Individual Analysis: A Failure or a Shared Experience of Social Justice

The process of Jungian analysis is reviewed and considered as inexorably intertwined with our lives in society and with aspects of our social interactions that long for interpersonal and restorative justice. Various models are reviewed, including Fanon, Gambini, Kimbles, Levine, Saban - each with an eye toward Jung's injunction that we must move beyond ‘knowledge’ toward ‘eating and digesting’, thereby metabolizing and shifting our way of living. Dissociated aspects of the analytic couple are discussed, both as represented by and articulating transgenerational issues, phantoms, and as presented in often neglected aspects of embodiment. Jeremy Harris's Slave Play is offered as an amplification of ubiquitous and unacknowledged transgenerational presences in our analytic interactions. Clinical examples explore countertransference aspects that illustrate Jung's challenge, such as an unwitting prejudice toward analysis as equalling transformation and integrating resolution, or toward analysis as leaving unexamined the presumptions of class structures and privilege. A personal dream is offered to illustrate a necessary reorientation of the analyst's ego toward an attitude in which rebirth comes only in and through interaction with the collective. It is argued that only with such interaction, which manifests movement toward social justice, is there an efficacious analysis.