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The weekend of November 15-17, The Jung Center of Houston will host this year's Fay Lecture series. Our speaker for this year is Ann Casement, a Jungian analyst and scholar from London, England. Ann Casement (LP, MBPsS) is a London-based Jungian psychoanalyst, senior member of the British Jungian Analytic Association, and associate member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (New York). She is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis in New York and a founding member of the International Neuro-Psychoanalytic Association. She contributes to The Economistand to psychoanalytic journals worldwide. She is the author of Post-Jungians Today, Who Owns Psychoanalysis?, and the forthcoming The Analyst’s Guide to Jung.


The topic for this year's Fay Lecture series is titled "Integrating Shadow: Authentic Being in the World." This talk will explore Carl Jung's concept of the shadow, in particular how the shadow manifests in cultures. In Jung's time, he was writing during the rise of totalitarian states such as Hitler's Germany and Stalinist Russia. But these concepts can equally apply to shadow manifestations in our culture today. The following are from a brief discussion that Ann Casement (A.C.) had with Michael Escamilla (M.E.), an analyst and Frank McMillan Jr. Scholar at the Jung Center of Houston, about her upcoming talk.



M.E.: For your upcoming Fay lectures, you will be discussing Jung’s concept of the “shadow,” which you mention might be viewed as one of his most important contributions to psychology. Has your way of viewing how to identify and work with the shadow, in analysis, changed over the course of your career?


A.C.: My thinking on Shadow has evolved enormously over the decades - one hugely important influence is Wolfgang Geigerich's thinking on this. Briefly, Shadow psychology in Jung's sense is only to be understood from its Christian background, which also gave rise to the whole phenomenon called psychology. Its historical development in the Christian tradition moves through the projection of shadow by the Crusades, accusations of witchcraft, and so on until it 'has come home' as a result of the horrors committed by the West during the 20th-century.


M.E.: Why do you feel integration of the shadow is such a critical concept for Analytical Psychology, and, if you could comment on this, how does it differ from Freud and ideas of some of the less savory components of the “Id” or from other forms of psychotherapy practiced today?


A.C.: Re the Id - it is the instinctual pole of psyche whose contents are unconscious and consists of hereditary and innate, and repressed and acquired contents - Freud's evolving notion of the System Unconscious wherein the boundaries between Ego, Superego, Id become more permeable in the second Structural model produced in the early 1920s.
Recent re-thinking by Mark Solms (Contemporary Freudian) and Jaak Pansepp (Neuroscientist) focuses on the Conscious Id, which views it as the seat of conscious in the brain stem from where consciousness is driven - not from Ego which is in cortical region of the brain as Freud thought. The new thinking gives even more support to Freud's notion of the Body-Ego.


M.E.: Jung, and by association, Analytical Psychology, have undergone criticism for having “shadow” elements that need to be addressed, such as Jung’s views on Jewish culture and, most recently, his characterization of some non-European cultures as having more “primitive” features. What do you consider the main shadow issues which Analytical Psychology, as a field, should be paying attention to in 2019?


A.C.: I've written about some of the shadow elements in Jung's history, which I covered in my book Carl Gustav Jung (Sage Publications, 2001), including issues regarding his ambivalent actions regarding serving as a journal editor in Germany during some years of the Nazi regime and the controversy about his views about Jewish culture. In the upcoming Fay Lectures, I will be, in response to a recent paper by Andrew Samuels and colleagues, which denounces Jung's attitude towards Africans and East Asians, exploring some of the difficulties with Jung's endorsement of anthropological concepts that he felt could be observed in "primitive" populations. In particular, I will speak about the concept of "participation mystique" and Jung's adoption of some of the anthropologic concepts of Levy-Bruhl. This concept is still revered by many Jungian analysts, but I think it is based on erroneous information, which is derogatory and plays into one of the areas of "shadow" in the Jungian community.