now it's a very old picture it's Jonah
emerging from the whale it's a variant
of a myth the myth is the dragon myth
I suppose the dragon myth is that
there's a dragon that lives under the
ground
that's eternal and now and then it rises
out of the ground to threaten the state
and someone within the state determines
to go confront the dragon voluntarily
and does so and then brings back
something of great value sometimes if
the hero is generally male sometimes the
thing of great value is a female that
the dragon has kidnapped that's the st.
George story and sometimes it's gold
another treasure like in the story of
The Hobbit and story that you all know
very well - classic hero story and the
hero story is another fundamental
element of the clinical theories I would
say it's predicated on the idea that you
learn through voluntary contact with
that that frightens or disgusts you and
that's a hallmark of psychoanalytic
theory young Carl Jung who will discuss
in detail said his primary dictum was in
steer Colinas in Minotaur which I'm sure
I'm massacring because it's Latin but it
meant in fill that will be found and one
of the hallmarks of the clinical
theories is that within the confines of
everyone's experience and you can think
about this as experience out in the
world or experience in the unconscious
mind there are dirty little secrets
let's say and skeletons and dreadful old
fears and remnants of abuse and memories
of pathological behavior and failures of
courage that you leave you undeveloped
perhaps out of a void
and that the psychoanalytic process is
precisely the careful encounter with
those forgotten and and repressed
elements of the self in the hope that a
clear encounter will redeem them unite
them with the remainder of your
personality and make yours make you
stronger in consequence and I would say
that that's just a variant of the manner
in which human beings learn and we'll
talk about this more in relationship to
Piaget because you always learn when
you're wrong which is very annoying now
what do you learn when you're correct
you you're walking in the world you're
operating the world you have a sense of
what you want to have happen you're
always looking at the world through this
sense of what you want to have happen
you're acting so that what you want to
have happen will happen and when it
happens well then you're happy because
well first of all you get what you want
and that's good maybe depending on what
you want but it's also good because if
you get what you want when you act then
it turns out that your model of how to
act is valid right that would come that
you get what you want indicates no error
on the part of your model but it's very
frequently the case that when you act to
get what you want you don't get what you
want and then that's unpleasant because
you don't get what you want but it's
even more unpleasant because it brings
with it the hint of a suggestion that
the manner in which you're construing
the world is incorrect at some
indeterminant level so for example if
you tell a party tell a joke at a party
you presume that people will attend and
then when they hear the joke they will
laugh and then if you tell the joke and
it goes flat or even worse disgusts and
offends people then you're going to be
taken aback and that's partly because
you didn't get what you want and that's
not so good but it's but it's more
because there's something wrong with the
way you concept
the situation and then you're faced with
a problem and the problem is the
emergence of a domain of the unknown
it's like well what kind of mistake did
you make
maybe you're not as funny as you think
you are that that could be a big problem
maybe you're not around people that who
are the way you think they are maybe
they don't like you as much as you
thought they liked you I mean the
potential for various paranoid thoughts
of increasing severity to come welling
up at you in a situation where you make
even a trivial social mistake is quite
broad and when you make an error of that
sort you have to face it and sort
through all the possibilities so that
you can find out what it was that you
did wrong and how to retool it so that
in the future you don't make the same
mistake and that requires well that
requires in some sense what you might
describe as a journey into the belly of
the beast the Beast being that place
where things have fallen apart and where
you're overwhelmed with negative emotion
and chaos and confusion and that's a
very old story that's the story of the
journey to the underworld and the hero
is the person who makes the voluntary
journey to the underworld to collect
what's being languishing down there and
that's the basic motif of psychoanalytic
theory I would say it's the basic motif
in some sense of clinical practice
because one of the things that you do as
a clinician is find out what people are
afraid of and what they're avoiding and
that can be in their path or in their
present or in their future
break it down into smaller pieces and
help them devise strategies of approach
and mastery and that improves the
quality of their personality and helps
develop them into people who won't make
the same mistakes over and over again