Archetypal and Cultural Perspectives on the Foreigner

Minorities and Monsters

Joanne Wieland-Burston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138345805
• eBook ISBN: 9780429794681
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this era of intense migration, the topic of the foreigner is of paramount importance. Joanne Wieland-Burston examines the question of the "foreign" and "foreigner" from multiple perspectives and explores how Jung and Freud were more interested in the wide phenomenon of the foreign in the unconscious rather than in their own personal lives. She analyses cultural approaches to the archetype of the foreigner throughout history using literary, cultural (as seen in mythological texts and fairy tales) and psychological references, and interprets the scapegoating of foreign minorities as a projection of the monster onto the foreigner. The book includes contemporary perspectives on immigration and displacement throughout, from analysing patient case material, the archetypal needs of people who join terrorist groups, feelings of alienation, and the work of Palestinian-German psychologist Ahmad Mansour. Throughout this personal and highly topical study, Wieland-Burston questions and studies C. G. Jung's own reflections on himself as a foreigner and her own personal experiences.

This book will be vital reading for Jungian psychotherapists and analytical psychologists in practice and in training, as well as for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, archetypal studies, identity politics, and courses examining the experiences of displaced persons, refugees, migrants and minority groups.

1

Deconstructing The Archetype Of The Foreigner

Introduction: the symbolism of the foreigner

On the inner psychic level the foreigner actually represents all that is unknown; we can call it the unconscious – whatever is not in the light of consciousness, but in the shadow. The entire unconscious can actually, therefore, be called the shadow. In the self-regulating psyche, according to Jung, the process of trying to integrate these unconscious aspects is of paramount importance; it is guided by the Self. This means that the Self, the central psychic instance whose goal is individuation (the development, or better still, the unfolding of a person’s potential for development) determines the way in which this process proceeds. And so, as we shall see in the final chapter on clinical work, the foreigner, the elements of the entire personality, the Self, which are yet unknown and often in some way unacceptable, are not evoked in the analytical process by force; the unfolding takes place according to the capacity of the individual to recognise, accept and integrate these unknown aspects. The Self decides the timing. This is the guiding light of Jungian work whose goal is not to provoke the client to integrate unconscious material, but rather to help the person learn to pay attention to, to care for, respect and integrate that which the individual is capable of integrating at that time. For this reason some contents may remain foreign for a long time; hypnosis, for example, is not advised to attempt to raise repressed material to consciousness by force at a time that might not be appropriate. Particularly foreign, painful or very strange or unusual contents arise at the appropriate time, when the person is capable of accepting them and not before. The Self guides the process, not the analyst, as many therapists of other schools claim. Foreign contents may remain foreign for long periods of time.

The motif of the foreigner has many dimensions. In this initial chapter my goal is to analyse the various facets of the foreigner archetype. In order to do so I shall first briefly define what I mean by the terms.

Identity: the foreigner and the non-foreigner

The term foreigner stems from the Latin for – meaning outside; in languages other than English the etymological root refers to the same outsiderness: straniero – étranger. According to the Duden Dictionary, fremd – the German word for foreign comes from Middle High German vrem(e)de and Old High German fremidi meaning distant or away (Duden 2003). He or she is an outsider, a stranger, when he comes from an other, a different country or culture; in the terms outsider or stranger the distinct otherness of the person’s cultural background is not implicit. But, because of their common etymological roots I find it justifiable to use these terms interchangeably: in my experience they all indicate the phenomenon of not belonging to the local group, not sharing its identity. The analysis of the multitude of facets, or faces of the foreigner will be analysed in the following, but first to the non-foreigners.

In speaking of the foreigner, the non-foreigner is implicit, the person who belongs to the in-group, who is not from the outside and is not different. Who is the “we group” that chooses to call the others foreigners, the “them group”? How does it define itself? Although this group is not really homologous, it does claim to share to a certain consequential extent a common identity. Contemporary philosophical and socio-political discussions are very concerned with the topic of identity. Today we are witnessing a definite socio-political trend in which many countries consider themselves as a homologous group with a relatively clearly defined and fixed identity. As a result, they often tend to denigrate and even exclude those whom they call the foreigners. Demographical facts show that the supposition of sameness, of a homologous identity, is no longer and probably never was the case for most national groups. Citizens of countries always included people who themselves or whose ancestors were not originally from that country: the ancestors had been merchants, prisoners, slaves, soldiers or refugees. Migration has always been a fact of life.

However, social mobility has increased steadily since the advent of the railroad and the Industrial Revolution. More and more people at the present time are foreigners in the society in which they live. As Francis Fukuyama in his book on identity (Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition, 2018) states, migration has become globalised. According to statistics published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2018 approximately seven billion people inhabited this planet and over seven million of them were migrants.

Concerned citizens have developed nomenclatures for concepts describing the inclusion of foreigners. One very early concept was that of the “melting-pot” used to describe the way in which foreigners were to be assimilated in the United States. In 1908, the Zionist British author Israel Zangwill adopted the term for his play of that name; the 1909 production in Washington, DC very much impressed and influenced Theodore Roosevelt, the president at that time. In recent years people speak of the Canadian “mosaic”, citing the example of Toronto, a city in which the ethnic groups are encouraged to keep their ethnic identities and still call themselves Canadian. The concept has also been named the “salad”. Implicit is the idea that the various foreigners are not expected to assimilate, but to integrate while retaining their foreign identity as they wish.

The differentiation between assimilating, integrating and belonging is important for the phenomenology of the process of acceptance of the foreigner. The French Canadian philosopher and political scientist Charles Taylor is also particularly insistent on the moral aspect of the question of the attitude to the foreigner in society. The American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who speaks of himself as an English-Ghanaian homosexual, approaches the moral aspect of modern-day “cosmopolitanism”, the need for empathy toward foreigners, as the need to “walk at least four moons in their moccasins” before judging them. The differentiation has been made between tolerance for the foreigner and respect for him or her. All of this scholarly work on the topic of the foreigner shows us how deeply the questions of the foreigner and identity have marked our world today. The mere proliferation of terms reminds us of the fact that the number of words to describe things or concepts in a language is determined by the importance of the things or concepts in that culture. The most well-known example is the numerous words for snow in the Inuit language; the Romantsch language in Switzerland has many different words for fields of grass.

The so-called postmodern man and woman may identify with and draw important aspects of their identity from the nation in which they live, in which they were born or from which their family originated. Some also identify strongly with their religion, their social group, some even with their sexual orientation or their skin colour. In this context I must briefly address the question of race. Race has long been, and still is, a category with which people identify. In the United States in the 1950s, official government forms asked people to indicate to which race they belonged. But, as Robert Wald Sussman (2016) reminds us in the introduction to his book The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea, in 1950 UNESCO declared, “race is not a biological reality but a myth”. As Sussman says, the concept of race is not actually scientifically valid because we all belong to the human race.

Diversity is a fact of modern life in individual countries and in individual human beings. Each of us actually has various facets, which make up our identity; composite facets. Francis Fukuyama and many others today go so far as to speak of people today having “hybrid identities”.

From the point of view of Jungian psychology we think of identity as those elements of the personality with which the conscious ego identifies – the more or less conscious contents of the psyche, or, in more theoretical terms, the complexes, which a person recognises as belonging to their image of who they are, or the aspects that they identify as being part of who they are. It is possible to identify oneself, for example, as belonging to a certain religious group without this being an important part of who one feels one is or has become. I find this question especially interesting: what is it that makes a person in contemporary society say that they are a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu? The elements that people point to as making up their identity in our world today pertain most often to nationality, profession and interests. Many would not mention their sexual orientation despite the fact that this aspect of the identity debate is very prominent in the socio-political discussion of our day and of prime importance for individuals from groups whose acceptance in society is questionable or relatively recent.

The in-group defines who is a foreigner and who is not. He or she is anyone that the in-group deems does not share the identity of the majority group.

The archetype

In Volume VIII of the Collected Works, Jung described archetypes as “typical modes of apprehension, and wherever we meet with uniform and regularly recurring modes of apprehension we are dealing with an archetype” (Jung, 1927: para. 280). Jung’s definition of the term archetype changed throughout his lifetime, although some argue that he merely developed it in more detail throughout his life (Martin-Vallas, 2013). At any rate it has become more complex and less easily defined. Subsequent generations of Jungians have gone on to try to understand and, to a certain extent, to redefine in modern terms how they understand the term.

I shall explain here my view: the etymological meaning of the archetype is a primary, original model or pattern. Jung himself described a relatively limited number of archetypes, such as the Great Mother, The Wise Old Man, the Shadow, etc. He also described life situations that are archetypal – such as birth and death. People cannot really be archetypes, but people can and do experience typical life situations: human beings the world over and at all times know such experiences. According to Jung, the experience of humanity would be imprinted in these primary models. The best comparison is instinct. The preparedness to experience the typical situations facing human beings – a potential pattern of behaviour – would be part of the material with which an infant is born: in the same way as a child is born with arms and legs, a heart and a liver, the psychological organs would be comprised of the preparedness to act in certain situations in typically human ways. In the same way as birds build nests and then fly out when mature, so people build family structures and the young leave when mature. The idea of inborn patterns of behaviour being part of the basic chromosomal material has in most recent years been proven to be the case with many other animals, generally mammals, from dolphins to elephants to chimpanzees. Dolphins and elephants have been observed in mourning rituals. In this manner, a human child who has not known a mother or mothering would, when she later has a child, instinctively know how to act in a motherly manner. Such actions and reactions are triggered by experiences in the outside world. This has led to the idea that these patterns are emergent, as in chaos theory (Martin-Vallas, 2013). The fact that the patterns actually do emerge when triggered in the outside world, and as if along a chronological continuum, seems apparent.

Our biologically given proneness to be able to act and react in typically human ways enables us to deal with typical situations in life as they appear. This inborn proclivity to follow certain human patterns of behaviour helps us deal with life. Modern scientists often speak of us being “hard-wired” to behave in certain ways. This terminology does not correspond exactly to the archetype for several reasons. The archetype is not merely hardware: there are not only biological but also spiritual aspects in the archetype. It is more a spiritual psychosomatic whole. The archetype does not manifest just like that, but is rather a predilection for a certain type of response prompted by an experience and coloured by this and previous experiences. Structurally speaking, the archetypes constitute the central nucleus of our complexes.

Erich Neumann and the Great Mother archetype

I will go on here to discuss first Erich Neumann’s model of the archetype of the Great Mother and then, using this model in an albeit less stringent manner, will analyse and deconstruct the archetype of the foreigner, as I see it.

There is naturally no human being who is a Great Mother; the archetype is rather the core of motherliness and has many different and contrasting facets, and is expressed in many different symbolic images. The powerful, energy laden, even numinous experience of the Great Mother is constellated whenever one of the facets is met in the course of life. Neumann defined the central, what he calls the “elementary”, trait of the Great Mother, as containing. This means that all aspects of motherliness are basically about the phenomenon of being a container – physically and spiritually containing the other. Neumann went on to differentiate the transformative processes, which can take place within the sphere of motherliness – on encountering the Great Mother. The Great Mother is the “archetype as such”. Anthony Stevens, in Archetype Revisited (2015: 284), defines it as an “innate neuropsychic potential … actualized in the form of archetypal images, motifs, ideas, relationships and behaviours”. The archetype as such exists in potentia and becomes manifest in various different archetypal images. Neumann distinguished both positive and negative developments evoked by encounters with figures embodying aspects of the Great Mother – from development to death, from inspiration to madness. He also named mythological figures, which he felt embody these various aspects.

The archetype of the foreigner

I will approach the archetype of the foreigner in a similar manner to Neumann (see Figure 1.1). More detailed descriptions of the individual archetypal images will be presented in the following chapter, which goes into a more in-depth treatment of mythological texts from the collective unconscious.

FIGURE 1.1 The archetype of the foreigner

Source: Neumann (1956: 80)

The elementary character of the foreigner and the basic attitudes

The elementary character of the foreigner is his differentness, his alienness. He is not like the others, he is different. Around the circle we must think of gradations. All of the manifestations and reactions to the foreigner are on a spectrum leading from one extreme to the other. The top half of the circle I call the acceptance of the foreigner, allowing his differentness to be accepted, respected and more or less integrated. This is the domain of creative chaos, which can lead to a new order. The predominant feeling tone here would spread from interest, to attraction, to c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Deconstructing the archetype of the foreigner
• 2. The archetypal experience of meeting the foreigner and being one in early cultures, mythologies and literary texts
• 3. Monster making/scapegoating: one way of dealing with the foreigner
• 4. Alienation in the modern world: feeling foreign
• 5. The encounter with the foreigner in the psychotherapeutic context
• Postscript
• Index