Jungian Perspectives on Indeterminate States

Betwixt and Between Borders

Elizabeth Brodersen, Pilar Amezaga, Elizabeth Brodersen, Pilar Amezaga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367339623
• eBook ISBN: 9781000168099
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Jungian Perspectives on Indeterminate States: Betwixt and Between Borders, Elizabeth Brodersen and Pilar Amezaga bring together leading international contributors to analyse and interpret the psychological impact of contemporary border crossing - both literally and figuratively.

Each chapter assesses key themes such as migration, culture, gender and identity formation, through a Jungian lens. All the contributors sensitively explore how creative forms can help mitigate the trauma experienced when one is forced to leave safety and enter unknown territory, and examines the specific role of indeterminacy, liminality and symbols as transformers at the border between culture, race and gender. The book asks whether we are able to hold these indeterminate states as creative liminal manifestations pointing to new forms, integrate the shadow 'other' as potential, and allow sufficient cross-border migration and fertilization as permissible. It makes clear that societal conflict represents a struggle for recognition and identity and elucidates the negative experiences of authoritarian structures attached to disrespect and misrecognitions.

This interdisciplinary collection will offer key insight for Jungian analysts in practice and in training, psychotherapists, anthropologists, political and cultural theorists, and postgraduate researchers in psychosocial studies. It will also be of great interest to readers interested in migration, sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity studies.

Part 1

Border, migration, and identity

Chapter 1

Crossing physical borders and the making of identity

The case of Europe

Monica Luci

Introduction

This chapter aims to analyse the problem of the making of identity and the role that crossing physical borders may play. The question of identity, a subject traditionally reflected in social sciences, is reframed here in terms of analytical psychology, and these two fields are ideally put in dialogue with each other.

Identity has to do both with the inner and outer world. Dynamics of the inner world can be described through the concepts of analytical psychology, but a particular emphasis is placed here on the outer world: non-human objects, space, and environment, which have a role, it is stated, in identity formation. Not only human objects but external space – the environment – and non-human objects are consciously and unconsciously invested and have a role in defining our belonging and sense of self. After having set some theoretical foundation of this discourse in psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, European identity is taken as a case study. This chapter addresses the question of the role of migration and terrorism in the making of a new European identity as the enactment of two opposite poles of a European cultural complex of an unheroic heroine. Looking at migration and terrorism as two poles of a complex characterised by the experience of bodily violence, the crossing of physical borders, the clash and meeting of two cultures or groups, and the concern for security and self-protection, this analysis intends to throw a new light on the processes implied in the making of identity.

Identity: a brief review of key questions

The diversity of ways in which the term identity is employed in social sciences makes it difficult to define it once and for all. The concept has an even much longer history in Western philosophy, which deals with very different meanings of the term. Such complexity of history and meanings cannot be addressed here for space reasons. However, it is important to be aware that these philosophical meanings of identity, in the sense of singularity, individuality, or self-sameness, may structure the ongoing discussion on identity in social sciences, and in particular, in psychology and psychoanalysis (for a review on this topic, see Sollberger, 2013).

“Identity” is a word sometimes used as synonymous with self which bridges between the psychic and social worlds. Many understandings of identity start with the presupposition of the existence of a reciprocal relationship between self and society. The self cannot be separated from society, because self can only exist and be meaningful in its relationship with other selves or entities, and in turn society has powerful influence on the self (for a review about theories on identity formation, see Cinoğlu & Arikan, 2012).

Stets and Burke (2003) believe that we can separate theories of identity into three different categories: the ones that explain identity within a group’s membership (here the group has prevalence on individuals); the ones that explain identity through the roles that one occupies in the group (here the role is the mediator between social and individual dimensions); and the ones that explain identity from a more personal perspective (here individual characteristics and needs have prevalence on the group).

In Western philosophy, there is a shifting emphasis on individual and group prevalence to explain identity. The notion of identity as an individual feature is historically linked to the idea of the sameness of the self, since Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode (1637). The cognising self (res cogitans), certain of its existence through its own acts of cognition (cogito ergo sum), became the warranty against an ambiguous and deceptive world of things (res extensa). This warranty was valid only on the condition that the ego remained the same, that is, identical. This was the guarantee for the possibility of knowing the world. However, this idea of an identical self was robustly challenged, among others, by poststructuralist deconstruction. Michel Foucault analysed the subject not as the source and foundation of knowledge but as itself a product or effect of networks of power and discourse (1979, p. 35) and so created and controlled by group and collective dynamics.

A different perspective on identity and self is introduced by Damasio, whose studies introduce the body as a basis for the primordial sense of self (Damasio, 2000, p. 154). Self-identity begins as a feeling within us, because emotionality precedes rationality in the development of consciousness. In other words, the primordial form of self-consciousness is not ‘I think therefore I am’ but ‘I feel therefore I am’ (Damasio, 1994). For Damasio the sense of self is progressively built out of three main stages: the protoself, the core self, and the autobiographical self. The protoself is the stepping-stone required for the construction of the core self: it maps, moment by moment, the most stable aspects of the organism’s physical structure. It generates primordial feelings about the existence of the living body independently of how objects engage it or not. The core self is concerned only with the ‘here’ and ‘now’: it is a transient entity re-created for each object with which the brain interacts. According to Damasio, the organism (body and brain) interacts with object, and the brain reacts to the interaction. Rather than making a record of an entity’s structure, the brain actually records the multiple consequences of the organism’s interaction with the entity (2010, p. 132). The autobiographical self goes beyond the here and now of the core self, even though it cannot exist without the core self; it grows and consolidates across the lifetime of an individual (Damasio, 1999; 2010). It is the intellectual and self-created part of the self: we are both the author and the main character in this internal story of who we are as a story perpetually open to revision.

For the complexity of our contemporary understanding, identity and self seem not to exist in the singular. Whereas identity was once defined by sameness and unity, both qualities have given way to difference and plurality, an idea particularly akin to contemporary psychoanalysis, in which the self is depicted as fragmented, not unitary since its origin (Bromberg, 1998, p. 186, p. 256, p. 311; Mitchell, 1991, pp. 127–139), essentially fluid, multiple (Gergen, 1991; Rosenberg, 1997), paradoxical (Jung, 1921, para. 789; 1928a, para. 274; 1954, paras. 430–432), and ‘protean’ (Lifton, 1993). For Mitchell, the self is a constellation of meanings organised around relationships involving a way of being with others, a person in relation to other persons, resulting in a plural and multiple organisation of self around different images and representations of self and object (Mitchell, 1991, p. 131). Similarly, Bromberg writes that the psyche does not arise as a compact whole that becomes fragmented as a result of a pathological process. ‘It is a structure that originates and continues as a multiplicity of self-other configurations … that maturationally develop a coherence and continuity that comes to be experienced as a cohesive sense of personal identity’ (1998, p. 181). However, this cohesiveness is a developmentally acquired adaptive illusion. Jung’s model of self is paradoxical in itself (Luci, 2017a, pp. 98–100): besides a dissociative model of personality expressed in the complex theory, Jung formulated a theory of integration and unity of self through its archetype. In Jung’s works, the self is depicted at the same time as centre and circumference of the psyche (Jung, 1928b, paras. 399–405). The nature of the Jungian self remains inherently out of reach but it can be grasped as ‘experience’ thanks to symbols of numinous nature (the king, the prophet, the hero, geometrical structures, etc.) producing a sense of wholeness that is self-validating.

Stets and Burke (2000), social identity theorists, define the self as a dynamic entity with the ability to interpret and reinterpret its environment and eventually transform itself: identity would be a product of this reflexive activity. Here a particular tension arises between the idea of an innate, stable identity and the ‘postmodern’ construction of identity as an amalgam of multiple incoherent and unstable centres of self.

Similarly, but with stronger emphasis on groups, Symbolic Interaction tradition in sociology tends to see the self as a product of the mind, which is created during interactions with social institutions and target groups that are used as reference points for the mind to evaluate its social environment, interpret the interaction, and then use the outcome to re-evaluate and, if necessary, change itself. One of its greater influences was G. H. Mead, and its theories about the relationship between self and society (1934). In this context, target groups or significant individuals become the major source for inspirations to the self. Thus, identities are meaningful after an interaction of some sort with other identities.

It is helpful here to distinguish two inseparable aspects of identity for the relationship between the individual and social dimensions: structure and agency (Stets & Burke, 2003, pp. 132–150). Structure represents the external and structural factors that are influential over identity. It refers, for example, to the impact of institutions on groups that exist in a society: individuals do not have absolute control or even choice over their behavioural options in society and there are sanctions for violators. However, when we start thinking about the agency aspects we realise that agents do feel freedom of choice. Agents do often realise that when using their imagination and creativity they can choose any behavioural option they desire. The only condition that they need to fulfil is to be within the borders of the structure. Actually, this is where we start seeing the original practices of revolutionary individuals, those who go beyond borders and change the structure.

Identity in analytical psychology

How can we think of identity in terms of analytical psychology? Along the lines of the investigations of social sciences, identity seems to be a self-defining narrative that derives from a process of mutual relationship between an individual ego complex, the self, and the groups to which the person feels belonging to, resulting in a perception of self as close to a group and distant or separate from other groups. It is not structure, although related to the structure of the self and the group, but more the result of a process. Identity has a changing nature and is influenced by internal and external pressures and needs.

The inner actors implied in identity may be the ego complex, the self, and two mediating inner agencies, Persona and anima; the first two agencies, ego and self, are more related to structure, and the second two, Persona and anima, more relate to agency. A fifth actor is also implied in identity dynamics: the Shadow that plays its part in the dynamics of these agencies as opposite or what is outside consciousness and rejected, the inferior, the undifferentiated, the primitive, the dark parts of personality (Jung, 1917, n. 5 para. 103).

According to Jung, the ego complex is made up of representations that constitute the centre of consciousness and make the individual experience oneself as identical and continuous (1921, para. 706). As such, the ego seems to be the structure more related to identity as a conscious self-definition. As a complex of conscious representations, the ego contains everything that the subject knows about itself, that is, all those characteristics of its way of being that are in agreement with the principles, ideals, and values of the social context in which the subject recognises itself (Pieri, 1998, p. 389). In this sense, its function is close to that of the Cartesian cogito. However, in analytical psychology the ego is also understood as a mediating force between consciousness and unconsciousness as well as the individual and the collective. In this sense, the individual psyche is constantly referring to the external world and the internal world, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright permissions and credits
• Editorial introduction
• PART 1 Border, migration, and identity
• PART 2 Border phenomenology and gender
• PART 3 Liminality between borders and symbol formation
• PART 4 Border crossing and individuation
• Index