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Published online: 13 February 2025
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025
Analytical psychology has fallen short in examining racial dynamics and racialization in the United States of America and its origins. Jungian analyst, professor, and poet Fanny Brewster names the racial complex as a construct central to increasing understanding. In doing so, she fills a void by expanding upon C. G. Jung's brief Eurocentric mention of a complex related to race appearing in The Collected Works, Volume 10 (1964). In her introduction, she notes that the book “explores and re-envisions C. G. Jung's conceptualization of The Theory of Complexes in relationship to a black and white racial complex from an Africanist Jungian perspective” (p. 1). Brewster deftly describes how the construct of the racial complex may be used to understand and describe the pervasive psychological impact of the enslavement of African Americans in the United States in the collective as well as personal unconscious; in her words, “how race, raciality, and racism operate in the United States.” Published in 2020, her discussion of raciality, although binary, reflecting the overculture's paradigm, therefore relevant to those coded and identifying as Black or White, is unequivocally relevant and timely.
An African American woman growing up in segregated North Carolina, she illuminates the features of the racial complex informed by her own experiences and historical and contemporary events. The first three chapters of the book describe the fundamentals of the racial complex. Brewster starts with a chapter that is essentially a primer on complex theory, thus making the book accessible to those of many disciplines. This is followed by a chapter describing the racial complex and its developmental roots in childhood. She concentrates on discussion of the racial complex as it may appear in the personal unconscious of Blacks. While the racial complex of White Americans is given relatively s