Re-Visioning the American Psyche Jungian, Archetypal, and Mythological Reflections

Editor

Contributors

Acknowledgements 

Introduction

Ipek S. Burnett 

Part 1: Politics, Power, and Polarization

Introduction

1. A Personal Reflection on Politics and the American Soul

Thomas Singer 

2. Violent Hearts: America's Divided Soul

Luigi Zoja

3. Captain Ahab and Donald Trump: False Claims, the Fragility of Belief, and the Perilous Ship of America's Soul

Dennis Patrick Slattery

Part 2: Colonization, War and Violence

Introduction

4. Frontierism and the American Psyche

Glen Slater

5. The American Way of War

Edward Tick

6. Hate, Rage, Cultural War and Trump's Furies: The Monster in the American Psyche

Ronald Schenk

Part 3: Transgenerational Trauma, Racism, and Social Justice 

Introduction

7. Defiant Remembering: A Quest to Heal Transgenerational Trauma

Andrew P. Grant

8. Life from a View of the Shadow

Kwame Scruggs

9. Toward "Splendid Cities": The Thirst for the Imaginal in the Life of Community

Mary Watkins

Part 4: Gender, Sexuality, and the Patriarchy

Introduction

10. In the Wake and Shadow of "The Battle of the Sexes": A New Myth Is Arising

Claudette Kulkarni

11. Private Parts, Public Prejudice: Archetypes, Gender Essentialism, and Patriarchy

Jordan Shapiro

Part 5: Psychotherapy, Citizenship, and Cultural Movements 

Introduction

12. America's Child

Thomas Moore

13. Archetypal Psychology and Fugitive Democracy: James Hillman's Political Legacy

Michael Sipiora

14. Swimming the Wave: Occupying Uncertainty and the OWS Movement 

Gustavo Beck

15. Nomadland: Searching the Horizon of the American Dream

Rebecca Armstrong 

Index 

Biography

Ipek S. Burnett, PhD, is the author of A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche: The Violence of Innocence (Routledge). Based in San Francisco, she works with human rights and social justice organizations and writes novels in her native language, Turkish.

"Building on her brilliant cultural analysis in A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche, Burnett now brings together fifteen authors to reflect on a wide range of American topics from political polarization to intergenerational trauma to capitalism and patriarchy. With rigorous research, imagination, kaleidoscope insights and heartfelt expression, this collection confirms depth psychology's potential to contribute to social responsibility. Interdisciplinary in nature, timely and timeless at once, this is a great contribution to Jungian studies and beyond." 

Andrew Samuels, author of The Political Psyche 

"America is on the couch as never before in this splendid collection of essays edited by Ipek S. Burnett. The remarkable success of the collection is to achieve coherence with diversity, wide coverage of topics with depth of analysis, and combine different depth psychological lenses with ancient myth and twenty-first century suspicion of patriarchal and religious apologias. However, perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Re-Visioning the American Psyche is to make the good old USA into a case study of contemporary philosophical and political crises. Can democracy exist in systematically repressed psyches? Can the psyche exist if history is systemically falsified and social justice denied? Truly, this book demonstrates that Jungian psychology is a valuable critical lens across multiple social and humanities disciplines. Re-visioning the American Psyche is essential reading for anyone in America or who wants to understand Americans."

Susan Rowland, core faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute, author of C.G. Jung in the Humanities. 

"Revisioning The American Psyche cannot be engaged with the mind alone but through the pores of our skin. Ipek S. Burnett has collected and arranged a number of essays that are designed to liberate us from traditional narratives about America that have permeated our psyche. The still quiet voice of care is awakened as we ask ourselves not only what it means to be a citizen of a differentiated humanity but how can caring manifest into collective action"

Robin McCoy Brooks, co-Editor-in-Chief of Intergenerational Journal of Jungian Studies and author of Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action.