Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Psychology”

Episode 179: The Final Frontier, with Lionel Snell

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 11:45:00 -0500

One of the great rewards of "weirding" the world is learning that boredom may be a kind of ethical transgression—the world is simply too strange to allow for it, and if you're bored, you're at least partly to blame. Few have put this notion to the test as rigorously as Lionel Snell, whose work as a magician celebrates the wonders of everyday events, from a walk in the park to a moment of car trouble. Unlike the pursuit of the extraordinary that often defines occult practice, Snell's approach reminds us of the magic in the mundane. In this episode, Snell, also known as Ramsey Dukes, shares the insights he's gained over his decades-long career as one of the leading figures in contemporary magical theory and practice.

For an exclusive Vimeo link to Aaron Poole's film Dada mentioned in the intro, go to Instagram and send @aaronsghost the direct message "movie link please".

REFERENCES
Ramsey Dukes, Thundersqueak
Weird Studies, Episode 141 on “SSOTBME
Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell
John Crowley, Little, Big
Arthur Machen, “A Fragment of Life”
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Max Picard, The Flight from God
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
Henry Bergson, Matter and Memory
Russell’s Paradox

Special Guest: Lionel Snell [Ramsey Dukes].

Episode 172: Head Over Heels: On the Hanged Man of the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 10:30:00 -0400

The Hanged Man is arguably the most enigmatic card in the traditional tarot deck. Divested of any archetypal apparel – he is neither emperor nor fool, but just a man, who happens to be hanging – he gazes back at us with the look of one who harbors a secret. But what sort of secret? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the card that no less august a personage than A.E. Waite, co-creator of the classic Rider-Waite deck, claimed was beyond all understanding.

The musical interludes in this episode are from Pierre-Yves Martel's recent album, "Bach." Visit his website for more.

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REREFENCES

Welkin/Gnostic Tarot
Sally Nichols, Tarot and the Archetypal Journey
Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
Yoav Ben-Dov
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Richard Wagner, ”Sigmund” from Die Walkure
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Star Wars
John Frankenheimer (dir.), The Manchurian Candidate
Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot
MC Richards, “Preface” to Centering
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Alan Chapman, Magia

Episode 143: On UFOs

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:30:00 -0400

In the 1950s, Carl Jung expressed frustration at the impenetrability of the UFO mystery, the "strange, unknown, and indeed contradictory nature" of this "ostensibly physical phenomenon" with "an extremely important psychic component." Throughout his writings on the topic, he marvels at the impossibility of coming to even preliminary conclusions. Fastforward to 2023, after a series of astounding disclosures on the part of qualified government people, and we have as much reason to be baffled as we ever had. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the mercurial, tricksterish fact of ortherwordly things seen in the sky.

Learn more about the Ohio UFO Heritage Conference on May 5-6, 2023.

Preorder Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
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REFERENCES

Patrik Harpur, Daimonic Reality
John Keel The Mothman Prophecies
Jaques Vallee Passport to Magonia
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast
Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
Weird Studies, Episode 141 on SSOTBME
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Weird Studies, Episodes 73 and 74 on Jung
Weird Studies, Episode 44 on William James’s Psychical Research
Jacques Vallée and Paola Leopizzi, Harris, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret
Jacques Vallée, "Physical Analyses in Ten Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Material Samples"
Shepard tone
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
Twin Peaks
Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Weird Studies, Episode 59 on Walking
Weird Studies, Episode 142 on “Last and First Men”

Episode 128: Demon Workshop: On Victoria Nelson's 'Neighbor George'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 17:00:00 -0400

The American writer and thinker Victoria Nelson is justly revered by afficionados of the Weird for The Secret Life of Puppets and its follow-up Gothicka. Both are masterful explorations the supernatural as it subsists in the "sub-Zeitgeist" of the modern secular West. In 2021, Strange Attractor Press released Neighbor George, Nelson's first novel. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss this gothic anti-romance with a mind to seeing how it contributes to Nelson's overall project of acquainting us with the eldritch undercurrents of contemporary life.

Click here for more information on the Supernormal Festival, Aug 12-14, in Oxfordshire, England.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
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References

Victoria Nelson, Neighbor George
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Victoria Nelson, Gothicka
Wendy Lesser, American critic
Ward Sutton Onion cartoons
Extension, metaphysical concept
Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer
Cessation of Miracles, theological belief
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
Greg Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: A Case for the Ontological Turn”
Orcus Grotto, sculpture
Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Biography
Weird Studies, Episode 96 on Beauty and the Beast
M. C. Richards, “Wrestling with the Daemonic”

Episode 124: Dark Night Radio of the Soul, with Duncan Barford

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 May 2022 10:15:00 -0400

For several episodes now, Phil and JF have been circling what St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Soul, that moment in the spiritual journey where all falls a way and an abyss seems to crack open beneath our feet. When it came time to go there in earnest, they could think of no better guide than Duncan Barford, host of the excellent Occult Experiments in the Home podcast. As a master magician, long-time meditator, psychotherapeutic counsellor and writer on spirituality and the occult, Barford is uniquely endowed with the tools, experience, and language to discuss even the most difficult spiritual topics with wisdom and warmth. A Virgil for any Inferno.

Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack: Volume 1 and Volume 2
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Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

SHOW NOTES

Occult Experiments in the Home, Duncan Barford's excellent solo podcast
Duncan's other website, focusing on his work as a psychotherapeutic counselor
Duncan's books on Amazon US

Weird Studies, Episode 67 on Hellier
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Judgement
Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Dogen’s Bendowa
Tibetan Book of the Dead
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel
Spinoza, Ethics
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

Special Guest: Duncan Barford.

Episode 102: On Pan, with Gyrus

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 10:30:00 -0400

"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her famous poem "A Musical Instrument," which explores nature's troubling embrace of savagery and beauty. It seems that Pan always raises questions: What is he doing? What does he want? Where will he appear next? Linked to instinct, compulsion, and the spontaneous event, Pan is without a doubt the least predictable of the Greek Gods. Small wonder that he alone in the Greek pantheon sports human and animal parts. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Gyrus, author of the marvellous North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos, to capture a deity who, though he has made more than one appearance on Weird Studies, remains decidedly elusive.

Support us on Patreon:
Find us on Discord
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

REFERENCES

Gyrus, "Sketches of the Goat God in Albion"
Gyrus, North
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Pharmakon, philosophical term
Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive
Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece
Hellier, television docuseries
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on exotica
Pink Floyd, Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Clayton Eshelman, Juniper Fuse
Plutarch “On the Silence of the Oracles”
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger
D.H. Lawrence, “Pan in America”
Jim Brandon, The Rebirth of Pan

Episode 95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's 'The Fifth Child'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 10:30:00 -0400

Doris Lessing's uncategorizable oeuvre reached strange new heights in 1988 with the publication of her short novel The Fifth Child. The story couldn't be simpler. In the England of the 1970s, a couple determined to live out a dream that many of their generation have rejected -- the big family in the old house with the pretty garden -- conceive a child that may or may not be human. From that moment on, the boy, their fifth, becomes the alien force that will tear their dream to pieces. Profoundly ambiguous and unsettling, The Fifth Child is a weird novel that raises questions about parenthood, family, and the impenetrable depths of nature.

Header Image: The Changeling by Henry Fuseli (1780)

Additional music: "Fast Bossa Nova: Falling Stars" by Dee Yan-Key

REFERENCES

Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
Doris Lessing, Shikasta
M. R. James, weird fiction author
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier”
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
David Icke, conspiracy theorist
Deros, underground beings from the fiction of Richard Sharpe Shaver
Hieronymus Bosch, Dutch Renaissance painter
Weird Studies, Episode 86 on “The Sandman”
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf
Louis Sass, “The Land of Unreality: On the Phenomenology of the Schizophrenic Break”
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Richard Thorpe (dir.), The Wizard of Oz
Frank L. Baum, The Wizard of Oz
Weird Studies, bonus episode on Adventure Time
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
Doris Lessing, Ben in the World
Roman Polanski (dir.), Rosemary’s Baby
Richard Donner (dir.), The Omen
Donald Cammell (dir.), Demon Seed

Episode 86: On E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," and Freud's Sequel to It

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 10:30:00 -0500

The German polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann is one of the founding figures of what we now call weird literature. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss one of his most memorable tales, "Der Sandmann." Originally published in 1816, it is the story of a young German student whose fate is sealed by a terrifying encounter with the eponymous figure during his youth. The story packs several tropes that would later become staples of the weird: the protean monster, the double, the automaton... Your hosts discuss how Hoffmann uses these tropes without letting any of them coalesce into a stable thing in the reader's mind, thereby effecting a slowbuild of ambiguity upon ambiguity that culminates in a true paroxysm of dread. The argument is made that Freud does essentially the same thing in his famous essay "The Uncanny," wherein Hoffmann's story plays an important role.

REFERENCES

E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Sandman
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
Edgar Allan Poe, American writer
Sunn o))), American metal band
La Monte Young,, American composer
Stuart Davis, Aliens and Artists
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
Neil Gaiman, Mr. Punch
Jaques Offenbach, Tales of Hoffmann
Frank Zappa, American musician
Ernst Jentsch,, German psychiatrist
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr
Weird Studies, episodes 73 and 74 on Carl Jung

Episode 74: A Luminous Parasite: Jung on Art, Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 27 May 2020 13:30:00 -0400

In this second part of their exploration of C. G. Jung's essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," JF and Phil try to discern the psychological and metaphysical implications of the great Swiss psychologist's theory of art. For one, this involves discussing what Jung meant by archetypes, and how these relate to the artists who bring them forth in artistic works. This in turn leads to a discussion of the emergent artwork as an "autonomous complex," that is, as a self-moving spirit that requires the artist merely as a conduit for its manifestation in human -- and cosmic -- history.

REFERENCES

Carl Gustav Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"
Arthur Machen, "Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy"
Rick Riordan, [Percy Jackson & the Olympians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Jackson%26_the_Olympians)_ series of novels
Robert Altman (director), Nashville
Homer, The Odyssey
Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffmann
E. T. A. Hoffmann, "The Sandman"
David Lynch, American filmmaker (the Dionysian!)
Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker (the Apollonian!)
Richard Wagner's idea of Gesamtkunstwerk
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, and JF's analysis thereof
Lisa Ruddick, "When Nothing is Cool"
Weird Studies episode 5: Reading Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool"

Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 May 2020 11:30:00 -0400

This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was in this text that Jung most clearly distilled his thoughts on the power and function of art. In this first part, your hosts focus their energies on Jung's puralistic style, opposing it not just to Freud's monism (which Jung critiques in the paper) but also to the monism of those other two "masters of suspicion," Marx and Nietzsche. For Jung, art is not a branch of psychology, economics, philosophy, or science. It constitutes its own sphere, and non-artists who would investigate the nature of art would do well to respect the line that art has drawn in the sand. Weird Studies listenters will know this line as the boundary between the general and the specific, the common and the singular, the mundane and the mystical...

REFERENCES

C. G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"
Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century
Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychologist
Kinka Usher (director), Mystery Men
Theodor Adorno, “Bach Defended Against his Devotees”
Aleister Crowley, English magician
C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus
Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in: Untimely Meditations
Weird Studies, episode 49: Nietzsche on History
Weird Studies, episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher
Rudolph Steiner, Austrian esotericist

Episode 69: Special Episode: On Some Mental Effects of the Pandemic

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 13:00:00 -0400

What is there to say about the COVID-19 virus that hasn't already been said, over and over again, all around the world, in quaratined houses and on TV and social media and countless Zoom chats ... what can we say that you haven't heard? Well, probably nothing. But we are now at the point where we realize that the real importance of the things we say is not their content, but the mere fact of saying them. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, and at a time when we have been driven into separate solitudes, we are discovering that the real meaning of our utterances might be something like "hello, are you there?" and "I am here, talking to you." In that spirit, Phil and JF have a conversation about William James's essay "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake," partly to discuss the ways that it's relevant to our present circumstances and the ways it's not, but mostly to make human connections, both with each other and with Weird Studies listeners.

As JF says, stay close, but keep your distance.

REFERENCES

William James, "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake"
William James, Writings 1902-1910
Noel Black (director), "To See the Invisible Man", 2nd segment of episode 16 of The Twilight Zone (1985-86)
Weird Studies no. 29, “On Lovecraft”
Weird Studies no. 64, “Dreams and Shadows: On Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea”
Weird Studies no. 67, “Goblins, Goat-Gods and Gates: On Hellier”
Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview"
Bruno Latour, "An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns"
H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep”

Weird Stories: "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake" by William James

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 11:00:00 -0400

In preparation for an upcoming special episode on living in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic, here's Phil Ford reading an essay William James wrote on his experience of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

REFERENCES

William James, "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake"

Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 16:00:00 -0400

In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman argued that the the "nightworld" of dream should not play second fiddle to the "dayworld" of waking life, because in the soul as on earth, day and night are equally essential, and equally real. To reduce a dream to a message or interpretation is to fail the dream. In order for dreams to do their work on us, says Hillman, we must cease to regard them as hallucinations, mere metaphors, epiphenomena, or illusions, and instead see them as the imaginal other life we all must live. Every night, for Hillman, each of us descends into the underworld to encounter those forces that shape us and our surroundings. The way down is the way up.

REFERENCES

James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
George Steiner, Real Presences
Hakim Bey, Orgies of the Hemp Eaters: Cuisine, Slang, Literature and Ritual of Cannabis Culture
Erik Davis, High Strangeness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
Brad Warner on drugs and Buddhism
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Christopher Nolan (dir.), Inception
Jorge Luis Borges, "Nightmares" in Seven Nights
Henri Bergson, Dreams

Episode 62: It's Like 'The Shining', But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 14:00:00 -0500

The 1947 British film Black Narcissus is many things: an allegory of the end of empire, a chilling ghost story with nary a spook in sight, a psychological romance, and a meditation on the nature of the divine. Its weirdness is as undeniable as it is difficult to locate. On the surface, the story is straightforward: five nuns are tasked with opening a convent in the former seraglio of a dead potentate in the Himalayas. But on a deeper level, there is a lot more going on, as Phil and JF discover in this conversation touching on the presence of the past, the monstrosity of God, the mystery of the singular, and the eroticism of prayer, among other strangenesses.

REFERENCES

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburged (dirs.), Black Narcissus
Rumer Godden, author of the original novel

Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Tim Ingold, British anthropologist -- lecture: "One World Anthropology"
Jonathan Demme (dir.), The Silence of the Lambs
Pierre Bourdieu, French sociologist
Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods
Don Barhelme, American short story writer
Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher
Weird Studies episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's Genjokoan
The King and the Beggar Maid
Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers
“Painting with Light,” featurette on the Criterion Collection DVD of Black Narcissus

Episode 61: Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 12:15:00 -0500

The Welsh writer Arthur Machen defined good and evil as "ecstasies." Each one is a "withdrawal from the common life." On this view, any artistic investigation into the nature of good and evil can't remain safely ensconced our modern, common-life construal of thinigs. It must become fantastic and incorporate aspects of "nature" that feel "supernatural" from a modern standpoint. Jonathan Demme's screen adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs is a powerful example. The film oscillates undecidably between a straightforward crime story and a work of supernatural horror. In this episode, JF and Phil cast Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling as figures in a myth that pits the individual against the institution, the singular against the type, and the forces of light against the forces of darkness.

REFERENCES

Jonathan Demme (dir.), The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (original novel)
Carl Jung on the doctrine of Privatio Boni
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Goldberg Variations
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"
Howard Shore, Canadian composer
Arthur Machen, The White People
Weird Studies, episode 3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
Machen, The White People
Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature