To Our Readers

Here in the United States, there is probably no greater challenge facing us today than coming to terms with our own shadow. Through the power and eloquence of African American and First Nation activists and writers, the legacy of our ancestral crimes of genocide and slavery is emerging more fully into collective awareness. The razing of statues of Confederate war heroes is a visible symbol of our evolution of consciousness, notwithstanding the spasms of racist violence also emerging defensively to fight that evolution. At the same time, we see the results of decades of increasingly unbridled malignant capitalism—the systematic exploitation of human needs and desires for profit—in the obscenely bloated excesses of the wealthy and in the evidence of our failing middle and lower classes: decreasing life expectancy, and increasing infant and maternal mortality, poverty, food insecurity, and rates of addiction and suicide. Our military-industrial complex, as a vast source of accumulated wealth from arms manufacturing and sales around the world, is also at play in our heavily militarized collective psyche, from video games for children to gun violence and mass shootings. After World War II even nature herself was declared our enemy, as we searched for new markets for unused chemical stockpiles, which confronts us today with the degradation of our natural world in myriad ways.

There would seem to be no greater champion of our collective shadow than our current president, no greater spokesman for the regressive pull to restore a fictional “greatness” that is our delusional and manic defense against it. In his vitriolic lies, untruths, and win-at-all-costs attitude, we see our own worship of power and defensive violence returned to us. In his reality television star grandiosity and his cruelly ignorant arrogance based on extreme wealth, he caricatures our own worship of greed and wealth, our racism, and our classism. In this way, he is presiding over us with a special role. He is forcing us to witness and reckon with our own shadow—our nationalist, racist, violent, greedy, ignorant shadow.

Without blind delusion, we can no longer easily take pride in the grandiose notion of American Exceptionalism. We, like all other people on the planet, have the opportunity to face the discomfort and disappointment of our own shame, weakness, and darkness. And it is an opportunity. Integrating the shadow of our country’s founding ideals and aspirations will ultimately make us more human, more whole, and, I hope, more compassionate. In the meantime, the ugly of the shadow rests over the country like a heavy dark fog. A grandiose and inflated national ego is being taken down by its shadow, with a president as perfect symbol.

A chief feature of our national ego is American Exceptionalism. It’s been declared to be in its death throes, but you might never know it given its vehement espousal, at the encouragement of the president, by white supremacists and vast populations of the disenfranchised poor. The credo often heard, espoused by presidents, politicians, and statesmen alike, is that America is an exemplar of human rights, democracy, and free speech, a country imbued with special values and beliefs that grant it the status of the richest and most powerful nation on earth, and the moral authority to influence and admonish other countries, friend and foe alike.

Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to describe America as exceptional in 1831 and 1840. The phrase fell to obscurity after the 1930s, when the Great Depression sobered a populous who could no longer support the illusion. Stalin used it as a riff on America. In the 1980s American newspapers popularized it to describe America’s cultural and political uniqueness (McCoy 2012), and Ronald Reagan crystalized the ideology. The phrase became an issue of contention between presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign, with Republicans attacking Obama for not believing in the concept (Ivie and Giner 2009). How fitting that our first African American president should be the first president to call American Exceptionalism into question.

As with any ego, there are strains of truth and reality inside the defensive grandiosity of American Exceptionalism. As Mary Ayers explores in her paper on the Trump phenomenon, a great deal of shame is also hidden inside, along with the rejected and despised maternal feminine. In her paper, “Alternative Facts: A Jungian Interpretation of the Trump Phenomenon,” Ayers confronts us with the banality and the calamity of the Trump phenomenon and provides the groundwork for understanding that our predicament is based on shame and our flight from shame. She makes the powerful argument that our current political predicament is rooted in the demonized image of the maternal feminine created by the denial of shame. And when the maternal feminine is excised from consciousness, she returns as a succubus causing calamity—a calamity we are now in the midst of. Ayers inspires hope with the reminder that Jung’s visions of Elijah and Salomé show the way to redeem the succubus by transforming her into the Virgin Sophia.

A basic psychoanalytic tenet is that repression always creates pathological potential. So, like any psychic content that is repressed and only grows more powerful, the dark side of the Great Mother, a place of the massive collective repression of shame for over seven thousand years, only grows in negativity as her goodness is silenced and banished from expression. When the maternal feminine is excised from consciousness, the blinding power of the Terrible Mother is completely cut off from conscious control—and so she returns, carrying the revenge of the repressed as the “Maid of Desolation” (Thompson 1981, 251) . . . Lilith returns from repression in her form as the Maid of Desolation, and in order to effect a reconciliation with her, mankind can no longer keep her down under him. She is the Eternal Feminine that whiplashes us right now in the form of Donald Trump. (9, 24)

I welcome Lilith and the eternal feminine in whatever redemptive form she is able to manifest.

In this issue, we are reprinting an Open Letter first published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy (BJP) in November 2018, along with an introduction to this reprint by Andrew Samuels. Samuels provides us the context for the letter published in BJP and a historical description of Jung’s cultural and racialized thinking as well as the effect it has had on the Jungian community. This short piece serves partly as an announcement to our community of ongoing developments concerning us. Additionally, it serves as a teaching moment about our Jungian community’s ongoing dialog and effort to address Jung’s complex relationship with Africans and African Americans.

The 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), produced under duress in wartime Vichy France, has long been on lists of the best and most popular films. This is where I discovered it, with my partner, who confessed it was his favorite film. I did not know it so we soon sat and watched it together. Carol Cooper’s “The Sexual ‘Other’ in Children of Paradise: A Depth Psychological Critique” has given me a deeper understanding not only of this classic film but also of my partner. The film revolves around problems of Eros and the relationships between an anima figure, Garance, and the four men who fall in love with her. In Cooper’s thorough analysis of the multiple layers of the film, she highlights Jungian, Hillmanian, and Lacanian ideas related to romantic anima and animus projections and the Surrealist ideal of the liberated woman. What I learned about my partner shall remain private, but Cooper’s paper did make me an ardent fan of the film that has been a thread of meaning woven throughout our relationship.

Perhaps there is an important corollary in our current juggling of the opposites of ego inflation and deflation exemplified in the article by Anthea Mawby. No matter how much you know about the relationship between the Australian penal colony and the Australian Aboriginal world they came to dominate, Anthea Mawby is likely going to expand your understanding. In “Australia: Shadow and Cultural Complex in the Antipodes,” she describes the connection between eighteenth-century convicts and Aboriginals as springing from a common taproot, the alchemical rhizome. The painful story of the ruthless domination of the Australian Aboriginals by the colonists and by present-day modern society highlights the fear of the unconscious and its shadow content as represented by the Aboriginals. It is a very sad piece, not only because of the descriptions of brutality, but also because, as Mawby describes, there is still little integration of the anima, represented by the Australian Aboriginals, into modern society and little remembering of the common origin of the two groups. The cover of this journal dovetails with this article in highlighting the beauty of a present-day Aboriginal boy whose generation may have the hope of achieving resolution of this cultural rift through the understanding of shared alchemy and DNA.

In this issue we are pleased to begin publishing archived papers given at the Analytical Psychology Clubs (APC) of London, New York, and San Francisco. The San Francisco APC generously provided Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche access to the transcripts of talks given as long ago as the 1940s. To be reminded of our collective history as Jungians is important because, in the rapidly expanding culture of analytical psychology, we are reminded that issues of an emerging psychology decades ago might well inform the issues we face today.

The first archived paper we are publishing is a transcript of a talk by Eleanor Bertine, MD, given to the New York APC in 1948. In “Report from Zürich,” Bertine discusses her visit along with Esther Harding as delegates from New York City to take part in the establishment of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. It was an auspicious time for the Jungian world. The visit took place when Europe was still in ruins from World War II, yet the Jungian ethos was gathering steam. Bertine relays not only chatty anecdotes about her time with Jung and other notables in the early analytical psychology world, but also discusses the effort of the Zürich group to establish standards for evaluating who and how someone might become a Jungian analyst. The latter is, as it should be, a perennial issue for all Jungian training centers.

For the reader who is unfamiliar with Eleanor Bertine, a bit about her history illustrates her importance as a pioneer in the development of analytical psychology. A native New Yorker, she graduated from Vassar College and Cornell Medical School and began her medical career as a general practitioner in 1913. She read the works of Carl Jung, translated by Beatrice Hinkle, and determined to study with him. She went to London in 1920 for personal analysis with Constance Long and attended Jung’s seminars there. Thereafter, and until 1935, she went to Zürich for protracted periods for analysis with Jung. In 1922, she first met Dr. M. Esther Harding, who was soon to become a leader of a small group of Jungian analysts in New York, including Eleanor Bertine, Dr. Kristine Mann, and Dr. Beatrice Hinkle. Frances Wickes later joined the group. On returning to New York City a couple of years later, Bertine and Dr. Mann established their own pioneering psychoanalytic practices. With Dr. Mann and M. Esther Harding, she co-founded the Analytical Psychology Club in 1936, which played a major role in the dissemination of Jungian thought. She also became a patron of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich at its founding in 1948. She and Dr. Harding, close friends and colleagues for forty years, went on to create the Jung Foundation and Training Institute in New York. Eleanor Bertine was a lifelong student, friend, and collaborator of Jung’s, and in her writings, she was always mindful of her debt to him. She was a brilliant seeker of the inner world.

Our interview in this issue, conducted by San Francisco analyst Nickie Amerius-Sargeant, features equine therapist Gail Hromadko on the touching and sensitive interplay between person and horse. In the context of a discussion about equine therapy with young people and their families, Gail teaches about the special intuitive intelligence of horses and the important role they can play in healing the heart and soul of traumatized individuals. In addition, the photos of Gail and her horses are spectacular and moving. Gail describes the deep bond between horse and human and validates that Jung was on to something when he drew our attention to the role of the horse in the collective:

Chiwantopel appears on horseback. This fact seems to be of some importance because, as the next act of the drama will show, the horse does not play a neutral role, but suffers the same death as the hero, who even calls him his “faithful brother.” This points to a curious similarity between the horse and rider. There seems to be an intimate connection between the two which leads them to the same fate . . . Legend attributes properties to the horse which psychologically belong to the unconscious of man; there are clairvoyant and clairaudient horses, path finding horses who show the way when the wanderer is lost, horses with mantic powers. In the Iliad (xix), the horse prophesies evil. They hear the words the corpse utters on its way to the grave—words which no human can hear. Caesar was told by his human-footed horse (probably derived from an identification of Caesar with the Phrygian Men) that he would conquer the world. (1956/1974, CW 5, ¶421)

Every winter Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche publishes poetry, selected by poetry editor Paul Watsky, translated from its language of origin. In this issue, the work of Liu Tsung-yuan is translated into English by Red Pine (also known as Bill Porter). Porter discovered Liu Tsung-yuan (773–819) while writing Finding Them Gone, his previous book on Chinese poets, and then learned more on a further trip to China. Liu Tsung-yuan was a major but little-known figure from China’s T’ang Dynasty—a golden age of poetry. He was a reform-minded government official who consequently spent most of his adult life in exile from the capital, and although he is better known for his prose, his poetry is captivating, capturing life in the far south of China where he spent his years of exile.

Reviews editor Helen Marlo brings to this issue five reviews.

In his piece, “The Never-Ending Creatura,” Leslie Stein reviews Sanford L. Drob’s Archetype of the Absolute: The Unity of Opposites in Mysticism, Philosophy, and Psychology, one of the only comprehensive works on the coincidentia oppositorum, which is at the heart of Jungian psychology. “Instead of the usual manner in which mystical traditions are discussed by resorting to the sayings of sages who have had mystical experiences, Drob approaches the issue of the opposites in mysticism by unraveling the paradox of language and the polarities of metaphysical and epistemological positions” (115). In his review, Stein appreciates Drob’s ability to write a complete work on this insuperably difficult subject that requires both psychological and philosophical expertise, as well as a willingness to undertake a mystical quest for a living experience of a unity to contain the opposites.

John Van Eenwyk reviews Paul Hogan’s Beautiful Nonsense. In his review, “Indigenously Based Trauma Treatment for Children,” Van Eenwyk, clinical director of the International Trauma Treatment Program, which works with practitioners in war zones, highlights the need to engage the challenge of trauma in remote areas of the world as well as in our own United States. He asks what can we do to encourage treatment for complex trauma at home and abroad, if there are recommendations we should keep in mind, if analytical psychology has something to offer that other practices do not. An important starting point for such a project, in Hogan’s view, is to understand the culture of the traumatized person or group. In this review, Van Eenwyk highlights the Butterfly Peace Garden (BPG) in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, founded by Fr. Paul Sutkunayagam, the first Sri Lankan Jesuit priest, and Paul Hogan, as such a program. This is a unique book on trauma and an excellent review of programs that apply a Jungian lens to work in this complex and important field.

In Naomi Azriel’s review, “To Infinity and Beyond,” she discusses Ann Belford Ulanov’s The Psychoid, Soul and Psyche: Piercing Space-Time Barriers. In her review, Azriel highlights the essential questions the book answers: “What is the source of healing in analysis? How does the psychoid level of the unconscious generate highly charged moments of inner transformation? And what is the nature of God and our knowing of God? Jungian analyst Ann Ulanov weaves together these seemingly enormous and unrelated questions with surprising force, luminosity, and insight in her latest book” (119). Azriel states that “this work both returns to and further clarifies the themes Ulanov has explored and developed over four decades. These include the nature of good and evil, the moral imperative inherent in depth psychotherapy and analysis, and the mutual relevance of Christian theology to analytical psychology and the works of C. G. Jung” (119–120).

Kenneth Kimmel reviews Jon Mills’s 2014 Underworlds: Philosophies of the Unconscious from Psychoanalysis to Metaphysics. Kimmel recommends this book “for all readers who recognize the importance of the multidisciplinary spirit that Jon Mills’s works epitomize” (125). “In 170 distilled pages spanning 4400 years in the history of Western ideas, Mills has shown great care and impeccable scholarship to illuminate the diverse philosophies of the unconscious that underlie his ambitious survey of psychic underworlds” (125). As Kimmel says, “Reading it has been both demanding yet richly rewarding, a tour de force that has stretched me to my limits” (125).

Finally, Dennis Patrick Slattery writes a review of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. His review, entitled “Slipping and Sliding Between Fact and Fiction: The New Myth?” may be thought of as a companion piece to Mary Ayers’s piece “Alternative Facts.” Slattery considers this one of the most important books of 2017. It is “a 482-page study that skips across several classifications: a cultural-historical study; a mythic exploration; a popular culture feast through the twentieth century; and a witty, incisive critique of how we reached our present ‘Alice in Wonderland’ status, complete with a stable of mad hatters, March hares, and dozens of trends, inventions, and beliefs that have created a version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World” (136). Both the review and the book itself are worth the read.

Though Jung Journal does not typically present themed issues, it seems that once again, many of the papers and reviews resonate loosely around a theme, this one our current struggles to become conscious in an increasingly imperiled world. As individuals and as citizens we face this moment in cultural history: its lights and shadows, their historical context, as well as new directions in healing our fractured and wounded souls, individually and collectively. While it is difficult and in many ways impossible to understand this critical moment as we are living inside it, a redemption awaits us if we can bring to consciousness our shame and horror about the pain we have inflicted on the world and recognize the power of our shadow to heal us. I hope you will find here, as I have, many jewels of insight and much food for thought in that direction.

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).