Being white,being Jungian: implications of Jung’s encounter with the ‘non-European’ other1

This personal account charts the changing relationship to a Jungian identity arising from the interrelated processes of understanding the roots of the colonial and racial ideologies that underpin Jung’s thinking, and a developing awareness of what it means to be a white person in a system of racism that maintains white supremacy. This is illustrated with reference to the image of a black man appearing in the dream of the white author and with use of post-Jungian thinking to critique the notion of an objective, non-racial psyche.     

The Anima as an Archetype of Human Resilience in the Face of Calamity1

This paper will provide a theoretical basis for looking at a dream in the analysis of a client during a calamity. Finding the archetype of the anima is a way of responding to a crisis, in this case to the COVID-19 pandemic period. With all the basic instincts disrupted by a catastrophe, the emergence of the anima, as archetype of life, is there to remind us how to survive and recover. The anima archetype, often representing psychological resilience in ancient myths, shows up in dreams to guide human transformation from the struggle to survive trauma to the art of living a full life.     

Archetypes and the ‘Impoverished Genome’ argument: updates from evolutionary genetics

Throughout his career, Jung felt the psyche had ‘ancestral layers’ that contained elements of an individual’s species history, and clinical experience has shown that this idea can be an aid to psychological healing and emotional well-being. Thus, some later thinkers have attempted to link such theoretical constructs to the genome, as Jung had little knowledge of genetics in his day. But in the early 2000s, genome studies suggested that the genome might contain too little content to be capable of encoding symbolic information. This opinion gave rise to an oft-repeated ‘impoverished genome’ argument, i.e. that the genome could not provide a significant contribution to the collective unconscious, prompting theorists to propose other sources for it, or to argue that it doesn’t exist. Today, however, developments in evolutionary neurogenetics calls the impoverished genome argument into question for a number of independent reasons. These developments re-open the idea that the genome may be worth reconsidering as the biological substrate for the collective unconscious.     

Is this a good time? Political activism and other in the temenos

This paper discusses raciality and Africanist culture as elements of the analytical clinical experience. The history of American Jungian psychology, and its relationship with the African diaspora, is reviewed with a perspective that seeks to deepen understanding of racism as an aspect of psychoanalytical institutional life. An attempt to separate political activism from the clinical setting is explored with consideration of the necessary intertwining relationship between socialization, racial identity and racism. Diversity and inclusion are becoming cultural signature markers of clinical work with individuals who have oftentimes, within the psychoanalytical clinical setting, been described due to ethnicity, as other. Political activism such as the Black Lives Matter movement stretches consciousness towards an insistence that blackness matters, skin colour matters and the lives of Africanist individuals matter. This paper reflects on cultural racial identity, the influence of politics on the individual, and the effects of these on the analytical relationship.