Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Colonialism and Depth Psychology
Colonialism and Depth Psychology
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?"
Jung reported falling into a "long meditation," in which he grasped for the first time
...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
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
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
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
Nhat Hanh(1987), and Aung San Suu Kyi(1997) who work with restorative methodologies
"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
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
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
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
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-
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
away from a hierarchy wherein the ego and the persona control the construction and
and intuition, previously unrecognized knowings and points of view emerge, which
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
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
from the fixed and narrow conceptions of personhood which are given by a collective
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Liberation
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
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
through, their circumstances. Such questioning led to naming "generative" words and
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
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
power. The question then becomes how to break through the barrier by reflection,
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
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
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.
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
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
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
longer seen as given, but, at best, utopian goals. The norm has become denial, fragmentation,
listen to dreamers who dare to imagine in the spaces created by these ruptures, dreamers
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
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
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
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
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
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
characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
ideas, to defend against what is new and nearby, to create compassion fatigue and numbness
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
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,
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
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
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
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.
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
bending in toward the world to accept the responsibilities of attending to what has been
dialogue with others who challenge us, knowing that we bring the past with us partly
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
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