Renewing our faith in groups: a moral imperative for our community

ABSTRACT

This paper is intended as a ‘practice’ in fostering the self-awareness of the Jungian community(ies) to stimulate what Andrew Samuels described as its ‘political energy’ – an energy that can be activated in intimate or larger group settings, which benefit from dynamic interactions and immediacy of affect. Such energy can also be generated remotely by appealing to the intellect and imagination. Here, I aim to activate political energy using what Joseph Henderson termed a ‘psychological attitude’ – that is, focusing on intervention and the potential for improvement. I invite us to consider what factors constrain and enable our political energy, with a view to understanding its nature more generally. This in turn will offer useful insights that we can integrate into our psychology.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural complex
• privileging difference
• political development
• commons
• psychocultural

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Peter T. Dunlap was raised by a psychologically minded mother and a politically active father. He brings their disparate versions of liberalism together as a psychologist working in private and political practice. He is engaged in research at the interface between Jung's psychocultural and political thinking, group theory, and emotion-focused work in psychotherapy and groups. He currently leads a group for community leaders focused on cultivating activism with a psychological attitude. Peter is the author of Awakening our Faith in the Future: The Advent of Psychological Liberalism (Routledge, 2008).

Notes

1. It is beyond the scope of this article to work out the history of the public/private cultural complex, but this history is important and one of several projects that I discuss at the end of this paper.