Fighting the Culture of Loneliness: An Interview with Dr. Erik Goodwyn, Part II of II

Pacifica Extension and International Studies will offer “A Jungian Analysis of Toxic Modern Society: Fighting the Culture of Loneliness” on July 30, August 6, 20, and 27, 2024, consisting of four classes taught by Erik Goodwyn, a renowned Jungian scholar and psychiatrist, as well as a fiction author. I’m delighted to speak with him about his upcoming seminar, as well as his creative endeavors. 

Angela: I saw that you will be addressing “narcissism” as part of your lecture on loneliness and hyper-individualism. I know given your professional training that you will not be throwing the term “narcissism” around in the way that popular culture does, as someone who is simply very selfish, when in the psychological sense of the word, narcissism is a devastating psychological complex to live with or be around. How does hyper-individualism relate to narcissism and have we truly seen a rise in narcissism over the last century or just a rise in awareness of what it is?

Erik: It seems to be a genuine increase in narcissism, defined through comparative studies of different value systems, where you look at how much a person values belonging to an affiliation or group and service to others, versus fame, looks, and money. The literature I found suggests we’ve seen a slow and gradual shift from the early part of the twentieth century. That’s an underlying value system that’s perpetuated now, essentially from capitalist mechanisms. It’s happened partly from advertising and people getting better at convincing you to buy things, rather than deriving fulfillment from groups of various affiliations. They’ve shown through studies that general trust in society and other people has dropped, which is one thing that leads to narcissistic defenses, that false sense of self or self-aggrandizement because social instincts aren’t being met.

There are four basic social instincts, one from the literature and one I’ve added. The interpersonal romantic bond, which people will pursue at great lengths, because we’re a pair-bonding species. Then there’s friends and family, close people who you interact with on a regular basis whom you can trust. Then belonging in a community, which originates from our time as hunter gatherers, and the longing for that is still there, although we don’t talk about that much anymore. The fourth is nature, a feeling of a connection with nature. These social instincts evolved because we’ve put all our eggs in one survival basket. We work together. A hundred or a thousand humans working together can do things that no species on Earth can do, except for viruses and bacteria (and some insects). The only thing that motivates that behavior are social instincts. That means there is an incredible amount of pain when those instincts aren’t satisfied. We develop addictions, narcissist defense mechanisms, and even join cults, which is why they pop up in western society a lot. A whole lot of things we’re observing are unhealthy attempts at healing. Symptoms are nature’s attempts at healing, as Jung says.

Angela: In looking at your work, I see that archetypes and dreams figure heavily into how you propose to address the toxicity of modern culture. Can you speak a little about this?

Erik: We have to recognize that the major problem resulting from our social structures and the inertia of our social systems is that they’ve gotten us to a place of disconnection, and the ultimate source of much if not most of it is the starving of social instincts. As part of our attempts at healing, one of the things that will emerge is the transcendent function, which is always producing symbols, trying to get us to reconnect. This will vary from one person to the next, but I think you’ll see the key to working as a clinician is to keep an eye open for dreams and archetypes during creative visualization that relate to social connection. It will be evident that we need to stop looking at the patients as the solution being entirely individual. It’s partly individual but partly social, like Ashok Bedi says, the goal of therapy is integration and adjustment to society, and figuring out your place in it. That will be in the symbols and archetypal images as expression of the problem and what to do about it but also the ritual ways that we connect traditionally.

One missing link may be the emphasis on ritual, in that it’s a way we enact our connections. Those acts speak directly to the social instincts, which emerge even before language does. In the West, we have a cerebral, hyperverbal process in therapy that stays way up in the clouds and doesn’t address the body, whereas rituals, which we may have to invent in therapy, find ways to enact the connection that is a meaningful experience because of their physicality. That is one way that the unconscious material is going to guide us. Dreams and archetypal images offer up various types of solutions to this sense of alienation.

Angela: You’ve said that your “passion is the imagination in all its manifestations,” and that is why you are, aside from being a Jungian analyst, an author of fantasy fiction. Fantasy is often derided by devotees of literary fiction as being  “genre fiction” because of “made-up” creatures that couldn’t possibly exist in the “real world.” Yet, if we look at some of the most popular stories from the history of humankind, there is no shortage of dragons, vampires, witches, and mythical creatures. Your forthcoming novel, King of the Forgotten Darkness: A Raven’s Tale Fantasy, is set in “the savage, Fairywild beauty of Erentyr.” Why do you think fantasy as a genre is looked down upon, and what has the writing of this book meant to you as a psychiatrist? Do we need dragons and fantastical creatures to function in the ultra-real world that we currently call reality?

Erik: Terry Pratchett has a great quote about this feeling amongst us that fantasy is lesser, “Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy.” Why it’s looked down upon, I think, is that critics don’t acknowledge that myths and fairy tales are a picture of how complexes work. This is what Marie-Louise von Franz identified so well. But some of the fantasy written now is disconnected from anything resembling psychic dynamics. Fantasy has the potential to be more real than literary fiction because it looks at symbols of our inner experience and can accurately expresses them apart from the limitation of physics. Of course, there are some works of fantasy that are very highly thought of. Tolkien has college courses devoted to his work. His work is deeply emotional, resonant, and true in many ways.

My novel is an expression of something I feel strongly about in the modern world. The story begins in a near-future modern world, where suffering has been eliminated by locking away the fantasy world, which is chaotic and full of demons, wizards, warfare and all kinds of fairy creatures. But I think we need fantasy worlds. Without them we don’t know what’s going on inwardly, they give us pictures of what is going on within that can’t be duplicated in so called realistic story telling. The barrier between the two is the source of the problem. In the modern world, the fantastical is squirreled away into this safe little box where it can’t hurt anyone, and it’s nice and safe and therefore considered frivolous. Truly engaging with it is anything but that. It’s scary. But we need to do it, otherwise we suffer greatly. That’s what Tolkien was doing. He was a fighter in WWI and saw what he felt was the destruction and disenchantment of the modern world. For him, his story was an expression not of something disconnected form the real world, but the real world as he saw it, where he thought we were going, inundated with Saruman’s wanting to turn everything into a factory. It’s the distinction between fantasy and imagination, such as alchemists make, ego fantasy versus a true encounter with the imaginal. It’s the ego-drive, wish fulfillment type of fantasy that is looked down upon. I tried to write a story that addressed the imaginal and a true encounter with the unconscious.

Angela: Thank you so much for speaking with me today, and I look forward to your forthcoming seminar! For those who would like to register for A Jungian Analysis of Toxic Modern Society: Fighting the Culture of Loneliness” or would like more information, please visit us here.

Read Part I of this interview on the Pacifica newsfeed.

Erik Goodwyn is a psychiatrist who has listened to the dreams and fantasies of suffering people from in both military and civilian settings. He is also a scholar published in anthropology, dream analysis, mythology, ritual, philosophy, and archetypal psychology. He has been invited to give lectures in Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and all over the United States. His passion is the imagination in all its manifestations, which is why he is also an author of fantasy fiction. He feels the symbolic and fantastical imagery of the imagination is the only way to depict some of the most important and mysterious truths of the human soul, as depicted in his Raven’s Tale series.

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Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.