Vision, Reality and Complex

Jung, Politics and Culture

Thomas Singer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367538132
• eBook ISBN: 9781000296792
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Vision, Reality and Complex brings together a rich selection of Thomas Singer's scholarship on the development of the cultural complex theory and explores the relationship between vision, reality, and illusion in politics and psyche.

The chapters in this book discuss the basic principles of the cultural complex theory in various national and international contexts that span the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump eras. Each chapter grounds this theory in practical examples, such as race and healthcare in the United States, or in specific historical and international conflicts between groups, whether they be ethnic, racial, gender, local, national or global. With chapters on topics including mythology, leadership, individuation, revolution, war, and the soul, Singer's work provides unique insights into contemporary culture, activism, and politics.

This collection of essays demonstrates how the cultural complex theory applies in specific contexts while simultaneously having cross-cultural relevance through the reemergence of complexes throughout history. It is essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, politics, sociology, and international studies, as well as for practicing and trainee analysts alike.

1Introduction to The Vision Thing

From The Vision Thing: Myth, Politics and Psyche in the World, edited by Thomas Singer, Routledge, 2000.¹

This chapter served as the introduction to The Vision Thing: Myth, Politics and Psyche in the World, a collection of essays that originated during a small conference over a stormy weekend at the funky Bolinas Rod & Boat Club in 1999. Featuring Jungian analysts and politicians, the conference began with a conversation I had in 1989 with Senator Bill Bradley who, along with many others as the turn of the millennium approached, wondered “What Myth Now?” I did not know it at the time, but it was the beginning of my decades-long circumambulation around the interfaces of myth, politics, and psyche in the world.

There are times when politicians stumble into the need to link the political and mythological. They are propelled by a peculiar mix of dire necessity, conscious intention, and a deep unconscious sense of collective need. The title of this book is taken from a phrase born out of just such a situation. Although George H. W. Bush had recently “won” the Gulf War and conventional wisdom had it that he was unbeatable in 1992, the president was having trouble communicating with the American people—especially around domestic policy, as so poignantly revealed when he went shopping at a supermarket and didn’t know what a bar code was at the check-out counter. The president had lost touch with everyday life and people in his own country. His reelection campaign began to implode. Bush himself identified part of his problem connecting with a restless electorate as “The Vision Thing.”

The Vision Thing—a phrase that Bush had inadvertently coined early in his administration as a self-acknowledged problem of articulating a clear vision—had been haunting him for four years. He often joked about it in his speeches in an attempt to defuse the implicit criticism that, in fact, he had little or no intuition as to where the country was or ought to be headed. In a futile attempt to resurrect his lame 1992 campaign, Bush tried to fill the vision gap by referring to a past “vision” of the sunrise of American promise he had when he was plucked from the Pacific as a downed fighter pilot in World War II, just as in 1988, in his inaugural address, he had sentimentally kindled a future vision “to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world” nursed by “a thousand points of light.”

Although Bush failed to fill the vision gap in the 1992 election, he did leave us to ponder his legacy of “The Vision Thing.” This book’s title was chosen from his aptly awkward attempt to link political reality with archetypal vision—not to mock George Bush, but to acknowledge the awesome difficulty of uniting vision with reality. In truth, “The Vision Thing” experienced at a personal and collective level attempts to bring together the political and mythological realms through psychological experience. “Vision” is seen with the mind’s or spirit’s eye, and “thing” designates the most basic, concrete stuff of reality. “Vision” and “thing” do not fit comfortably together. It is the rare leader who can put “vision” and “thing” together in a believable way; it is the rare leader who can articulate a true vision that fits with real politics.

Origin of idea

The idea for this “vision thing” book grew out of a conversation I had with Senator Bill Bradley in 1989. Over dinner one night Senator Bradley asked about Joseph Campbell’s life-long study of mythology. Public interest in Campbell was peaking at the time, and Senator Bradley was curious both about Campbell’s work itself and the increasing public attention given to mythological themes. He wanted to understand more about the importance of myth in human affairs and, specifically, what was currently capturing the public imagination about the study and insights of mythology. Our talk was not about myth in its popular use as “inaccurate fiction” but about how in some mysterious way a living myth establishes a meaningful link between humans, nature, and spirit. In this use of the word myth is the central story a people tells about itself to understand its beginnings, its purposes, and its place in a broader historical and cosmic order. At the heart of Senator Bradley’s inquiry were the pragmatic American political questions: “What myth, now? What stories are people telling about themselves and our world now?”

Initial dream

The conversation with Senator Bradley stirred me deeply, and that night I had what C. G. Jung called a “big dream.” It seemed to be a comment on the relationship between collective consciousness, as expressed in political reality, and collective unconsciousness, as expressed in myth, vision, and dream. I will offer the heart of the dream, though a “private” communication, because I believe that if we are serious about engaging what lies beneath the surface of our individual and collective lives, it is best to begin at home and because my home-made vision became a kind of guide, question, warning, and meditation that I kept very much in mind as the themes of this book (and all my future studies of vision and folly) unfolded (over decades). Here is my dream’s central section: I am talking to an ancient sage about the meaning of the rapid changes taking place in the world as the millennium approaches. He has his hands on the skull of a black monastic nun from the early Christian era. The puzzling dream, with its hints of an unfamiliar past political history, teased me with its elusive profundity. Over the years of gathering the pieces of The Vision Thing, it constantly reminded me that the questions the authors of this book are asking are huge, not easily answered, and require a creative imagination that can embrace the profound changes in our political, economic, geographic, and even cosmological reality. The dream reminded me that such upheavals also marked the early Christian era and to my Jungian ears suggests a mystery surrounding something dark, feminine, spiritual, and long removed from the world. With the advent of the millennium many prophets are coming forth with crystal ball prophecies of what is in store for our civilization and planet. They shout at us with enormous conviction on the truth of their ready-made intuitions and fill our heads with Utopian promises that are either technological or anti-technological. Black and white, boom or bust prophecies, and strangely empty metaphors about our “need to prepare for the twenty-first century” suggest a poverty of ideas as we grapple with the awesomeness of a truly unknown and unenvisioned future.

One California Jungian analyst’s meditation on the skull of a black nun from the early Christian era does not provide any better crystal ball. Rather, such a meditation assures us only of the certainty of death; underlines the turmoil and upheaval of a world in rapid transition; and behind it all evokes the eternal presence of religious mystery. The image, moreover, moves beyond a Christian, Western perspective on these matters. Like a Tibetan monk contemplating a skull in daily religious practice, my “sage” seems to suggest that we can look upon the skull both in the horror of human destruction and as a reminder that death is always our companion in life. As Hamlet knew, our individual lives will soon end in death, and the life of our times will shortly be but a skull in the hands of future generations. Our times are fleeting. Do they matter at all? How can we make them count?

Negative capability

Thankfully, my solution has not been to rededicate myself with firmer twentieth-century resolve to the pursuit of a unitary saving vision. Rather, in the spirit of the dream, this book seeks to cultivate the art of not knowing. It is the same art that Keats urged for the poet—what he called “the negative capability,” by which he meant the deepest receptivity, free from any overriding insistence on a particular point of view.² This attitude is quite different from that taken by those who address us with their daily, instant interpretations of political and cultural life. Reality becomes a toy in their hands in which the meaning of events appears to precede the actual unfolding of the events themselves. Perhaps this is the shadow side of our so-called information technology. The more information we get, the less we really know. It is small wonder that skeptical deconstruction has become the dominant philosophical stance of our times. Retreat into an absurdist position of refusing to ascribe meaning to anything seems like the only reasonable way to escape the tyranny of spin doctors’ instant analysis. Perhaps more useful in the long run will not be the refusal to give a definite meaning to anything, but the hard effort of holding open the door to meaning in the hope that it may reveal itself in time. Without that, we are stuck with accepting instantaneous meaning or its opposite, across-the-board meaninglessness. “Negative capability” as receptivity urges holding open the space of not knowing long enough for something authentic to emerge. When we pursue an inquiry about our collective mythological, psychological, and political future, it is an attitude worth cultivating.

The common observation of those who study myth and history is that it is almost impossible to know the myth or myths of the times one is living through. If this is true, why should we even bother to ask the basic question of this book, “What myth(s) now?” One answer is, because the question has already posed itself to us. Perhaps one of the greatest prerogatives of being human is the right to take up unanswerable questions posed by the facts of our lives. For example, many of us who came of age in the 1960s shared an almost tribal assumption that we were participating in the birth of a new era and that we had even glimpsed the outlines of its universal mythology. How different that time and even the myths we thought we were giving birth to appear now through the rather short lens of a few decades! Very few people of my generation know more than that they aren’t in Kansas anymore. So the idea behind this book which began with a straightforward question from a thoughtful politician—“What myth now?”—can also be phrased, “Where are we now?” This is the kind of question that can only be answered through dialogue. The actual work on this book began when the politician’s reasonable question engaged the nonrational dream response of a psychiatrist trained to read such compensatory, unconscious communications in the tradition of Jungian analytical psychology. This first exchange between two very different kinds of mindset establishes the basic paradoxes and tensions the book sets out to explore: conscious and unconscious, politics and myth, reality and vision—all mediated by the psychology of individuals sharing and trying to envision the same collective psyche.

Myth, politics, psyche

The basic assumption of the book is that there are deep, highly charged, unexplored relationships between mythological or archetypal reality, psychological reality, and political reality. I have sometimes pictured this as a continuum:

myth/archetype ⟷ psyche ⟷ politics

On one end of the spectrum is the purely mythological or archetypal realm with its grand themes of death and rebirth, inner transformation and outer renewal, human and God. On the other end of the imaginary spectrum is the realm of everyday politics with its power plays, deals, persona appearances and deceptions, and a quite substantial knowledge of the practical world. Politicians are at least as adept at shrewdly engaging the reality of the “shadow” as analytical psychologists—even if they do not use the same jargon. In the model I am proposing, psyche sits between and mediates the exchange between myth and politics. Individual fears, aspirations, and conflicts are part of this psyche. Psyche also has a collective aspect that carries the conscious and unconscious concerns and values of the group in which the individual lives. It is the tension and interaction between myth, psyche, and politics in the world that this book proposes to explore. In a way, there is nothing new about this exploration. The Upanishads, the Koran, the Bible, and just about every other sacred scripture of the world’s great religions wrestle continuously with the theme of man as a political animal against the backdrop of deep archetypal encounters with spirit.

So the questions addressed by this book are at once old, timeless, and contemporary. Perhaps what makes its way of exploring them new is the psychological effort to make a bit more conscious the nature of the tension and interaction between mythological and political realities. Intuition tells us that such relationships are everywhere, nowhere more pronounced than in our culture’s media intermingling of myth, politics, and entertainment. The “American dream,” for instance, is still a vital myth with deep political resonance. The underlying linkage is self-evident. We hardly question the fact that much of American politics is deliberately dressed up to give the appearance of fulfilling the material and social promises of that “dream.” What is not self-evident is the teasing out of the relationship between the mythic “dream” and the actual politics, because most people are not accustomed to think of myth, psychology, and politics at the same time. But, in my thinking, myth, psychology, and politics are so entwined in the collective psyche—often quite unconsciously—that we might even think of them as bound together in some kind of marriage. Yet, strangely, as with the forces influencing other marriages, we have trouble articulating clearly the relationship between them or even talking about them at the same time. The expedient and practical do not mix easily or naturally with the symbolic and inner. And yet myth does not exist without embodiment in politics, and politics always has deep, unconscious origins in the stories of a people and its leaders.

There is an inherent opposition between the kinds of people who are most interested in the inner dynamic of archetypal reality and those interested in everyday politics, just as there is an inherent tension between mythological thinking and political thinking. Both have different modes of perception, of apprehending the world. They represent different ways of being in the world. Put someone who sees the world archetypally in a room with a politician, and the dialogue quickly dissolves into misunderstanding and confusion. For instance, quite savvy and articulate students of politics and history can go a bit dumb when the conversation turns to the realm of myth and psyche as if these “spacey” ideas have nothing to do with the everyday affairs of men and women. Real discussion quickly breaks down into mutual distrust. Those who are archetypal and psychological in their thinking display disdain for the mundane machinations of the politician, and those who are political in their thinking perceive (quite accurately) that these more rarefied psychologically minded thinkers do not understand how the real world of human deal-making works.

The collective psyche

Another factor in the tangled relationship between myth and politics is the notion of the “collective psyche.” At the heart of this book is the idea that the tension between myth and politics is mediated, intensified, and transmitted by a psyche that is somehow shared by all of us and articulated by a psychology that we hold in common. C. G. Jung wrote: “… the human psyche is not a self-contained and wholly individual phenomenon, but also a collective one.”³ The word psyche derives from the Greek, meaning “soul,” and usually psyche, like soul, is conceived of as an individual phenomenon. It was Jung’s discovery that not only is the individual psyche real, but also there is a living “collective psyche” that arises out of the group or “collective” experience of human beings, and that this collective psyche has an objective reality beyond the interpretations accorded it by different individuals. It is important to note that the collective psyche is not just real in groups. The collective psyche is alive and operative in the individual as well as a transpersonal force to be reckoned with. Just as the individual psyche gives expression to the ripples of deep personal yearnings, one can picture the collective psyche as providing the strong currents and tides in the ocean of common human concerns. Like ocean currents, they are often imperceptible, unfathomable, and moving in conflicting directions. Occasionally, however, collective trends coalesce into large and unpredictable waves that dramatically alter the course of human affairs.

An example of such a potent wave moving through the collective psyche and landing differently in different groups of individuals is the contemporary struggle over what kind of leaders we want to have. A good argument is being made that at least a piece of our present crisis in political leadership is about what kind of “father” (or “mother”) should lead us at this time: firm or loose, principled or responsive. There are some authorities whose leadership is solidly rooted in principle and order. They are firm, sometimes stern—but always grounding their authority in principle, as befits the father archetype that informs their “patriarchal” behavior. Margaret Thatcher was such a “father.” There is another more modern type of “father”/”mother” whose strength is based on a fluid sensitivity to the changing needs of the family and community. Loose and flexible, his or her fatherhood or motherhood is based less on principle than responsiveness. It is fascinating how Republicans like George H. W. and George W. Bush are talking about “compassionate conservatism” and Democrats are trying to show that they are firm on economic matters while still being responsive to social issues. Both parties are trying to find the right balance of firm and loose “fathers,” leaders who will be both principled and responsive in their models of leadership. Obviously, the image of leadership in the collective psyche is in flux and it lands in the individual psyche with different resonances depending on the kind of fatherhood (and motherhood) one has had, not had, or yearned for.

There are many people who do not believe in an individual psyche, much less a collective psyche. For them, the individual psyche is a Romantic, and before that neo-Platonic hangover soon to be replaced by the rational Aristotelian coupling of neuropsychology and psychopharmacology. Within such scientized monikers, “psyche” is getting buried in mind’s neurology and pharmacology. By scientific rationalists, the idea of a “collective psyche” is often dismissed as mystical nonsense. Those who reject the notions of an individual and collective psyche argue that the attitudes, moods, and values of the population are more accurately explained by the rational social sciences of economics, politics, and sociology, which can be measured and tracked by statistics. “It’s the economy, stupid!” is sometimes their knee-jerk explanation for what most affects the electorate. Given the importance of money in our lives, this reduction of political motivation to a material cause makes sense. But not always. The “collective psyche” has a spiritual zeitgeist dimension that is not reducible to sociology or e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Introduction to The Vision Thing
• 2 The cultural complex and archetypal defenses of the collective spirit: Baby Zeus, Elian Gonzales, Constantine’s sword, and other holy wars
• 3 Unconscious forces shaping international conflicts: Archetypal defenses of the group spirit from revolutionary America to conflict in the Middle East
• 4 The cultural complex: A statement of the theory and its application
• 5 Playing the race card: A cultural complex in action
• 6 Snapshots of the Obamacare cultural complex
• 7 Extinction anxiety: Where the spirit of the depths meets the spirit of the times, or extinction anxiety and the yearning for annihilation
• Index