The Transcendent Function and Politics: No!

No school of psychotherapy is making a greater contribution to the alleviation of the suffering of the world than Jungian analysis and analytical psychology. How wonderful to be able to say such a thing, with hand on heart! Jungian analysts, supposedly the most unworldly, introverted, even mystically-inclined group of therapists on the planet, are getting passionately involved in a huge range of cultural, social and political problems. They have become part of the attempt to recover the political from the swamps into which it has sunk in many countries. This turnaround probably derives its energy from a sense that the change of direction was urgently needed, perhaps as reparation for past misjudgments, mainly in the 1930s. Anyway, the job is well started and is carried out these days by so many of us that I don't think I can produce a list of names. Many have sensed the danger of losing the revolutionary idealism of Jung's pioneering work if we stand still and rest on our laurels. Many of us know that our common interests will collapse if we only pursue our common interests, if we only invest in what advantages us.

I believe we are now in the middle of developing Jung's radical intuition, floated in the 1930s, of the need to create a culturally sensitive psychology. A culturally sensitive psychology does not level out all differences in the psyche that stem from politics, ethnicity, religion, nation, social class, gender and sexual orientation. Jung was against the universal imposition of a single system of psychology. Inevitably, so-called universal psychologies (like Freud's) are in fact context-bound, limited, personal confessions. So Jung was perhaps the first to anticipate the ethical and political disaster of a one-size-fits-all, colonial psychology. Hence he is one of the founding fathers of transcultural and intercultural psychotherapy. He was also one of the first to understand that we cannot insulate clinical practice from contemporary political