Scandal, Shadow, and the Underworld: Where the Symbolic Meets the Political

Listen to the full episode here:

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In this Patreon exclusive episode, recurring guest and friend of the podcast Dr. Bob Langan returns to help unpack a scandal unfolding within the community of analytical psychology and Jungian media. It is one that sheds light on an already-perforated boundary between the symbolic and political registers, and more pointedly reveals the limits of the Jungian framework as it is often employed today to fend off the intrusion of far-right ideology into its inner circles.

Taking the public collapse of the popular podcast This Jungian Life (a lawsuit between its co-hosts, allegations of pseudonymous anti-trans activism, and the installation of a producer with ties to The Epoch Times) as a case study, Craig and Bob trace how the reification of archetypes, the politics of projection, and the discipline's own economic and institutional pressures leave it vulnerable to exactly the reactionary capture it claims to diagnose.

Bob's website: https://www.roberthlangan.com/
ig: roberthlangan
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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to Left Hand. This is Craig from the Podcast. Today's episode is a Patreon exclusive, which means if you're listening on YouTube or Spotify or Apple Podcasts, you're going to hear about five minutes. But if you pivot to our Patreon account, you will get the full 90-minute discussion. It's a wide-ranging discussion that uses a scandal that's currently unfolding in the world of Jungian psychology to address what Bob and I believe are some of the problems and challenges with interfacing the symbolic and political dimensions of life. Bob has a class coming at Acid Horizon Research Commons. Information on that will be in the show notes below, along with the Patreon link to access this episode. Okay, let's listen to all right. Bob's with us here today. Bob, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I'm doing good, Craig. How you doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

I'm doing well. We've decided to have this discussion. Bob and I were going to have a chat about this anyway, so we thought we would just record it and offer it to our left-hand patrons here, primarily because I think it edges up against some of the very issues that this podcast was initially intended to address, which is in broad terms, how is it that the symbolic dimension of experience, imagination, interfaces with our political life? And where might there be gaps or pitfalls in navigating the divide between the symbolic and political registers? And Bob and I, we have skin in this game, as it were. And recently something came to our attention, which we might have to do a little bit of front loading to inform some viewers about, given that Bob and I have an extensive interest in, at least in my case, in my younger days, had an interest in Jungian psychology. And that interest has wavered and transformed and metamorphosized in many different ways since then. Bob, who has written a PhD on Jung and Spinoza, and who has a class coming up at Acid Horizon Research Commons, where he's going to teach you the hidden spinozist aspect of Jung's work. One of the things that both Bob and I do is we kind of keep tabs on the community surrounding both the work of Carl Jung and what we would call Jungianism or Jungian-isms, which there are many of, or at least a few of anyway. One thing that recently came to the attention of Bob and myself was an incident that is ongoing on what is pretty much one of the biggest guiding lights in Jung-related media today, which is a podcast called This Jungian Life, which features three Jungian analysts who are named Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, and Lisa Marciano. And they have been quite successful, I think, in reinvigorating an interest in the work of Carl Jung. And it's one of the things where I appear, like when I listen to that particular podcast, I'm there as a kind of fly on the wall, a sort of tourist. I will say I started listening to it incidentally back in 2018, 2019, then the pandemic came. And when I didn't, when I didn't have a job, I had much more time to listen to podcasts. And this podcast caught my ear, particularly, I have to say, because one of the co-hosts of the podcast was just such a phenomenal interpreter of Jung's work. I think taking it in new directions, had such great takes. I mean, seemed like a genuinely beautiful soul, somebody you would love to have as either a therapist or a confidant. And that was the co-host Joseph Lee. And then it recently came to light that this podcast, which is basically billed as three Jungian analysts who were also good friends, ended up having this internal dispute where Joseph Lee decided to sue Lisa Marciano and the other co-host, Deborah Stewart. We're going to get into that, but before I do, I don't know, maybe Bob, you can say a few things about your interest in that podcast and maybe just say a few things about how this appeared on your radar.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Yeah, I mean, I like you, I've been aware of this young life for some years. I I can't say I listened to it frequently. It wasn't completely my my cup of tea, mostly just because it had a very, I don't want to say introductory atmosphere, but