---
title: "The Spectre of the Other in Jungian Psychoanalysis: Political, Psychological, and Sociological Perspectives"
description: "Marybeth Carter and Stephen Anthony Farah gather fourteen contributors who test whether Jungian psychology can hold the Other as a political and social reality rather than an intrapsychic figure, and who disagree sharply about the answer."
author: "Marybeth Carter and Stephen Anthony Farah, editors"
year: 2022
shelf: the-psyche
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=The+Spectre+of+the+Other+in+Jungian+Psychoanalysis+Carter+Farah"
content_type: book-commentary
related:
  - singer-kimbles-cultural-complex
  - morgan-work-of-whiteness
  - brodersen-amezaga-jungian-indeterminate-states
collections: []
key_takeaways:
  - "Renos K. Papadopoulos argues that the Other is a counter-index word with no content until the specific 'this' it opposes is specified, that Jung had no theory of the Other at all, and that the concept entered Jungian discourse only in the 1970s—which makes reification and the loss of relationality the volume's two standing dangers."
  - "Roger Brooke's chapter makes the collection's most consequential claim: Jung did not apply his own compensatory dream theory to his African dreams, and the oppositional equations that survived that failure became the coordinate system of individuation itself."
  - "The later chapters divide rather than converge—economic inequality inside the analytic fee, Jung's unreconciled individualism and structuralism as a bad model for sociology, and the silencing effect of participation mystique on the peoples it names."
references:
  - "Carter, Marybeth, and Stephen Anthony Farah, eds. The Spectre of the Other in Jungian Psychoanalysis: Political, Psychological, and Sociological Perspectives. Routledge (Chapman & Hall), 2022. ISBN 978-1-032-12186-4."
  - "The consulted copy carries a 2023 first-publication statement on its imprint page against a 2022 Library of Congress control number; both dates are recorded here rather than silently reconciled."
glossary_terms:
  - other
  - otherness
  - collective-shadow
  - race
  - individuation
  - projection
scholar_prompts:
  - "If the Other has no content until the this it opposes is named, what exactly has Jungian psychology been analyzing when it treats otherness as a psychic given?"
  - "What happens to individuation as a concept once Brooke's account of Jung's unanalyzed African dreams is accepted rather than quarantined as biography?"
  - "Can a clinical relationship constituted by economic inequality be interpreted as transference without dissolving the inequality into symbol?"
seo_title: "The Spectre of the Other in Jungian Psychoanalysis (Carter and Farah)"
seo_description: "Carter and Farah on othering in Jungian psychology: Jung's African dreams, race, individuation, projection, and social structure."
last_updated: 2026-08-23
---

**A conference in Cape Town becomes a book about othering**

This is a curated collection, not a monograph, and it should be read as one. Fourteen chapters grew out of the 2017 International Association for Jungian Studies conference in Cape Town, and Marybeth Carter and Stephen Anthony Farah treat the location itself as the organising provocation: the modern birthplace of the struggle for equality is not a neutral venue for a professional gathering about difference. The editors situate the book's urgency in a sequence of overlapping crises—pandemic, identity politics, refugees, LGBTQ rights, Brexit, MeToo, Black Lives Matter—which means the volume functions as a period document of Jungian studies confronting the collective, not as a settled theory of the Other. Andrew Samuels sharpens this into a self-critique of the profession. He was jailed in South Africa after ANC recruitment and clandestine tasks, and he uses that biography to indict Jungian analysis as esoteric and elitist, demanding that analysts ally themselves with movements and take politics into public life. That demand sets the book's stakes: the question is not whether Jungians can think about othering, but whether their institutional form permits it.

**Papadopoulos and the problem of a word that means nothing on its own**

Renos K. Papadopoulos supplies both the theoretical spine and the volume's clearest warning against the enterprise he is introducing. The Other, he argues, is a counter-index word: it carries no content until the specific 'this' it opposes is specified, and it therefore borrows its meaning entirely from whatever it is set against. Jung had no theory of the Other whatever; Papadopoulos himself introduced the term into Jungian discourse in the 1970s by way of Lacan. From this he names two dangers the rest of the volume must navigate. The first is the paradox of reification, in which a deliberately fluid, non-essentialist concept hardens into a thing that can be possessed, diagnosed, and projected. The second is the loss of relationality, in which opposition swallows similarity and the Other becomes only what is not us. His most useful distinction for the critical chapters that follow is between Jung's adoration of the distant, exotic Fremde and his contempt for the near and familiar Andere—and he observes that the German of Jung's famous dictum about consciousness uses Andere, not Fremde. The exotic could be revered precisely because it stayed far away.

**Reading Jung's African dreams against Jung's own dream theory**

Roger Brooke's opening chapter is the volume's most consequential piece of scholarship, and its charge is technical, not moral. Jung did not apply his own compensatory theory of dreams to his own dreams of Africa. Confronting the Arab prince dream and the Chattanooga barber dream, he reacted from an anxious ego instead of analysing them, and thirty years later in *Memories, Dreams, Reflections* he was still narrating from inside the dream, never interpreting it. Brooke's argument is that this is structural, not biographical trivia. The oppositional equations left standing by the failure—white and non-white, conscious and unconscious, civilized and primitive, individual and collective—became the coordinate system of Jung's account of individuation and the development of consciousness. Jung's colonialism therefore survives inside the discipline's central terms, extending beyond its embarrassing passages, and cannot be excised by apology. Brooke's constructive proposal is equally strong: the Nguni concept of ubuntu supplies the ethical and communal dimension that individuation has always lacked, reframing object relations as ancestral relations. Africa returns as a source of theory, with its material no longer reserved for European self-discovery.

**The white shadow as a cultural complex, not a personal failing**

Karen H. Naifeh begins from Fanny Brewster's charge that Jung's refusal to deepen his thinking on race left American Jungian practice without direction. Her argument is that racial bias is held in place by a cultural shadow far less accessible than the personal shadow, and correspondingly harder to withdraw: what one has never owned individually cannot be retracted individually. She reads the barber dream as the exemplary failure—Jung could not tolerate the threat it posed to his European personality—and locates the mechanism in his 1925 geology of the unconscious, where clans and nations lie beneath the waters. Building on Singer and Kimbles's [cultural complex](/library/the-psyche/singer-kimbles-cultural-complex/), she names three forces that keep unconscious racial bias operative and insists the work is not only an obligation owed to people of colour but a self-interested one, since white people are not free either. Brewster's own chapter refuses to let that formulation stand as the last word. Writing from within the African Diaspora, she declines the demand to move forward from historical trauma and insists on a remembered African otherness that is chosen rather than imposed—a difference the volume preserves instead of resolving. Kevin Morgan's [work of whiteness](/library/the-psyche/morgan-work-of-whiteness/) belongs alongside both.

**Othering as an economic, sociological and mythopoetic problem**

The later chapters test whether the Other can be held as anything but an intrapsychic figure, and they reach genuinely divergent answers. Gustavo Beck argues, with deliberate methodological weakness, that clinicians dissociate money from economy—fees become transference, capitalism stays outside the room—and he uses his own analytic fee, negotiated in dollars against Mexican pesos, to show that the analytic relationship is itself constituted by economic inequality running in both directions. Johann Graaff diagnoses the opposite failure: Jung's individualism and his structuralism were never reconciled, producing a one-sided and sometimes cynical account of society, nationalism and crowds that has set a poor example for Jungians attempting sociology since. Barbara Helen Miller shows the cost concretely, arguing that Jung's unadjusted use of participation mystique silences the peoples it names, while Sámi healers deploy the concept with full awareness of projection and identification—they were never inside the condition the term assigns them. Beebe, Farah, Nakamura and Hon close the volume in film, anime and fairy tale, where otherness takes form. The unresolved tension is the book's real finding: no shared method survives the crossing from psyche to economy to society.