Depth Psychology and Colonialism:

Individuation, Seeing Through, and Liberation1

Helene Shulman Lorenz and Mary Watkins2

The face of a bird of prey

What we from our point of view call colonization, missions to the heathen, spread of
civilization, etc., has another face--the face of a bird of prey seeking with cruel
intentness for distant quarry--a face worthy of a race of pirates and highwaymen.
All the eagles and other predatory creatures that adorn our coats of arms seem to me
apt psychological representatives of our true nature.
Jung, 1961, pp. 248-249

In 1925, at the age of 50, Jung visited the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. According

to Jung(1961), Ochwiay Biano, the chief, shared that his Pueblo people felt whites were

"mad," "uneasy and restless," always wanting something. Jung inquired further about why

he thought they were mad. The chief replied that white people say they think with their

heads - a sign of illness in his tribe. "Why of course," said Jung,"what do you think with?"

Ochwiay Biano indicated his heart.

Jung reported falling into a "long meditation," in which he grasped for the first time

how deeply colonialism had effected his character and psyche.

...someone had drawn for me a picture of the real white man. It was as though until
now I had seen nothing but sentimental, prettified color prints. This Indian had
struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind. I felt rising within
me like a shapeless mist something unknown and yet deeply familiar. And out of
this mist, image upon image detached itself: first Roman legions smashing into the
cities of Gaul, and the keenly incised features of Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus,
and Pompey. I saw the Roman eagle on the North Sea and on the banks of the
White Nile. Then I saw St. Augustine transmitting the Christian creed to the Britons
on the tips of Roman lances, and Charlemagne's most glorious forced conversion of
the heathen; then the pillaging and murdering bands of the Crusading armies. With

1 We dedicate this paper to Aung San Su Kyi, the leader of the democracy movement in Burma, and a Nobel
Peace Prize recipient. Her leadership exemplifies the deep linkage between individuation and liberation this
paper speaks to. Unfortunately, her life is presently in grave danger from the military government of
Burma, and we urge you to write them in support of her.
2 This paper was originally delivered at The International Symposium of Archetypal Psychology,
Psychology at the Threshold, hosted by Pacifica Graduate Institute, August 31-September 4, 2000 at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA.
 a secret stab I realized the hollowness of that old romanticism about the Crusades.
Then followed Columbus, Cortes, and the other conquistadors who with fire, sword,
torture, and Christianity came down upon even these remote pueblos dreaming
peacefully in the Sun, their Father. I saw, too, the people of the Pacific islands
decimated by firewater, syphilis, and scarlet fever carried in the clothes the
missionaries forced on them.
Jung, 1961, p. 248

Jung did not access these insights into the cultural unconscious while alone at his

tower in Bollingen. This meditation required his presence at Taos, a place which holds

these tragedies in its own history and countenance. It necessitated his being in deep enough

relationship and dialogue with Ochwiay Biano that he was able to glance at himself briefly

through the chief's eyes, to see his own shadow as a European for the first time. In his

autobiography, he said, "That was enough."

In our view, it was not enough, but only a beginning. We need to sustain and

deepen this glance in ways that Jung was unable to do in 1925. Our psyches and societies

have been forged on the anvil of colonialism. As depth psychology was being born a

hundred years ago, colonialism was stretching to its fullest reach. Depth psychology's

development coincides with the rise of national liberation movements and the ending of the

colonial era. To the degree that depth psychology is a social critique of the narrowed vision

of the dominant aspects of Euro-American culture, it considers problematic many of the

same dichotomizing and hierarchizing structures that are critiqued in post-colonial theory.

We would not see this as accidental if we understood that the psychic structures and

contents that depth psychologists describe reflect the psychic corollaries of colonialism,

despite the fact that the context of colonialism is hardly ever named (e.g., you will not find

"colonialism" in the index to Jung's collected works, his biographies or his

autobiography.3

3 Aniela Jaffe remarked that the part of Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections that was cut was the chapter
on his travels. It seems Jung had gone on at great length about their significance. To Jaffe these pages
seemed out of tune with the rest of the book, and so they were deleted (Jaffe, 1977).
Re-membering the Context of Colonialism for Depth Psychology

We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future
in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is
absent, or it's romanticized. This culture doesn't encourage dwelling on the past, let
alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past.
Toni Morrison, in Gilroy,1993, p.180

All practices of healing - such as depth psychology - reflect their own cultural

context, while also struggling to address and transcend those aspects of culture that give rise

to suffering. Depth psychology can easily be studied to point out how its language and

methods reflect a colonial mindset. Various writers have (rightly, in our view) critiqued

aspects of depth psychology for being racist, antisemitic, sexist, and Eurocentric (Samuels,

1993). At the same time, depth psychology gives us a methodology with which we can

creatively and imaginatively rework current assumptions, biases, or limitations in our ways

of seeing the world. This is the aspect of depth psychology which we want to place in

dialogue with post-colonial theory. In this paper, we would like to outline how depth

psychology, particularly Jungian and archetypal psychology, attempt to heal the psychic

sequelae of colonialism.

From this vantage point, we can place depth psychology's restoratory methodologies

alongside those of post-colonial theorists such as Freire(1989), Anzaldua(1990), hooks

(1992), Belenky(1997), Griffin(1992), Sulak Sivaraksa(1992), Martin-Baro(1994), Thich

Nhat Hanh(1987), and Aung San Suu Kyi(1997) who work with restorative methodologies

of "liberation." Holding together Jung's process of individuation and Hillman's process of

"seeing through" with processes and goals of liberation largely generated from the South,

we can begin to chart paths to a post-colonial consciousness that can be regenerative for

both cultures and individuals.

Colonialism, which created the material basis and wealth that gave rise to the

technologies of the twentieth century, is based on two kinds of power. The first is the power

of one group or individual to appropriate the resources, labor, and territory of another group

or individual, creating hierarchy and inequality. The second power is the capacity to deny
responsibility for having done so, to silence resistance and opposition, and to normalize the

outcome. By normalization we mean that the resultant inequities and suffering are made to

appear as if they are completely natural through mythologies of scientific racism, gender

role, ethnic identity, national destiny, and social Darwinism. In "official culture," the

supposed superiority of some is taken as fate, while the imagined inferiority of others is

taken as fact. Beneath this tear in the social and psychic fabric, we each carry the uneasy

feeling-sense that there is much about our experience of self, other, and community that can

not be said, indeed, even formulated into thoughts.

Further, research into extremely repressive situations show that when people

perceive atrocities and injustices, often they must actually renounce their own perception to

avoid danger to themselves. In her study of the fourteen years of military dictatorship

(1976-1983) in Argentina, which unfortunately was supported and financed by the U.S.

government, Diana Taylor calls this "percepticide" According to Taylor, this renunciation

"turns the violence on oneself. Percepticide blinds, maims, kills through the senses" (Taylor,

1997, p.124).4 When whole populations are forced to not-know what is going on around

them, when the media choose to not-name injustice, watching-without-seeing becomes "the

most dehumanizing of acts." This kind of renunciation establishes a split within the self,

where certain knowings are exiled and unavailable for the negotiation of one's life. Robert J.

Lifton (1986), in his study of Nazi doctors, described this as a doubling of the self, where

one self is condemned to numbness regarding what the other self knows and understands.

4 Taylor sees the performance of acts of terror on the part of the Argentine military government as primarily
aimed at normalizing the collaboration of the population with repression. "The military violence could have
been relatively invisible. The fact that it wasn't indicates that the population as a whole was the intended
target, positioned by means of the spectacle. People had to deny what they saw, and by turning away
collude with the violence around them. They knew people were 'disappearing.' Men in military attire,
trucks, and helicopters surrounded the the area, closed in on the hunted individuals, and 'sucked' them off the
street, out of a movie theater, from a classroom or a workplace. And those in the vicinity were forced to
notice, however much they pretended not to. Other spectators who have suffered similar violence - Elie
Wiesel watching the Nazis exterminate the man who destroyed one of the chimneys at Auschwitz,
Rigoberta Menchu watching her brother be tortured and burned alive - have judged this watching to be the
most dehumanizing of acts" (Taylor, 1997, p.124).
 The fictitious "rational consumer" self in a homogeneous nation, mythologized in

the official history of the modernist era, has been created by a long practice of percepticide.

For how many years did history books portray the genocide caused by colonial expansion

as a triumph of civilization, the tragedy of slavery and the plantation system as unrelated to

the wealth amassed for industrialization, the exclusion of women, Native Americans and

African Americans from the political process as the rise of democracy? Educated in this

paradigm, how much have we learned to deny? How have we been maimed and blinded by

the thousands of media images that allow us to normalize violence, stereotypes, and

passivity? In order to see ourselves more fully, the pictures we paint of ourselves and our

theories of psychology must also include the likelihood that our perspectives are limited by

our situated histories; that what we can see is steeped in collusion with the paradigms that

shape our consciousness.

As carriers of internal colonization, we may have developed the habit of silencing

our own and other's suffering, resistances, and creativity when these come into contact with

the official mythologies of normalized culture. Many of us have learned all too well what

not to say and when not to speak. Carried too far, this split may produce in some persons a

dissociated sense of a magic interior world where everything is possible, which lives

alongside a harsh outer world where nothing can be altered. Interior journeys and aesthetic

adventures may be chosen as preferred modes of being, protecting one from exterior

realities that seem immutable and fixed. For others, sustained dissociation can create a sense

of an impoverished and empty interior, yielding a sense of inferiority and alienation.

Feelings of impotence and fatalism become linked with despair, addictions, and violence.

While many cultural groups continue to have public rituals where what has not yet

been spoken can be aired communally, the fragmentation of modern urban environments

and the dissociation of the individual from the group that is part of the myth of

individualism sends others to small dialogue groups or therapy. Private therapy provides a

safe space for some people to begin to listen to the silenced voices at the margins of their
consciousness. What is known, but not yet said, is invited into the reality of the therapeutic

relationship, where there is support for exploring, experimenting, resisting, and seeking

alternatives through creativity and conversations with others. When people enter therapy or

dialogue groups aimed at consciousness-raising, feelings silenced by shame, fear, and self-

hatred emerge along the way to imaging new possibilities.

Individuation

How old is the habit of denial? We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we
know….For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the
world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that
history is sung.
Susan Griffin, 1992, pp. 4, 8

In addressing the restoration of a torn soul, Jung described the normative psyche he

found in the first half of last century: a hierarchically organized psyche, dominated by a

one-sided ego and collectively identified persona. Such a hierarchy pushes into the margins

all that is inferiorized by the culture (the shadow), and sustains a sense of power through

identification with collective norms. Dissociation, denial, repression, projection were the

defenses to be studied and confronted - each a psychological variant of a cultural process

that maintains the status quo balance of power in colonialism.

In depth psychological methodology, this psychic configuration necessitates a move

away from a hierarchy wherein the ego and the persona control the construction and

representation of identity. Through attention to dream, image, spontaneous thought, feeling

and intuition, previously unrecognized knowings and points of view emerge, which

supplant controlling monological thought with a vibrant, multi-layered complexity of

dialogue among many.

Jung's hope for this kind of process was that one could begin to differentiate from

mindless adherence to collective norms. With this differentiation would come a possible

creative participation with culture, imagining and enacting alternatives to the status quo.

When therapy is seen as only a retreat to an individual, interior, private space, cut off from

culture, this hope becomes short-circuited. The American consumerist ethos too often
allows us to see psyche or soul as a privatized possession of the individual, which makes it

impossible to grasp the permeability of psyche and culture and the possibility that one's

individuation may fuse with liberatory movements within one's culture.

Jungian work begins with "pathologizing" official stories of "normal" and "healthy"

adjustment to taken-for-granted social values, and it invites dialogue with all that has been

cast into the shadows. Jung's notion that we are surrounded by a collective consciousness

that frames our ways of knowing ourselves and others means that to push outside of this

frame leads to a "defeat of the ego" and the gradual creation of a new form of subjectivity

that is, in its own way, also a defection.

The goal of Jungian work is "individuation," a differentiation of subjectivity away

from the fixed and narrow conceptions of personhood which are given by a collective

culture. This process could be described as a form of decolonization, a revalorization of

those values cast aside by the technologization, industrialization, and rationalism of the

modernist era. Jung was clear that this kind of psychic differentiation should not entail a

literal isolation.

Individuation is only possible with people, through people. You must realize that
you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space
or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. You are part of an atomic structure, and
that atomic structure is part of a molecule which, with others, builds up a body.
Jung, 1988, p. 103

Creating community and dialogue was part of individuation.

Since the individual is not only a single entity, but also by his very existence,
presupposes a collective relationship, the process of individuation does not lead to
isolation, but to an intenser and more universal collective solidarity.
Jung 1966, p.155

Having lived through both World Wars as well as the rise of fascism in Europe, Jung

believed that the only hope for peace and freedom lay in the ability of individuals to break

away from repressive social agendas. Individuation always involves a rupture of the

normalized roles of the surrounding social collective.

With this rupture we become capable of new ideas, utopian dreams, and healing

insights. Apparently, we have a deep archetypal need to create spaces in our worlds where
older, fixed complexes can be metabolized so that spontaneous creativity can emerge.

Jungian analysis can be imagined as just such a space. Within the temenos of regular

dialogue with a mentor in what Dora Kalff has named "a free and protected space" (Kalff,

1980), an analysand learns a method of self-witnessing, a kind of autoethnography and

autoarcheology shared with an educator committed to participatory research. In the form

proposed by Jung, Jungian analysis does not diagnose or reduce the images of the

analysand to already-known reductive categories. Rather, the encounter is seen as one that

involves and changes both in the dialogue, as the analysand practices remembrance in order

to regenerate utopian potentials still outside literal everyday routines.

Jung developed the notion of a "transcendent function" as both the medium for, and

the outcome of, individuation. A transcendent function involves the creation of practices of

dialogue with whatever new images and events emerge spontaneously in our inner and outer

worlds. In developing such a function, we work at critical reflection and imaginative

interpretation, a hermeneutics that brings the already known into contact with the new. We

gain different perspectives from this work, which leads us to understand what we are and

what we can become from multiple points of view. Through such a practice we learn to bear

the anxieties of disidentification with surrounding cultural constructs and old patterns of

thought. We become less defensive and more open to the experimental, unknown, and

synchronistic, more aware of unconscious potentials that are still preverbal. As a result, such

work often involves the arts - writing, storytelling, painting, movement - in imaginative

symbolizations of the dialogue process; and it often involves conversation with others. Jung

claimed that the process of developing a transcendent function would lead to "a considerable

widening of the horizon" and "a deepened self-knowledge" which might also "humanize" us

and "make us more modest" (1966, p.137). He believed that the more we engage in this

work, the more fully we can be with others in the world. Finally, there would be, Jung wrote,

"no distance, but immediate presence" (Jung, 1973, p.298).

Seeing Through
 ...I do not ever truly have ideas; they have, hold, contain, govern me. Our wrestling
with ideas is a sacred struggle, as with an angel; our attempts to formulate, a ritual
activity to propitiate the angel. The emotions that ideas arouse are appropriate, and
authentic, too, is our sense of being a victim of ideas, humiliated before their grand
vision, our lifetime devotion to them, and the battles we must fight on their behalf.
Hillman, 1975, p. 130

In archetypal psychology we direct our attention to the voices and images of

pathology, to that which suffers, often in exile from heroic consciousness. But it is not only

to the margins we turn. Indeed, much listening is done to the heroic ego itself, attempting to

discern which ideas it has identified with, literalized, and taken for granted. These

identifications have exiled other points of view, laying claim on reality and truth. When

ideas remain unworked, the reality they spawn is experienced as natural and inevitable,

something to be suffered or enjoyed, but not questioned. When ideas are seen through and

worked with, they become "the nodes that make possible our ability to see through events

into their patterns" (Hillman,1975).

Listening to the truth through the perspective of the many at the margins, while

practicing seeing what one holds most dear and true as a perspective are movements that

support each other. They work to free us from false certitude and our easy dismissal of

otherness. For Hillman, seeing through or deconstructing ideas is an on-going process of

liberation which allows us to create with ideas, rather than remain enslaved by them. "Ideas

are ways of seeing and knowing, or knowing by means of insighting. Ideas allow us to

envision and by means of vision we can know" (Hillman, 1975, p. 121).

Many depth psychologists are tempted to split ideas from action, psyche from

culture, psychological work from cultural work. Indeed, it is difficult to hold psyche and

culture together, to witness pain as it issues from both quarters, and to enter the mess and

fray of participation, solidarity, and responsibility. However, in Hillman's archetypal

psychology, these separations are seen as false. Ideas and action are "not inherent enemies,

and they should not be paired as a contrast" (Hillman, 1975, p.116). Reflection is an activity

and action always enacts an idea. "[When] an insight or idea has sunk in, practice visibly
changes... By seeing differently, we do differently" (Hillman, 1975, p. 122). Ideas such as

"manifest destiny," "growth," "development," "racial superiority," "primitivity," "white

supremacy," "noblesse oblige," "individualism" fueled colonialism, shaped psychological

theory and research, and mapped themselves onto intrapsychic and interpersonal

relationships. Seeing through them is no small matter, and it is a work that affects culture

and psyche at the same moment. As in Jung's case, it requires dialogue with or among

others who have carried the burden of these ideas.

Liberation

For me education is simultaneously an act of knowing, a political act, and an artistic

event. I no longer speak about a political dimension of education. I no longer speak
about a knowing dimension of education. As well, I don't speak about education
through art. On the contrary, I say education is politics, art, and knowing.
Freire, 1985. p.17

In the year that Jung died (1961) a young teacher in Brazil named Paulo Freire was

asked to initiate a literacy program that would involve teaching 5 million people previously

denied education by institutions of neo-colonialism that had survived slavery. As in the

United States, where also it was forbidden to teach slaves how to read and write, such

deprivation was used in Northeast Brazil to disempower the masses and make claims of

their inferiority easier. Such claims would then rationalize an abuse of labor,and the

consignment of the masses to conditions of poverty, malnutrition and illness in order that

others in power could profit. Freire deeply believed that the power to read and write should

be linked with developing a capacity to decode the reality in which one lives. In literacy

groups, a leader, or "animator," helped people engage in a process of questioning, of seeing

through, their circumstances. Such questioning led to naming "generative" words and

themes for one's writing and one's living.

As in psychotherapy, these groups directed participants' attention to what they were

suffering. Unlike individual therapy, participants easily saw that their individual suffering

was shared by others in the group. As the origins of suffering were interrogated, group

members began to see that their personal difficulties were grounded in the arrangement of
power and resources which they had largely taken-for-granted. Psychological change and

cultural change were understood to be indissolubly linked.

Freire reasoned that everyone would discover obstacles as each began to examine

the "limit situations" which restricted their freedom, obstacles which prevented further

growth and in many cases made survival difficult. Some people would accept these limit

situations as inevitable; whereas others would begin to perform what Freire called "limit

acts." Limit acts are strategies that allow us to detach from seeing limit situations as

unchangeable givens - a refusal and problematizing of what is normalized by those in

power. The question then becomes how to break through the barrier by reflection,

witnessing, acting, and reimagining.

By first seeing through arrangements one has taken as god-given, one emerges into

a field of creativity and imagination that Freire named "annunciation." The goal is to

uncover some "untested feasability": "something the utopian dreamer knows exists, but

knows that it will be attained only through a practice of liberation" (Freire, 1989, p. 206). It

is "an untested thing, an unprecedented thing, something not yet clearly known and

experienced, but dreamed of."

Like Jung, Freire thought that his method of dialogical action would not provide a

blueprint for an outcome. Only out of local dialogue could alternative futures be imagined

by those who had the courage to refuse "being-in-a-lesser-way." No one can do this for

another, because to think for others simply recolonizes them. To be free involves becoming

an active participant in one's own context and history, to become consciente or aware and in

dialogue with others. This is the prerequisite of humanization, becoming what Freire called

o ser-mais - "being-in-a-larger-way" or being more-so.

The short-lived populist government of Goulart which created the National Literacy

Program or Programa Nacional de Alphabetizacao, ended abruptly with the military coup of

April 1, 1964 that was assisted by the US government and the CIA. The literacy movement

was viewed as subversive to the status quo, which indeed it was. During the fifteen years of
military rule which followed, Freire was forced to go into exile and many of the people with

whom he worked were tortured and killed. His book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,

became world famous, was translated into dozens of languages, but was banned in most

Latin American countries as well as the Iberian Peninsula during the years of his exile.

In the Space of Rupture, Imagination

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly as a theory, a

doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to
be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of
what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are
imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
Michel Foucault, 1986, p.50

In the long development of modernist Eurocentric discourse, an image of the

completed rational subject who ruled the psyche paralleled the notion of the nation-state

which ruled the political-economic sphere. History was seen as a progressive evolution,

blessed by God or at least "manifest destiny," from the "primitive" irrational to the

"civilized" rational of contemporary Euro-American culture. In this fantasy, much was

silenced that has begun to be spoken of today. In an era of globalization, difference, not

consensus, multiplicity, not unity, conflict, not repression and disidentification rather than

identity, is all too apparent.

In the second half of the twentieth century, numerous writers on every continent -

including many depth psychologists - have begun to deconstruct modernist fantasies about

unified selves evolving in a progressively developing world. The voices of communities and

environments that have suffered as a result of the hymn to progress have found an audience,

complicating the story and making it difficult to view the march of development as an

unqualified success. As a result of this eruption of multiple points of view, much current

research focuses on the local, the idiosyncratic, the forgotten, the denied, and the crossroads

of influences and intentions that make up both psychological states as well as regional

history.
 Contemporary post-colonial studies posit rupture, disequilibrium, the witnessing of

ones own conflicts and contradictions, and the imagination and creation of utopian dreams

for alternative futures and experiences as central to our lived experience in globalized

environments. What is most apparent in this discourse is the difficult, almost alchemical

work involved in imagining a coherent self or a functional community in solidarity, no

longer seen as given, but, at best, utopian goals. The norm has become denial, fragmentation,

dissociation, and contradiction--states of being which Jung suggests points to a type of

personality more like an archipelago than a continent. As depth psychologists, we must

listen to dreamers who dare to imagine in the spaces created by these ruptures, dreamers

who bring to us possibilities for post-colonial consciousness. Here, we have chosen as

examples Ignacio Martin-Baro and Gloria Anzaldua.

Ignacio Martin-Baro, a Jesuit psychologist from El Salvador who was murdered for

his alliance with the poor by "security " forces funded by the United States, wrote about the

revolutionary ideal of community (el pueblo or el pueblo unido) linked to a process of

liberation similar to what Freire described. He said that el pueblo is: "an opening - an

opening against all closure, flexibility against everything fixed, elasticity against all rigidity,

a readiness to act against all stagnation." It is "a hunger for change, affirmation of what is

new; life in hope" (1994, p.183). In order to exist as a community or el pueblo a group of

people must necessarily move beyond the current literal state of their relationships to

imagine a "negation of non-solidarity." A "dis-associating and egoistic individualism,"

which denies the connection between self and culture, must be abandoned to forge this new

consciousness "that does not involve the non-being of others, and that comes about through

a having that is communitarian and united" (1994, p.183).

Martin-Baro's utopian vision of community involves a changed notion of self. "The

self is open to becoming different, on a plane of equality with neither privileges nor

oppressive mechanisms." It implies "an opening toward the other, a readiness to let oneself

be questioned by the other, as a separate being, to listen to his or her words, in dialogue; to
confront reality in relationship to and with (but not over) him or her, to unite in solidarity in

a struggle in which both will be transformed" (1994, p. 183).

For Chicana activist Gloria Anzaldua(1990), a new way of being in the world

emerges when one "has gone from being the sacrificial goat to becoming the officiating

priestess at the crossroads" (p. 380), where "mestiza consciousness" can develope. With

the notion of la Mestiza, Anzaldua is describing the development of a new type of

subjectivity. "In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, [la Mestiza] is

subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has discovered that she can't

hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep

the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and

patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible can she

stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La Mestiza constantly has to shift out of

habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use

rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking,

characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole

perspective, one that includes rather than excludes" (p. 379).

When we begin to live out of this open awareness, it changes the way we see the world,

the way we understand ourselves, and the way we behave. By gathering up many lost and

excluded parts of ourselves and our communities, we begin the process of giving voice to

strengths, wounds, and needs as we "seek to recover and reshape" what Anzaldua(1990)

calls our "spiritual identities" (p. 386).

Psychological and Cultural Restoration

If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves
either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our
picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do
we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we
put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in
order to find ourselves.
Jung, 1960 p. 379
 What can we contribute to a "picture of the world" from this holding together of

depth psychology with post-colonial theory and practice? Can we begin to imagine the norm

of both individual and community life as evolving interconnected systems of multiple

elements that potentially are chaotic and discordant, that is, not necessarily moving toward

order, unity, reason, progress, or enlightenment? Can we envision the alternating rhythms of

seeing through and utopic imagining as liberating to both psyche and culture? Can we take

the process of moving attention to the margin, of listening into the multiple voices that have

been exiled from consciousness, as foundational to both depth psychology and post-

colonial cultural work? What if, as depth psychologically-minded cultural workers, we labor

against falsely separating the processes of individuation from those of liberation? Can we

bear to acknowledge the complete interdependence of psyche and culture, while working to

differentiate ourselves from identifications with collective norms and ideas?

Healing arts develope because every cultural environment evolves routines of

normalization that are ruptured regularly by life circumstances. Chosen or unchosen

transitions and circumstances - the death of a loved one, illness, growing into adolescence,

new or ending relationships - break apart old ways of thinking and being everywhere. With

the development of colonialism, whole populations began to suffer previously unknown

types of rupture - genocide on a massive, unthinkable scale, slavery involving tens of

millions of people, colonial conquest, world war, massive migrations due to the disruption of

self-sufficient local economies. These ruptured conditions are documented contexts for the

increased incidence of mental illness and experiences of suffering (Kleinman, 1988). The

process of rupture is further intensified by globalization. In contemporary neo-colonial and

hierarchical environments, the oppressed feel a constant assault on, and rupture of, their

dignity, humanity, and dreams for happiness. Those privileged to live comfortable lives in

the midst of human misery, must perform ever more complete percepticide within their own

psyches if they are to sustain a sense of comfort.

 In all of these forms of rupture, whatever structures of self-identity have existed up

until that point may prove insufficient to navigate the new situation. At such a moment, we

can imagine that a deep human need for meaning, coherence, community, and hope may

reassert itself, attempting to create processes of restoration through the cultural work that

arises from alternating waves of seeing through and utopian imagining. Such imagining

necessarily reaches into the past for images of recollection which are capable of

contextualizing, narrating, and mythologizing the current situation.

In what we call "creative restoration," restoration to an idealized past - a golden age -

is neither sought nor possible. By creative restoration we mean psychologically-minded

cultural work and culturally-minded psychological work that crafts psyche and world in the

image of the deeply desired; that provides a healing context where what has been torn can

be reimagined and sutured in concert with others. Such restorative work consists of acts of

love and care that have both human and spiritual dimensions. While certain restorative work

can be suffused with wrong turns and misreadings, sometimes it breaks into moments of

grace and communitas that allow desired transformations.

However, the drag and weight of our historical, cultural, and personal complexes are

forceful, and there is also a type of "normative restoration" that is constantly available in

times of rupture. Here, ways of the past are anxiously referenced and rehearsed. Jung

raised the possibility that when confronted with new potentials which needed to be

assimilated to consciousness, his patients might instead move toward what he called "the

retrogressive restoration of the persona" (Jung, p. 163). This can happen with communities

and nations as well. In normative restoration, we cling rigidly to the constructs of the past,

ceremonializing them and rejecting all new elements as polluting. Facing an unwanted

rupture or rapid social change, fascist violence or personal crisis, we can use the arts of

restoration - performance, storytelling, ceremony - to reify mythic figures and historical

ideas, to defend against what is new and nearby, to create compassion fatigue and numbness

toward current suffering.

 Both agendas for social and cultural liberation as well as psychological individuation

can yield a type of normative restoration. In many liberation movements, leaders have failed

to realize that new societies would require new subjectivities - people who were critical,

imaginative, and free to voice oppositional strategies and points of view. History yields

many sad examples of movements that began as liberatory and ended as controlling and

repressive. At the same time, many schools of psychology, intending to assist individuals in

finding new potentials, stop short of critiquing and engaging the social limitations which

make transformation impossible. Thus, often the mental health establishment helps to

personalize, marginalize, and medicate what is essentially a protest against a dehumanizing

and repressive social milieu.

If projects of social liberation and personal individuation are to become processes of

creative restoration, each requires completion in the other. Anyone involved in the

differentiation from collective consciousness for which individuation calls will soon find

social situations where new images and behaviors are necessary. Jungian analyst Adolf

Guggenbuhl-Craig hoped that depth psychologists would be thorns in the side of their

communities. On the other hand, anyone who truly wishes for liberation for the

marginalized and oppressed will soon discover their needs for individual experience and

support in reimagining alternative identities and futures and in voicing their own, personal,

critical and dissenting perspectives

Liberation and individuation projects that aspire to creative restoration require the

capacity to question the status quo and work with imaginal scripts. bell hooks (1994)

speaks of the kind of education that is needed to support such transgressing of boundaries,

an education that whets the appetite and creates the capacity for the practice of freedom. She

says, "It is also about transforming the image, creating alternatives, asking ourselves

questions about what kinds of images subvert, pose critical alternatives, and transform our

worldviews and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad. Making a space
for the transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision, is essential to any effort to create a

context for transformation"(1992, p. 4).

In our analysis, the Jungian work of individuation, the archetypal work of seeing

through, and the practices of liberation and conscienticization, are each instances of the arts

of cultural and psychological restoration that have been practiced by healers all over the

world for centuries in various local forms. Yet leaving behind the triumphalist and

modernist fantasies of progress toward perfection, in a post-colonial discourse we are left

with projects that are always provisional and incomplete. In a world desperate for new

understandings that will mitigate suffering and inspire creation, we need to be clear that both

liberation movements and individuation processes can also be retrogressive and support

neo-colonial hierarchies. We need to learn how to distinguish creative restorations that

bring together complex and multiple dissonant experiences through dialogue, from

normative restorations that force our experience apart into oppositional and dissociative

binary oppositions: pure vs. polluted, insider vs. outsider, sacred vs. profane, us and them.

Neither depth psychology nor post-colonial consciousness promises a safe distance in

which we can stand free of the cultural constructs that form us and with which we constantly

collude. Instead, both require a complex, ongoing and situated engagement that necessitates

bearing suffering, witnessing our own involvement in neo-colonial relationships, and

bending in toward the world to accept the responsibilities of attending to what has been

experienced and understood. We need to reach for creative restoration cautiously, in

dialogue with others who challenge us, knowing that we bring the past with us partly

unconsciously. Yet we can be drawn forward by a paradoxical joy of vulnerability, which

allows what has been suffered to be known, bringing with it potential relief from the

dissociations of both self and community. If, as healers skilled in the arts of creative

restoration, we are successful , we may find a sweet liberation from imprisoning ideas and

cultural arrangements, and the pleasure which comes from working together towards a

deeply -desired, just and peaceful world.

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Helene Shulman Lorenz, Ph.D., is a Core Faculty Member in the Depth

Psychology Doctoral Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Trained as a Jungian analyst
at the C.G.Jung Intitute in Zurich, she is the author of Living at the Edge of Chaos:
Complex Systems in Culture and Psyche, and several recent articles on depth psychology,
globalization, paradigm change, and decolonization.
Mary Watkins, Ph.D., is the Coordinator of Community and Ecological Fieldwork and
Research in the Depth Psychology Doctoral Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is
the author of Waking Dreams, Invisible Guents: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues,
the co-author of Talking With Young Children About Adoption, a co-editor of Psychology
and the Promotion of Peace (Journal of Social Issues, 44, 2), and recent essays on the
confluence of liberation psychology and depth psychology.