Response to Umberto Galimberti

I would like to thank Prof. Galimberti for giving us such a learned and wide-ranging introduction to our conference. His excellent paper sets out the rather disturbing environment in which we find ourselves as analytical psychologists today. In this short response I want to consider some of the implications of this new technological context for our own theory and practice as analytical psychologists.

Some of the implications of the technological revolution were already apparent to Jung who was regularly scathing about the double-edged benefits of science and technology. In his essay ‘Man and his symbols’, completed not long before his death in 1961, he wrote:

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so indubitably useful and so much needed that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or of our odious subservience to them. … In spite of our proud domination of nature we are still her victims as much as ever and have not even learnt to control our own nature, which slowly and inevitably courts disaster. … It remains quite natural for men to quarrel and fight and struggle for superiority over one another. Where indeed have we ‘conquered nature’?

However, in 1961, it was still possible for Jung to put his hope and faith for the future in the psychological and spiritual development of the individual through listening to the unconscious and especially dreams. As a remedy for the world's ills, that seems far less likely today. Jung's well-known antipathy to the social collective also made him unable to grasp the kind of structural perspective that underlies Prof. Galimberti's analysis. For the psyche is not, as Jung tended to believe, the only power in the world—the social world itself, the world of production and the relations of production is a power in its own right that deeply impinges on the construction of our own being. We may not be so determined by ma