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One of Carl Jung's seminal achievements was his recognition that the individual human psyche stands at the nexus of individual psychic factors, broad collective, and cosmological forces. While such an idea would not have been news during a pre-scientific age, it was a controversial claim in the early phase of psychoanalysis, during which Sigmund Freud had set the tone by insisting that analysis was a more or less an entirely personal and individual process. Although the significance of collective factors for understanding individual psychic life and process has since become a defining feature of Jungian psychoanalysis, I think it is an open question how wide and deep this relationship between clinical psychoanalysis and collective factors is, and to what extent understanding this relationship can also be useful for articulating the nature of psychoanalytic process.
Renee Moreau Cunningham's book Archetypal Nonviolence: King, Jung, and Culture through the Eyes of Selma is an original contribution to psychoanalytic understanding of nonviolent resistance to injustice, both as collective and clinical phenomena. Cunningham deftly integrates the formative thought of Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, weaving factual matters of social and political history with psychoanalytic theory into a coherent and readable text, in which she interprets the cultural forces embodied in the march from Selma to Montgomery. She focuses on Jungian psychoanalytic theory, while simultaneously distilling from that the essentials of nonviolent resistance that may be pertinent to psychoanalytic practice. It is an excellent illustration of how gaining a substantive psychological understanding of an important social action, one which defined the collective unconscious of a nation at the time, can illuminate aspects of clinical practice.
The first chapter of Archetypal Nonviolence draws the reader in through a brief but gripping account of the months around the march from Selma to Montgomer