Josh Mortensen (00:02.475)

Okay, Katarina Sarafidou, welcome to the Explorer Poet Podcast.

Katerina Sarafidou (00:08.109)

Hi Josh, thank you for having me.

Josh Mortensen (00:09.717)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve already touched base once before, so we’ve gotten to know each other a little bit. But I’m actually really looking forward to this conversation. I’ve talked to a lot of people about Carl Jung, I’ve gone into specific topics like shadow work and synchronicities. But one of the one of the, I don’t know, bigger topics that come up that comes up every now and then with Carl Jung is the Red Book.

And what I’m hoping to do with you today is do kind of a deep dive on the Red Book. And it’s something that I’ve read several times and I know a lot of people have read and there’s a lot of different interpretations of its meaning and its purpose. And there’s some mystery around its original writing and publication. And yeah, I would love to get into all of that with you. But before we do that, maybe just to kind of

give a little bit of an intro of who you are and where you’re coming from. I came across you through the circle of analytical psychology, which is based in London. And I’m curious if maybe you could just tell us a little bit about the circle of analytical psychology.

Katerina Sarafidou (01:25.006)

Sure, yes. mean, as you say, the Circle of Analytical Psychology is a project that was based in London in the UK and it started with two of my colleagues, George, Diane and myself, about ten years ago now.

It was just a few years after the Red Book had been published and it was such a monumental event in the field and yet it was such a difficult thing to understand but also very important. So we decided to develop a project where we can work on the Red

and teach the Red Book basically to other Union analysts and trainees. So we teach the Red Book across two years, so it’s a full reading of the text.

and it takes us two years to go through it. So we’ve done it five times now and every time we discover something new it’s very exciting and it has attracted by now people from all over the world, from the States, from Singapore, from other places in Europe.

So as the Red Book becomes much more significant in the field, gradually, so the circle of analytical psychology has become also much more important to us.

Josh Mortensen (03:11.383)

Yeah, well, what do you what do you think the Red Book has done to the psychology field or I guess the depth psychology or psychoanalytical field? What what is the emergence of the Red Book? How have you seen things shift or change? Or? You know what? What has the impact been?

Katerina Sarafidou (03:29.654)

Yeah, I mean on the one hand it doesn’t come across often that you actually find a completely new primary text that appears over a hundred years after the inception of the psychology. So the Red Book is a completely new primary text that was published in 2009.

of decades after Jung’s death. So on the one hand that alone is quite exciting but of course the Red Book itself is an extraordinary piece of whatever one can, it’s an extraordinary publication, it’s difficult to categorize.

The significance of it is that people didn’t knew it existed. So Jung had talked about it and he had shown it to a few friends and colleagues in his lifetime. But that was only a handful of people. But people in the field didn’t know they exist. But of course they hadn’t seen it.

And what it does is it reveals really the sources of Jung’s ideas, the sources of analytical psychology before the concepts, before terms such as collective unconscious, such as archetypes.

such as shadow. So before all of these terms and all of these concepts, you have the Red Book and the Red Book shows the genesis of these concepts. And the genesis of these concepts are based on Jung’s own experiences, which he records and transcribes in the Red Book. So it is a very significant…

Katerina Sarafidou (05:35.265)

event in the field it’s also quite disturbing I would say it has been at least for in several places in the field of analytical psychology just as much as in my view it has infused new life

field of anthropology, it has also met with some suspicion and caution, I guess, by maybe some of the more institutional aspects in the field, which I can understand in some ways.

Josh Mortensen (06:12.961)

Yeah, what do you mean by disturbing? What’s been what’s been disturbing about it?

Katerina Sarafidou (06:18.326)

Well, if you look at the language of the Red Book, for example, it is not your conventional language that you see in the collected works, in the Jung’s collected works, where he tries to make a linear exposition for the sake of understanding and for the sake of really…

presenting a framework, scientific or empirical framework is really important for the model of the psyche or for working analytically, that kind of thing. Rather, the language of the Redwick is poetic, it’s prophetic, it’s emotional, it is urgent, there’s nothing scientific about it, it is quite intimate.

and it’s difficult to isolate a narrative across it and if you look at the black books, the black books were probably the diary entries that were the source of the red book so what Jung would do is that he would

Katerina Sarafidou (07:33.711)

some cases it was every evening, say after dinner he would retreat into his study, he had active imaginations which he would record in his diaries, the black books as they are now called. And then after a certain point, he did this from 1913 all the way to 1932.

kept writing in the black books. But after a certain point, he transcribed some of these entries into the red book. So what I was starting to say is that if you look at the black book entries, you see even more Jung’s own process, which is quite intimate and vulnerable. So…

It’s difficult to relate to, particularly if you’re coming from preconceived ideas as to what individuation is, or what archetypes are, or what the unconscious is, or what the symbol is. If you come from very preconceived ideas, the Red Book will likely dislodge.

some of those. So it can be quite…

I it makes demands on people, both intellectually, I think, and personally. And I do think that often there is a certain flight from the Red Book, either towards hyper-intellectualization or certain…

Katerina Sarafidou (09:24.302)

shallow sentimentality. So it’s reduced to something that is very aesthetic or poetry. It’s not. It’s actually a living description of a process that is vital for us today, at least according to Jung and for those of us who can actually resonate with this material.

Josh Mortensen (09:54.138)

Yeah, one thing that I think is fascinating about the Red Book, this is something that you mentioned, but he wrote it or he began writing it, at least in the black books, and then then transcribing it then as something more kind of complete in the Red Book. But he started doing that early on in his career. Did you say 1913 was when he started?

Katerina Sarafidou (10:14.136)

Yes, November 1913 is when he first put pen to paper in the Blackbooks.

Josh Mortensen (10:19.457)

Yeah, because so many of his other writings came out much later after that. And so that was something I had never realized. In fact, I think it might have been when we talked for the first time, I had never really put together the date that the Red Book had actually begun to be formulated. And so it’s really interesting. There’s this idea of this numinous beginning. And it is really interesting that he experienced these

you know, this act of imagination or whatever the these images that the unconscious gave him as he as he went in observed it. It’s just interesting that he experienced it all ahead of time. And then the rest of his career, it seems that he was almost then trying to put labels to the things he had experienced or the processes such that he could then, you know, relay it outwards or communicated outwards in a way that was helpful for others.

Katerina Sarafidou (11:14.786)

Yes exactly and in fact you know he started, first put bench bed there in 1913, the material that we find in the regbook are from 1913 to 1916.

at least the textual material is from 1916. So everything that we see in the collective works, so the vast majority Blink’s works from 1916 onwards, anything that he ever produced from 1916 onwards circles back to this source of the Red Book, which was a mystery up until now. And as you say, mean, decades later, so what you just described about the fact that the…

spent his life trying to communicate and elaborate his experiences in a language that could be received by people. That’s exactly what he did and he also says this, he says in

that it took him really 45 years to distill through his scientific work what he experienced during the time in the Red Book, etc. But everything else that he did in the decades that followed were the elaboration.

and scientific exposition of that work. But the newness beginning, as you say, and as the way he put it, was there, was in these experiences.

Josh Mortensen (12:55.469)

It’s pretty fascinating that he went through his whole career with very few people even knowing that this thing existed. And then even after he had passed away and moved on, it was still a mystery that it took a long time for it to come out. It’s wild. You mentioned some people with whom he had shared the book with while he was alive, and there’s only a handful of them, do we have any of these people’s own thoughts?

on what the Red Book was or conversations that they might have had with Carl Jung about the Red Book.

Katerina Sarafidou (13:31.375)

Sure, yes. one of those was Carrie Baines, one of his early collaborators, and she helped him transcribe some of his books. I think Carrie Baines is in my…

For my mind, she’s one of the most intelligent people that he had around him. And he relied on her in some ways quite a bit in her intellect. So I think the debate at the time was, and I think his own hesitation was how this material would be received.

And that was one of the reasons that it was not published by the New Heirs for all of this time. I mean, I’m sure there is other reasons, but that was one of the reasons. Precisely because the material is just so unconventional and it went against his own image as the scientist, you know. And in fact, when you see, when one sees the…

the beginning entries of the Black Books in November, he says that the fact that he has to let go of his science is agonizing to him.

but he had to shed this way of thinking. Later on in the Blacklist, his soul tells him that science is just a language, is childish to focus too much on it, that it is only a language, but for him he had tied up his own professional identity to it, so it was quite agonizing. What he said, which is quite interesting, if you see the first part of the book that

Katerina Sarafidou (15:33.471)

The Red Book has three different parts, it consists of three distinct books, as she said. So the title of the first book is The Way of What is to Come. So he talks about…

something that is to come and perhaps the Red Book was also for the reader that was to come and that’s us today, you know, so perhaps the collective psyche is a bit more ready to receive the content of the Red Book today. And I myself am quite fascinated by this, you know, because when it was first published in 2009, Norton & Norton, the publishers, only published a very small print run.

So about 5,000 copies or thereabouts because they thought that the main audience for this would be qualified union analysts of which there are about 3,500 in the world or maybe that’s thereabouts that’s somewhere at the time. And in fact, it was sold out right away. It didn’t see

shelves in bookshops for two years because it remained being sold out and ordered out. very quickly it had more than 120,000 copies sold. It has now been translated formally to at least 11 or 12 languages. It just received a Greek translation last week.

So my point is that it has really captured the public imagination. It’s not just of relevance to humans. It has captured something vital in my view in the collective psyche. People are interested and people are not only interested, but… Because I have another reading group, I have a young reading group where…

Katerina Sarafidou (17:48.025)

where it’s a bit more open and we have people with other backgrounds, academic backgrounds or non-union, second-alytic backgrounds. People are taking the content of Red Book into their stride. It means something to them and they are able to engage subtly and intelligently with it. So I think the pressure for integrating the Red Book.

in the field comes more from outside the field rather than from inside the field interestingly enough.

Josh Mortensen (18:20.781)

That is interesting. And it’s, you know, this idea that Jung was trying to stay kind of within the scientific realm. He wanted to be in this, he wanted to be respected professionally, and he wanted his work to be taken seriously. And I think he had this notion that the only way for that to happen was for him to be empirical and to be able to provide, you know, things that were repeatable, results that were repeatable. And

it’s very much, you know, the way that the Western world has become is everything needs to feel scientific in order for us to trust it. And if you think back on the timeline as well, you know, he was kind of a contemporary a little bit later than Freud, but kind of a contemporary of Freud and Freud, for whatever reason, his work was taken very much as this like scientific rational, at least in the mainstream kind of, you know, the way of thinking about it. And so it makes sense that

Jung would want to do the same thing, but at the same time, he had this problem of having experienced his own inner world and seeing that everybody has this inner world and that we are kind of inherently these spiritual beings. And I find it fascinating the way you’re talking about how maybe the way of what is to come wasn’t just about that one portion of the book, but also it really was about who

like the people who are living now, like you and me, and the people who are experiencing the world as it is today, you know, however many decades later, because there is a big, there is a strong sense in the world today that this rationalism and the science focused way of seeing everything has kind of led us astray. There’s, have a lot of conversations with people who feel a bit betrayed by technology and

science, I mean science itself has really taken a hit over the last several years because there’s this constant, it kind of, I think it kind of speaks to Jung’s ideas around what humans are and what the human psyche is inherently, being something that wants to connect with the spiritual, with the inner unseen realm, and so even science itself in many ways gets treated like a religion.

Josh Mortensen (20:45.889)

rather than just a process. And it really is just a process. not a, you know, it ends up being like scientism. And because of that, a lot of people, you know, they see the flaws in pure rationality, recognizing that we do have kind of an an inner intuition or instinct about life. And then also there’s this growing sense that the institutions in our world are going to let us down.

And so there’s a lot of people kind of those institutions may be religious or government or whatever it may be. And so a lot of people are looking for more of a mystical side of life, a more of a way of kind of finding their own path. And it makes me think of Joseph Campbell and how like there are so many people who are actually just looking for a direct experience with the numinous or a direct experience with the mystical. And in a lot of ways, I think that’s what Carl Jung’s Red Book brings to people or offers them like

a version of that, kind of an example of how to experience that.

Katerina Sarafidou (21:49.359)

Yes, completely agree with you. think we need both. I agree with you that sometimes the idea of natural science, the idea that everything can be explained through reason. And not only that, if we structure our society rationally, then we can…

to really protect ourselves from chaos and maybe reach unlimited progress. I think you can see why this is attractive and perhaps it is quite comforting.

But it is, as Jung So tells you, science is in fact just a language. The reality is that when you open the doors to the inner world, you open the doors to chaos. And you have to have a way of navigating this chaos. So we have to find a way to engage with what Jung calls in 1928, the irrationalities of the psyche.

And science is only half the picture of who we are. So the rational part of us. In the Red Book he says at some point when he tries to tackle this emphasis, this scientific emphasis in the West, in Western thought, he says that he meets this figure Isdobar.

they have this dialogue and where one of the combinations of this dialogue is the realization that there are two kinds of truths. There is the truth of the outer things, which is the truth of science, and then there is the truth of inner things, where science can’t offer much help. You mentioned something earlier about

Katerina Sarafidou (23:56.099)

you know, empirical science and natural science and I think what Jung says is that and up until the end he insisted and I think this was accurate that he was an empiricist, know, that what he did and what he conveys was based on empirical observation of psychic phenomena in himself.

and in his patients. That much is true, but that’s not the same as natural sciences. The natural sciences which focus, as you say, on repeatability, predictability. In terms of scientifically speaking, the broader, the object of your research…

than the looser the method. If you have a very tight method, the narrower the area of your research can be. If you have a subject or an object that is as broad as the human mind, then you have to loosen up your methods a bit. What Jung says is that…

Analytical psychology, if it is a science, it is a human science, not a natural science, because analytical psychology deals with the issue of meaning. Natural science is known nothing of meaning. So that’s the idea. The other thing to pick up from what you’re saying is the difference between Freud and Newell. We have to also remember that Freud

was a neurologist, but Jung was a psychiatrist. So their observations when it comes to the psyche was very different because they dealt with very different patients. So Freud was dealing with middle class patients who had neurotic symptoms, hysterical symptoms.

Katerina Sarafidou (26:17.774)

function of disturbances that may or may not have some kind of organic cause. What Jung saw as a psychiatrist in the Bukowski clinic from very early on in his career, even before tonight’s call, were profoundly disturbed patients. And that influenced the formulation of their theories because what Jung observed is the total collapse of the ego in schizophrenic patients. And then…

which Freud never experienced with his patients. So what you found is that even when there is this disintegration and collapse of the ego in schizophrenic patients, there was still something created in the psyche that tried to coordinate and protect and sort of bring about some kind of…

center and unity in the personality. So one of the reasons, other than the personalities, one can say, but one of the reasons that the theories went in such different ways were simply the different patients that the works posed. Freud was very invested up until the end in his second analysis as

being seen as a natural science. For me, this attitude towards psychoanalysis is deadly for psychoanalysis. It’s not helpful for psychoanalysis. But there’s different agendas, I guess, and different perspectives.

Josh Mortensen (28:06.593)

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s interesting the way that you talk about natural science, or I guess psychological analytics being this kind of search for meaning, this meaning making endeavor or process, or at least it’s centered around this idea of meaning. Because when I think about, say, religion versus science, I’ve talked about this before on my podcast, but I often think about them as

both just being a desire to figure out the world, to understand the world. There’s like this, the same need, the same kind of human need is at the bottom of both science and religion. It’s just that they’re a different path. And so they ask different questions. Science being this question of how, and religion being this question of why. And so when you say Carl Jung spoke of

you know, his work not being natural science, because it’s focused on this meaning and meaning is a question of why. And science is asking this question of how and they, they’re both valuable. I think that’s what our world is starting to discover is that they’re both valuable, to disregard one because you have the other is actually, it’s to miss a lot of useful information.

particularly when you turn and look at that inner world and the way that we’ve always oriented ourselves around stories and these big archetypes that come out of us and structure us as collectives. going forward, it’s going to happen the same way. Whether we think we’ve gotten to this point of being very aware of ourselves and very aware of the outer world, going forward, we are going to still operate in the same way where we’re going to…

organize ourselves around stories and myths and the characters and kind of the arcs of those stories. They’re always going to be important to us.

Katerina Sarafidou (30:09.902)

I actually don’t think that ever went away, know, that maybe it went a little bit more underground, but I don’t think it ever went away because it is a vital function of society. Like you, I don’t think that science and religion are competing with one another, to see them as…

mutually exclusive propositions is I think a failure of category, know, it’s an error, it’s a category error. They have different domains and they both are important and make no mistake, the main insights of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, so I’m just using now psychoanalysis as an umbrella term, to cover, you know,

Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Pitcher, so the main set of alphabetic thinkers.

So the main insights of second-eye and occipital vision are validated by science and neuroscience and say attachment-based research. So things such as the affectivity of the psyche, things such as the idea of the dynamic unconscious, the psyche as self-regulating, so the mind that seeks to protect itself from overstimulation, the archetypal nature of human subjectivity, even the

idea of the self. These things are, and several others, are in fact validated by Baltimore science and the touching base research. What you’re not going to validate in science are things such as Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Death, which is a religious proposition, as you say, or Freud’s Oedipus complex, you know, or Klein’s Enviographed, because these are, as you say, they’re frameworks of meaning.

Katerina Sarafidou (32:07.022)

And what they do is they provide a language for us to put all of the random pieces of our lives and experiences as we go day to day through life, to put them into a narrative that makes sense to us and can put some kind of meaning to our suffering that can help sustain psychic life.

This is what these frameworks of meaning do, these are what religious narratives do, these are what second-analytic narratives do, or some second-analytic theories of theoretical frameworks do. They’re frameworks of meaning that help us navigate our emotional life and our relational life. I don’t think this is a battling whatsoever, I think we need to be…

nuanced in terms of which aspects of analytic work or theory we put under the scientific lens because as I say that the fundamental insights are validated over hundreds of years later by neuroscience but if you put the wrong thing under the scientific lens then you lose

Josh Mortensen (33:26.743)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. this, I agree with you that this kind of meaning making through story or myth never went away. In fact, what you’re saying makes sense to me that this, know, Jung’s work kind of validates this idea that we need that meaning making. And when it works the way it’s supposed to work, we don’t notice, we don’t notice it at all. We just kind of…

I always, I think about the difference between a story and a myth. And there’s lots of different ways that the word myth has been defined. But one of the ways that I think about it is that when you read a story, say you pick up a novel and you read the novel or you watch a movie, you kind of, there’s a part of you that’s like, okay, that’s a story and I’m watching it right now. A myth is the same

It’s still just a story, but you don’t realize that it’s just a story because you’re living it out in real life. You think it’s like real, it’s your version of reality when in fact it is just a story. And the way the human psyche works is that it’s almost, you’re not supposed to be aware of it because it’s just the system that you’re operating on.

And that’s what I think is fascinating about circling back to the Red Book and the modern myths that our current culture is founded upon, most of them being from, you know, an evolution through the Christian myth. And so all of these ideas that in the modern world we just hold as real, or especially the more religious folks hold as real.

I think that’s one of the things that’s interesting about the Red Book is the way that Carl Jung confronts some of those myths and shows us, at least from my perspective, of shows us how we are supposed to move forward with or away from some of the myths that have built the world that we’re in.

Katerina Sarafidou (35:39.247)

Yes, I think I agree with what you’re saying about the myth being sort of something that underlines your version of reality, you say. The way I define myth is that it’s a symbolic narrative that brings continuity and meaning.

to one’s life. It reconciles us with our mortality, with the limitations of our material life.

and provides certain sustenance and meaning to the human psyche. So there are symbolic narratives. The thing is, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we know it or not, we all live some myth or another. But what Jung says is that it’s important to find out what is the myth you are living.

because it could be that you are living a myth that is not yours. It’s a collective myth, but you need to find your own way. But we are all living.

myth or another. And this is how he started actually the Red Book is as he put it in the Memory Streams Reflections is that he, when he started, when he put Pen to Paper in the Black Books in 1990, he had just completed this major two volume work at the time of Symbols of Transformation where he went over forensically into world myths and tried basically to the time analyze

Katerina Sarafidou (37:29.826)

them like he analyzed mythic figures as it were his patients and what he said at the end of that

said that he didn’t know what was his myth and what was the myth that he was living and he felt that he urgently needed to find that out. Later on when someone asked him whether he did find what myth he was living, this came up in the protocols of the memory stream reflections of the interviews that he had with Anjala Jaffa.

protocols by the way that we just published last month. So when he was asked what was the myth that he was living, he said that his myth was the myth of Anthropos. The myth of Anthropos is the myth of the seven sermons of the dead which is in the Red Book.

And the myth of the seven sermons is the myth of individuation. That’s why I think is so, one of the reasons why the red brick is so important.

Josh Mortensen (38:42.625)

I find individuation fascinating for a couple of reasons. One being that it’s this idea of finding your own myth, integrating your parts, becoming like your whole self. And in a sense, it’s just like you were saying, if you don’t figure out your own myth, then you will unconsciously just live a myth that somebody else has given you or your culture has given you. And so part of individuation is

making sure that you’re living the myth that your psyche or your soul wants to live. What’s fascinating about that to me is that we’re like at the end of, maybe not at the end, but we’re well into this big societal experiment with the idea of monotheism and I see, you know, the way that I think about monotheism is that you, as a

Katerina Sarafidou (39:19.928)

yesterday.

Josh Mortensen (39:41.85)

we have oriented our psyche towards one archetype within the whole self. And when we worship this one archetype over time, you… know, if worship is this idea of, in a sense, emulating the thing that you worship. So, you know, in the Christian myth we have Jesus Christ and we often say,

what would Jesus do or be like Christ? And so you’re trying to do, especially in this monotheistic realm, we’re trying to emulate the God that we worship. And if we’re worshiping an individual over time, we become more and more individualized. Maybe not individuated, but we start to feel more and more like individuals rather than a collective. The irony that I see in that is that if you

read about ancient peoples, people that were living in tribes in the wilderness. Even way back then, one of the processes for kind of initiation from a child into an adult was to send somebody off to have a long period of fasting and self-reflection and meditation. what they were supposed to do was figure out who they were. In a sense, they were supposed to discover their myth and then come back and tell everybody else what the myth is. And so it’s the strange thing of

We were there thousands and thousands of years ago. And then it took all of this history and all of this cultural evolution and mythological evolution. And then eventually we just get back to the same point where, oh, we’re all, we’re all supposed to be, you know, figure out who we are, live the life that we’re supposed to live, but in such a way that we benefit our group or we benefit our tribe. And, um, I don’t know, that’s, that’s fascinating, fascinating to me. But then as far as Carl Jung and the Red Book,

taking the myths of say Christianity and really kind of exploring what that myth means on a psychological level rather than just a literal or concrete know interpretation level but really exploring what it means to have a direct experience with the myth and those types of initiations and then how that’s supposed to move us towards more consciousness or individuation or whatever it may be I find that very fascinating.

Katerina Sarafidou (42:12.514)

Yes, definitely. It’s about reorientating ourselves towards the myths of our time. And I think sometimes it’s very easy to romanticize pre-Christian systems and then see Christianity as something very monolithic.

or think that we need to go back to some kind of idealized or utopian time before Christianity. Jung doesn’t, that is not born out of Jung’s own writings or his own thinking, I don’t think, because he sees Christianity

Christ, it’s the God image of a certain age and that reflected where we were in the West as a collective. But the idea is that now we’re moving on into a new phase of conscious development. So it’s not about regressing back, but it is about

taking with us what we have learned from Christianity and everything that the Christian paradigm has given us and integrating that and moving beyond it. What he says in the Red Book, because by the time he comes to the Red Book, he’s already familiar with some alchemical texts, although he hasn’t engaged heavily with alchemy until 1928, but already by 1932 he’s read some alchemical texts. And he’s also read

eastern text like the Upanishads. So he does have a certain breadth of different religious frameworks but his main point of reference is of course Christianity. He critiques it, he reveres it, he adjusts it, he transforms it, he tries to position himself and his reader towards it and what he says is that people should aim to become

Katerina Sarafidou (44:33.934)

Christ and not a Christian. He says that what we have done in Christianity is that we have concretized one person’s individuation, so Christ, and we try to imitate him as opposed to actually do what he did, which is to live our own life. So that’s what he says, that we are no longer the sheep that need a shepherd.

that we have now come of age and a new aeon has begun, a new month, platonic month, a new age has begun and we need to take on the burden of individuation like he did, like Christ did. So, and I just wanted to, now that I make this point, I just want to, if I may, just go back.

to circle back to what we said earlier about one of the reasons that he didn’t publish the Red Book or he was cautious about sharing it. One was, as I said, that he was conflicted about the scientific, non-scientific nature of what he was doing. But the other one was precisely what we just discussed now, so the problem of imitation. So he didn’t want people to imitate him because that would be another error.

He didn’t want to be a guru whereby people would just follow and concretize his own process. And in fact, in the Red Book, he warns against imitation. And he speaks to the reader and he says, this is my way, it’s not your way. You have to find your way. And I think that’s really important. So, the events that he describes in the Red Book are…

unique to him. It is the process that he offers us as something that is more broadly relevant and we would say archetypal. So it is the process. So the danger of imitating Jung or concretizing his experiences in the Red Book, just like we did in Christianity, for example, is…

Katerina Sarafidou (46:57.556)

that then we turn analytical psychology to a religion. And he says that this would be the death of analytical psychology. Analytical psychology is not a religion, but it is the religious making process. And I think that’s the better way to relate it.

Josh Mortensen (47:17.761)

It seems very tricky because he’s exploring, he’s exploring things that are so religious like, so spiritual, so these inner worlds, these stories, and he’s exploring in the red book, he’s literally exploring the evolution of the myth. So the way that I see, the way that I see myth is that it’s, it’s an evolution of culture or an evolution of ideas and evolution of memes. And so

I think Joseph Campbell’s really good at this, at like showing, he’s got this series called The Masks of God, and he shows how from archaic people, ancient people, all the way up through the different times and in the different places, these myths have changed and evolved. And I think you’re right, one thing you said that I think is very right is that we’re not supposed to go backward. To go backward would be a regression, psychologically. The myths are always…

supposed to help us become more conscious, to become more aware, and I think that’s what they’re doing. think that we are, like with Jung in the last century and what he was able to put down in writing both from his experiments, his experience, and his work with patients and his study and research of myths, he was able to outline how this kind of religious nature

works with the psyche and it is drawing us more and more towards consciousness. And if you think about the Christian myth itself, which he addresses in his his red book, it has been literalized or made concrete as if everything about it exists or existed in the outer world as something very tangible. But when you do that to a myth,

it makes it so that it no longer really exists in your inner world. It doesn’t work on you to become conscious in the way that it could. And so in the Red Book, like you’re saying, he’s treating Jesus not as our literal savior, but as our exemplar. Do what he did, but don’t do it the way that he did it. And another way of thinking about it is that all myth could be literalized, and when it does, it becomes

Josh Mortensen (49:41.624)

just set in stone and it becomes stagnant and stale and people who literalize their myth, and I’ve seen this so much in my own life from the world that I come from, people who literalize their myth, they just stop growing. They kind of just become stagnant in their own psychological and spiritual growth. But when you can take a myth and internalize it psychologically, for example, in the Red Book where

Carl Jung has to do this, he kind of identifies his God and then he has to kill his God, he has to sacrifice his God, in the same sense that the Jews recognized Jesus as somebody imitating a God or trying to be a God and so they sacrificed him. And to take that psychologically for us, as we grow up there is this image around which each of us

like an internal image around which we kind of focus all of our efforts to kind of be this thing, this mask that we put on for the world or this ego that manages that mask or like we have this idea of who we are and what we’re supposed to be, but that image is crafted from our environment and our culture and the stories and the influences. And at some point, if you would like to individuate, if you would like to achieve a higher version of consciousness, you have to take that God image

And I say God image because you may not think of it as a God, but it’s this thing you’re worshiping and you have to take it and get rid of it. You have to kill it. And it’s one of the most painful experiences you can go through, like being crucified. But then when it’s gone, there’s going to be this period of like kind of in between limbo like space where you don’t really know who you are. But over time, you nurture this new

creation, this new God, and then you go through this resurrection or rebirth. And I think that’s what Carl Jung was doing in the the Red Book. And he said that after, you know, after he had gone through all of that period, he kind of said the process is complete, like he’s, he’s individuated, he’s become this thing, where he now knows who he is independent of what his culture tells him he is. And I think

Josh Mortensen (52:04.929)

It’s just a great example of how myths are actually supposed to work. And this is the example of the myth that is of our time. And he’s showing us how it’s supposed to work. I think it’s fascinating. But again, probably why he didn’t want the Red Book released because he didn’t want to come across as you said, a guru. But I think he also was, you know, given our Western world, he didn’t want to come across as a prophet. And he didn’t want it to be turned into a religion.

Katerina Sarafidou (52:33.262)

Yes, think that was a concern, this becoming a religion. He said at some point, systems are abhorrent to me. I suspect that he would see this as a risk. I do think…

I sometimes wonder because right before he died, he sent a to one of his colleagues, Eugene Rolfe, it’s an unpublished letter, but it was referenced by the editor of the Red Book, Sonu Shantasani. So, Jung, right before he died, he sent a letter to Eugene Rolfe, set in 1960, saying that, have failed.

my utmost task, which was to show the world that soul is real and that everything depends on it. And I think that’s quite a sad way to reach the end of your life and that this is what you’re thinking, that you failed to demonstrate that soul is real. And what I’m thinking now is that seeing the popularity of the Red Book.

and I say popularity not in a superficial way but the profound resonance it has had to the collective psyche and in fact how much it reinvigorated Jung and Jung’s thought across several fields certainly where I am moving professionally.

I wonder what you would say, because I think actually his thinking has been vindicated. And people are able, as I said earlier, that we are likely the readers that were to come, that this material resonates with us, and people take it into their strides.

Josh Mortensen (54:38.357)

I agree. Yeah, I think that he would… it is interesting that he would end his life feeling that way, that he had failed, but at the same time had never shown any desire to publish the Red Book. And it’s an irony, right? Because you can tell people they have a soul as much as you want, but until they have a direct experience with it, they’re not going to know for certain what that means.

Katerina Sarafidou (54:46.37)

Yes.

Josh Mortensen (55:07.321)

And think that’s one of the reasons a lot of people have struggled with Jung’s writing over time is because they’re reading it and trying to intellectualize it. But if they haven’t had the direct experience, then they’re not really sure what it means. And so I think that’s why a lot of artists and writers and creators and those who are genuinely trying to explore the seekers of the world, there’s something about Jung that really resonates because you have this direct experience with the

the archetypes that he’s talking about and the parts of ourselves that he’s talking about and the stories and the emotion and the intuition that comes along with it. Because when you feel it, like, yeah, was something, it was probably something that I had felt my whole life and I didn’t really know what it was or how to explain it until I had read Jung. And I think that’s powerful. Once you can kind of put words to it.

Katerina Sarafidou (56:07.576)

Yes. When did you come across you and Josh? So when did you first meet?

Josh Mortensen (56:14.295)

Yeah, good question. It hasn’t been that long. I was thinking about this recently, how much of a deep dive I’ve done into it and how much I’ve read and talked to people about it. It’s probably been about six or seven years now since I first came across Jung. yeah, so not, sorry.

Katerina Sarafidou (56:30.702)

So after the red book

Josh Mortensen (56:35.545)

after yeah well after the red book was published yeah probably probably 10 years after the red book was published that I first came across Jung myself and the way that I came across Jung was that I I grew up in a religious setting and in my early 30s I left the religion of my birth and my wife and I we had gotten married in this church and raised our kids in this church for a few years and then

It was honestly raising kids in the church that we realized, we don’t want to do this to our kids. We don’t want to, you know, kind of enforce these ideas on them that we’re not certain of ourselves. And so we walked away from the church and then I would say I had like a Nietzschean kind of nihilist collapse where I couldn’t, I just felt like I didn’t trust any of the institutions anymore. I had a lot of feelings of like betrayal. And so I just went on this…

journey, I guess, or this exploration of trying to figure out a new framework for understanding reality, because again, religion was my framework. And I started off by looking into science and studying evolution. And eventually, I think I was trying to

read different myths from different times and about different gods, and I really wasn’t connecting with them. And then at some point I read Joseph Campbell, and I read enough Joseph Campbell, like when I read that I thought, this stuff makes sense what he’s talking about as far as the evolution of culture and myth. And he quoted Carl Jung a lot, and one of Joseph Campbell’s kind of aphorisms is that if you read somebody and you like them, then you should read the people that they like to read.

And so I read Joseph Campbell and he led me to Carl Jung. And then I had an experience with Carl Jung where some of the first books I read of his were, you know, his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. And I also read Man and His Symbols, which is about dreams and it’s got a lot of other authors that contributed. But there was this intense feeling of like this numinous connection with the words. And I realized that all throughout my life, I had been dreaming.

Josh Mortensen (58:53.817)

and having experiences and connecting with symbols in a way that I could never explain. once I came across Carl Jung, then all of a sudden it all started to click together. the world pairing, again, pairing kind of science with physics and biology and evolution with the psychology, Carl Jung, depth psychology.

history, culture, we pairing it all together it kind of created a cohesive storyline for me in a sense and then I could also kind of it helped me understand who I was a lot better because I now could see that I was the product of all of this evolution both biological and cultural throughout all of time and it’s just now this is my time and place in all of it.

Katerina Sarafidou (59:48.661)

I mean what you’re describing basically is what you would call the…

crisis of consciousness that comes at some point in life, that means you have to reorient yourself towards the matrix, the cultural symbolic matrix that has nurtured you and made you who you are today, and then you now have to detach yourself from it and develop a new relationship with it. So basically that is the…

the starting point of individuation for you in the second part of life because we are all, as you said, I we’re all born in a certain logos, in a certain symbolic matrix that permeates everything we do, it permeates our moral sort of values, our actions, decisions and relationships and that sort of gives us a shape and

and sustenance, but the whole point is that one has to develop an individual relationship to it after a while. And as you said earlier,

It can be very painful to sort of realize that what you have been born in or what you have been taught or what you have been exposed to are not absolute truths but they have a certain psychological basis that is obscured or overlooked and that you have to find your own way towards it. It’s quite painful but it’s a necessary part of the process, yes.

Josh Mortensen (01:01:38.2)

Yeah, absolutely. And Carl Jung’s idea of individuation, think another word for it is just growing up. You know, I’ve read his Psychology of the Unconscious, and it’s all of this. I mean, it’s a dense, it’s one of his dense books, but it’s got a lot of a lot of analysis and kind of it’s, it’s academic, in a sense, the way that it’s written. But the whole point is that there is a process of going from being a child to being an adult.

and

Katerina Sarafidou (01:02:09.623)

Which text are you referring to? yeah.

Josh Mortensen (01:02:11.925)

It’s called psychology of the unconscious and it’s about the libido. It’s about sublimating the libido to the outer world. it’s, find it fascinating. part of this is, is when moving from being a child to being an adult, what you actually have to do in some sense is accept paradox, get to the point where paradox is comfortable or at least tolerable.

Because when you’re a child, everything has to be so certain. It’s like a survival mechanism. You have to know what’s safe and what’s not safe. And you have to know who you can trust and who you can’t trust. But when you become an adult, you have to put away childish things and you have to embrace paradox a little bit. And one of the big paradoxes with myth is that these are things that never actually happen, but are always true. And I think that’s one of the things that the Red Book does.

does for people who read it is it really is the evolution of the myth of our modern times. It’s showing us how to go into the next phase of consciousness to take the myth that we consider the, like you said, the logos of the world that you grew up in to take that thing and move it into the next phase, the evolution of that myth.

Yeah, I’m just, I’m so grateful that the Red Book was eventually published. Even if it was against Carl Jung’s wishes, like I can be, I can be, you know, I could see from his perspective, I can be compassionate or empathetic about it. But at the same time, I’m really glad that it came out because it was, I think it’s a, it’s a very, very important piece.

Katerina Sarafidou (01:04:01.089)

It was not against his wishes, it was just the timing because when you see the Red Book he is addressing a reader. So it was written for an audience, so sometimes he will say, he will address you as you, or he will say friends. So he’s addressing the reader and in fact he edited the Red Book.

for the services of an audience. this is why the reading experience of the Red Book is so vastly different to the Black Books, where the Black Books were not intended for the reader. It really is raw material. But when you see how he edited the Red Book and he added a layer of elaboration and explanation, it was intended for an audience. It’s just that…

the right audience and I would say that it’s us today that we are the right audience. So in some ways it was probably a good call. I think, I mean, in terms of individuation, which you just sort of touched upon, I sort of am picking up on your word paradox, which you say, and I think this is so important and so central to individuation. I would say that this is in fact

the ethics of individuation. So the ethics of individuation is the living engagement with paradox. So for Jung, the splitting into opposites and

is an inescapable existential condition of human consciousness. So we split into opposites. That is an inescapable existential condition of consciousness. But we tend to attach ourselves to one end of the opposites and then push the other end of the opposition into the unconscious and into the shadow. This is, as you say, it’s quite…

Katerina Sarafidou (01:05:59.481)

You mentioned it’s childish and it is easier because then the psyche escapes ambiguity. It’s a safer place to be, you know, because then the paradox, the opposition, the conflict is projected outwards. It’s not in me. It’s out there or someone else represents this opposition. So what he says in the Red Book is that…

because the Red Book is also, he’s writing the Red Book during the war, the beginning of the war and during the war, the first war. And he says that people have to kill the hero in themselves. And because they do not know this, they kill their courageous brother. So it is about sacrificing this,

attachment to one end of the opposites, this heroic attitude which means that we attach our sense of I on a specific end of the opposition and project the other end of the opposition upwards. And the idea is to, as he says, to kill the hero in ourselves, to actually suffer the conflict and the paradox within. This is the real, this is the imagery of

of crucifixion, know, it’s the ego hung on the cross of opposition, that the ego, the individual psyche that has to bear opposites and engage with paradoxes. So this is the idea of moving beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche also puts it. It’s not to become amoral, know, let alone anti-moral.

not going to the side of the opposition. But it’s also not being amoral. As human beings, we don’t have the luxury of being amoral, of sitting on the fence. We can’t sit on the fence. This is a dereliction of duty in some ways. So amoral is just the unconscious and the gods. The human being is a moral agent. We make decisions.

Katerina Sarafidou (01:08:26.062)

and moral choices every day, sometimes very difficult ones and very painful ones. But what we mean by moving beyond good and evil is to try to bring them into a relationship within the individual psyche. So it’s this living engagement with paradox and contending with ambiguity, which is most difficult thing in the world.

It’s the most difficult thing in the world. Opposition and splitting of opposites and projecting the unwanted parts of the world and of ourselves is a place of safety. The ambivalence, ambiguity is the loneliest place to be in the world, but it is essential, it is a fun world. And it is a sacrifice as well.

Josh Mortensen (01:09:20.686)

I think.

Yeah, I think that you have a great way of explaining it. Like you sum it up well, it’s like this tension of opposites. And if you’re not willing to hold that tension, then you’re become imbalanced and identify with one side of it. You’re gonna project it outwards. And circling back to this idea of being childish, the religion that I grew up in has this scriptural verse, and it’s kind of a popular aphorism in the religion.

Katerina Sarafidou (01:09:53.198)

was your religion Josh? What was your religion Josh? it Christianity?

Josh Mortensen (01:09:54.457)

Sorry, what was that?

Josh Mortensen (01:09:59.074)

Yeah, was a version of Christianity, was Mormonism, so I grew up in the LDS church. and there’s this idea that men are that they might have joy, and so there’s this idea that the entire purpose of our existence is joy or happiness, and that was one of the things that was difficult for me that I had to let go of because

Joy and happiness are great, but they’re also just emotions and emotions are fickle and they come and go. And you’re always going to experience ups and downs in life, you know, it’s just kind of silly to, it’s childish to want to always feel good. And I’ve even had conversations with other people who have grown up in that religion, family members even, and they will say, yeah, I would like to become more conscious.

but I’ve heard that conscious, being conscious doesn’t make you more happy or being conscious is, it can make you more depressed, it can make you more difficult. I don’t think it makes me more depressed. In fact, I think I’m far less depressed trying to be conscious. But at the same time, I am aware that I can’t just feel happy all the time because when you’re conscious and you’re holding the tension of those opposites,

A lot of the times what that means for me now is that I just have to actually feel things that I wasn’t willing to feel before. I have to acknowledge things that I wasn’t willing to acknowledge before. And so there is a sense of consciousness, there is a sense where you could say that consciousness is not pleasant all the time. Of course it’s not. But that’s kind of the point is to choose to suffer certain things rather than project them out onto others and by doing so causing more harm in the world.

And so when you talk about morality, I think consciousness in essence is like a higher level of morality because you stop blaming the world and you stop by pulling back the projections, you then stop doing damage in the world in a sense like Carl Jung says, if you’re willing to kill the hero inside of you, you’re not going to go out and kill your heroic brother.

Katerina Sarafidou (01:12:19.01)

Yes, I think the idea of happiness is a big issue. don’t think psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, I don’t think it does well with the idea of happiness. It’s a very superficial concept. I’m not suggesting we embrace moodiness or darkness or whatever.

All I’m saying is actually that you can’t experience deep joy if you are completely unaware of its opposite. the depth of emotion or the depth of experience comes from affirming life fully. If you push, because they’re all part of the human experience, as Jung said,

nothing human is avian to me. They’re part of a whole. I think, and that’s the idea of opposites. The idea of opposites didn’t come with you. It’s a very old idea going back to Heraclitus and Plato, where it says that life consists of opposites. We know health because we know illness.

we appreciate joy because we have experienced sadness. Otherwise it’s all a straight line, it’s all shallow. And I think it’s also quite naive to think that you can escape the darkest aspects of life. You don’t escape them, you project them somewhere. You push them into the unconscious or you see them as fate.

that comes from outside. So it’s a bit naive to think that this… you can escape it. In fact, what you don’t acknowledge in your psyche, it rules you from beneath and you’re not even aware of it. It rules you and you act it out. You act it out on other people.

Katerina Sarafidou (01:14:47.626)

And that’s the problem with projection. Sometimes, know, we all go through life by projecting things outwards in the world. We map our own psyche out there in the world. But part of this growing up is to learn how to withdraw your projections and own them and integrate them. Otherwise, you reach…

at a certain point in life, sometimes late in life, and it’s quite tragic because you see people who have lived a very shallow life and they have no sense of themselves. Because then when we project our psyche outwards for a very long time or in a persistent way, we turn the world.

the replica of our own unknown face, as you also put it. So the world becomes the replica of my own unknown inner world. So my reality is distorted, my relationships are shallow, my sense of fulfillment in life is non-existent. So it’s a bad deal, it’s a bad deal to think.

You can do away with the darker aspects of experience. You don’t. One way or another, you’ll have to negotiate them.

Josh Mortensen (01:16:28.705)

Yeah, absolutely. Well said. And I think about it, I think about it in terms of a tree and the sun being consciousness and the roots being all that darkness that we don’t want to always approach. And if we’re not willing to go deep, go down into that, those depths, then the light of consciousness is going to burn us up and we won’t be able to handle it. So we’ve got to, you got to get balanced in some way. But,

Yeah, Katarina, this has been really great. We just kept going right past the time, so my apologies, but I really enjoyed it. I feel like I could talk to you for hours. And so thank you so much for doing this. If people want to find you, they want to find your work, the circle of analytical psychology, where would they go looking for you?

Katerina Sarafidou (01:17:04.227)

Bye.

Katerina Sarafidou (01:17:16.354)

Yes, they can just reach me through our website. The website is thecircleofanatkapsychology.org.uk

to speak to people and they can reach us there.

Josh Mortensen (01:17:35.321)

Okay, awesome. Well, thank you again, and hopefully we can do this again sometime.

Katerina Sarafidou (01:17:39.609)

Thank you to Josh for very nice talking to you. Bye bye.

Josh Mortensen (01:17:42.254)

You too. Bye.