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The Racial Complex

A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race

 

In The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race, Fanny Brewster revisits and examines Jung’s classical writing on the theory of complexes, relating it directly to race in modern society. In this groundbreaking exploration, Brewster deepens Jung’s minimalist writing regarding the cultural complexes of American blacks and whites by identifying and re-defining a psychological complex related to ethnicity.

Original and insightful, this book provides a close reading of Jung’s complexes theory with an Africanist perspective on raciality and white/black racial relationships. Brewster explores how racial complexes influence personality development, cultural behavior and social and political status, and how they impact contemporary American racial relations. She also investigates aspects of the racial complex including archetypal shadow as core, constellations and their expression, and cultural trauma in the African diaspora. The book concludes with a discussion of racial complexes as a continuous psychological state and how to move towards personal, cultural and collective healing. Analyzing Jung’s work with a renewed lens, and providing fresh comparisons to other literature and films, including Get Out, Brewster extends Jung’s work to become more inclusive of culture and ethnicity, addressing issues which have been left previously unexamined in psychoanalytic thought.

Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this book will be of great importance to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, sociology, politics, history of race, African American studies and African diaspora studies. As this book discusses Jung’s complexes theory in a new light, it will be of immense interest to Jungian analysts and analytical psychologists in practice and in training.

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Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss

 

Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss is a powerful exploration of the intergenerational psychological effects of child loss as experienced by women held in slavery in the Americas and of its ongoing effects in contemporary society. It presents the concept of archetypal grief in African American women: cultural trauma so deeply wounding that it spans generations.

Calling on Jungian psychology as well as neuroscience and attachment theory, Fanny Brewster explores the psychological lives of enslaved women using their own narratives and those of their descendants, and discusses the stories of mothering slaves with reference to their physical and emotional experiences. The broader context of slavery and the conditions leading to the development of archetypal grief are examined, with topics including the visibility/invisibility of the African female body, the archetype of the mother, stereotypes about black women, and the significance of rites of passage. The discussion is placed in the context of contemporary America and the economic, educational, spiritual and political legacy of slavery.

Archetypal Grief will be an important work for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, archetypal and depth psychology, archetypal studies, feminine psychology, women’s studies, the history of slavery, African American history, African diaspora studies and sociology. It will also be of interest to analytical psychologists and Jungian psychotherapists in practice and in training.

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Race and the Unconscious

 

Race and the Unconscious engages the archetypal African consciousness that enriches our knowledge regarding the foundational mythopoetic of Africanist dreaming.

Featuring crucial historical context, Jungian and post-Jungian theory, clinical case studies, and dream series interpretations, the book offers readers a rich framework for exploring and understanding the language, images, and symbols of African and African American dreamlife. It expands the modern understanding of dreaming with the inclusion of Africanist perspectives, philosophy, and mythology while emphasizing the potential for and process of psychological healing through dreamwork.

Race and the Unconscious is a must-read for Jungian analysts and analytical psychologists in practice and in training, as well as anyone interested in understanding psychological processes inclusive of those of African descent and their culture, including academics and students of sociology, anthropology, African American studies, and African diaspora studies.

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African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows

 

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.

  
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Racial Legacies 

Jung, Politics, and Culture

 

This essential new book presents a discussion of racial relations, Jungian psychology and politics as a dialogue between two Jungian analysts of different nationalities and ethnicities, providing insight into a previously unexplored area of Jungian psychology. 

Racial Legacies explores themes and historical events from the perspective of each author, and through the lens of psychology, politics and race, in the hopes of creating meaningful racial relationships. The historical ways the past has affected the authors' ancestors and their own lives today is explored in detail through essays and dialogue, demonstrating that past racial legacies continue to bind on both conscious and unconscious levels.

This book distinguishes itself from other texts as the first of its kind to present a racial dialogue in the context of Jungian psychology. It will be of great value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and students of Depth and Analytical Psychology.

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