The Transcendent Function and Cultural Complexes: A Working Hypothesis

For some time, I have been thinking about how insights of analytical psychology can be more useful in understanding social, political, and cultural aspects of our lives in which the collective psyche is the currency of exchange. Complex theory-one of our tradition's most useful clinical concepts in the study of individual psychology—has offered a particularly fruitful way to think about the nature of conflicts between different groups of people. In this panel presentation, I want to consider how one can think about the transcendent function in relationship to the slowly crystallizing theory of cultural complexes.

Cultural complexes can be defined as emotionally charged aggregates of ideas and images that tend to cluster around an archetypal core and are shared by individuals within an identified collective. They accumulate experiences that validate their point of view and create a store house of self-affirming, ancestral memories which are based on historical experiences that have taken root in the collective psyche of a group and in the psyches of the individual members of a group. The complexes of a given culture are built up over time and multi-generational experience, some of which have been traumatic. Deeply embedded tribal memories, patterned behaviours in the form of rituals and strong beliefs based on repetitive experiences are the stuff of cultural complexes. They function in an involuntary, autonomous fashion and tend to affirm a simplistic point of view that replaces more everyday ambiguity and uncertainty with fixed, often self-righteous attitudes to the world. As such, cultural complexes can be thought of as the fundamental building blocks of a truly inner sociology which contain an abundance of information and misinformation about the structures of societies. Perhaps most potent, when cultural complexes are activated, very primitive, destructive affect states of fear, hatred and murderous rage—as well as more positive affect states of joy an