You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I am very pleased to present this issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, which is dedicated to the highly challenging and complex theme of the relationship between analytical psychology and the political world. The issue of the relationship between analytical psychology and social and political activism has been the central theme of discussion of three international conferences that were held in London , Rome and Prague , and which will be followed by a fourth one in San Francisco .
The theme to which this issue is dedicated is so complex that it touches on the entire spectrum of concepts of analytical psychology, from the theory of archetypes and complexes, to the meaning of ‘individual’, ‘collective’, ‘individuation’, or, more specifically, the constructs of ‘Self’ and ‘persona’.
In the opening article, a reprint of the first chapter of his seminal book The Political Psyche, published in 1993, with a retrospective introduction, Andrew Samuels challenges the traditional distinction between inner and outer worlds, or between analysis and political activism. If the Self is (also) defined as the union of opposites, it then includes both what the ego perceives and imagines as ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Carta 2017), such a coniunctio oppositorum challenges our understanding, especially when, and because, at least in the West, we normally resort to the first Aristotelian category, the category of substance; therefore we think of the Self as an entity, and an entity must be either inside or outside. But if we adopt the sixth Aristotelian category, that of relationship, the picture changes dramatically. Now the Self may be imagined as an intra/inter-psychic relational network that creates, distinguishes and unites inside and outside, and the Self becomes, by definition, the dynamic, ongoing relationship between the inner world and the outer one, thereby completely abolishing the possibility of limiting psychology to psychology, and po