James Hollis on Living Between Worlds

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direct, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is James Hollis, an American

young and psychologist. He's the author of sixteen books and a public speaker. James also has a private analytic practice and is the executive director of the Young Educational Center. Today, Jim and Eric discuss his book, Living Between Worlds, Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times. Hi Jim, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you. Eric. I am really happy to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book, Living Between Worlds, Finding Personal

Resilience in Changing Times. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. And in the Parable, there's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well. I think we confront that kind of paradox in our personal lives and in our national lives at every single moment, and that is

the presence of our full humanity. We'd like to think we are always feeding a good wolf, but the bad wolf is always there, and it's often operating in the unconscious. And of course the problem with the unconscious, it's unconscious, so we're not aware of what our our motives often are,

what agenda we're really in service. I've often said, the folks who are trying to make decisions or trying to figure out why a certain pattern emerged in life, when you stop and work it through and keep working it backwards and asking questions, what was this choice or this behavior really in service too inside of you? And at first we may not know, or we may have a

quick rationalization. But the more we ask that question, the more it begins to unfold and we begin to realize they're often other agendas and other motives that I just mentioned operating within us at all times. And this this is sort of what you meant by the idea of the shadow. We identify with our conscious life, but it's what's going on in the unconscious. None of us is an exempt from human nature, none of us is the exam from the whole human project. So both wolves are

present at all times. I love that idea that both wolves are present. You are a practitioner of something known as depth psychology, and I was wondering if you could share with us just a little bit about the difference between depth psychology and some other forms of psychology. Are sure, most psychology focuses upon our behaviors, and it's understandable or the thought process by which we've got to those behaviors,

and that's useful as well. But as I just mentioned, there's a vast see we call the unconscious, which is present in all of our choices, our behaviors, and our reactions to people. And so in depth psychology we try to engage the unconscious, which is by definition very difficult to do. So we pay attention to our dreams, for example,

we pay attention to our symptomatology. I was recently in the hospital and a nurse was asking what I did, and she asked the same question you asked, and I said, we tried to work with the unconscious, and she really she sort of furrowed her brow and she says, oh, I get it. You work with people in comas. Huh No, not quite or maybe once in a while. But we try to pay attention to what is not evidence as as I said, we're offered in service to the shadow government,

whether we oh it at the time or not. In depth psychology. Rather than say how quickly do I get rid of my suffering the internal discord, we asked why has it come? What's it about? What is it asking of me? What sort of accountability do I need to exercise in order to address this? And that's a whole different kind of agenda. There are places where altering our behaviors and some of our thought processes are useful, for sure,

and all the therapists I know employ those techniques. But there comes a point where you have to say, there's another sort of autonomous energy within us, and among other things, it creates our psychopathology. In other words, no one comes into my office who was just in the neighborhood and

wanted to have a chat. They're there because their previous mode of sort of dealing with their dilemmas have worked very well, and so they're looking for some alternative, maybe a quick solution perhaps, but it doesn't quite work that way. And so we we say, all right, what why is it that your syching has autonomously withdrawn its approval and support from where you'd like to to invest things, and and that begins a kind of dialogue with one's own depths.

And that's why we talked about it as depth psychology. And so what are some of the ways we can begin to wade into these depths? They're not obviously apparent. One of the things that you say in the book is that it's often not about what it seems to be about. So what are some of the ways that

we start to listen to our own psyche more effectively. Well, the first place to look, I would say, because we have to look at what is available to consciousness, is look at those patterns in your life which you find keep showing up even if you change your outer relationships or your geography. There are certain sorts of familiar places that you go to so frequently, particularly those places that you find injurious to your well being or perhaps even

harmful to others. And then say, all right, everything I do is a logical expression of something at work in my psyche. The question then is could I work backwards to be able to see what's going on there? What produced that behavior? And even when I thought I was doing the right thing, again, where is that coming from? In me, I might be doing a good thing as I believe it to be. For example, we all developed

patterns of conflict avoidance. That's understandable. On the other hand, there are times if we're going to be a person of value, we have to be willing to sort of stand for that and be present to whatever heat it brings back upon us. And you begin to look at, well, all those patterns of avoidance, and do I not find their roots in the long ago and far away in my childhood adaptations to the circumstances around me. We start trying to look at those patterns as rising out of

the stories that we have working intrapsychically. And I put stories of quotes here, stories that in a sense are our understandings at the time that we provide as a way of trying to understand what's going on. So every child, for example, is reading his family of origin or or reading the world around her and coming up with stories, who are you? Who am I? What am I supposed to do here? What am I not supposed to do here? We carry those stories with us. That's another way of

talking about complexes. We have complexes because we have history, and some of our complexes are useful and helpful. In other words, if you hadn't had some positive bonding experiences in your childhood, you wouldn't be able to form intimate relationships today. But on the other hand, you will find so many of those complexes operated autonomously pull us out of this moment and take us back to another time

and place. We also have dreams. I'm now eight years old, and sleep research has told this, if you get to eighty years old, six entire years of your life will been spent dreaming. As extraordinary. I'm astonished by it repeatedly. Nature does not waste energy. It's obviously serving some purpose. And I think that part of what our dreams represent for us is part of the self regulatory dimensions of

the psyche. In any given day, we receive so many stimuli that we're not able to absorb them a metabolize, and that's what we have to go to bed to sort of process that, whether we're paying attention or not. But also over time, if we begin to pay attention, we realize, okay, there's some kind of intelligence here. It pays little attention to my conscious desires and is trying to form some sort of responses to my life. It's

a commentary. And if I pay attention that commentary and I start dialoguing with that, then I began to realize that the center of gravity shifts from simply being in response to the stimuli of the world outside of us, which will hit the same old buttons and produce the same old behaviors. I start finding some encounter with a

more personal authority. The biggest project of the second half of life is really the recovery of personal authority to sort through that traffic and say, all right, of all the many voices that I have within me, which ones are coming from my own depths, which are from my family of origin, which represent the traffic that we're exposed to all the time, And can I find a courage to live those And if I do, you'll find your site views supporting you. And there other techniques that we

use too. Began to undertake a dialogue. And this is not me. I just add, this is not narcissism, This is not self absorption. It actually the ultimate accountability, because it's obliging us to really address what's going on inside of me. And to the degree I don't attempt that interrogation to that degree, most of my behaviors out there in the world will either be conditioned responses or we'll be coming from that wolf you are describing my shadow government,

and we all have one. So we have these unconscious processes that you're saying, these these depths within us. Uh. You often use the word autonomous processes, so it sounds like there's a variety of different things that are moving beneath the surface, for lack of a better word. There's these different things that are moving beneath the surface, and then there's this sort of conscious sense of eye. Help me understand a little bit from your perspective, who I am?

Am I involved in those depth processes as part of me down there in the death ups is part of me here on the surface. How do you sort of come up and talk about the sense of eye or that part of me that's real? Well, all of it's real if you if you think about it, every aspect of it is part of who you are. But of course the egos that part of this that thinks about the eye, as you just said, it's who I think

I am at any given moment. Years ago, I had a client who was trying to get her husband into therapy and he kept resistant by saying, well, I know what I think. Well, it's what he doesn't know that he thinks, or what is thinking him unconsciously is where the problem is coming from. So the conscious eye is what we call the ego, and it's very important because it interfaces with the outer world. It's my ego that stops, it stops signs, my ego that gets to work on

two him. It's a necessary function that's an adaptation to the outer world. It's also that same ego that is in charge of making choices. Therefore, it's an agent of my moral system, what choices I make in this world. On the other hand, the ego can easily be possessed and often is. So I think of the ego as a kind of tiny disk floating on a large iridescent ocean that we call the soul the unconscious, and it's an important disc it's it's the boat that we're in consciously.

So it will help us get to our directions in mind. But it's foolish to think that it's in charge of the ocean. What it has to do, as just as we have a conversation with the external world, we have to have one of the internal worlds, and to the degree I don't have that conversation. As I mentioned, the behaviors and motivations and agendas will be coming out of

the unconscious. So one of the things that Young said and you quoted in this book is that within us there's a sort of a deep these are your words, a deep resilience guided by some locusts of knowing, independent of ego consciousness, a center that produces our dreams to correct us, symptoms to challenge us, and visions to inspire us. So it sounds like, in addition to all these autonomous processes,

is there a process that is more truly us. Yes, what you are just describing is what you call the self with a capital S. And the self is often confused with the ego. See again, the ego is simply a cluster of energy. This case, I'm talking to that cluster eric identifies as eric um. But there's the totality

of the human psyche at work. It involves your body, it involves your feeling function, it involves the life of the spirit, it involves all these autonomous processes that are keeping the whole system going, and it has the purposefulness of nature. We are animals in nature, and included in that nature is the fact, for example, that we're all mort And so the ego says, hey, wait a minute, I'm not impressed with that idea. I'd rather change that

if I may. But you see, that's part of the nature and naturing, and that's how we get separated from the essential nature of our own nature. And so the self is essentially that guiding instinct, that guiding energy that tries to heal your wounds, that tries to make correctives. It presents this with the feeling function. You know, you don't choose your feelings. The feelings are qualitative analyzes of how things have happened. But we learned along the way

to repress our feelings, ignore them, doesn't you know. It creates our dreams, it creates our symptoms. You know, many times it's the revolt of the self that has brought people into this kind of conversation where a person has to pull out and say, what's going on here? How did I wind up in this place in my life? That sort of thing. So the self is the not true instinctual motive towards homeleness and towards development and to the egos dismay. Part of that development includes of course

aging immortality as well. But again we are the ones with the standpoint of the ego only that is in contradiction to nature by trying to run from there to deny that. But nature is at all times working its way through us. Here at the one you feed, we explore ways that we feed our good wolf. That is to say, how can we build up our strength, resilience, and sense of well being so that when life's challenge is both big and small come our way, we aren't

completely demolished. In fact, we're able to grow because of them, and even when life's not turbulent, we can experience deeper levels of joy and awe and appreciation moment to moment. The Spiritual Habits program takes that quest one step further by applying principles of behavior change to core spiritual principles. We create a set of spiritual habits to weave into our daily lives so that we can experience the gifts

of spirituality and even more profound and personal ways. I just finished the one on one Spiritual Habits program with my client Robin, and here's what she had to say about it. So now that I've finished the Spiritual Habits Coresum, reflecting on the skills and benefits that it brought to me, and I'm really happy with the things that I gained from having taken it and participated in this with Eric.

I feel a lot better equipped to handle the bumps I encounter on a daily basis that are part of life. I think for a long time I had this view that life is supposed to reach an equilibrium or homeostasis and take a lot less effort from that point forward. And I've realized that the bumps and sort of jostles and jiggles that are part of everyday life are normal,

and I'm a lot less exhausted by them. So I have a more balanced approach and perspective on things that come my way, and I see myself as being a lot more capable to handle what life throws at me with all the changes that are normal. If you'd like to learn more about the program and see if it might be right for you, go to one you feed dot net slash talk and book a free thirty minute,

absolutely no pressure call with me. That's when you feed dot net slash talk, and that's exactly what we'll do we will just talk and see if the program is a good fit for you, whether it might be helpful to you, and we'll get to know each other. So I really look forward to meeting you. When you feed dot net slash talk. One of the things that you talk about is that there's often you refer to them

as passages or in between states. Right. That's part of the title of the book, Living Between Worlds, Finding personal Resilience in changing Times. We can talk about changing times externally, but also it sounds like there's changing times inside of us, sort of passage, which is sort of maybe something old

is dying and something new is not yet been born again. Yes, when I first returned about forty five years ago from my training in Zurich at the Young Institute to the United States, and I started seeing many different people with different backgrounds, different presenting issues, different histories. One thing was in common to each of them, and that was their roadmap,

which may or may not have worked well. Theretofore was presently no longer applicable to the territory in which they found themselves, their understanding of themselves, what their agenda was, or in some cases they had done what they thought they were supposed to do what life and what society asks of them, but inside it was never feeling rights or it produces a depression or something of that sort. And then I realized, all right, that's what a passage is.

Something has died, something has played out, and we're in that difficulty in between. And that's where some some energy and some you know, developmental stage or self some sort of strategy of life as grown exhausted, and we have to puld attention to that in between. A lot of folks have been placed into that during our plague times that we're all going through and around this world, where they began to realize a lot of their usual distractions,

their friends, their families, their outer activities, even there office space. Uh, you know, so much of that was carrying a provisional sense of self. And if that was not available to them in some way, then you know, all of that unfinished business and all that's the life projected out there. King sort of rushing back as confusion, dismay, and course sometimes said depression. None of us know until we're obliged

to go through something. Is there something in our nature that will always rise to the surface if if we hold that tension and stick with it. You don't put it so succinctly once he said, we need to know what supports us when nothing supports us. And sooner or later, everybody in their life reaches a point where there understanding of things it just doesn't work anymore. And of course we begin by going back and trying to revivify the old understanding, but it just gets worse. So that's that's

where the new will emerge. That's where the person will have to undergo a difficult passage, because there's always something wanting to renew itself, something that is wishing fuller expression. Just very briefly, the agenda of the first half of life is to gather enough ego strength to leave our parents, step out into the world, form relationships, find a career, become a citizen, etcetera. All useful and necessary. But then at the second half of life you have to say,

and why am I still here? What's important for me now? And you know, just as the question of the first half is what is the world wanted me? Then then one has to ask a different kind of question for which most of us are not prepared, and that is what is the soul ask of me. When I use the word soul here, I'm just translating literally the Greek word psyche. That has to say, what is that depth within me asking of me now? And another way of putting at is what wants to enter the world through me? Say,

that's that's a different question. It's not about how do I free myself from confidence? How do I free myself from distress? How do I reach that sun met where everything is resolved? Well, dream on that time never really comes. What we really have to say is is the life I'm living meaningful to me? And if it's not, why not? And if it's not changing and undertake whatever power one has to undertake to change it. And when we're living then in accord with the developing agenda of nature, then

we will feel that support that's there. And the most elusive, but most important of all of the indications that rise from the depth of the soul is that inexplicable thing called meaning. If we think we find the right partner in life, where we earn enough money, we gain power over something, we're going to have a meaningful life. Well, there are a lot of people who have done that, but they haven't experienced what they thought they were experienced.

Meaning is something that is a byproduct of being in right relationship with one's own soul. And you don't manufacture that. You submit to that. And that's quite different. When you say you don't manufacture that, you submit to it. Do you mean we don't manufacture the meaning. We submit to the meaning that is coming from deep within us right or submit to the rigor the difficulty, even the suffering

that one must address in order to live more meaningfully. Now, for example, through the years, I've often had to sacrifice what I would consider a normal life and diversion. You know, at the end of a work day, I see people all day in therapy and in the evenings rather than you know, watch a movie or something. I've often written

because things were wanting expression through me. I was never writing for money, I was never writing for anything else except to give voice to something that I felt was important. And I was seeing in my clients or myself in the course of the day and me of teaching and writing and being in therapy has always been a calling. It wasn't what I would have intended in childhood, but

it was sort of what was intended in soul. And so I find myself privileged to have been able to in a sense submit to what was wishing expression through me, because I think all of us are some kind of experiment by nature, some sort of investment by nature. And the question is what is the nature word soul asking of us? And when we conserve that, you will find of that resilience that we've referenced, and you will find

a deep sense of purposefulness in your life. And when you run from it or you simply submit yourself to your old stories, one has a fugitive life. It's not a crime to have fear. Everybody has fears. The pragmatic question is always and what do your fears make you do? What do your fears keep you from doing with your life? And and then you realize where you're summoned to accountability is you can't have your life governed by fear. You can't avoid them, but you can't be governed by it.

And therefore you have to throw yourself into that breach and say, you know, I'm going to have to go through what I fear in order to express what is wanting expression through me in this world. And that's not something that is grandiose, it's actually humbling it's not something that is going to make me popular. It will often separate me pull and patterns from the past. But inwardly, there's that deep, deep sense of the rightness of our journey.

And when we're doing that, we can feel it, we know the difference, and when we're not, there's something inside that sickens in, sours and produces nothing good in the world. So a question for you about symptoms, because according to your writings and depth psychology, the presence of symptoms, let's just pick a symptom in this case, depression is a natural expression of the psychea commentary on how our life

is going from the soul's perspective. And I want to explore that a little bit more with you through my own life and my own times of depression, because I have had experiences where, yeah, depression was a manifestation of something was wrong in my life, me not living in a certain way, and I seem to have had the opposite of that, or maybe not the opposite, but I

seem to have had a different circumstance. And that different circumstance is that I appear to get visited by depression even though my life appears to be again, I'm using the word appears to be the life I want, and I'm living the way I want to live based on what matters, and what seems to happen is that depression comes in and it suddenly turns things that are normally meaningful to me meaningless, and then it will pass, And when it passes, I will go back to what appears

to me again to be my normal life. Where I go, here's the things I love. I love. I love making music, I love doing this work that I do. I love this person and I love that person. But while that depression, and that's a word I'm using for it, and I sometimes not even sure that's the right word to use for it. While it's there, it's sort of drains the meaning out of everything, even things. If I try and think, well, what else might matter? My brain just goes nothing. I mean,

the term I've heard is antedonia. Right, Things that normally provide me joy just get sucked out of joy. So is depression all always a expression of the psyche that something's wrong or there are other instances? Are there chemical changes that our brain goes through, or say a little bit more about kind of what I just said there, Well,

of course, and you're actually right in your description. First of all, we have to say their depressions and their depressions that are driven by biological sources, and there are various forms of addressing that, including some medication. There are depressions that are reactive, depression to outer lawses. You know, if you have a critical loss in your life, you're

not supposed to just sort of skip gaily alone. You're supposed to say, if there's a value there, I have to greet that, greet that laws, and it would be pathologically not to do that. But you're right. From time to time we're visited by those difficult and dark times, and they are in pain. We don't always know what they mean. But one of the things we always have to ask is is this depression asking some question of me? And you're right. Sometimes they come, and sometimes they abide

for a long time, and sometimes they're fairly transient. So I think we often have what I would call pockets of depression. That is, say, well, just for example, when I stop and think about the suffering in the world, I think about injustice in the world, that occasion a pocket of depression, and I consider that part of my humanity that means I'm not indifferent to the terrible things that go on in this world. Um. And at the same time, UM, I also have to find what is

my role here? What is my position here? How do I go about addressing that if I possibly can? And it's again and the autonomy of the psyche, and we don't always know the answer to those questions. Sometimes we just have to say, let me sit with it. I'm speaking in Montreal about a year ago, and a friend of mine up there who was with me and Zuri, said, you know, when we would experience depression in Zurig, and I think probably all of this did being away from

family and another culture, another language, et cetera. Rather than have our analysts supervisors talked to us about five easy steps to do this or that, they'd say, you know, go back to your shabby apartment and sit with it until it reveals what it wants from you. Now, nobody wanted to hear that, but I think for all of us who stuck that out, that's how we began to also find new resources in our own psyche. And it's that kind of thing that often is calling for some

substantial change in some key areas. I wouldn't even started on this whole profession and this whole discipline of depth psychology without myself in my early thirties getting a depression. I'd achieved everything that I wanted in my life, and I was happy with it. I was an academian and a lovely family. But I found myself as Dante did, in the dark wood mid life, and that's what sent me to my first hour, And little did I know it was going to be moving me in a new direction.

I'm not talking here for actually as much as I'm talking about how so much of my life had been living in the head and not really in the feeling function. And this was the psyche's way of reaching up and pulling me down into that place. And I would never want to romanticize them and say that was easy or wistful. It was far from it. But I think it was a move towards healing something, and it was a move

towards some greater illness. So sometimes, to tell you the truth, we have to sit with it, abide it, pay attention, be open to it, dialogue with it. And I came to realize, you know, in the course of my training, that's when I began to appreciate the role of dreams, and after a while I'd be realized hate. You know, there's some intelligence in me that knows more than I know, and it's trying to communicate with me. And it's always

been speaking to me. And at times I had intimations of that, but other times I just shut it off. And so my had of tube toward that source of wisdom, natural wisdom that's inside of each of us slowly changed and modifying, and the ego became less resistant and I think, less imperial in its position and far more humble. Does this work doesn't make us feel terrific in terms of the ego. It's as you put it in his memoir Memories,

Dreams Reflections. Well, here's another thing I found out about myself, and it felt like a defeat. Well, why would it be a defeat except that the ego had the fantasy that it was the bombs fact, had the fancy it was in charge of everything. Well it's not. It's one participant in a very large congress of voices, intracitically exactly. I was introduced to your work via a question, and I don't know if somebody paraphrased this question of yours

or if it's an exact question of yours. But that's what got me introduced to your work, and since as I've explored different parts of your work, I think questions are a big part of your work. And so I want to start with this question because I think it's a brilliant question that has helped me many times. And then I'd like to ask, maybe what are some other questions that we can be asking ourselves if we want to say, hey, let me go a little deeper into

what's happening with me. And the question that got me introduced to your work was does this path or this choice make me larger or smaller? Yes, well, we come to junctures in our lives where we don't know what to do, whether to change jobs, or change relationships or whatever, and asking a question is the first way to begin

to explore what's really at stake for you intrapsychically. You know, maybe the new job that offers more money, better position, whatever is really fool's goal, that it would really take you away from something that really matters to you, how much you're gonna have to trade away of yourself or or many times you say, well your desire to hang onto the owl. Is is really your insecurity at work?

And you're distrusting yourself? And then you ask the question, because intuitively we always know the answer to the question, will this enlarge me psychologically? Spiritually? Is this going to diminish me? If you don't know the answer to that, you keep asking that another important question of the places where we're stuck, and everybody has some stuck places in their life. Stunt places are always blocked by some archaic fear.

Sometimes we can identify the superficial fear pretty easily, but you have to start probing and saying, but where is the wiring here that leads metaphorically into my basement? And there's an archaic fear. There's the fear of being out there by myself, being abandoned, being alone, or there's the fear that this is too large for me, it's going to overwhelm me. Where is that fear? Because that's what's keeping me stuck. And many times that fear is really phantasmal.

You can work right through it because an adulge has grown up in the meantime, who can take that on Whatever was overwhelming or intimidating to the child but the stuck place will continue unless we address that other kind of question. We also always have to ask ourselves this basic question as well. As you've already suggested, what I'm doing may be productive, it may be applauded by people around me, but you know, does it bring me meaning? Do I find myself growing? And it's clearer to me

the psyche has two agendas at all times. One is our growth and development and what is self healing? And both of those are going on at all times, and the growth and developing parts, when it's steinied, actually injures the second. It adds to the wounding of life rather than the healing of life. For very few people, if if any, do we hear in childhood you have to sort of in time figure out what's right for you and really live that. It's more commonly the message, how

do you fit in? How do you meet the expectations of people around you? What are your parents expecting from you? Those are the kinds of questions that have that sort of archaic institutionalization inside of each omist that our own and the chief deterrence for our feeling a sense of permission and a sense of freedom to move forward and make changes in life because the nature of nature has changed,

that's for sure. Our body is changing every second, our psyche is changing in every second, and here we are stuck in the same old, same world. Yep. I want to ask you one or two final questions. We're nearly out of time here, and I appreciate your time. My first question is related to dream work or maybe that's not even the term that you would use, or is it? Yeah, it's a good word, dreams dream work? Do we need to know what we are really doing in order to

explore our dreams? And by that, do we need to understand what all the sim balls mean? Do we need help in someone else interpreting them for us? Or is it simply enough to turn our attention sort of inwards and say, you know what, Psyche, I'm going to start listening to you, and I'm going to start just taking what comes up to me in my dreams, and I'm just gonna start taking it with a little bit of seriousness, and I'm going to pay a little bit closer attention

and see what emerges for me. First of all, sleep research has told us that you know, you don't even have to pay attention to dreams for them to serve a purpose. Laboratory circumstances where people have been allowed to sleep but not dream. After a while, they begin to hallucinate. So if that material has to be worked through in some way, whether you want to or not. And secondly, not everybody is or should be on therapy. I'm not

recommending that to everybody. On the other hand, when you have dreams, the ego sort of on the one hand saying oh, I know why I dreamt that that was on the telly last night. No, the psyche has no obligation to talk about what you already know about. It's a scavenger that begs, borrows, and steels from conscious life and utilize these things and maybe pulls your teacher from thirty or forty years ago, from grade store or whatever. What associations do I have here? What emotional memories do

I have with that person or this situation. It's patient work. You know, you don't expect it to come out like a telex. It just tells you to do this or do that. You begin to realize over time. Everybody has a symbolic system. The best interpreter of the dream is really the dreamer, because you and I could dream about our grandmother today, but we have different grandmothers. There's grandmother Linus and that that's a common experience that we have,

or some other image of that sort. But then you have a particular set of emotional experiences that rose out of your relationship, if you had one with your grandmother, And then you began to say something there is being triggered. There's some kind of analog. That is to say, every moment in life is new, but the psyche is often bringing up the analogy. Something is happening today in my life that touches on this experience with that third grade

teacher or the grandmother, or whatever the image is. And if I begin to say, where is the emotional links? Where is the symbolic link, then you begin to realize these things do have meaning. And there is this ongoing commentary. And I've I've seen people, for example, who said, oh, why do I having the same kind of dream, you know, repeating the same area. It's like, well, because these are your issues, your problems, when do you want someone else's problems,

in which case you'd have their dreams. So our dreams often do have recurrent motifs and do have themes because after all, they're they're tracking the life and times of the single person when they do appear wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Jim for taking the time to come on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation live. About a hundred more questions I could ask, but we are at the end of our time, so all have links in the show notes to your books and to your website,

and I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Eric. It's been a privilege to talk with you as well, and I appreciate your questions greatly, and I wish you well. Thank you, be well, bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now. We are so

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