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. This is the first of a two-part interview.
Angela Borda: You’re teaching Pacifica’s upcoming seminar “A Jungian Analysis of Toxic Modern Society: Fighting the Culture of Loneliness,” based on your book of the same title. Can you tell us a little about the genesis of the book? What brought you to this topic as one to research and write about?
Erik Goodwyn: This book has been rattling around in my brain for many years. It started not long after my first book, Neurobiology of the Gods, which was the academic side. As I began to get more experience working a clinician in the real world, I noticed the same problems popping up over and over again. In medical school, they tell us to do the bio-social-psych model of mental illness. What I noticed is that we give lip service to that, but we don’t really do it in practice; we talk about the individual psychology sources of illness but not the cultural aspect. It’s usually a very vague, cursory and substance-less commentary on cultural factors. So I started to think about that a lot and over the years, and it affectionately became known in my family as the “rant book,” because I kept ranting about things that were bothering me about our culture. So fast forward 10 years. I wish I’d finished the book 6 or 7 years ago because now everyone is talking about the loneliness epidemic. I’m glad other people are seeing the problem, but I don’t know anyone who has approached it from the Jungian lens, which is what started me writing it.
Angela: My first thought, when I saw the title of your book was, “Why is loneliness bad?” As a writer, artist, and introvert, I am familiar with both loneness and loneliness. One being a necessary state to bring certain kinds of creative projects into the world, and the other being a state of suffering, I assume you’ll agree? Yet many artists and writers subscribe to the notion that what they produce is an alchemization of suffering, that loneliness is necessary to the urge to tell certain kinds of stories. I know how catastrophic depression and anxiety can be, so I’m not being flippant when I wonder if loneliness is something that can be avoided or if we should seek to avoid it at all. What is your take on that?
Erik: That’s a great question. I would say first there is definitely a difference between solitude and loneliness, because I could spend all day long working on a creative project without speaking to anyone and be fine. Loneliness, on the other hand, is when you have a deep, unsettled feeling of separation or alienation. The brain craves a secure attachment with someone whom you trust deeply and can be vulnerable with. If we don’t have that, solitude is empty and miserable and terrifying. If we have secure attachment, we can be introverts and go off and happily work on our projects. When I went to medical school, I was gone from home and my family five days a week, only coming home on the weekends. That was very painful at times, but it also meant I could work on myself. Because I usually had secure attachments, it was okay. When those attachments weren’t so safe and secure, the loneliness and suffering would be there.
In terms of transforming those feelings into creative work, I think maybe that question targets what we can do with suffering, which is inevitable. One of the things we can do is create works that help us to transcend it or integrate it or make meaning of it. Suffering is inevitable, even if you have secure human attachments.
Angela: Can you speak about the role of religion or the connection to nature or the universe as it pertains to the modern age and loneliness?
Erik: In the West, Christianity has fallen away and there’s not much in its place. Jung wrote about this, and I have two chapters devoted to it in the book, both to spirituality and our connection to nature. Modern society is distant from the natural environment. We spend all of our time indoors. That has physiological consequences. The theory from a medical point of view is that we evolved in environments with natural stimuli, flora and fauna, to the point where we’ve lost exposure to some of the bacteria in nature that our body expects to calibrate to. And with nature deficiency, we end up vulnerable to things like inflammation responses, which is tied to depression. I think that’s another type of social instinct, because it manifests in the same way. If we’re lacking in interpersonal connections, we’re lonely. And nature deficiency gives us the same kind of reaction. You can make the argument that we evolved to connect to nature, and we feel something isn’t right if we’re not.
Spirituality is another dimension of this, in that religious systems help us reinforce our social belonging and interconnection. If it’s not there, which it pretty much isn’t now comparatively speaking, it’s potentially a cause of suffering and loneliness. Jungian psychology is one avenue to resolve that.
Angela: The course will have four lectures, and my eye was caught by the second, which will focus on hyper-individualism as a source of increased anxiety and depression. At some point in the development of the dominant “American” culture, we decided that having our own studio apartment was preferable to living in a family house with three generations under one roof and the ghosts of our ancestors in the attic. Certainly that is related to increased wealth and the ability to actually have single-person or nuclear-family domiciles. But please tell us what exactly hyper-individualism is. Why is it prevalent now, and how does it damage our sense of well-being?
Erik: With, as you point out, greater material wealth and advances in technology, in a culture that is obsessed with individualism, you get an erosion of what would be the norm from an evolutionary point of view, which is multigenerational households or collective living in tribes. In the book, I go through the evidence behind why I think that is related to rising rates of depression and anxiety in the West. There is a lot of proof that for the last 100 years there’s been a rise of depression an anxiety, especially during covid, and now we have all of these mental health problems. But nobody is asking why we’re so depressed. I traced this back to our culture valorizing individualism to an extreme, compared to other cultures with a collective identity. It’s even measurable in brain scans. We’ve achieved our quest for rugged individualism but at what cost? People tend to think there’s no cost. But we have so many instances where we feel we don’t belong anywhere or know who we are. And I think one of the factors is hyper-individualism. We’ve lost the ability to be part of a group.
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Registration is now open for “A Jungian Analysis of Toxic Modern Society: Fighting the Culture of Loneliness”. To register or read more information, visit us here. To read Part II of the interview, visit us here.
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.
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.
