Legitimizing the “War on Terror”: Political Myth in Official‐Level Rhetoric

This paper argues that mythical discourse affects political practice by imbuing language with power, shaping what people consider to be legitimate, and driving the determination to act. Drawing on Bottici's (2007 ) philosophical understanding of political myth as a process of work on a common narrative that answers the human need to ground events in significance, it contributes to the study of legitimization in political discourse by examining the role of political myth in official‐level U.S. war rhetoric. It explores how two ubiquitous yet largely invisible political myths, American Exceptionalism and Civilization vs. Barbarism, which have long defined America's ideal image of itself and its place in the world, have become staples in the language of the “War on Terror.” Through a qualitative analysis of the content of over 50 official texts containing lexical triggers of the two myths, this paper shows that senior officials of the Bush Administration have rhetorically accessed these mythical representations of the world in ways that legitimize and normalize the practices of the “War on Terror.”     

Femininity and Masculinity in City-Form: Philosophical Urbanism as a History of Consciousness

Mutual feedback between human-made environments and facets of thought throughout history has yielded two myths: the Garden and the Citadel. Both myths correspond to Jung’s feminine and masculine collective subconscious, as well as to Nietzsche’s premise of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art. Nietzsche’s premise suggests, furthermore, that the feminine myth of the Garden is time-bound whereas the masculine myth of the Citadel, or the Ideal City, constitutes a spatial deportment. Throughout history the two myths have continually molded the built environment and thought, but the myth of the Ideal City – from Plato to Descartes to modernity – came to dominate city-form and ensuing aspects of contemplation. This relationship seems to have shifted during the twentieth century. Intellectual dispositions have begun to be largely nurtured by an incongruous city-form emerging from the gap between the incessant promise for an automated, well-functioning city, on the one hand, and looming alienation, coupled with the factual, malfunctioning city, on the other hand. Urban decay, a persisting and time-bound urban event that is a byproduct of this configuration, suggests the ascent of the Garden myth in post-modern city-form.     

Abstraction and Finitude: Education, Chance and Democracy

Education in the west has become a very knowing business in which students are encouraged to cultivate self-awareness and meta-cognitive skills in pursuit of a kind of perfection. The result is the evasion of contingency and of the consciousness of human finitude. The neo-liberalism that makes education a market good exacerbates this. These tendencies can be interpreted as a dimension of scepticism. This is to be dissolved partly by acknowledging that we are obscure to ourselves. Such an acknowledgement is fostered by the mythic dimension of experience, which also recommends a degree of humility to the citizens of democratic states.     

‘Who is my Jung?’ The progressive,though sometimes ambivalent,expansion of Jung's idea of the collective unconscious: from an ‘unconscious humanity’ to – in all but name – the soul of the world

This paper discusses Jung's idea of myth as a projection of the collective unconscious, suggesting that the term ‘projection’ separates human beings from nature, withdrawing nature's life into humanity. Jung's discovery of a realm independent of consciousness – in conversations with his soul in The Red Book, and in synchronicity, began a dialogue which finally brought him, through the Alchemical Mercurius, closer to the idea of a world‐soul.     

Metamorphosis and the aesthetics of loss: I. Mourning Daphne--the Apollo and Daphne paintings of Nicolas Poussin

The myth of Apollo and Daphne, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is viewed through the self‐referential eye of the seicento painter, Nicolas Poussin. Collectively, the tree‐metaphoric myths are argued to metaphorically represent, mourn, and negate unbearable realities, including the developmental challenges of adolescence and adulthood – in particular, loss. Examined in the context of their aesthetic precedents and a close reading of Ovid ’s text, the two Apollo and Daphne paintings that bracket Poussin’s oeuvre are interpreted as conveying the conflict and ambiguity inherent to Ovid, as well as connotations more personal to the artist. The poetic and aesthetic reworking of the regressive, magical experience of metamorphosis restores it to the symbolic world of metaphor: for reparation, remembrance, and return.     

Family myth,the symbolic realm and the ancestors

Abstract: This paper¹ takes the shape of a diptych. The first part explores the ancestors as embodied ghosts, internal objects or as mediated through ancestral heritage, as these aspects intertwine in a Möbius strip. The second part looks at ancestral heritage and the different ways in which ‘family myth’ appears in a Jungian context and in Systemic Psychotherapy (family therapy). Both share an interface through the current paradigm shifts towards mutual reflexivity in patient and therapist and a focus on the interpersonal space. The ancestors give substance to the eternal riddle: ‘from whence do we come, who are we and where do we go’, which connects past, present and future. Our ancestors are part of our minds, perhaps in the way Damasio (2010) postulates that ancestral experiences mediated through culture shape our brains. The leitmotiv of individuation through mimesis (sameness) and alterity (difference) runs through both parts.     

“THESE ANXIETIES ARE NOT MINE”: ADOLESCENCE,THE OEDIPAL CONFIGURATION,AND TRANSGENERATIONAL FACTORS

Part 1 of this paper draws on the film Back to the Future (1985) to highlight various aspects of adolescence, the oedipal situation, and transgenerational factors. The authors then discuss the Oedipus myth and its themes of adolescence, narcissism, identity, acting out, repetition, aggression, and the parent–child relationship, among others. Comments drawn from Winnicott's writing on oedipal issues are discussed as well. As an illustration of some of these issues, in Part 2, the authors present the clinical case of Osvaldo, age sixteen. Transference‐countertransference issues in this treatment are explored in depth.     

Blame attribution in sexual victimization

The current study explored how victims and third-parties attribute blame and perpetrator motivation for actual sexual victimization experiences. Although we do not assert that victims are responsible for perpetrators’ behavior, we found that some victims do not allocate all blame to their perpetrator. We sought to examine how victims and third-parties allocate blame in instances of actual completed and attempted sexual victimization and how they perceived perpetrator motivations. Victims of completed rape (n = 49) and attempted sexual assault (n = 91), and third-parties who knew a victim of sexual assault (n = 152) allocated blame across multiple targets: perpetrator, self/victim, friends, family, and the situation. Participants also described their perceptions of perpetrator’s motivation for the sexual assault. Victims tended to assign more blame to themselves than third-parties assigned to victims. Furthermore, victims perceived perpetrators as being more sexually-motivated than third-parties did, who viewed perpetrators as more power-motivated. Results suggest that perceptions of rape and sexual assault significantly differ between victims and third-party individuals who have never directly experienced such a trauma.     

THE EMERGENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN GENESIS 1–3: JUNG'S DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The development of a robust, holistic theological anthropology will require that theology and biblical studies alike enter into genuine interdisciplinary conversations. Depth psychology in particular has the capacity to be an exceedingly fruitful conversation partner for theology because of its commitment to the totality of the human experience (both the conscious and unconscious aspects) as well as its unique ability to interpret archetypal symbols and mythological thinking. By arguing for a psycho‐theological hermeneutic that accounts for depth psychology's conviction that myths about the origin of the world are always simultaneously myths about the origin and emergence of human consciousness, I demonstrate that the presence of numerous Jungian archetypes in Genesis 1–3 suggests that the narrative can be read from a psychological perspective without diminishing or marginalizing the dominant theological themes of exile and return. Furthermore, such a reading fundamentally suggests that the narrative is not about how sin entered into creation, but rather how consciousness emerged in human community.     

The King of Norway: negative individuation,the hero myth and psychopathic narcissism in extreme violence and the life of Anders Behring Breivik

The paper discusses negative individuation and the hero myth as developmental concepts. It is suggested that in negative individuation healthy psychological development is hindered and goes astray. Aggression then becomes the central psychic system. Repressed anger is the core element in psychopathic narcissism (Diamond) and malignant narcissism (Kernberg). Both Diamond and Kernberg extend narcissistic personality structure to antisocial, psychopathic personality in an effort to better understand extreme violence. According to Freud, love (libido) and hate (the death drive) are the major motivational systems in the human psyche. In contrast to Freud, Jung sees libido as a life force in general, not simply as a sexual drive. Jung writes about evil and the shadow but does not present a comprehensive theory of the negative development of an individual's life. The concept of negative individuation connects the shadow and the death drive with psychopathology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. In this paper, I explore these concepts in the light of contemporary affect theory according to Kernberg. I also ask how ideology is tied to extreme violence and how it is possible that narcissistic personality structures can lead to such radically different outcomes as were manifested in the lives of Anders Behring Breivik and Steve Jobs.