Routledge African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows

Product Description African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows explores the little-known racial relationship between the African diaspora and C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology. In this unique book, Fanny Brewster explores the culture of Jungian psychology in America and its often-difficult relationship with race and racism. Beginning with an examination of how Jungian psychology initially failed to engage African Americans, and continuing to the modern use of the Shadow in language and imagery, Brewster creates space for a much broader discussion regarding race and racism in America. Using Jung’s own words, Brewster establishes a timeline of Jungian perspectives on African Americans from the past to the present. She explores the European roots of analytical psychology and its racial biases, as well as the impact this has on contemporary society. The book also expands our understanding of the negative impact of racism in American psychology, beginning a dialogue and proposing how we might change our thinking and behaviors to create a twenty-first-century Jungian psychology that recognizes an American multicultural psyche and a positive African American culture. African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows explores the positive contributions of African culture to Jung’s theories and will be essential reading for analytical psychologists, academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, African American studies, and American studies. Review "African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows brilliantly captures the essence of American Jungian Psychology and its relationship to African Americans. Fanny Brewster has written a ground-breaking book essential to our understanding of Jungian Psychology, and its influence on how we perceive and interact with one another in American society based on racial preconceptions. As we witness the beginning of new political and social movements in our country, this book is uncannily timely in its historical view of African American culture, racial complexes, and the psychological divide due to racial tensions in America." - Laura Wexler, author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America "In this rich exploration of the psychological legacy of slavery and modern day racism, Fanny Brewster manages to hold to the value of Jung’s ideas whilst also offering a serious critique of the racist roots of some of his concepts. In so doing she offers a crucial and potentially creative challenge to our Jungian community which largely persists in turning a blind eye to these matters and remains predominantly white. Whilst of considerable interest to anyone concerned with the psychology of racism, this book should be essential reading for all who consider themselves Jungians on both sides of the Atlantic." - Helen Morgan, Jungian analyst and Chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council "Fanny Brewster in her compelling book on African Americans and Jungian Psychology, makes visible what she calls a racial complex that has operated from the beginning birth pangs of Analytical Psychology with Carl Jung’s own blindness to the current cultural context in his theory of archetypal psychology, to the silence of the Jungian community over the past nearly one hundred years to redress and address the blank spaces around race in the development of its theories and practices. The failure to include those forces that continues to generate the expressions of racial tensions and violence that appear daily in our newspaper and social media and the lives of many of our patients of color perpetuates another kind of invisibility. Fanny’s narrative is a weaving of her fertile imagination in a way that opens Jung and analytical psychology’s relationship to race and its cultural context of the presence of some of the same societal tensions that can be found haunting our analytical thinking and practices. She challenges the reader to locate him or her