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Phantom Narratives
Phantom Narratives
The Unseen Contributions
of Culture to Psyche
Samuel Kimbles
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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Copyright © 2014 by Rowman & Littlefield
The chapter 3 epigraph and text thoroughout chapters 2 and 3 are from Gem of the Ocean,
by August Wilson. Copyright © 2003, 2006 by August Wilson. Published by Theatre
Communications Group. Used by permission of Theatre Communications Group.
Parts of chapter 2 are from Two Trains Running, by August Wilson, copyright © 1992 by
August Wilson. Used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
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Kimbles, Samuel L.
Phantom narratives : the unseen contributions of culture to psyche / Samuel Kimbles.
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ISBN 978-1-4422-3189-4 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4422-3190-0 (electronic)
1. Intergroup relations. 2. Social psychology. 3. Jungian psychology. 4. Personality and culture. I.
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To my muse Sara
Epigraph
FROM JUNG’S COMPLEX THEORY TO CULTURAL COMPLEX
THEORY AND PHANTOM NARRATIVES
The following is a summary of “Interview with a Phantom: Cornelius Gurlitt Shares His
Secrets,” by Õzlem Gezer, which appeared November 17, 2013, in the online version of
Spiegel magazine.
The reclusive, eighty-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt hoarded art treasures his father obtained
under dubious circumstances during the Nazi era. In February 2012, customs investigators
and officials marched into his apartment and carried away over 1,000 works of art—a
“treasure trove” (Gezer, 2013). They left nothing behind. Taken were paintings and draw-
ings by Max Liebermann, Marc Chagall, Max Beckman, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, and
Henri Matisse. The collection apparently came from the estate of his father, Hildebrand,
“an art critic, museum director, and art dealer who died in 1956, one of the men who
established modern art in Germany and, after 1933, did business with the Nazis” (Gezer,
2013). A question is whether Hildebrand Gurlitt wrongfully obtained the paintings and/or
does the artwork belong to the son. “For decades, Gurlitt had unpacked the artwork each
evening to admire them. Now they were gone and Gurlitt was alone” (Gezer, 2013).
Living in isolation, his apartment was his world. “He spoke to his paintings. They were
his friends, the loyal companions that didn’t exist in his real life. He considered it is his
life’s mission to protect his father’s treasure, and over the decades he lost touch with
reality” (Gezer, 2013, “What do these people want from me?”). Like his father he was
protecting and saving the artwork from the dangers of others. He claims to have had
nothing to do with acquiring the artwork, only with protecting it.
He was visited by a woman from a counseling service, while outside his apartment the
world press gathered and strangers knocked on his door. “He does not understand what
people want from him” (Gezer, 2013, “There is nothing I have loved more”). He sees
himself, like his father, as the protector of the paintings—a hero. His father had protected
them against bombs, being burned, from the Russians, the Americans. Gurlitt references
Hitler and the Nazi Party. He “seems trapped in another time” (Gezer, 2013, “Fatal
misfortune”) and compares his plight to Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony.” He lived
with his parents, and then his sister, and finally his mother. His sister died last year. “Yet
no matter where Cornelius lived, he remained a phantom” (Gezer, 2013, “Growing up
with paintings”). “‘When I’m dead, they can do with them what they want.’ But until then
he wants to have them for himself, then he will finally have a bit of peace and quiet again”
(Gezer, 2013, “I’ve really missed the paintings”).
COMMENTARY
This story speaks to what can happen through self-alienation from both the perceived and
social world of others as well as the internal world. Thus, something familiar (living
alone) has become unfamiliar and excites the feeling of the strange. Yet, enfolded in this
odd little story are a host of cultural issues and history that the unconscious is presenting
through this magazine narrative of Cornelius Gurlitt. We can feel the effect of this back-
ground phantom narrative through the description of this man’s life that is not just person-
al but collective and cultural: the conflict between past and present, individual and cultu-
ral narrative, the absent presence of a moving and dead history simultaneously, individual
and group trauma, haunting and longing, a violent past of suffering and outrage, a close-
ness to a cultural trauma that’s not experienced and/or acknowledged—I imagine there is
little interior life; instead, there is a void. His narrative is simple and superficial. Thinking
and processing symbolically seem to have collapsed and/or never developed. Even though
Gurlitt defines his trauma in terms of the traumatic loss of his artwork, his life’s fabric had
been knitted together by undigested personal and social facts (persecution, loss, disap-
pointment); enclosed and cut off from others he has become a phantom. His attachment to
the artwork provided protection against a nameless dread. Ghosts present themselves as a
way of being present through, representing an absence and a certain way of going on
being. This book is an exploration of the many manifestations of phantom narratives
through cultural complexes—that invite us to look at the impacts of culture on psyche.
Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xv
1 From Jung’s Complex Theory to Cultural Complex Theory and
Phantom Narratives 1
2 Phantom Narratives Unseen but Present: Background 15
3 Phantoms Travel: The Journey to Africa—Cultural Melancholia
in Black and White 45
4 Cultural Complexes and Collective Shadow Processes 51
5 Cultural Complexes and the Transmission of Group Traumas in
Everyday Life 67
6 Social Suffering Through Cultural Mourning, Cultural
Melancholia, and Cultural Complexes 79
7 A Cultural Complex Operating in the Overlap of Clinical and
Cultural Space 91
8 Chaos and Fragmentation in Analytic Training Institutes 105
Bibliography 113
Index 119
About the Author 127
ix
Preface
Groups, their activities, differences, and excitements stirred my awareness in
youth. Observing my family setting and its relationship to the surrounding
culture, then in the schoolyard and in society with its many cultural process-
es, I could see that there was many ways we were entangled in-group life. Its
conflicts, confusions, struggles to belong, are burdened by the dark shadows
of fear, anxiety, desire, and suffering the group dragon that threatens to
swallow us up and spit us out. And I wondered about the potential for
transformation in group life. Later, I was drawn to participating in groups as
a trainee, leader and finally as teacher, trainer, and researcher. These pulls
lead me into the study of psychology with a big question: What can psychol-
ogy offer to the study of groups, institutions, and cultural life? As I pro-
ceeded with my analytical training I became convinced not only of the exis-
tence of the unconscious,but that the study of the unconscious activity in
group life can shed understanding of group and societal life that was essential
for change. As I consulted to organizations, participated in training groups,
leading groups, attending to societal processes I came convinced that con-
sciousness of the manifestation of the unconscious at the level of the group
could open up the potential for change at the level of the group. Cultural
complexes represented through cultural phantoms are ways of thinking about
some of the unconscious dynamics of the major activities of groups that
operate in our lives. For me this recognition became something of a via
longissima—a long meditation through engagement. This mediation and its
narrative is what I share in this book—previously as application of cultural
complexes and currently as the images and presences of what I call cultural
phantoms in group life. By reading the changing roles of social organiza-
tions, political processes, practicing ideologies we can witness how the forms
of our subjectivities change and shape our participation in group life. We are
xi
Bruno
Realce
xii Preface
better able to see the effect on our subjectivities on our participation in this
autonomous context call the unconscious at the level of the group. Hopefully
the concept of cultural complex and its representations through cultural phan-
toms can contribute to the development of a psychological change in group
life.
Acknowledgments
Previous versions of the papers in this volume were published in the follow-
ing journals and books listed below.
Daimon Verlag, “Cultural Complexes and Collective Shadow Processes,”
2003.
Spring Journal, “Social Suffering through Cultural Mourning, Cultural
Melancholia, and Cultural Complexes,” 2007.
Psychological Perspective Journal, “Transmission of Group Trauma in
Everyday Life,” 2006.
Routledge Publishing, “A Cultural Complex Operating in the Overlap of
Clinical and Cultural Space,” 2004.
Permission to quote from August Wilson’s, Gem of the Ocean. Theatre
Communications Group.
Permission to quote from August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Penguin,
1992.
My gratitude for the ongoing support of John Beebe and Tom Ogden for
their invaluable comments and feedback on the book at the various stages of
its development.
I acknowledge my colleague, Suzy Spradlin, with whom, through our
work together on groups, many thoughts and ideas have emerged that have
contributed to my understanding the unconscious life of groups.
I acknowledge the contributions of my colleague Tom Singer to the con-
cept of Cultural Complex and his ongoing work in this area.
I appreciate the support of the members of the Jungian who through their
embrace of the concept of cultural complexes have made their own contribu-
tion to its development.
I am also grateful to Maury Lapp for his granting permission to use the
image of his painting on the cover of this book.
xiii
Introduction
In this book, I briefly review Jung’s theory of complexes and its relationship
to the theory of cultural complexes. I also apply the concept of cultural
complexes by looking at such topics as cultural shadows and collective vio-
lence, the intergenerational transmission of group traumas, and the way gen-
erational complexes can lead to shared social suffering. These topics all share
in common the way cultural complexes bundle psychological themes of be-
longing, identity, identification, shadow, boundaries, identity politics, other-
ness politics, and the universal striving for recognition. In addition, such
moral constructs as good/bad, dirty/clean, pure/impure, responsible/irrespon-
sible are shown to enter the superego of collective consciousness through
their ability to link fear with fascination, possessiveness with disavowal,
shame with entitlement, and narcissism with empathy. My basic argument is
that we are all acculturated through attitudes that are absorbed into our no-
tions of self and other long before we are conscious of these attitudes as
factors that have shaped the way we hold ourselves in the world. As a
consequence, they tend to operate unconsciously, deciding for us, more than
we realize, who we experience ourselves as being and who is different from
us. These complex processes become “psychically charged and volatile”
when they become the self-experience of individuals (Odajnyk, 1976, p. 36).
Their origin, however, lies in the particular gods of our cultures, which is
one way to look at how imperative our cultural complexes can be. As Jung
noted, “Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme
with -ism” (1953/1977, para. 326). Recognizing that some events are just as
powerful as gods in shaping a complex response that will last for generations,
Jung also noted how little record we keep at a conscious level as to what,
exactly, fired us up to keep discharging the same complex response—long
after the facts of the matter have disappeared from memory: “For the true
xv
xvi Introduction
historical event lies deeply buried, experienced by all and observed by none.
It is the most private and most subjective of psychic experiences” (1931/
1970, para. 315).
My point, however, is not to lament this fact of human nature, but rather
to open it to critical inquiry. I have found that cultural complex awareness
and analysis can permit us to explore with a measure of dispassion “the most
private and most subjective of psychic experiences” of intergenerational
complexes, those tangled mixtures of individual, group, and cultural/psychic
processes. This is not possible, of course, until we realize that cultural com-
plexes constitute a narrative structure of images, behavior, and rituals, which
generate what I would like to call phantom narratives. Phantom narratives
are reflected in what is thought of as a dead past, but is “a structure of feeling
[that] gives notice to the necessarily social nature of what we call the subjec-
tive; it gives notice to the texture and skin of the this, here, now, alive, active
contemporaneity of our lives” (Gordon, 2008, p. 199).
In my exploration of the themes associated with cultural complexes, I use
a theoretical lens to frame what I have developed in my experiences in
working with and consulting for groups and institutions and through forms of
collective consciousness that are regulated by cultural complexes. My expe-
riences also come from living in a world in which the usual approaches to
differences of all sort are fraught with extremes of identification, with ideolo-
gies that survive through their ability to enable collective consciousness to
get away with blatantly scapegoating others. To be human is still, in other
words, to show our fear of other humans and our deep ambivalence of their
right to be at all.
Several of the chapters included in this book were originally written for
oral presentation in places around the world where, for over a decade, I have
experienced a strong welcome for this sort of Jungian analysis. Although
most of the chapters have had little difficulty being integrated into the sum-
mary statement of where I want to go to in this book, I am aware that there is,
inevitably, overlap and repetition among them—especially as I demonstrate a
continuous need to keep defining the concept of cultural complex lest it lose
its power to explicate what it was designed to comprehend. I urge the reader
to attend to the different ways it is possible to make use of this concept in
looking at such areas as intergenerational transmission of cultural attitudes
and complexes, collective shadow processes, social suffering, and the other
disturbances in the human condition that make volumes like this necessary.
I believe that the danger of blurring the concept into a generalization about
conscious group processes is counteracted by the repeated reference I will
make to the fact that what I am talking about are the phantom narratives that
inform the more conscious processes that sociologists and social psycholo-gists have already brought to our attention without the need to enlist the help
of depth psychologists. What I am adding, I hope, to what these cultural
Introduction xvii
thinkers of the past century were able to tell us, is an integration of what we
can infer at this point about the unconscious aspect of group life. As Jessica
Benjamin said, “When we recognize the outside other as a separate and
equivalent center of subjectivity, that other becomes for us, a ‘like subject’”
(1995, p. 7). We can, in other words, liken group complexes to the complexes
we have learned about in ourselves in the first full century of Jungian
psychotherapy. I believe my own experience as both analyst and analytic
patient reflecting upon my own complexes helps me to recognize and empa-
thize with the same types of unconsciousness that appear in groups, in ways
both insidious and controlling of how we see everything and everyone else.
Chapter One
From Jung’s Complex Theory
to Cultural Complex Theory
and Phantom Narratives
The Ariadne thread running through this book starts with Jung’s theory of
complexes, passes through the synthetic idea of the cultural complex, and
introduces the idea of the phantom narrative. The phantom narrative is my
attempt to convey that which is brought to life—both as image and activity,
affect and meaning—through the activity of the unconscious at the level of
the group. Woven through the background of this thread I see Jung’s early
idea of splinter psyches, in which “energy, possesses a value that exceeds
that of our conscious intentions” (Jung, 1934/1954, para. 203); the work of
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1994) who, in their studies of secrets in
families, developed a theory of the transgenerational phantom; as well as
Wilfred Bion’s Experiences in Groups (1961/1983) and Avery Gordon’s idea
of the “ensemble of social relations that create . . . particular kinds of sub-
jects, and the possible and the impossible themselves” (2008, p. 4). Some of
the more recent attempts to speak about group claims on individuals can be
seen in the work of Richard Kradin, (2012), Samuel Gerson, (2009), and
Angela Connolly (2011). Although these clinicians do not speak directly
about the unconscious at the level of the group or of a group archetype, in
their writings aspects of group experience expressed at the level of the fami-
ly, sibling, organization, or culture provide powerful contexts for exploring
both individual development and the development of group consciousness
(Coleman, 1995).
Starting with Jung’s theory of complexes, I weave the thread into cultural
complexes that represent a continuation of my attempts at further elaboration
of and contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of the unconscious
1
2 Chapter 1
at the group and cultural level. In particular, I focus on how groups function
to provide a context for our need to belong, have an identity, and to be
recognized. In addition, I look at how our very needs for belonging, identity
(identification), and recognition, as organized by our cultural complexes,
contribute to cultural conflicts expressed through shadow dynamics while
generating social suffering.
In the section that follows, I briefly review Jung’s complex theory and its
application to the unconscious at the level of the group through cultural
complexes, and then I introduce the idea of phantom narratives. I will ex-
plore all three of these concepts more fully in the chapters that make up the
body of this book.
JUNG’S COMPLEX THEORY
In a 1906 paper, Jung detailed the experimental procedure used in the Word
Association tests, which he developed. In this procedure, he examined “the
reactions [time of subjects] to see whether they are at all subject to any law;
whether individual patterns occur, i.e., whether any definite reaction-types
are to be found” (Jung, 1973/1990, para. 2). Jung noted there were disrup-
tions in the subjects’ responses to the tasks (the idea being to respond with
the first thing that comes to mind). Subjects’ reactions often did not come
with “equal smoothness,” or they came “with lengthened intervals,” or with
“disturbances, slips,” and so on. In examining these responses, he referred to
these disruptions in the continuity of responses to stimulus word reactions as
“personal matter”: that is, he found the disruptions referred to a symbolic
situation that was troubling the subject or indicated some problematic
psychic contents. For these responses, he used the term “complex” “because
such a ‘personal matter’ is always a collection of various ideas, held together
by an emotional tone common to all” (Jung, 1973/1990, para. 1350). Some-
thing, he noted, interfered with the intention of the subject to react quickly
and correctly to words. Through his use of the Word Association experiment,
he discovered time and again that in response to the simple instruction to
respond to a stimulus word, the patient’s consciousness was disturbed by the
autonomous behavior of the psyche. The subject related to the task through
an activated attitude toward it, which Jung felt caused the subject to translate
it according to his or her personal understanding. Jung thought of this as
assimilation. In other words, the task became a subjective one (organized by
a complex). This interference was shown to be based on “the value of the
affective element” defined as a complex. “The complex must therefore be a
psychic factor which, in terms of energy, possesses a value that sometimes
exceeds that of our conscious intentions” (Jung, 1934, para. 200). “And, the
deeper one penetrates into their nature—I might also say into their biology—
From Jung’s Complex Theory 3
the more clearly do they reveal their character as splinter psyches” (Jung,
1934, para. 203). Later he stated, “The universal belief in spirits is a direct
expression of the complex structure of the unconscious. Complexes are in
truth the living units of the unconscious psyche” (Jung, 1934, para. 210). The
development of the concept of complexes in later years was to form a foun-
dation in analytical psychology for the understanding of unconscious dynam-
ics in the individual psyche as expressed at personal and collective levels.
Thus, complex theory was Jung’s first original contribution to the science
of psychoanalysis. Though the overt aim of the experiment was to determine
average reaction speed to various stimulus words, he was to later use the term
constellation to describe the recognition that the outward situation released
a psychic process in which certain contents gather together and prepare for
action. When we say that a person is “constellated” we mean that he has taken
up a position from which he can be expected to react in an adequate definite
way. But the constellation is an automatic process which happens involuntarily
and which no one can stop of his own accord.” (Jung, 1934, paras. 94, 198)
To summarize, through the Word Association experiment, Jung (1934) dis-
covered that “the psyche [was] constellated by the outward situation” (para.
198), “behave[d] autonomously, expressing an image of a certain psychic
situation, which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, in-
compatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness” (paras. 196, 201). “It
has an inner coherence” (para. 201) and though dissociates (para. 202) “be-
haves like an animated foreign body” (para. 201) in the sphere of conscious-
ness, indicating, “there is no isolated psychic processes or life processes”
(para. 197). He identified at least four aspects of unconscious functioning—
autonomy, dissociability, emotional activation (constellation), and the image
“of a certain psyche situation” (para. 201)—as elements of the complex
response. At the personal level, complexes tend to express both deeper levels
of psychic functioning and early developmental/ familial relationships. “Eve-
ryone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well
known, though far more important theoretically,is that complexes can have
us” (Jung, 1934, para. 200)
CULTURAL COMPLEXES: A BRIEF HISTORY AND REVIEW
Though I first began to think about and formulate the concept of cultural
complexes while a candidate in Jungian analytic training, as an African
American, I was raised in a cultural situation in which group and family life
were powerful influences for me. My development as an individual was
intricately related to an understanding of not only the type of group con-
sciousness I was participating in (school, church, and so on) but also the
4 Chapter 1
attitude of other groups toward my reference group (whites toward blacks),
as well as how we as a group coped with the challenges we faced through
dealing with the facts of discrimination and unjust treatment in the wider
society. Thus, I have long been tuned in to the disparities in human and civil
rights issues of injustice and inequality as these have been lived out around
differential access to education, decent housing, affordable medical care, and
economic opportunities. Through my training as a psychologist and psycho-
analyst, I have deepened my attempt to bring the psyche into the dialogue
around differences and the fundamental human need for recognition. So, in a
way, this book reflects my ongoing effort at bringing analytical psychology
to the table so that it might have a larger presence in the discussion of critical
social and organizational issues that contribute to mental and spiritual health
through developing group consciousness and group development. My work
with cultural complexes is a key part of my thinking about how conscious-
ness can develop at the level of the group, as well as how the group may
develop a consciousness of itself for understanding its own process of emo-
tional and psychological development.
I ask the reader, however, to see my more specific use of the black
experience as a way to define cultural complexes and phantom narratives, as
a way to begin to think psychologically about these pressing issues. The
basic issues of invisibility and namelessness, marginalization, powerlessness,
and rootlessness are existential issues facing all of us. When these issues are
melded with class, racism, gender, and ethnicity, the psychology of differ-
ences comes into play as group survival seems to be at stake. Another way to
say this is that cultural complexes are equal opportunity expressions of un-
conscious dynamics in group life. No group or individual is immune from
these processes.
With that personal introduction to this section, let me now turn to a
significant dream. And, as is often the case when people are training in the
hope of eventually being certified as Jungian analysts, many dreams related
to their membership in the analytic institute continue throughout their candi-
dacy. In the first dream, which I had the night before my interview for
admission to the analytic training program in San Francisco, I found myself
waiting for the Admissions Committee (of the analytic training institute) to
call me for my interview. I was sitting with a number of other black men in a
mosque of some sort. They were all dressed in black suits. Someone on the
admissions committee then called my name. I got up, and as I was about to
leave the room in which I had been waiting, the door was barred by several
of the black men. They said they would not let me pass until I demonstrated
to them our secret handshake. My giving them the sign of this handshake
would let them know that I would never forget them.
Rather obviously, the theme of this dream about the need for me to give
the black handshake was an expression of how important it was to clarify
From Jung’s Complex Theory 5
which group identification I could be leaving by making such an intense
commitment to the individual way in Jungian analytic training, which pre-
sumably would teach me how to hold and foster the process of individuation.
Because of this, I needed to reassure its members of my continuing loyalty to
my group identity. I see this dream today as anticipating the fact that, as a
Jungian analyst, I have continued to give attention to the intrapsychic and
archetypal basis of group as well as individual processes. Because the
Jungian tradition has tended to regard cultural and group processes as exoga-
mous to the individual’s development, the significance of culture for individ-
uation has often been overlooked. According to the promise I gave the other
black men in this dream, my personal and clinical development en route to
analytic training would have to be different. I would have to recognize that
working with cultural issues was intimately related to individuation. That
was the promise I made by giving the handshake that signified I would not
forget the group. Kinship and loyalty issues, power dynamics, oppression,
and guilt could, therefore, remain within my mind as a context for analytic
training. They were, I would never forget, inextricably intertwined with the
analytic enterprise I had decided to join. Indeed, in my subsequent training,
to which I was accepted, I often noticed that my teachers regularly conflated
the cultural unconscious and the collective unconscious. The cultural signifi-
ers they unconsciously included in my training experiences were often not
addressed. I concluded that there was a level of unconsciousness related to
these cultural processes within my trainers and that this manifested in the
complex of invisibility (Kimbles, 1998), in which not only the reality of any
person dehumanized by a cultural projection was invisible, but also the na-
ture of the complex responsible remained invisible to the person enacting it.
Today, I would call such a complex a “phantom.”
Nevertheless, it was in my chapter “The Cultural Complex and the Myth
of Invisibility” that I began to define more clearly what I meant by cultural
complexes (Kimbles, 2000). Many of the ideas described in that chapter have
continued to constitute the framework for the emerging theory of cultural
complexes. These basic ideas are:
• Cultural complexes operate through the group’s expectations, its defini-
tion of itself, its destiny, and its sense of its uniqueness. They operate
through the group’s fears, its enemies, and its attitudes toward other
groups.
• Cultural complexes are a dynamic system of relations that serve the basic
need for belonging and identity through linking personal experiences and
group expectations as these are mediated by ethnicity, race, religion, and
gender processes.
• Cultural complexes impose constraints on the perception of differences or
accentuate them, emphasize identification with the group or differentiation
6 Chapter 1
from the group, and allow for feelings of belonging to or being alienated
from the group.
• Cultural complexes allow us to relate psychologically to cultural factors
that operate beyond the individual but intersect with the individual’s sense
of self.
• Cultural complexes are the psyche’s way of narrating its relationship to
the group.
Over the intervening years, I defined cultural complexes more specifically
(Kimbles, 2000, 2004a, 2004b). Later my colleague Tom Singer and I pulled
together contributions from analysts who were asked to make use of the
concept (see Singer & Kimbles, 2004a, 2004b; Kimbles, 2006, 2007, 2008).
Tom and I did a number of presentations together that helped me feel the
power of the idea of the cultural complex and the reality of what our fore-
father in this area of study, Joseph Henderson (1990), had called “the cultural
unconscious.”
The building blocks of the theory that emerged consisted of theoretical
strands that were pulled together from a number of analytic sources. These
strands were Jung’s complex theory and Henderson’s concept of the cultural
unconscious. Jung’s complex theory was his first original contribution to
depth psychology, and for a time it brought what he had been doing in the
area of exploring the unconscious into line with Freud’s psychoanalysis, for
itprovided experimental proof for Freud’s theory of repressed wishes, fears,
and conflicts. Freud even adopted the term complex to describe the Oedipal
wishes, fears, and conflicts that he felt were universal. After Jung’s departure
from the psychoanalytic organizations whose mission was to explore the
implications of Freud’s ideas, Freud said that complex was not a word essen-
tial to psychoanalysis, and it was largely dropped by the psychoanalytic
establishment. Jung’s Zurich School of Psychoanalysis, on the other hand,
continued as a new school of analytical psychology, whose chief mission was
to continue to explore what Jung called complex psychology. This led to the
discovery that complexes, not unlike the Oedipus complex already named,
have archetypal cores that are quite mythological in both content and style.
But, for our purposes, it is important to recall that Jung, even before he had
formulated the notion of archetypes, meant the term complex to describe
patterns of interlocking associations grouped around emotionally toned
themes and ideas. Complexes, therefore, are naturally occurring elements in
human beings that structure the individual responses to biological givens
such as the body, aging, and death, and to interpersonal relations within
family, tribal, and broader communal systems. Despite the obvious role cul-
ture has in the shaping of complexes, Jung never systematically applied
complex theory to the life of the group or the collective. Rather, Jung focused
his attention on articulating the relationship between what he called the per-
From Jung’s Complex Theory 7
sonal unconscious, in which complexes derived from personal experience,
and the collective unconscious, in which the aspect of complexes that re-
flected the more generally human issues for which he chose the term arche-
typal made sometimes a very vivid appearance. In this way, Jung bypassed
the significance of human groups, perpetuating a kind of theoretical distrust
of the group unconscious, which set up the individual’s relation to the arche-
typal against the group interpretation of what it thinks both persons and
archetypes should be.
At the same time, Jung frequently amplified what he meant by archetypal
issues by referring to a vast array of cultural sources, including literary,
philosophical, and religious texts that had significant influence on culture;
for example, the Christian church fathers, literary giants like Goethe, Rosi-
crucian alchemical treatises in the West, and such influential figures and
texts in the East as Confucius, Lao Tse, and the I Ching. Analytical psycholo-
gy’s relationship to culture has thus been wide ranging, yet ambivalent, be-
cause culture has been used to amplify ideas that are argued to be essentially
archetypal in the human psyche, not the consequence of complexes that are
themselves derived from culture.
We can nevertheless tease out a cultural theory in Jung, if we realize that
Jung’s focus in amplifying archetypes with cultural material involved three
interwoven strands of cultural awareness: First, Jung was sensitive to how
Eurocentric, rationalistic attitudes alienated many Westerners from their pri-
mal, instinctual roots. Second, in his conceptualizations of the level of con-
scious differentiation of the themes that he thought resided in the collective
unconscious, he made a series of assumptions that had implicit within them a
privileging of Western conscious attitudes and values and, therefore, a cer-
tain derogation of traditional cultures. Third, the concept of the collective
unconscious (defined in the next paragraph) was defined in a way that would
keep the cultural matrix from having too much of a role in interpreting the
personal and archetypal layers that he felt were crucial to the deepest individ-
uation. In other words, recognizing that there were different levels of con-
sciousness within groups, he did not want groups to have the final say in how
the archetypes would be encountered by the individual and thus gave short
shrift to the need for individuals to come to terms with what their groups
have already done to shape their experience of the archetypal.
It was not until the early 1960s, when Joseph Henderson introduced the
concept of the cultural unconscious, that analytical psychology had a more
neutral way to conceptualize that intermediate area of the psyche that exists
in all of us between the personal and archetypal and that underlies so much of
our experience of ourselves as persons going about being what we have been
taught to regard as typically human, with the kinds of complex assumptions
that our group experience has invited us to accept, more or less unconscious-
ly, as given. Henderson (1990) defined the cultural unconscious as “an area
8 Chapter 1
of historical memory that lies between the collective unconscious and the
manifest pattern of the culture” (p. 103). It may include both these modal-
ities—conscious and unconscious—but it has some kind of identity arising
from the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which assists in the forma-
tion of myth and ritual and also promotes the process of development in
individuals (Henderson, 1990). Henderson located the unconscious at the
level of the group and provided a place for historical continuity at this lev-
el—a living continuity between a long-forgotten cultural past that may have
become, for all intents and purposes, archetypal and that seemed to be merely
personal, informed at the cultural level by little more than contemporary, that
is, relatively recent history.
Henderson, however, despite postulating a cultural unconscious, never
applied the concept of complexes to how it is organized and so left it with
little dynamism. The dynamics about how past, present, and future provide
for historical continuity, as well as the processes constituting the cultural
unconscious were left open for later analytical psychologists to explore.
The concept of the cultural complex thus arose out a perceived need to
offer a unifying concept to the analytical psychologist who wants to explore
the cultural unconscious more systematically. Thinking of unconscious cul-
tural assumptions and behaviors as complex-based addresses and reconfig-
ures the opposition between the personal and the archetypal levels of psycho-
logical functioning and provides a dynamic approach to factors that operate
at the level of the group that are manifested as cultural processes and prod-
ucts. It allows for an understanding of specific aspects of group life and how
these operate to transmit culture both for better and worse in the unconscious
of both individuals and groups.
Over the years that I have been engaged in pursuing the implications of
this organizing conception (1998 to the present), I have applied the elements
I postulate here for cultural complexes in three different areas: first, in look-
ing at intergenerational processes at the level of the group; second, by exam-
ining collective shadow processes at the level of the group; and third, by
seeing the role of cultural complexes in producing social suffering. In this
book, I have included a chapter that represents the application of the theory
of cultural complexes to all three of these areas. Here, I simply mention that
in the final area, I have found that through a focus on the social suffering
caused by group complexes involving the assumed inferiority of particular
ethnic groups, genders, or sexual orientations, I have been able to take a
depth-psychological look at the impact of political, economic, and legitimacy
discrimination. I do so by exposing the projection and introjection of collec-
tive shadows and intergenerational dynamics in the psychological lives of
individuals, as reflected in their dreams. But all the areas in which group
complexes affect social processes do so by creating social perceptions, cultu-
ral functions, and roles that individuals enact. I and other Jungian analysts
From Jung’s Complex Theory 9
have been able todemonstrate, often with striking specificity, how such
complexes structure the approaches people instinctively take toward issues
that range from healthcare to religion and how they define the institutional
and economic power that shapes suffering and the opportunities to relieve it
that we daily find expressed in the way we live now.
BION ON GROUPS AND HIS RELATIONSHIP
TO CULTURAL COMPLEX THEORY
The activation of cultural complexes shows that emotional processes have
already been transmuted into group and individual processes or formations
that are structured by fears and anxieties around differences and similarities.
Bion in his work Experiences in Groups (1961/1983) seems to be expressing
a similar attitude toward psychological phenomena within collections of peo-
ple, which he was able to study in the setting of the first Kleinian therapy
groups held at the Tavistock Clinic in London from the late 1940s onward. In
his seminal book codifying what he learned there, he reflects on the evident
expression of unconscious Basic Assumptions in a therapy group (he iden-
tifies three: that the group is meeting to enact Fight-Flight, to create opportu-
nities for Pairing, or to promote Dependency). He notices that the ascendance
of one assumption leads to “suppressing the overt activity of the other two
basic assumptions” (Bion, 1961/1983, p. 102). And then he asks, what for
me, is the interesting question: what is the fate of the two other basic assump-
tions that are not operative?
In order to explain the linkage between the one operative Basic Assumption,
and at the same time to explain the fate of the inoperative Basic Assumptions,
I proposed to postulate the existence of “proto-mental” phenomena. The proto-
mental system I visualize as one in which physical and psychological or men-
tal are undifferentiated. It is a matrix from which spring the phenomena . . . it
is from this matrix that emotions proper to the basic assumption flow to rein-
force, pervade, and, on occasion, to dominate the mental life of the group.
(Bion, 1961/1983, p. 102)
Bion’s “proto-mental systems” are the theoretical root of my own view of
phantom narratives as forming the organizing background of the mentation
expressed by cultural complexes. “Proto-mental systems” provides the ge-
neric, abstract understanding of what is implied by the dramatic term phan-
tom narratives, which I have introduced. I see Bion as having recognized a
kind of activity at the level of the unconscious in groups that reflects a “field”
in the sense that the pioneering psychologist of group behavior Kurt Lewin
would have understood the term. When Bion (1961/1983) says, “the three
Basic Assumptions, one of which is active and expressing an emotional
10 Chapter 1
intensity, the other two, unexpressed ones as constituting an emotional
background” (p. 102), his language is ripe with archetypal emotional field
phenomena. This kind of field is the proto-mental matrix that provides the
frame for the emergence of a Basic Assumption as to what a group is about.
It is a particular manifestation of the unconscious at the level of groups that
has great influence on the valences expressed by the different individuals in
those groups; that is, on the power they assume their reactions to what at-
tracts or repels them will have. They assume a certain social influence for
their individual feelings, because those feelings derive their own power from
an unacknowledged, but no less potent for that, cultural background. One
lesson of therapeutic group work is that awareness of the power of this proto-
mental dynamic potentially frees up emotional energy for a different and
more conscious kind of work in which the group can become the agent for
positive cultural change. Bion calls the group that accepts this assumption
and pursues it consciously, the “basic work group.”
Later Bion (1961/1983) postulates that an emotional state precedes the
Basic Assumptions and follows certain proto-mental phenomena of which it
is an expression: “Sometimes it is convenient to think that the basic assump-
tion has been activated by consciously expressed thoughts, at others in
strongly stirred emotions, the outcome of proto-mental activity” (p. 101). He
concludes this reverie by saying:
In my opinion the sphere of proto-mental events cannot be understood by
reference to the individual alone, and the intelligible field of study for the
dynamics of proto-mental events is the individuals met together in a group.
The proto-mental stage in the individual is only a part of the proto-mental
system, for proto-mental phenomena are a function of the group and must
therefore be studied in the group. (p. 103)
Here, Bion points to one of my essential points—that cultural complexes
cannot be understood within individual psychological functioning alone.
They are group-level phenomena and are always an expression of a both/and
dynamic—that is, both group and individual.
When active or activated, we enact what we have already internalized and
now express through our Basic Assumptions: that is, we recognize and
“know” our place in the social order, how our agency in that order is exer-
cised, what gender and sexuality mean there, and the significance of one’s
appearance (Flatley, 2008). Or to use Christopher Bollas’s term (1987), we
act on our “unthought knowns,” which is another way of describing the
motives that produce the most powerful unconscious dynamics, the ideologi-
cal cores of cultural complexes.
Jung, in his paper “On Psychic Energy” (1928), speculates about what he
calls the “canalization of libido” (para. 79): “I mean by this a transfer of
psychic intensities or values from one content to another, a process corre-
From Jung’s Complex Theory 11
sponding to the physical transformation of energy” so that “when nature is
left to herself, energy is transformed along the line of its natural ‘gradient’”
(para. 80). In this way natural phenomena are produced, but not “work.”
Both Bion and Jung were concerned with how to make psychic energy
available for work (Bion) or consciousness (Jung), against the pull of instinc-
tual factors at play both in the individual and the group—for instance, the
proto-mental process (Bion) or the archetypes of the collective unconscious
(Jung), when manifested in certain forms, shapes, or orders, such as the Basic
Assumptions of a group (Bion) or the complexes of an individual (Jung).
Cultural complexes are—exactly in Bion’s sense “proto-mental”—im-
plicit formations expressing emotional valences at the group level. From the
point of view of Jungian theory, cultural complexes are expressing archetyp-
al organizing activity at the level of the cultural unconscious to shape the
emotional processes that shape the collective convictions of group life. Ar-
chetypal activity orders, and we experience life according to, certain patterns.
These patterns, at the group level, fall into place around the instinctual needs
to belong and have an identity via identification that pushes for recognition.
Cultural complexes represent, from the archetypal point of view, the mani-
festation of particular mental representations (images) around sameness and
differences. These are the core aspects of cultural complexes. The shadow
side is the creation of differences in the form of the threatening and/or dis-
owned other.
Since neuroses are in most cases not just private concerns, but social phenome-
na, we must assume that archetypes are constellated in these cases too. The
archetype corresponding to the situation is activated, and as a result those
explosive and dangerous forces hidden in the archetype come into action,
frequently with unpredictable consequences. (Jung, 1954/1968, para. 98)
Potentially, gaining awareness of cultural complexes allows us to recognize
our own subjective responses to the broader social situations of which we are
both part and participant. We are invariably the co-conspirators in the phan-
tom narratives we inherit from past generations andintuit as important to our
own contemporaries. Our subjectivity is thus invariably more attuned to cul-
tural complexes than we know and not as freed up as we would like to the
activity of the present effort in each new generation to rethink the past and to
discard what about it did not work. This attunement to the phantomatic
narratives of our culture is, therefore, both relational and intersubjective and
lived very much in our own time. If we can become conscious of this attune-
ment to the self-perpetuating past, it allows us to see cultural tradition as a
potential space, a political arena that may become transitional to transforma-
tion. Seen from this point of view, the marketplace of cultural ideas,
including the market itself, as we live it today in an economic myth rife with
12 Chapter 1
phantom narratives from past assumptions of what capitalism and commu-
nism are or should be, is a plurality of unconscious subjectivities with differ-
ent, competing motivations and possibilities—their energy for consciousness
largely untapped, but still potentially available.
In this book, I develop and apply the concept of cultural complexes to
examine the implicit unconscious structuring processes that are involved in
the intergenerational transmission of cultural attitudes, especially through
persuasive unconscious stories or phantom narratives. In this effort, I seek to
place cultural complex theory within the wider bandwidth of social sciences,
on the one hand, and psychoanalytic theories of group life, starting with
Freud and Bion and ending with the contemporary researches of Abraham
and Torok, on the other. I will also develop the implications of these insights
for Jungian psychology.
Much has changed over the past decade that makes the understanding of
group life more transparent, especially given the influence of social media on
making changes and life from around the globe immediately available to us.
But is that awareness revealing or reifying the group complexes that we are
now, in sophisticated circles, trying to be “hip” to? The new millennial
consciousness raises anew the question about the influence of the group in
creating the space in which thought is allowed, and thus how group complex-
es also shape our thinking about and processing of the reality of the uncon-
scious at the group level.
Finally, I describe psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic training institutes
as prime examples of the presence of group complexes in settings and organ-
izations that imagine that they are privileged to keep an eye on the uncon-
scious and the role of cultural complexes in nevertheless shaping what is
seen and concluded, coming full circle to the question of how much any
group can really know about itself if it hasn’t examined its group complexes.
This book shows more fully than previously how cultural complexes link
societal, institutional, and individual processes, many of which involve forms
of group consciousness that are quite sophisticated, in touch, and aware, to
express the dynamics of an unsuspected unconscious at the group level. This
book shows how the theory of cultural complexes gives us a way to track the
moving dynamism of the unconscious of a group. It will show how a group
complex reveals itself as it operates through roles, functions, and subgroups
in the larger group that has given this complex currency. Potentially, an
understanding of how a cultural complex generates group dynamics will
enable individuals within groups to respond to and make use of the indica-
tions that a cultural complex is afoot. I will give examples of how individuals
who have become aware of the presence of a cultural complex have been
able to change their relationship to cultural spaces and contexts, taking some
of the role of creating them away from institutional and cultural forces.
“Through [recognizing] these connections, individuals can become not iso-
From Jung’s Complex Theory 13
lated, nor depersonalized and institutionalized beings, but citizens—aware of
and working with their social contexts as they interpret their experiences.”
(Shapiro & Carr, 1991, p. 172). Henderson (1990) anticipated this develop-
ment within analytical psychology when explaining the dynamics of what he
called the “social attitude”:
It is occasionally said that depth analysis promotes autonomy of the individual
at the expense of his social adaptation. In relation to politics, this is often true.
A stage of individualism, even selfishness, is inevitable at the beginning of any
process of self-discovery in order to break one’s original identity with the class
into which one has been born, or the kind of family identity that keeps us
unconscious. If, however, the individualism of this first break with tradition
becomes fixed, its narcissistic eccentricity precludes any truly social attitude.
The kind of psychological development we see during a sufficiently long
period of analysis convinces me that there must come a time for a reacceptance
of the social dimension of life in the process of individuation itself. This is not
like the previous unconscious identification with a particular class of belief
system but is born in response to an individual need. (p. 18)
Cultural complexes arise out of the cultural unconscious as they interact with
both the archetypal and personal realms and the broader outer world arena of
schools, communities, media, and all the other forms of cultural and group
life. The cultural unconscious refers to the intermediate psychic level that lies
between the archetypal layer of the psyche and the personal layer. Although
groups have many different configurations (school, church, army, fraternity,
institute, and so on), their basic dynamics—in Bion’s terms, their Basic
Assumptions (1961/1983), or in Jung’s terms, their complexes—are active.
In a way, just as Bion introduced a method of observation in his work with
small groups, I hope cultural complexes introduce a way of thinking about
the emotional life of large groups, whether ethnic, racial, class, gender, or
institutional. Just as with Bion’s Basic Assumptions and work group, cultural
complexes allow us to look at groups in their exogenous (patterns and struc-
tures) and intersubjective aspects.
Groups in their constitutive role for human development also carry an
internalized or personal aspect. Using the concept of cultural complexes may
make it easier to see the internal role of the irrational and powerful relational
needs that are constellated around the need for belonging and identity and the
contribution of these dynamics for individual self development and for group
functioning. Nevertheless, both the external and the internal group, in the
minds of individuals and group members, often present insoluble problems,
chronic conflicts, and rigid stances because of the presence of complexes
(both personal and group) in their social and individual forms.
Drawing on the original studies and formulation of complexes by Jung, I
apply the concept of complexes to the understanding of groups both small
14 Chapter 1
and large. Complex theory as applied to the cultural level of the psyche, as
expressed in groups as well as at the group level of the individual psyche,
shows all the characteristics of complexes that operate at the individual level.
They are expressed in deeply held beliefs and emotions that operate in group
life, have autonomy, and express an energic field (a resonating field), provid-
ing nucleating centers of activity, rituals, and ideologies in group life. Com-
plexes can (and do) possess individuals and whole groups—as seen in gender
discrimination, racism, and genocidal violence. They can (and do) cause
human suffering at the individual and group levels.
The addition of the concept of cultural complexes opens up four signifi-
cant perspectives on the unconscious functioning at the group level:
• One, they allow us to understand how emotions, beliefs, and images oper-
ate at the group level to organize group phenomena.• Second, this perspective allows us to understand both the individual’s
relationship to the group, that is, his or her attitude, as well as how the
group functions within the individual. The group as an outer situation and
its internal, living psychic reality constellate a psychic situation for the
individual and the group.
• Third, through attention to group complexes, we may get into a better
relationship to the autonomy of the psyche as it plays itself out at individu-
al and cultural levels, expressed as collective myths, ideologies, rituals,
images, and themes.
• Fourth, the group becomes an intelligible field of study, whether seen
through the lens of sociology, politics, anthropology, organizational de-
velopment, or psychoanalysis.
To quote Bion (1961/1983):
[N]o individual, however isolated in time and space, can be regarded as out-
side a group or lacking in active manifestations of group psychology. . . .
Acceptance of the idea that the human being is a group animal would solve the
difficulties that are felt to exist in the seeming paradox that a group is more
than the sum of its members. The explanation of certain phenomena must be
sought in the matrix of the group and not in the individuals that go to make up
the group. (pp. 132–33)
Chapter Two
Phantom Narratives
Unseen but Present
Background
To start with Jung’s contribution to my introduction of phantom narratives,
I pick up themes and images from his doctoral dissertation, entitled “On the
Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena” (1902/1970),
which laid the foundation for some of his most important concepts, including
subpersonalities (autonomous complexes), the representation of an uncon-
scious perception in the formation of imagery and personification; the auton-
omous psyche; the idea of images and hallucinations as potentially healing;
and the mythical. The nineteenth century had witnessed “the emergence of
modern spiritualism, which spread across Europe and Africa. Through spiri-
tualism, the cultivation of trances with the attendant phenomena of trance
speech, glossolalia, automatic writing, and crystal vision—became wide-
spread” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 195). It was in this cultural context that Jung’s
medical dissertation focused on the psychogenesis of spiritualistic phenome-
na. Freud and psychoanalysis were also influenced by the vibrancy of the
occult. Jung felt his approach needed to be differentiated from occult
phenomena, however, in as much as both spiritualism and psychoanalysis
focused on subconscious, dissociated aspects of the personality. Psychoanal-
ysis offered a more medicalized and biological understanding of occult phe-
nomena. For those with more spiritualistic explanations, these subconscious
aspects related to “an inherent spirituality or transcendence” (Gyimesi, 2009,
p. 460). Jung (1902/1970) also put forth the notion of a nonrational life force
15
16 Chapter 2
as the center of the human psyche:
If we look back into the past history of mankind, we find, among many other
religious convictions, a universal belief in the existence of phantoms or ethere-
al beings who dwell in the neighbourhood of men and who exercise an invis-
ible yet powerful influence upon them. (para. 570)
It was Freud’s tilt toward a scientific, rational understanding of phenomena
that straddled the fence between the rational and the unknown that put much
of the earlier intuitions about spiritualism into the background for him and
that led to Jung’s marginalization in the larger psychoanalytic community.
I find Freud’s concept of the Uncanny to be a valuable bridge between
Jung’s earlier paper on occult phenomena and the cultural spiritualism of the
late nineteenth century and my concept of the phantom. In his essay “The
Uncanny” (1919), Freud differentiated between the continued presence of
animism in the psychology of so-called educated Europeans, the omnipo-
tence of thoughts based on it, and repressed infantile complexes. Because his
work was anchored in the significance of the drives and the prehistoric past,
for Freud, the manifestation of the uncanny was either a manifestation of
“repressed infantile complexes” or “primitive beliefs” that have not been
overcome: “The primitive beliefs are most likely related to infantile com-
plexes, and are in fact, based on them” (p. U249). Drives and sexuality,
therefore, provided a foundation for intrapsychic causality, the understanding
of psychic reality, and personal biography. Freud’s rejection of the occult
was captured in an exchange between him and Jung: “A bulwark against
what? [Jung asked]. ‘Against the black tide of mud’ and here he hesitated for
a moment, then added—‘of occultism’” (Jung, 1961, p. 150).
The thinking about the uncanny has moved beyond the boundaries of
literature, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis to politics in the twentieth century,
to “alienation as an economic, political, psychological, and existential condi-
tion” (Masschelein, 2011, p. 136):
The uncanny is a key concept to grasp the experience of aesthetic estrange-
ment, political and social alienation resulting from a deeply rooted, disturbing
unhomeliness that characterizes human existence in the world, but tempered
by mild, surrealist undertones and the guise of familiarity. (Masschelein, 2011,
p. 147)
Masschelein (2011) goes on to speak about Derrida who “proposes a ‘haun-
tology’”:
a philosophy of haunting, of the return of the repressed, in which the spectral
takes precedent over being, existence. This new philosophy wants to examine
the intermediated or suspended state of the ghost and of fiction—neither dead
Phantom Narratives Unseen but Present 17
nor alive, neither here nor there—as exemplary for the omnipresence of the
immaterial, the virtual, and the unspeakable in our society. (p.150)
At the same time, the rise of new media, digital technologies, and the increased
virtuality of communication also calls for notions that can capture their imma-
terial yet very strong presence in society, like spectrality, haunting, and ani-
mism. Contemporary society’s dilemmas of xenophobia, immigration, exile,
homelessness, and trauma entail forms of anxiety that are related to the opposi-
tion of the familiar and the strange, to the blurring of boundaries that is threat-
ening and undermining. (p. 158)
How is this alienation made possible and under what circumstances can the
familiar become uncanny and frightening? Perhaps these phantom narratives,
organized by cultural complexes expressed as cultural history and memory
can, at times, produce disturbing feelings that alienate us from the familiar
social world of others, both familiar and unfamiliar. The social and cultural
symptoms of this alienation in contemporary life can be seen in the many
forms of marginalization prevalent today—homelessness, immigration, eco-
nomic disparities, unemployment, and so on. Background to these social
phenomena is
the existence and constraints of social, cultural, and communicational arrange-
ments of which people are unaware, in so far as these arrangements are not
perceived (not “known”), and if perceived, not acknowledged (“denied”), and
if acknowledged, not taken as problematic (“given”), and if taken as proble-
matic, not considered with an optimal degree of detachment and objectivity.
(Hopper, 1996, p. 9)
I introduce the concept of phantom narratives as a hybridized term express-
ing the background ambiguity of subject/object, individual/group, politics/
sociology, and personal biography and cultural history, conscious and uncon-
scious, held together in an affective field. This affective field has a narrative
structure with “deep and buried contents” (Chomsky, 1968) that operates at
the level of the cultural unconscious and is structured by cultural complexes.
In addition, phantoms are images and representations of these complexes.
I employ the term to open a new kind of imaginative space for reflecting on
the changes and impacts that our current historical situation bringsto us as
context and content for adaptation and growth at both the group and individ-
ual levels. It is the unbearable, the too muchness, the untranslatable, the felt
presence of the absence that opens the space for phantom dynamics.
Jung (1934/1954), in referring to the opening words of the Dedication in
Faust, says:
“Once more you hover near me, forms and faces”—are more than just an
aesthetic flourish. Like the concretism of the devil, they are an admission of
the objectivity of psychic experience, a whispered avowal that this was what
18 Chapter 2
actually happened, not because of subjective wishes, or fears, or personal
opinions, but somehow quite of itself. Naturally only a numskull thinks of
ghosts, but something like a primitive numskull thinks of ghosts but something
like a primitive numskull seems to lurk beneath the surface of our reasonable
daytime consciousness. (para. 312)
Two Trains Running by August Wilson—A Phantom Narrative
“There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death.
Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept
responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of any-
one.”
—August Wilson
American playwright August Wilson’s Two Trains Running (1992) is a play
about the black experience in twentieth-century America. The cultural/social
context for the play is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1969—the time following
the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Black Power
movement, the migrations of blacks from south to north in the early part of
the twentieth century, urban renewal and change, the uncertain future con-
nected with this cultural change are all explicitly present in the play’s di-
alogue. The play’s setting is the diner of Memphis Lee. His diner, along with
the rest of the block, is scheduled to be torn down as part of the city’s
community-wide renovation project. Archetypally, the biblical figures of
Prophet Samuel and Aunt Ester are strong presences in the background of the
play.
The dialogue, the temenos for the play, takes place among seven charac-
ters: Memphis; Sterling, an ex-con who embraces the tenets of Malcolm X;
Wolf, a bookie who has learned to play by and with the white man’s rules;
Risa, a waitress who has mutilated her legs to distance herself from men;
Hambone, a lost, disturbed man who each morning yells, “Where is my ham,
I want my ham” (Wilson, 1992, p. 22); and West, the undertaker who pre-
pares Hambone’s body upon his death. Like Risa, Hambone has scars all
over his body. West says, “Man had so many scars. I haven’t never seen
nothing like that. All on his back, his chest . . . his legs” (Wilson 1992, 91).
Finally, there is the character of Holloway, the resident philosopher and
believer in the prophecies of a legendary 369-year-old woman (Aunt Ester)
who, in the play, never speaks directly herself, but whom, at some point, each
member of the group makes reference to seeing. Her age roughly coincides
with the history of Africans in America. In 1619, approximately twenty
blacks from a Dutch slaver were purchased as indentured workers for the
English settlement of Jamestown. They were the first Africans in the British
Phantom Narratives Unseen but Present 19
North America colonies. Hence, Ester as phantom represents their struggle
and heritage as well as the long history and legacy of slavery up to the
current time. She becomes a numinous figure connected to generational dy-
namics and, to my mind, allows the play to burst through its place in time
(Pittsburg in 1969) to reach a profound transhistorical truth about the contin-
uation of intergenerational cultural complexes.
The play flows from the everyday exchanges between the characters,
weaving a tight, interconnected web through being in active communication
with one another. Personal boundaries are permeable, and the background of
slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the
civil rights movement, generates an intergenerational picture of survival,
suffering, and coping. This play, through its vertical and horizontal (time and
space) dynamics, its style and language, allows the interplay between collec-
tive conscious and cultural unconscious to be seen in terms of the web of
their interrelationship. The vertical refers to the massive time period (as
Ester) and allows for a generational continuity across time periods of a spe-
cific racial and socio/political context. It is the crossing of those two dimen-
sions—the vertical and the horizontal—of space and time that allows the
characters in Two Trains Running to express the many different attitudes that
have emerged in the African American community to represent responses to
a history of racial discrimination. Thus, the phantoms of previous times are
re-created, becoming presences that haunt the activities of the play: the an-
ger, despair, and self-berating is reacted to within the racial and social con-
text of such feelings. And yet, underneath these affects, there is a sense of
affirmation and redemption that I feel is embodied in the phantom figure of
Aunt Ester. Not only do the characters speak about personal losses, but also, I
imagine, these losses are intertwined with the background social context of
frustration, anger, hatred, aggressiveness, oppression, and struggle. And al-
though the social politics around race relations have changed—different eth-
nic, racial, and gendered difference groups may align in ways that allow for
more complexity and working room around differences in regard to racial
and social issues—we are constantly working and reworking issues around
grievances; disparity in treatment, for instance, in the criminal justice system
(incarceration, stop and frisk, racial profiling, immigration); education (affir-
mative action); economic differences; persistent unemployment; family
breakdown; and societal disarray. Cultural complex dynamics undergird
these issues and bring with them an affective intensity, for they require
changes at the phantasy level—at the level of the unconscious, that is, our
seeing, experiencing of each other, and engaging the psychotic anxieties that
come with such encounters.
Wilson (1992) does not tell us what Aunt Ester says to the characters who
visit her except to “take $20 and throw it into the river”:
20 Chapter 2
HOLLOWAY: All he got to do is to see Aunt Ester. Aunt Ester could straight-
en him out. Don’t care whatever your problem. She can straighten it out.
. . . you got to pay her, though. She won’t take no money herself. She tell
you to go down and throw it into the river. Say it’ll come back to her. (pp.
23–24)
It is interesting to reflect on the symbolic nature of the cultural complex in
relationship to Aunt Ester’s advice and role in the play. The seventh Presi-
dent, Andrew Jackson, appears on the $20 bill. A slave owner, he also initiat-
ed the forced relocation of thousands of Native Americans to Indian Territo-
ry. His enthusiastic followers created the modern Democratic Party. Thus, in
his life, he embodied the contradictions around slavery, power, and money.
During his term, the Second Bank of the United States was shut down. For
Jackson, the bank symbolized how a privileged class oppressed the will of
the common American people. So throwing a $20 bill into the river is,
perhaps, a way of sacrificing one’s absolute allegiance to the “almighty
dollar” and bringing one’s faith into balance between social and spiritual
values. The exchanges between Aunt Ester and the other characters (or atti-
tudes) in Wilson’s play can neither be expressed in logical language nor can
Jackson’s contradictory life—these complexities are all reflected in the mir-
ror of the characters in Memphis’s diner.
From this point of view, Ester represents a kind of cultural anima, in the
Jungian sense of a connecting principle for African Americans in the play,
and a way of thinking about and representing the irreducible aspect of per-
sonal sufferingand cultural dilemmas around race, class, ethnicity, and gen-
der. As she is never made visible, she represents the phantomatic context for
the play and expresses a phantom quality. Through encounters with her, the
characters are helped to transform the raw beta elements (emotional dynam-
ics) of culture into digestible ideas through which the characters are able to
affirm their humanity within dehumanizing conditions.
Just as within individual psychology we may think about the imago of a
mother or father complex, in cultural complexes, we may think in terms of
phantoms as images of group life that reflect the specific dynamics operating
in groups and individuals through various social attitudes and structures that
are alive in current events. For instance, the history of cultural traumatic
events that have destroyed and disrupted social and cultural patterns, causing
breakdowns in family and social functioning, have created symptoms of
cultural traumas that can be seen in the varieties of learned helplessness,
passivity, and lack of efficacy in relationship to one’s own environment or
world: an expectation of failure, anger, and a shift toward an external locus
of control, self-blame, poor self-esteem, and the generation of invisibility.
All of this occurs within a cultural setting of political, economic, and
institutional power structures that privileges certain groups over others. I like
Phantom Narratives Unseen but Present 21
the term social suffering from medical anthropology and given exposure by
Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (1997). The term allows
me to visualize the structural situations that freeze cultural complexes:
Social suffering results from what political, economic and institutional power
does to people and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves
influence responses to social problems. Included under the category of social
suffering are conditions that are usually divided among separate fields, condi-
tions that simultaneously involve health, welfare, legal, moral and religious
issues. (Kleinman et al., 1997, p. ix)
Another way to translate all this is that it is not only that trauma is perpetuat-
ed by victims, but also that those who are heirs to the benefits and privileges
of the spoils perpetuate attitudes, rituals, and the social machinery that create
these conditions. These are phantomatic effects.
My term psychic presences is meant to convey the experience of intrapsychic
preternatural entities, which present as images or phantoms and which we, in
turn, reify as real. These images of phantoms undergo a transfiguration or
transmogrification as we progress. . . . They evolve into symbolic images that
designate the “presence of the absence” of the object-person, that is, the pres-
ence of the legacy of the experience with the object in its absence. (Grotstein,
2000, p. xix)
Most of the papers on absent presences or intergenerational processes, how-
ever, have focused on how transgenerational processes contribute to organiz-
ing and disorganizing attachment (Cavalli, 2012; Kradin, 2012). My first
hypothesis then is that intergenerational processes are manifested as phantom
narratives that provide structure, representation, and continuity for unre-
solved or unworked-through grief and violence that occurred in a prior his-
torical cultural context that continues into the present.
HENDERSON’S CONTRIBUTION TO PHANTOM NARRATIVES
Joseph Henderson (1990), who introduced the concept of the cultural uncon-
scious, defined it as
an area of historical memory that lies between the collective unconscious and
the manifest pattern of the culture. It may include both these modalities, con-
scious and unconscious, but it has some kind of identity arising from the
archetypes of the collective unconscious, which assists in the formation of
myth and ritual and also promotes the process of development in individuals.
(p. 102)
22 Chapter 2
For me, the issue in Henderson’s definition has to do with “it has some kind
of identity arising from the archetypes, which assists in the formation of
myth and ritual and also promotes the process of development in individu-
als.”
I introduce the term phantom by way of responding to “it has some kind
of identity arising from the archetypes” and how it is represented in the
individual and the group. Phantom is akin to phantasy in that it is the im-
age(s) that gives specific quality and identity to emotional experiences in
groups. The phantasy and the emotional experience come together in the
phantom, reflecting emotionally charged (Bion’s valence [1961/1983]), af-
fective ties between members of a group or community as they express their
relationships to each other and the group. The cultural unconscious invites an
imaginative orientation to grasp the subjective and social presences, forgot-
ten and lost, that continue to operate as formative forces in our lives at the
level of the individual and the cultural unconscious.
In this and later parts of this chapter, I describe what phantom narratives
are about and how they are related to cultural complexes.
PHANTOMS AS PSYCHOLOGICAL ATTITUDES
TOWARD HISTORY
Cultural complexes involve the patterning of historical processes organized
in such a way so as to provide continuity and a relatively coherent narrative
for group members. It seems to me, however, that this history keeping by the
unconscious in individuals and groups is relatively independent of the con-
scious intention and the goals of the group, and yet there seems to be a
teleological aspect to it also; that is, the history making has an autonomous
character. This autonomy means that there is an independence from space/
time coordinates, reflecting a nonsequential, transpsychic arrangement of
historical patterns as these are related to individual and group complexes.
Jung’s idea of history includes “not only childhood and the immediate
family, but also the larger matrix of culture, generational patterns, and archa-
ic history as embedded in the collective unconscious” (Stein, 1987, p. 61).
His “inclusion of archetypes within the historical nexus leads to the realiza-
tion that the influence of history on individuals is ubiquitous, rooted in cul-
ture and the unconscious, pervasive throughout all segments of emotional
and mental functioning, and is, therefore, fundamental to identity” (Stein,
1987, p. 61).
My initial approach to the history of groups began with my thinking about
intergenerational traumas that I felt were organized around cultural complex-
es. But thinking in intergenerational terms raises the question of how this all
occurs. By what mechanisms does the transmission happen? Since we are
Phantom Narratives Unseen but Present 23
talking generally about the movement from past to present, across time di-
mensions, how do we talk about how, without direct communication, we may
be affected by processes and dynamics from another time and place? Addi-
tionally, what about the intersubjective, the way that relating stimulates and
generates associations and complexes in each other that put us into different
emotional spaces and awaken memories? All of these questions seem to be
related to generational continuity and, of course, to the survival of people,
groups, and/or religions.
SOME OF MY BACKGROUND PHANTOMS
My interest in phantoms comes from several sources of influence. I will
mention only four. For a number of years, I had been working to utilize the
concept of complexes to better understand psychologically a variety of his-
torical, political, and cultural situations as these manifested in therapy and
analysis. From this work, I eventually formulated the concept of cultural
complexes. Cultural complexes, as opposed to individual complexes, are
group based. Like individual complexes, they function autonomously within
each individual and group to organize the attitudes, emotions, and behavior
that make up group life. Their archetypal telos seems to provide both individ-
uals and groups