BJAA: Working with Difference as Jungian Analysts
In recent years, several BJAA members have written papers exploring the unconscious forces at work in the consulting room in the areas of race, class, migration and sexual difference.
Current debates within the profession, postcolonial studies and the history of psychoanalysis in relation to totalitarian and fascist regimes call us to review our theoretical models and we need to make space to explore how these attitudes may still pervade.
The papers listed here attempt to explore unexamined prejudices that might affect our capacity to listen to the people we work with and hear their concerns – both conscious and unconscious – about conflicting messages in our culture about race, sexuality, class and identity.
For copyright reasons we are not able to include the full texts of all the papers listed.
Male Same-Sex Desire
Giorgio Giaccardi
‘Mending The Symbolic When A Place For Male Same-Sex Desire Is Not Found’
Giorgio Giaccardi (2019). Published in “Sexuality and Gender Now. Moving Beyond Heteronormativity.” Edited by Hertzamnn L., Newbigin J. (Routledge 2020)
About this chapter
The chapter reflects on the problem of unsymbolised psychic experiences and the ensuing attempts at repairing this lack, by drawing on inputs from cultural studies and clinical practice, within a post-Jungian understanding of the process of individuation. In particular, the paper will consider some aspects of the process leading from a symbolic deficit to the formation of containers for male same-sex desire, as revealed by the kind of emotional experiences traversed, and the symbolic representations generated by gay men in the contemporary Western world, such as melancholy, rage, concealment, sentimentality, camp, excess, centrality of sex, appropriative identifications, communality of desires, and experiences of time.
‘Problems of symbolisation and archetypal processes: the case of same-sex desire’
Giorgio Giaccardi (2019). Published in “Indeterminate States, liminality and Borders” (Routledge 2020)
About this chapter
This paper considers how a range of archetypal processes may be activated and shaped by the tension between same sex-desire and an heteronormative symbolic order, namely Senex/Puer, Persona, Anima, Father, Trickster, Pan, Shadow, as well as what may be seen as an archetypal tendency of the male psyche, not explored by Jung, towards forms of ‘communality’.
Some of these processes are illustrated through letters and poetry of the Italian intellectual and artist Pier Paolo Pasolini. Although many of his views on same-sex desire, being not only inscribed in the heteronormative order but somehow also buttressing it, have subjected Pasolini to much criticism by the gay movement, his sensitivity and lucidity have translated into verses and reflections of great perceptivity and insight on the themes of being outside the symbolic order on account of one’s desire, both in its more romantic and melancholic form as a youth and in its highly sexualised state as an adult.
About the author
Giorgio has a particular interest in the topic of male same-sex desire, with a focus on the process of symbolisation and in integrating an archetypal approach with insights from critical theory and the humanities to advance analytic understanding of how subjectivity develops around same sex desire in a collective consciousness still largely permeated by heteronormative assumptions.
He is a Senior Member of the BJAA/bpf in London & a Member Analyst of the Associazione per la Ricerca in Psicologia Analitica in Milan.
Migration: Issues of Identity and Language
Grazyna Czubinska
“Migration As An Unconscious Search For Identity: Some Reflections On Language, Difference And Belonging”
Czubinska. G. Published in “British Journal of Psychotherapy”, 33, 2,159-176 (2017)
About this paper
The author addresses some issues regarding patients who relocate and who struggle with adaptation to a new reality. She argues that emigration is a complex psychological phenomenon that requires a therapist to pay special attention to the issue of language, difference and identity, and suggests that the issues of different culture and language in analytic psychotherapy need to be considered as part of a wider cultural context to which we all belong, rather than a specialized area of interest. The paper illustrates, through the clinical example of an East European male patient, that the psychic work of emigration can be understood as a process of integrating splits between pre- and post-migration selves. The author concludes that the analyst needs to let herself be involved as a ‘real person’ to reach the non-interpretative aspects of the patient’s psyche through a mutuality of shared experience to promote a change.
‘Difference – is it hated or desired. Reflections on Totalitarian state of mind.’
Czubinska. G. Published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology (2020). Vol 65. Issue 2. Pages 325-344.
About the author
Grazyna Czubinska is a senior member and training analyst with the British Association of Jungian Analysts. ( BJAA) and also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for the Foundation of Psychotherapy and Counselling, former graduating body for the WPF Therapy where she has a long history of teaching and supervising. Born and brought up in Poland, she emigrated to the UK during the Cold War in late seventies. Her educational background is in philosophy and literature. Her widely read paper “Migration as an unconscious search for Identity: some reflections on language, difference and belonging “, published by the British Journal of Psychotherapy (BJP) (2017), was awarded a certificate of achievement. She is interested in transcultural issues and the interface between psychoanalysis and politics. She has contributed to the development of Jungian analysis in Poland, where she has taught and supervised.
Email: [email protected]
David Henderson
‘Cultural Homelessness: A Challenge to Theory and Practice’
David Henderson (2016), Psychodynamic Practice Vol. 22 No. 2, (Routledge 2016)
About this paper
This paper explores the experience of culturally homeless persons, who have lived in multiple cultural frameworks before the age of 14. They “live in a framework that may include experiences, feelings, and thoughts that do not belong to any specific cultural reference group… they lack a cultural home. They may experience a strong yearning to ‘go home,’ but home is no one place.” The lack of the experience of having been unconsciously embedded in a coherent cultural and linguistic matrix has consequences for how we might conceptualise their ego development. I want to develop the idea that these people have multiple egos, because their early experience was nurtured and shaped in a multilingual, multicultural matrix. The gap between egos is a deficit, if you like, but it is not the result of splitting, repression or dissociation, or even of unconsciousness since the culturally homeless client is likely to be extremely attuned to these gaps.
What challenges does this mode of being pose to psychoanalytic theory and practice? A therapist who is working with a normative theory of psychological development, attachment, psychopathology, psychic structure or the analytic process is in danger of failing to recognise a fundamental aspect of these persons’ lives. The therapist may be tempted to diagnose the patient as being borderline, an as-if personality, psychotic, autistic, or even having multiple personality disorder. While there may well be aspects of the personality that are consonant with these descriptions, these diagnoses may constitute a category mistake. As Jung observes, “the patient’s difficulty consists precisely in the fact that his individual problem cannot be fitted without friction into a collective norm; it requires a solution of an individual conflict if the whole of his personality is to remain viable. No rational solution can do justice to this task, and there is absolutely no collective norm that could replace an individual solution without loss.”
About the author
David has lived in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the USA and the UK. In addition to his very stimulating private practice, he enjoys walking Bo, the Labradoodle, and following the fortunes of the Manchester United Red Devils and the Duke University Blue Devils. His research interests include the Freud/Jung relationship, psychoanalysis and religion, apophasis and psychoanalysis, Jungian theory, Bion and the philosophy of Deleuze.
He is a member of the BJAA/bpfand also a Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, where he is one of the organisers of the Jung/Lacan Dialogues.
Joanna de Waal
‘Where Does I Stand? Reflections on Home and Identity Ensnared in a Cultural
Narrative.’
de Waal J. (2023). Published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, 68, 4, 706–728.
About this paper
In this paper the author explores a cultural narrative that she suggests rests on the concepts of the Feminine and Masculine as such, employing both as though they contain an agreed set of universal givens. These givens are extrapolated from an androcentric perspective on female and male bodies, in particular their biological functions regarding reproduction. The metaphors of the baby-in-womb, mother’s preoccupation with child and heteronormative sexual relations are the primary cyphers for the narrative. She suggests that remaining unconscious of this narrative, such that it is taken as a universal given, can hamper a person’s relation to themselves, the world and others. The author names two concepts, Home and Identity: Home being an hospitable and accommodating space with Identity denoting the one who inhabits the space. In the narrative these two are unhelpfully categorized as belonging to the Feminine and the Masculine respectively. For ease of understanding the author uses a capital letter to designate an abstract idea, and lower case when referring to the concrete or particular. Clinical examples are given throughout the paper to illustrate how acknowledgement and awareness of this narrative might free the analyst or therapist to think more broadly around issues pertaining to space and identity.
About the author
Joanna de Waal is a member of British Jungian Analytic Association (BJAA) in private practice in Oxford, UK. She teaches on the West Midland Institute of Psychotherapy Jungian analytic training and the BJAA theoretical training programme. She is leading on the development of the new BPF/BJAA Jungian Psychotherapy training. Her qualifying paper won the 2017 Lady Balough Prize at the BPF, and she has given papers at the IVth European Congress (IAAP), 2018 and the XXI International IAAP Conference, 2019. Email: [email protected]
Class
Emilija Kiehl
‘You were not born here, so you are classless, you are free!’
Journal of Analytical Psychology, 61, 4, 465-480
About this paper
The unconscious impact of differences in culture and social class is discussed from the perspective of an analyst practising in London whose ‘foreign accent’ prevents patients from placing her within the social stratifications by which they feel confined. Because she is seen by them as an analyst from both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the British psycho-social fabric and cultural complex, this opens a space in the transference that enables fuller exploration of the impact of the British social class system on patients’ experience of themselves and their world. The paper considers this impact as a transgenerational trauma of living in a society of sharp socio-economic divisions based on material property. This is illustrated with the example of a patient who, at the point of moving towards the career to which he aspired, was unable to separate a sense of personal identity from the social class he so desperately wanted to leave behind and walk the long avenue of individuation. The dearth of literature on the subject of class is considered, and the paper concludes that not enough attention is given to class identification in training.
‘Barbarians at the gate: racism in the shadow of tolerance in the neoliberal cultural complex’
In: ‘The Analyst in the Polis: proceedings from the second conference on analysis and activism-social and political contributions of Jungian psychology’, eds. S. Carta, A. Adorisio & R. Mercurio. Rome: e-book
About the article
In the neoliberal ideology prevalent in the today’s Western societies that see themselves as free, democratic and tolerant, racism is considered a thing of the past – a product of outgrown, primitive beliefs and attitudes on their way out from civilized societies. On the helm of the evolving civilization, the Western liberal leads the way to an ever more progressive society, gaining ever greater moral high ground at every step. A question is, where did the emotions that fueled his past attitudes to the Other go? In this paper, the author briefly re-visits some of the now seen as obsolete views on race in the liberal Western societies and traces them forward to the present time where they continue to serve the same psychological and socio-political purposes as they have always done.
About the author
Emilija’s interest in socio-political and cultural matters goes back to her childhood. Memories of lively discussions among her parents, grand parents and extended family are still vivid, and this aspect of the life of the psyche has been interwoven into her thinking as a Jungian Analyst. Emilija has worked as published translator of works by, e.g.: Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Christopher Lasch, Scott Peck, and others. She is a Senior Member of BJAA/bpf, a former Chair of BJAA & is currently BJAA representative on the Executive Committee of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP).
Race: how do we think about race today? A developing discourse.
Ruth Calland
Race, power and intimacy in the intersubjective field: the intersection of racialised cultural complexes and personal complexes
Calland R. (2019). Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2019, 64, 3, 367–385
About this paper
The unconscious impact of differences in culture and social class is discussed from the perspective of an analyst practising in London whose ‘foreign accent’ prevents patients from placing her within the social stratifications by which they feel confined. Because she is seen by them as an analyst from both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the British psycho-social fabric and cultural complex, this opens a space in the transference that enables fuller exploration of the impact of the British social class system on patients’ experience of themselves and their world. The paper considers this impact as a transgenerational trauma of living in a society of sharp socio-economic divisions based on material property. This is illustrated with the example of a patient who, at the point of moving towards the career to which he aspired, was unable to separate a sense of personal identity from the social class he so desperately wanted to leave behind and walk the long avenue of individuation. The dearth of literature on the subject of class is considered, and the paper concludes that not enough attention is given to class identification in training.
About the author
Ruth Calland is a senior member of the BPF and a Jungian analyst and supervisor working with adults and couples.She was Chair of the BJAA during the pandemic, when she initiated the development of the once-weekly Jungian training. She teaches on the BPF Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Training, is a training analyst, and the Creative Workshops Coordinator for BJAA. She has an interest in the outsider, neurodiversity, queerness and creativity. Her paper ‘Race, power and intimacy in the intersubjective field: the intersection of racialized cultural complexes and personal complexes’ won the Fordham Prize in 2021. She is also a professional artist.
Carol Leader
‘A fundamental change in vision: where black lives matter.’
Leader, C. (2021). Published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology. Vol 66, Issue 3 pp.665-677
About the article
Using the lens of clinical work, the author, a white supervisor, plots her concerns about unconscious racism in the training of a black supervisee. Years later this supervisee brings a distressed black trainee nurse to supervision who is struggling with relational difficulties while suffering from unconscious racism in her hospital. Supervisor and supervisee grapple to offer the patient treatment on both fronts. The author explores the underlying presence of ‘white privilege’ and ‘unconscious racism’ which finds a global audience as a result of the killing of George Floyd – an event which also had implications for the long-term supervisory partnership. Links to Jessica Benjamin’s concept of ‘doer and done to’ are made, as well as discussion of a gradual change of vision in the supervisor herself. The author also makes use of insights gained from consultancy work in a multi-racial company and two Channel 4 UK television programmes that feature workshops on unconscious racism in a mixed secondary school in the London Borough of Sutton.
About the author
Carol Leader is a training and supervising Jungian Analyst and a Senior Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, both with the British Psychotherapy Foundation (Bpf). She is a Fellow of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Association. Before retraining as a psychoanalytic therapist she worked extensively in theatre, TV and radio. Carol is in private practice and writes, lectures, and leads workshops and seminars for several public platforms and professional trainings. In particular she is part of the founding training team for the New Approach to Training (NAT) for the Jungian professional training at the Bpf. She was awarded the British Journal of Psychotherapy’s Roszika Parker prize in 2014 for her paper on William Blake’s visionary insight and its relation to clinical practice.
Jane Johnson
‘Being white, being Jungian: implications of Jung’s encounter with the ‘non-European’ other’
Johnson, J. (2020). Published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, 65:4, pp 707-718.
About this article
This personal account charts the changing relationship to a Jungian identity arising from the interrelated processes of understanding the roots of the colonial and racial ideologies that underpin Jung’s thinking, and a developing awareness of what it means be a white person in a system of racism that maintains white supremacy. This is illustrated with reference to the image of a black man appearing in the dream of the white author and with use of post-Jungian thinking to critique the notion of an objective, non-racial psyche.
‘A review of the Ninth Andrew Samuels lecture for Confederation for Analytical Psychology African American Jungian Analysts – on Culture, Clinical Training / Practice and Racism’
Johnson, J. (2018). Originally commissioned and printed for publication; in New Associations, Issue 27, Winter 2018, The British Psychoanalytic Council
About this review
It was a new, and profoundly stirring experience for the author, as a white person, trained in and belonging to predominately white psychotherapy institutions, to be part of a gathering of around 150 delegates where black and Asian therapists were well represented, and where thinking about, and creative engagement with, the emotive and often painful issues of culture and racism in clinical training and practice was led by black therapists and analysts. This CAP conference, organised by Andrew Samuels and Ruth Williams, addressed important issues for Jungian analysts, but also for all those working in depth psychology, relating to the cultural wound of colonialism and slavery and the implications for therapeutic work if the unconscious transgenerational transmission of this legacy goes unrecognised.
About the author
M.Sc., (UK) is a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst in private practice. She is a senior member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation (BPF) and a training analyst for the British Jungian Analytic Association (BJAA). Her background is in psychodynamic psychotherapy training and teaching, including as a past Jungian director of the M.Sc. Psychodynamics of Human Development (Birkbeck College, London University). She is co-chair of a group that delivers a psycho-social approach to teaching theory in BJAA clinical trainings that engages with colonial, heteronormative and gender biased roots of traditional psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic thinking.
Helen Morgan
‘Between fear and blindness – the white therapist and the black patient’
Morgan, H. (2014). In: Lowe, F. (Ed), Thinking Space: Promoting Thinking About Race, Culture and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Beyond, London: Karnac
About this chapter
This chapter is an attempt by a white psychotherapist to consider issues of racism and how they might impact on the work in the consulting room. There are two main features of this first statement that I want to emphasise by way of introduction. The first is that I intend to explore questions of difference in colour, and not issues of culture. This is not because I believe that matters of cultural differences in the consulting room are not interesting, or that culture and race are not often conflated, but, rather, that there is something so visible, so apparent, and yet so empty about colour that to include a discussion of culture can muddle the debate and take us away from facing some difficult and painful issues. A black patient may come from a culture more similar to my own than a white patient, yet it is the fact of our colours that can provoke primitive internal responses that are hard to acknowledge and face.
‘The Work of Whiteness. A Psychoanalytic Perspective.’
Morgan, H. (2021). Oxford: Routledge
About this book
‘Whiteness’ is a politically constructed category which needs to be understood and dismantled because the system of racism so embedded within our society harms us all. It has profound implications for human psychology, an understanding of which is essential for supporting the movement for change. This book explores these implications from a psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic perspective.
The ‘fragility’ of whiteness, the colour-blind approach and the silencing process of disavowal as they develop in the childhood of white liberal families are considered as means of maintaining white privilege and racism. A critique of the colonial roots of psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung leads to questioning the de-linking of the individual from society in modern day analytic thinking. The concept of the cultural complex is suggested as a useful means of connecting the individual and the social. Examples from the author’s clinical practice as well as from public life are used to illustrate the argument.
Relatively few black people join the psychoanalytic profession and those who do describe training and membership as a difficult and painful process. How racism operates in clinical work, supervision and our institutions is explored, and whilst it can seem an intractable problem, proposals are given for ways forward.
About the author
Helen Morgan is a Jungian analytic training analyst and supervisor, and Fellow of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. Her background is in therapeutic communities with adolescents and in adult mental health. She was Chair of the British Association of Psychotherapists between 2003 and 2007, and Chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council between 2015 and 2018. She has published a number of papers, including several on racism.
Johnson, J. (2020) Being white, being Jungian: implications of Jung’s encounter with the ‘non-European’ other. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 65:4, pp 707-718.
Helen Morgan & Fanny Brewster
‘Racial Legacies. Jung, Politics and Culture’
Published on the British Psychotherapy Foundation website.
About this book
This 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.
Jane Johnson & Helen Morgan
‘Jung & Racism’
Published on the British Psychotherapy Foundation website.
About this paper
During 2013-15 a number of BJAA members came together to share concerns and work on their responses to the issues raised in a paper written in 1988 by Farhad Dalal entitled Jung: A Racist, published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. The work of a small reading group was presented to a larger meeting of around 25 members where participants engaged with their personal responses to Dalal’s challenge, and where they also discussed the implications for clinical work and training.
The research and thinking done during this period are summarised in an article ‘Jung and Racism’ by Jane Johnson and Helen Morgan. The article (with 2018 revisions to take account of developing theory) is an introduction to the significant questions for Jungians in relation to the racism in Jung’s writing and to the way post-Jungians have thought about this. It also outlines developments in Jungian theory that contribute to understanding the phenomenon of racism.
Complex Mental Health Conditions
Ruth Calland
‘Facilitating the Emergence of Hidden Dissociative Identity Disorder: Finding the Lost Maiden Medusa’
Calland, R. (2022). Published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology 67:73-87.
About this paper
This paper uses the myth of Medusa as a containing narrative to explore the aetiology, recognition and treatment of emergent dissociative identity disorder or DID, in apparently high-functioning people. Both the ‘hiding’ nature of DID, and disbelief in therapists are identified as impediments to recognition of the disorder, despite the high prevalence of DID. The paper describes the impact on psycho-neurobiological development of both disorganized attachment and group sexual abuse at a young age, both typically present for DID survivors, leading to multiple ego centres in the psyche. DID is perceived as a creative protective mechanism against knowing, that also seals the abuse survivor into a lifetime of fractured self-experience, and exile from relational depth with others. Two case studies illuminate a key feature of DID, the existence of lost but ever-present child selves/alters, and how these may present within the therapeutic relationship. The author supports the facilitation by the analyst of self-diagnosis and describes how careful attunement to inner turmoil and confusion, can act as a containing mirror within which to discern the individual needs of a multiplicity of selves/alters, leading to increased self-agency, internal co-consciousness and the ability to function more authentically with others.
About the author
Ruth Calland is a senior member of the BPF and a Jungian analyst and supervisor working with adults and couples.She was Chair of the BJAA during the pandemic, when she initiated the development of the once-weekly Jungian training. She teaches on the BPF Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Training, is a training analyst, and the Creative Workshops Coordinator for BJAA. She has an interest in the outsider, neurodiversity, queerness and creativity. Her paper ‘Race, power and intimacy in the intersubjective field: the intersection of racialized cultural complexes and personal complexes’ won the Fordham Prize in 2021. She is also a professional artist.