1st Edition
Jungian Analysis in a World on Fire At the Nexus of Individual and Collective Trauma
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.
1. Introduction 2. Our Climate Crisis. The Need for an Active Analyst when working with the Nature Archetype in Jungian Analysis 3. Archetypal Nonviolence in Analysis 4. The Dark Feminine Rising. A Psycho-Cultural and Clinical Meditation 5.The View to A Kill: Conscious Cruelty and the Role of Ambivalence in Our Use and Abuse of Non-Human Animals 6. Cuauhtémoc and the Other. Confronting the Chingada Complex 7. Finding your Inner Gun. A Jungian Perspective on Mass Shootings and American Gun Culture 8. An Ecological Future Beyond the Pandemic 9. The Jungian Analyst in Between Life and Death. Clinical Ethics in an Age of Pandemic
Biography
Laura Camille Tuley, PhD, is a Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the coordinator and a faculty member of the New Orleans Jung Seminar of the IRSJA and Co-Editor of the 'Clinical Commentaries' and 'Film & Culture' features of The Journal of Analytical Psychology. Tuley has contributed to Psychological Perspectives, Exploring Depth Psychology and the Female Self: Feminist Themes from Somewhere, the New Orleans Review, Mothering in the Third Wave, Art Papers, Hypatia, and the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy.
John R. White, PhD, is a Jungian psychoanalyst and philosopher. He is the coordinator of the C G Jung Institute Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh, president elect of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center, scholar-in-residence at the Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and author of Adaptation and Psychotherapy: Langs and Analytical Psychology (2023).
In this summer of fire comes this vitalizing volume on how collective archetypal dynamics impact the being trying to be human. With existential catastrophes in the relation to the Other, that ‘other’ of nature, people, the nonhuman, climate, the iconic gun, pandemic, the atrocity of colonialism, etc. brings soul-death inside the consulting room. Here is how to treat it.
Susan Rowland (PhD), Pacifica Graduate Institute, author of The Alchemy Fire Murder (2023)
This challenging book aims to further the development of Jungian analysis by paying careful attention to the importance of our present social, cultural, and political realities. Our world has changed in a way that has radically affected the psyche and soul of both patients and analysts. This change has opened fundamental questions about analytic practice, the relationship between our inner and outer realities, and how this change might alter the nature of the analytic dyad. This work has brought together a diverse group of authors whose engagement with today’s challenges has made diverse and creative contributions to a world truly on fire and to the heat and development of Jungian psychology.
Stanton Marlan, Ph.D., ABPP, FABP, Jungian analyst and author of C.G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination
Laura Tuley and John White, editors (and contributors) have given us a trenchant and definitive work; one which unequivocally acknowledges the consulting room as a place where the political and personal can be met ---and possibly transformed. Each chapter tackles a compelling social issue by incorporating established Jungian ideas and clinical practice with a form of conscious ‘activism’ that pushes back on privileging the interior life while eschewing messages of distress from our troubled, fragile world. Whether taking on gun violence, racism, factory farming or environmental crisis, these authors challenge us to heal and move past the old inside/outside split in our discipline by allowing the overwhelming reality of our world --with its inevitable effect on the psyches of both analyst and analysand – to inform us body and soul.
Constance Romero, M.ED., LPC, Senior Training and Supervising Analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and Co-Editor of the ‘Clinical Commentaries’ and ‘Art & Film’ features, The Journal of Analytical Psychology
Tuley and White have assembled a collection of essays that confront the reader with various forms of psychic assault emanating from collective trauma. Like fish who are unaware they live in the medium of water, they and their authors seek to remind us, to awaken us, to the co-created nature of inner experience and the outer world. They grab us by the lapel, shake us, and demand that we take notice of the toxicity of our medium and its devastating impact on us – and we on it. This book is a “le cri de Merlin" for collective realization and integration by actualizing a broader principle of individuation.
August J, Cwik, Psy.D. Senior Training and Supervising Analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and Former Co-Director of Training, C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago
Timely and sorely needed, this collection invites analysts and therapists alike to look up and notice what is happening in our sociopolitical collective. Forcing our gaze away from our navels, we are reminded that we are inextricably linked to a larger environment where lives can be dramatically altered in a split second and where our engagement is essential. These voices offer hope for those exploring the depths that ecological restoration, social/political health, and inclusivity are part of our collective telos.
Jeanne A Lacourt, MS, LPC, NCC, Ph.D, Professor, American Indian Studies, St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, Jungian Analyst
Tuley and White have put together a lively and thoughtful anthology that challenges conventional wisdom on the relationship between analysis (or treatment) and activism, and calls attention to the psychological toll taken (and the real world challenges posed) by urgent social, political and ecological problems, including environmental degradation, climate change and the impact of COVID and other zoonotic diseases; factory farming, animal rights and our broken relationship to the natural world; the evils of racism and colonialism; American gun culture and mass shootings; the ubiquity of human aggression; non-violence as therapeutic praxis. They point to the futility, indeed the perversity, of harnessing therapy to the goal of fostering adaptation to an insane society, adding to the small but growing literature that addresses these troubling social pathologies from a specifically Jungian perspective.
Daniel Burston, Professor of Psychology, Duquesne University and author of Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University and Anti-Semitism and Analytical Psychology: Jung, Politics and Culture
