Interview with Dr. Fanny Brewster: Reflections on Her Life1

I'm delighted to interview my friend and colleague, Dr. Fanny Brewster. Fanny and I first met at a meeting of the New York Association for Analytical Psychology. We discovered we both lived in Brooklyn and promptly began to discover one another over long lunches in our neighborhood. Fanny now shares personal history rooted in her connection to ancestors who found the strength to survive 200 years of slavery on land that was once a South Carolina plantation.

As a Jungian analyst, Fanny brings depth psychology to her lectures on culture, women, social justice, and more. She is a professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute, a faculty member at the New York C.G. Jung Foundation, and president of the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. Her books include African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows (Routledge, 2017); Archetypal Grief: Slavery's Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss (Routledge, 2018); and most recently, The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race. (Routledge, 2019); Race and the Unconscious: An Africanist Depth Psychology Perspective on Dreaming (Routledge 2023).

Fanny's poems have been published in the Psychological Perspectives Journal and have been nominated for the Gradiva Awards given by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP). Fanny's living connection to her forebears infuses her work with ancestral wisdom infused with her own capacity for humanity, creativity, and soul.