The last Words Create Worlds essay in this blog was “Words Create Worlds.9: Life and Death are in the Power of the Tongue” on January 7th, 2021, the day after the insurrection. I am feeling the need to start writing this series, again, though, with current events in the United States and abroad.
The inspiration for this essay series comes from Rabbi Heschel. He said, as recounted by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:
“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness—or evil—into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[1]
We live in what is increasingly called a post-truth world and with the growth of AI, truth is getting even more difficult to ascertain. Truth may become only one perspective amongst many in the marketplace and in politics.
The reason I am reviving this essay series is because I have recently had two clients refer to videos by “Carl Jung” discussing empaths and narcissists. I found this very strange, as the word “empath” is a contemporary term which Jung did not use. “Narcissist” is also a term he rarely used. I cautioned my clients that these could be AI created fictions and began looking into the source of this misinformation.
I count 208 videos posted by Surreal Mind (listed as joining April 26, 2025) on YouTube, with 137K subscribers. Most of these videos contain AI images of Jung in different settings and give a muddled mixture of occasional true quotes from Jung (unrelated to empaths and narcissists) in a morass of misattributions. I hesitate to go deeply into these false attributions, lest I lend them credence they don’t deserve. Let us just look at one in video, “4 Stages Every Empath Abuse By Narcissist Goes Through / Carl Jung Psychology,” [sic] (with 31K views), whose first words are a deceptive falsehood. The video starts with the words, “Carl Jung discovered that empaths who survive narcissistic abuse go through four distinct psychological stages, and the final stage terrifies narcissists more than anything else.” These stages are listed on the screen as: 1) “The Light Trap” (a term not found in Jung’s Collected Works – CW); 2) “Soul Extraction” (not found in the CW); 3) “The Dark Night” (found in discussions of St. John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul” and the nigredo stage in alchemy, but nowhere in regards to “empaths” or “narcissists”); and 4) “The Phoenix Rebirth” (not found in the CW). We do not have to go any further into the video to know that it is not founded on Jung’s works and is therefore a deceptive untruth.
The videos are narrated in a deep English-accented voice (sounding like Terrence Stamp in the movie “Yes Man”) with eerie background tones. (If you get creeped out by these videos, please watch the “Yes Man” scene as an antidote!) The narrator often will quote Jung directly, then blur into a statement such as “stage 2 is what I call the great devouring.” It is not clear who the “I” is who is appropriating Jung’s name, you can’t even say he is appropriating Jung’s work, more stringing together a few unconnected quotes and creating, what could be called a manifesto for empaths fighting narcissists.
As a scholar, I feel obligated to give a few references to debunk the claim that Jung’s work has anything to do with the conceptual framework of these videos.
I have the complete Collected Works of Jung, in book and e-book form, so I did a quick search for “narcissist” and only found 3 instances of variations of that word in the entire twenty volumes of the Collected Works.
“This kind of analysis brings the work of art into the sphere of general human psychology, where many other things besides art have their origin. To explain art in these terms is just as great a platitude as the statement that ‘every artist is a narcissist.’ Every man who pursues his own goal is a ‘narcissist’— though one wonders how permissible it is to give such wide currency to a term specifically coined for the pathology of neurosis.”[2]
The context of this quote is a critique of psychoanalysis reducing the production of art to a neurotic and pathological activity. Jung is in no way writing about the dangers of “narcissists.”
The only other appearance of a variation on the word “narcissist” is in a critique of Freud’s view of introversion and Eastern spirituality as pathological self-focus.
“Freud identifies it with an autoerotic, ‘narcissistic’ attitude of mind. He shares his negative position with the National Socialist philosophy of modern Germany, which accuses introversion of being an offence against community feeling. In the East, however, our cherished extraversion is depreciated as illusory desirousness, as existence in the samsāra, the very essence of the nidāna-chain which culminates in the sum of the world’s sufferings.”[3]
If anything, Jung’s three instances of the word “narcissist” in the CW are a defense of introversion and artistic creation as not being a narcissistic preoccupation with the self, but impliy that there is a healthy form of self-focus possible.
The word “empath” or the concept of a “highly sensitive person” is not found in any of Jung’s writing as these are terms that were developed long after he had died in 1961. Variations of “empathize,” “empathizes,” and “empathized” appear twenty-three times in the collected works, but these are used in the ordinary manner of speech and not referring to “empaths” or “narcissistic abuse of empaths.”
Why would someone create obviously untrue videos and make false attributions to Carl Jung, replete with AI generated images of Jung? I really couldn’t tell you. Maybe someone thinks that invoking Jung gives their ideas credibility or validity?
There is a $39 The Alchemist’s Path: Perception Training for Empaths that can be purchased through the Surreal Mind YouTube site. So, there is possibly some money being made from the popularity of these deceptive videos through sales, but maybe more through ad revenue.
Since initially posting this, I have found another site, The Unconscious Guide, which takes the deception a step further by adding AI voice-over that is supposed to sound like Carl Jung, again speaking about empaths and narcissists.
I am disturbed, on multiple levels, by these empaths vs narcissists videos that are said to grow out of “Carl Jung Psychology:”
- These videos are blatantly untrue. They have nothing to do with Jung’s work and misrepresent him as founding a contemporary pop psychology misinformation mill.
- The videos clog the internet with AI misinformation.
- The videos further the dehumanization we have been trying to counter in medicine and health care by reducing human beings to labels, in this case, “empath” or “narcissist.” We have worked diligently in medicine to shift from the language of “he’s a schizophrenic” to “he is a person living with schizophrenia.” To call oneself an “empath” and another a “narcissist” diminishes the humanity of both people to a label.
- The videos promote a division of the world into the good: empaths, and the bad: narcissists. We don’t need further polarization and “othering” in the world at this time, even if it is currently very popular to demonize “others.” These videos encourage people to enter into a kind of “psychological warfare” against an inhuman enemy instead of focusing on one’s own humanity.
- Both the medium (the AI aesthetics and auditory tones) and the message (the false attributions to Jung) feel sticky, creepy, and cult-like.
What I am concerned about, beyond the obvious misappropriation, is that I hear clients latching on to the victim aspect of this empath/narcissist narrative. The risk is that people can over-focus on the power of the “narcissist” and ignore their own power. Healing is about caring for Self, not about finding fault in others. As Nietzsche wrote,
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you.”[4]
What this quote means to me is that we must be careful in studying the wrongs of others, lest we become like them to “overcome” them. True healing is self-connection and awakening the goodness of your own heart. In addition to the deceptiveness and misrepresentation of Jung, I do worry that this narrative risks being too much about the “other” and not enough about the Self.
Jung is important to me, his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, was one of the two books that led me on the path of becoming a psychiatrist (psyche-iatros: soul healer). The other book was M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, I learned of a view of the profession of psychiatry that was more than a reductionistic approach to brain chemicals, but a complex psychotherapy focused on personal growth. For Jung, the study of psychiatry included the arts and humanities, anthropology, archaeology, the study of language, dreams, and spirituality. The goal of life, and therefore psychotherapy, was the path of individuation, a journey from the limitation of one’s childhood and public persona to states of greater wholeness. This psychological journey shares a great deal with the spiritual quest. Jungian psychology tends to focus more on the inner journey of growth in which the ego clings to its limited persona and the obscuration of the personal shadow in order to manifest more of the “self.” This path of growth focuses on inner experiences of dreams and visions from the unconscious. This growth is in service to the self, not in service of the ego. Jung’s psychology is not for those who wish to be comfortable in the everyday world, but it is for those who wish to undertake a journey of self-discovery to become not who they think they should be, but to become who they are truly capable of becoming.
Here is the last paragraph of Modern Man in Search of a Soul:
“The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the…[people]…in whom it lives and who proclaim it. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of…[humanity]. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.”[5]
These videos obscure more than reveal Jung and his writings – they are predominantly misinformation and deception. I find them creepy, cult-like AI fantasies. I encourage you to watch the Terrence Stamp scene in “Yes Man” and then go back and watch these videos and see if you look at them differently. If you would really like to learn about Jung, read Memories, Dreams, Reflections autobiographical sketches written by Aniela Jaffé through conversations with Jung, or the newly published Jung’s Life and Work: Interviews for Memories, Dreams, Reflections with Aniela Jaffé, or Carl Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, or The Essential Jung: Selected Writings.
[1] Heschel, S. in “Introduction,” Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition, 1997.
[2] Jung, CG. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (CW 15), ¶ 102, p. 68. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Kindle Locations 221217-221220). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
[3] Jung, CG. “Psychological Commentary on ‘The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation,’” Psychology and Religion: West and East (Collected Works 11), ¶770, p. 481. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Kindle Locations 148354-148359). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
[4] Nietzsche, F. Aphorism 146, Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to Philosophy of the Future, Kaufmann, W (trans). New York: Vintage Books, 1989, p 89.
[5] Jung, CG. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. New York: Harvest, (1933), p. 244. Kindle Edition. Location 3572, (pp. 250-251).
Being Fully Human 