COVID-19 Interconnectedness: Health Inequity,the Climate Crisis,and Collective Trauma

The COVID-19 pandemic brings to the forefront the complex interconnected dilemmas of globalization, health equity, economic security, environmental justice, and collective trauma, severely impacting the marginalized and people of color in the United States. This lack of access to and the quality of healthcare, affordable housing, and lack of financial resources also continue to have a more significant impact on documented and undocumented immigrants. This paper aims at examining these critical issues and developing a framework for family therapists to address these challenges by focusing on four interrelated dimensions: cultural values, social determinants of health, collective trauma, and the ethical and moral responsibility of family therapists. Given the fact that family therapists may unwittingly function as the best ally of an economic and political system that perpetuates institutionalized racism and class discrimination, we need to utilize a set of principles, values, and practices that are not just palliative or after the fact but bring forth into the psychotherapeutic and policy work a politics of care. Therefore, a strong call to promote and advocate for the broader continuum of health and critical thinking preparing professionals to meet the challenges of health equity, as well as economic and environmental justice, is needed. The issues discussed in this paper are specific to the United States despite their relevance to family therapy as a field. We are mindful not to generalize the United States' reality to the rest of the world, recognizing that issues discussed in this paper could potentially contribute to international discourse.     

From horror to ethical responsibility: Carl Gustav Jung and Stephen King encounter the dark half within us,between us and in the world

This paper explores the experience of horror. The term is usually understood collectively to refer to experiences of terrorism, racism and other conflicts; however, the paper explores the equal horror for the individual of facing deep and painful psychic contents and traumatic experiences. The paper explores the way that both C.G. Jung, through analysis of the psyche, and the author Stephen King, through his horror novels, have accepted and explored the experience of encountering ‘the dark half’ or ‘It’ that is the other within themselves, forming images and symbols capable of linking their personal experience to that of the collective. This encounter is transformed, as far as Jung is concerned by analytical psychology and for King by fiction, through an attitude of active imagination. This led both men to developing an ethical responsibility towards the images of the unconscious, as well as the personal and collective contents of human life. The paper depicts how encountering the ‘dark half’, through Jung and King can provide a Jungian analyst with a special attitude with which to deeply explore and ethically process the experience of horror in different fields, including therapeutic practice, analytical training and in the traumatic and conflictual facing of the other, with which, today as always, the world presents us.