James Fadiman || Psychedelics and the Founding of Transpersonal Psychology

excited to have doctor James Fatiman on the podcast. James is an American psychologist and writer known for his extensive work in the field of psychedelic research. He co founded, along with Robert Frager, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, which later became Sophia University, where he was a lecturer in psychedelic studies. Fatimin is author of the book The psychoedel Explorer's Guide, A Safe, Therapeutic and Sacred Journeys. Dude, thank you so much for chelling with me today. I'm very

happy to be with you. I've never referred to one of my guests that do before, but it somehow felt appropriate. All right, Well, you are such a legend in the field, one of the founders of trans personal psychology right there, you know, late sixties. So there was a time when psychedelic research was respected. Is that right? There was a time when LSD was the most researched psychiatric drug in

the world. And what happened. And when I first entered the field in the late sixties, I wrote Sandos and said, is there any research? I got two volumes only of abstracts, so yes, it was quite respectable. Well, why don't we trace your history a little bit? Why did you decide to get into that topic? And you know, like where did you go to college? You know, what were some of these gettings in your life where you got Really you're like, this is what I want to study. Sure.

I was a Harvard undergraduate and I had a charming and somewhat neurotic professor named Richard Alfert, and my junior summer I worked with him at Stanford on research about children and various other things. And he had one undergraduate me and one graduate student, Ralph Metzner, and nothing about psychedelics for any of us. And I graduated and was living and working in Paris, and Richard came over and said the greatest thing in the world has happened to me,

and I want to share it with you. Well, and that's how I became interested in psychedelics. I thought you were going to say that your teacher professor was Tim Leary,

and now never really connected with Tim. Worked with Richard, and then went to Stanford for graduate school and worked off campus with a group called the International Foundation for Advanced Study, which was doing clinical research using higher dose psychedelics, and did some publications which Stanford was nervous about, and did probably the only PhD on the effectiveness of psychedelics

therapy that's been done. That was done for decades because the US government then said, we don't want to know any more about this. We are shutting down in the same day, over sixty research projects. Do you know what the what the catalyst there was? Why did they feel

that way all of a sudden. Well, by that time, psychedelics had escaped the laboratory and were part of the kind of hippie cultural subculture, and that subculture did not appreciate much of what the United States was doing, particularly the Vietnam War. So here were people who were against the establishment, who didn't like much of capitalism and racism and a few other things, and the government had no

idea what to do. And it is my theory and this is my fantasy that they were sitting around saying, how can we stop the spread of these psychedelics that make children not respect their parents and not want to go and kill strangers in a country they've never heard of, right, And someone said, well, we could stop research. That's something, And someone else in the room said that's an intelligent idea,

and they stopped all research. When you read the CIA experiments in this area, which were, by the way, really bad research, it makes sense. The answer is no, there's no good reason. And their politics, as we all know, transcends science and transcends evidence when it wishes to well. The whole notion that psychology would study healthy personality, yeah, for reasons that seem absurd in retrospect. So a surprise

was something that needed to be argued about. It's as if you were saying, well, I want to study humanity, but I only want to study a couple of percent of them and then generalize, right, rather than why don't I study everybody and probably learn more? Yeah, So it was like that was a revolutionary idea at the time, and you knew him, and so I want to hear more about this moment where he's like dude. I'm sure he didn't say dude. He's like, right, did people call

you Jim? Yes? Should I call you Jim? Okay, Jim, I'm outport right now, Jim. Oh my gosh, I have to tell you about this experience that happened to me. Oh my omg. Now what is it about the psychedelic experience that is so transformative for people? Like? What is it about? Man? Can you tell me? Well, though I prefer that everyone should read the volume by all this Suxley on his first masculine experience, which is being consistent selling ever since. I'll take it in a couple of sentences.

It expands your worldview, and it makes self evident that we are interdependent, not only on one another, but on the rest of the natural world. Again, this is now common sense that ecology says we actually live in a habitat, not in a city, and that it turns out that people have more inherent goodness in common than any other trait. So it changes the way you look at relationships, It changes the way you look at your own relationship to nature.

It changes the way you look at self imposed scientific limitations on certain kinds of research. So it's a career change here for those of us who are being professional psychologists, but for most people it makes them more optimistic about the overall wonder and beauty of the world and more aware of it. That's probably pretty enticing if you think about it. It's incredibly enticing, and you hear similar descriptions among people who are expert meditators as well. The fact

is that this particular part of consciousness. Think of it as another band on the FM radio, but wayn here at the top, repeated by mystics in every tradition I've ever been able to discover, by serious meditators, by people who are involved in trance behavior, Lots of ways people have approached this same area and their reports are all similar.

So the question becomes, then, what is the best way for someone born in the West in the twentieth century to have access to these spiritual kind of truths in a way that makes sense for them. Yeah, because these kind of experiences can certainly be divorced from beliefs or religion. Remember, beliefs are things that you are that you don't know, right. Nobody says I have a belief in gravity, Yeah, good point,

or in sunset or in cheesecake. People say I have experienced in the spiritual kind of vocabulary at least of one system. Belief is a lower version than knowledge. Yeah, but you know a lot of religious individuals would counter that and say, well, they're just accessing a different truth as other there are multiple truths. Well, there are multiple

truths because truths come through a filter called us. Yeah, so that you know, it's a commonplace in the first year psychology to say you don't see the same grid that I see when we say the word red, and well, that's true. We both see something close enough so that we can converse really pretty intimately about it. The psychedelic people and trans personal psychic ten personal psychology did is say, these different religious traditions, when you get back to the

initial experiences, simply look like variations on a theme. They don't look like genuine opposition differences. Yeah, you know this, it's interesting because we're going to so go into Abraham Masa right now talking about Maso's ideas, because he really believed self actualized individual people who reach self actualization see

reality more clearly than everyone else. That kind of he describes as how they take off their like a clouded lens and kind of put on a Yeah, they take off some of their individual preconceptions, right, you know, like I'm short. Short people are really good. I'm not short. These short people are not really good, you know, And I'm making it obvious and dumb, right, But it's just as true when someone says, well, you're from a religious tradition that, since I know nothing about, probably is not

as good as mine. Right, But there's multiple ways of getting to that same thing that psychedelics maybe like induces it, But there are other spiritual practices that can get us in that mental state. Is that right? Oh well there are other practices. Yeah. I would hardly say taking a psychedelic and going to a U two concert is a spiritual practice, right. But there's an English mystic Elwen Underhill, who said, if God is infinite, he can be approached

in an infinite number of ways. And it's the the image of if your goal is to get to the mountaintop, really, any place you start, as long as you're going towards up, is probably a possible method. So interesting you said the word infinite. That's a common theme in a lot of these kinds of discussions. Can I read it quote? I'm not going to tell you said this quote, and you're

gonna have the guests who said it. One problem, one problem with science, and one reason that people who look beyond science are suspicious of it, is that it is not very well taken account of the infinite. Therefore, it's inherently less of a system than some of these other systems. Who said that, Oh, I could think of a thousands, but I hope it was Maslow. Guess what it was you?

It was you now sitting right next to Maslow. April thirteenth, nineteen seventy age age that's what age twenty nine, Jim Fataman, I wanted to surprise you with some quotes from them. I agree that is wonderfully surprising, and as you notice, it's a very gentle reproof that science basically, and I would now say it from an older perspective, science does exactly what science does, and it says we're not going to look into certain areas because our basic assumption say

they don't exist. And that seems perfectly respectable to me. You know, just as astronomy says, I don't really look into biological organisms because that's not what astronomy is for. So my feeling now is that, you know, I won't say some of my best friends are scientists, or we have one lawyer who's a scientist, but that different ways

of knowing demand different tools. Just as if one is being a therapist and working on dream analysis, one does not apply a double blind laboratory methods because it's just totally inappropriate. So it's a matter often and I think Maslow said this very nicely when he said, if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem becomes a nail. Everything looks like you. Now, that's right. So the tools of science are good for what science is good for. It's funny because do you know what Maslow how he

responded to you. He said, but science is beginning to do that. So he defended science. Oh, he loves science. He loved science. But you did done this whole thing about astrology. Yeah, but of course those of us who'd

had psychedelic experience were saying science is fine. And the reason science doesn't touch religion except to say bad words about it, is because it really doesn't have the tools it doesn't know how to approach those kinds of experiences, And now we have neuroscience that says I know how to approach those experiences. You tell me, you know, you get into a blissful state in which your whole being is filled with light and love, and I will show you what parts of your brains light up. How do

you feel about that? And my feeling is how charming? Kind of like having a little Christmas card and when you open it, some little light twinkle on a tree and you think that's charming, but you don't think it's explained Christmas. Yeah, it doesn't really show us what the experience is like. Yeah, right, shows us what part of the brain lights up when there are various things. And that's lovely and may even have practical application, but it is not very helpful when you're trying to look at

the nature of consciousness. Sure, it doesn't mean that these scientific methods can't be developed, though, my colleague David Yayden is doing some great work to try to have people reports in as much detail as they can on like all experiences and self transcendent experiences. And yeah, yeah, well scientific method see titming method says how can I find

out more about this? And then you go back to your toolbox, and it's like those wonderful boxes you get at a hardware store that have sixty four different kinds of screwdrivers, three of which you will use a lot, and the others maybe you'll use once or twice in your life. But that's really cool that you have them. Yeah, so scientific method is saying I don't know something, How

can I move towards knowing more about it? Science, Western materialistic science says that, except it says, however, I don't want to look at certain things because since I know they don't exist, I don't want to look. And that really goes back to Galileo with the Theologians, where he says, look look at Saturn. It's got these things rolling around it, and they say, I don't want to look because it can't. So things have actually not changed, except now the scientists

are more sounding more like the theologians. The theologians aren't sounding morely scientists, though some of them are. The Dalai lama is. Actually that's a really good point. Actually there are there are There are a couple exceptions. And when he what he says, and it's really remarkable. He says, if science can disprove some of the basic tenets of Buddhism, then we will drop those tenants. I think that's a remarkable statement coming which is absolutely pure science. Yeah, it is,

and it's a really remarkable statement. So do you still believe in astrology? Because that I ever in nineteen seventy there's this whole fastening exchange. I'm I'm just obsessed with this, this meeting. I want you to take me back here, take me back to April thirteenth, nineteen seventy and the second Interdisciplinary Conference on the Voluntary Control of Internal States held in Council Grove, Kansas. Do you have any memory

of this? Do you have a member where we are? Yeah? Yes, Stanley Kriptner was there, Tart was there, Mark Maslow was there. Robert do you know? Do you know also was there? While the doctor why oh Andy? Yeah, Andy Wild and were probably similar agents at the time. Yeah. Like, pay me a picture. I'm so glad. It looks like, yeah, well you have to get that all of us west coast and east coast people are now in the middle

of Kansas, Okay. And among the things I recall was the meals were white bread, white potatoes, white dessert, and two others starts. So we were all a little culture shocked by eating strange foreign food. And we were also all living together in little dormitories. So there was great deal of discussion off the record in the evening between us, and we were all young, and many of us remained

very good friends forever. And Maslow was again one of our heroes because he had really already taken the first steps, and he came up to a point, and there was a point in which we were trying to get him to acknowledge the reality of what would be called trans personal states, and he was trying very hard, but it

was hard for him. And what I say to people is if you look at the distance Maslow came in his career where he started with wire monkeys and clots monkeys with Harlow, and how far he came, the fact that he did not come that last few inches and we did does not make us larger. It just makes us more in debt to what how far he took it. Well, you said he didn't go there, but he does, you know, right around that time, I mean that was only a

couple months before he passed away suddenly that meeting. I mean, it's what a remarkable time in history to for all these stars to align in one place. I would have given a lot of money to be a fly on that wall in that meeting. But he does. He does have published things saying the last year or two his life, saying that there now seems to be a fourth force.

He seemed to be promoting a fourth force. He seemed to be a promoting No, he promoted the force force which Tony Sudacheg has said, we're going in this direction right, and we're fought. We have in your writings enough to go on. Yeah, But he was always concerned. On that flight, the flight to Kansas, I was actually sitting with him. No way, and there were tents, no wait, wait, hold on, let me just do it like process that you were on the airplane with Maslow on the way to that. Well,

somebody had He's just a human deed. It wasn't my fault. Okay, Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna get over that now. Okay, go on. Two okay, two things, and two things happened. One is, as you know, he wrote about peak experience. But he also said in his older life that he had what he called a plateau experience, and plateau as you get up to a certain hYP but then it's flat for a long period of time, so it's a longer experience.

And I watched him have one, and we talked about it later because we had an attractive stewardess and Maslow looked at her, appreciated her as a nice, attractive young woman, and then began to to inside himself abstract that from this nice young woman to nice young women, to beautiful women,

to women to the feminine. And I watched him and he just kind of went back inside himself and was there was an up smile, and then after a while he came out and we talked about it, that he had a peach experience, that he'd gone from the very individual to probably what the Unions would have called the archetype. So that was one incident on that flight. The other incident is I don't recall the book, but there was a footnote that said, basically, astrology, the eaching and related

things are claptrap. I suggested to him that he take that out because one is, he didn't really know what he was talking about, and he was being biased, and two, a lot of his friends would be disappointed in him because they were doing research in those areas and he took it out. So he had a hesitation about what later became probably New age psychology. And correctly he had some reservations. But he also didn't have much experience and

was honest enough to acknowledge that that's beautiful. He always seemed conflicted, like if you look at his college. He wrote a college essay on Emerson when he was twenty years old, where he I don't know if you ever saw that. Did you ever see that college essay he wrote, No, I'll send it to you. It's fascinating because he talks about he's conflict. On the one hand, he believes that, you know, God like these peak experiences, we don't need to claim, we don't need to give God credit. He said,

why don't we give humans credit? Right? And he seemed to have had one of these experiences when he was very young, and he admits it was very transformative for him. He said that in this twenty year old essay, and I don't see him saying that ever, talking about that experience ever again. But he does talk about the important peak experience so there was this very mystical side to him, There really was, but there was also this very skeptical side him, and I think he was kind of they

were kind of fighting with each other within himself. Did you get that sense? It parallels the fight in psychology, because remember psychology comes out of William James, who was totally comfortable and as still the great Essay on Religious and Mystical Experience. But psychology looked around the university and saw where all the prestige was going and all the money was going, And it wasn't into philosophy, it wasn't

into religious studies. It was into quote science, chemistry, physics, biology, etc. And psychology to this day is trying to look like those sciences, and those sciences do not actually believe that psychology has made it yet. So the psychological love of heart measurements and double bline studies and brain imagery is still trying to take very much invisible abstractions and treat them the way physics treats rare elements. So if you go to a physicist and he says, oh, you study depression,

what is depression? And then you talked for a while and he says, I didn't hear anything yet about what is depression. I heard opinions and speculations and notions. Can you say, where is depression? No? Can you say, does depression have any substantive reality outside of your definition? You say no. And then he said, is it true that you psychologists actually every five to ten years change the definition of certain mental illnesses? And you say, yes, we do.

And he says, well, we actually don't change the names or the properties of any elements. And that's why you're not a science. And if I can just be kind of academically wonky for a moment, the argument began between Aristotle and Plato, where Aristotle said, you make up the world from what you see around you, and he did these encyclopedic works of birds and minerals and trees, and Plato said, there's beyond those are forms, invisible forms that have no substance in the world, but manifest as all

these differences. So you see chairs, I see the form called chair from which all chairs descend. And that argument between the reality is only what you can see, sense, measure, et cetera, and reality is that which creates all of that you see sense and measure goes on today interesting. I mean, you know, returning back to the psychedelic experience for a second, it kind of evaporates those boundaries, right, It vaporates these kind of preconcessis exactly. It evaporates boundaries,

just as the ecologists do. Remember we used to say we're going to save a species, and then we realize you can't save a species. You have to say the habitat which might hold another thousand species, all of which are necessary for all of those thousand and one species to survive. That's a very interconnected way of looking at a situation. Psychology has a tendency to say, let's look

at this individual, of this individual, of this individual. And most psychotherapy, if you think about, is someone comes into an office and shuts the door and the psychotherapist is the only reality the psychotherapist knows about the patient is what the patient says. Yeah. So if the patient says I'm married, and it turns out the patient is not married, it's just for living with someone that will not perhaps

ever come out. So the interconnectedness of people in their environment is something that clinical psychology has really not yet quite caught up with biology and ecology. This is why you call it psychothelic therapy. I mean, you're trying to

actually develop a new form of therapy, right. Yeah. Well, in my careers, I was a psychotherapist, and what I realized is that I really had very little knowledge of whoever I was working with, and it was their worldview that I was working on, not really their world And that's a huge difference. Yeah. Can you labor a little bit more on that difference, Yeah, Yeah, which is that Let's say I'm as I was. I had undergraduates at Stanford who were all charming and bright and intense and interesting,

and most of them were from pretty healthy backgrounds. But why was I seeing them? Well, I was seeing them often because there were stresses that they couldn't really work with because they didn't have the power. For example, someone says, you know, since I've come to Stanford, I am absolutely in love with medieval French literature. And I say, isn't that wonderful? You get to study what you love? And they say, my parents want me to go to medical school.

And until I came to Stanford, that's all I thought I ever wanted. And now I see it was because it's only what they wanted. Yeah, And I say, do your parents want you to be happy? Or do they want you to go to medical school? And then I would look at the length of the pause, and I would know a great deal about the family dynamics that

the student himself may be get unaware of. But as a psychotherapist, I wasn't able to deal with the parents who were the defining characteristic of what was making this person mentally not as healthy as he should have been. Yeah, it's a really neat way of looking. So family therapy, for instance, you know, talks about the identified patient, meaning the people of the family have settled on to blame everything on. But family therapy says no, no, no, no, no,

everyone is part of it. Well, and then the sociologist says, wait a moment, Let's look at their economic situation, let's look at their neighborhood, let's look at their ethnic background, and to what extent that's a pressure on them. And then the ecologist comes in and says, and they also live in a natural setting. I suspect if we replace their diet of bad food, that this entire family mentally

unhappy people would be a lot happier. So you have to keep extending the boundary past the professional categorization of who is the helper. Yeah, I really like that. Yeah, because we do create a lot of these artificial divisions that do get in the way of our growth. That's true. Sure.

And if you say, if you look at Native American healing, there are certain healings where the person genuinely needs healing, but who comes to the healing is the entire plan, the entire family, the entire tribe, So everyone is there to be of support, and it's a very different feeling. So they're just different models, and there's nothing wrong with

each model as long as it understands its limitations. Yeah, it's all about integration and that includes and that definitely includes psychedelics that also have this where you know, we are the truth and we are going to make the world entirely better, just as psychotherapy did and just as it did and so forth, and so we all have our living. So I really appreciate you saying that. And and I think, if I may like resurrect what Maso was saying and that meeting, I think that I think

what he's because I think I get him. I think I get what he was his his criticism. He had a phrase he called unearned peaks. He was really railing against unearned peaks, and especially what he was saying at Esslein and the kind of emphasis on the selfishness kind of using these things and these experiences are using LST too for personal development kind of the expense of others.

In that meeting itself, he said, I think this is a funny phrase in the preface to the new addition, I speak of the dangers of overemphasizing the mystical aspects of religion. Some people run the danger of turning away from the world and from other people to search for anything that will trigger peak experiences. This type of person represents the mystic gone wild. And I love that expression, the mystic gone wild. I love it. He said. That's he said that right there in the meeting. You were

probably sitting right next to him. I don't know if you remember where you're sitting. Yeah, that's that's I love it. It's kind of the mystic as hedonists. Yes, you know, there you are. That's what he wrote about prayer. How dare you when there is an injustice interia? Correct? And

that's what he didn't get. And I think he was trying to integrate, you know, the benefits, potential benefits of this kind of way of thinking, but integrating it with a sort of body shiva path, you know, a Buddhist sort of I'm probably not pronouncing that word right, but yeah, the police path of enlightenment, where remember the Bodhisatsa says, I cannot go on to basically to pure enlightenment and no identity until everyone goes correct, and it's either a

path of extreme service. And the phrase in Buddhism is all sentient beings, so probably rocks don't have to be enlightened, right, right, But there's another way of looking at it, which is the Bodhisata says, I'm actually part of everyone else, think young collective, unconscious in the West, mystical reality in most systems. If I'm part of everyone else, then by definition I can't go on until everyone else goes on. So it's not that I am such a good being. I'm just

an honest and aware being. You know. It says if your arm says I think I'm going to get enlightened and leave, and the rest of your body says, honestly, we support your interest, but you're going to have to take the rest of us with you. Do you agree with Mathow then on that old Well, I don't think Maslow. I'm thrilled he had a young mystical experience, yes, but I don't think he fully understood the notion that improving oneself improves the world. And let me give you an example.

I'm sitting in my house in California, and imagine that I have a cold burning stove, and although it doesn't get very cold here, it's cold enough, so I use my stove and coal. Now I stop burning coal, the air all over the planet just improved. Yeah, I can't divorce myself from the rest of the planet. So the notion, and it's in lots of spiritual systems, is if you and round Us actually said it last week, which is, if you work on yourself, that will help others. If

you work on others, that may or may not help others. No, I think the humanist psycholgue really really did believe in that. Yeah. Remember America has a very curate and background. It says you can't have anything good unless you work hard for it. Now, that's just a theory, and it's a theory that we know by all the evil rich people that we don't like that it's not true that lots of people get

enormous benefits without doing anything to deserve it. But we have a feeling that that's somehow against the natural order. And it turns out the natural order honestly doesn't care who's richer than someone else, since the natural order says, and you know, in fifty to eighty years, you're all going to be dust and your property really isn't going

to help you. I hear what you're saying. I think that there's a good criticism there in the sense I think that the humanist psychologists very much, including Carl Rogers, really did believe that if we could help people become more integrated, that it would just naturally be better for the world. So I think they did believe that very much. I think I still like pinpointing what he really was around against that was what he was seeing at Escellent.

You know, there's still like a and you see it today. I would criticize today some people over you know, they'll go to a yoga session or like a meditation session and think that they're enlightened because you know, they're feeling better, and they may ignore the real suffering around them. And I think that is a potential potential danger. Yeah, yeah, no, the you know, the idea that one can have enlightenment without compassion is what Matislow was was leaning toward her.

And if you kind of get into the spiritual systems, they all agree with him that there's a false enlightenment where you say I'm God, that's right, and then you say and you say them, am I God? And they say no, you're not, and you say you missed it. And there's a confrontation between Richard Alpert, who's now robbed

us back from India. He's wearing, you know, a big brown dress and carrying Amala and he visits his brother, who is wearing a Brooks Brother's suit and a you know, one hundred dollars tie, but happens to be in an insane as abum. I know, we don't call them that,

but that's what they are. And the problem for the brother is that the brother thinks he that he's a brother is Christ And they're kind of talking together and the brother says, why is it that you're running around in sandals and a brown dress out and you're considered sane and I am not considered saying even though I'm a practical businessman with a and Ramda says he gently gets him to admit that, although he never says it anymore in the institution, they chill kind of believes he's Christ.

And Ramda says, you think you're Christ? And he says, well, yeah, kind of. And Ramda says, am I Christ? And his brother says, of course not. And Ramdas says, that's why you're in the asylum, which is the ceiling of being enlightened. If it excludes of feelings, is simply a step on the way. I just got to chill because it's a really profound and again, and the traditions know this Zen

is full of this. It's called you have an enlightenment experience, which means now you can settle down and do real work. It doesn't mean you're done and you can, you know, retire to a cloud. Yeah. You do see a lot of computing gurus and quotes who are really seem to be like, I'm done, I reached it and now everything I say is gospel, and I think that's right, and I'm charging you for that, right, yes, yeah, or please donate money to my cause. Yeah, oh yeah, I've just

finished a manuscript on the healthy multiplicity. We have a convention, which is the notion where a single self kind of an assumption with very little evidence, and we have massive evidence that we shift into different cells, and these different cells are often quite different, have different agendas, have different opinions, and we've just written a book which makes it incredibly easy for people to see and understand that. And what we've found is that when people acknowledge their own selves,

they no longer demand consistency in other people. See. That's what drives a lot of psychology crazy, which is how do you explain serious inconsistency if one is a single, unified self And the answer is you can't. But if your inconsistency is you go into other cells, some healthy, some not as healthy, then it all makes sense. As we know, very famous psychologist whose name I won't pronounce,

but he developed the notion of being in flow for creativity. Yeah, and we who are in the creative businesses like writing books and so forth, understand entirely that feeling of being in flow, And what it is is it's a self shift into the cell that is totally devoted to the work at hand and may miss meals, may have no sense of time is quite different from our other self, which doesn't behave that way and really can't. And there's

endless books of how to get into flow. There's also endless books about what do you do when you're quote triggered, which is get into a very negative self. So there's a thousand examples, and we're simply my co write and I Jordan Gruber, have just completed a manuscript which lays out the thousands of ways one can see it in the culture, because if it's true, it should be very evident.

And that's everything from David Bowie who had lots of selves, to arguments within classical psychology, which includes Freud, who is a great proponent of selves and then changed his mind, so he's both the hero and the villain of one part of our book. I would love to read this book. You know, evolutionary psychologists have argued we have multiple selves sub selves that each have their own evolutionary goals. You'll

come up with examples pretty easily. But if you think of it in psychotherapy, if your goal is to have people's selves harmonized and the ones that are troublesome helped, often they are ones who feel unheard and malnourished. It shifts the nature of the psychotherapeutic endeavor towards really easier success. Yes, then let me give you just one example of where

psychotherapy is particularly poor. The research says that if you're an alcoholic, there's about a two percent success rate for psychotherapy, AA is about a one third success rate, and so forth. But two percent is really pretty pathetic. And the answer is very simple, which is, anyone who's listens has ever been drunk, knows that in the morning you feel terrible. And also people often feel guilty because of how they've behaved or they don't even remember, meaning their self is

cut off from the other self. So who goes to psychotherapy, Well, the one who wakes up, the one who feels bad, who feels guilty, who has hangovers, and the self that is the alcoholic that truly enjoys drinking and flirting and dancing on the table and throwing up in the street, that one doesn't come to therapy. So it's not surprising that therapy doesn't work such a good plan because if you said, well, I feel neurotic, you say to your spouse, why don't you go to therapy? It's not going to work.

So it's a rather radical reformulation of how we consider ourselves. Yeah, I love it. But you know, the humans do have this great capacity for integration, though we can you know, like Ing's that the individuation process for young was all about accepting all sides of all the different selves that we exactly, yeah, exactly, and also knowing which self to be in what will we call being in the right mind at the right time, being in the right mind.

I like that, And you know, yeah, and if you think about it, if you have parents who are living, when you go to be with them, you will shift into another self. Oh yeah, and they it turns out, will actually shift. At one point, I was visiting my mother, was about fifty and my mother says to me, you know, you really need to put on a sweater. And I think I'm a professor, I've gotten written books, I'm famous in a small way. I have a wife and children. I actually know when I need to put on a sweater.

And I said to my stepfather, I said, how did you live with my mother? And he said, she's only like this when you're around. And there was this wonderful moment of appreciating and I didn't have the term. Then the self shift that she would get into when I would visit, and then being slightly more honest, the self shift that I would probably get into when I was with her, And it suddenly made a lot of my

relationships make more sense. Yeah, it does. It makes a lot of sense, And so it's important to acknowledge and understand that and kind of being more understanding and forgiving of ourselves, which then you're saying makes us more forgiving

of others. And I really liked you actually end up because let's say you have a friend and suddenly your friend does something like cheats you, and you say, I never realized he's a dishonest for ever going to talk to him again, rather than wow, there's a part of him that's really dishonest. Have to be careful. Yeah, And as you can imagine, if you're in management, if you're in a relationship, suddenly the world, the world becomes a lot clearer when you take away and this is where

we started. If you take away the filter that distorts your vision, and one of the filters that distorts your vision is the totally wrong assumption that people are consistent, for which you have never any evidence. You know, you kind of remind me of the whole personality debate in the sixties seventies about is personality is it consistent over time or how much is it influenced by the environment, And that's kind of been reconciled in the sense that

there are some stable patterns. But we're just talking about patterns, and throughout the course of our day we go in and out of you know, no such thing as perfect consistency, but there's relative consistency, like one person can be more relative, there's consistency. There's consistency in situations. I mean, just looks a very very normal. It's hysteria. But someone who works hard all day and interacts with people and makes decisions and is productive and then comes home and sits in

front of a television with cans of beer. Now, if you're an alien from another civilization, you know that this person has morphed into another being. But it looks to us very usual, because what happens is people will self shift when they get home. Yeah, and just as in almost any relationship with famous people. One of our colleagues, Arthur Dykman, did a wonderful article on that there are no enlightened beings, because if you talk to their wives,

they'll say, nay, he's not enlightened. You should see him at home either. And what they're saying is that our public self, which is very real, is different than our private self, which is equally real. Neither is phony, neither is a role. It simply makes life easier. One of the reasons I wrote the book is because my wife and kids have asked me for twenty years when I please do that, because they all know it's made their

lives more sane. One thing that humanistic and trans personal and cognitive and psychoanalytic all agree is it would be wonderful if, using whatever tools we have, people could see the world more realistically and sanely, because then they would make better decisions. Well, thank you for the pioneering work that you've done to help people reach that state, and

thanks for shoying with me today. Well, I'm delighted that you call, that you ask that you're doing what you're doing, and I also found the book Ungifted really a delight, and that you're doing you know that you're carrying the notion of brilliant minds, the inherent capacity of everyone to be more who they want to be. Yeah, and to use their parts or in my world, their cells just more congruently and more with more health. It's just as we're very much in the same camp. And I love

to talking to you, Jim. I love it. I'm deeply honored by what you just said, by the way, and you know, just so touched because I feel like there's a wavelength here of a similar spirit of you know, how can we help people? Yes, yes, we have different selves, but there is a most valued self, you know. I think all of us at the end of the day could kind of sit down and say, you know what, like I think that this these are some boundaries here of what I feel happiest and most moral or most

operating in all cylinders. This is the self, you know, and I think you know we both want to help people kind of reach that state more consistently in a way. Well, I'm going to give anyone who's listening the easiest conceivable way to make their life work, because they all know it already. It's called when you're really upset, count to ten. You think, what on earth is that for? Okay, when you count to ten, you literally self shift down. You're not kind of down shift into a calmer self that

is better able to handle the situation. We all know it. Simply calling itself makes it more easier to see why it works so well. And I think we all like that person better. I think we can probably all agree. You know. It's funny a lot. There's some really fascinating research coming out showing by Nina Stromans or others showing that what we all mean by our real self is really our moral self, you know, like yeah, yeah, yeah. The idea that there's a false self, right is kind

of nonsense, nonsense. You know. It's like people say, well, I'm not myself today, and I say, well, who are you? And it turns out it's somebody who is in the same body and has the same name in the same driver's license. But it's a it is a different self, they're right, Yeah, you know, I can't imagine what got into me. Of course you can't, because that's a different self, of course. But you know, that's enough of that, enough

of that. But there is something we can still save, the real self notion and put it in modern day parlance, you know, And it's just it's our value it self, it's our moral self. It's yeah, it's the self. We like the bathroom of ourselves. That's right, that's right. Yeah, I love it. But also that shifts because the one who's a whiz at the office or as a gifted professor, you don't want that one to be who's playing with

your three year old. M Why is that? Because the one who's playing with your three year old really behaves differently more. Okay, Okay, you got it. I got it. I took I think I took what you said to literally like, you want a different person. Yes, you say you want a different self. Herschel Walker who, Yeah, Herschel Walker who is fantastic football player. He's also a dance ballet He's got a huge company. And what he says is you don't want Herschel football sold, a football player

to come and be your babysitter. Right. I love it. So you know, maybe you know we're so maybe we can both. You know, we're working towards making a world where people are more flexible and free to be the right in the right as you said, be in the right mind at the right time. I love it. Thanks again for chatting with me today. Okay, well you can have it. No I like giving credit. I really appreciated that.

We'll have a great day and thank me, thank you, And I love finding out what mattis flow and I said right back then and how close we were to where we still are. Yeah. I will continue giving you uh stuff, little nuggets that I find about that. So thank you. I'm delighted. Okay, okay, have a good day, you two. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I

hope you enjoyed this episode. If you like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a reading and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the mind of brain, behavior and creativity.