A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche

The Violence of Innocence

Ipek S. Burnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367192792
• eBook ISBN: 9780429513640
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche: The Violence of Innocence, Ipek Burnett's penetrating cultural criticism enriched with psychoanalytical and Jungian insight offers a timely interrogation of national consciousness in the United States.

Through evocative storytelling, Burnett unpacks the images and myths that run deep in the American psyche—from that of the New World, the city upon a hill, to the Manifest Destiny, the melting pot, and the pursuit of happiness. Against this backdrop, she investigates the vicious cycles of innocence and violence that have dominated American history and continue to reinforce systematic oppression in America, evident in racial and economic inequality, xenophobia, materialism, and more. Burnett's thought-provoking analysis exposes the ways in which psychological defenses such as historical amnesia, projection, denial, and dissociation work on a collective level, helping America avoid a confrontation with these violent truths of its past and present circumstances, and its national character.

With its seamless multidisciplinary approach and revealing insight, this book will be of great interest to psychologists, scholars, and students of Jungian and post-Jungian thought, depth psychology, and cultural and American studies. Eloquent and accessible, it will engage readers who strive to be self-reflective, well-informed global citizens.

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1

The Columbus fantasy

Paradise

1492. With three small ships named La Santa Maria, La Niña, and La Pinta and eighty-six sailors, Christopher Columbus sailed into the unknown. For over two months on the open sea, with no ground beneath their feet, his exhausted men searched the horizon to spot land. They grew impatient. They pleaded to go back. But Columbus was determined to cross the Sea of Darkness, as the Atlantic was called, and reach the East. Tomorrow, he promised. Gold, spices, silk, he promised. He was confident of what lay ahead: fortune and fame for him, a colonial empire for Spain, converts for the Church. As historian Kirkpatrick Sale puts it, Columbus was driven by “God, gold, and glory.” ¹

On the night of October 11, the crew caught glimpse of an island in the Bahamas, and they reached shore the next morning. ² Columbus’s descriptions in his journal were euphoric: “This land is so lush and its weather such a delight”; “I have never seen anything so beautiful”; “The sounds of the crickets in the night are an enchantment, and the evening air is sweet and fragrant”; “The loveliness of this country surpasses all others, as daylight exceeds the night.” ³

Initially Columbus was not able to give a precise location for where they have landed. He thought that they must be somewhere in the Indies, somewhere off the coast of China, somewhere on the Asian Continent. He did not suspect this island was a previously undiscovered landmass. After a period of contemplation, he wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella:

I have made the following conclusion: The world is not round as they describe it. It is shaped like a pear that is round except for the protuberance where the stem is, where it swells up. It’s like a round ball that has something like a woman’s nipple on one part of it, and there, where that protuberance is found, it rises high into the sky. … Holy scripture testifies that Our Lord made the earthly paradise. … I believe that it is at the summit of this pearlike protuberance. … Here I have found all the signs of this earthly paradise. ⁴

For Sigmund Freud, fantasies evoking the primary erogenous zones have been associated with oral fixation and signal the need for emotional or psychological nourishment. ⁵ Columbus perceived the land he encountered in images of round, swollen protuberances and erect nipples; he responded to it with the hunger of a suckling newborn and the lust of an aroused lover. His description of the world’s pear-like shape and terrestrial paradise’s location on its protuberance did not merely indicate a nautical miscalculation, an uneducated geographical estimate, but possibly a fixation stemming from a psychological and spiritual yearning. Due to the force of his deep-seated yearning, Columbus believed he had found paradise on earth as it was promised in the Holy Scripture.

Although Columbus himself never set foot on mainland America, his fantasy of having discovered paradise proved to have an irrefutable hold on the American psyche. Following Columbus’s voyages, European pilgrims traveled to the land that is now the United States of America, and pioneers pushed the frontier across the continent, their hearts and minds filled with the myths of the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age, aching for a new start. In the end, the impassioned fantasy proved to be more than a new beginning for Columbus alone; it also composed the first chapter of American history as it is typically taught. It became America’s creation myth: In the beginning was paradise.

As religious historian Mircea Eliade explains, the longing to go back to beginnings and reenter paradise is a universal motif across cultures. ⁶ Paradise is one of the crucial symbols of primordial perfection, pristine innocence, perfect communion between God and man, ⁷ and consequently represents the goal of our longing for redemption and rebirth. ⁸ Columbus expected his voyage to result in Spain’s and even Christianity’s revival. At the time, Europe was overrun with great anxiety about the spread of Islam, amid speculations of an impending apocalypse. Furthermore, European states were engaged in fierce competition for wealth and power and were eagerly searching for new colonies. Columbus must have been hoping that his successful expeditions would aid his country and religion and, in the meantime, also bring about his own redemption. Finally affluent and famous, he could move up the ranks of society, in the direction of the heavens. The fantasy of paradise was a promise for a new beginning, a new life, a new world for him and all those on his side.

It is ironic that Columbus found the future in a primordial past that stood even behind the historical past, a time before the Fall. “It is so difficult to find the beginning,” acknowledges philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. “Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.” ⁹ For Columbus, the belief in a new beginning in paradise resulted in a radical historical regression—it meant regressing to a place beyond the boundaries of time, to a mythic period. Consequently, American history adopted Columbus’s vision of the future in a timeless past and based its creation myth on the imaginal background of paradise where, to borrow literary critic R. W. B. Lewis’s apt phrase, “the American Adam” ¹⁰ could begin life anew.

In 1620, after a difficult journey across the Atlantic Ocean, the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, with the first English settlers. William Bradford, who later became the governor of the colony, described the land they came upon as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” “All things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face,” he wrote, “and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.” ¹¹ This hostile environment the Pilgrims encountered probably conflicted with their fantasy of the mythical paradise for which they had undertaken the journey. Soon the settlers began to clear the forests as if attempting to tame the land and convert it to their idea of a safe and peaceful paradise.

Looking at the early settlers and their descendants’ relationship to land and nature in Northern America, the indigenous people witnessed a split. “Western culture, through its unique play of history, disconnected itself from the natural world in order to conquer it,” comments Tewa author and educator Gregory Cajete. “In doing so, Western culture also disconnected from the wellspring of the unconscious and ancient primal orientations to spiritual ecology and a deeply internalized sense of place.” ¹² Cajete’s commentary underscores the consequences of this psychological struggle. In the eyes of the Western conqueror, the earth that the indigenous tribes held to be sacred and revered as Great Mother was a threat to their vision of paradise on earth—the enclosed, pristine garden to host the ideal society. Wilderness had to be repressed and nature had to be civilized; physical land had to be negated in the name of the utopic fantasy. Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes views the impossibility of the American utopia to be a centuries-old burden afflicting the Americas at large. In an essay titled “This Is America,” he writes:

We were condemned to utopia by the Old World. What a heavy load! Who could live up to this promise, this demand, this contradiction: to be utopia where utopia was demolished, burned and branded and killed by those who wanted utopia. … And who were then forced to destroy what they had named in their dreams as utopia. ¹³

For Columbus, it was paradise at first sight: that pristine, beautiful, abundant nature. And paradise meant redemption, rebirth, and innocence, “a divinely granted second chance for the human race.” ¹⁴ Yet, paradoxically, to be redeemed, to be reborn, and to live in a utopian innocence, Columbus and his followers—including the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the pioneers who settled in the North American land that was later to be named the United States of America—committed grievous sins in what Kilpatrick Sale in the title of his book cunningly identifies as “the conquest of paradise.”

With the impossibility of utopia—the impossibility of its promise and demand that Fuentes notes—the relationship to paradise became one of appropriation, annihilation, and inevitable alienation. Holding tight to the mythical and utopic fantasy of paradise in their collective imagination helped the colonizers deny the immediate realities of history and geography and thus destroy the land, its natural resources, and the lives of its inhabitants, both human and animal, seemingly without feelings of terror, guilt, or grief. In other words, this paradisiacal innocence not only produced corruption and cruelty but also whitewashed the colonizer’s memories, so they could remain in denial of their wrongdoings.

In the beginning was paradox.

In many traditions, paradise is considered to be a primordial symbol of wholeness. Jung writes, “the Garden of Eden was a favourite mandala in Christian iconography, and is therefore a symbol of totality and—from the psychological point of view—of the self.” ¹⁵ Although paradise may imply perfection, innocence, wholeness, and totality, even such archetypal ideas are not absolutes; they cannot exist without their opposites. Just like light and dark, good and evil, and high and low depend on one another, perfect rests upon the ground of the imperfect, and completeness can only be fulfilled through incompleteness. ¹⁶ If fulfilling paradise’s destiny of wholeness necessitates its opposite—living through sin, loss, guilt, and shame—then this is exactly what happened in the history of America.

After all, the Garden of Eden was the place of the Fall.

Savage

The Fall calls for the fallen—fallen ideals, and the bodies that have fallen in the name of those ideals. Once we realize how fantasies and fantasy-based ideas can lead to oppression, exploitation, and murder, we can see America’s creation myth simultaneously as a story of its fall. In Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise, beholding the obscure terrain of this history, Kirkpatrick Sale writes:

We arrive here at a realm of myths and myopias and misunderstandings, of uncertain realities and certain fancies, imposed dreams and received nightmares that comprised the European image of the American for at least the next two centuries, an image that might best be thought of as the confusing and shifting combinations of the Noble Savage and the Savage Beast. ¹⁷

The noble savage and the savage beast: the difference between the two was not empirical but imaginary. Both fantasies lived—and still live—in the realm of the im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Columbus fantasy
• 2 Mythopoetic politics
• 3 The American dream, the royal road
• 4 The pursuit of happiness and its discontents
• Conclusion: From hubris to humility
• Bibliography
• Index