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In Soul and Culture, Roberto Gambini embarks on an adventure that has long been of interest to me. His project is that of finding soul in the world, discovering connections between psychic reality and cultural life. Gambini's focus is close at hand: he looks at his native Sao Paulo, at its culture and newspapers, its cement and urban trees, its civic life and educational system, finding traces of soul wherever he turns. He
works to overcome typical Western dualisms between interior and exterior, subject and object, inside and outside. He points out that dualism has insinuated itself in our own field, analytical psychology, despite the fact that Jung sought to undermine this dualism wherever possible. We have not always followed Jung's lead, even though we might call ourselves ‘Jungians’. For Jung, psyche was found in everything and not just inside persons. This was the point of his studies of national character and cultures, his explorations of nature, place, religions and societies. His centrifugal movement toward the world culminated in one of his master strokes, that is, the theory of synchronicity, which was meant to explain the uncanny relation between interior and exterior reality.
Gambini writes with passion and commitment, and he is urging his readers to at least three propositions: 1) that we need to overcome the prejudice that soul is confined to human subjectivity; 2) that we need to recognize that the so-called external world has an interiority of its own, of which we must become conscious and to which we must attend; and 3) that the analytic gaze has to shift from purely clinical investigations to responding to the world, culture and society in terms of its archetypal content. ‘I believe that such a precious tool as Jungian psychology should not be kept only for clinical psychotherapy. … We have to deal with the injuries of the world around us’ (p. 36). This sounds familiar, some will be saying. Isn't this the concern of much of James Hillman's work (1