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This collection of papers illustrates the wide scope of one of Jung's central concepts, the archetype of the shadow. The title was conceived as a basis for the Congress before the recent changes in the balance of political world power. Perhaps we are now, in 1990, seeing a shift away from the ‘split world’ of paranoid defence systems and mutual projective identifications, which were holding apart two idealising ideologies. The more chaotic world situation which has emerged might turn out to be less potentially destructive if a different set of projections were making possible a greater capacity for dialogue.
At the time, the symbol of The Wall dominated the Congress. Thomas Kirsch, from San Francisco, expressed this in the opening address. One of his patients had dreamed of the Wall dividing the city but new buildings were being built. He, Kirsch, saw that the patient was coming out of his depression but he could not believe that ‘the wall’ could ever be demolished.
The paper by Nathan Schwartz-Salant on ‘The archetypal foundations of projective identification’ confines itself to the personal and clinical; but the material in it lends itself to extrapolation on to the socio-political sphere where the ‘opposites’, when seen to have component parts, can also be seen to have the potential for the integration of those parts.
Some of the papers did concern themselves with such socio-political issues, some focused on clinical applications, and some attempted to link the two. If there is a common thread running through this volume, it is the consideration of how archetypes emerge in forms which can be used to illustrate the discussion of processes that range from the deepest collective unconscious of humankind to the most individual expressions of consciousness. Different Jungian perspectives are represented in the collection, and it is hard to choose papers to discuss or recommend because the book provides material for such a wide range of interests and purposes.
Some papers,