Practising Analytical Psychology in East Asia: A Post-Jungian Italian Perspective

Two years after “Jung, Asia and Inter-culture: Jung across Cultural Borders”, the first-ever International Conference on Carl Gustav Jung and his Red Book, held in Taipei, Taiwan, in October 2013, the author presents an updated reflection on her experience with East Asian trainees and clients and on some of the characteristics and difficulties that it entails from a post-Jungian Italian perspective. First of all, the encounter with a different culture such as the East Asian one requires the Jungian analyst to be aware of any cultural projection or countertransference he/she might have had beforehand, processing at the same time any possible cultural transference or projections on the part of the trainees and clients. A second reflection focuses on the use of English, usually the working language in East Asia, as a paradoxical bridge that might facilitate the analytic encounter, highlighting the quality of the analytical relationship and indicating the client's inner dynamics. The last reflection is about the need to interweave psychic experiences common to all human beings with the cultural images through which they are declined, aiming at achieving a cross-cultural imaginal narrative thanks to the method of active imagination. “Active deep writing”, a new form of active imagination through writing, developed by the author and tailored to the East Asian trainees' and clients' cultural characteristics, is then briefly described as a cross-cultural way to process the personal, cultural, and archetypal aspects of their analytical experience.