Peer-Reviewed Academic Articles

"Gypsy fate": Carriers of our collective shadow
Alexandra Fidyk, Ph.D. 
Pacifica Graduate Institute
Santa Barbara, California

Narratives, 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.

Shadow Dynamics in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
Matthew Fike, Ph.D.
Winthrop University

Aphra 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.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Slavery Haunting America
Inez Martinez, Ph.D.

Toni 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. 
 

Keynote Speech

from "Making the Darkness Conscious: A Jungian Exploration of Psyche, Soma, and the Natural World in an Age of Crisis"
The Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies 7th Annual Conference in Burlington, Vermont, August 7-10, 2008
"Dionysos.  Lysios.  Mainomenos: Performing ecstasy and madness in the practices of art, analysis and culture"
Gary D. Astrachan, Ph.D.

This paper takes up in particular just two out of the many names or epithets surrounding the great Greek god Dionysos: Mainomenos, the 'mad god', or 'raving one', and Lysios, the 'loosener', 'liberator' and 'releaser'. 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.
 

Book Review:

Rinda West, (2007) Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story and Encounters with the Land

by Susan Rowland, Ph.D.