On Finding Our Soul's Vocation (James Hollis)

Listen now (62 mins) | “You said the important word there and that is the word grown up. To be grown up is what? To recognize, yes, I am accountable for what spills into the world through me..."

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So says James Hollis, a PhD and Jungian analyst who is still in private practice in Washington D.C. Hollis started his career as a professor of humanities before a midlife crisis brought him to his knees—and to the Jung Institute in Zurich. The author of 19 books, Hollis is one of the best interpreters of Carl Jung’s work, making it accessible for all of us who want to understand how complexes, archetypes, synchronicities, and the shadow drive our lives.

Hollis’s books are very meaningful to me—you’ll find a long list in the show notes—and the chance to interview him did not disappoint. In fact, at one point, where he describes what we do to boys as we turn them into men, I actually started to cry. Meanwhile, James Hollis still lectures—you can go to his site to find a way to see him live. The fact that he’s 84 and does not seem inclined to retire—in fact, he told me he has another book coming out next year—is a testament to how a vocation doesn’t feel like work. This is one of my favorite interviews to date. I hope you love it as much as I do.

MORE FROM JAMES HOLLIS, PhD:

Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity

The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves

James Hollis’s Website

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Connie Zweig, “Embracing the Shadow”

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Niobe Way, PhD, “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

It is such a pleasure to be with you and honestly, interviewing you is daunting even though I know you'll guide us through, but you manage—and I also say this as someone who I see a Jungian therapist and I love Jungians—and yet I have so much trouble reading the source. I cannot, it's too difficult for me. So you are one of my very favorite translators. Thank you for your service.

JAMES:

Well, thank you. Thank you. Actually, I didn't know it was a job description, but I've spent the last half century trying to bridge young to the world population and that's what a teacher does. So I think of myself as a teacher primarily.

ELISE:

So let's talk about this moment in time. I want to interview you in some ways about men and the anima and shadow just because I feel like we're in a crisis right now in saying that there's a crisis of masculinity in our culture is to blame women when I see it as the repression and suppression of their own femininity and that the cure for that is not more masculinity maybe.

JAMES:

That's right. Okay.

ELISE:

Can you diagnose this cultural moment that we're in where it feels like there is just shadow everywhere. You do such a good job of breaking down shadow in its forms. What is the shadow and then how does it manifest in our lives?

JAMES:

Well, the shadow is Jung's metaphor for those parts of our psyche that when we make conscious and when they wind up in the world and we have to deal with the consequences of the activity of the shadow, we find troubling, inconsistent with our intentions, maybe contradictory with our values or sometimes asking more of us than we feel comfortable in addressing. It's not synonymous with evil, though evil can come from that. The shadow manifests individually and collectively because in every organization there are shadow issues of power and competition and so forth. No matter how noble the intent of the organization, the shadow follows. Every time you have a new technological advance, for example, the shadow follows. I remember when the internet was first coming out and someone I know said this is going to bring about world peace because dictators now have to worry about their citizens getting information but somewhere else.

And you'd learn that it's not just us against them, but you have to deal with the influx of information. Of course, the shadow has follows the technological advance and shows up ranging from pornography to people being scammed online to the recruitment of fascist groups everywhere and so forth. So the shadow is again, those parts of our humanity that we prefer not to deal with. In other words, no one wants to deal with their vanity or their pettiness or their ambitions, let's say. And so we'll disown them and the shadow will show up in four different ways. Most of all, it's unconscious. And so it just keeps infiltrating our relationships to our children, to our partners and to our neighbors and so forth. Or we sense its presence and then we try to separate from it, maybe blame someone else, project it onto our neighbor, the people across that invisible boundary there you see are the problem, not me.

And when a certain itinerant rabbi said 2000 years ago, one can see the speck in your eye, but miss the log in my own, there's a perfect example of the disowning of the shadow. You see, I can see your faults, but not my own. Or thirdly, one is caught up in them. People like to attend rock concerts, they like to attend sporting events and lose their mind. What happens in Vegas, stay in Venice, Vegas rather. That's again reveling in the shadow or fourthly, we have to make it conscious and then we have a difficulty. It's as Jung pointed out in his 1937 lectures at Yale University, he says A person who can address their own shadow now has a new problem. And the problem is you just can't go around blaming people elsewhere. You have to recognize we share a common humanity. The wisest thing ever said about the shadow came from the Latin playwright, Terrance again to millennia ago who said, nothing human is alien to me.

So I have to recognize I am carrying the whole human project. I'm not exempt from this, and therefore I have to look at my anger, my issues of power, my issues of jealousy, for example, and so forth. To the degree that I can address those things, I'm doing a great contribution to our society because lifting them off of my children, off of my partner, off of my neighbor and so forth, I mean one of them richest areas for shadow expectation or exploration I should say, is to look at the expectations that parents have of their children. They say, well, I want my child to grow up healthy and live their life and so forth, but in the long run, I really want them to show up and be somewhat like me espousing my values and my religion, my politics, and bring home somebody to relate to that I find acceptable.

That kind of thing. And that's not about love, that's about power. And power itself is not a shadow issue. It's the capacity to address life's tasks. It can become shadow ridden when it's caught in a complex or an agenda of some kind, and then it's a different matter. And as Jung pointed out, where power prevails, love is driven out, you see? So it's not that power's the problem, the equitable sharing of power, the exercise of power can be very appropriate and benign. It's when it's caught in those agendas that rise up from our ancestral psyche that they become problematic. I mean, look at the world leaders right now, and when Plato said, we should only be ruled by philosopher kings, well, I'm yet to run into a philosopher king that you see are very disturbed individuals who've seized power and with that pathologize their countries and the relationships with other people and so forth. So they're anything but the examine life that Socrates said was so critical to our wellbeing.

ELISE:

Yeah, it's interesting to think about, and I'm very curious for your thoughts. You mentioned power driving love out, and one way that I would interpret that is that if the feminine, and obviously I would love for you to explain the masculine and the feminine and the Jungian sense and the qualities that we each having both or that women have an animus and men have an anima, the presence of the feminine or the presence of the masculine, but it feels like in this cultural moment where the feminine transcends us, but is love, creativity, nurturance, care, and the masculine, is this direction order truth and maybe power? Is that, do you think that what we're seeing in the way that power is becoming contorted laden with shadow potentially evil, is the masculine unchecked by the feminine or do you think that's a stretch?

JAMES:

Well, it's both accurate and a stretch. First of all, when we use those terms masculine and feminine, we're talking about social constructs and any construct is not going to be particularly applicable to any single individual. And yet we grow up in cultures where those constructs have been determinative and limiting by the way. So we know so well the imposition of gender limitations on women through the years that have been horrific really and debilitating. And the same is true for men, albeit in a different fashion, even if they've had the instruments of power in the culture inwardly, they've been separated from their own souls. And Jung was writing about this over a century ago, and his language is somewhat stereotypical today, we would say, but there's still some value there. And a Spanish analyst by the name of Irene de Castello once talked about the difference between focused awareness and diffuse awareness.

And I think those are useful ways of thinking about the anima and the Animas. Both words mean soul from the Latin, but if man is caught up in goal-driven behavior and competition with others and climbing the ladder of success and ambition and so forth, he's often doing that at the price of his own soul. But he may or may not understand that. I remember one of the financial leaders back in the 1990s who wound up ultimately going to jail because of stock manipulation who had a personal fortune of $400 million more than we've earned in a week or two. And he said, the person at the end of life with the biggest pile of wins. And I remember thinking, that's the most infantile philosophy of life I've ever heard. That's the philosophy of the sand pile. I have a bigger pile of sand than you do. Of course I'm now at the end of my life, so I'm dead. What an infantile philosophy. And yet that had driven his life. I don't mean to be sounding judgmental, I'm just being descriptive here what I'm talking about. Here's the person who hasn't figured out that he might be here for some other reason than to acquire money,

That what's the nature of your relationship to your inner life? What's the relationship to the people in your world and so forth worth? So part of what's happening now is the recognition that gender descriptions are really social constructs and therefore can be deconstructed, has allowed so many women, mostly those with the capacity for education and affluence, admittedly so it hasn't reached everyone take hold of the opportunity and live a different kind of journey, which is stunning and impressive to see how many are in medical school now, how many in law school and how many are in the field of therapy and so forth, which is extraordinary. But for men, basic definitions have stayed pretty much the same. You're supposed to go out there, be competitive against your neighbor, life's a zero sum, your winner or loser. You're supposed to go out there and be competitive and achieve whatever is success in life and then arrive at the top and realize that there's no there.

That's the terrible paradox in all of this. And so men have been separated from their souls, which again is what anima means is the inner life of purpose and meaning and depth and dignity and direction, I should say as well is a kind of foreign body, so to speak. So at this time, so many men are adrift because traditional definitions are no longer applicable. We're not out there in most cases fighting to survive, but one is working somewhere in an office in front of a computer screen or something like that. And the understanding of what it means to be a man now is really up for grabs and for only a few has it occurred that the great venture of our time is the exploration Inwardly, if you think there are difficulties out there, start really dealing with your own complexities within and the mixture of voices that are going on at any given moment and start struggling with that. And then you have a true adventure. And when you do address that, you're again lifting that off of others because what is unaddressed here is still going to spill into the world out there and burden your partner, your children, your colleagues and others.

ELISE:

I want to come back to the shadow, but just thinking about in The Broken Mirror, when you one suggest for couples, which I loved, but then you turn to the interior lives of so many men, you talk about how restrictive the lives of men are and how the lives of men are mostly governed by fear and disconnection. You asked some stunning questions. Can you talk a bit about what you see?

JAMES:

Yeah. You see men are not anywhere in their culture used to asking questions about their own life. It's more about what you need to function out there. So to say that men's lives are governed by fear is the dirty little secret in a way. It is to say you are supposed to act like you're calm, cool, and in charge of things when in fact it's a roiling mixture of fear and other emotions. And so some of the questions I would ask of a man, what do you find difficult about being a man? And most men have never thought about that. Women think about these things all the time. I ask them, when did you shut down? Because most men emotionally get shut down between five and eight years old because the savage life of the playground is such that you learn very early to open yourself is to risk shame and humiliation.

And every man I know has gone through shaming and humiliation. So they spend a lot of time trying to distance themselves from that. So they have lost contact with asking a question like, well, what quickens your own soul? Really what stirs you? What draws you in a way that is really important to you? And another element to this is the breaking of the linkage between father and son because so many sons who want to model themselves after their fathers, well, their fathers are missing. They're lost somewhere out there, or they're disconnected from their inner life. And so there's this very deep hunger for the wise father who can help them, show them, provide models to them, and that's another element. And so generally speaking, men are adrift and many are at risk of following some sort of guru or some sort of a charismatic figure who will tell them what to do, give them their marching orders, and ultimately leads 'em over the cliff.

ELISE:

As the mom of two young boys, I think about this all the time, how do I keep them connected to their intuition, their emotions, that inner voice, that their soul truly, and it's hard because the culture is strong and insistent probably stronger than any single parent's best intentions.

JAMES:

That's right. Well, one of the things you can do certainly is to affirm them, model your own good a development as an example of the focused awareness and task orientation, but also give them permission to honor that inner world to say ultimately what you're here for is to figure out what's important for you and to try to follow that. Yes, you have to solve the task of how do you support yourself and how do you form relationship and so forth. But ultimately, you're here to figure out what is really calling you in your life and to pursue that. Now, most men have never had that kind of permission. Quite the contrary, we were defined by what you see around you. I had to be visited by a significant depression at midlife to begin to investigate these things myself. I as a young person was as caught up in climbing the ladder as anybody else was. And as I said, I achieved everything that I thought I was supposed to do by the time I was early thirties, and then I found it was pretty empty there. So depression came and that's what sent me into therapy for the first time. And by the way, the word psychotherapy from the Greek means literally listening to or attending to the soul

And psychopathology translated from the Greek says basically attending to the expression of the suffering of the soul and moment, you realize what that's all about. Then you realize this very imprecise term that I'm using soul is neglected in modern psychology and most modern therapy and certainly in corporate life. By so I mean simply the intuitive recognition that there's something inside of each of you that knows you better than you know yourself. That is not only taking care of business for you, growing your toenails, digesting your breakfast, doing various things, but is also seeking to heal the wounds that come inevitably in life, but also trying to give some purpose and direction. When you're in contact with that, it doesn't necessarily free you from conflict in the world or from hard times, but it gives you a sense of sustaining purpose or you have a sense of meaning in that work. For example, as a child, I couldn't have imagined spending my adult life listening to the suffering of other people. I mean, that was my job, you see? I mean, I thought I could be a major league baseball player. The problem is

ELISE:

Obviously

JAMES:

Got the body for that, not me. And yet I find myself deeply moved and deeply informed by precisely doing that, and I'm still working at that. So that's the difference between job and vocation,

What you do to pay your bills. And I've certainly done difficult jobs from time to time, from digging ditches to cleaning houses when I was retraining and so forth. But calling Atu vocal is, what are you called to do with your life's energy? Doesn't have to translate into work. I'm talking about in terms of your relationships and your appreciation of nature or your appreciation of aesthetics or whatever form it takes. What you can do for your sons, I think, is to give them permission to have their own life. I feel most people don't really feel permission to feel what they feel or to pursue what they pursue in life. And I think that I wasn't exposed to that. I just had to somehow fight my way through all of that and to recognize in the end, if you honor that which is seeking expression through you, that's the best person you can share with other people. Ultimately, it's not selfishness. Quite the contrary. It's humbling. If you want power and status, well, there's the avenue to that, but again, you get there and it's empty.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, that's beautiful. And I feel very closely connected to my vocation and committed hopefully to contending with my own shadow and seeing that as my primary opportunity to grow up, get bigger, expand my consciousness, hold space, do my part for the collective shadow, which I see as not only a responsibility, but perversely great fun or just incredibly interesting, I guess engaging work and difficult. Of course,

JAMES:

Yes, if you can stand it, it's the best work you can ever do because it's humbling. It's not inflating, it's humbling. Here's something else I didn't know about myself, and it's not so pretty necessarily when I make it conscious. You see, you can use the important word there, and that is the word grownup. To be grownup is what to recognize. Yes, I am accountable for what spills into the world through me, and if I don't want to be, then I'm just irresponsible and immature. And if I want to be accountable, then I have to start inquiring about from when are these things coming from in me? If I don't do that, they'll just keep happening. And secondly, to know that I'm accountable for those consequences and thirdly, that I have to find some source of guidance when I'm not depending on simply the dictates of the culture outside me. You can put it this way. We all need to find what supports us when nothing supports us. That's a paradox you see, but essential supports you when the outer structures and marching orders that you got from family and culture when they don't work anymore.

ELISE:

Yes, and at this moment in culture too, it feels like so many of us are in an arrested development where we, I don't know what we want. We want penance, we want restitution. We want someone to, I guess in some deeper way, parent us.

JAMES:

We want somebody to take care of us. We want someone to tell us what it's all about. We want somebody to fix it all for us. I mean those infantile and understandable needs for the child because we're powerless. But for the adult to still be driven by that, something hasn't happened yet for that person. That's why I say many people are not yet adults. Even if they walk around in big bodies or in big roles in life, they haven't really stepped into the depth, dignity, and dangers of their own journey.

ELISE:

I just need to sit with that for a second.

A lot of my work, I wrote a book that came out last year about the price women pay for goodness. It's really about the collective shadow of women and the way that we've repressed and suppressed the structure is the seven deadly sins, and then projected so many of these qualities which are deeply human and part of our wholeness unto other people. And so I've done a lot of work with women in terms of reconnecting, even using envy really as a way to understand what it is that you want and maybe have been unwilling to acknowledge or see or accept. Is there a corollary for men who are even maybe potentially more disconnected to that calling that vocation? Is it in our dreams? How do you help people?

JAMES:

Sure. Lemme just back up a little bit and say that I've been asked by women's groups from time to time to speak about men's lives and so forth, and I said, imagine three things. First of all, that all the people, your close friends, the ones you would share, your worries about, your children, your marriage, your body, everything with those people are gone forever. You can never speak about that to anybody. Secondly, you have to sever your deep connection to something that gives you a sense of guidance, whether it's your intuition, your instinct, whatever you call it. Thirdly, you have to enter a competitive world in which your value as a human being is essentially defined by your capacity to be productive and meet standards set by total strangers. Now, if you think about that, you realize what that leads to is self estrangement and enormous amount of loneliness.

And that's why men have dumped upon women too great an expectation for compensating for that and or self anesthetizing medications of one kind or another, because that of course does violence to the soul. And so underneath that, you see again, the frontier for men is within, not that you don't function in the outer world, you have to take care of business out there. Whatever you need to do to address supporting yourself, your family, et cetera, that's the easy part. The hard part comes when you start dealing with what is unaddressed inside of you. And there's a question I've always raised with couples, for example, that I think is essential for each of us as individuals. And that is what are you asking of someone else that when you really think about it and you process it, what are you asking of someone else that you need to address yourself?

That's because we expect the other to fix it somehow take care of it. My sense of wellbeing is in the hands of my partner, for example, or my children are carrying my unlived life or something like that. Jung said, the greatest burden the child must bear is the only of life of the parent. That means that the child will be stuck at the same level, and I could give you tons examples from therapy or spend their life trying to overcompensate for that, trying to get unstuck, you see? So to live your life with a sense of purposefulness and risk and the willingness to venture into that is freeing to every child. It opens the door for them. And if you don't do that, then the door is shut. And how are they going to deal with that? You see,

ELISE:

God, yeah, that made me cry. I've never cried on this podcast before, but thinking about the severing of boys and men from a whole circle of relatedness is devastating.

JAMES:

Yeah, well, it is.

ELISE:

It really is. Yeah.

JAMES:

When I wrote the book Under Saturn’s Shadow about men, I was touched by letters and emails that I got from total strangers in the Australian outback. You think how in the world they ever read this book or something like that saying, I always thought there was something wrong with me until I read your book. And I realized this is something all other men go through and I feel less isolation and I feel less shame now. So that was in a way predictable as I think about it. But at the time, I was a little surprised by it. And then I began to realize all the more deeply how isolated men are, they can be with each other at rubbing elbows all the time, but generally speaking, they're topics of communication or sports and politics, both are out there. You see, it's almost never what's going on in here, which women have been able to share in a way that is ultimately giving them a sense of community, a sense of relatedness and a sense of support in all of that.

ELISE:

Yeah, and I'm thinking about one of my closest friends happens to be my neighbor as well. And so we walk every weekend almost without fail, and in a way it's a shadow dumping for us. Sometimes we just need to be able to freely express ourselves and then look at what we've said and be like, what's happening in a very safe container to say, why is this person twisting me like this? Or why am I having this extreme reaction to something that's happening in the world? And we see it that way or have conditioned ourselves to see it that way where it's not just a event and we aren't firmly holding each other accountable either, because that wouldn't be that fun. But in a way it's like, oh, I am letting this come up. How does one recognize shadow material as it comes out of us? I'm sure it varies, but I bet you have an answer.

JAMES:

Well, first of all, as I said most commonly, the shadows operating unconsciously, you might

Question later, why did I get so angry yesterday? Or why did I say that? Or why did I freeze at that critical moment? You see one may or may not revisit it, but usually we see it after the fact. It's hard to catch it in the flush of the moment, but you can be pretty sure that the normal range of human emotions, we'll be present in all human beings. And you mentioned the seven deadly sins. I actually have a chapter in one of the books on the seven deadly sins, and I said, these are not terms we tend to use today, but they were perceptions of how people get into trouble and

Why is it they get into trouble? You see, it's because there's so much that's unexamined within them. It's human, for example, to feel envy. But alright, then being envious is now a task for you. How do you feel good about your journey without having to be competitive and do it better than your neighbor or something like that or achieve some kind of recognition for that? Because I noticed that four of the seven deadly sins were all based on the basic perception. I am not enough in myself to be satisfactory. Well, who said that? Right? Where did that come from? Who has the power to tell you what is satisfactory? So you see there's a deferred accountability there. I'm the one accountable for these feelings that I have. Or another one is anger. Anger is human. You can't avoid it from time to time, but anger can fuel your resolve to address things rather than simply something that carries you away. And greed is another one. I don't have enough. Gluttony is another one. I am not enough in myself. I have to keep filling myself with something because it feels pretty empty in there. And so all of the deadly sins, so to speak, which were obviously from a judgmental standpoint, are very much part of our human nature and I'm accountable for each one of them. So as antique as the concepts may be, the word sin itself had originally come from a word that meant to miss the mark. It was an archery term. Nobody hit the target all the time. Nobody hits dead center. Welcome to the human story. We are, that's why I said nothing human is alien to me. So every once in a while, we need to think of ourselves as we just mess things up. You can have the best of plans, but you mess it up. Well, where did that come from? What's that about?

ELISE:

No. And I write about the sins as essentially an internal GPS so that we can use them to guide our reaction to the world. And here's a fun fact. I don't know how much you know about the history of the sins, but they were never in the Bible and they came out of the desert in the fourth century. And the eighth thought, distracting thought was sadness, which I include in the book, in the context of men being disconnected from their feeling. And it's fascinating to me that one, when Pope Gregory assigned them all to Mary Magdalene and turn them into the sins that that's the one he dropped. Because I feel like our culture is, there's so much grief.

JAMES:

That's right. That's right.

Yeah, I think that's true. There's a deep abiding sadness. Sadness for what? Well, for one thing, if people really reflect there's a sadness for the earth that we've so ravaged and it's beginning to take its revenge on us, there's sadness for one's disconnect from others. There's sadness from the unlived life. There's sadness from being disconnected from what your life really wants you to do. See, the first half of life is governed by this imperative. What does the world want of you? How do you mobilize enough energy to deal with it? What your parents want, what the school teacher wants, what the employer wants, what the larger society wants, et cetera. Well, that's part of developing an ego consciousness and being functional in the world. But then the question is now is that what I'm supposed to do the rest of my life? Is that what I'm here for?

To be socially adapted? And I think the question of the second half of life is quite a different thing, and that is what is wanting to enter the world through me, which may have very little to do with your desire, your intentionality, or what makes life easy for you. That's why I said I could never have imagined. I mean, my early life was an academic and it was rich and valuable and I still love teaching as you can see, but it was something that allowed me to stay up here and not have to deal with what was going on down here.

That's why I was privileged by my own psyche. And I wouldn't have thought this at the time to have a depression that pulled me down into my first hour of therapy. It was from that I had to begin to explore all that had been left behind. So there's sadness for the unlived life, sadness for the road, not taken sadness for the journey one has abandoned because something in us wants us to engage in the mystery of life. Yung said, life is a short pause between two great mysteries. And the point is we don't know from once we come or whether we go if anywhere, but right now is a short pause. What are you going to do with it? Another way I put this is from time to time things happen in our lives. The question now is how are you to live your life in the face of that over which you may have little power. In my own life, I'm dealing with aging of course and health. I nearly died a couple of years ago. I've had major health issues, but I'm still here. I'm still engaged and my life is still calling me to engage. That's why we're having this conversation today. So that's not something that easy or comfortable, it's just meaningful. And what is meaningful allows you to overcome your inhibitions, allows you to overcome your fears, overcome the fear of shaming, for example, and so forth

ELISE:

And energy. Clearly I think it we perceive work is draining us, but energy maybe comes from a vocation that your work in some way creates some momentum in your life. I mean, I can't imagine ever stop working. I hope I have a career that's as long as yours. It's amazing. And that I would keep going. Are you a golfer? No.

JAMES:

No. I played golf when I was young and I haven't played for 50, 60 years and I don't miss it really. So I have a lot of interesting things going on. And I mean people's dreams alone are fascinating.

Didn't make it up from a conscious standpoint, but sleep research has told us that we average approximately six dreams per night and everybody's going to say, oh, I don't dream that much, or I don't remember my dreams, or I think my dreams are caused by what I saw on television last night, or something like that. Well, they're missing the point. There are two issues here. One, the dreams go on regardless. Therefore it has something to do with what nature wants, not what you want, but what nature is doing inside of you. And it's probably repairing and restoring, but it's also reacting. If you stop and pay attention, it's reacting. And you'd have to begin to say, alright, there's something again, something in me that knows me better than I know myself and it's able to observe my life and offer a point of view. You can put it this way, said, if you knew there was a 2 million year old wise soul within you, wouldn't you want to talk to that person? Wouldn't you want to know their perspective? And he said, that's the world from which the dreams come. You don't make your dreams up from a conscious standpoint, try to drum up a certain dream with a certain theme tonight, and it pays no attention, but it's there. And further, if you live to be 86 years of your life will be spent dreaming, not sleeping up to spent dreaming, but six years. Again, that says something about the importance of the psychodynamics going on within each of us.

ELISE:

Yeah, I dream, but I lose my dream. Is there a way to build the muscle of retention?

JAMES:

Well, first of all, it is not something you can manage or control, right?

Yeah. It's interesting that when people enter therapy where a therapist is willing and able and competent to address dreams, there's no magic dictionary to explain them. You have to work with them. People are more likely to remember there's a certain amount of intentionalities. I will remember my dream tonight. And to have a pad and a pen there to write the alarm clock is the enemy of dream retention. You need to stay there for a moment and say, what was I thinking or feeling? And write it down as quickly as possible. But most people that I see will have at least one dream. They remember a week and I ask them to bring it. And some remember half a dozen dreams a week. It depends on the person and it's not the only thing we address, but it's one way to get some sense of what is the psyche saying inside of you. And it is saying something. It's the wisdom of nature, not the wisdom of your culture. It will critique, for example, some of your conscious intentions or values and so forth. And that's why I say over and over this work is humbling, not inflating in your sense of self-importance. This is not self-indulgence. This is not naval gazing in a way. It's the hardest work you'll ever do, but it is a calling. You see, what is my own soul saying to me about me and about this life journey?

ELISE:

You mentioned that life is held between two mysteries, where we come from and where we go. And at the beginning of our conversation you talked about how shadow is not a synonym for evil necessarily. How do you think about evil? Do you think of it as a energy source or force outside of us or something that we part of our behavior? Or how do you think of evil?

JAMES:

It's a mystery. First of all, I don't have an definitive answer to that question. Much of what we evil is simply our human ego attitude. If Jaws wants to eat me, it's not being a bad fish, it's just being a fishy fish. It does what sharks do. And if cancer is eating me, I may have an attitude about that, but it's not evil, it's nature, nature. So we have to recognize the human attitude toward this is often informed by our complexes that want our own sovereignty and endurance and well, we're at it. Why not immortality, right? But secondly, it's clear that the whole range of human possibilities is carried within each of us. What sends a person down a path is hard to know for sure. When Hannah re went to Jerusalem to the trial of Eichman, she went there, she said, expecting to see the devil. And what she saw was this mild-mannered civil servant. He was the typical anonymous figure who kept the machine going, so to speak. One of the things he did was solve transportation problems. It was above his pay grade what the trains were carried now.

And she coined a phrase, the banality of evil that some people were offended by as if she was normalizing it or legitimizing it. What she was talking about and how it comes out of ordinary people and the camps and the evil that was done. And all of these things were not by monsters, but by human beings like us. Now, every once in a while you'll come across a person whose relationship, whether it's what's happened to them or something genetic where there's an inherent malignancy it seems that keeps hurting other people. And inside that person's soul is an enormous vacancy, so to speak. Every once in a while you find a malignant narcissism, for example, and the narciss person who we all have narcissistic wounds that say wounds to our sense of importance or wellbeing. But a narcissist is the kind of person who stares in the mirror and nobody stares back inwardly.

They're empty. That's why they have to use power control, manipulation of one kind or another to receive the valuation of others. If you're constantly worried about how people are thinking about you, it's because you haven't owned your own journey. Narcissism is a defense against emptiness, and the narcissist will, as I said, use his or her capacities for controlling others or manipulating others. And it's a very arid zone inside. So back to your basic question, evil. Well, some of it is a human definition and you could say going without a mask over your face could be evil in some culture or some other practice that's normal here. Becomes defined by the culture as wrong here becomes so to speak, an evil. So we have to recognize a lot of what we call evil as relative to the situation, but it's clear from the standpoint of nature or divinity.

Death is not evil. Suffering is not evil. It's normal. Yet there is within us the capacity to do something that is self-serving and at some level to enjoy it. There was a fine article in The Atlantic by Ron Rosenman where he talked about the link between Hitler and his associates laughing about the coverup of the concentration camps and Osama bin Laden laughing about the burning of the towers that collapsed and killed so many people. And he said in that laugh, there was a deliberate enjoyment of the malignancy. And he labeled that as absolute evil, the enjoyment of the suffering of someone else, which I think is an important distinction. We've all done evil things, most of it unwittingly, Simone Devore said once in a thought that chills anybody who's a parent just by being yourself, you hurt your children. Well great, right? We had that little bundle of joy, a lifetime of worry begins and you don't know how you're harming that person.

Most parents are operating out of their best lights at the point, at that moment saying, well, this is what I think is right for my child. But in the end, none of us knows what's right for the soul of another person. A good part of my therapeutic work, and as you would know yourself, is trying to undo the parental intentions or the parental instructions or the parental limitations or the causes of parental behaviors or whatever. So the very people who brought this child into life are often the source of their greatest suffering. And there's a paradox there. And so again, part of that work is as you know for an individual to recognize, I am not what happened to me. Many times we get defined by what happened to us. And that's unfortunate. So child's defined by poverty, a child's defined by alcoholism, defined by abuse or racism or sexism or whatever form rather than stuff happens. And what comes out of that is the story that I have about that. And often that story underneath all this is really the question, what is your life journey about? That's the question you have to keep coming to. And what might be right for a certain stage of the journey is sometimes outgrown.

And there's another journey that is calling for here. Give you a quick example. I had a client who came right on schedule age 40. Her last child had just left her first dream. She's in a hospital and she feels there's something terribly wrong with her, but she doesn't know what it is. And a relative of hers comes to her and says to her, and I'm changing the name here, Joanne, it's time to die. And that's the end of the dream. And she also was waiting for her first hour of therapy. And this is a dream she brought. And she was naturally looking at it from a conscious standpoint and she said, does this mean I have a terminal illness? And I said, well, not for a few decades, let's hope. Right? It was a perfect example. And I happen to know this many years later, she's still alive and she entered our world, by the way, as therapist, but she had filed her instructions to the letter in terms of her ethnic and cultural background, but had been done.

That's over. And it was interesting that her psyche said to her, we're going to pull out your favorite relative. And we examined why that person would show up in the dream. She said, well, she's the one person who was always seeing me as I was and supporting me. And I said, well, you see, there's the agent of growth and change in your life. That life you've known was fine. It's been done. You're going to create another family and produce more children when you're 40 onward. That's not the way this works. And that energy that was put there has to now move in a different direction. In my own life, there was a point where I didn't do any writing whatsoever. And so my last child drove through town from graduate school en route to her life in another part of the country. I felt the usual empty nest syndrome, but I did that old therapist trick, what would you say to someone else who brought you this problem? And I said, well, I would say your energy was well spent. Here's the product. She's a self-determining young lady who's off to her career. She's doing exactly what she's supposed to do and the energy you put into that has now come back to you. What are you going to do about that?

And that's what has led to 19 books since then. I wrote one early just in the world of academia to prove I could do it. That's part of the game. But the other 19 were coming from a different place. They were personally important. So that energy comes back to you. What are you going to do with it in service To what values? That's the key.

ELISE:

Yeah. Just to sort of hammer home this evil. I think that's so right, everything you were saying, but is that what's present when you talk about the rock concerts? Not the rock concerts are evil, but I feel like I sense it as more of an unconscious mob energy at times.

That’s completely out of control, out of conscious control. And that to me, it feels yes, like a mystery, but also some sort of energy that can enter, not necessarily by saying yes, but because we're not home.

JAMES:

That's right. No, nothing wrong with rock concerts. I'm just saying anytime you have a mob or you have a group as you can put it, the larger the group, the lower the level of consciousness. And there's something very seductive about entering into the group psychology. That's how mass movements are on a superficial level, that's what fashions are. Everybody has to rush out and buy the same clothing or the same new object or something like that. What is that about? Really stop and think about what is that about? You see? And part of the shadow there is I haven't found my particular standpoint here, I haven't found who I am in this mix. And it's very seductive to be pulled into the group so you don't have to stop and think. There's a fundamentalist inside of each person wants clarity, external authority, black and white values. So this is right, this is wrong, et cetera. And that received authority here. And that's all a way of deflecting my personal accountability. And that's something that is a shadow issue. Wherever you find mass movements or groups or organizations, again, however well intended, they may be,

ELISE:

Yeah, they might start out with wonderful intentions, but over time, people and groups seem to get perverted or corrupted by power.

JAMES:

And the old saying, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And organizations ultimately tend to evolve towards groups that refuse self-examination, do not like to be critiqued, privileged their leadership, whether it's academia or religious group or government, whatever. And the chief ethic then evolves not to serve the values that were the founding intention, but the self-preservation of the organization for the sake of its continuing now. All of that is shadow. And that's why a good institution can also be oppressive to people because it's bringing those values rather than the original intent.

ELISE:

Yeah. Oh, it requires a certain amount of vigilance and work, doesn't it?

JAMES:

Yeah. It is hard work, but it's the best work you can ever do. It's more interesting, more exciting, I've said to people, this is not about a curing you because you're not a disease. It's about making your life more interesting to you. And you could think, oh really? Is that what this? Yeah. If your life's interesting, the journey is rich and valuable. If it's not, it's pretty deadly, isn't it?

ELISE:

Sure. This is one of my favorite conversations to date. Thank you so much, truly, and thank you for your work. I'm glad I haven't read everything that you've written yet, because I would like 19 more books, please. Alright. You seem to have infinite energy.

JAMES:

Well, there's one more coming next year. I can't guarantee beyond that.

ELISE:

Wow. I actually cried. I haven't cried during a pulling the thread conversation, I don't think. But that section, when he was talking about the experience of men, really hit me in the heart. He wrote in his book, imagine that all of your close friends here and elsewhere are cut away from your life forever. Those friends with whom you share your worries about your children, your marriage, your sex life, or lack thereof. Your body, your troubles in general are never again available to you. Yeah. In the broken mirror, he writes really powerfully about men and also about couples, but all of his books are a treat. If you want to understand the way that our interiority often unconscious becomes visible, and I'm so grateful to thinkers, teachers, therapists, and writers like James Hollis for making really complex material accessible, clear, available. It's such an incredible service.

I hope to have him on again soon. If you like this episode, please share it. I really loved this conversation. If you like today's episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.