Jungian analyst Murray Stein in his office in Zürich. Photo by Laura London. (I took this photo of Dr. Stein after a very long journey to his office in 2015. Please stop using it without my permission.)
A summary of the topics discussed on Episode 9 – my interview with Jungian analyst Murray Stein, recorded in Zürich on November 25, 2015:
1. Religious extremism
2. The dark side of Joseph Campbell's ‘finding your personal myth’
3. Luigi Zoja’s book, Paranoia
4. How ISIS is grounded in a myth
5. What if Russia were to attack Turkey in retaliation?
6. Jung’s vision before WWI, and how he saw WWII coming in the dreams of his patients and in his own inner work
7. Why he thinks it would be dangerous for us to have ‘a leader,’ a Churchill, right now
8. His suggestion to Jungians: go inward, follow your own dreams, don’t listen to leaders, follow your inner voice, try to keep sane, and try to keep your balance.
9. Look for cover because it’s going to run its course. And we don’t know what that course will be.
10. Putin-Erdoğan-Obama
11. The need to act vs. the need to understand
12. Holding the tension of the opposites: “If enough individuals did it, it would have an effect on the collective.”
13. You can’t go directly to the collective and tell them what to do. The most effect you can have is on yourself and then hope that this will extend to the people you know. That, gradually, over time, will have an effect on the culture.
14. The difference between Jungians and Freudians
15. How he thinks the Islamist extremists are suffering from a kind of collective, cultural inferiority feeling, and that they compensate with feelings of superiority.
16. The French educational system
17. The genius of Jung is that he was interested in ALL religions but he didn’t identify with any of them.
18. How Jungians are open to the movement of the spirit, wherever it comes from
19. On his new book, Minding The Self: the idea behind this book is that the Jungian approach to spirituality is to stay open to what the unconscious offers.
20. How such a simple thing as paying attention to your dreams grounds you in yourself
21. Zürich is like the Mecca for Jungians
22. The three Jungian training programs in Zürich: ISAP, the Zentrum, and the Jung Institute
23. Donald Kalsched’s books on trauma
24. The publication of Erich Neumann’s correspondence with Jung
25. His book, Jung’s Map of the Soul
26. The North American organization, the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts
27. How and why Jung came up with the term Analytical Psychology