Josh Mortensen (00:00)

Robert Hopcke, welcome to the Explorer Poet Podcast. Yeah, absolutely. As we were saying before, before we started recording, I’ve talked to a lot of Jungian analysts, I’ve talked to a lot of Jungian writers. And I mean, to me, it’s endlessly fascinating. I could talk for hours about it. I love to connect stories and myth with psychology and kind of try to piece it all together. But I’m very interested in

Robert Hopcke (00:03)

Thanks, Josh. Good to be here.

Josh Mortensen (00:23)

some of the stuff that you’ve written and it’s been a while since you wrote your books. But you focused a lot of your time and energy, I guess, at least in the writing sphere and in conversations about synchronicities. And so I would love to get into what that is and why it’s important for us. But before we jump into that, I also typically like to ask my guests, when it comes to these topics, psychology, depth psychology, healing,

stories, myth, archetypes, what drew them to that? So what drew you to that? And when did you first identify that this was something of interest to you?

Robert Hopcke (01:00)

Well, I mean, I think that the two topics kind of go together. think that my career, my interest in Jung and eventually my work in synchronicity sort of fit together in the sense that when I started reading Jung, a lot of his concepts weren’t very well known by the general public at the time. I mean, we’re talking about the late 80s, early 90s, right? And so I found that

when I was finally reading Jung myself in graduate school, a lot of stuff I thought I knew about Jung ended up not being true. So I spent a lot of my early career kind of dedicated to correcting some of the things that I was hearing people say about Jung, but that in fact Jung himself never said or meant in a different way.

That was a little bit of the impetus behind writing my articles and then eventually the books about synchronicity. But yeah, how did I begin with Jung? I I would say it was really kind of by chance. I mean, my internship here in Berkeley, California, back in started in 1981. And it was a campus ministry organization connected with the University of California. Cal Berkeley.

Counseling Center had contacted all the campus ministries because they had an overflow of students seeking counseling and they thought maybe some of the campus ministries would be able to do some counseling with the students. And I just happened to be in a pastoral counseling program with a couple of other people and we put together a counseling program at UNITAS, which was right across the street really from the University of California, not too far away from the Counseling Center. So that’s how I started my internship, you know, to get my hours to get licensed eventually as a family therapist, which I…

which happened in 1986. So we hired supervisors for ourselves and the supervisors were very Freudian. We did very psychoanalytically oriented work. And we were seeing some deeply disturbed people, mean, some of the personality disorders, et cetera. So, and that was a time, especially in Freudian psychoanalytic circles in which treating personality disorders sort of came of age. I mean, there were techniques and various ways of understanding it theoretically that

were actually really very successful. that was really pretty much my internship was very Freudian, very psychoanalytic. So when I started my second master’s degree to get a degree in clinical counseling, because I had one in pastoral counseling, and I wasn’t sure the state of California was going to allow me to be licensed with a degree of theology. It ended up happening, which was good. But I was like, can’t hurt to get a second master’s degree. So I got a second master’s degree in clinical counseling. And it just so happened that the head of the department at Habert

state, now Cal State East Bay, where I got my second master’s, was Swiss. So I have this degree in theology from the Lutheran Seminary, and I meet this Swiss woman, and she’s like, how did you not read Jung in pastoral counseling? you know, because Jung, I mean, it was a great question, because I know subsequently, they think like, how did we not read Jung, you know, like Jung who created the field of psychology and religion, The psychology of religion. So

And of course she was Swiss, so she was very much kind of, you know, in favor of her countryman Jung sort of being come more well known. But of course, within Freudian circles, Jung was considered kind of really anathema, kind of a crack pod. He had rejected, you know, psychoanalytic orthodoxy. You know, he went crazy and all kinds of stuff that we were told about him. So that’s when I started reading Jung. I mean, essentially, Doraliza said,

you’ve already done a master’s degree in counseling. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to do we’re going to make this an independent study for the next two years with me. So that’s what did I enrolled in courses, but I basically read young. And again, I did sort of what I had done with the Scanner’s Edition of Freud, which was like, you start at the beginning with volume one, and you just read to the end. so you

can’t see them behind me here, but you know, there’s 18 volumes of the collected works of young behind me here. And that’s what I started doing. I mean, I just start, I picked the volume one and started reading. was, how old was I? 25 maybe? So it was a crazy thing kind of to do. I got, you know, massive psychic indigestion and my dream life started taking off, of course. And it was, it was a very interesting way to do it. So that’s kind of how.

My career at Young started.

Some of it made, I mean, what was interesting, mean, one of the myths I heard about Jung was that the collected works was poorly translated, it was difficult to read, it was very abstruse and obscure, and my experience was completely the opposite. Like, I completely understood what he was talking about, like, right from the start, I mean, in some intuitive, natural way, right? And so that was the first thing I was like, he’s…

not at all kind of this Freudian stereotype. was, he’s actually the, I found the translations extraordinarily lucid and the concepts made complete sense to me and all sorts of things just sort of clicked in. Of course, I had come from a background of theology, religion and spirituality, Protestant theologies, spiritual, I’m not practicing Roman Catholic, but at the time grew up in a Lutheran household, et cetera. So there was a lot of

And I had read Memories, Dreams, Reflections during my time at Georgetown. I had gone to Georgetown for undergraduate and Georgetown, the oldest Catholic school in the country, as they’re proud to sort of say, requires that every student take two semesters of theology and two semesters of philosophy. They’re a Jesuit school. So my freshman theology course, my very first course at Georgetown at all was called Spiritual Biography.

And we read Jung, we read Knight by Elie Wiesel, we read Black Oak Speaks, we read Fortunately the Artist is a Young Man, a spiritual autobiography. So I read Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Memories, Reflections during my freshman year at Georgetown. So I come circle back to Jung more or less six, seven years later after I had graduated. yeah, it all kind of makes sense. There’s a lot, Ring and I had similar backgrounds, similar interest in religion.

similar critical view of the institutional church as an out gay man, you pretty much. So a lot of this stuff kind of made just very much intuitive sense to me. And then of course I had the actual experience of it opening my intro psychic life, you know, just sort of exploded, you know, just torrential dreams and archetypal symbolism and everyone I think that begins reading Young or becomes acquainted with him has a similar kind of Jungian conversion experience, you know.

collective unconscious comes like warring up and you have to deal with it. So that was the next step. Of course, obviously, I was like, okay, I need to find myself a Jungian analyst and get this all into a container. So I did I worked with Ray Kildof here in Berkeley twice a week for many years, you know, he was my analyst. He’s now a blessed memory. He passed on quite some time ago at this point. So that was kind of my Jungian experience. I mean, one of the things that I did throughout, again,

tendon upon, my own experience, right? Reading him, which sort of disconfirmed a lot of the things I had been told about Jung was to start actually kind of create a bit of a career, facilitating people actually reading Jung instead of reading about Jung. So, you know, the first generation of analysts obviously had written

Like a wide variety of different introductions to Jung, you know, but I was like, just thought people were unnecessarily intimidated by the collected works. So in conjunction with an editor at Shambhala, I put together the guided tour of the collected works, which is still in print now after I don’t know how many years, almost 40 years at this point. Came out in the second edition quite some time ago with 40 chapters on different Jungian concepts with graded readings.

in the collected work so that someone can go if you want to read about the shadow, you know, I point them to the article in the collected works. That’s probably the easiest and most accessible to read. And then they can go deeper and more complicated. And there’s a list of secondary sources. So the guided tour has been sort of you wanted to do a guided tour of the collected works. You’re like, here’s where you find this. Here’s where you find this. Here’s where alchemy is. Here’s the Ottawa. Here’s, you know, UFOs, you know, some of the things that you you

you hear about, you know, I’m like, okay, this is where it is. So there’s that reading through all 18 volumes as a gay man in the 80s, 90s, trying to kind of put together an archetypal theory of homosexuality that wasn’t homophobic, you know, that was accepting and neutral. I checked all the places where Jung had mentioned homosexuality, and then did all the subsequent secondary literature research. And so Jung, Jungians and Homosexuality is my second book.

which was the first book in Jungian psychology in English to really deal with homosexuality as a topic, stand-alone topic. So that’s kind of, you know, goes back to your question. I think that’s been a large part of what’s characterized my Jungian career, which was sort of helping people actually read Jung and correcting some, think, misconceptions or misunderstandings or popular

distortions of his ideas. And that’s how we get to synchronicity. So that’s where I thought, like, you know, as you know, I think synchronicity, I’ve certainly found out since writing the book, right? I think synchronicity is one of those concepts, like a lot of psychological concepts, you know, that’s now been sort of adopted into common parlance. And I think a lot, you know, my nomination for

the one that needs to be corrected these days is narcissism. Everyone is using narcissism all over the place. I’m like, I don’t think people really understand what narcissism actually is sometimes. So was the same with synchronicity. I was hearing people use the term synchronicity advance or synchronicity and I was like, no, that’s not actually what it means. And they’re like, well, what do you mean? I’m like, well, Jung coined the concept.

So there was no word synchronicity before Jung, so he gets to tell us what it actually means. He’s the one that created the concept. The book itself, Synchronicity and A Cause of Connecting Principles, was written in 1950, and it was actually sort of written for a popular audience. So was another one of those things. If you go to the collected works and you pick up that book, it’s actually pretty readable. It wasn’t scholarly, it wasn’t technical. was, you know,

very much written for a popular audience. So that’s kind of how those, you your question, how did I get into Jung and what about synchronicity? That’s how those two things kind of intersect for me.

Josh Mortensen (11:33)

Yeah, that’s fascinating. have. mean, it’s so interesting because I came to Jung probably eight years ago, six years ago. So I’m not that far into Jung as far as my the timeline of my life. But I had a very similar experience where I I I kind of I knew of Carl Jung. I heard what, you know, people had ideas about him or some of his teachings. But even even today, it’s not like his like it’s not like Jungian psychology is mainstream.

as far as, you know, I took, I took some psychology classes in school and I never heard about him once. And, but then once I sat down and I started reading his books, I think I started, I think the first book I read was probably man and his symbols, which is mostly about dreams and the, and it’s also, it seems to be written for a public audience. Yeah. And I had a similar experience where all like, just intuitively connected with it. It was almost like every time I read Jung,

Robert Hopcke (12:19)

It definitely was.

Josh Mortensen (12:28)

I read his memories, dreams, reflections, and like several other books. And it was almost like I had a physical reaction in my body, like I could feel it. And it was fascinating to me. And to me, just being somebody who, you I’m a writer, I’m a storyteller. And so I see everything is symbolic now, but, and a big part because of Jung. But when I started reading it, everything just seems to…

It seems so intuitive to me as well. It was like the myth. You could just see how myth flows through us. And I was feeling it as I read it. And yeah, and I have a similar experience also with a lot of the Jungian terms that get used kind of in common parlance or, you know, they’re almost just, they get a lot of his ideas get boiled down. One of the ones that I always like to talk to people about is introvert and extrovert because…

Robert Hopcke (13:16)

Lord.

Josh Mortensen (13:18)

Yeah,

because people want to make it sound so simple that, know, extroverts like people and introverts don’t like people. when you actually read what Jung said, because he coined those phrases as well. Yeah. And so when you read that and you go, well, one of them is a thinker and one of them is a feeler. And to me, it makes so much sense because I grew up deeply introverted. And then just reading, you know, like reading Jung’s works and understanding why I became an introvert, as opposed to,

sublimating my libido to the outside world. It just made so much more sense to me. Yeah, it’s fascinating. I’m curious. So it seems like this type of symbology and even religion, really kind of, it seems to make sense to you as well. It seems to connect with you. I’m curious, coming from a Lutheran background. I don’t know that much about Lutheran, the Lutheran religion. My family background, or the family I grew up in was Mormon.

And so we have going way back to Denmark, we have Lutheran connections there, but this was like the middle of the 1800s when they came to the United States. And I did go back and visit one time to Denmark and I actually went to the church that’s right next to the little farm my family lived on. And I found that fascinating, but I don’t know. You know, I can look back in history and look at Martin Luther and think of him as like a really important character, maybe even a hero of his time.

I don’t know that much about the Lutheran church itself. I’m curious if you grew up in it. Was there something there that helped you experience life through symbols? Is that why Jung connected with you, or do think it was something else?

Robert Hopcke (14:57)

I think it was something else really. mean, I guess, you know, maybe to sort of take it really from a broad perspective to kind of, and this is again very broad strokes, but to sort of tie it into the kind of what you and I sort of might share from our Protestant background, right? I mean, we have the, you know, we have up until 1517, kind of this monolithic Roman Catholic Church, right? And the Roman Catholic Church still believes that kind of

The two sources of revelation are both scripture and tradition. And in fact, in some ways in the Roman Catholic Church, tradition precedes scripture as a source of authority because scripture is subsequent to tradition. There was Jesus, there was the apostles, there was the early church, they acted in a particular way, and then subsequently it was written down. So tradition precedes scripture in a particular way.

And so that’s what happened, I mean, throughout the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church, which was the church, the Christian church really for 1500 years in the West at least. And these too, know, Byzantine church as well. Those are the sources of authority. The difference, I think, then is that tradition creates this monolum…

you know, monumental late medieval institution with all sorts of various problems. as the know, the church was society for a long time, you know, with the turn into the modern era that starts breaking down. And so Protestantism starting with Luther and then all the subsequent Protestants, including Mormons, you know, I say including Joseph Smith, right? reject the idea that tradition is a source of authority. And

focus solely on scripture or personal revelation. So that’s kind of what the dividing line is even today between Catholicism and all sorts of Protestantism is that essentially scripture and personal revelation are the sources of authority for Protestants and tradition and scripture is still the sources of authority for Catholics and the Orthodox, I would say. So that’s kind of where Jung comes from.

I mean, that’s kind of what you’re picking up in Jung, right? In other words, here Jung’s born in 1875, lives until 1961. So he’s 300, 400 years into this Protestant tradition, which very much prizes in a wide variety of different ways, personal revelation, God speaking to the individual person, right? So here we have Joseph Smith who founds Mormonism, personal revelation of a particular prophetic thing, right?

So that’s what I would say. That’s, I think, kind of characteristic of Protestantism in general. So consequently, that’s where I think you and I Protestants have a kind of natural affinity for Jung. I mean, Jung was sometimes called Gnostic for that reason. Gnosticism was this kind of alternative Christianity from the early years of Christianity, which prized personal revelation. They believe God spoke to individual people in particular ways and that those

revelations were sources of authority. so consequently, Luther, to start the entire Protestant Reformation, kind of rejected the authority of the church and founded the principle of only scripture. so that’s what I’d say, there’s a Protestantism tends to be very individualistic in that way, which is, course, know, Protestants founded the United States.

I mean, think one of the things that those of us that study religion, my late husband was a sociologist of religion here in the United States. One of the things that they sociologists, religions, always say that every religion in the United States tends towards Protestantism, right? So when the Jews come over, they might have a very sort of old world kind of Judaism, but eventually they begin to sort of look like a Protestant church and various sorts of their various movements, even within my Catholic Church.

which have a very sort of evangelical Protestant kind of feel to them. United States culture is very Protestant, very individualistic, very much personal autonomy, very much God speaks to me personally. I mean, one of the things of course, particularly here in the Bay Area, you hear all the times, I’m not religious, I’m spiritual, by which they mean I don’t subject my religious beliefs or practice to an external community for approval or support.

I do my own thing. So that’s what I would say. That’s where I think Jung’s Protestant background has a great deal, shows through all over the place in his writing in a particular way. It’s almost a presumption, right? He did have a great deal of, I think, respect. And I think he was very intellectually taken by many of the doctrines and dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.

I think he could see within the Roman Catholic Church a much, much richer vocabulary of symbol, imagery, and ritual than he grew up with in the Protestant Church, right? So one of the main differences too, I mean, you know, with some exceptions, but one of the main differences is if on the Protestant side of things, you’re more or less rejecting tradition, your liturgy, your

practice becomes more and more spare, less and less elaborate. You know, if you set aside certain sacraments, if you set aside certain kinds of old rituals and traditions, it becomes more and more spare. Protestantism tends toward a certain puritanism about it, right? So Jung over here, having grown up in his father, was in fact a Protestant reformed minister, right, who lost his faith, tells that story in memory streams or collections.

sort of looks over the fence at Roman Catholicism or Judaism or at other Hinduism and other religious traditions that have a much richer, more colorful, more elaborate, more ancient, more complicated symbology. So he wrote a lot about Catholicism. He wrote transformation symbolism of mass, for example. I mean, how do the symbols of the Roman Catholic mass

Disclose certain archetypal truths about what it means to be human and how the psyche could grow or transform itself into wholeness, right? So that’s what I would say. I think that’s the link between my own Protestant background, which is, know, kind of very familiar with The very sort of individualistic way of thinking about it, you know and young, you know young’s particular take on religion, you know, I think

He also, I think, I also appreciated it too, again, because having grown up in a fairly pious Lutheran household, very rich, practicing Christian practice of my own. What I liked was that in the United States, it was just kind of when I say sort of like barbed wire between religion and psychology, right?

So this is where you know, is like as you said, like when you were when you go to study psychology in your master’s program, you don’t get any kind of psychology of religion like that’s just enough. Now there are plenty of programs out here in California that have specifically created themselves in order to overcome that particular kind of separation, right? And you know, those are the union oriented ones, Pacific or Graduate Institute, California Institute, behavioral studies, etc. So there a lot of

Well, that place is out here in California where that’s not really true. Anyone right? There’s I taught at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, right? For quite a number of years. So, yeah, plenty of places where that that’s case. But in general, right? Psychologies over here, religions over here, never the twain shall meet. You know, when I was I had my degree in theology, pastoral counseling when I went for my licensing exam in the of California, you know, the coach told me like, do not breathe the word of religion.

They will not license you, you know. So that’s what I would say. So it was refreshing to see, it still is refreshing to see in Jung, the way in which you can discuss how religion, how religious experience or spiritual experience works for someone psychologically without getting into arguments about the truth or the falsehood of the theological proposition. And so that’s what I also appreciate. was like this bridge between these two very important pieces of who I was.

Here I am training to be a psychologist, also have a very deep and abiding religious practice. Jung’s psychology of religion allows me to discuss those in a way that is helpful. It’s helpful and, I say, of enlightening. Right? Enlightening in a way that’s sort of like my psychological insight about my religious practice and my religious experience of my psychological practice.

fit together and Jung gave that to me, would say, you know, so that’s for, for, and I’m very grateful. So that’s kind of how that all sort of fits together. I think it’s one of the things that I think, yeah, I I think people find the most attractive. mean, as we well know here in the United States, is a pretty contentious issue, you know, it’s not easy to talk about religious issues without getting into a fight.

And so I feel like this is a middle way, you know, in which people can actually discuss the psychological, symbolic, psychic, intra-psychic experiences of religion without having to get into kind of competing truth claims around who’s right or wrong about the nature of God or nature of practice or whether the church is the sole mode of salvation, blah, blah, blah. You know, I’m like, OK, well, there we go.

Josh Mortensen (24:35)

Yeah, I would say the irony of all of that keeping the psychology and the religion separate is that I almost see religion, I almost see them as almost the same thing in a sense where, you know, I’ve read so far back on different religions over time, lot of Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong are my influences, but I see pairing that with some of the ideas from Jung, it’s very apparent to me that

a person’s religion or a group’s religion is often just a reflection of how the psyche of that individual or that group has been organized and the symbols that are working on them and the things that are important to them through that. it’s hard for me to even separate the two, but I can see, given you spoke a lot about America and the way we do things here and given that we are so intent on keeping church and state separate and

and psychology and religion separate. It makes sense as to why it would end up that way, but I see them as being so interconnected that it would be hard for me to analyze my own psychology without looking back at the religion that fostered my upbringing.

Robert Hopcke (25:41)

I mean, I guess you invited me to make this more of a conversation than an interview. So guess I’m sort of curious. I guess I’m wondering what insight your knowledge of Jung has shed upon your Mormon background for you. mean, again, because Mormonism is such a particular kind of very unique American religious tradition. guess I’m wondering what sense of Mormonism has Jung helped you make or what part of Mormonism

when seen through the lens of Jungian psychology, as you now are much for a failure, has Jung helped you illuminate. I’m really curious about it. don’t get to talk to many Mormons or former Mormons about their experience of Jung and what it’s sort of added to their experience of Mormonism.

Josh Mortensen (26:25)

Yeah, well, I grew up in the Mormon church and it was just so complete, completely like our life was entirely focused around the church. Everything we did, as a family, we prayed together multiple times a day. We read scriptures together, both the Old and New Testament, but also the Book of Mormon. We read every day, attended church, our social sphere was the church.

And so it was all I knew for so very long. And it was in my early 30s when I actually, this was long before I dove into Carl Jung, I just kind of started to explore the history of the church a little bit more. And eventually I stepped away from the religion. And in stepping away from a religion, for me, my experience was I needed to then go figure out what the world actually was, like what is actually going on. And Carl Jung just happened to be one of the people I came across.

who helped me to kind of figure that out. And it’s, yeah, once I understood archetypes and the idea of pairing that with myth or story, it became apparent to me that all of these characters that I had been learning about my whole life and the things that they had done, they were, they represented, they could represent some part of me. So if I was to read scripture, I could internalize it a lot more.

To me, that’s a lot more helpful. So I know that some people believe in religion as a literal thing, as a literal explanation for reality and existence. But for me, it became much more helpful when I could see how these were stories that were about me internally, and these were characters that might exist inside of me. And from the Garden of Eden all the way through the New Testament in Jesus Christ,

And honestly, one thing that really helped me to kind of see that story play out was reading Carl Jung’s red book. And I think his red book was something that I don’t know if he ever intended other people to read. It was almost like a…

Robert Hopcke (28:22)

That’s quite the story. mean, he absolutely did not want anyone to read it. And in fact, I think with the popularity of and I think the Jung heirs, sort of really went against his wishes and got that published. It’s a very interesting thing to hear because the more traditional Jungians are sort of scandalized that his privacy would be violated in such a way. On the other hand,

your experiences, what I hear consistently, like what a revelation it is for so many people. think, you know, I don’t know, you know, like it was private and the reasons that it was published might have been kind of dicey, you know, so to speak, you the heirs want to make money off as a state, right. But on the other hand, you know, it has its own life. And so it so it actually enlivened your psychic life reading it, huh?

Josh Mortensen (29:12)

Yeah, I would say so. It really helped me to be able to internalize the myth and see kind of the process I was going through anyways. You know, that death rebirth or death resurrection cycle. And it was something that I had to go through several times, to be honest. For me, I would say my life and my experience with ideas that I cling to and then have to let go of and then find new ideas and try not to cling to them as tightly.

It’s been more of a cycle of reincarnation than rebirth in a weird way or of resurrection.

Robert Hopcke (29:42)

Yeah, I there’s so many things that, you know, I want to sort of say about what you were just talking about, I think.

Yeah, I I think that was one of the primary things that certainly, you know, kind of comes across in Jung’s idea about the archetypes to collect them unconscious, right? That all of these basic human experiences, we all share on some basic level, right? They’re collective. I sometimes explain it like everyone’s got sort of five fingers and two hands and you know, everyone sort of shares that everyone’s hands are different, everyone’s fingers are different, right? We all have these basic

experiences of our human existence, birth and death on either end of it, and mother, father, femininity, masculinity, all of these cultures have these basic human experiences, right? All expressed in such different ways, and so consequently, you know, there’s that. And then, you know, again, what you’re talking about as well, I think, one of the things when you’re growing up, you know, your religious tradition or my religious tradition, right? The idea, of course, is that God is

out there, right? Sort of like it’s an external object of reality and a person that’s out there, right? And so here’s this internal experience that Jung sort of points us to, like at what point… Now that’s not foreign to Christianity, right? Christ lives in me, right? That’s part of it. But that’s not really strongly emphasized, you know, that the exteriority of God is definitely emphasized, you know.

our dependence upon that exterior objective reality out there is definitely emphasized. So yeah, I can definitely see, know, when Jung helps you sort of, or I bring it inside and sort of understand that, like what we’re reading about in scripture actually reflections of archetypal experiences of a collective experience and that we sharing them in some ways. And what would that be like to sort of then do what we do in kind of dream work?

right? When we do a subjective interpretation of dream work, what part of your psyche does that character represent? What part of your experiences that particular situation reminds you of or kind of bring you to? Yeah, you know, although there have been plenty of Christian mystics that have gone in that direction, know, the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Oleola, certainly encouraged imaginative prayer of that sort of way, you know,

read a scripture passage and be each one of the various characters or even be some of the objects. What’s it like to be the cross? What’s it like to be the water? What’s it like to be the stones? So that’s been there, but Jung took it to another level. I think that’s where he’s understanding that there’s a certain kind of interiority to our experience of God. So that’s one of the questions. It’s interesting to hear.

Yeah, you you that’s I was interested. You Mormonism is as you just described such totalistic like religion, know, like my sister my sister’s an ordained Lutheran minister and So she had a parish in Pennsylvania for many years and we would frequently go visit the Amish You know the Amish country in Lancaster, Pennsylvania another very totalistic kind of religious, know in which you know, the entire society is built on religious principles and there’s a very sort of very sort of

I say sort of bright line drawn around, you know, what’s inside and what’s outside. So, yeah.

Josh Mortensen (33:05)

Yeah,

yeah. And that totalistic kind of approach from my experience with at least with the Mormon Church is such that you literalize the myth so entirely that in a real way, you don’t get presented with as many symbols. for example, for me, going into a Catholic Church is fascinating because it’s so large and beautiful and ornate and there’s so much decoration and symbols everywhere.

But to go into a Mormon church, it’s very, very plain, just drywall, some pews, like simple carpet. And it’s fascinating to me now where I am to look at, you know, the symbology of it and the relationship to the archetypes and to see how the different interpretation plays out in such a way where with the Mormons, you’re not trying to be drawn into it. You’re trying to externalize it and live it.

in a way that when you go into a Catholic church, it’s like the symbols pull you in. It’s like, yeah, you’re in a different place altogether. I find that fascinating. Yeah, well, we’ve been going for a while and I do want to make sure that we talk about synchronicity. I’m curious about it, but I can do that. I can go down rabbit holes and I find it enjoyable, but I do want to cover this. Before you were talking about how you were writing, you were kind of researching and writing about some of the things that with Jung had kind of

appeared in in just kind of pop culture in a way where like I mentioned the introvert and the extrovert and there’s just such a simplistic version of that that people understand or share. I’m curious with synchronicity what maybe first of all what is what was kind of what is the kind of mainstream way that people think about synchronicity but then also what what do think Jung really meant by it?

Robert Hopcke (34:48)

Well, I sometimes talk about, I sometimes start my lectures, and I’ll say this today, I mean, that’s somewhat facetious, but I say everything you want to know about synchronicities and the title of this book. And I think that really puts the finger on the main difference between, I think, a popular understanding of the term and what Jung actually meant. So the title of the book he wrote in 1950, and again, he died in 61, so this was kind of in later life.

synchronicity, colon, an a causal connecting principle. So what’s pretty clear is, and I think the word that I draw everyone’s attention to is a causal. So Jung is establishing synchronicity. Jung wrote this book to establish the principle of synchronicity as an alternative explanation of reality as over against the

I think, conventional idea of cause and effect. So he wanted to connect, he wanted two events, an internal or an external event, or two external events to be connected, to be able to be connected through their psychic meaning to one another, rather than…

through causes and effect. In other words, he wanted to establish synchronicity as a psychological principle of connection as over against the physical empirical science explanation of how events were connected. So that’s why he used the word a causal, because synchronicity is an a causal connecting principle. It doesn’t deny that there are causes to events. But when you look at the

connection between two events through the principle of synchronicity that cause is in a certain way irrelevant to the explanation of why it’s meaningful to someone. So the know the the example I usually use when I talk about this to sort of illustrate this is sort of like you know I was a synchronicity version a virgin until this happened right. I was I was talking to I was had a had a client with me in my internship an older man

very much dominated by his mother. And we were working through kind of how he could get out from underneath the psychological domination of his mother. And I had sort of, in a certain way, was, as a young therapist, as frequently the case, sort of pushing and pushing and pushing him in a particular way. And not, wasn’t very empathic about how difficult this was for him, right? And so consequently, he sort of snapped in the middle of one of our sessions and sort of

turned on me and said, you don’t really understand kind of what my situation is. I’m powerless. I’m powerless. At which point all the lights went out. We had a power failure. All the lights go out. So of course, I’m a therapist and I’m seeing symbolism and everything and I’m sitting there in the dark while he’s like telling me how powerless he is and all the lights go out. And I think to myself, and he doesn’t notice it. So, okay.

So we’re sitting, it was the middle of a storm here in California. So there was a power outage in the middle of my session with this guy. So we continue on kind of, you know, in this sort of shadowy kind of half light, you know, and then I, you know, so the lights going out, of course, calms him down some, I pull myself back, realize I had been a sort of unempathetic. So I’m supplying empathy, I’m supplying empathy. And finally, he kind of comes around to my point of view. And he sort of says, well, you know, you

are correct. You know, I think you’re trying to convince me that I have more power in this situation with my mother than I necessarily appreciate. And I said, Well, how does that feel? You know, the feel like you might be powerful. He’s like, Well, I don’t know, I gotta try that on. I’m powerful. I’m powerful. And all the lights go back on. Right. So was this like really wild experience, right? And, and I wrote a number of articles for the Journal of Article Psychology about synchronistic events that occurred

for me and for other analysts in their therapy sessions with clients in the middle of their therapy sessions, right? And there’s this famous story and Jung writes in his book, In Synchronicity, in which he’s talking to a client and the client had had this dream of a scarab beetle, you know, and while he’s discussing this dream, a scarab beetle flies through the window, Jung catches it.

and presents it to the client and says, here is your beetle, you know. So this is sort of a Jungian tradition of those synchronistic events in analysis, right? So that story is great because I think that kind of gets to the difference between cause and effect and what Jung is talking about is synchronicity is an a-cause of connecting principle, right? There is a cause to that event, you know, like the power transformer in Richmond, California was hit by lightning, and that’s why the power went out, right?

But what Jung is saying in his book on synchronicity is that explaining why those two events are connected through cause and effect doesn’t get to what they meant for the people involved in them. What they meant was it was pretty striking. It’s this kind of amazing coincidence in which the client’s powerlessness or powerfulness gets mirrored in external reality by the literal power failure or the literal power resumption that’s going on, right?

Also, what that means, however, is that as this illustrates too, mean, meaning is very personal, right? The client didn’t even notice anything was going on. He’s in his own psychic space. I’m the one that noticed it. So for me, it was synchronistic. For the client, it didn’t even really occur. Like he didn’t even notice that was what was going on. So that’s what I try to get across. I think a lot of times what happens when people think about synchronicity as

you know, Jung’s theory of meaningful coincidences, right? I often sort of see them step over the line to explaining it, you know, to sort of adducing what I call sometimes occult causation. They attribute the coincidence to a particular external factor, right? God sent me this as a sign or the universe was giving me a message that blah, blah, blah. And that’s

the opposite of what Jung wanted. mean, Jung wanted the meaning, wanted to emphasize that the meaning of a meaningful coincidence is in us. It’s not out there. The universe isn’t, the universe may be sending you a sign. God may be giving you a, you know, may have a plan for your life. That’s why he brought that person into your life or this particular event had occurred. But Jung is like, I’m going to stay agnostic about that. What I want to look at is synchronicity.

as an a causal connecting principle. He wanted to say that these coincidences are meaningful not because of something out there, but because of the narrative coherence they stimulate us to embrace about our own psychic experience, based on the archetype of the self, which is the archetype of wholeness. That we all have the capacity, archetypally, basically, to make a certain kind of wholeness out of our lives.

And so consequently, when these random events occur, sometimes it’s a coincidence between an internal experience and an external event. If I have a dream about a person, place or a thing, and then suddenly that person, place or thing is something I bump into the next day, that’s pretty synchronistic. That’s a coincidence. Jung wants to say that those are random events that at times we make meaning of because of

our capacity for meaning making. Because in the course of our everyday life, all sorts of random events occur all the time that aren’t necessarily all that meaningful. So he wanted to talk about synchronicity as an a causal connecting principle. And that’s really kind of I think the misconception I wanted to connect correct kind of in my writing about it, right, which was to sort of not

have people feel as if they needed to justify how meaningful something was to them by inducing a specific causal explanation to it that was, I don’t know, spiritual in nature, transpersonal in nature. It could be meaningful because you experienced it as meaningful. It’s an a-causal connecting principle in Jung’s understanding.

So people often sort of object to Jung’s idea when they understand it. They’re like, so what are you saying? I always laugh about this one. People will come up to me and say, so basically what you’re saying is that people just can make up whatever they want to make up about what’s meaningful in their life. And I’m like, yeah, what’s wrong with that? Would you prefer that their lives be meaning less? No, exactly. That’s exactly what Jung is doing. And this is where I.

you know, you’re talking to someone about narrative, right? mean, another thing I found, and this jives with Jung’s intention, right? What I noticed when I was doing the research was that when I would ask people about synchronistic events, they would tell me a story. Like it was a story. It had a beginning and had a this is what happened. It had an end. There’s kind of a narrative coherence to it, right? And I feel like that discloses, I think, what Jung wanted to kind of get across to that, you know, that

we make meaning out of the random events of our lives. And he wanted to help people make meaning out of the random events of their life as opposed to, so that’s what people will say. People’s like, so you’re just making it up, aren’t you? And I’m like, well, like every book, novel, work of art you’ve ever encountered is something that was made up. I’m like, yeah, that’s what we do. That’s what it means to be human. We make meaning out of the random events of our lives. So that’s a little bit what I wanted.

kind of get across, I think people are sort of uncomfortable with the way in which, you know, if you just sort of stay agnostic about what the cause is, you can still affirm how meaningful it is to you on the basis of your own personal experience and how, you know, this is what you were talking about earlier, kind of the various archetypal, now that’s to say, shared human experiences that

A particular coincidence brings forward for you when it occurs. yeah, I like to. So that’s what I do in the book. I go through. I mean, one of the prime reasons, one of the prime areas in which people talk about synchronicity is how they met their partner, you know, how they met their life partner. Another thing that struck me is how how people kind of started their career, sometimes by complete chance, right? Certainly various aspects of people’s spiritual religious life.

kind of has that how I found my spiritual teacher. Sometimes they have a religious explanation for it, but often a very sort of synchronistic random set of events brought them to whatever kind of practice. Dreams, I have all kinds of stories in both of the books about ways in which dreams either foretold events in a particular way that then came true or prepared people in particular ways for events that then happened that were transformative.

And then I look at birth and death. I mean, there’s nothing more random than when we’re born. And there’s really kind of nothing more random than when we die. And so how we make meaning of those two kind of bookends of each of our experiences is often very synchronistic in that sense. So that’s what I would say, think. Yeah, the synchronicity. Synchronicity is sort of a cause of connecting principle. The connection is really the emotional meaningfulness of something.

most synchronistic events have some kind of important symbolic character to them. There’s some symbol involved in a particular way, like the power failure, you know, the literal power failures symbolizes the internal intrapsychic non material power failure he was feeling emotionally. And then, you know, what I my own contribution to it was sort of that I noticed that synchronistic events tended to happen in times of transition. So there are times when, you know,

the we’re no longer who we were and we’re on our way to being someone else and that’s kind of a rich and fertile ground for synchronistic events. So those are some of the misconceptions I guess I wanted to kind of get across. It’s so, but that a causality is very difficult for people to kind of abandon. They want to leap to an explanation to it. And I feel like I’m kind of happy to kind of like, you know, who’s meaningful to you. That’s, mean, that’s what I do as a therapist, right? I mean, you know what?

My clients don’t have to justify how they feel. I just sit and accept how they feel. So I feel like if you tell me it was meaningful, then I’m going to explore why it was meaningful, not try to explain it in order to justify it. It’s its meaning is its own justification.

Josh Mortensen (47:43)

Yeah, in a sense, it’s actually pretty coherent with the rest of his ideas, which earlier we were talking about the externalizing of religious myths rather than pulling them in and letting them actually be your stories and you navigate through them and figure them out yourself. And in a way, I think that the psyche

What I actually think is just by reading enough and experiencing life long enough, being an author and like, the craziest thing about being an author in synchronicities is that I will write things in a book, a story I’m working on, stuff that’s never happened to me before, but once I write it, it then happens to me. And it’s not like I’m going looking for it, but I’ve had some very, very striking examples of times where I’ve written something, never happened to me before.

And then a month or so later, the literal thing that I wrote, plays out exactly the way that I had written it. And it’s always shocking. But I think in a real way, story is, how the human mind conceptualize the world, navigates the world. And so each of us on a, you know, in our psyche, in our soul, there’s some story that wants to be played out or is being played out. And to identify that story,

does not mean to nullify it. I’m always telling my friends or people that I’m talking with, tell them, we believe in myths. That’s what humans do. We’re myth makers. We’re this homo religioso or creature thing that just believes in stories. so then they start identifying, I start pointing out different stories about myths that we might be living in the modern day. And so they start thinking, okay, so we’re not supposed to live those myths.

And that, don’t think that’s the point at all. It’s not that you’re not supposed to live them, but it could be helpful to be able to identify them. And in the same way to notice the a causal nature of a synchronicity does not negate that it could have meaning to you, but it’s just to recognize that in the same way that it’s not wise to project the archetypes out there, it’s not wise to project your meaning out onto the universe. It’s you and it’s like, it connects with you. It’s your story. It’s the emotions inside of you.

that that’s where the well of meaning probably lies.

Robert Hopcke (49:55)

Well, that’s what you and I bump into, think, particularly in American society. We sort of say like American society doesn’t believe in the psyche. You know, like, and that’s kind of like, and I wouldn’t say it was just American psyche, but it’s certainly kind of motivated a lot of Jung’s writings. You know, I mean, Jung is writing and this is why he got somewhat of you know, disparaging reputation that he actually got. I mean,

You know, he’s working, he’s a psychiatrist, so therefore he’s working within a medical model, which is highly empirical, right? It’s very external, very cause and effect, right? And here he is and trying to advocate for the reality, if not the actual predominance of interior experience, right? If it doesn’t happen, I sometimes say, like, if you can’t imagine something, it’s not going to come into being extra.

You have to imagine it first and then you can make it. It doesn’t go the other way around, right? So that’s kind of what Jung spent his entire life within a very medical model, a very Western empirical, cultural milieu, trying to champion, you know, the reality of and in fact, the overwhelming importance of intrasyptic experience. So you’re correct. I mean, that’s, know, I think when I do explain it, people often have their ass, you’re like,

So synchronicity wasn’t just sort of like this fun thing he did at the end of his life. Like, no, it’s actually an outgrowth of it’s a complete, complete outgrowth, a continuation of many of the various issues, aspects of the psyche that he wanted to kind of get across and advocate for the reality of, know, throughout his life, right? Yeah, the interior experience. I mean, you sort of see it all the time, right?

And very much again, we live in a, you know, using the word introverted and extroverted, we live in a very extroverted thinking culture, you know, here in the United States. And so extroverted thinking sensation culture in particular, right? So anything introverted, anything feelingful, anything intuitive, you know, is looked at kind of a scant. And, you know, and people don’t even believe it quote unquote exists. And I’m like, well, I don’t know about that. You know, I think that’s, that’s why I sort of love dreams in a particular way, right?

Because like all mammals dream, right? But your dream or my dream, it’s entirely an interior experience. Not only is it an interior experience, it’s an entirely unconscious experience. is something we, none of us have any control over. And only your dream has occurred to you. You were the only person that had that dream. I mean, it doesn’t get any more individual or interior or

not in control of the conscious mind than that. And all of us dream every night, all the time. Not only that, our animals even dream, right? I mean, our pets dream, our cats or dogs, I mean, all mammals dream, right? So I just sort of love that. And I think that’s kind of like Jung picked that up from Freud, right? I mean, here we are, dreams are the most interior experience we possibly can have. And so real, I mean, so impactful.

You know, if you have a nightmare or if you have some amazing erotic dream, you have some crazy anxiety dream, it affects your whole day. And it is nothing, nothing occurred outside of you and your own psychic experience. Not only that, never even occurred in your conscious mind. You know, it’s completely unconscious and it happens every night. It’s like the most powerful kind of argument, I think, for the

brightness of what Jung spent his whole career trying to champion, which was the reality of the psyche. In fact, that the psyche precedes almost everything else. know, the psyche is more important than culture and society in a certain way. You know, because culture and society or whatever goes on externally proceeds from someone or some group psychic experience, collective psychic experience. So that’s how synchronicity does fit in. I think you’re, you know, quite perceptive to say that. And that’s kind of

You you and I were talking like, let’s say the thing. I can talk about synchronous. I had been talking about synchronicity for 30 years. It never really gets old. You know, I have to say it goes in a wide variety of different directions. I think what’s interesting now, of course, right, is that this was even happening in Jung’s lifetime, you know, with the advent of quantum physics and sort of the understanding of kind of the, I want to say sort of the fluid nature of actual physical reality in certain ways on a subatomic level. Right.

I think this is where you sort of think like, okay, well, I wouldn’t call it an explanation, but there might be some insight as to why or how certain kind of external events are connected in ways on some subatomic and obscure occult level that we might not understand. But even so, you know, be like, well, that’s a lovely causal explanation, but that doesn’t really kind of get to what it means to you, right? So.

Josh Mortensen (54:56)

Yeah, that’s interesting because I would say that most people do think of it as a causal relationship when they hear the word synchronicity. And I think I’ve even thought about it that way before because I’ve tried to, I don’t know, connect some kind of universal consciousness or, know, maybe, you know, who, if we’re, if we’re in our own dreams, when we’re asleep, whose dream are we in when we’re awake and are we all connected through this same thing? And it is, it is a tempting thing because you do, you know, I think

both from a physics perspective, but also from a psychology perspective. think people want a theory of everything that pulls it all together and makes sense. And in a lot of ways, there’s just, the more I dive into all of this story and myth and psychology and even physics, it’s very apparent that there is this great mystery that I don’t think we’re ever gonna fully solve. And in a weird way, that just makes life so much more interesting and

so much to be curious about, there’s so much to explore. But if you ever, it’s like having a project, know, like my wife and I are fixing up our house and my wife will say to me, I can’t wait until the house is finished. And then my response is always like, yeah, but then what are we going to do? We’re just going to sit in the house, you know? Yeah, I think life is the same way. And if there was an absolute objective answer to some causal nature of synchronicity, would, in the same way that if there

If in the same way that if you read a story and you absolutely believe that that story is true and that it happened, it actually takes away some of the value of the story.

Robert Hopcke (56:32)

Yeah, you know, I think and that’s, I think we can, that was, I think something, you know, was very intent on making clear throughout his career, right? He wouldn’t deny the potential truth of any of our causal explanations for any of these things on a spiritual or religious level. I mean, what he would basically say is, well, that’s all well and good, but ultimately that’s, while that’s a causal explanation, that’s a matter of belief that’s not really provable.

So why don’t we just sort of set that aside and then look over here at kind of what you made of it. And I think that’s another step that people don’t go to, though I feel like they should, which is how much of their own psychic experience is being projected out onto the quote unquote universe or onto God. You know, I feel like I’m trying to think who it was that said,

they’re so suspicious of people that know God’s will because it’s so frequently coincides with their own. You know, and I’m like, yeah, exactly. Right. I think that’s it. So that’s what I would say. I think that’s what Jung sort of enters into the answers of the conversation. Like, there may or may not be an objective divine being out here. But what he does know is that there is a God image in the human psyche that that that there is some kind of

image, experience, desire for it, if you want to use this term, higher power, something transcendent. And that’s often projected out onto people. that’s a different thing. I mean, you know, what if the new monocity of your experience in a particular synchronistic event is coming from you, not from outside you, towards you? What if you are projecting that? And that’s where his intention is to help

one make that conscious, right? So rather than just allow that to unroll automatically without any awareness or sense of choice, as if I’m bound to this faith, Jung wanted to help people individuate, right? Which is to sort of come to their own individual understanding of how they’re experiencing things and therefore withdraw the projections and take them back in. What’s it like for you to

experience yourself as participating in divinity or omnipotence or you were saying earlier in this conversation, resurrection or any other kind of religious reality that we might project out onto a situation rather than recollect and own as our own experience. Yeah, I wrote a book that’s never been published in English. So the book on synchronicity was really popular in Italy, you know.

My mom’s Italian, I lived in Italy, I speak Italian, so for some reason I was very popular in Italy. I helped the translator help translate it into Italian, so I think that’s a part of it. So Mondadori wanted me to write a second book. They were a little disappointed I didn’t want to write another book on synchronicity so soon. So, but I wrote a book called the Saggese di Santi, which is the wisdom of the saints. And I took all of the sort of classic and traditional legends of the lives of the saints.

and I treated them in a Jungian fashion, I looked at them as sort of fairy tales, right? What do these stories about St. Paul or about St. Francis or Joan of Arc or Padre Pio or any of the saints that I deal with in the book, what if they all represent aspects of our own individual psyche? What if they’re archetypes in a particular way? There’s somewhere between a deep and abiding universal archetype

and an actual person. What’s the middle ground here? It’s sort of a cultural archetype in a particular way. And so that’s sort like, you know, it’s like sort of help people understand that, you know, you’re St. Francis to some extent, you’re Paul, your revelation and conversion experience can be paralleled with him. You’re Joan of Arc, you’re the one receiving messages and kind of saving the nation. You know, what does it look like if you look at the legends of the lives of the saints?

from a psychology of religion or a Jungian perspective rather than a literal historical, this is what St. Francis did, this is what Joan of Arc did, this is what Padre Pio did. So I think that’s a book that, you know, I wouldn’t say was super popular in Italy either, know, and Italians have a very kind of modern secularistic view of their own Catholic tradition in a particular way. I have no hope of it getting published in English, but I feel like it was sort of a, it’s a,

It’s an interesting collection of stories that certainly kind of pervades Catholic Italian Catholic culture for sure and I just want to say like, OK, there’s an alternative view to this. That’s not just religious and not just literal. There is the archetypal and psychological view of it, you know, and that really can be applied to any number of different kinds of narratives. I mean, you know you and I. I’m certain don’t want to touch the third rail of current American politics currently, right?

But I would say I’m always sitting back and looking at how people are crafting narratives to talk about particular realities and what it reflects about them rather than reality. And I feel like that’s one of the ways in which I’m maintaining my sanity during the current divisiveness that’s going on into this country is sort of like.

really staying strictly Jungian about this. I’m like, okay, there’s a lot of archetypal energies that are flowing through people and are being acted out without a whole lot of consciousness and a lot of projection. So what is that? Where is that coming from? And what does that mean about the person who’s doing the projecting, right? Rather than kind of believing the truth of the projection. So, you know, Jung is actually kind of a source of

sanity and health even through times of adversity but I would say like this like once our country is going through currently so

Josh Mortensen (1:02:31)

Yeah, I find it to be the exact same thing. think, well, if you’ve got that book, I think it sounds fascinating. I would read it in English because I think the way that you talk about it is exactly how I approach almost every story story from scripture fairy tales. When I watch movies, I can’t help but see all the characters as aspects of myself. And it’s just again, I think that when you don’t project it outward, but you take those characters and pull them inward and think about it internally, it actually is really helpful. You can do that with almost any story. And I think it’s helpful.

And then also I’m doing this, I’m watching this political theater play out in the same way. And it’s just, yeah, the only way to keep your sanity is to just sit back and say, okay, these are human beings and this is their psychology and this is how they’re externalizing it. And yeah, just kind of sit with that. yeah, Rob, this has been really great. I really appreciate you taking the time. I found the conversation early on about

your story and the different explanations you gave about the Protestant and Catholic Church. I found that really fascinating. hadn’t heard stuff like that before. And then also just this last half hour diving into synchronicity. Really interesting because I think you’ve enlightened me a little bit about what Jung actually meant. And it actually does feel more cohesive now. So I appreciate that. Really. Thank you.

Robert Hopcke (1:03:47)

Well, you’re welcome. Thanks so much for the invitation. I always enjoy talking about these things. Great to talk.

Josh Mortensen (1:03:53)

Yeah, absolutely. And if anybody online who ends up listening to this, want to find you or they want to find any of your books, what’s the best way to track you?

Robert Hopcke (1:04:02)

My website is Rob Hopckey calm so that’s pretty easy just Rob Hopckey calm and then If they want to find my books, know I mean I go to really any bookseller and kind of you know Amazon or Blackwell’s or any any of these places, you know, just type my name in you know, right now I think about 13 books many of the books are on union psychology If I wrote the book on synchronicity, I kind of felt like well I had said well I needed to say within union psychology. I’ve gone on to

write about Catholic spirituality in a wide variety of different ways. I’ve done a lot of translation work. I did a lot of translation work from Italian and French for Crossroad publications. So some of those books are there too, and they might pop up. For example, my late husband had been a Franciscan and left the order. And so he and I translated Little Flowers of St. Francis, which is a medieval collection of, first medieval collection of

legends of the lives of Saint, life of Saint Francis Shambala, my previous publisher actually wanted us to do a contemporary American English translation. The translation that’s, that exists is sort of scholarly and pretty literal, you know, and they wanted something a little bit more readable and a little bit more narrative and sort of storytelling. So it was very fun. So that, that’s there, Little Flowers of Saint Francis has my name on it, you know, with an intro by Richard Geroir. So, you know, so that’s what I would say. People are

I sort of joke about it. Sometimes people like know me from the Jungian world and they’re like, Catholic and people know me from the Catholic world. They’re like, Jungian, you know, like, you know, I contain multitudes, what can I say? There it is. I often say to my clients, my job as your therapist is to make your life more complex, not simpler, you know, like, I think you’re in the problems you’re trying to simplify. We’re pretty complex. So like, let’s expand to embrace complexity, right?

So I’ve lived that myself and that’ll be evident in my reading list, you know, if you look at my books.

Josh Mortensen (1:05:58)

Well, awesome. I’m glad you figured it figured out that that’s a good path for you to be a little complex. And yeah, again, I really enjoy it. Thanks for talking with me, Rob. ⁓

Robert Hopcke (1:06:06)

So

thank you so much for the invitation, Josh. I enjoyed it.

Josh Mortensen (1:06:09)

Yep. Bye.