Political Passions And Jungian Psychology

In this book, a multidisciplinary and international selection of Jungian clinicians and academics discuss some of the most compelling issues in contemporary politics. Presented in five parts, each chapter offers an in-depth and timely discussion on themes including migration, climate change, walls and boundaries, future developments, and the psyche. Taken together, the book presents an account of current thinking in their psychotherapeutic community as well as the role of practitioners in working with the results of racism, forced relocation, colonialism, and ecological damage. Ultimately, this book encourages analysts, scholars, psychotherapists, sociologists, and students to actively engage in shaping current and future political, socio-economic, and cultural developments in this increasingly complex and challenging time.

Jungian psychology has taken a noticeable political turn in the recent years, and analysts and academics whose work draws on Jung’s ideas have made internationally recognised contributions in many humanitarian, communal and political contexts. This book brings together a multidisciplinary and international selection of contributors, all of whom have track records as activists, to discuss some of the most compelling issues in contemporary politics. Analysis and Activism is presented in six parts: Section One, Interventions, includes discussion of what working outside the consulting room means, and descriptions of work with displaced children in Colombia, projects for migrants in Italy and of an analyst’s engagement in the struggles of indigenous Australians. Section Two, Equalities and Inequalities, tackles topics ranging from the collapse of care systems in the UK to working with victims of torture. Section Three, Politics and Modernity, looks at the struggles of native people in Guatemala and Canada and oral history interviews with members of the Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora. Section Four, Culture and Identity, studies issues of race and class in Brazil, feminism and the gendered imagination, and the introduction of Obamacare in the USA. Section Five, Cultural Phantoms, examines the continuing trauma of the Cultural Revolution in China, Jung’s relationship with Jews and Judaism, and German-Jewish dynamics. Finally, Section Six, Nature: Truth and Reconciliation, looks at our broken connection to nature, town and country planning, and relief work after the 2011 earthquake in Japan. There remains throughout the book an acknowledgement that the project of thinking forward the political in Jungian psychology can be problematic, given Jung’s own questionable political history. What emerges is a radical and progressive Jungian approach to politics informed by the spirit of the times as well as by the spirit of the depths. This cutting-edge collection will be essential reading for Jungian and post-Jungian academics and analysts, psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists, and academics and students of politics, sociology, psychosocial studies and cultural studies.

In this book, a multidisciplinary and international selection of Jungian clinicians and academics discuss some of the most compelling issues in contemporary politics. Presented in five parts, each chapter offers an in-depth and timely discussion on themes including migration, climate change, walls and boundaries, future developments, and the psyche. Taken together, the book presents an account of current thinking in their psychotherapeutic community as well as the role of practitioners in working with the results of racism, forced relocation, colonialism, and ecological damage. Ultimately, this book encourages analysts, scholars, psychotherapists, sociologists, and students to actively engage in shaping current and future political, socio-economic, and cultural developments in this increasingly complex and challenging time.

"Jung never wrote a treatise that systematically defines the implications of his psychological theories for politics. His views on the subject are dispersed throughout his works, although a number of books and essays are closely concerned with politics, either explicitly or by implication and logical extension. Hence, this book represents a compilation of those of Jung's ideas that have political and/or social implications, gleaned from the voluminous writings on various subjects, a comparison of those ideas with Freud's, and a consideration of just what Jung's ideas imply for the social and political questions." from the Preface. "Jung's anthropological studies, his concepts of the archetypes and the collective unconscious, did inevitably make him take stands in contemporary political conflicts and he developed a number of sociological and political ideas. Although Professor Odajnyk has not refrained from honestly giving his own views, he gives in his book a very valuable survey of Jung's attitude toward anthropological and political questions." -Marie-Louise von Franz, from the Foreword Contents: The Origin of Culture and Politics * Psychic Inflation * Mass Psyche and Mass Man * The Individual and the State * Politics and the Unconscious * The German Case * The End of Politics * The Future of Man * Jung and Freud * A word about Democracy

What can depth psychology and politics offer each other? In The Political Psyche Andrew Samuels shows how the inner journey of analysis and psychotherapy and the passionate political convictions of the outer world are linked. He brings an acute psychological perspective to bear on public themes such as the market economy, environmentalism, nationalism, and anti-semitism. But, true to his aim of setting in motion a two-way process between depth psychology and politics, he also lay bare the hidden politics of the father, the male body, and of men's issue generally. A special feature of the book is an international survey into what analysts and psychotherapists do when their patients/clients bring overtly political material into the clinical setting. The results, including what the respondents reveal about their own political attitudes, destabilize any preconceived notions about the political sensitivity of analysis and psychotherapy.

This essential new book presents a discussion of racial relations, Jungian psychology and politics as a dialogue between two Jungian analysts of different nationalities and ethnicities, providing insight into a previously unexplored area of Jungian psychology. Racial Legacies explores themes and historical events from the perspective of each author, and through the lens of psychology, politics and race, in the hopes of creating meaningful racial relationships. The historical ways the past has affected the authors' ancestors and their own lives today is explored in detail through essays and dialogue, demonstrating that past racial legacies continue to bind on both conscious and unconscious levels. This book distinguishes itself from other texts as the first of its kind to present a racial dialogue in the context of Jungian psychology. It will be of great value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and students of Depth and Analytical Psychology.

Winner of the IAJS Book Award 2023 for 'Best Edited Book' Winner of the 2023 Gradiva Award for 'Best Edited Book' This volume explores Jung’s theories in relation to the concept of Other and in conjunction with the lived experience of it, while examining current events and cultural phenomena through the lens of Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, sociology, literature, film and philosophy. The contributors examine global expressions of these various viewpoints, disciplines and life experiences and how cultural, political and sociological complexes evoke challenges as well as invitations to the idea of the Other from intersecting and convergent perspectives. The Spectre of the Other in Jungian Psychoanalysis is timely and important reading for Jungian and post-Jungian analysts, therapists, academics, students and creatives.

Andrew Samuels is one of the best known figures internationally in the fields of psychotherapy, Jungian analysis, relational psychoanalysis and counselling, and in academic studies in those areas. His work is a blend of the provocative and original together with the reliable and scholarly. His many books and papers figure prominently on reading lists in clinical and academic teaching contexts. This self-selected collection, Passions, Persons, Psychotherapy, Politics, brings together some of Samuels' major writings at the interface of politics and therapy thinking. In this volume, he includes chapters on the market economy; prospects for eco-psychology and environmentalism; the role of the political Trickster, particularly the female Trickster; the father; relations between women and men; and his celebrated and radical critique of the Jungian idea of ‘the feminine principle’. Clinical material consists of his work with parents and on the therapy relationship. The book concludes with his seminal and transparent work on Jung and anti-semitism and an intriguing account of the current trajectory of the Jungian field. Samuels has written a highly personal and confessional introduction to the book. Each chapter also has its own topical introduction, written in a clear and informal style. There is also much that will challenge the long-held beliefs of many working in politics and in the social sciences. This unique collection of papers will be of interest to psychotherapists, Jungian analysts, psychoanalysts and counsellors – as well as those undertaking academic work in those areas.

Jungian Political Analysis addresses the question: in what ways can Jungian psychology contribute to an understanding of politics? Specifically, what are the explanatory concepts that I draw from analytical psychology? And, what political conditions do I select that invite understanding? These nine chapters present distinct socio-political contexts in which I explore answers. The sequence of chapters represents a progression in my understanding. Explanatory concepts from analytical psychology: complexes (dissociation, repression, projection), persona, shadow, cultural complexes (collective trauma), narcissism (healthy and unhealthy), religious function, inflation, compensation, and individuation. Political conditions: oppression and liberation, political consciousness, inter-ethnic strife, fanaticism, Islamism, political movements, welfare state policies, populist morality, neoliberalism, distributive justice, psychopolitical healing, and conspiracy theories.

This volume of essays, all authored by practicing Jungian psychoanalysts, examines and illuminates ways of working with individual analytic and therapeutic clients in the context of powerful and current collective forces, in the United States and beyond. One of Carl Jung’s central achievements was his clear recognition that the psyche is a locus not only of individual and personal experiences but also of social, collective, and even cosmological experiences. This important insight on Jung’s part both opens broad vistas for psychoanalytic practice and poses potential challenges for the psychoanalytic practitioner attempting to understand and aid the individual client amidst the pressure of intense collective energies, especially amidst collective crises. Among the themes treated in this volume are principles of non-violence, environmental activism, feminism, ecological shifts due to the pandemic, the Chingada complex, mass shootings, industrial farming of animals, and death anxiety. Jungian Analysis in a World on Fire will be of interest to Jungian, psychoanalytic, and depth-oriented analysts and therapists engaged in how best to work with individual clients in a time of social, political, and environmental crisis. It will also be valuable for scholars interested in understanding the impact of contemporary, collective traumas on individual psychology.