oh, I've been struggling with an idea recently. I was thinking maybe you'd be able to help me out with. Basically, in a recent interview, you talked about how myth is meant to reconcile inherent contradictions in reality, right? But I'm sort of stuck between two mythological or psychoanalytic ideas that I think are both really important. But they seem to have an inherent contradiction within them that I've been trying to figure out. So, on one hand, you have this idea that there's times in your life where you have to identify things in yourself that are insufficient or there's a problem somehow that you have to kind of have a controlled burn or like a Phoenix-like transformation where you discard part of yourself that doesn't fit or is not working. But then on the other hand, you have talked about this Union idea where as you become really when you get older you mature by reincorporating things about yourself that you lost when you were younger or that you know you're trying to integrate.

your shadow or you're trying to find parts of your personality that maybe you've been rejecting and try and figure out how to bring them into the fold. Jordan Peterson has this quote that I really like which is I'd rather be whole than good. So on one hand you may identify something as a problem and you want to get rid of it or burn it off, but then on the other hand it seems like the path to being stronger is to figure out how to put everything together. So there's a one of the things Jung wrote about in his works on alchemy was an explanation of the prime alchemical dictum which was solve et coagula which meant dissolve and integrate. So imagine this, imagine you had a fairly hostile father who was not very well controlled in his aggression, decent person other than that, but let's say that. And so your reaction is I'm never going to be aggressive and so you built a moral structure that's part of

your personality and there's possibility floating around outside of that did you you've denied an ethical you've denied any ethical what would you say you've stripped the idea of aggression of any ethical utility whatsoever okay so what happens this burns off and then that comes back up now you still have to integrate it so it's associated in some sense with Nietzsche's ideas. Morality as cowardice because one of nature's most trenchant critiques of traditional morality let's say is that most of what passes for morality isn't morality it's just cowardice it's not that I'm a good person and I don't hurt you it's that I'm afraid to hurt you and because I don't want to admit that I'm afraid to hurt you then I say I'm moral because then I can mask my essential fear and cowardice in a guise of morality and that happens far more often than you would think because harmless and moral are by no means the same thing so some of what you're burning off you can sit

and this is where Freud was such a genius. I think is because he concentrated on aggression and sexuality, which are perhaps the two most difficult parts of a personality to integrate. Said that the hyper-simplified morality stops you from tapping into deeper recesses of your psyche, and it's partly because there are primal forces. It's not surprising that you don't want to have anything to do with them, that you stay away from situations where they might make themselves manifest. But the problem is by denying the worst in yourself in that manner or suppressing it, you preclude the possibility of the best, because no one can be a good person without integrating their capacity for aggression. Because without that capacity for aggression, you cannot say no. Because no means if you really say it, no means there isn't anything that you can do to me that will make me change my mind. Or conversely, it means I will play for higher stakes than you will. And unless you've got your aggression integrated, there isn't a chance you can say that. And if you did, no one would take

you seriously because they'd know it was just a show. So one of the most useful things that you need, I think, was to work on this idea of the integration of the shadow, because he was really interested in the idea of evil, right, especially working with trying to parcel out what happened in Nazi Germany and during the Second World War. What do you do with the part of you that's aggressive and potentially malevolent? You just crush it. That's the super-ego response, in some sense. You just put it behind you, so to speak. Is that a possibility, or do you admit to its existence and bring it into the game? And that's, see, for Freud, in some sense, morality was super-ego clamping down on the id, and they were fundamentally opposed. Both Jung and Piaget had a different idea, and I think they were right. It's like, no, no, you invite the bad guys out to play, and so you're an aggressive hockey player, but it's disciplined aggression that makes you gives you access to the whole source.

of energy you wouldn't otherwise have. And then with regards to sexuality, it's like, well, untrammeled promiscuity doesn't constitute a virtue, but neither does unavoidable virginity, right? In fact, I think that's worse because it also masks itself with virtue. It's like, well, you should be able to do things that you wouldn't do. That's like the definition of a genuinely moral person. They could do it, but they don't. And then that's not cowardice. And so that's you burn off the things that get in the way of that integration. So when you say dissolve and integrate, it'd be a good way to sort of bring the two ideas together, that the burning off and the difficult process is necessary because the elements of yourself are structured together in a rigid way that is not working properly. And that's what happens to Geppetto in the belly of the whale. He's so caught in his presuppositions that he can't escape, right? And so Pinocchio represents the

new force. So, it's very interesting. So, when you watch Pinocchio try to rescue him, the first thing Geppetto does is confused Pinocchio with a fish because he wants something to eat. But Pinocchio is better than something to eat because he can rescue him, so he doesn't need to eat. And then Pinocchio wants to make a fire in Geppetto objects because he's gonna burn up all the furniture. It's like we don't need the damn furniture if we're getting out of the whale, you know. And so, Geppetto and he's old so that's the rigid structure that's the old year that has to die off before the new year can be born. It's a forest fire that allows for new growth. And that's how those things are put together and to see. And it's useful to know too because if you burn something off, you might think, well, there's nothing left. It's like that's not true if it's

Deadwood then you have room for new growth, and you want to be doing that on a fairly regular basis. That's the snake that sheds its skin and transforms itself, right? That's the death and resurrection from a psychological perspective. It's exactly the same idea. Now, we don't know the upper limit to that, right? Because we don't know what a person would be like if they let everything that they could let go, let go, and only let in what was seemly, let's say. But you can see that's funny. We don't know that to some degree. You can see people very firm. You can see people start to do that without that's not a rare experience, and people improve very rapidly. They can improve their lives very rapidly. A lot of it's low-hanging fruit. Like if you just stop doing really stupid things that you know are stupid, your life improves a lot. So, and it frees you up. It also means there's an element there that's also associated with pride.

because people tend to take pride in who they are, and that's a bad idea because that stops you from becoming who you could be. Because if you're proud of who you are, you won't let that go when it's necessary. You won't step away from it, you know, and then you end up being your own parody, something like that. That's also a very bad idea. You want to be continually stepping away from your previous self. And so big, and I guess part of that too is that you, you have to decide, you know, are you, are you order or you chaos or you the process that mediates between them. And if you're the process that mediates between the, you, you are the thing that transforms. And that's the right attitude for a human being, because that's what we are. We're the thing that voluntarily confronts chaos and transforms. That's what we are. And so, for better or worse, you know, that's our deepest biological essence, you might say. And so you can let things go if you know that there's more growth.

Jordan Peterson: Why and How to Integrate Your Shadow

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Jordan Peterson: Why and How to Integrate Your Shadow

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