Intergenerational Complexes in Analytical Psychology

The Suffering of Ghosts

Samuel L. Kimbles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Index: Psychology

Intergenerational Complexes in Analytical Psychology: The Suffering of Ghosts draws attention to human suffering and how it relates to unacknowledged and unrecognized traumatic cultural histories that continue to haunt us in the present. The book shows the many ways that our internal lives are organized and patterned by both racial, ethnic, and national identities, and personal experiences.

This book shows how the cultural unconscious with its multiple group dynamics, identities, nationalities, seething differences of conflicts, polarizations, and individual personalities are organized by cultural complexes and narrated by archetypal story formations, which the author calls phantom narratives. The emotional dynamics generated constitute potential transitional spaces or holding containers that allow us to work with these issues psychologically at both the individual and group levels, offering opportunities for healing. The chapters of the book provide numerous examples of the applications of these terms to natural and cultural catastrophes as well as expressions as uncanny phenomena.

Intergenerational Complexes in Analytical Psychology is essential reading for analytical psychologists, Jungian psychotherapists, and other professionals seeking to understand the impact of intergenerational trauma on individuals and groups. It is also relevant to the work of academics and scholars of Jungian studies, sociology, trauma studies, politics, and social justice.

Chapter 1
Working with cultural phantoms through cultural complexes

Recently, I saw the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012) on a recommendation from friends who knew I was going to New Orleans for a conference. I thought the movie was fantastic, full of magical, imaginative, and gritty suffering, and the shadow associated with earthiness. I felt a type of immediacy as well as a separateness. It reminded me of Du Bois’s image of the Veil, the kind of double consciousness that creates a barrier and a separation from otherness, making for an inner space. I also thought of the image of Duende in Spanish lore in its recognition of a presence, where the experience of immanence brings in the irrational, the absurd, the instinctive, and fate as other. The intimation of madness, the absent but present mother, the body, death, the world on the other side of the broken levee that became flashpoints for discussions of race – all constituted for me the feeling of an absent presence that was as big as Hurricane Katrina, the storm that devastated New Orleans on August 23–25, 2005. On the other hand, perhaps Hurricane Katrina as the phantom in the movie was the representation of the cataclysm.

This is the theme of Beasts of the Southern Wild, whose central protagonist is a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy who lives with her father, Wink. She has lost her mother and lives in a shack with her father situated in the remote Delta. Wink is preparing his young daughter for the end of the world. When the father falls mysteriously ill, nature falls ill with him. Temperatures rise, the ice caps melt, and fearsome prehistoric beasts called aurochs run loose (an extinct species of large wild cattle that inhabited Europe, Asia, and North Africa). The aurochs appear in the film during and shortly after the storm’s rising waters threaten to engulf their community, sending Hushpuppy in search of her long-lost mother. The movie depicts (although Romanized) the harsh reality of poverty and places the innocent little Black girl as the actual and symbolic victim of the storm, which is, psychically, indistinguishable from the racism that is as present in the background as the poverty, the storm that the broke through the levee that allows the nightmare to come rushing into our imagination. There is no containment for making sense of what’s happening. We, as audience, like Hushpuppy and Wink, cannot offer any holding for either their or our feelings.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans in 2005 wasn’t simply a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death.

In this chapter I introduce the concept of the phantom as an image related to collective dynamics that operate as largely background in our cultural life. These are preliminary thoughts as I introduce yet another concept into the discussion of cultural complexes. But I hope it is one that will deepen our understanding, reflections, and discussion on the activity and dynamics of the group at the level of cultural processes.

Contemporary culture is a Tower of Babel of competing assumptions and ideologies about human rights, individual and group tensions around differences, resources, and intergroup conflicts both within and between nations, genders, and religions. These tensions produce complex moral and ethical dilemmas and push us toward political conflicts and social splits that we use to include and exclude each other. But what are we to do with all this? How do we process these times? Think about this? What actions can we take?

The one thing that seems to be missing in our Tower of Babel is a psychological attitude that allows us to see and to relate to what the unconscious is doing with these cultural ferments. In other words, what is missing is a psychological attitude toward the psyche expressed at the cultural level.

We tend to acknowledge the psychology of scapegoat dynamics but then feel powerless to do much with this awareness. Hate, envy, paranoia, and our difficulty with understanding and working with differences bind us over and over again to old patterns of relating based in fear. Previously, I introduced the concept of the cultural complex with the hope of opening up larger areas for viewing and getting language for describing what the psyche is doing with the interplay of these cultural phenomena. Building on the work of Joseph Henderson on the cultural unconscious (1990) and C. G. Jung’s work on complexes (1934/1969) and the archetypal unconscious, the cultural complex allow us first to understand better how the psyche operates at the group level to organized group phenomena. Second, it allows us to understand both the individual’s relationship to the group as well as how the group functions within the individual. Third, through attention to group complexes, we may come into a better relationship with the autonomy of the psyche as it plays itself out at individual and cultural levels, expressed as collective myths, images, and themes.

Background of my interest in cultural phantoms

Before moving on to say what I mean by phantoms, I want to present some of the background that helped me to get into these ideas. My first recognition that the group psyche had a stake in individual and group survival occurred through a dream on the night before my admission’s interview to the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

In the dream, I was sitting in a mosque with a dozen or so African American men, all dressed in black suits. I recognized them as Black Muslims. My name was called, and I got up and approached the door to leave for my interview. Suddenly, these men jumped between me and the door and said they would not let me pass until I demonstrated to them the secret handshake, and they would know that I knew them and would not forget them.

When a dream stirs up and reverberates through many levels of the psyche, as this one did for me, one can be relatively sure that something of the numinous and the archetypal has been activated. This kind of dream puts us in the shoes of that archetypal situation where we may resonate with the deeper currents of the living reality of the psyche. This living reality for me included recognition that the group, the African American community, was making a claim on me. That claim is something that I have been responding to and living out for many years. I have come to feel that it was a call for a reconnection to my Black ancestors that would open me up to my greater identity that comes through experiencing the reality of the psyche at the level of the group where symbols are embodied in our ways of living our values, identity, and integrity.

This dream brought to my attention the historical setting in which my current choice was situated. It forced me to remember the cultural assaults on our Black American humanity – hence, the title of one of my first papers on cultural complexes: “The Myth of Invisibility.” I thought of the earlier Black authors who had touched me and the titles of their works: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks, Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man, James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, all sharing the horrific dilemmas that are created in coping with collective hate, and the list goes on and on. Surely the theme that constitutes these authors’ responses to American cultural life is that of invisibility, rootlessness, and homelessness. So I move through cultural complexes to the phantom or, as Borges (1999) says, from nightmare to dream, that is, to the presence of something from the facts of collective traumas to a way of working psychologically with their reality. My dream brought to my consciousness the importance of holding a connection to these ancestors/brothers as I go forward. My dream reflected an inner identity and a continuity that must be attended to and its shadow of collective responsibility and guilt as I moved from one frame of identity toward integrating another.

I am reminded of President Obama’s report of his first trip to Kenya, before he went to Harvard Law School. He sensed his father’s ghostly presence in the streets of Nairobi: “The Old Man’s here, I think, although he doesn’t say anything to me. He’s here asking me to understand” (Obama, 1995, p. 323). Later he said, “The pain I felt was my father’s. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright” (p. 430). These kinds of internal responses to transitions around identity and culture must be very common, even if they are minimized. For what Cornel West says of Black culture is true of any people whose cry is for being seen:

The original cry of the black culture is neither a word nor a book, not an architectural monument or legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan – a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition.

(West, 1999, p. 81)

This chapter is part of an ongoing response to this request to remember and to share with others as I have integrated these kinds of reflections into my development as an analyst over the past number of years.

History-keeping by the unconscious in individuals and groups seems independent of the conscious intention and goals of the group, and there seems to be a teleological aspect also (Stein, 1987). There is an independence from space/time coordinates reflecting a nonsequential, transpsychic arrangement of historical patterns as these are related to individual complexes. Like phantoms, history is a strange attractor (strange attractors are hidden islands of structure, subtle patterns of order at the heart of chaos).

Jung’s idea of history includes not only childhood and the immediate family, but also the larger matrix of culture, generational patterns, and archaic history as embedded in the collective unconscious. Inclusion of archetypes within the historical nexus led me to the realization that the influence of history on individuals is ubiquitous, rooted in culture and the unconscious, and pervasive through all segments of emotional and mental functioning, and is therefore fundamental to identity.

My first approach to history began with considering intergenerational traumas that I ultimately felt to be organized around cultural complexes. Thinking in intergenerational terms raises the issue of how all this occurs: by what mechanisms does the transmission happen? Since we are talking generally about the movement from past to present, across time dimensions, how do we talk about the fact that without direct communication we may be affected by processes and dynamics from another time and place? In addition, what about the intersubjective? And how do our ways of relating to each other stimulate and generate associations and complex responses that put us into different emotional spaces and awaken memories of the Other as well as our relationship to others past and present? These kinds of questions come up routinely in the transference-countertransference clinical situation. At a deeper level this seems to be related to generational continuity and, of course, to the survival of a people, group, or religion. Henderson, who introduced the concept of the cultural unconscious, defined it as

an area of historical memory that lies between the collective unconscious and the manifest pattern of the culture. It may include both these modalities, conscious and unconscious, but it has some kind of identity arising from the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which assists in the formation of myth and ritual and also promotes the process of development in individuals.

(1990, p. 102)

The part of Dr. Henderson’s definition of the cultural unconscious that I am drawn to has to do with “some kind of an identity arising from the archetypes, which assists in the formation of myth and ritual and promotes the process of development in individuals.” The term phantom is my response to “what kind of identity arising from the archetypes” as expressed through the cultural unconscious. In the remainder of this chapter, I describe what the phantom means and how it relates to cultural complexes.

The background to my thinking about the phantom can be found in Jung’s own work described in his doctoral dissertation, entitled “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena” (1902/1970), which laid the foundation for some of his most important concepts: subpersonalities, that is, autonomous complexes; the representation of an unconscious perception in the formation of imagery and personification; the autonomous psyche; images and hallucinations as potentially healing; and the mythical. Today we are likely to describe words like phantom in terms of the exteriorizations of unconscious complexes. Nearly twenty years later he said, “I doubt whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomena in question” (Jung, 1920/1969, para. 600, fn. 15). Jung’s work at that time occurred when Freud’s concerns about the uncanny expressed his attempt to understand the origins of certain psychic phenomena. The tilt toward scientific, rational understanding of phenomena that straddled the fence between the rational and the unknown put many of the earlier intuitions into the background for Freud (1919/1959) and was to lead to Jung’s professional marginalization in the larger psychoanalytic community. Both Jung and Freud were interested in the psychic background, mostly the transpsychic for Jung and the more personal unconscious for Freud. However, Avery Gordon (1997), nearly a century later in using Freud’s paper “The Uncanny,” posited: “The uncanny is the return, in psychoanalytic terms of what the concept of the unconscious represses: the reality of being haunted by worldly contacts” (p. 54). “Something has become unfamiliar to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view” (Gordon, 1997, p. xvi). The phantom is the unbearable, that which is too much for consciousness, the untranslatable, that felt presence of the absence that opens the space for phantom dynamics.

Phantoms

Just as within individual psychology we may think about the imago of a mother or father complex, in cultural complexes we may think in terms of phantoms as constellations of images representing the psyche at the level of the group, expressed through social attitudes and structures that are alive in current events. For instance, the history of cultural traumatic events that have destroyed and disrupted social and cultural patterns causing breakdowns in family and social functioning have created symptoms of cul...