the leadership go? Where does the authority go? Underground. Is it given to the most emotional person in the group? Do people start fighting? Do they fight?

 

the pairing, the different sorts of ways that the group unconscious can go. But yeah, I think we all come to the groups with our own psychology too.

 

Speaker 2 (42:04)

Yeah, and I guess that, sorry, go ahead.

 

Speaker 1 (42:06)

I was just gonna say, we haven’t even talked about scapegoating, but that’s like one of the big ways that groups will dispel or contain some of the distress and the anxiety, right? Is to like load up a specific member or sometimes an out group as like the villain. And they can project all of the unwanted psychic material onto that person. And it’s like, you’re the, you’re the bad guy. That’s the bad person. We, in both.

 

Speaker 3 (42:31)

that

 

Speaker 1 (42:32)

Well, in in the book, actually delineate. think there’s, there’s room to really get, nuanced around our understanding of scapegoats because there are times where scapegoat is loaded up and then expelled from the group. And that’s where the term comes from historically is like loading up a person in the village or a goat even, like symbolically loading it up with all of the bad spirits of the bad energy and then like exiling it or killing it. And

 

What I’ve seen is a lot of times a group will want to actually keep that person around to continue loading them up. It’s like really handy, emotionally, unconsciously to have somebody to blame all the time. And so, you know, you can have internal scapegoats, can have external scapegoats, can have scapegoats that are ejected and killed off. And it’s like kind of, and then it’s like, who’s the next one going to be? I’ve seen that in organizations. And then sometimes you’ll have scapegoats where they’re

 

The group becomes very defensive about keeping them around. It’s like this ongoing coping skill where, they just love to crap on this one member or whatever. It might not even always be the same member. but the scapegoating stuff is also really fascinating because you can see it in populations of chimps in zoos. They’ll exhibit the same behavior. I think Josh, you probably really liked this book called our inner ape. It’s one of the ones we recommend.

 

It’s a, it’s a really fun read. It’s by Franz de Waal. And, he, he observes that chimps in zoos, when their anxiety is high, they will either, they will often corner a member and just scream at them in the corner. And when they remove that member from the group, they’ll just figure out another member to put in the corner. Like the important thing is that they have somebody to scream at, not that there’s like any actual wrong been done by that chimp. and then at other times when the tensions.

 

Intergroup tensions are real or intra group tension is too high. Uh, they’ll like start to screaming at like the tigers in the next pin over. Uh, so there’s like, can want it’s, it’s really baked in even to these like groups of primates around how they dispel emotional energy. And so we come up with all these complex ideas. like, well, I’m not scapegoating HRs metrics show that this person has like unsatisfactory scores on X, Y, and Z. And we have like these.

 

Complex narratives, but ultimately we are expelling and trying to find a way to like reduce our own anxiety and the group anxiety many times with when these dynamics arise.

 

Speaker 2 (44:46)

Yeah, it seems, it’s so fascinating that these dynamics are obviously like genetically coded into us. They come from something well outside of our own consciousness. And to watch our, you know, to apes, chimps, bonobos behave in such a way, I probably would pick up that book and read it. There are two Netflix series that come to mind. One is, I can’t remember either one of their names, but one is about

 

a guy who followed around or a team that followed around a group of chimps in the actual jungles of Africa. And the other one is about this chimp sanctuary where they have a bunch of different groups of chimps and both of them are these like docu-series where they just video chimps and chimp behavior. And what was so fascinating to me to watch it was it was just like watching every group that I’ve ever been a part of. They just behave in such a predictable way and you can see human behavior in it.

 

Speaker 1 (45:39)

And it’s fun because there’s something less personalized around it. You can really just be like, look at what they’re doing, X, Y, and Z. I mean, I would imagine if I was watching that and watching a group of chimps, I would still find a way to identify with certain members of the tribe or the crew. that one step of removal does make it feel safer to make these observations at times, I’ve found.

 

Speaker 2 (46:04)

Yeah, absolutely. And then the other thing that’s interesting about the chimps, which I’m curious your guys’ thoughts on this as well, is we talked about the highest authority, whoever’s at the top. We talked about the scapegoat who typically is gonna be at the very bottom. So what we’re talking about is like this stratified hierarchy within the group. so that’s also, Adon, you mentioned about like people coming into the group with their own personalities or their own kind of history. And so,

 

once you’re in the group, way that the hierarchy within the group forms as well is really interesting. And I’m just curious, do you guys have anything to speak to on that and how those dynamics develop or how to manage them?

 

Speaker 3 (46:44)

There’s a lot to, yeah, we argue in the book that there’s always going to be some sort of hierarchy that forms. like, you know, it’s very popular nowadays to talk about how everything is like, you know, there’s no this flat, flat hierarchy. There’s, you know, there’s no real bosses here, this kind of thing. And I think, Brian, you mentioned the example of working in an organization where this was the case. And it was just like super confusing to know what exactly to do.

 

But I think part of that comes back to the…

 

the about how the unconscious dynamics in the group serve to form some sort of hierarchy anyways, because the sort of, I don’t know if power is the right word, but like there’s some sort of charge that goes somewhere else and some person in the group is taking some sort of informal power that is even more powerful than the stated one.

 

And you see that everyone knows what we’re talking about. Everyone can think about this. This is maybe some even silent person in your organization or group who has so much power because people are afraid of what they think or say, or they make them feel unusual kind of, know, or else someone who’s very emotional and hysterical and they’re equally sort of bantittos around them and they have this sort of informal power.

 

Speaker 1 (48:06)

Or even like a member, founding member that left, right? Might still have like spectral power. This is so stupid, but I think of like the show, The Office and how often they refer to like Robert Dunder, who’s like, you know, this long since gone or whatever, like some of like Dwight and some of the members were like, yeah, Robert Dunder would have never like done, they like talk about him still. So you can be like an ex-member, you don’t actually have to be a tangible member even.

 

to be a part of the hierarchical structure in a sense. And, and Adon, you mentioned the idea of like informal versus formal. It’s a big difference there. one of the things that we talk about in the book as well is that when the formal hierarchy is not being seen as meeting the unconscious needs of the group, that’s when you’ll really see informal power structures ramp up. That’s when you’ll see a lot more gossiping and underground.

 

Networks, the way at least I think of gossiping networks is that it does a few things for members. First of all, it’s an underground power structure. Like who is actually getting the information and who is it being shared with? Because people inevitably get left out of those dynamics. So there’s power there. It’s also way of reasserting kind of individuality or creating other alliances and like stepping a little bit back from enmeshment with the group without

 

officially endorsing yourself as doing so. So you kind of get to play both angles, right? Like you can talk crap about the organization and be like, you believe X, Y, and Z did that? And you, you get to see the other members reactions, like at least a coalition, a powerful little coalitions, like are they on the same page as me? Do we think the same way about this? Am I safe to have these, these views? And then that gives you an outlet to have some of those expressions that are maybe not officially endorseable, like things that you can’t own.

 

out loud.

 

Speaker 3 (49:58)

Or even the example of literal affairs, where the affair is used as a way to get back at the executive. I think the actual example of that from Walter White’s book.

 

Speaker 1 (50:10)

Will

 

White and Walter Witt.

 

And then, yeah, also the word dynamic is important because hierarchy is very, very dynamic and it changes. It’s not something that is formally and informally, you know, I can’t, maybe it’s a product of this day and age, you know, but I don’t think that I’ve been in an organization where there hasn’t been significant leadership change.

 

over the course of whatever, one, two years. That’s a dynamic change. That’s shifting currents in the waters. changes the, even if it’s the same person in, or a different person in the same role, they’re not gonna carry it the same way. There’s a new leader stepping in is a drastic change to the power network, no matter what. And,

 

Yeah, of course, informal power networks are very mercurial and changing constantly. so like who’s included in what member attraction to each other and like the power dynamics and you can get about as complicated as you want with it. But that stuff is really fascinating. We relate that we haven’t talked about myth much in the last few minutes, but if you look at the story of the like the Greek Pantheon, for example, there’s a quick

 

change of the guard and leadership succession, like God’s being killed off, Uranus being castrated by Cronos, Cronos being killed off and banished by Zeus before there’s any sort of structural stability for a time. And we see that in groups forming, I think in newer companies, can see that, certainly in group relations conferences where

 

The group may try on a couple of different leadership combinations really quickly as it transitions through different phases. so, sorry, this is too much of a rabbit hole, but I think it’s really fascinating. There’s these stages of groups is a really common model that people use where it’s like storming, norming, forming, performing. the, Our idea is that

 

the groups will demand different qualities and leadership for each of those phases. so either a leader can adjust in sense that the currents are shifting and adjust their approach, or they might just get replaced by the group. so as a group moves from like a forming phase into like more of a storming phase, they’re renegotiating boundaries. Conflict is gonna be more prevalent. It takes a different.

 

type of quality from leadership to handle and navigate those waters. And if it’s not happening, they’re going to expel that leadership or form a more compelling informal power network that’s going to actually do the things it needs to see done.

 

Speaker 2 (52:40)

Yeah, that’s pretty fascinating to think about stages of groups. Even so, I have a little bit of experience in the tech world and I often think about the, you know, as a startup, you go from zero to one, which is just getting things off the ground, getting a product out there. And then from there, you’ve got to go from like one to 10. And the skillset needed for each of those stages as a leader is completely different. And it’s fascinating to think about

 

the stated goal of the group, whatever the mission statement might be, the values that are listed out, that stated objective and kind of formal setting of the group compared to the informal kind of unconscious myths that rise up within the group as a collective. And then each stage, those things get reshuffled. And with the story, each story or each myth,

 

that the collective adapts to or adopts is it’s gonna call up a need from different versions of archetypes, different heroes, different villains, different role players. And so each, it’s almost as if I have this little kind of saying that I like to throw out there. It helps remind myself to just always be adapting, which is everything evolves always. And a group,

 

a group, it’s almost as if a group can never be static. It’s always gonna be, there’s some kind of adjustment, there’s some kind of, you know, and for me, the group I interact with the most is my family. I’ve got my wife and two kids. And it seems like no matter how much you want things to just run smoothly, there’s always some moment where we have to pull everybody together and talk about what’s going on and talk about how we’re gonna work through it and talk about, you know, forgiving each other and how we’re gonna solve it in the future. There’s always something.

 

in a group to be working on. And so the dynamics are constantly shifting and the archetypes with them are probably constantly shifting.

 

Speaker 1 (54:35)

Yep. Yeah, beautifully said. I think there was a lot on there. That was great.

 

Speaker 2 (54:39)

Yeah,

 

well, we’re up at the hour. again, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to chat with me. This has been a lot of fun. I find it very fascinating, very interesting. Your book again is Gods, Heroes and Groups Using Mythic Archetypes to Understand Group and Organizational Dynamics.

 

Speaker 1 (54:54)

The subtitle is a little different. I’m not sure where you got that one. It’s just groups, God’s heroes in groups, relational dynamics through mythic archetypes.

 

Speaker 2 (55:02)

Okay, so I think I might have pulled this off of off of indelible evening, so maybe it was.

 

Speaker 3 (55:09)

Oh yes, don’t worry about that. That was the name of the workshop.

 

Speaker 2 (55:13)

Okay, so I’m saying the name of the workshop. So go ahead, say the name of the book one more time, God’s Heroes in Groups.

 

Speaker 3 (55:18)

relational dynamics through mythic archetypes.

 

Speaker 2 (55:21)

Okay, awesome. And then if somebody wants to find that, get a copy or get in touch with you guys, where would they go?

 

Speaker 1 (55:27)

It’s on Amazon. It’s on Barnes and Nobles. It’s a it’s published through Kynac Books.