An institute writing about itself, not a survey of racism

The problem this book sets itself is narrower and harder than the title suggests. It is not a survey of racism in analytical psychology; it is a document produced by members of one named training community, the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association of New York, writing about the institute they belong to. The editors explicitly decline to speak for any psychoanalytic community, offering the volume instead as an exemplification of how an institute might formally take up systematized racism within its own training, practice, and admissions. That framing does real analytical work. A general treatise on racism can be read and admired without cost; a record of colleagues addressing each other in print cannot. The plurality of voices—Carter, Houck, Ulanov, Fausch, Salman, Lamborn, Hayes, Braun, with a preface by Harry Wells Fogarty—therefore functions as evidence, with thematic variety secondary. Contributors write from different chairs in the same room, and the disagreements between them are part of what the book demonstrates. Read as a genre, it belongs less to scholarship than to institutional testimony, with the risks that carries: proximity can sharpen accuracy or protect the familiar, and the volume is legible only if the reader holds both possibilities open.

Carter’s demand: denounce the writings without erasing them

Christopher J. Carter’s opening chapter, with its appendix, is the volume’s most concrete act. It makes an itemized demand of the International Association for Analytical Psychology: a written and public denunciation of the racist and misogynist strands in Jung’s corpus, an expression of regret, and increased curricular attention to bias in training. The demand is precise because it is addressed to a body with the authority to answer it, and it is unusual because it refuses the remedy critics of Jung most often reach for. Carter insists the writings not be erased. Removal would spare the institution the discomfort that constitutes the actual training material. The argument rests on two claims that carry the chapter. First, that “race” is a false construct whose deconstruction is a prerequisite of individuation rather than a political preliminary to it—a position stated bluntly in the volume’s most quotable line, “Racism is real. Racists exist. But race does not exist.” Second, that the customary defense of Jung as a man of his time is an evasion, because Jung was cognizant of his biases and defended them in print. The second claim is the sharper one. It shifts the question from historical context to authorial responsibility, and it makes the appeal to period sensibility inadequate and factually wrong about the record.

Ulanov on the primitive: a paradox Jung could not hold

Ann Ulanov approaches the same material through Jung’s own psychology, staying inside it. Her chapter reframes his statements about “Negroes” as a subset of a wider ambivalence toward what he called the primitive layer of psyche, and her indictment is structural: Jung alternated between negative and positive valuations of that layer instead of holding them together as paradox. The failure is diagnostic in his own terms. A psychology that stakes everything on the tension of opposites collapsed, at this point, into oscillation. Ulanov’s contribution to the volume’s vocabulary is the collective equation—the unexamined identification with the viewpoint of one’s own society—which names why the judgment of Jung’s era escaped a man otherwise trained to suspect consensus. She also declines to simplify the picture, noting that Jung encountered black figures in dream and vision as emissaries of the Self. That refusal is methodologically important. It keeps the analysis inside a contradiction and leaves it unresolved, and it forecloses the easy verdict in either direction: neither a Jung whose racism is incidental to his psychology nor a Jung whose psychology reduces to it.

Black as archetype, not only as projection

Deborah Fausch presses on a distinction the surrounding literature often lets slide. The flat black of America’s color complex—an undifferentiated screen for what white consciousness will not own—is not the same as an archetypal black that contains its own opposites: fertile and deadly at once, primordial void and germinal beginning. Working through the Aztec Smoking Mirror, she argues that whiteness requires an oppositional mirror to constitute itself while blackness does not, which reverses the usual dependency assumed in analytic accounts of racial projection. The clinical proposal that follows is the chapter’s real intervention. Withdrawing projections, the standard prescription, leaves the impoverished cultural image intact; drawing instead on archetypal imagery of black can loosen the cultural complex for black and white patients alike. This is a claim about what image work can do, and it is contestable—an archetypal reading can restore depth to a symbol while still leaving the historical people flattened by it unaddressed. Fausch’s argument is strongest where it insists that impoverishment of the image and injury to persons are the same problem approached from two sides.

From ghost to ancestor: what the volume asks clinicians to do with Jung

Across the later chapters the book converges, without becoming a single voice, on a clinical-ethical program: Jung’s racial complex is to be neither exorcised nor excused but transformed from a haunting ghost into an ancestor through anamnesis, mortification, and mourning. Salman locates the work in the analyst’s relation to what is disowned—“how we act in relation to our own dirt.” Hayes reads whiteness itself as a cultural complex whose spell must be broken, not a demographic fact. Houck names analytic neutrality as a defense in its own right, a technical virtue that propagates silence in the consulting room and the seminar. Braun draws the institutional conclusion: reparation is a debt owed by training institutes, not a gift they may choose to offer, and it comes with the recognition that “Addressing and making reparations for the harm of racism is a task that can never be completed.” The unresolved tension is whether an institute can hold that stance without converting endlessness into permission to defer. The book leaves the question open, which is honest, and which is also the reason its value will be settled by what the community that wrote it does next.