A conference volume with an editorial thesis

Edited collections usually announce a theme and let fifteen chapters wander inside it. This one does not. Drawn from the 2018 joint IAAP–IAJS conference at Goethe University in Frankfurt, the volume holds together because Elizabeth Brodersen and Pilar Amezaga’s introduction makes a case. They define indeterminacy philosophically, working through Broad, Popper, Ciprut, Guyer, Hardin, Honderich, and Mills, then bind that definition to Jung’s distinction between directed thinking and indirect symbolic thinking—the difference between thought that aims and thought that circles. Onto this they graft two further frames: Van Gennep and Turner’s three-phase model of liminality, and an explicit encounter between analytical psychology and the Frankfurt School’s theory of recognition. That last move is the risky one. Recognition theory locates the wound in a social relation that withholds acknowledgment; analytical psychology tends to locate it in an intrapsychic process that requires withdrawal from social relation. Setting them against each other in an introduction is more honest than reconciling them, and the chapters that follow do not resolve the tension so much as inhabit it. In the middle phase, the cited liminal subject is socially and sometimes physically invisible, stripped of status, value, clothing, property, and kinship position. The volume’s whole question is whether that condition, treated for a century as generative, still is.

Migration as a cultural complex, not only a policy problem

Monica Luci’s opening chapter mounts the most ambitious single argument in the book. She reads contemporary European identity as governed by a cultural complex she names the unheroic heroine, enacted at the physical border between two opposing figures: the terrorist as threatening other, a group hero possessed by an archetypal Spirit father, and the asylum seeker as exposed other, an individual hero in flight from the Terrible Father. The pairing does real analytic work, because it explains why European public feeling can swing between these two images without ever leaving the same complex—they are poles of one structure, not competing assessments of one situation.

What lifts the chapter above archetypal labeling is where Luci grounds identity formation. She refuses to keep it inside human object relations. Drawing on Bick, Anzieu, Winnicott, and Huskinson, she treats the non-human environment and the skin as psychic boundary as constitutive, which lets her connect the literal crossing of a border to the psychic membrane that must remain porous enough for traffic to pass. The metaphor grows from the argument; it is not decorative. A skin that seals is not safer; it is dead. This is a claim about political psychology with a testable clinical analogue, and it makes migration something other than a policy file with a symbolic afterword.

Whiteness, ethnicity, and the trauma clinicians fail to see

Rachael A. Vaughan’s chapter is the volume’s strongest challenge to Jungian training practice, and it is aimed inward. Working through three clinical vignettes, she argues that American clinical culture treats whiteness as an absence of ethnicity—as the unmarked default from which other people deviate—and that this foreclosure has a specific therapeutic cost. If white clients are assumed to have no cultural material, then their intergenerational, collective, and personal migration trauma has nowhere to appear in the consulting room. It is not repressed by the patient; it is unrecognized by the frame.

She builds the case from Kimbles’s phantom narratives, Hirsch’s post-memory, Akhtar’s account of migration as cumulative subliminal stress, and the French field of psycho-généalogie, and she does not let the clinical point stay clinical. Decentring the monolith of white identity is, she argues, simultaneously a therapeutic and a political task at a moment of rising white supremacy. The formulation is precise enough to avoid the obvious objection: this is not an appeal for sympathy toward white suffering, but an argument that an identity experienced as having no content is exactly the identity most available for capture by supremacist content.

Gender at the border: municipal practice, sandplay, and symbol

Part 2 pairs a non-clinical, non-academic contributor with clinicians, and the pairing is the argument. Elena Barta writes as a historian and municipal officer for Frankfurt’s LGBTIQ coordination unit, describing how a city administration actually handles trans and intercultural work—trans* homelessness, suicide prevention in schools, Germany’s third-gender-marker debate—and stating plainly that psychoanalysis has been experienced by trans people primarily as a pathologising force. Placed inside a Jungian collection, that sentence is not a courtesy; it is a bill presented to the field by someone whose daily work is the aftermath.

Alongside it, Ramos and El Khouri present a Sandplay case in which a child’s gender incongruence is worked through symbolically, with diagnosis held back, and Giaccardi analyses the developmental cost incurred when same-sex desire finds no adequate representation in a heteronormative symbolic order—a cost borne not by the desire but by the symbolic order’s poverty. Read together, the three refuse a single Jungian account of gender. The section leaves the reader with an administrator’s evidence, a clinician’s image, and a theorist’s structural claim, unharmonized.

When indeterminacy stops being therapeutic

The book’s most valuable internal disagreement arrives in Part 4, where Toshio Kawai and Stefano Carpani both contend that indeterminacy has ceased to be a scarce good. Kawai’s version is technical and devastating to habit: classical analytic method loosens a determinate ego to open indeterminate space, which presupposes an ego already well established. With autistic-spectrum patients and, he argues, in contemporary culture more broadly, the condition is reversed—the patient begins in indeterminacy and needs a determinate point from which to emerge. That sometimes requires a direct, spontaneous response from the analyst, changing the technique at its root. Carpani makes the social case, setting Jung’s individuation against Beck’s individualisation and Bauman’s liquidity, and holding that endless new beginnings without substance lead to anomie, leaving freedom out of reach. Polipo’s closing chapter takes a different turn, converting the transcendent function into two paradoxical virtues, vulnerability and incorruptibility—a normative move Jung himself resisted, and one worth resisting again, since a process named as a virtue becomes something a patient can be judged for failing. The collection is wider than these four concerns: chapters on film, on Japanese fish symbolism, and on Conrad occupy a substantial share of the book and are not represented here.