Archetype X: Visible and Invisible Otherness

This article applies Jungian psychology to the film Get Out (2017), written and directed by Jordan Peele. It examines American culture, race, and racism issues through the conceptual lenses of complexes, archetypes, and personal myth. The movie is organized into a series of chapters exploring psychological, racial complexes: the complex of being the objectified other, the complex of not being other enough, and the complex of otherness and annihilation. The article then considers personal myth and the presence of invisible otherness in the lives of both Jung and Peele. The author places emphasis on the necessity and responsibility of the other as a disrupter and developer of personal and cultural individuation, and proposes the development of an archetype of otherness through the arts, Archetype X. The naming of this new archetype opens a way for the marginalized to begin to be seen, to create a home in which to place themselves and to belong.     

The Worker-Priest Archetype

The concept of the worker-priest archetype, in its most recent official form, originated in France's Roman Catholic Church as a missionary attempt to “rediscover the masses” of the industrial class workers in the French factories of the 1940s. This effort was shut down by the Vatican in the 1950s out of fear of Communist influence within the movement. With the advent of the Vatican II Council (1962–1965) of the Catholic Church, new life seemed to have been infused into this archetype. For example, the liberation theology movement in Latin America was strongly influenced by Vatican II. In the United States, many new forms of liturgical celebration were created, and social reform movements, doubtless as part of the 1960s social-revolutionary energy, emerged and were fostered. When the conservative faction within the Catholic hierarchy reacted to what they perceived as dangerous and threatening developments in the church, they acted to stop this liberal movement. One likely consequence of this slamming shut the windows that had been newly opened by Vatican II was a mass exodus of Catholic priests in the United States who left the clergy and entered civilian life.

?This article focuses on interviews with three of the men who were active Catholic priests, two of whom chose to leave the priesthood and one who remained a priest but moved the focus of his work to the “inner city.” There he cared for young black men as an unofficial social worker/priest, operating on his own to serve a population traditionally underserved by the Catholic Church.     

The Orphan Archetype

This article explores the archetype of the orphan and traces it through myth, story, fairy tale, literature, and perhaps most importantly, through the author's personal experience. This is a treatment of the theme of abandonment that details the “inner orphan's” predicament. Rothenberg, a Jungian analyst, speaks from the depths when she says: “It is only when one is truly alone that the creative potential that is carried deep inside has the space and room to emerge into the light of day.”     

Tense and Relativity

Those inclined to positions in the philosophy of time that take tense seriously have typically assumed that not all regions of space‐time are equal: one special region of space‐time corresponds to what is presently happening. When combined with assumptions from modern physics this has the unsettling consequence that the shape of this favored region distinguishes people in certain places or people traveling at certain velocities. In this paper I shall attempt to avoid this result by developing a tensed picture of reality that is nonetheless consistent with ‘hypersurface egalitarianism’—the view that all hypersurfaces are equal.     

The Zombie Archetype: Living in a Viral Culture

When psyche brings forth monsters, it is always wise to take a close look. When the active imagination of global culture fixates on a particular kind of monster, there's a veritable treasure trove of hidden meaning and valuable psychological information to be unearthed. Zombies warrant closer scrutiny for several reasons: (1) They are currently enjoying a place in the cultural spotlight; (2) they embody the loss of will and the disempowerment that occurs in so many of the situations humans fear and loathe the most; and (3) they are remarkably flexible metaphors that stand in as symbols for social ills as disparate as viral pandemics, the evils of technology, and the chaos that threatens to take over in the face of political collapse. What is behind the popular appeal of the brain-devouring quest of the walking dead? Can the lure be linked to globalization and the inevitable sharing of biohazardous particulates among the people of the world? Or can it be further reduced to a manifestation of the primordial fear of death itself? This article examines zombies across time and place and finds them to be worthy representations of the specters of frightening forces that hunt down and haunt the living.     

Superluminal Signaling and Relativity

Special relativity is said to prohibit faster-than-light (superluminal) signaling, yet controversy regularly arises as to whether this or that physical phenomenon violates the prohibition. I argue that the controversy is a result of a lack of clarity as to what it means to ‘signal’, and I propose a criterion. I show that according to this criterion, superluminal signaling is not prohibited by special relativity.