ABSTRACT
Many theories have studied violence and subsequent anxieties in American culture, but as Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels pointed out, a depth psychological attitude toward matters of the culture and the body politic is a response that endeavors to reflect what is already there, rather than imposing a counter-transferential-like, moral judgment on it. According to Jung, in an individual, a complex consists of an accumulation of affect-laden opinions, images, ideas, and associations. Jung theorized that wounded and rejected aspects of the psyche cluster into complexes in the unconscious. He observed that the origin of a complex was frequently traumatic and often due to an irresolvable moral conflict. In addition, the epidemic-like numbers of rape in the military are evaluated as evidence of an ongoing and intense emotional reactivity to violence in the culture, veering between the extremes of panic and torpor.
