ABSTRACT

Jungian Reflections on Systemic Racism is a unique contribution of Jungian analysts and analysts-in-training who provide individual perspectives and approaches to promoting greater inclusivity in analytical theory, training and practice.

This book examines issues of racism through intrapsychic, interpersonal, and archetypal lenses. Drawing from the specificity and ingenuity of Jungian psychoanalysis, the authors provide personal narratives, clinical vignettes, and theoretical perspectives that exemplify ways of comprehending and furthering the work of anti-racism. The editors assert that without deeper exploration of our theories, distinguishing between the theory itself and the theorist’s unconscious biases, our clinical paradigms unconsciously align and thus perhaps promote an attitude of white supremacy in psychoanalytic training programs and practices. Without claiming to reflect the official view of any particular psychoanalytic community, it utilizes Jung’s analytic paradigm to offer insight into the dynamics of the cultural complex of racism from a depth psychological perspective.

Jungian Reflections on Systemic Racism is an important resource for psychoanalytic students, trainees, supervisors, and practitioners, as well as for clinicians, medical professionals, social workers, mental health professionals, sociologists, and anyone interested in the wide impact of the unscientific construct of 'race’.

chapter 1|20 pages

Time for Space at the Table

An African American-Native American psychoanalyst's first-hand reflections. A call for the IAAP to publicly denounce (but not erase) the White supremacist writings of C.G. Jung 1

chapter 3|23 pages

The Smoking Mirror

An archetypal perspective on the color black

chapter 4|11 pages

On Failings

chapter 5|19 pages

From Ghost to Ancestor

Transforming Jung's racial complex

chapter 6|15 pages

The Whiteness Complex

Breaking the spell

chapter 7|19 pages

The Sunken Place

Silence as the propagation of toxic whiteness

chapter 8|18 pages

Reparative Transgression

A psychoanalytic institute reckons – and does not reckon – with its own racism