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Jungian Analysis in a World on Fire: At the Nexus of Individual and Collective Trauma

Editor : Laura Camille Tuley, Editor : John R. White

Reviews and Endorsements

In this summer of fire comes this vitalizing volume on how collective archetypal dynamics impact the being trying to be human. With existential catastrophes in the relation to the Other, that ‘other’ of nature, people, the nonhuman, climate, the iconic gun, pandemic, the atrocity of colonialism, etc. brings soul-death inside the consulting room. Here is how to treat it.
Susan Rowland (PhD), Pacifica Graduate Institute, author of The Alchemy Fire Murder

This challenging book aims to further the development of Jungian analysis by paying careful attention to the importance of our present social, cultural, and political realities. Our world has changed in a way that has radically affected the psyche and soul of both patients and analysts. This change has opened fundamental questions about analytic practice, the relationship between our inner and outer realities, and how this change might alter the nature of the analytic dyad. This work has brought together a diverse group of authors whose engagement with today’s challenges has made diverse and creative contributions to a world truly on fire and to the heat and development of Jungian psychology.
Stanton Marlan, Ph.D., ABPP, FABP, Jungian analyst and author of C.G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination

Laura Tuley and John White, editors (and contributors) have given us a trenchant and definitive work; one which unequivocally acknowledges the consulting room as a place where the political and personal can be met ---and possibly transformed. Each chapter tackles a compelling social issue by incorporating established Jungian ideas and clinical practice with a form of conscious ‘activism’ that pushes back on privileging the interior life while eschewing messages of distress from our troubled, fragile world. Whether taking on gun violence, racism, factory farming or environmental crisis, these authors challenge us to heal and move past the old inside/outside split in our discipline by allowing the overwhelming reality of our world --with its inevitable effect on the psyches of both analyst and analysand – to inform us body and soul.
Constance Romero, M.ED., LPC, Senior Training and Supervising Analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and Co-Editor of the Clinical Commentaries and Art & Film features, The Journal of Analytical Psychology

Tuley and White have assembled a collection of essays that confront the reader with various forms of psychic assault emanating from collective trauma. Like fish who are unaware they live in the medium of water, they and their authors seek to remind us, to awaken us, to the co-created nature of inner experience and the outer world. They grab us by the lapel, shake us, and demand that we take notice of the toxicity of our medium and its devastating impact on us – and we on it. This book is a “le cri de Merlin" for collective realization and integration by actualizing a broader principle of individuation.
August J, Cwik, Psy.D. Senior Training and Supervising Analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and Former Co-Director of Training, C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago

Timely and sorely needed, this collection invites analysts and therapists alike to look up and notice what is happening in our sociopolitical collective. Forcing our gaze away from our navels, we are reminded that we are inextricably linked to a larger environment where lives can be dramatically altered in a split second and where our engagement is essential. These voices offer hope for those exploring the depths that ecological restoration, social/political health, and inclusivity are part of our collective telos.
Jeanne A Lacourt, MS, LPC, NCC, Ph.D, Professor, American Indian Studies, St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, Jungian Analyst

Tuley and White have put together a lively and thoughtful anthology that challenges conventional wisdom on the relationship between analysis (or treatment) and activism, and calls attention to the psychological toll taken (and the real world challenges posed) by urgent social, political and ecological problems, including environmental degradation, climate change and the impact of COVID and other zoonotic diseases; factory farming, animal rights and our broken relationship to the natural world; the evils of racism and colonialism; American gun culture and mass shootings; the ubiquity of human aggression; non-violence as therapeutic praxis. They point to the futility, indeed the perversity, of harnessing therapy to the goal of fostering adaptation to an insane society, adding to the small but growing literature that addresses these troubling social pathologies from a specifically Jungian perspective.
Daniel Burston, Professor of Psychology, Duquesne University and author of Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University and Anti-Semitism and Analytical Psychology: Jung, Politics and Culture