This article was downloaded by: [University of Cambridge]

On: 23 October 2014, At: 07:33

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:
Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The San Francisco Jung Institute Library

Journal
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription
information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uzju20

Cultures of Violence: Trauma, Healing, and

Transformation
Brian Feldman
Published online: 18 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Brian Feldman (2004) Cultures of Violence: Trauma, Healing, and Transformation, The San
Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 23:2, 27-36

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jung.1.2004.23.2.27

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)
contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our
licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication
are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &
Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently
verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial
or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use
can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
 The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 2004, vol. 23, no. 2, 27–36.

Cultures of Violence: Trauma,

Healing, and Transformation

John Beebe, ed., Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy:

Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

Perspectives from Analytical Psychology, Papers from the 2002

North American Conference of Jungian Analysts and Candidates,
Einsiedeln, Switzerland, Daimon Verlag, 2003.

Reviewed by Brian Feldman

The collected papers from the 2002 North American Jun-

gian Congress form a rich ensemble of texts that help to give
meaning to the epidemic of violence and destruction that has
taken a firm grip not only upon world culture on a collective level,
but also upon the conscious and unconscious lives of the indi-
vidual. The contributors to the conference have cast their particu-
lar Jungian-oriented lens upon the collective and individual roots
and repercussions of this addiction to violence and destruction.
Is it all part of the human condition, part of a destructive death
instinct that Freud countered to eros, the drive towards life,
creation, and connection? Or is it part of what Jungians would
call the shadow, with its personal and archetypal components—
the personal aspects being experienced as the darker sides of
aggression and sexuality, with their potential to evoke feelings of
terror, violence and the impulse to destroy; and their collective
component experienced as a possession by an evil destructive force
often represented as the devil? In reading this collection of essays,
I was emotionally affected and impressed in an ongoing way by
the courage to present clinical material that is both raw and
visceral in the descriptions of emotional trauma and abuse, and
by the attempts to make meaning out of the often chaotic and
painful dialogues that take place between analyst and analysand.
I became a Jungian because I felt that the process of finding
meanings in life is not only a major developmental task, but also

27-36.p65 27 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 28 Brian Feldman

a primary component of human existence. I have been struck by

how both contemporary infant research and neuroscience re-
search1 support this belief that the major motivating force within
the individual is a striving towards wholeness and coherence, and
that the brain is constantly trying to put it all together. This all
takes place within the context of our primary relationships, as well
as within the context of our particular culture. Symbols form the
language of our cultural heritage and are the mode through which
culture is transmitted, and it is our interpretation of these sym-
bolic interchanges and symbols in both their individual and
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

collective contexts that forms the underlying and deeper structure

of this book.
The essays in the book can be grouped into three general
areas, and I think that discussing the contributions in this way
will add some coherence as well as texture to the topics covered.
The first area is more purely theoretical and offers some important
expansions upon, and exploration of, a Jungian theory of violence
and aggression at both the personal and cultural levels. The essays
by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, John Dourley (with a response by
Beverley Zabriskie), Thomas Singer, and Sam Kimbles fit into this
category. Then there are essays that masterfully utilize clinical
material from adult analyses to illustrate some important theoreti-
cal concepts, presented by Jacqueline Gerson, Mary Dougherty,
and Sherry Salman. These essays are helpful in understanding how
Jungian theoretical concepts can be utilized pragmatically in clini-
cal analytic practice to enhance our understanding of working
with severely traumatized analysands. The third area is one that
I would call applied analysis, where analytic concepts are utilized
to gain an enriched understanding of literature, religion, poetry,
music, and the history of analytical psychology, in this case Jung’s
relationship with Sabina Spielrien. These essays were sensitively
written by Arthur Colman, Arlene TePaske Landau, Naomi Ruth
Lowinsky, Brian Skea, and Judith Hecker. As a group they offer
an interesting and compelling contemporary Jungian view of
culture in its broadest sense. These authors grapple with and
interpret culture, and engage in a kind of trafficking in symbols.
They form a language in which we can hope better to understand
creative genius and the voices that can potentially integrate both
the personal and collective levels of experience, and through this
expression offer to us a deeper understanding of ourselves. This

27-36.p65 28 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 John Beebe, ed., Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy 29

is, I think, what all great art can offer us, and in part it explains
why we experience a hunger for the aesthetic experience. Virginia
Woolf used to call this interpenetration of the personal and the
collective ‘moments of being,’ a phrase which I think poetically
describes the profound impact that creative processes can have
upon us.
The first of the theoretical essays, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés,
entitled “Explaining Evil,” offers useful insights into the explo-
ration of curanderismo, a mixture of Spanish and Indigenous
American healing practices that have had a deep personal as well
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

as professional meaning for Pinkola Estés. She describes poetically

a pantheon of symbolic figures that give meaning and texture to
this healing practice, which is a strong force in Latin American
culture. Symbolic figures such as the guerreros, the warrior sen-
tinels who strive for consciousness, provide strength to the
emotionally depleted or confused individual when mediated
through the charismatic/healing power of the curandero. Other
prominent symbolic figures are los testigos, the witnesses who
evolve a narrative. Los testigos stand up to evil and speak; they give
the legitimacy of voice to the individual and help him/her to
create a meaning out of the confusion that can result from vio-
lations and abuses. Pinkola Estés’s description of these abuses at
both the personal and collective level are emotionally moving.
The creation of un cuento sagrado, a sacred story, can provide a
symbolic container for the numinous, for mystery, and for the
transformation of la lucha, the struggle, from the personal to the
transpersonal/collective levels. This provides a powerful structure
for the emergence of self, for the emergence of coherent meaning,
and for the emergence of moments of being that help to give
shape to identity and a capacity for agency in the world. In my
practice with Latin American clients I have witnessed the power
of the curandero tradition and how it is linked generationally to
the ancestral past. I have found it common that traditional forms
of psychotherapy can be utilized and co-exist alongside curandero
practices. In Brazil there is a saying that Brazilians, regardless of
their ethnic heritage, may go to Catholic church on Sunday and
to Macumba/Umbanda (Afro-Brazilian indigenous healing)
ceremonies on Monday without any conflict. In fact, my sense
is that there is a strong need to have both practices present, and
my observations at the last Latin American Congress of Jungian

27-36.p65 29 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 30 Brian Feldman

Psychology held in Salvador do Bahia was that the native healing

of Macumba/Umbanda reaches to and touches aspects of the
Brazilian psyche/soul that the Brazilian form of Catholicism does
not quite touch. Sensitivity to these practices as elemental aspects
of the Latino psyche can help non-Latins better understand the
Latino other and themselves. Pinkola Estés talks in a poetic voice
of the dark experience of evil and of the potential for healing that
curanderismo can offer, and with her depth of understanding she
offers us a view into the psyche/soul of the Latino.
Thomas Singer’s essay “Cultural Complexes and Archetypal
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

Defenses of the Group Spirit” and Sam Kimbles’ essay on “Cul-

tural Complexes and Collective Shadow Processes” develop the
concepts of the cultural unconscious and the cultural complex to
help understand the structuring of emotional experience at both
the personal and group level. Kimbles’ elaboration of the cultural
complex is particularly significant as he relates the development
of a group identity to the shared experience of a cultural complex.
According to Kimbles the cultural complex organizes and gen-
erates in-group feelings of belonging and identity, and it is a
product of the conscious and unconscious accumulation of nega-
tive and positive group feeings and experiences. Singer integrates
Jung’s theory of complexes with Henderson’s theory of the
cultural unconscious.2 For Henderson the cultural level of the
psyche, the cultural unconscious, exists as a third area alongside
the personal and collective aspects of the psyche. Cultural com-
plexes, according to Singer, are based on the repetitive, historical
experiences that have taken root in the collective psyche of a
group and in the psyches of the individual members of a group,
and they also express the archetypal values of the group. Singer
builds on Kalsched’s seminal work on archetypal defenses of the
personal spirit,3 especially with the concept of the daimons, the
protective warriors who provide safety and the illusion of security.
According to Singer, when the spirit of the group is injured the
daimons, or archetypal defenses of the group spirit, can easily be
embodied as suicide bombers or terrorists, or emerge within our
culture in the guise of figures such as Ashcroft and Rumsfeld.
They can be seen as protecting the sacred, but endangered, value
of the group self. Singer and Kimbles provide interesting insights
into the uses of violence and aggression as archetypal defenses that
give the illusion of self/group cohesiveness. I think Fordham’s

27-36.p65 30 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 John Beebe, ed., Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy 31

concept of defenses of the self can also be of use in understanding

the extreme measures both individuals and groups utilize to
preserve an experience of an intact self that is in danger of being
annihilated by a dark and potentially violent other. Perhaps an
interchange with the developmental Jungian approach would help
to expand our understanding of the use of these desperate defense
mechanisms.
John Dourley’s article “Archetypal Hatred as a Social Bond:
Strategies for Its Dissolution” offers a view of Jungian social
psychology. He feels that social processes of archetypal bonding
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

are expressed formally in lasting cultural achievements. The

bonding has a double effect according to Dourley: it legitimates
the society’s supremacy among societies, and in so doing it grounds
that society’s latent hatred of differently bonded societies. Dourley
cites Jung’s conviction that such social bonding lowers the con-
sciousness of those bonded in direct proportion to the power of
the social bonds. The greater the commitment such bonding
forges, the lesser the individual consciousness of the bonded. With
the lowering of collective consciousness comes an inevitable low-
ering of the moral responsibility of the group, and also of the
individual in the group. Dourley explores Jung’s use of Levy-
Bruhl’s concept of participation mystique, which he describes as
a feeling of the individual’s identity being experienced as continu-
ous with the surrounding world of nature and of the human
community. This is a state of mind that Levy-Bruhl observed was
prevalent in ‘primitive’ societies. Dourley also explores Levy-
Bruhl’s concept of representations collectives, the symbols that
shape social cohesion. At times they represent the psychic equiva-
lent of a magical salvation to contemporary societies under the
guise of religious and political ideologies. Dourley explores how
archetypal hatred is the shadow side of archetypal faith, and how
cultures and societies achieve self-affirmation through the cohe-
sion provided by the hatred of an evil other. These explorations
into the dark side of social bonding leads Dourley to postulate
that at the societal level, the murderous side of the collective faith
needs to be faced without flinching. He is not quite clear how
this can happen, but I would be eager to hear more about his
hypotheses. Beverley Zabriskie’s contextualization of Dourley’s
thesis in current neuroscience research helps to see how brain,
individual and culture all interact with each other in inextricable

27-36.p65 31 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 32 Brian Feldman

ways. Overall, there is much richness in these theoretical papers

that deserve careful pondering.
The clinical papers by Jacqueline Gerson, Mary Dougherty,
and Sherry Salman help to fill out the clinical relevance of the
theoretical ideas with which these Jungian analysts are grappling.
Gerson, in her paper “Kidnapping: Latin America’s Terror,” with
a great deal of sensitivity and with an interesting description of
her own personal experiences, describes the terror of kidnapping
in contemporary Mexico. The vivid description of the pleasure the
kidnappers take in accomplishing the kidnapping and how they
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

are psychologically fed by the knowledge that they possess the

other is chilling. She masterfully integrates the symbolism of
kidnapping with the major Mesoamerican myth of Quetzalcoatl,
the mythic hero who brings culture, astrology, agriculture and
writing to Mexico. Quetzalcoatl, the victim of an aggressive
brother, Tezcatlipoca, who, out of sibling rivalry seeks to discredit
him, gets him drunk, and in his drunken stupor Quetzalcoatl
rapes his own sister. This transgression leads to Quetzalcoatl’s
banishment from Mexico. He is forced to abandon his people,
though promising to come back at a specified time, the very year
when Cortes and the Spanish arrive. This is an important
synchronicity, which leads to the downfall of the Aztec empire
and the violation and devastation of their rich culture, a catas-
trophe, according to Octavio Paz, that is the most significant
aspect in the cultural identity of Mexico. Analtyic work with two
female clients gives a clinical depth to Gerson’s cultural analysis.
Mary Dougherty’s paper “Escape/No Escape: The Persis-
tence of Terror in the Lives of Two Women” integrates in an
evocative manner the work of Renos Papadopoulos on therapeutic
witnessing, a process that empowers abuse victims to develop new
narratives within which their experiences of abuse and torture can
acquire meaning. With the help of a supportive analytic frame-
work the exploration of significant abuse is possible and the frozen
narratives related to the abuse can become unfrozen and facilitate
the passing beyond emotional impasse. Dougherty looks carefully
at significant points in the analyses of two women who struggled
in long analyses to free their core selves from the effects of abuse,
violence and terror. She tries to help these women find their own
voices in the face of violence, and to help them to understand
their experience of trauma as both tragic and rooted in cultural

27-36.p65 32 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 John Beebe, ed., Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy 33

history, rather than seeking to interpret their symptomatic re-

sponses as evidence of psychopathology. In her clinical descrip-
tions Dougherty interweaves both the personal developmental
traumas these women experienced within the matrix of their
primary relationships, and the abuse and actual torture they ex-
perienced as a result of social violence and terror under the
repressive and violent regimes in their native countries.
Dougherty feels that these political contexts reinforced the hold
of the original complexes on her analysands’ psyches. These
women each exhibited a clinging, anxious attachment to their
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

victim status, which constellated a psychology of grievance,

leading to attacks on the perceived goodness/creativity within
themselves and others. Dougherty’s analytic work over many years
shows how difficult it is to give up self-destructive, defensive self-
care systems that protect against feelings of extreme fragility and
loss of self. She also explores how important it is to work with
the transference/countertransference relationship with these
clients, so that the diabolical self-care system can be humanized
and potentially transformed.
Sherry Salman’s article “Blood Payments” looks at the
archetypal underpinnings of vengeful affects and how they can
emerge full-blown in analysis. She speaks of analysands with severe
pathologies who relentlessly cry out for the validation of their
experiences of early wounds and betrayals, and who insist on
vindication and retribution. She feels that blood payment of some
sort must be made for the violation of the integrity and natural
order of the early world of the analysand. She sees this blood as
often exacted from the analyst through what she describes as
“sacrificial dramas such as projective identification.” She feels that
“without this retributive justice, there can be no willing freedom
on the patient’s part to descend into the symbolic dialogue of
interpretation, there is only relentless fury, acted-out or
introjected in a psychological jihad.”4 Salman wants to give venge-
ful, retaliatory affects a place in Jungian analysis, and wants to give
these affects the “dignity they deserve.” From an archetypal
perspective she amplifies the symbol of the Furies, who in Greek
mythology are symbolized as being three sisters, winged and
whip-wielding, with serpent-filled hair and deadly claws, beastly
predators when enraged, who lived in the region just before the
gates of Hades, the region reserved for those souls who

27-36.p65 33 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 34 Brian Feldman

committed terrible offenses. The Furies certainly evoke terror, and

it is terror that Salman’s deeply traumatized analysand evokes with
her bitter and angry outbursts and attacks upon the analysis and
the analytic relationship. Salman courageously and patiently works
with this client and finds that through her own suffering with the
client, and the creation of a secure space where the terror and
violence can be experienced, that the Furies can be given their
due. There are important lessons to be learned from her steadfast
commitment to the work.
The papers dealing with applied analysis are moving narra-
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

tives about culture. Colman’s “Music and the Psychology of

Pacifism: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem” offers interesting
insights into Britten’s struggles with both his homosexuality and
his pacifism, and a deep reading of Britten’s War Requiem. Arlene
Te Paske Landau’s study “The Impulse to Destroy in Thomas
Hardy’s Jude the Obscure” is a profound Jungian interpretation
of Hardy’s classic novel that she discusses alongside her own
profound experiences of violence and loss. Judith Hecker looks
at the Islamic point of view in her captivating paper “A View from
the Islamic Side: Terror, Violence and Transformation in the Life
of an Eleventh Century Muslim.” Hecker, originally an Israeli,
has done graduate work in the area of Islamic culture and writes
a probing analysis of the spiritual autobiography of an Islamic
sage, al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali, an influential writer in the history
of Islam, was a prominent jurist and theologian, and in his later
years an important Islamic mystic. Hecker offers a careful reading
of his autobiography with an emphasis on his midlife crisis, which
led him towards mystical Islam. She looks at Islam as the other,
viewed as the cultural shadow of Judeo-Christian culture. Hecker
writes of Jung’s fascination with Islam, and his dreams of the
Kasba that indicated to him the position of the Arab as shadow
for the Westerner; but Jung placed him not as a personal shadow,
but as an ethnic-cultural shadow, which for Jung signified the
shadow of the Self. Hecker has a deep appreciation for Islamic
culture and brings to our awareness the passionate and intense
writings of Islamic alchemy, apparently greatly appreciated by
Marie Louise von Franz. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s article on the
personal impact of the Jewish Holocaust and the poetry of
Holocaust survivors is a profound evocation of a creativity that
breathes next to destruction. She presents in a most moving way

27-36.p65 34 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 John Beebe, ed., Terror, Violence and the Impulse to Destroy 35

how the generational transmission of the Holocaust affects the

survivors as well as the next generation in both creative and
destructive ways. Brian Skea’s article “Jung, Spielrein and Nash:
Three Beautiful Minds Confronting the Impulse to Love or to
Destroy in the Creative Process” offers a new reading of the
Jung/Spielrein affair. Skea views their relationship as a coniunctio
gone wrong. He sees psychosis or suicide as possible outcomes
of a failed inner coniunctio, and that betrayal, manipulation, or
abandonment can represent an outer coniunctio gone awry. He
believes that Jung, Spielrein and Nash (a Nobel Prize winner) all
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

demonstrate the relationship between creative genius and the risk

of madness. Even if we question grouping these three figures
together in this manner, Skea demonstrates with considerable skill
and conviction how we need to understand the destructive ele-
ments, or shadow side of the coniunctio. Skea perceptively notes
that the constellation of the Jungian Self through the archetype
of the coniunctio does not always imply union and wholeness, but
also disunion, fragmentation and destruction. The beautiful
minds that Skea refers to contain within themselves the predis-
position to psychotic breakdown and the potential for self-healing
that Jung, Spielrein and Nash shared. Skea offers a new reading
of these three creative individuals, but I also think that their
differences may outweigh their similarities.
For those who were able to attend this important conference
these papers will reawaken you to the depth of their insight, and,
to those who did not attend, they offer a chance to begin to
engage in a dialogue with some truly creative Jungian analysts.
John Beebe has done a wonderful and beautiful job in editing the
manuscripts and bringing them all together in this important
contribution to Jungian psychology. I feel a great debt of grati-
tude to him and to the contributors for their generosity of spirit
and hard work.

ENDNOTES
1
Brian Feldman, “Encountering Otherness: Anthropological, Develop-
mental and Clinical Dimensions,” in Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice,
Vol. 5, 2004, 23–39.
2
Joseph L. Henderson, Cultural Attitudes in Psychological Perspective,
Toronto, Inner City Books, 1990.
3
Donald Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma; Archetypal Defenses of
the Personal Spirit, London and New York, Routledge, 1996.
4
Sherry Salman, “Blood Payments,” in Beebe, ed., 237.

27-36.p65 35 4/6/04, 10:48 AM

 36 Brian Feldman

ABSTRACT: The collected papers from the 2002 North American

Conference of Jungian Analysts and Candidates are reviewed and
commented upon. The papers presented at the conference can be
grouped into three areas: theoretical papers, clinical papers and
papers focusing on applied analysis. The theoretical papers explore
curanderismo and Indigenous American healing practices, cultural
complexes and the cultural unconscious, and the social psychology
of archetypal hatred. The clinical papers explore the implications
for individual development and analytic treatment of severe psychic
and physical trauma. The clinical presentations focus on the impact
of kidnapping in Latin America, the psychological ramifications of
prolonged exposure to abuse, violence and terror in the cases of
two women analysands, and the complexities of the transference/
countertransference relationship that emerge in the treatment of
an analysand who presented with severe infantile and childhood
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 07:33 23 October 2014

trauma. Papers in the area of applied analysis explore the history

of analytical psychology, the music of Benjamin Britten, the per-
sonal impact of the Jewish Holocaust and the poetry of Holocaust
survivors, Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, and Islamic
mysticism as viewed through the life of the eleventh century sage
al-Ghazali.

KEYWORDS: abuse; Britten; complexes, cultural; curanderismo;

Hardy; hatred; Holocaust; Indigenous Americans; Islam; kidnap-
ping; terrorism; trauma; violence.

27-36.p65 36 4/6/04, 10:48 AM