Dreaming for the World: A Jungian Study of Dreams During the COVID-19 Pandemic1

This project explores what dreams might reveal about the collective psyche’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in its first year, before the development of vaccines. A brief survey, distributed to Jungian colleagues and organizations, and to various social media sites, invited people to submit online a dream related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four hundred and thirty-six dreams were submitted. Forty additional Russian dreams were collected and submitted by Russian colleagues. Using qualitative research methods based on phenomenological hermeneutics, the researchers categorized and counted the range of COVID imagery. In addition, the researchers describe a range of psychic responses to the pandemic, including horror, grief, sickness, social discord, and violence, but also images of healing and transformation, increased sense of community, and spiritual renewal. Several healing nightmares are presented. Healing alchemical and anima/animus imagery is described. Twelve dreams are introduced and presented. It is concluded that the collective psyche, rooted in the Self, is a healing resource for social and cultural trauma. This project supports Beradt’s (1968) inspirational study of dreaming in Nazi Germany, as well as recent studies of COVID-related dreams and recent publications on the social nature of dreaming.     

Displacement trauma: complex states of personal,collective and intergenerational fragmentation and their intergenerational transmission

Originally presented at the Journal’s one day conference entitled ‘Displacement: Contemporary Traumatic Experience’ held in London in November 2019, this paper expands on the author’s theory of the implicit psychological organizing gestalt, an associated pattern of psychic functions which operate in an integrated way to simultaneously structure and organize our experience of self-cohesion and self-continuity. The gestalt, which implicitly links the formation of psychic skin, body image, cultural skin and both personal and cultural identity with place, functions as an emergent non-conscious permanent presence or background ‘constant’. It develops over time and emerges out of embodied emotional experiencing with the total environment – both human and non-human. The author argues that it is the rupture of this gestalt and the disorganizing consequences of its loss which underlies the experience of displacement trauma. If disruptions in the formation of the gestalt and/or its later rupture remain unrecognized and unrepresented then the absence creates a void which can be intergenerationally transmitted. Case material is presented which describes this and which highlights the ways in which the gestalt can contribute to our understanding of collective displacement anxiety, cultural trauma and cultural complexes.     

Sitting through the emptiness

This article explores clinical encounters with experiences of the ‘empty ego’ which arise from early relational trauma. The ego’s emptiness is held in repetitious complexes and arises out of affectively charged experiences between self and other which remain split-off from awareness. This kind of consciousness is viewed as dualistic, separating non-dual subjectivity from its dualistic objects of consciousness. In contrast, what I am calling healing void states of non-dualistic consciousness, when admitted to awareness, allow the individual to dis-identify from the traumatizing representations of self and other through an experience of non-duality. In contrast to an objectified, dualistic emptiness of the ego, healing void states come about in moments of non-dual, unified consciousness. These states occur in the ego-Self relationship by linking the ego’s dualistic awareness in chronic subject/object splits to ones of non-dual pure consciousness. The healing void state is always incipiently present and potentially able to bridge the ego-Self connection in bogged-down treatment. The paper explores potential integrations with non-dual models of consciousness such as Vedantic and Kashmir Shaivism, among other mystical traditions. A combined Vedantic-Jungian understanding can provide a transcendent bridge that integrates Eastern concepts of non-duality in treating emptiness.