African Americans and Jungian Psychology

Leaving the Shadows

Fanny Brewster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317351856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows explores the little-known racial relationship between the African diaspora and C.G. Jung's analytical psychology. In this unique book, Fanny Brewster explores the culture of Jungian psychology in America and its often-difficult relationship with race and racism.

Beginning with an examination of how Jungian psychology initially failed to engage African Americans, and continuing to the modern use of the Shadow in language and imagery, Brewster creates space for a much broader discussion regarding race and racism in America. Using Jung's own words, Brewster establishes a timeline of Jungian perspectives on African Americans from the past to the present. She explores the European roots of analytical psychology and its racial biases, as well as the impact this has on contemporary society. The book also expands our understanding of the negative impact of racism in American psychology, beginning a dialogue and proposing how we might change our thinking and behaviors to create a twenty-first-century Jungian psychology that recognizes an American multicultural psyche and a positive African American culture.

African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows explores the positive contributions of African culture to Jung's theories and will be essential reading for analytical psychologists, academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, African American studies, and American studies.

1

Jung’s Early America

Racial relations and racism

American Jungian psychology as practiced, and related to African Americans, has barely changed since its inception by Jung 100 years ago. The Eurocentric focus of Jungian psychology, without consideration of a positive Africanist cultural context, continues to hold on to its European roots, which remains alienating to many African Americans. This is largely due to Jung’s own early writings from the Collected Works, his interviews during time spent on his few visits to America, and his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. American Jungians in the practice of Jung’s psychology continue, with few exceptions, to teach and train individuals to become analysts with little acknowledgment of current American antagonistic racial lives or the necessity of a cultural context within the American Jungian analytical frame. It almost appears as an unspoken code that if this cultural context continues to be ignored, it will disappear. This is one of the main features of American racism—making and treating African Americans as if we are invisible, as if we do not exist, except to be of service.

Jung initially identified African Americans within his collective unconscious theory as being and carrying the Shadow—his principal archetype for all that was negative within the unconscious. The theoretical idea of shadow and the Shadow archetype have grown and been expanded upon in recent writings by some Jungians within the last two decades. Jung’s concept of the Shadow was initially discussed by him in the following manner:

Closer examination of the dark characteristics—that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow—reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, passive quality. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral judgment.

(CW 9, part II, Para. 15)

From this early development of Jung’s concept of shadow, subsequent Jungian analysts developed a general idea used in reference to people of color. This most specifically occurred in Jungian dreamwork. Jung’s words above can be compared with those of Marie-Louise von Franz and Fraser Boa in The Way of the Dream: Conversations on Jungian Dream Interpretation (1994: 107); in speaking with a White dreamer who shares with von Franz about one of his dreams, she gives this response:

The black garment represents a typical feature of the undeveloped inner anima figure. Just as we shall see that the animus in women is sometimes destructive and negative, the black anima is relatively negative in a man. The black anima indicates that his whole capacity to love is mostly autoerotic….The peeling of the skin of the black female and the transformation into a white golden anima is the transformation of the loving capacities of a man, the transformation of his Eros from a primitive autoerotic fantasy into a true human capacity.

(Author italics)

Unfortunately, the image of African Americans in Jungian dreamwork as shadow, or the Shadow, was a major component of the work for decades. In changing times, the definition shadow was used to include not only the negative qualities of the unconscious but also a psychic location where we store all types of personal material that it is emotionally difficult to accept. This material may be considered by the ego to be positive or negative. However, the initial Jungian understanding of shadow was that it was negative, dark, and primitive and belonged to that of the primitive.

However, within the major teaching institutes, public programs, and literary training tools of American Jungian psychology—the Collected Works—the racial, non-multicultural thinking of Jung’s psychology continues to survive without any disclaimers or updating.

Jung, a protégé and later colleague of Freud, was present in the beginning days of psychoanalysis. After his separation from Freud in 1912, Jung began the development of his own type of psychoanalysis, which he called analytical psychology.

Jung began his career at Burgholzli Hospital in Switzerland as a medical doctor working with schizophrenic patients. He became interested in how they fantasized, their dreams and delusions. In his private practice, Jung noticed that there were similarities between patients in both settings. This eventually led him to explore historical teachings regarding archetypes, or what he also later called the collective unconscious.

Jungian psychology is but one part of the broader field of American psychology. The establishment of Jungian psychology began in the early days of the twentieth century. Jung saw an opportunity for the creation of his particular type of psychoanalysis as opposed to that of Freud, who did not have the same level of interest as Jung in bringing psychoanalysis to America.

Freud said, after his first and only visit, that “America was a mistake.” The context within which he made this statement implied that there was little merit in attempting to bring his psychoanalysis to America. It was a country unworthy of it. Jung may have felt that he could become a pioneer in the more open field that America presented since Freud was already established in Europe.

Jung’s early relationships were with men such as G. Stanley Hall, William Alanson White, and Trigant Burrow. Though he had initially come to America with Freud, Jung later made trips unaccompanied by him. As their friendship deteriorated and Jung began to experience the emotional loss of his closeness with Freud, America might have been a way to become more of his own person in being identified with the new psychoanalysis—analytical psychology.

When Jung arrived in America in 1912, his main purpose was to engage in activities that would support his collective unconscious thesis: that race was not a factor in the archetypal realm—in the collective unconscious. He believed that he could confirm this idea by “testing” African Americans. Jung had already been exposed minimally to members of this ethnic group on his previous two trips to America. It was his belief that a study with this group would solidify a major point of his argument regarding archetypes.

Jung journeyed to Baltimore where he visited with Burrow. From there, he proceeded to Washington, D.C., where he remained for a month, interviewing and collecting the dreams of several African American men residing at the St. Elizabeth Hospital. Jung states in his Collected Works that one of the dreamers had a dream of Xion. Jung surmised that the dreamer could not have known about the Greek myth, nor about the symbolic wheel of the dream, and that therefore the dreamer had had an archetypal dream. He felt that this proved his point that the archetypes of the collective unconscious were not racially inspired energies.

As far as Jung has stated regarding this experience with the dreamers, he did not collect nor was he interested in the related cultural or associative psychological material from the dreamers. During the time that Jung completed his “study” on these dreamers, it would not have been unusual for patient information to have been collected and used for the purpose of the medical staff without the permission of family or outside governmental authority. This has only been a factor in more recent times with society’s recognition of the need for patient’s rights and privacy and their advocacy of these rights.

The idea of the collective unconscious was a very important one that Jung was eager to claim as a part of his own theoretical base and as a distinguishing mark to separate him from Freud. In his research, Jung wished to prove that the unconscious was not bound by race. He wanted to show empirical studies that everyone, regardless of racial identity, belonged to the collective unconscious. Not only were archetypes in the imaginal life of schizophrenic patients, they were also present in his normally neurotic patients.

To prove the existence of archetypes across racial boundaries, Jung decided to come to America and do this research on African Americans. I say on, rather than with, because in those early days of experimental research and studies, patients were most times not given options for consent to treatment. Families frequently left mentally ill or physically disabled members in the care of hospitals and doctors who had broad rights of treatment without family interest or consent. This is the type of setting that Jung entered to conduct his empirical study of African Americans in 1912. Thanks to the help of William Alanson White, then chief administrator of St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C., Jung was given full access to 15 African American male patients. Jung reports that he recorded their dreams for a month during the time he stayed at the hospital.

As a result of his research with this group of African American men, Jung claimed that his hypothesis regarding the nonracial nature of the collective unconscious was correct. The men of Jung’s study were not named or recognized in any way by Jung other than as his subjects. This manner of treatment by Jung, though not unusual within medical and all other societal circles, underlies one of the still-present problems affecting American Jungian psychology in its relationship with African Americans.

Jung was not so different in his way of treating these African American men than was racially customary in 1912 America. His behavior actually fit well into American society’s generally racist treatment of African Americans during those times. In this way, Jung is a “man of his times,” as is frequently said by Jungians in justification of Jung’s negative cultural attitude and comments regarding African Americans.

African Americans in these days of the introduction of psychoanalysis to America were attempting to survive in a post–Reconstruction Era that saw the rise of racism in the form of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In the first two decades of the twentieth century, African Americans were still traumatized by White race riots and lynching. The 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riot by Whites resulted in the killing of up to 300 African Americans and the destruction of the entire community of Greenwood. In Florida in 1923, the African American town of Rosewood was completely destroyed by rioting Whites. In both of these instances, the given cause for White aggression was the attack and rape of White women by African American men. These are only two examples of the violent hatred expressed by White Americans in the years when psychoanalysis was just being established in America.

There is no mention in American Jungian psychology literature of the impact or influence of White racial violence, African American slavery and its effects, or the significance of race within psychoanalytical work—with the very limited exception by Jung. These exceptions were generally of a negative reflection on African Americans and are noted through various chapters within this book. Jung’s recognition and acceptance of the KKK as only a social group attempting to regain some primal experience of brotherhood, like the Knights of Columbus, was very far from the American political truth as any African American knew. Jung did not offer any possible solace through the psychology he was beginning to establish in America. In fact, he indicated that Jungian psychology was actually not for anyone of African ancestry.

The atmosphere of what appears to be “permitted” violence against African Americans continues until today. During 2014, African A...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Polly Young-Eisendrath
• Introduction
• 1 Jung’s early America: racial relations and racism
• 2 The reality of racial chains and the myth of freedom
• 3 American racial Black and White complexes
• 4 Africanist traditions and African American culture
• 5 African archetypal primordial: a map for Jungian psychology
• 6 Archetypal grief of African American women
• 7 The Jungian shadow
• 8 The dreamers of Saint Elizabeth Hospital
• 9 African American cultural consciousness and the Jungian collective
• 10 The promise of diversity
• 11 Summary: healing through an Africanist perspective
• Index