C.G. Jung and the indigenous psyche: two encounters

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn The Lament of the Dead, James Hillman quotes Foucault as saying there are two ways to escape ‘the box of contemporary thinking’. One path lies through erudition, the other through the indigenous experience. While the history of Jung's ideas has been thoroughly explored, we understand little about his encounters with indigenous people in the American Southwest. For example, the literature on his visit to Taos Pueblo is riddled with misleading information. Part of the problem begins with Jung's own confusion regarding his contact at Taos with Antonio Mirabal. Not only did Jung wrongly believe that Mirabal was an ‘Indian chief’; he misspelled and mistranslated his Tiwa name, Ochwiay Biano. Although the encounter could be described (at one level) as superficial, Jung refers to it as one of the most important experiences of his life. This paper will explore what Jung seems to have encountered in Taos, and the ways his experience were orchestrated by the unseen presence of others (including Mabel Dodge Lujan, D.H. Lawrence, and Jaime de Angulo). Archival records and news accounts from the 1920s show that although Jung imagined he was meeting face to face with a ‘primitive' who still lived in the world of ‘participation mystique’, Mirabal was a gifted Native American impresario who later visited one American president and turned down an invitation to visit a second. I argue that the complex of colonialism surrounding Jung's relationship with Mirabal has infected subsequent encounters between the Jungian tradition and indigenous people.