In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into Carl Jung’s analytical psychology — explaining the ego, personal unconscious, collective unconscious, archetypes, shadow work, and more. Malcolm (who is openly not a fan) breaks down why Jung’s ideas sound profound but lead to disempowering, unscientific views of the mind that have quietly infected conservative and manosphere thinking (hello, Jordan Peterson fans).

We contrast Jung’s mystical “deep state” model of the psyche with a more pragmatic, first-principles understanding of consciousness, unconscious processing, memory, trauma contextualization, and emotional framing. Learn why repressed memories are mostly myth, how you can choose your emotional reactions (and why that’s empowering), why shadow work can manufacture problems that didn’t exist, and how over-mythologizing the self leads to cognitive abdication.

If you’ve ever felt pressured into “integrating your shadow,” doing dream analysis for growth, or treating archetypes as destiny — this episode will give you the tools to spot the woo and reclaim agency over your mind.

Timestamps below. Like, subscribe, and share if you want more no-BS breakdowns of influential ideas that shape culture.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we’re going to be talking about Jungian psychology, which people know I am not a fan of, but I want to explain what his psychology is, and it’s important to know about because if you are consuming. Manosphere content. What you may not realize or even conservative content more broadly is a lot of conservative intellectuals recycle Jungian theory without telling you that’s what they’re doing.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Famous person for doing this is Jordan Peterson.

Simone Collins: Well, Jordan Peterson talks about young a lot. I think just not that many people necessarily understand how much young has influenced him.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so it’s useful to be able to note, call out when you’re having Jungian BS thrown at you and to understand why it’s wrong, because a lot of it can sound like, oh, shadow work or something like this.

I can see. How this is useful. And it’s fundamentally bad because it leads you to bad conceptualizations of how [00:01:00] your brain works. Mm-hmm. That lead you to psychological places that can be more difficult than they need to be to resolve. So let’s dive in. Hmm. The structure of the psyche, in Young’s perspective is that you have the ego, the center of consciousness, your sense of i identity and everyday awareness.

It is an important part, but not the whole self, and it can become rigid or inflated if it ignores the unconscious. And this is where you talk about people with like. An inflated ego, and we’ll get to more what he means by this, which by the way, and I think a very bad way to think about this phenomenon.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: Then you have the personal unconscious. This contains repressed or forgotten personal experiences, memories, and feeling toned complexes, emotionally charged clusters of ideas like a mother complex or inferiority complex, which we’ll get to a lot at. The other. Really important to him these act asynchronously and can influence behavior strongly.

Now the first thing I need to note, just like [00:02:00] before we go farther. Scientifically speaking to the best of our knowledge in psychology right now. And, and, and, and keep in mind, I am very dubious of psychology as a science, but I am trained enough in it to feel like I have a fairly good understanding of where the BS lies and where where things that we’ve actually pretty much gotten down at this point.

Mm-hmm. And one of the things that it seems pretty reliable at this point is that. Repressed memories are not a real phenomenon. Yeah. You do not forget something. Have it continue to affect you and then have it come back later in life. Yeah. When this happens, it is almost always in the studies that have like looked at this a lot.

One of two phenomenon phenomenon. One is called forgetting Before remembering. So, what happens in is somebody will go to their, their spouse or something like that [00:03:00] and been like, oh my God. I just had this memory that came back to me all of a sudden of my father or uncle sexually, you know, essaying me as a kid.

And this is horrifying. And then the person who they came to is this will be like, oh, oh my God. That is horrifying. Well, secretly being like, actually you talked about that all the time. And causes this phenomenon. Is they’ll remember something like this, but then the context of that memory changes.

Hmm. They might remember their uncle doing something funny with them as a kid or touching them in a way that they thought was silly or weird or made them a little uncomfortable. Yeah. Like

Simone Collins: their uncle was always creepy and like did stuff

Malcolm Collins: like that that, yeah, it did this creepy thing for me, but it wasn’t, you know, grape.

And then one day they’re sitting there and they’re like. That was a grape. Oh my God. But because they hadn’t remembered it with such a charged word, like grape [00:04:00] attached to it. They had forgotten the previous times. They had remembered it. They had forgotten that that was always in their memory because what they’re actually remembering is I had never remembered that as a grape.

I had never remembered my uncle Graped me. I had just remembered my uncle did this funny thing to me. So you get enough of a category change that you forget that you had previously always had this in your memory. The second thing is it’s an implanted memory. This is, when these, these very famous with hypnosis, but also it can happen with psychologists more broadly which is to say it’s very easy for people to conflate fake memories.

People fake memories all the time. Our brain. Constantly makes up memories. The, obviously the famous study that I talk a lot about when I’m talking about ai, when people are like, well, AI makes up how it knows something. And the famous memory blindness studies in humans where you show them pictures of attractive women and then you do sleigh of hand and you go, why did you pick this one?

And they’ll just go on a long rant about why they chose that one. And it was not the one they just chose. Or

Simone Collins: even like, [00:05:00] political ballot choices.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So people will just make up why they made decisions. And, and this, this has a big problem with memories, right? Because if you make up, oh, well, you know, a psychologist walks you through something in a hypnotic suggested state, or they, you, you know, they walk you through, well, do you remember this happening?

You can think back and create that false memory shockingly easily. It is very, very easy for humans to create false memories. And the reason why I’m so against people who push the idea of repetitive memories is because the moment you have this concept and you believe it’s real, then you and any culture that stems from you, your kids, everything like that, that you teach about this are very susceptible to this.

Mm-hmm. And this is really bad because this is the core wedge that things like the urban monoculture and cults like Scientology. Used to drive a wedge between people and their support network, IE your their families. Mm-hmm. So if your kids grow up [00:06:00] believing in suppressed memories, it’s much easier for someone to later te teach them.

Imagine how mortifying that would be if somebody convinced one of your kids that you assayed them and you didn’t. And yet, we know from research, this happens all the time for people who go visit psychologists and stuff like this.

Simone Collins: Well, and this was even an issue in, in the period of this. The Satanic panic.

All these kids were like, yeah, I was involved in this horrible stuff. And everyone’s like, what whatcha you talking about?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this

Simone Collins: never happened.

Malcolm Collins: Then his final layer here, the collective unconscious young’s most distinctive contribution, a deeper universal layer shared by all humans inherited across generations, not personally acquired.

It is like a psychic instinctual reservoir containing primordial images and patterns common to humanity. And he believes that this is like a real physical thing. He’s not talking about like. Pop culture here or something like that which is obviously stupid and woo, and we would immediately call that out as stupid and woo.

But let’s go to the ego. ‘cause I actually think [00:07:00] people might think the ego is the least objective one of these ideas before we get into all the shadow work and everything like that. But I actually think it’s the most wrong of his ideas about how the human brain works. And because it’s the most wrong it can lead to and, and because it doesn’t seem obviously wrong, it can lead to tons and tons and tons of mistakes.

And it is seeped into every aspect of our language. He has a big ego. You know what somebody might say, right? And they’re literally referring to a psychological theory when they say that the ego is the center of the field of consciousness. Your subjective sense of I personal identity will, continuity of time.

It handles everyday awareness, decision making, reality testing, and adaption to the external world. Young saw it as essentially, but limited. It’s like a small isl...