ABSTRACT
What it means to be Western is a topic that cries out for a multidisciplinary treatment that would involve depth psychologists. Jung saw himself as a sort of therapist for Western culture (Stein 1985) and he despaired of its one-sidedness, materialism, overdependence on rationality, mind-body split and loss of a sense of purpose and meaning. (He even, in a characteristic moment of imaginative genius mixed with psychological inflation, tried to be the therapist of the JudeoChristian God, in his iconoclastic book Answer to Job.)
What happens if, instead of taking Western approaches to psychotherapy as inspiring sources of new ideas and languages about politics (my habitual approach, I must admit), we see psychotherapy more as part of the problem, as contributing to rather than healing all the problems that Jung identified as afflicting us “here,” in “the West”?
