Josh Mortensen (00:02)

Paul Bishop welcome to the Explorer poet podcast

Paul Bishop (00:51)

Paul Bishop’s fine. We don’t have to bother about. Don’t bother with the handles.

Thank you very much, I’m pleased to be here.

Josh Mortensen (01:05)

Yeah, I’m really excited to chat with you. I came across you through the Jung in the World Park podcast with Patricia Martin. And yeah, and a lot of a lot of great stuff on that podcast. And you’re working in some very intriguing things, at least they’re interesting to me, you know, with given the my interests and the all the people that I like to talk to on this podcast. I talked to a lot of people in the union space, a lot of people who are artists and creators and writers.

Paul Bishop (01:13)

that’s right, yeah.

Josh Mortensen (01:34)

And you’re kind of, you do a little bit of both. do, obviously you’re professor in Glasgow and you’ve written a lot of books and it seems like you’ve, I mean, you’ve covered a lot of different material. But what would you say right now, kind of what is your main focus of interest? What are you exploring? What are you researching? What are you writing?

Paul Bishop (01:57)

Yeah, no, that’s good starting point. ⁓ I guess I’m still trying to understand what our good friend C.G. Jung is all about. ⁓ And ⁓ I put that down too. It’s my fault I haven’t worked it out, not his, that he hasn’t communicated it better. He’s given us 20 volumes of collected works and now a lot of lectures and seminars that are coming out. But I find him an intriguing figure.

⁓ And at the moment I’m midway through a project ⁓ which began a couple of years ago with Chiron to do a study of ⁓ Jung and the Red Book in relation to three big texts. So it’s a kind of great text methodology. ⁓ Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Partizifal, Goethe’s Faust and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. So I’m halfway through that. We’ve done volume one and volume two and three and four are in the pipeline.

That’s what I’m doing at the moment.

Josh Mortensen (02:57)

Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s like a, to, to review each one of those works, but then through the lens of what was Carl Jung trying to get at with his red book.

Paul Bishop (03:09)

That’s right. And I think what I’m trying to do is to, well, say to people, these are fantastic texts. The problem is that because they’re canonical, people tend to shy away from them a little. And I think that’s a shame. So I want to open up those texts. And Jung is a great way to open up complex texts like that. ⁓ But also because they were significant for Jung, I hope that it’ll explain what Jung is about as well. So it’s trying to bring these two different discourses

the literary and the psychoanalytic together.

Josh Mortensen (03:44)

And it does seem that Jung, he was just interested in so many different things, like so many different mythologies, so many different esoteric practices. I was speaking with a friend last week and she’s a practitioner in the I Ching. And I don’t know a lot about the I Ching, but she was telling me that she knows that Jung at least had some exposure to it. And then she said that the more that she read him, the more she read him, the more she could see that this was something that was definitely a part of his…

practice a part of his way of life, probably influenced him a lot. But then also just, yeah.

Paul Bishop (04:15)

absolutely.

Really mega important for him, ⁓ he gets to know the I Ching, think, through ⁓ Richard Wilhelm, so a German sinologist, ⁓ about the end of the 1920s. And he gets really interested in this oracle and he works with it and consults it. And then later in the 40s and 50s, it plays an important role in him developing this extraordinary idea that he brings to the table of synchronicity.

So yes, I Ching is absolutely mega important for you.

Josh Mortensen (04:49)

Yeah, very interesting. ⁓

And then obviously all of the myths and the all this even we may not even call them myths, but these books you’re talking about with with ⁓ Faust and and Parseval and you know, these these are in an essence, these are kind of where the myths evolved to before they got to us in the modern day. And so sometimes we just look at these things as like maybe some philosophical texts or maybe one of the first versions of a novel. But I think in reality, that’s how myths have always moved forward. And that’s that’s

what they’ve become to us in a lot of ways.

Paul Bishop (05:24)

Yeah, no, that’s right. And, you know, I’ve described these works as epics of transformation. And the epic genre is, of course, one which leads us right back to the world of myth. mean, you know, to cite the example of Homer or Virgil, where is it myth? Is it history? Well, one thing you’re sure about, it’s epic. And these are in medieval times and then in classical times, romantic times, modern times.

these are the re-workings of the epic form. So I think that literature and myth work very, very close together. And in these big texts, which culminates then, this series, which I say is culminating in Jung’s Red Book, is a way of reinvigorating the epic as a genre and then the myth as a psychic resource at the same time as well.

Josh Mortensen (06:17)

Yeah, I want to get into all that, but before we move too far forward, I usually like to ask my guests, what is the source of the curiosity for you around this subject? Was it an early period in your life when you realized that you were able to connect with either the mythological or the psychological or the spiritual and in some way? ⁓ Yeah, what’s your background on that? Where does the curiosity come from?

Paul Bishop (06:44)

Yeah, well, that’s a very good question. And yeah, I wish I knew sometimes. I guess like anybody, I’m attracted to things which are a little bit marginalised. And Jung is certainly marginalised in ⁓ the academy. And I think the various reasons for that, we might want to talk about it. But once you’ve identified somebody as ⁓ something of an outsider figure, you think, well, OK.

Let’s try and work out, you know, what this guy done wrong. And in trying to work out what somebody’s done wrong, you often find out, well, you this is what they’ve done right. And just to give an example, in University of Oxford, where I did my my undergraduate studies, if you wanted the collective works of Jung, you had to go to the Bodleian Library and order them up by volume. If you if you wanted them in German, then you’d have to go somewhere else to the Taylorian and order them up there.

it seemed a curious kind of ⁓ split approach to him. Nobody’s quite sure where to put him as far as the academy is concerned. And I think once you’ve been bitten by that bug, ⁓ makes you want to go on and explore further. And I’ve had some great teachers and supervisors who’ve encouraged me to look at Jung and relate him to German literature and thought. So I guess it came out of a kind of initial intuitive interest.

And then the sense of, well, let’s actually try and get at the bottom of why this figure is so controversial. Maybe he’s something to teach us and we’re just not receptive to listening to what that teaching is.

Josh Mortensen (08:26)

Yeah, yeah, I think it’s for some people it seems like Jung ⁓ is easy to dismiss because because of his constant, you know, circling back to

the stories and the symbols and the for some people perhaps maybe for those in particular who lean more towards the extroverted way of just experiencing life it just doesn’t initially connect with them that there might actually be something here it seems a little bit you know in our modern parlance it seems it could be a little woo-woo where most and this is obviously this is what Jung struggled with is because he wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist as somebody who could provide

Paul Bishop (09:00)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (09:10)

evidence, but at the same time he also saw kind of the inner workings ⁓ in his version of the psyche where the symbols were so critical and the stories and for me personally in a you know I always I connected with Jung right away as soon as I started reading it I could almost feel it in in a strange way but at the same time the

and i’m sure you have plenty to say on this as well there’s various there’s various branches of psychological research psychological treatment and for a lot of the kind of what what you might call mainstream psychology

There’s almost no discussion at all about symbols and myths and stories. There’s almost no discussion at all of the inner experience of the psyche and the archetypal forces that we’re all kind of dealing with. But once you read a bunch of Carl Jung, once you read even Nietzsche, and once you read Joseph Campbell, it just all kind of blends together and you can see it all.

Paul Bishop (10:13)

Yeah, no, no, that’s well put. ⁓ I mean, think to bear in mind with Jung is that he comes in various forms. you the early work is absolute, his scientific studies on word association are absolutely orthodox, empirical kind of evidence-based approach. And Jung always said, he said, I’m an empiricist. One might raise one’s eyebrows at that, but…

there is a side to him which is absolutely empirical. Then there’s the other side which becomes more more interested in ⁓ culture, ⁓ symbols of culture, ⁓ symbolic cultures like alchemy and so on. And you might also relate that to his interest in religion and the symbolic importance of religion.

And in between these two kinds comes then the new Jung that we’ve discovered in the last decade or so, which is the Jung of the Red Book, which is, well, it’s imaginative, yes. And in a way, it’s also empirical because it’s transcribing something that happens. And in fact, through this transcription, we can say that that is, in fact, the happening itself. ⁓ And I think that makes him a very, very complex ⁓ figure.

You could spin it another way and say there’s lots of points of entry into Jung’s thought because he is so protean as a thinker.

Josh Mortensen (11:48)

Yeah, yeah, and there’s also it’s interesting because like you said he’s 20 plus volumes of books and Some of it is very dense and very difficult to read and then but at the same time there there are other books that are actually very approachable his autobiography or his biography ⁓ Which I think somebody else finished for him, but memories dreams reflections actually a very straightforward book to read through there’s not a lot of difficulty there and then

Paul Bishop (12:14)

Yeah, that’s

right. It’s interesting because we’re in the run up now to the protocols that were the basis on which Anjela Jaffe ⁓ essentially edited together, Member of Dreams Reflections, ⁓ and very soon, in fact, in a matter of weeks, probably, we’re going to be able to see what those protocols were ⁓ and what was the, as it were,

textual basis on which memories, dreams, reflections came to be written. But memories, dreams, reflections will still have, I think you’re right, ⁓ this ⁓ remarkable function of being the point of entrance for Jung. It’s the gateway drug, you like, to analytical psychology, ⁓ because it is so gripping. And even if half of it is written by Aniele Jaffe or more, it tells us a lot about the way Jung wanted to see himself.

presented. And one might compare Jaffe to the figure of Johann Peter Eckermann, ⁓ who wrote down the conversations of Goethe. Nietzsche said that it was the best German book that had ever been written.

Josh Mortensen (14:15)

Hi Paul, are you there?

Paul Bishop (14:20)

You’re back.

Josh Mortensen (14:21)

Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m not sure what happened.

Paul Bishop (14:25)

That’s okay.

Josh Mortensen (14:26)

⁓

That’s okay, you were talking about the protocols that are soon to come out for the memories, dreams, reflections.

Paul Bishop (14:33)

That’s right. Yeah.

I’ll just pick up on that again, shall I? Yeah. So coming out very soon in a matter of weeks are the protocols, that is to say the notes that Aniele Yefi took in her conversations with Jung on the basis of which memories, dreams, reflections was then put together.

Josh Mortensen (14:37)

Yeah, please.

Paul Bishop (14:57)

And even if Jaffe had a very significant editorial or even compositional role in Membran’s Gene Reflections, the book remains important, I think, as a kind of gateway drug, if you like, to analytical psychology. It tells us a lot about the way Jung wanted to see himself ⁓ presented. And in this respect, I think it reminds me of the editorial role that’s played by ⁓ Johann Peter Eckermann.

⁓ who put together a book called The Conversations of Goethe. So these are transcriptions of conversations with Goethe, but you know, how much was altered or lost in transcription, that’s obviously very hard to assess. So Membrist-Jung’s reflections, I think, will always retain this status ⁓ as being responsible for way that many, many people approach Jung in the first instance.

Josh Mortensen (15:53)

Yeah, that makes sense. ⁓ Yeah, it is interesting the idea of how he wanted to be presented, which is maybe that’s a good segue into just a quick discussion about the Red Book itself, because, yeah, obviously this was not something that he intended for the public. then, you know, we, I mean, for me, just being selfish about it, I guess, I’m very glad that it made it into the public because it’s something that I’ve read several times and I just find, I find very fascinating when I…

Paul Bishop (16:21)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (16:22)

when obviously having read some of his other books and come to understand his way of thinking about the psyche and transformation, but also just being more, for me being more curious about the general kind of evolution of story and culture and myth across time. And then what this book represents as, in the time and place that it was written down with the person it was written by, it’s something that’s,

Paul Bishop (16:29)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (16:51)

It seems to me something that’s obviously an extension of or an evolution of the myth, of the world that Jung came from. not that it’s going to lead, not that that’s the only branch in the evolutionary chain that the myth could follow, but it’s at least one of them.

Paul Bishop (17:11)

Yeah, no, I think that’s a good way putting it. you know, Jung asks this question in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He says, you know, what is the myth that you addressing the reader, what is the myth that you were living? And the sense of, well, know, a myth is not simply something that you look at or read, but is something which is inherently experiential. That might appear a bit puzzling until we look at the Red Book.

And think one of the most fascinating things about the Red Book is that we don’t just have the final product, this very large leather-bound volume with these wonderful manuscript pages and so on, but we also have the earlier versions of it, the earlier drafts, and in particular the Black Notebooks, which is where Jung began to describe the visions, dreams, experiences, however we want to call them. And so what it means is we can actually see

how the Red Book develops, both in an empirical way, but also then in a way which makes us think, how is it that one creates one’s own myth that one’s going to live?

Josh Mortensen (18:21)

Yeah, creates it or in some way discovers it or yeah, yeah, comes to, I think a lot of people have to come to realize what the myth even is, which may very well be, you know, that thing that’s going on in the red book where he has to transition from one way of being to another.

Paul Bishop (18:42)

absolutely. And the Red Book is full of transitions. ⁓ It’s a bit like Goethe’s Foust in that way, which has lots of transformations and lots of transitions as well. And in a way, transitioning or transformation, one could say is the key master idea as far as Jung is concerned. ⁓ And, yeah, he has… ⁓

He has his eye on the history of culture, he has his eye on intellectual history, he has his eye on how it is that symbols come into being and particularly the moment then fade away again. But he does this as someone who realizes that he has, as it were, ⁓ skin in the game ⁓ and that the loss of the symbolic ⁓ against which Jung is reacting is something which affects us now very much. to that extent, think Jung could be a good guide to understanding what’s happening in our modern or postmodern world.

Josh Mortensen (19:39)

Yeah, absolutely.

Josh Mortensen (00:00)

Okay, Paul Bishop, sorry about the technical difficulties. think we were just, we had just gone through some discussion about Carl Jung and his Red Book and then we were focusing on memories.

Paul Bishop (00:11)

That’s right. Yeah. I think that Memories, Dreams, Reflections ⁓ gives us an account of how ⁓ the Red Book came to be written. And an important role here is played by the Black Notebooks in which Jung began transcribing the visions, dreams, experiences, whatever it was that happened to him from 1913 onwards. So the fascinating thing is we can actually see how the Red Book

comes into being through a process of transcription and edition and then it’s final and it would seem to me aesthetic elaboration as a quasi-medieval manuscript ⁓ in this beautiful red leather binding.

Josh Mortensen (00:59)

Yeah. Yeah. And I guess what’s, what’s fascinating about that is again, because early on we were talking about how Jung, ⁓ he was kind of intent on portraying himself in a certain way or wanted to have some control about his kind of public appearance. And so this, that, is fascinating that you get to see. Yeah. Again, if, if he, if he’s someone who didn’t want the red book to come out and if he’s someone who did want to have some control over his public appearance, it does seem a shame that

in one sense that it’s all out there now for everybody to see. Yeah, but at the same time.

Paul Bishop (01:33)

Yeah, I

think you make it. Yeah, I think it’s a very good point there. No, I think I think it’s absolutely right. ⁓ I think everybody was saying because, you know, we knew that the Red Book was there. ⁓ But you couldn’t look at it. There were tantalizing ⁓ glimpses that were given in a couple of biographies, one by Gerhard for instance, and he’s mentioned as we’ve been talking about in in Memories, Dreams, Dreams, Reflections.

⁓ And it was the kind of, you know, ultimate object of desire, if you like, for anybody interested in Jung. And now once it’s out, and one part of me is obviously delighted that it’s out, but I think I can also understand now for the first time why one would have, as the author, not wanted it to be published. Because in a way, we’re looking at Jung’s own dreams. And as the saying goes, we should tread softly on dreams.

And I think there is something curiously intimate and ⁓ almost very personal when one reads the Red Book. It’s an extraordinary text from that point of view as well. And I think the point you’re making is absolutely right, which is, you know, are there no more secrets? ⁓ I think there will always be a secret with Jung of one kind or another. I don’t think we need worry about that.

Josh Mortensen (02:59)

Okay, yeah. And then earlier you were saying that almost all of Jung’s work is kind of geared towards this idea of transformation and even in the red book you see several transformations. And then for you, especially with this project that you’re focusing on now, this epic of transformation project, I think that’s an interesting place to kind of, I don’t know, an interesting idea to kind of dial in on. Yeah. when from at least from a Jungian perspective,

when we talk about transformation, know, what type of transformation or what is the, you know, obviously there’s this archetype of wholeness and there’s this desire for individuation, but what is transformation from a psyche perspective? What does that look like?

Paul Bishop (03:47)

Yeah, no, that’s a very good question. ⁓ I think to understand what it looks like, that’s one of the reasons why I’m keen on following up the use that’s made by Jung of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal and Grotus Faust and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Because in all of those works, you very clearly get a sense of what transformation means. So in the case of Parzifal, it’s Parzifal focusing out

who he actually is. And that is to say that he is one of the keepers of the grail. ⁓ And one of the things that’s been quested after in this quest for the grail in Potsiphal is a quest for his own identity, discovering who he is and becoming it, assuming the responsibility for the grail, which is tied up with all the questions which he asks or doesn’t ask and the consequences that flow from that.

Same thing if we look at Goethe’s Faust, we start off with Dr. Faustus there in his study, basically going through a kind of midlife crisis. None of it seems worthwhile anymore. He wants to understand what actually is going on in the world. And he’s frustrated that he’s unable to do that. That’s why he ends up signing the pact with the devil. And this takes him then on a series of journeys, a series of adventures.

which at the end of part two culminates with Goethe giving us a view in very Dante-esque terms of what the afterlife looks like and his final ascension right up to, thus, ewig weiblicher, the eternal feminine. So that’s ahead of a big journey from frustrated academic to this mystical experience. It’s presented in mythical terms by Goethe at the end. Same deal, I think, with Zarathustra, who is a prophet who

has a message that he’s trying to bring the people, the message about the Ubermensch, the Superman, the message about eternal recurrence, and he keeps on failing to do this. And so we have different books. Across the four books of Zarathustra, we see different strategic communication attempts that are made in order to get this message across. And it is also Zarathustra’s own transformation from being just an ordinary and everyday prophet to

profit of the Ubermensch who has safely delivered the message. Now, I think if you look at those, you can say, well, they’re pretty wild, they’re pretty wacky, they’re particularly specific, but they help us understand what transformation would mean. I think in a Jungian sense, we could summarize his idea of transformation by using a phrase that Nietzsche does. It’s about becoming who you are.

Josh Mortensen (06:38)

Yeah, because a lot of these stories, I think that may be the thing that people struggle with as far as reading a story, watching a movie, and then connecting it back to themselves in some way. Which maybe this is a different topic as well, but I think that’s also why religion gets literalized so easily, because it’s so much easier to understand things as something out there rather than something that’s internal. But to, you know, for any one of these stories to go in search of the Holy Grail, it seems like something that’s

external to us. then if the real journey is actually internal in some way, even if it requires outside activities and outside forces, ⁓ sometimes it can be difficult for people to internalize these things and see it as a process that goes on within ourselves. And then the other part of it is just how long it can actually take to go through any kind of process of true transformation because that

that feeling that you talk about with Faust of just, he’s just so despondent. In our modern parlance, we might describe him as being depressed because he’s just realizing at some point that he’s pursued a path that he’s looking around and he’s just thinking, I’m not that satisfied with what’s going on. I’m not that fulfilled. But then, he might be in his 40s, maybe in his 50s and he’s thinking, geez, well, how do I start over now? That feeling and that feeling of,

at first realizing that the path needs to change. That’s what may be described as a midlife crisis. You might call it the dark night of the soul. And that period of time can actually be fairly extended. And so ⁓ maybe it’s difficult to conceptualize that this story, this narrative with all the different pieces in the narrative arc, you actually have to go through each one of them to achieve that kind of end state that you would hope is the goal.

Paul Bishop (08:38)

Yeah, no, I think that’s well put. ⁓ I suppose I’d say that in the case of these epics of transformation that I’ve talking about, you know, there is a kind of elasticity of time. mean, you know, it’s hard to say how long does Faust’s part one and two take is kind of difficult to answer with any precision. But we see Faust from his midlife crisis stage

right through to being a very old man at the end of part two with his final project for the land reclamation scheme. ⁓ So we do see individual over the greater portion of their life. Certainly Zarathustra has ⁓ a kind of seasonal recurrence which is operating the setting and the rising of the sun which forms a kind of chronological framework if you like.

But his mystical sense of time, I’m thinking about the chapter at Noontide where he says, you know, this could have been at a particular time or any time because there is no time for this kind of thing. Again, you’ve got the same elasticity there. It takes many years where the young Putsiphal grows up asking his mother this question, what is God? And it takes him many years to realize his identity as being the grail keeper.

⁓ in the conclusion to that work. So you’ve got the longevity of time in the narrative level of these texts. I’d also think it’s a, you’ve got longevity of time in the sense of these are books that you can pick up, read at half an hour and put down again. They take a lot of time. They ask a lot of time for us. I would say it’s time which after a while one will willingly give because of the rich rewards that one has from reading of them.

These books involve a lot of our time as well, and that’s kind of bearing out this point that you’re making about it not being anything which is instantly available to us.

Josh Mortensen (10:44)

Yeah, something like a, you know, I was spending time with some friends lately and some of them are, ⁓ you know, evangelical or born again Christians. And in the Christian faith or in that vein of the Christian faith, there’s this idea of, of like an instant salvation just in, in, the moment. Yeah. Believing and then you receive it, you know, for forever because of that one moment. And, it just seems like it’s, it seems like it’s got to take a little bit more effort or.

That may be a very different myth to compare it to. ⁓

Paul Bishop (11:20)

It is, I mean, and you’re right that these texts are not a sort of a one-stop shop. ⁓ They are very demanding texts, but I think that there is the saying, all things are as noble as they are difficult and rare, and it really applies to these works as well. But there is a trade-off. The more the effort one puts into reading them, the more richly they will reward the reader as well. So it’s a worthwhile effort to do it, I think.

Josh Mortensen (11:49)

Yeah, absolutely. The other thought I have about, it’s connected to time as well, but just more of this idea of externalizing the story or externalizing the process of transformation rather than internalizing it may look something more like you go down a path hoping to achieve some end state and you may not achieve that actual end state. So I actually have this,

kind of way of thinking about it where I think most everybody ⁓ in particular in our Western world where we’re kind of treated as individuals, I’m sure that everybody has something deep down inside of them that they really want to be doing or they really hope that they could do. And it may be art, it may be writing, know, for me it’s writing. For some people it might be starting a business, for other people it might be sailing around the world. It could be anything, but there’s this thing inside of them that’s been.

probably gnawing at them for a really long time that I just want to do that thing. And it’s really easy to assume that the reward for doing that thing is accomplishing that thing. Meaning that if you had this desire for a long time to start a business and it would be really easy to imagine that the reward for starting that business would be the external reward of money, influence, fame, popularity, it could be all these things. When in reality, the

The grail is something that the psyche is after. And so you go down that path, it’s almost as if the psyche knows what you need to do, what you need to go experience and suffer and what you need to overcome to feel more, maybe whole as a person, to feel more like yourself, to figure out your identity. And that external outcome may never actually happen the way you wish it would.

may never make the money you want to have. You may never find the fortune and fame that you were after. But just by honestly pursuing that thing that your psyche is giving to you, then you do end up in this transformative state, which does make it all worthwhile even without that external reward.

Paul Bishop (14:00)

Yeah, no, I hear what you’re saying there. And I think that one might look at it in psycho-lytic terms as trying to distinguish between ego objectives or ego attachments and then something very different that one might call, Jung has this marvelous phrase where he talks about the call of the self. So you’re listening to something which in a way is you, in a way it isn’t you, in a way it’s what you are not yet.

And I think that these texts that we’ve been talking about do illustrate what that call of the self might be. it doesn’t have to be presented in a very explicit kind of way, but it’s a useful image for thinking about how someone like Parzifal is trying to find his way in the world. And I think it’s interesting that Jung was interested in the Grail myth and his wife did a lot of work, which was

was subsequently published with Marie-Louise von Franz. ⁓ Steiner, very, very interested in Parthesifal as well as a narrative of the growth of the individual. And so, yeah, I think one could say that these works are literary instantiations of the call of the self, because the more one deals with them, the more one feels personally bound up with what it is these texts are trying to communicate, the transformational ambition which is

actually embodied in the literary texture of these works themselves.

Josh Mortensen (15:33)

Yeah, and maybe just as a, ⁓ know, I don’t know how Nietzsche felt at the end of his life, but just as an example of how it’s not always external rewards, or at least maybe not, you know, fame in his time and place. But I’ve read recently that when Nietzsche passed away, he had really not sold that many of his books, and he really wasn’t that well known, even though he’s very well known today. ⁓

Paul Bishop (16:00)

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. Well, Neitch is an interesting case because in a way, he’s the ultra successful academic. ⁓ He gets a professorial post ⁓ at a very, very young age, younger than anybody else, any of his contemporaries. ⁓ But it turns out to be not what he’s wanting to do. After 10 years, he leaves ⁓ academic work.

and must have had one of the best pension schemes going because he just spends his time wandering around Europe, wandering around Europe, but also writing these incredible texts and developing this remarkable and world-changing ⁓ philosophy. But you’re absolutely right that in his time, ⁓ very, very few copies of the books were sold. And tragically, it’s only after his death and the

the last few years, the story of how the last few years of his life were spent in a state of madness, Geistiger Umnachtung as the Germans call it. so it’s kind of ironic in a way that the Nietzsche myth then fuels the emergence of interest in his thinking. And in some ways, I think we’re still trying to claim for ourselves the Nietzsche ⁓ that wasn’t there at the beginning of his presentation because it was

so often picked up by people and induced for their own political or ideological ends. In a way that’s been the tragedy of Nietzsche’s reception as I’m sure you’ll have been aware.

Josh Mortensen (17:36)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s just, I find it fascinating that there are always these external rewards that people are after, even in our modern psychology, self-help, spirituality, of guru culture, there’s always people that are willing to point you towards external rewards, but they’re kind of, in a sense, they’re bypassing the spiritual benefits or the deep psychological benefits of pursuing things for

the sake of just pursuing them because it’s something your psyche calls you to.

Paul Bishop (18:12)

Yeah, no, no, I think that’s right. But I think Jung’s interesting in this regard because he’s very shrewd. And on the one hand, he talks about the importance of the persona. He says, we need to have a persona, we need to have a mask for our professional life, our social life and so on. But the big mistake, he says, is to identify with the persona.

If you’re a musician, you over identify with playing music. If you’re an academic, you over identify with telling other people things and so on. And I think that’s a good example of how Jung can be immensely practical. He realizes we can’t go around telling each other the truth of what we think 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because society would collapse. But the mistake is, he says, for people to over identify with this mask or persona.

and to block out what these other aspects of the unconscious are trying to tell them about, the person they could be.

Josh Mortensen (19:14)

Yeah, that’s an interesting idea too, because earlier you had talked about one of the first objectives in the, all of these epics of transformation is to figure out your identity. and today ⁓ identities become like almost a political topic recently. But, ⁓ so there is kind of a, I don’t know, a pop culture idea of what identity is. think it’s all very personally, I think it’s all very ego driven. It’s all based on, it’s all based on the outer world, but in this sense,

when you talk about, you know, pursuing that discovery of your hero’s identity or what that identity is, how do you conceptualize that idea of an identity for each of us?

Paul Bishop (19:57)

Yeah, no, that’s a good question. And you’re quite right that the term identity has maybe certain resonances when talking about identity politics and some. I think the difficulty in talking about identity in this, the psychoanalytic or this Jungian sense is it’s a bit like talking about authenticity. You know, you can’t tell somebody what they should be.

to become their own authentic selves. It’s a discovery or a creation that they themselves have to undertake. And yet we all have a sense of what it means to be authentic or ⁓ inauthentic. So the challenge I think is trying to apply a concept like identity or authenticity in a clinical context or a therapeutic context or these days also a political context in a way where it doesn’t just become a slogan.

And I think for Jung, when he’s talking about identity, equally when he’s talking about the self, is that he’s not talking about it in the sense of a simple slogan, but it’s a way of trying to capture the essence of a project, an existential project, which, as we were talking about a moment ago, can take an entire lifetime.

Josh Mortensen (21:15)

that way of thinking about in an existential project because each one of us were this unique combination of DNA from our parents and then that DNA, even if we’re in a household with lot of siblings, each one of us is going to be slightly different from a genetic perspective. And then even on our environment will be different based on the year that we were born and who our parents were then compared to the years that our siblings were born.

And then you go out into the world and you all have different traits and you have different interests and you have different curiosities. And so there is this. There’s no way that everybody could experience reality exactly the same. And so it is. In in real in reality, it’s it’s it’s a project that each one of us has to pursue on our own, listening to, you know, dealing with our own memories, dealing with our own traumas that may be dealing with the.

the inherent genetics of who we are and what that gives to us as far as physical traits, personality traits, you know, and then just the curiosities that we have, the things that we actually want to do with the world. It’s, I like, I guess I’m just saying I like that definition as a lifelong project.

Paul Bishop (22:36)

Yeah, no, think the important thing that there is, know, what makes the individual is in many ways, so profoundly determined by genetics, by class, by all sorts of historical factors. I mean, we have opportunities to pursue the quest for identity.

at the beginning of the 21st century that we wouldn’t have had in previous centuries, but you can also fit that and say, well, in earlier centuries, maybe that quest for the true self would have been more socially recognized and hence more realizable. I think that seeing ourselves as historical beings and understanding that we occupy a particular historical moment at time is one of the biggest challenges because, you know, for us, we’re

always in a kind of eternal now and we don’t necessarily recognise the historicity of what’s happening. That’s also reason why I think these texts, so we’re looking at late medieval, classical and then modern, they cover different sort of historical frameworks where you had different historical expectations, different ways of being able to pursue this epic of transformation that were socially and historically

psychologically too and conditioned. And so seeing how these different works inhabit that historical space I think can be useful for us as trying to understand the historical space we occupy as well.

Josh Mortensen (24:13)

That idea of the hysterosity of it is very important to me because it is very difficult to look outside of our current moment and our current experiences. We have this strange thing as humans where however things are now, however we’ve experienced them, we just kind of assume that that’s how they are here and every other place and now and every other time. And yeah, the way you mention just kind of these,

the goals or the aims of the characters in these stories, just given that they’re from different times and places, they have these objectives that they don’t necessarily match up with the objectives that we would have now. And I had this experience of, I just happened to be reading the Odyssey, which I think is a great epic of transformation. And I saw that there was this meetup group that was doing, they were gonna do…

Paul Bishop (25:02)

saluting.

Josh Mortensen (25:08)

kind of like a book club thing where everybody was reading the Odyssey and then they were going to come together and talk about it. And I got there, I arrived there being who I am having read a lot of Jung and Joseph Campbell and seeing, when I was younger in high school, I had to read the Odyssey and I just couldn’t get it. I couldn’t understand it. I think part of that was growing up in a very literal kind of Christian Mormon household. And so I just didn’t see the symbology of it. But now, years later, 20 years later, reading it again, I was

I thought it was amazing. just saw all these very important pieces of his journey home and I could even conceptualize what a journey home meant. And then I went and sat down with this group of people and they were all just disgusted with how barbaric the Odyssey was. And I just thought, wow, you guys just missed the whole point. Like we’re not supposed to be applying our standard of morality to the Greek myth from thousands of years ago because

you know, it wasn’t even a, it wasn’t even, this was pre Christianity. This wasn’t even a conversation on morality. This, and so I just saw it as, you know, what we’re talking about here is this epic of transformation and what, what he had to go through and the kind of ideas he had to deal with the archetypal characters in his life and inside of him that he had to deal with before he could return home and be that whole person who existed in place that he came from. Yeah.

Paul Bishop (26:38)

Yeah, no, I think that’s a really interesting example because, well, first of all, that one has to have a certain level of maturity in order to be able to make something of these texts. And I think that’s actually signaled in Pazifal by the fact that

being brought up by his mother alone in the forest, he isn’t properly socialized. There are a lot of things he doesn’t understand about the way of the world. has continually to be taught this by his mother, by his uncle. has to get this advice. He doesn’t always understand it. We actually see thematized this question of a maturity or a lack of maturity and where that leads. And he has on the one hand a very profound question which he asks his mother,

So, mother, what is God? And ⁓ she gives him a kind of very sanitized, neat little theological account. But when one day he’s in the forest, he sees the knights ⁓ on horseback in shining armor, he thinks they’re God because they appear so strong and beautiful and it’s so reflecting the light of the sunshine and sun. And it’s a wonderful example of how we’re shown the hero manifestly getting something.

getting something wrong. And I think that’s an important lesson for us that things become apparent to us in the course of time that wouldn’t have been apparent at the beginning. And I’d compare it to my own reading of these texts, which is that as I’ve grown up and hopefully a little bit wiser, so my appreciation of them has grown as well. And every time I read them, I see a new aspect of it and I appreciate it all the more. ⁓

I think the point about what I’m trying to make about the inevitable historicity and just how deep that goes in us is illustrated, for example, by that episode after Odysseus has come back and boy is it going to be payback time and the punishment that’s meted out on the maid servants who’ve been ⁓ serving the suitors and so on and the fact that they are strung up and executed in a horrible way by being hanged and this detail of

their legs flapping is, think, for anyone today, is absolutely abhorrent. For the Greeks, it’s revenge which he is, or one reading of it at any rate, is that it is revenge which he’s entitled to take. And it would have been something approved of in Greek times. I know it’s a controversial reading, but I think that the Greeks would not have had that instinctive sense of outrage that we have.

And that’s simply because we are all historical beings in one way or another. But we can, through literary texts and historical texts, rediscover that earlier mentality. And in rediscovering and recovering that earlier mentality, we gain a greater sense of flexibility about our own and where it’s come from, and hopefully then where it’s going as well.

Josh Mortensen (29:45)

Yeah, and part of it as well is understanding this was a different era and they had different sets of rules and they lived in a different way. But also part of it, maybe to come back to the Red Book, it is horrific in the Odyssey to treat the maidservants that way. At least it appears so. Psychologically, you could assign them a symbolic meaning.

rather than thinking that it’s something literal that you need to do when you come back. But you could look at it as maybe ideas. They represent ideas that limited you before you went through this maturation process. But then to come back to the Red Book as well, the idea there in a real way, it’s taking the Christian myth where you have this God and you’re sacrificing this God. ⁓

It’s one thing to sacrifice your maidservants, it’s a whole other thing to sacrifice your god. if you take both of those literally, there’s a pretty big disconnect in our modern version of morality. ⁓ But if you can take them both kind of psychologically or in this kind of mystical way where there’s this process that you need to go through internally, then yeah.

It’s very uncomfortable. There’s some very uncomfortable things you have to come up against. But when you can see them symbolically, you can maybe muster up the courage to go through with it, to move forward in the way that Jung did in the Red Book, even though he obviously lamented a lot and suffered much for what he had to go through.

Paul Bishop (31:29)

Yeah, no, I think that’s well put. you’re right that, you know, as far as the Odyssey is concerned, you know, you can have a kind of neoplatonic reading of it and ⁓ give it an entirely symbolic reading. And yeah, sure, that’s absolutely there.

Of course, in a literary text, it’s very often not a kind of, know, an either or, but it’s, you know, it’s a growth. It’s a stacking up of the different interpretive layers or possibilities of interpretation. And I think we find passages in the Red Book which are similarly challenging as well. I’m thinking of the episode where Jung’s told that he is going to have to eat the liver of

a young child that’s just been killed. It’s absolutely abhorrent, and it’s meant to be. And I think it has a similar kind of function to this episode that we were talking about in Homer, which is, you know, this isn’t a recommendation you should go out and do it. know, it’s a way of trying to show us what has to be done.

in order to bring something about and how we have to confront that dark aspect of the self as you might say as well in the constellation of that authentic identity. So it’s not a recommendation, nor is it something we should simply pass over. We should think about, what does this speak to? To which dark side of ourselves do these episodes speak? And in that sense, how can we learn from them?

Josh Mortensen (33:11)

Yeah. even just the emotion that something just trying to picture yourself actually doing something like you use the word abhorrent that emotion that could come up that disgust, that revulsion. It’s easy to. Skip over those emotions in our lives, it’s easy to just move past them, and it may not be that you you literally have to partake of a young child’s liver.

but there may be something in your waking life or in your psychic life that you are avoiding because you have the same level of abhorrence or revulsion for. And it may just be that that’s the thing that it’s supposed to be connecting you with.

Paul Bishop (33:55)

Yeah, I mean, there’s clearly a symbolic dimension to that episode. mean, Jung makes this joke later on in life about having this dream of going to Liverpool and he thinks, well, you know, this is so obviously difficult because Liverpool, it’s the pool of life. And I guess you could make a case for there being a similar kind of allegorical aspect to that particularly ⁓ shocking episode. But I think that also extended to the Red Book as a whole. ⁓

When it appeared, I thought it is like nothing else that I’ve ever seen. And it’s not like the currentness. mean, it’s harder to sort of play, you know, spot the archetype in the way that some literary critics do with, in their literary interpretation. You know, the figure of Isdubar, who’d have thought it, the whole theatricalization.

of Jung’s dialogues with his soul. Quite remarkable and for my part at any rate unexpected stuff and also very unlike the Jungman sees in the collected works. So it really is a kind of work, sui generis, it’s unique, it’s of its kind and I think it’s significant that Jung saw it not as an example that we were meant to follow but that he’d give the advice to other people, you should work on your book.

So don’t be bothered about mine and what’s in my Red Book. You should have your own project, ⁓ your own as he calls it, kind of cloister of the soul where you can work through your own transformation in peace.

Josh Mortensen (35:35)

that thing that everybody has that’s inside of them that’s wanting to come out in some way, whatever it may be. ⁓ my friend last week, same friend I was speaking with, she was talking about how you can read and read and read and read your whole life. You can spend your whole life reading and you could consume the Red Book over and over and over trying to understand it just perfectly well. But what you’re getting at is that it may very well be that what

What Jung is indicating is that we all need to put down his book and go work on our own and let that whatever that process that our psyche wants to go through, let that come out through us.

Paul Bishop (36:14)

Absolutely. think that’s part of it. And in a way, it explains why the Red Book was not made accessible because Jung never saw it as being a kind of crucial part of the ⁓ journey of individuation. That said, however, he did talk about it in Memories of Dreams, Dream of Reflections.

He does use some of the mandalas in his essays where he’s talking about that form. So it’s not entirely hidden from you. It’s not entirely occluded, ⁓ but it’s not the main ⁓ idea because that’s Jung’s myth and he wants us to invent our own and to inhabit our own mythical view of the world, which we’ll see it as a cosmos, that is to say a place with structure and meaning.

That’s the task that I think he’s trying to work through for himself in the Red Book. It’s the case that he’s trying to argue in his more academic publications in the 20 volumes of The Collected Works.

Josh Mortensen (37:19)

Yeah. And I can imagine it being for him, for somebody who was so seeped in myth and spent his whole life reading about symbols, writing about symbols, working with patients on their symbols, that this was just a method that worked for him to get into his own psyche and figure out his own myth. And it may very well be that other people have different methodologies.

Paul Bishop (37:46)

Yeah, no, that’s right. you know, the editor of the great book, Soto Shandasani, has talked about, you know, the library functioning ⁓ as a model for the collective unconscious. I think, you know, the idea is there. know, Jung doesn’t entirely dream this up. You can, if you look at the books he had in his library, if you look at some of the materials that he was reading, you can see how he draws on this as well. And I think the point is with the library is, okay, there the library is, but, you know,

you’re not going to able to read every book in it and you’re not going to read every book in the same way. So the library might be something given, but for the users of the library, it’s going to be very, very varied in the use that they make of it. And I think the same thing we could say of the collective unconscious is that how we engage with it and how we use it is not something that can be prescriptively laid down and something that’s very, very clear in the Red Book is if there’s one thing that it’s not,

It’s not prescriptive, you know. It’s not a textbook in that sense and it’s not trying to be. But it’s, think, a text like Nietzsche’s Zeratustra, Goethe’s Faust and Pazifal, which has an unconscious… It works on the unconscious part of ourselves as well as on the conscious mind. It works on both of those. And in that way, it helps move us further along that path of integrating consciousness and unconscious, which is what Jung calls individuation.

He also calls listening to the call of the self.

Josh Mortensen (39:18)

When I read it, especially the first time that I read the Red Book, I definitely felt this. could feel something. It was kind of a strange sensation. There was almost a little bit of…

a bit of like an anxiety in a sense. I can’t exactly

Well, I think what I felt was, ⁓ so maybe just to be very frank about it, if you’ve ever tried any kind of psychedelic, say an LSD or a mushroom, these are not the kind of things that you wanna do very often. But maybe there’s like a call to you to say like, I wanna experience it in a way, because I wanna get down into my psyche and maybe experience it.

you know, some things that I’ve been blocked on or something, but there’s always a hesitation around it. There’s always like a nervousness. You never know what you’re actually going to experience. And in a sense, when I picked up the red book and first started reading it, that’s what it felt like to me. As if for me, it was gonna reveal something about my inner world that I was maybe, maybe I’d put it into what might be called my shadow where I was, I was not, had not to that point been willing to,

approach those subjects or approach those emotions. like sitting down with the red book and opening it and beginning to read, I had this feeling of like, okay, like I’m consciously choosing to go into something that very, very may very well change the way that I even look at myself. And so I think that’s where the anxiety came from.

Paul Bishop (40:59)

Yeah, no, no, that makes sense. I mean, it’s a controversial area in analytical psychology, whether ⁓ you should use psychedelic drugs or similar substances as part of the therapy. mean, there are some people who recommend it, but I think the majority is probably going to take a dimmer view of it. But I’m very struck by what you’re saying about that sense of anxiety, because

To me, this is what Jung himself says when he senses things building up in him in 1913. And he says, and this phrase we find in the black book, and we find in Memories, Dreams, Reflections as well, where he says, I let myself fall. And this idea of making a decision to go with the flow, if you like,

To me, that’s also the message which we find at the end of Goethe’s Faust part two, where Faust, who’s been incredibly ego-driven and all sorts of projects and things that he’s been up to. But at the end, the final thing that he has to learn is that the eternal feminine, das ewig weiblicher, will lift him up and draw him onwards. And it’s an entirely different dynamic.

from the one with which he has, for the most part, like the Western human being that he is, the way that he’s led his life. And I think that that sense of a reversal of the direction, that is bound to cause an anxiety. And that anxiety is there, I think, in the Red Book in various ways as well. The sense that this is, just as ⁓ he describes Zarathustra as being dangerous, because it’s a voyage to the other pole of the world.

that there is something dangerous, there is something of life and death at stake in this work as well.

Josh Mortensen (43:00)

Yeah, that description of recognizing that there’s something of life and death in this, even if it’s just internal, even if it’s just psychological, that death of, know, because I grew up in the Western world and I grew up in a very egocentric environment. so for a long time, I think that was my identity was whatever the mask that I was wearing. so, yeah, gradually learning to, know, that feminine

nature of just accepting of just, you know, and that was a big part of it. ⁓ I have one kind of maybe last question for you because you’ve been, you’ve obviously, you understand this stuff so well and you’ve spent a lot of time with it. But then from a personal perspective, I’m sure that you’ve probably noticed the different points where you’ve been on your own kind of heroes, epic or epic of transformation. And I wonder if you just have, you don’t have to give any details about your own, you know, your own journey.

but if there are some positive overtones or some feelings of gratitude that you have for, in a sense, being aware of this stuff as you go through your own life, moving yourself towards your own identity, your own joy, your own holy grail, what is that like for you?

Paul Bishop (44:17)

Yeah, well, I used to make a joke and say that ⁓ I tried to bundle up my Oedipus complex with my midlife crisis at a very early stage of my life and get them out of the way so that I could move on. ⁓ I think that what these works have, Jung as well, as a kind of commentator on them, that ⁓ the lesson that it’s taught me is

to pick up on the theme that we were discussing earlier in our discussion, it’s about the importance of time and that time is needed to work on these texts and understand them and time is necessary to pause as well and then come back to them again. The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger says, he says, the horizon of being is time.

And I think that’s absolutely right. And I suppose I’d say that the big take on my own experience of working on these texts, and I hope I understand them a little bit better than I did at the beginning 30 years ago, is that they’re going to still require a lot more time in the future. And I got my work cut out for the next two volumes, three and four in this series for Chiron. But I guess my journey is going to extend a long while after I finished that project as well.

Josh Mortensen (45:42)

There’s something beautiful about it that there’s always something to pursue. There’s always something more. You can never actually get to the complete full answer.

Paul Bishop (45:51)

Absolutely, there’s always something else that’s so true.

Josh Mortensen (45:55)

Yeah. Okay. Well, ⁓ Paul, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Yeah, this has been really fun. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. ⁓ If people want to find you, you your writings, you know, I know you write a lot of articles, you’ve written a lot of books, you’re working on this Jung and the Epic of Transformation series. If people want to find these things, where would they go look?

Paul Bishop (46:16)

They can look at the ⁓ University of Glasgow website. There’s a page called Enlighten which lists all the publications that staff have produced. But you could also just go to, if you’re interested in the books that I’ve written and in particular the Chiron books, you’ll find them on Amazon. So go to amazon.co.uk or amazon.com and I’ve got my own page there as well.

Josh Mortensen (46:44)

OK, well, awesome. Thank you so much again, Paul. ⁓ I really, really appreciated it.

Paul Bishop (46:49)

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Josh.

Josh Mortensen (46:50)

OK, bye.