To Our Readers

In 2018, Marielle Franco paid the price for her activism with her life. At thirty-eight years old, she was already a trailblazer: the sole black woman on the Rio de Janeiro city council and one of the few politicians in Brazil who are openly gay. Franco was murdered by two former military police officers in a brazen political attack, in a country increasingly mirroring the United States in the recent election of a right-wing nationalist president, Jair Bolsonaro. In fact, ethnic nationalism has an increasing power and presence in most Western democracies. White terrorism is a “thing” that can now be identified and is supported by a network of white nationalist apologists, sympathizers, and supporters. As such, our president, too, is a kind of regressive anti-trailblazer: a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose—to terrorize and eliminate the threat of the Other. Terrorism is a part of how we live now. But what does it do to us? Jelani Cobb wrote the following in The New Yorker on March 20, 2019, about the recent New Zealand massacre:

The macabre harvest of innocents, this time claiming fifty-two lives in two mosques, in Christchurch, New Zealand, is a double-edged form of madness. It is both the product of an absence of human empathy, and a drain on the reserves of those who possess it: decency these days requires the ability to stare barbarism in the face, repeatedly, randomly, intensely, without becoming inured to the ugliness of its features. Terrorism hopes to inspire fear and confusion, but its most pernicious impact begins the moment that people no longer feel either of those things but, rather, simply a grudging acknowledgment that this is the way we now live.

The recent announcement of the 2020 Fourth Analysis and Activism Conference and Sixth Presidential Election Conference reminds us that activism is very much in the ethos of our Jungian community. In this issue, many faces of activism emerge as analytical psychology’s “Spirit of the Times” engages with the “Spirit of the Depths,” opening us to consider that there may be as many kinds of activism as there are individuals who take up the cause of social and personal transformation. The costs of activism are as complete and demanding as any form of personal transformation. And if, as Jung said, an encounter with the Self means a death for the ego, are we now witnessing a collective ego’s death throes—including violent efforts to defend against that death—to prepare for a new birth?

In “Encountering the Other: The White Shadow,” Karen H. Naifeh provides us with a timely reflection on white privilege and white fragility. In a personal, clear, and compelling piece, she details her own experience as a white woman addressing multicultural issues. She says, “In spite of the strenuousness with which white culture keeps racism and oppression in place, the cost to society is enormous” (16). She quotes Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (and one of my own heroes), on the individual costs:

I continue to believe that we’re not free in this country, that we’re not free at birth by a history of racial injustice. . . . there are spaces that are occupied by the legacy of that history that weigh on us. We talk a lot about freedom. We talk a lot about equality. We talk a lot about justice. But we’re not free. There are shadows that follow us. (16)

Naifeh describes the individual and collective manifestations of racial bias and, by extension, class bias, and provides a road map for addressing these unconscious biases in the individual and cultural psyche. In this way, Naifeh is a consciousness activist, imploring us to do the work of inner self-examination on the path to psychic wholeness.

In a turn to the world beyond the living, Megumi Yama highlights the presence and power of spirits in her paper, “The Meaning of the Mystical Experience on the Boundary between Life and Death: Observations from Survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake.” In this novel work, Yama introduces stories about the sightings of spirits of deceased family members who were swallowed up by the tsunami that immediately followed the devastating 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11, 2011. Over 18,000 people were killed, most by drowning, including more than 2500 people who are still unaccounted for today. Yama explores the interface between life and death as a boundary and contextualizes this interface in the words of Japanese folklorist Norio Akasaka: “a boundary . . . is always a chaotic space from which various meanings—spirit, chaos, darkness—spring out” (1989/2002, 33). Boundaries are where opposites meet and have generated rich images and stories since ancient times.

It was in the folkloric tradition of the premodern world of Japan that sightings of spirits were to be found. But, as Yama argues, the norms of modern science and technology may give way to beliefs from that ancient world in times of natural disasters, which allows people to cherish unusual experiences born in the boundary between the living and the dead and to find solace through the sense of awe created. Yama reveals striking stories in the paper about how such sightings of spirits were experienced and how they led to healing the overwhelming grief experienced in this society. These accounts were most likely not known to us if we live outside of Japan. I found this to be a larger story about the healing of the modern rational world by the emergence of ancient and important beliefs brought about by an unfortunate disaster. What transformations would occur if we could more easily perceive the interpenetration of the modern rational world with the ancient world of spirits?

Jung Journal is happy to welcome Meili (May Lee 李梅) Pinto’s “Confucius’s Hero’s Journey.” In this paper, Pinto expands the Western quest for the monomyth of the hero’s journey to include an unlikely candidate in China’s sage and moral teacher Confucius. Where elaborate stories usually accompany the hero’s journey, Confucius cuts to the quick in pre-historical responses to the problems of existence. The tales of the hero’s journey may differ from West to East, but Pinto makes the argument that Confucius is no less a hero of mythic proportions.

With Confucius’s philosophy pared down to a system of ethics and his aphorisms to random insights that sporadically guide action, no wonder Confucius is not discoverable as a hero. Although known worldwide, what is he really known for? That is probably why Confucius has not found a solid foothold in the Western world. He is neither this nor that in the Western configuration of things. (43)

She goes on to quote Herbert Fingarette: “In the twentieth century this central role of the holy in Confucius’s teaching has been largely ignored because we have failed to grasp the existential point of that teaching” (Fingarette 1972, 1). Arguably, Confucius was an activist in that he revolutionized the understanding of everyday experience. I am particularly fond of his teaching on evil: “Attack the evil that is within yourself rather than attacking the evil that is in others.” What could be a better starting place for our activist endeavors?

Last year, we published an important paper by Daniela Boccassini, entitled “Beyond Narcissism: Mirroring, Mandalas, and Feminine Self-Remembering.” We are again fortunate to have another of her scholarly works in the pages of this issue: “Down to the Father’s Womb: Jung’s and Dante’s Encounters with the Dead.” Both Jung and Dante had mystical experiences with the dead and as such were accessing a psychic plane at the higher or deeper levels of consciousness. Boccassini sums up a rather complex topic with the following:

For both [Dante and Jung], meaning as a revelation of the purpose of life emerged as light out of darkness, once they realized how their life mission was to take shape. This they understood as a call to re-create in their present times the legacy of those among their forefathers who had had the courage to turn their back to mainstream views and values and walk instead the lonesome road of the dead. (75)

In her conclusion Boccassini draws together Jung, Dante, and Corbin, each having become men of their own time, having ceased to be members of their own time:

I would like to conclude [with] Corbin . . ., who in the 1961 conference at Eranos, just a couple of months after Jung’s passing, evoked in his talk on spiritual knighthood (a topic that would have appealed to both Dante and Jung) the three existential ages that have been coexisting in [Christian] human society: the age of the Law, when humankind’s sin comes to the foreground; the age of Redemption, when humankind realizes freedom from sin through the Son of God; and the age of Spirit, when humankind realizes the divinity inherent to its own creative nature. For those who access this third age, reality ceases to be what it was, because in this light they cease to belong to themselves alone; they cease to belong to their times, having entered their own time, the individuated time of their inner realization: a way of being present to the present itself, of opening the present, of being the way of what is to come. The revelation of the anthropos theleios, the man (or woman) of light within, has taken root in their heart. (76)

Boccassini’s argument is that the road of the dead leads to resurrection of what has been dead in ourselves, generating new meaning and new understanding. What if activism is an experience of coming alive after undergoing a psychic death? Perhaps our Jungian activism is part of our continuing path of individuation, of coming fully alive. Paradoxically, this led me to the question of whether individuation in and of itself, barring efforts to change the outer world, is a sufficient form of activism as valid and complete as any other.

The archival article we are presenting in this issue is by Arwind Vasavada, “Fee-Less Practice and Soul Work,” which was first delivered as a talk to the 1980 Eighth Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, in San Francisco. It was first published in Soul and Money (Spring Publications, 1982) and was later published in Money, Food, Drink, and Fashion, and Analytic Training: Depth Dimensions of Physical Existence: The Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress for Analytical Psychology (edited by John Beebe, 1983).

Arwind U. Vasavada (1912–1998) was born and raised in India. A founding member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts, he lived and worked as a Jungian analyst in Chicago throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His practice began, however, in India after he traveled to Zürich “in the 1950s to study at the Jung Institute and to work in analysis with C. G. Jung. Although he had only a few sessions with Jung, he considered him his guru, a title which Jung himself did not accept in the Indian sense; he nevertheless gave Vasavada some important ‘transmissions,’ to put it in the terminology of Hindu tradition. After finishing his training in Zürich, Vasavada returned to India to open an analytic practice. June Singer visited him in India in the early 1970s and invited him to come to Chicago, an invitation that he gladly accepted” (C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago).

In this talk, Vasavada takes up the issue of money, analysis, and soul-making to examine the age-old question, “Who am I?” Concerned with the process of receiving and giving, the issue of the paying of fees in the analytic process allows us an opportunity to understand the questions “Who gets paid?” and “Who pays?” as a vector leading to the existential questions of uncertainty in the world and the fear of being without work. In facing the anxiety and insecurity brought about by the idea of poverty, we are confronted with essential questions about who we are and what we truly need. The deceptively simple ideas in this article represent a kind of activism of sorts in which Jungians are now engaging. Vasavada provides us with a model of the Jungian activist, as does Naifeh in her piece on the white shadow. Both embody forms of Jungian activism by challenging cultural assumptions that return us to the inner work necessary for the transformation of self and society.

Our poetry section this issue features Bob Hicok. Paul Watsky, our Poetry Editor, provided this description of the poet and his work, compelling reasons for Jungians to be interested in his poems:

Hicok’s poetry is known for its accessible meditative style. Narrative and associational, his poems are at once funny and wry, poignant and silly, smart and sad: they offer varied portraits of the lives and stories of working people, of violence and pop culture, while containing moments of unexpected beauty and trenchant observations on human nature. …

When asked … about the relationship between restraint and revelation in his work, Hicok replied, “Because I don’t know where a poem is headed when I start, it seems that revelation has to play a central part in the poems, that what I’m most consistently doing is trying to understand why something is on my mind … Maybe writing is nothing more than an inquiry into presences.” (Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/bob-hicok)

Helen Marlo, our Reviews Editor, offers four fine reviews in this issue.

Melanie Starr Costello reviews Carolyn T. Brown’s Reading Lu Xun through Carl Jung. Brown is the retired director of the Office of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. In her book, Brown “offers an in-depth analysis of the fictional writings of China’s most celebrated intellectual of the twentieth century” (96). Lu Sun’s narratives present metaphoric critiques of the “Chinese character,” exposing the ineptitude and inhumanity embedded in accepted social patterns. Costello highlights Brown’s

striking insights into how the stories are structured around intra- and interpsychic patterns that draw the reader into the process, especially where opposites are not resolved within the narrative. As conclusions, a resolution of discord or a spiritual triumph in the face of tragedy will leave the reader in a reflective state, but the absence of resolution may stimulate transformative processes in the reader herself and perhaps inspire social or cultural expressions of activated psychic energy. (98)

Joel Weishaus reviews Joseph Masco’s The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico. Weishaus believes that what makes The Nuclear Borderlands unique is the question asked by its author, a professor of anthropology and the social sciences at the University of Chicago: “What kind of cultural work is performed in the act of making something ‘unthinkable’?” (Masco 2006, 2). Weishaus suggests that “The Nuclear Borderland’s tightly written 425 pages of accessible scholarship should be … required reading for anyone interested in acquiring an erudite perspective on what is, along with climate change, the greatest threat to the future of human existence” (101). Dealing with the “unthinkable” is the work of all of us who toil against the behaviors that would lead us down the slippery slope of world destruction.

Steve Zemmelman reviews Erel Shalit’s The Human Soul (Lost) in Transition at the Dawn of a New Era. Zemmelman describes Shalit’s work as filled with passion and concern as if he were an Old Testament prophet. In this volume Shalit warns the reader of the potential for soul loss found in “the dangers of worshiping the false gods of the digital age under the thrall of a shadowless utopia created by human ingenuity” (102). Zemmelman adeptly takes the reader through the contents of the book, which “applies insights from analytical psychology to understand the postmodern world imaginatively and in its complexity. [The book] explores the risks facing humanity when advances in technology hasten a global shift in consciousness that tilts toward—or even falls into—superficiality, anonymity, and transiency” (103). Zemmelman also balances Shalit’s warnings and hesitations by adding his own valuable commentary about the importance of the new technological world.

In a tour-de-force review of a tour-de-force volume, Betsy Cohen reviews Ladson Hinton and Hessel Willemsen’s Temporality and Shame: Perspectives in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (2018). Cohen notes that “the eleven chapters are written by contemporary Jungian analysts, as well as philosophers, a filmmaker, and an anthropologist, creating an interdisciplinary dialogue for our distressed times. This cross section of thinking allows us to reflect on shame’s relationship to time, ethics, culture, religion, morality, human nature, and clinical work” (107). Cohen carefully details each enormously rich chapter in a book that is as contemporary as any we might now read, since so many of us have had to grapple with both personal and cultural shame due to the collapse of our political mores and ethics. By the end of her review we understand that this volume is as much a primer as an advanced study of the deeply fundamental experience of shame.

In his latest “Enterview,” Robert Henderson brings us an intriguing conversation between esteemed and seasoned Jungian psychotherapists and analysts Thomas Moore, Murray Stein, and Russell Lockhart about the idea and archetype of the Wounded Healer. The three men share what it has meant to them in their own lives and work. I appreciated the opportunity to learn about these analysts who have collectively shaped much of modern-day analytical psychology. Though our cultural awareness in general has shifted toward an understanding of the wounding of minorities and the underprivileged, these three men from the dominant culture also have something important to say about how we may approach our wounding and find value in it. Undeniably our wounding allows for the development of empathy, which can help bridge the divides between us.

In conclusion, it appears that activism takes many forms and has many ramifications. There is a cost to all forms of activism. As analysts and analysands devoted to the hard work of individuation, we know how difficult it is to pay the price of change in the sacrifice and suffering required. Yet it is only through our inner work on self and outer work in the world that something new is possible. As many of the articles in this issue demonstrate, the activist orientation is not only about taking to the streets and engaging in political work, but also about illuminating the depth and complexity of this world, which challenges the assumptions of bias, our inherited unconsciousness. It is my hope that the rich offerings in this issue help us to consider soul work as activism and activism as world soul work, both indisputable facets of individuation.

Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, Editor