I suspect this is the way we might best look at the apparent confusion on the surface right now. Nothing turned out to be as it seemed on the night of June 8th. The country we thought was this type of country turned out to be that type of country. Hardly anybody seems to have been what they appeared to be. I have carried for a long time a general idea of the collective - the community I live in - as a fairly conservative lot. With deep and seldom openly expressed yearnings for the world of fifty years ago, when Britain was top dog, or thought she was, and they could feel the basic satisfaction of knowing that they, too, were the top dogs of the world by extension - borrowed trappings, you might say, but nevertheless much valued. Pride - national pride - is a powerful thing, and not to be discounted by the unwary. It has led to major wars, even in our time, and while we laugh at the jokes of the comedians on this subject, we also need to be cautious about being too flip about it. Indeed, what had been deeply buried for generations came whistling to the surface during the election debates: the question of identity. In Jungian language, I would call this the question of Self.
Look at it this way: we now know a lot more than ever before about our heritage as primates who have adapted to live on two legs, with larger brains and a more sophisticated pre-frontal cortex than we have ever seen among the animal kind of this planet. It may exist elsewhere - we don't have the means to check out the question - but it sure does exist here. People who tell me we are 'just animals' or 'no better than the rest of the animal kingdom' are missing a big point here. We are profoundly different in one major respect at least because evolution has provided us with a pre-frontal cortex, whose primary function, it seems, is to enable us to choose a life ungoverned by pure impulse. We do not need to respond in a knee-jerk manner to whatever life throws at us - we have the option, at least, of pausing for thought - whether we choose to take this option or not. And this makes all the difference in the world. But alongside this remarkable evolutionary growth has been the development of a highly complex, sophisticated psyche - it is clearly a bi-product of evolution, but in its variety, its creativity and sensitivity, it outreaches the already remarkable developments of the human brain. Psychically we have grown way beyond what our bodies can achieve on their own because we have the power of imagination. You may be thinking, well, this is to state the obvious: but it is always worth restating the obvious, especially when we get bogged down in social and political arguments of a kind that may appear rational, but where rationality on its own has very little chance of succeeding.
What seems to have happened, in short, is the development of complex brain power combined with sophisticated psychological components - and here I want to point out the enormous value and power of the Self. According to Jung, the Self is the totality of the psyche, not just one mean little part of it, such as some psychodynamic theorists have proposed, on the one hand, or such as brain researchers seem to have on the other. We can see the neurones and their connexions under a microscope or scanner - we cannot see what the brain has made of itself, in terms of its ever-widening capacity for the uses of the imagination. We can only see that in the works of human beings - in the entire landscape of knowledge, understanding and creativity which our newborn children are now heir to. We are, Jung pointed, all of ourselves - and what is more, some bits are not more important than others! We are not only our self-important little egos but are capable of wider consciousness than that - with its ability to enter another person's inner world and see it from their point of view. And that is just the beginning. We are also our vast unconscious minds - a genetic inheritance, basically, encompassing the entire history of the human race from day one, with its unlimited ways of inventing stories about itself, which we now condescendingly call 'myths' and 'fairy tales', but which we might equally call poems, novels or Hollywood movies for that matter. In energy psychotherapy, we see the totality of the psyche as including consciousness, unconsciousness, the physical body, the karmic or soul level of experience, the auric field (known as the biofield in some quarters), and the powerful pulses of the meridians and chakras. So the psyche is a massive construct, is my main point. To which construct Jung gave the name Self. He gave it a capital letter, we think, to distinguish it from the self as today's particular identity, what we see when we look in the mirror, if you like. The psyche also, and importantly, overlaps the psyche of everyone around us. So that sometimes we behave as though we were individuals and sometimes we behave as though we were a functioning part of a more collective whole. This he called 'the collective unconscious.'
What has struck me about the recent general election is how disturbing shifts in the collective can be and feel to us as individuals. I thought I was living in one kind of country and found I was living in another. Both beliefs are actually true, or as much of truth as I have been able to figure out for now. It's not that the country became different overnight, but rather that it has always had the capacity to be both 'this' and 'that', though, at any given time, one 'this' is more visible than 'that'. Some eruption, if you like, arrived on the surface which had been simmering quietly at a lower level for some time. We had been in more respects than one living in the past. Not only were we living on a national pride that was no longer well founded in reality, but we were clinging to the comforting stories we told ourselves about our tolerance, about our liberal values, about our compassion for those more vulnerable than ourselves. Clinging, in fact, to partial truths, at best, while the world moved on, and challenged us in a way that what we were capable of in 1945 soon got left behind the hurry and jostle of a nation without an Empire struggling to make ends meet. If you doubt me, look at the police evidence of eruptions of racism and hate crime which follows every assault by the Wahabi cult, who operate by fear, intimidation and violence. It happens every time, say the police - it cannot be dismissed as a temporary aberration. It has been a running sore in a reasonably orderly national life, in fact, taking many forms, for a couple of generation and more. It is in the psyche of the nation and erupts every so often under some real or imagined provocation like the Manchester and London attacks. But provocations do not have to be this stark - it erupted at the time of the EU referendum, when many people, it would seem, voted with the fear of the stranger uppermost in their minds, and the insecurity and sense of having been devalued which seemed to them to have followed from EU membership.
I had never doubted the existence of these darker aspects of the collective Shadow, but I think I had become less certain about the existence of the light - those who had not forgotten our sources of real national pride, not in the trappings of being top dog, but in the capacity of our people to be friendly and tolerant to the stranger, and to those in need, both among our own people and with those who come to us in distress for help. A price that could include being the only nation in the world who still has a mainly unarmed police force, that has a National Health Service owned by all and contributed to by all, so that no one need fear illness that has no recourse to treatment. All right, nobody said it was easy, for crying out loud! How easy is it ever to set aside your own woes for a while in the attempt to figure out whether somebody else needs something more? Of course it isn't easy. Far easier to look through the narrow prism of self-interest and an entrenched view of the economy as an engine for the betterment of the richer wealth creators, in the belief that somehow this will by osmosis enable the poor to prosper! Sometimes common sense is a more useful indicator of what is likely to work than the cleverest ideology. If your youngest child was in poor health, would you jump to the conclusion that the way to deal with this is to concentrate on the health of the older, healthy children, as this will then trickle down to the ailing youngster and make her better too? Somehow I doubt it. Common sense suggests the opposite - that you concentrate some energy on taking care of the one who needs your care the most, so that they may in due time become a fully functioning contributor to the whole family? But - and this is an important caveat - you do not neglect the older children, in the process, who may become envious and start to create problems of their own.
But let's not get carried away with too much optimism early on! It's not my job as a psychotherapist to tell people how to live - rather, to help them understand better the way they are actually living. People don't always notice, I find, unless you draw their attention to it. It is unconsciousness which makes cowards of us all - and Jung reminds us that our only true moral duty is not to be any more unconscious than we can possibly manage! And the way we have been living, I suggest, is in too much unconsciousness, in too swift a knee-jerk response to every up and down of the difficult world we live in. There has not been an adequate pause for thought - for the use of the prefrontal cortex. The Conservatives lost face, have become narcissistically wounded, and the Labour Party gained kudos but did not win. Notably, both sides are in a state of flux - it's not just that something else needs to happen, but that something else must happen on both sides and soon. 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.' A 'hung' parliament is what we dislike the most as a nation - we like decisiveness, we love clarity, we want to know who is in charge so we can get on and live our individual lives a bit more.
How do we construe this state of affairs? From a psychological perspective, the Self - the national identity - is in a state of ambivalence about the nature of its own identity. Much analysis will follow - has indeed already begun - and mountains of words will be expended on the subject of the nature of this ambivalence. I would like, while there's time, to insert a brief reminder: that whoever tells you confidently that they have the answer will probably be proved wrong! Well, it's not so much that they're wrong, but in a situation like this the last thing we need is more splitting: more attempts to decide who is 'right' and who is 'wrong', what is 'good' and what is 'bad', what is the work of God, and what that of the Devil. They are all right a good deal of the time! There is seldom one final answer to anything that will hold through the aeons of time and change that the human race inevitably stumbles through. Equally, they are all very capable of being wrong a good deal of the time! And what seems right today may be profoundly wrong tomorrow. So loosen up, we Jungians like to think, get a life! Care, yes, have hysterics, no!
Psychotherapists tend, in situations like this, to look for a third alternative. One thing we have learned for sure about the human psyche is that it often lacks a capacity to stand outside itself and see the wood for the trees. This is actually (no big secret) why we recommend psychotherapy at all. Because it offers the rare chance to be with someone who has a slightly better chance than average of seeing the wood and the trees - both at the same time! The joy and fear of waiting for the third to appear is that we have no idea at this moment what it might be. Could it be even worse than the options we seem to have right now? Well, yes, to be candid. But we often find that this is not the case - since the Third often seems to contain a possibly better solution proposed by the deeper layers of the Self, which has been working on this problem for much longer, and much more thoughtfully, than we have been capable of working on it by ourselves alone.
So let's not get too overwhelmed by the self-important demands of Left Brain for an instant solution to this mess. Yes, let it go forth and collect information, as it loves to do and does well. Let the number crunchers crunch and in due time let them let us know more in depth what the nation is/was thinking on June 8th. But then let us have a serious pause for thought. Looking back, I would say that this happened with the EU Referendum and has certainly happened, it would seem with the Scottish Referendum. What the Scots were thoroughly enthused about a brief two years ago, now appears to be lower down their list of priorities. They did not stop thinking because there had been an independence referendum! The same happened in a more confused and chaotic way with the EU Referendum (but then, there are a lot more of us). Some people didn't like what they saw and heard - a lot of people thinking, indeed second guessing themselves as well as others, was not what they wanted. Sorry to those who don't like it, who feel that a decision is a decision and that it cannot be rescinded. News is, we human beings do that sort of thing all the time! It's the only way we can possibly live, given our highly complex make-up, and our highly chaotic and contrary history. 'The best way forward' emerges - in due time. Meanwhile we all process as much as we can of where we are now. It may be painful and uncomfortable, it may make you feel insecure and as though your much vaunted stable identity has done a cartwheel, but look: it is what it means to be a human being. How about thinking about it this way . . . .?
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