Introduction

Psychoanalysis is, in many ways, a distinctly personal and individual undertaking, often focused on individual adaptive problems as well as internal struggles that are, and are experienced to be, totally unique—sometimes even feeling utterly inexpressible to anyone else. Yet one of Jung’s great contributions to psychoanalytic practice is his recognition that the individual psyche or soul, though ontologically an individual, is experientially both individual and a participant in a greater whole—or in fact a number of such wholes. Jung sometimes calls these wholes “cultural dominants” and locates them, so to speak, in the “collective unconscious.” We could add that among such psychic “wholes” are not only broad cultural dominants but also dominating ideals, complexes, and myths associated with smaller groups, such as one’s own family, friend group, and profession, as well as other communities and collectives with which one identifies, consciously or unconsciously.