The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race By Fanny Brewster. New York:  Routledge, 2020,  129 pp.

Fanny Brewster, a Jungian psychoanalyst, has once again made an important contribution to psychoanalytic understanding of race and racism with her new book. Both of her previous books, the powerful Archetypal Grief: Slavery's Legacy of Intergenerational Loss (2018), and African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows (2017), explored critical aspects of African American experience from a Jungian perspective. To provide context for approaching the critical issue of race, culture, and racism from a Jungian perspective, Dr. Brewster offers a concise consideration of Jung's concept of the complexes, and an unsparing account of the racism in Jung's approach to what she describes as his “racial complex,” his attempt to understand race in American culture.

Dr. Brewster offers an enlightened, “friendly” challenge to her fellow Jungian psychoanalysts “to open up a dialogue on one of Jung's theories emerging from his work on the Word Association Experiment. The racial complex is one such under-developed theory. I feel that it is left to us Jungians to begin these conversations” (p. 22).