Analysis and Activism

Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Psychology

Emilija Kiehl, Mark Saban, Andrew Samuels, Emilija Kiehl, Mark Saban, Andrew Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317364900
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Jungian psychology has taken a noticeable political turn in the recent years, and analysts and academics whose work draws on Jung's ideas have made internationally recognised contributions in many humanitarian, communal and political contexts. This book brings together a multidisciplinary and international selection of contributors, all of whom have track records as activists, to discuss some of the most compelling issues in contemporary politics.

Analysis and Activism is presented in six parts:

• Section One, Interventions, includes discussion of what working outside the consulting room means, and descriptions of work with displaced children in Colombia, projects for migrants in Italy and of an analyst's engagement in the struggles of indigenous Australians.
• Section Two, Equalities and Inequalities, tackles topics ranging from the collapse of care systems in the UK to working with victims of torture.
• Section Three, Politics and Modernity, looks at the struggles of native people in Guatemala and Canada and oral history interviews with members of the Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora.
• Section Four, Culture and Identity, studies issues of race and class in Brazil, feminism and the gendered imagination, and the introduction of Obamacare in the USA.
• Section Five, Cultural Phantoms, examines the continuing trauma of the Cultural Revolution in China, Jung's relationship with Jews and Judaism, and German-Jewish dynamics.
• Finally, Section Six, Nature: Truth and Reconciliation, looks at our broken connection to nature, town and country planning, and relief work after the 2011 earthquake in Japan.

There remains throughout the book an acknowledgement that the project of thinking forward the political in Jungian psychology can be problematic, given Jung's own questionable political history. What emerges is a radical and progressive Jungian approach to politics informed by the spirit of the times as well as by the spirit of the depths.

This cutting-edge collection will be essential reading for Jungian and post-Jungian academics and analysts, psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists, and academics and students of politics, sociology, psychosocial studies and cultural studies.

Section 1 Interventions

1 Opening our Rooms The ETnA projects for migrants in Italy

Stefano Carta

DOI: 10.4324/9781315669700-1

Introduction

Italy, as a country of emigration, has now rapidly become a country of immigration, which has enhanced the need to care for the people who have started to migrate from Africa, South America and Asia. In the last 25 years, this strong wave of immigration immediately has created a sacred social space, a Shadow projection, i.e. a scapegoating area (Girard, 1977), projected on the migrant, on the foreigner, on the refugee, who hence are often, if not always, seen as bad or mad. The migrant is bad because he is taking our jobs, imposing his point of view or menacing ours; or because he does not want to become like us, or because he actually wants to become like us too much, etc.

On the opposite side, the migrant is plainly incomprehensible and, therefore, he is mad.

It is this second, pathologising stigma, which, as psychotherapists, we need to be particularly aware of.

Due to this historical situation, 12 years ago, during my presidency of the Italian Association of Analytical Psychology (AIPA), a group of Jungian analysts began to get directly involved in social and anthropological matters regarding migrants and refugees.¹

What do we do with them?

Perhaps the most fundamental tenet in our work with our foreign clients, which has guided us so far, is Jung’s idea of countertransference and co-transference² and his view of psychotherapy as a dialectical process between patient and therapist:

If I wish to treat another individual psychologically at all, I must for better or worse give up all pretensions to superior knowledge, all authority and desire to influence. I must perforce adopt a dialectical procedure consisting in a comparison of our mutual findings. But this becomes possible only if I give the other person a chance to play his hand to the full, unhampered by my assumptions.

( Jung, 1935, para 2)

In such a situation it is impossible to influence someone if you are not influenced.³

For this (constructivist) Jung there is not only one form of consciousness, which may be assessed only in relation to its intensity.⁴ For Jung, consciousness is an eminently qualitative phenomenon. Here Jung left behind the illuministic idea of a single form of consciousness (the illuminist Reason) in favour of a plural, constructed, and therefore negotiated, process of interpreting reality. The uncritical idea of consciousness as quantitative phenomenon represents an intrinsically positivistic and racist (I use this term in a general sense) realism, and would transform any encounter into a colonisation by the one who supposes to hold the ‘higher’, or ‘truer’ form of consciousness.

Unfortunately, in a multitude of passages, Jung also wrote about the ‘primitive’ mind (often referring to Lévy-Bruhl), projecting a less differentiated way of using one of the ‘two forms of thinking’ ( Jung, 1911–12/1956) into those human beings that were more foreign to him_ the Africans, but also, in different ways, the ‘Eastern’ cultures (as if these could really be subsumed into one category). Working with migrants, we constantly face these two sides of Jung. Nevertheless, this double nature of Jung paradoxically may help us, as if, by being so divided, he had highlighted for us in a clear form not just one opposite (the constructionist, dialectical, plural one), but also the other (the positivistic, culture-centred theoretical position).

The difficulty of integrating the ‘two forms of thinking’ and fostering a complex, plural form of consciousness, and therefore a complex identity, together with the risk of a regression towards a more undifferentiated, ‘primitive’ form of consciousness is obvious to all, although it does not involve any ‘primitive people’ at all (as there is not such an anthropological entity), but actually describes the ‘primitive’ way the psyche may function. And here I want to refer to our own psyche in the first place, of course. This inclusion of the European psyche among those that may function in a ‘primitive’ way is not based on the fact that at the very time that Jung was writing, Europe was regressing to the most undifferentiated and ‘primitive’ psychic condition in human history, but also because, in my opinion, we function in a primitive way today and every day. The penetrating persuasive force of publicity, the many hours lost commuting in our cars, the manic rhythms of our urban existences, hyper-capitalism and its reduction of everything to its quantitative (economic) ‘value’, the flat acceptance of the non-values of globalisation (for us psychotherapists the DSM is the most striking and poisonous example), and the way citizens are manipulated and form their political decisions are examples of the pervasive psychological slumber of the ‘evolved’ European – Western or Westernised – man.

Only if I, as a psychotherapist, am aware that I myself might be the (primitive) Other that I thought I was describing, can I make the imaginative step of comprehending my foreign client. And it is precisely this assumption that describes the constructionist, wholly symbolic and plural Jung that I am referring to. The Jung that advises us that in the dialectical analytical situation there are (at least, and cum grano salis, as the therapeutic relationship is a-symmetrical) two patients and two therapists at the same time:

We could say, without too much exaggeration, that a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient. It is no loss, either, if he feels the patient is hitting him or even scoring off him; it is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician.

( Jung, 1951, para 239)

How do we develop our work with our foreign clients?

Perhaps the best way to outline the basic attitude that guides us is to say that we try to apply the Socratic rule by which I, the analyst, do not know anything, except that I know that I do not know. This matters because I have in front of me a person who expresses his inner world with perhaps quite different cultural codes, therefore a person particularly fit to be an unknown. At the same time my client does know, but either does not know he knows, or he does not want to reveal to me what he knows. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers have secrets that they keep within themselves, and rightfully so, because they need to protect their core identity through a natural process of concealment (Devereux, 1967; Jung, 1931; Winnicott, 1960/1965).⁵

In both situations, the non-expert is I, who must learn from the expert, who is my client. And this learning process will take place within the highly refined and peculiar environment of our inter-subjective relationship, which now defines a ‘third area’ between our two foreign cultural origins.

It goes without saying that I am describing a process in which I am constantly trying to understand something of my own unconscious – often a personal, and especially cultural unconscious content. Such unconscious contents often contain hidden, implicit, anthropological assumptions. This paradoxical process in which the analyst is the non-expert makes a true process of co-evolution possible – a process that binds the therapist to his patients. The nature of this ‘third space’, which I have mentioned before, is rooted in the pre-linguistic fundamentals of human experience, such as empathy, listening, recognising and mirroring – all striving to protect a sense of hope and trust, together with reparation and care. It is the analyst’s fundamental ability to withstand and share his involved and self-reflective emotional stand towards the patient that forms the vessel, the holding environment, for this process.

Fostering this hybrid, complex vessel, this ‘third space’, is the fundamental aim of our encounter with our clients. In this regard we are comforted by the fact that a third space when two (or more) persons meet is always constellated. In this regard the references to Jung’s highly differentiated theory of the therapeutic relationship, and therapeutic alliance and its various forms of transference, counter- and co-transference, is for us very important (Jung, 1946).

One interesting issue regarding the implicit relational structure that is spontaneously constellated between the Conscious and the personal, cultural and collective Unconscious of the therapist and those of his client, is the automatic tendency to constellate not only compensatory forms of relationships, but also hysomorphic⁶ ones, in which one will resemble (mirror, in some way) the other. This was the case in the refugee camp in Dadaab, at the border between Kenya and Somalia, where both the refugees and the international personnel were in serious conflict, without realising that both of them were lamenting similar problems, such as that of ‘having been away from home for too long’.

Again on depathologising

According to the structure that has been described as the ‘triangle of violence’ (Losi & Papadopoulos, 2004), if a ‘saviour’ is constellated, it will synchronically constellate a victim and a perpetrator. Therefore, paradoxically enough, when there is a clearly designated victim (and in the case of the migrant/refugee this is a strikingly constant occurrence), we should first of all ‘work on’ the perpetrator or the saviour. Therefore, in order to reach his foreign client, the therapist must once again first of all rescue himself from his own unconsciousness – from his blind fa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements and permissions
• Foreword by Tom Kelly
• Introductions by Emilija Kiehl, Mark Saban and Andrew Samuels
• SECTION 1 Interventions
• SECTION 2 Equalities and inequalities
• SECTION 3 Politics and modernity
• SECTION 4 Culture and identity
• SECTION 5 Cultural phantoms
• SECTION 6 Nature: truth and reconciliation
• Index
• Plates