George Floyd and Covid-19: Inflection Points in the Anthropocene Era?
My article just appeared in print and is available free as read-only.
Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 66, No. 3, June 2021
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/QRR4CFTHRJFVBF4QD3UX?target=10.1111/1468-5922.12675
Dennis, Thank you for sharing this piece on the current state of public affairs in the United States and how it pertains to psychodynamics. I truly enjoyed what you wrote about the apparent realization of how fragile people are in their political support. Donald Trump with his ineloquent and ignorant views on world matters brought light to the uptrending pattern of socially deconstructive group psychology. Sadly we must recognize that this beast has many forms.
The past two years have been wild and timing is everything. To start, the citizens were carefully placed into a war crafted by the needs of political media, essentially hortatory propaganda with a flavor of current events. Nietzche, one of Jung's great inspirations, writes about how the collapse of formal religious institutions will lead individuals to manifest their psyche in the public affairs of the state. A Jungian understanding of the topic requires a basis that numinous experiences are important for individuation. Are we to truly believe that those rioting in the street for the sake of racial equality have developed a personal psychology that is not tied to the public affairs of the state? All this happening during one of the largest elections in the world, the media pushing their message to inspire the hearts of those to feel sudden empathy for a stranger who despite the color of his skin has a decorated criminal record including breaking into a woman's house and holding a gun to her stomach while four other men robbed her house. Racism was used as a trojan horse to break in the doors of the political status quo. The public rushes to conclusions about events without any evidence, and we saw this with the Breonna Taylor situation. Before any evidence is revealed to the public and before and judicial process had taken place mass amounts of people rioting in the inner cities destroying the very communities they live in. I'm not denouncing the occurrence of racism in the world, just elucidating that we can accuse "racism" of arrested development for something that is due mainly to human incompetence.
Despite all this we need to strive for more apolitical heterodoxy in our understanding of the situation. I'm guilty of it myself.
Anyways I really love your background. I dreamed of studying in Zurich before COVID separated me from there, also I love insects and plants.
Just purchased your book Jung & Ecopsychology, looking forward to it.
Dennis,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this piece on the current state of public affairs in the United States and how it pertains to psychodynamics. I truly enjoyed what you wrote about the apparent realization of how fragile people are in their political support. Donald Trump with his ineloquent and ignorant views on world matters brought light to the uptrending pattern of socially deconstructive group psychology. Sadly we must recognize that this beast has many forms.
The past two years have been wild and timing is everything. To start, the citizens were carefully placed into a war crafted by the needs of political media, essentially hortatory propaganda with a flavor of current events. Nietzche, one of Jung's great inspirations, writes about how the collapse of formal religious institutions will lead individuals to manifest their psyche in the public affairs of the state. A Jungian understanding of the topic requires a basis that numinous experiences are important for individuation. Are we to truly believe that those rioting in the street for the sake of racial equality have developed a personal psychology that is not tied to the public affairs of the state? All this happening during one of the largest elections in the world, the media pushing their message to inspire the hearts of those to feel sudden empathy for a stranger who despite the color of his skin has a decorated criminal record including breaking into a woman's house and holding a gun to her stomach while four other men robbed her house. Racism was used as a trojan horse to break in the doors of the political status quo. The public rushes to conclusions about events without any evidence, and we saw this with the Breonna Taylor situation. Before any evidence is revealed to the public and before and judicial process had taken place mass amounts of people rioting in the inner cities destroying the very communities they live in. I'm not denouncing the occurrence of racism in the world, just elucidating that we can accuse "racism" of arrested development for something that is due mainly to human incompetence.
Despite all this we need to strive for more apolitical heterodoxy in our understanding of the situation. I'm guilty of it myself.
Anyways I really love your background. I dreamed of studying in Zurich before COVID separated me from there, also I love insects and plants.
Just purchased your book Jung & Ecopsychology, looking forward to it.