Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America: Myth, Psyche, and Politics / Edition 1

by Thomas Singer

Overview

Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America explores many of the cultural complexes that comprise the collective psychic-filtering system of emotions, ideas, and beliefs that possess the United States today. With chapters by an international selection of leading authors, the book covers ideas both broad and specific, and presents unique insight into the current state of the nation.

The voices included in this volume amplify contemporary concerns, linking them to themes which have existed in the American psyche for decades while also looking to the future. Part One examines meta themes, including history, purity, dominion, and democracy in the age of Trump. Part Two looks at key complexes including race, gender, the environment, immigration, national character, and medicine. The overall message is that it is in wrestling with these complexes that the soul of America is forged or undone.

This highly relevant book will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, politics, sociology, and American studies. It will also be of great interest to Jungian analysts in practice and in training, and anyone interested in the current state of the US.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367272357
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/27/2020
Series:	The Cultural Complex Series
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Thomas Singer, MD, is a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst, practicing in San Francisco. He is the editor of a series of books exploring cultural complexes in Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. His interests include studying the relationship between myth, politics, and psyche in The Vision Thing and the Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche series. He is current president of National ARAS, an archive of symbolic imagery.

Table of Contents

List of Figures xii

Synopsis xiii

Editor xiv

Contributors xv

Acknowledgments xix

Introduction Thomas Singer xx

Preface Jules Cashford 1

Part I Meta Themes in American Cultural Complexes 11

1 Here's Johnny! American Carnival in Modern Times Stefano Carta 13

2 The Purity Complex Betty Sue Flowers 35

3 The Cultural Complex and Addiction to Dominion: Psychic Evolution Cannot Be Thwarted Jerome Bernstein 44

4 Wrestling with Our Angels: Inner and Outer Democracy in America Under the Shadow of Donald Trump Donald E. Kalsched 53

5 America Exists! Reflections on My American Cultural Complex Joerg Rasche 89

6 The Second Goya Craig San Roque 98

Part II Specific Cultural Complexes 111

Race 113

7 Every Voice, Every Vote Counts: Challenges to a Multicultural Democracy in the Shadow of American Political Economy and American Cultural Complexes Alan G. Vaughan 115

8 The Racial Complex Fanny Brewster 145

9 Crime and Punishment in America: A Cultural Black Hole Ronald Schenk 152

Gender 169

10 The Body Blow of Trumpism: Shame and Fear as a Cultural Complex Sharon Heath 171

11 Walt Whitman on Religious Liberty: Marriage Equality and the American Cultural Complex Steven Herrmann 180

Immigration 197

12 An Immigrant's Transit: From a Multicultural Complex to a Multicultural Mind Lynn Alicia Franco 199

National Character 219

13 Our Divisible Nation: In the Grip of an Alpha Narcissistic Complex Jacqueline J. West 221

14 The Child in 21st-century American Film John Beebe 239

Environment 255

15 A Tale of Two Cultures: Climate Change and American Complexes Jeffrey T. Kiehl 257

Healthcare 275

16 Biomedicine: Its Cultural Complex and Its Dispiriting Richard M. Timms, MD 277

Index 288

Editorial Reviews

"Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America takes Jung’s concept of personal complexes and applies it to our national life. The result is a volume full of insight and passion. For anyone interested in the deep forces that shape our politics, this book is a "must read." Thomas Singer has spent 15 years developing the idea of cultural complexes, and now he and his collaborators have produced a work that will be read for a very long time."
– Senator Bill Bradley

"Nothing could be more timely or more timeless than this stunning collection by renowned international Jungian scholars and psychologists. Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America is a necessary book for today in making conscious what is paralyzing America, the cultural complexes that polarize. Yet the book also superbly articulates the deep psyche at work in any history or culture. This book is about discovering who we are collectively—the end of the illusion of individualism. Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America is informed and compassionate, inspired and carefully researched. It offers the reader Ariadne’s thread from the labyrinth of the United States as superpower to the possible future of planetary reciprocity—a cultural complex worth striving for."
– Susan Rowland, author of Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002), The Ecocritical Psyche (2012), and Remembering Dionysus (2017), and professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute

"With deep reflection, in sadness and in passion, here we have a polyvocal and acute political analysis as a range of brilliant writers addresses today’s endless American crises. This timely latest element in the canon of "cultural complexes" deserves to be widely read and appreciated outside the Jungian world as much as inside it. Never before have I seen "the spirit of the times" and "the spirit of the depths" woven together so convincingly. The book is a tremendous example of pluralistic writing. I read it as a kind of conversation, yet one that does not have to have a settled endpoint of agreement. Singer’s lifework on what he has called an "inner sociology" enables him to perform as a sublime host or chorus master."
– Andrew Samuels, former Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex, and author of The Political Psyche

"America’s Puritan roots have endowed its political traditions with fiercer ethics than we see in Europe. We have only to consider the excessive projections of "evil" during the blind aggressiveness of McCarthyism and in the cruelty of the current Trumpian era, all of it contributing to what Richard Hofstadter documented in The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The demonization of one’s political opponents has certainly occurred in many places, but more often as a result of tyrannies, not in the context of a supposedly mature democratic system. In this century, Thomas Singer has already contributed greatly to the psychological fertilization of politics, but this present book by Singer and his contributors is the most timely of them all."
– Luigi Zoja, author of Paranoia: The Madness that Makes History (2011) and The Father: Historical, Psychological and Cultural Considerations (2001)

"Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America takes Jung’s concept of personal complexes and applies it to our national life. The result is a volume full of insight and passion. For anyone interested in the deep forces that shape our politics, this book is a "must read." Thomas Singer has spent 15 years developing the idea of cultural complexes, and now he and his collaborators have produced a work that will be read for a very long time."
– Senator Bill Bradley

"Nothing could be more timely or more timeless than this stunning collection by renowned international Jungian scholars and psychologists. Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America is a necessary book for today in making conscious what is paralyzing America, the cultural complexes that polarize. Yet the book also superbly articulates the deep psyche at work in any history or culture. This book is about discovering who we are collectively—the end of the illusion of individualism. Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America is informed and compassionate, inspired and carefully researched. It offers the reader Ariadne’s thread from the labyrinth of the United States as superpower to the possible future of planetary reciprocity—a cultural complex worth striving for."
– Susan Rowland, author of Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002), The Ecocritical Psyche (2012), and Remembering Dionysus (2017), and professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute

"With deep reflection, in sadness and in passion, here we have a polyvocal and acute political analysis as a range of brilliant writers addresses today’s endless American crises. This timely latest element in the canon of "cultural complexes" deserves to be widely read and appreciated outside the Jungian world as much as inside it. Never before have I seen "the spirit of the times" and "the spirit of the depths" woven together so convincingly. The book is a tremendous example of pluralistic writing. I read it as a kind of conversation, yet one that does not have to have a settled endpoint of agreement. Singer’s lifework on what he has called an "inner sociology" enables him to perform as a sublime host or chorus master."
– Andrew Samuels, former Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex, and author of The Political Psyche

"America’s Puritan roots have endowed its political traditions with fiercer ethics than we see in Europe. We have only to consider the excessive projections of "evil" during the blind aggressiveness of McCarthyism and in the cruelty of the current Trumpian era, all of it contributing to what Richard Hofstadter documented in The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The demonization of one’s political opponents has certainly occurred in many places, but more often as a result of tyrannies, not in the context of a supposedly mature democratic system. In this century, Thomas Singer has already contributed greatly to the psychological fertilization of politics, but this present book by Singer and his contributors is the most timely of them all."
– Luigi Zoja, author of Paranoia: The Madness that Makes History (2011) and The Father: Historical, Psychological and Cultural Considerations (2001)

From the Publisher