Our Uncertain World – Challenges and Opportunities in Dark Times

Carl Jung also lived through the dark times of World War I, the Depression, the rise of fascism and World War II, seeking to grapple with collective psychological dynamics such as the projection of the shadow and psychic contagion, while pursuing the inner work of individuation, which is always ours to undertake whatever the circumstances. The series of essays by Jung scholars address living with personal uncertainty, social turmoil, and grappling with the challenges of the environment, the pandemic and war. There seemed to me a general lack of awareness about the extent to which crises and chaos are orchestrated and perpetuated in the interests of geopolitical ambitions, intelligence, the military and pharmaceutical profits – while climate and sustainability are now massively funded, with dissent censored as misinformation/disinfomation in all these areas.

Archetypally, the Apocalypse is a fundamental theme of our time, as put forward by Edward Edinger, who suggested that ‘the only way to avoid catastrophe is for enough people to understand deeply what is going on’ – as Jung also advocated in his work, for instance, on the undiscovered self and resistance to mass psychology at this time of death and rebirth, disintegration and reconstruction; we must beware, however, of this reconstruction being centrally imposed through a UN declaration of planetary emergency or other forms of authoritarian domination. Democracy also has a crucial inner dimension towards awakening interiority and greater consciousness – withdrawing simplistic and fundamentalist, totalising and polarising projections, ultimately integrating light and dark forces in the psyche – a coincidentia oppositorum.