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When your heart is breaking, you need soul food. Unity in Europe seems to be unravelling by the day. As Rasche writes in this brave book, it feels like watching your house burn down. Dismay evokes a desire to look the other way. As I sit writing this, safely ensconced in the not always so United Kingdom, the trauma of war means many of the contributors to this book are no longer speaking to each other. When feelings run so strong, we can surmise we are in the grip of a cultural complex. If a complex is an affectively driven set of ideas and images that constellate around an archetypal core, a cultural complex shapes what it means to be a citizen of a particular country, affecting individuals as well as the collective.
The contributors have risen to the seemingly impossible challenge of reflecting on events whilst we are in their midst. This book is part of a series about the concept of the Cultural Complex as originally described as a kind of inner sociology in Singer's and Kimbles' book “The Cultural Complex” (2004). Joseph Henderson saw culture as a living expression of unconscious psyche, a two-way bridge between the personal and the collective. Trauma affects the ideas, beliefs, memories, feelings and behaviour that emerge in the collective psyche forming a cultural complex. Just as our patients may be limited by critical negative thoughts and self-sabotage because of their individual complexes, Singer and Rasche contend that this can apply collectively with cultures too.
The subject of this recent volume of papers is Brexit and the Ukrainian/Russian conflict. The link felt tenuous although both evoke collective division. Jung said of individual complexes that we must live them out in full, “drink them to their dregs” (1938/1954). This book invites us to incorporate what divides us. As Jung (1927/1931) wrote, “psyche can only know psyche through psyche.” I wondered how possible it is to write about a cultural complex when we are in the thick of the affective force