How Did I Become a Statistic?
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2026
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jung wrote “The Undiscovered Self” in 1957, opening with “What will the future bring?”, as the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and nuclear weapons gained enough momentum to threaten survival. He argued that mass-mindedness, amplified by state power, corporate bureaucracy, and scientific rationalism, reduces people to statistics, numbs conscience, and makes evil all the easier to project.
When institutions promise safety and efficiency, what happens to individual responsibility?
If religion is an instinct, what strange substitutes will it flow into when it’s suppressed?
What can we do to strengthen our Ego-Self axis to resist groupthink?
Late in his life, Jung sought to restore the value of religion by freeing it from specific dogma and defining it as a conscientious regard for the irrational facts of experience. As he watched various nations lose their footing and careen into extremes that swept the populace into unthinking obedience, he quietly stated over and again, a vital connection to the transpersonal was the only stable alternative to the deification of the State.
We discuss how crowds crush self-reflection, why turning individuals into units of human resource makes people feel replaceable, how projection turns rivals into demons and justifies violence, why psychologies that seek to make us fit in are agents of compliance, how shadow integration grants inner authority, how secular isms capture our religious hunger by harnessing their agenda to archetypal rituals of purity, heresy and sacrifice, how art might save us and why dreams will always offer a refuge that the collective cannot steal from you.
Mentioned:
The Undiscovered Self
Present and Future
God, the Devil, and the Human Soul
Jung, His Life and Work
The Apotheosis of Washington
Nuremberg
The Wall
Infinite Jest
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a major part of this essay, and I just want to jump to a quote. He says, the evil, the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the dark foreboding are there before our eyes, if only we would see. |
| 0:13.4 | Man has done these things. I am a man who has his share of human nature, therefore I am guilty with the rest and bear unaltered |
| 0:23.0 | and indelibly within me the capacity and the inclination to do them again at any time. |
| 0:30.3 | Even if, juristically speaking, we were not accessories to the crime, we are always, thanks to our |
| 0:37.2 | human nature potential criminals. In reality, we are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. |
| 0:40.1 | In reality, we merely lacked a suitable opportunity to be drawn into the infernal melee. |
| 0:46.2 | None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow. |
| 0:52.2 | So take that on board and ask, where is that in me when we're railing against |
| 0:59.7 | politician, a friend, a family member? Like, where's that in me? |
| 1:06.7 | Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, |
| 1:14.7 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation |
| 1:18.3 | that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 1:24.4 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 1:28.4 | I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 1:33.4 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, on Cape Cod. We wanted to do something a little different today. |
| 1:50.8 | We've done this before, but we don't do it too often. |
| 1:53.4 | We're going to take a close look at a single essay of Jung's, |
| 1:58.1 | and this one is called, it's known as, |
| 2:04.2 | the undiscovered self. And it was published in 1957. It's one of the last things that Jung wrote. And it was touchingly enough, very |
| 2:13.3 | concerned with the future. Jung knew himself that he wasn't going to be around, but he was very |
| 2:20.6 | worried about what was going to come next. And in fact, the first line of the essay is, what |
| 2:27.4 | will the future bring? So that's what we're going to talk about today. |
... |
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