Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies
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Book Reviews
Full text linkTransformative Teaching: Promoting Transformation through Literature,the Arts, and Jungian Psychology, by Darrell Dobson, SensePublishers,2008, ISBN 978908790417andEducation and Imagination: Post-Jungian Perspectives, edited by Raya A.Jones, Austin Clarkson, Sue Congram, and Nick Stratton, Routledge, 2008,ISBN 978041543259
The Content of Their Complexes:: The Wounded Leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama
Full text linkSince his first appearance before the collective psyche at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has been compared to Martin Luther King, Jr. While the content of their characters may be similar, this article takes up the dissimilar content of their complexes. In The Wounded Researcher, Robert Romanyshyn wrote, “A complex is a kind of wounding, and for the wounded researcher it is both the obstacle and the pathway into the unfinished business in the soul of his or her work.” This article extends Romanyshyn’s theory into the realm of leadership, exploring the marriage of a wounded leader (King and Obama) and a wounded collective (America) with the same complex. That this sympathetic complex may prove an obstacle and provide a pathway into the unfinished work in the soul of both the leader and his or her followers was certainly true with King; will it hold true with Obama?  
Shadow Dynamics in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
Full text linkAphra Behn (1640–1689)—the first woman to write professionally in English—is remembered today primarily for her novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave: A True History (1688), which addresses both the abuses of slaves in Surinam and the psychological complexity of enslavement. This essay uses Behn’s portrayal of slavery to examine complementary processes that hold individuation at bay and thus propel the events toward tragedy: men’s shadow projection manifests as brutality, especially against Oroonoko; and present women are objects of anima projection, while absent women symbolize the lack of men’s anima integration. In addition, the narrator’s frequent stress on female characters’ tempering influence on men, which anticipates Jung’s essentialism (his attribution of gender to biological sex), is cultural accretion rather than psychological truth. The novel’s essentialist position, however, deconstructs itself because of Imoinda’s prowess in battle and the narrator’s own unrealized complicity in slavery. Ultimately, by providing a compensatory voice, the novel critiques the culture of slavery that it reflects
Dionysos. Mainomenos. Lysios:: Performing madness and ecstasy in the practices of art, analysis and culture
Full text linkThis paper takes up in particular just two out of the many names or epithets surrounding the great Greek god Dionysos: Mainomenos, the \u27mad god\u27, or \u27raving one\u27, and Lysios, the \u27loosener\u27, \u27liberator\u27 and \u27releaser\u27. Tracing the trajectory of these two powerful images from their earliest origins in the myths and socio-political rituals of Attic tragic drama, into their intrapsychic nocturnal recapitulations in the experience of dreams and dreaming, we arrive at their most contemporary individual-psychological enactments in the context of the consulting room. Dreams, tragedy and the analytical situation itself are re-viewed as the stages and containing modalities for the performative presentations of the ecstasy and anguish, and the rapture and suffering which follow in the frenzied wake of this wild god. In pursuing the shared project and endeavour of both sublime art and Dionysiac psychoanalysis to totally transform our representational subjectivity, we must explore the necessities of de-creation, dis-solution and dis-memberment in order for an authentically creative re-membering of our basic human relationships with world, nature and other to more fully come into being
Toni Morrison’s Beloved:: Slavery Haunting America
Full text linkToni Morrison’s Beloved explores how the American decision to enslave Africans was a failure in love affecting the love relationships between enslaved mothers and children, mates, and members of the free black community. Through focus on maternal infanticide, the novel makes conscious the slave mothers’ plight: since they could not offer their children lives in freedom, they experienced motherlove as “as a killer.” The concepts of cultural phantom, cultural shadow, and cultural complex help identify what in Beloved is being drawn from collective unconsciousness for purposes of collective healing. The following analysis distinguishes personal complexes, such as the protagonist’s negative mother complex, from cultural complexes, such as the guilt issuing from the structural impossibility of protecting ones children from slavery. Morrison’s giving conscious representation to the psychological legacy of slavery opens a possibility of increased psychological freedom for the African-American community. Further, because Beloved offers to American collective consciousness the understanding that enslaving people is a failure in love, it provides an opportunity for all Americans to help heal the American dream, making it more whole by enabling the rights to life, liberty, and equal justice for all through incorporating the ideal of love of one another.  
“Gypsy” Fate:: Carriers of our collective shadow
Full text linkNarratives, both individual and collective, are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, others, and ultimately ourselves. As a receptive and a creative activity, they tell us how we are always already caught up in the enacting and re-constructing of stories. Here a Romani narrative, a collective identity constructed through negative inflation, exile, and splitting, is read through the lense of a “scapegoat” complex. Such a reading points to the way we are split between any form of “us” and “them” – conscious and unconscious, light and dark. Non-Roma or Gadje, then, are not separate from this “other” but are co-creating and co-living this identity and narrative. Addressing the unconscious, personally and collectively, becomes our ethical responsibility so that we become aware of both our shadow and the other with whom we manifest (and blame). In attending the “problem” of the scapegoat, I hope to extend not only the discussion of difference in teaching and research but also in our social or political response toward people, in particular the Roma, and other ethnic and visible minorities who have been denied rights, persecuted and discriminated
The Religious Imagination:: Fear and Fundamentalism in Contemporary American Culture
Full text link"The Religious Imagination" is an examination of the forces that have come into play in creating the Fundamentalist Christianity that has become a major factor in American public life, politics, and culture. Two archetypes, the Puritan and the Cowboy, have dominated the American imagination since our earliest days, and this paper inquires into the origin of the two models and the ways in which they have become ruling archetypes in our society. Although the two are very different, each has had a part in making us vulnerable not only to fundamentalism, but to its shadow, hedonism, evidenced in the puer culture that has possessed the country. The paper suggests that the only way out of the puer aeternus trap is consciousness and growth toward the individuation that is the crux of Jung’s theories
Book Review, Robert D. Romanyshyn, The Wounded Researcher:: Research with Soul in Mind. Spring Journal Books, 2007. ISBN 9781882670475.
Full text linkWriting about War:: Jung, Much Ado About Nothing, and the Troy novels of Lindsay Clarke
Full text linkArguably, in a time of war literature, and indeed all writing, is saturated with deep psychic responses to conflict. So that not only in literary genres such as epic and tragedy, but also in the novel and comedy, can writing about war be discerned. C.G. Jung, Shakespeare and Lindsay Clarke are fundamentally writers of war who share allied literary strategies. Moreover, they diagnose similar origins to the malaise of a culture tending to war in the neglect of aspects of the feminine that patriarchy prefers to ignore. In repressing or evading the dark feminine, cultures as dissimilar as ancient Greece, the 21st century, Shakespeare\u27s England and Jung\u27s Europe prevent the healing energies of the conjunctio of masculine and feminine from stabilising an increasingly fragile consciousness. In the Troy novels of Clarke, Answer to Job by Jung and Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare, some attempt at spiritual nourishment is made through the writing
“Sonny’s Blues” and Cultural Shadow
Full text linkJames Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” portrays a jazz artist’s transformation of an historic and ongoing aspect of America’s cultural shadow, treating black people cruelly as if they were not real. He is enabled to bring about this transformation through his becoming conscious of and owning his personal shadow, treating people regardless of race cruelly as if they were not real. His self-knowledge indicates an equality in the human potential of behaving oppressively and thus frees him from the self-pity and helpless rage of victimization possible to those having suffered the injustice of racism. It thus frees him to create music free of lament, music which in turn frees his brother, who has responded to American racism with repression of his emotions, to feel his grief. Baldwin’s story implies that art, such as the story “Sonny’s Blues,” can express a society’s unjustly caused suffering without lament if the artist has taken responsibility for having him or herself unjustly caused suffering. This art is portrayed as freeing its audience through new consciousness and feeling to develop a new relationship with cultural shadow, one suggesting a beginning of its integration