The Shadow and the Specter: Carl Jung, Psychoanalysis, and Modern Politics
Rev Left Radio
Breht O'Shea
4.8 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2026
⏱️ 147 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Breht speaks with scholar Angie Bittar about the life, thought, and enduring relevance of Carl Jung. Together they explore Jung's understanding of the unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, individuation, dreams, symbols, myth, and the modern search for meaning.
After introducing Jung on his own terms, Breht and Angie place Jung in conversation with Marxism, historical materialism, and revolutionary politics. They discuss alienation, spiritual hunger, reactionary projection, fascist myth, scapegoating, bourgeois individualism, and the ways unconscious forces shape ideology and political life. They also ask what radicals can usefully take from Jung, what they should remain cautious about, and how the left might confront its own shadow without reducing politics to therapy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody, welcome back to Rev Left Radio. |
| 0:08.5 | All right, on today's episode, we have Angie Batar, who has actually been on Rev Left a few times, |
| 0:13.9 | specifically on our episodes around Syria. |
| 0:17.3 | She reached out and we discussed our mutual interest in psychoanalysis and Jung and Freud and we decided to do an episode explaining, clarifying, and putting into conversation, Jungian psychoanalysis with revolutionary politics, with Marxism, anti-imperialism. |
| 0:34.8 | We discuss fascist myth making. |
| 0:37.5 | We discuss the individual psyche, the role of the ego, various forms of neuroses, core |
| 0:43.3 | Jungian concepts like individuation, the shadow, the universal unconscious, and much, much more. |
| 0:51.0 | This is a two-plus-hour conversation on psychology, on history, on culture, much more. This is a two plus hour conversation on psychology, |
| 0:55.8 | on history, |
| 0:56.8 | on culture, |
| 0:57.6 | on politics. |
| 0:58.8 | And I think it's fascinating and I hope |
| 1:01.4 | incredibly useful to our audience to understand an aspect of our world |
| 1:06.4 | that doesn't get talked about obviously a lot on left-wing podcasts like this. |
| 1:12.2 | Though we do, of course, |
| 1:19.0 | pride ourselves on covering unorthodox topics on this podcast. But of course, we put it into conversation with politics, as we always do. We can't help ourselves. And so I'm really excited |
| 1:23.3 | to share this with you today. I also wanted to plug a really great learning resource called |
| 1:28.8 | Unlearning Capitalism. I've been linking to this new website in our show notes. It allows |
| 1:33.7 | people who are interested in Marxism and anti-imperialism and decolonization, in theory, more broadly. |
| 1:41.8 | It offers them a really easy to navigate resource that I want people to check out. |
| 1:47.7 | It was made by a comrade of mine, and I'm very excited for people to learn about it and to share it. |
| 1:53.9 | So I'll link to that in the show notes. |
... |
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