Caught between cultures: cultural norms in Jungian psychodynamic process

Abstract

In our increasingly mobile world, more of us are caught between cultures rather than in one culture. We straddle different ethnic, racial, political, geographical, and religious groups, forced into awareness of the precarious nature of our self-definition, involuntarily gazing at the constructed nature of our cultural norms, unable to avoid reckoning with the choices of which collective to honour. The impossibility of separating individual from collective is foundational to work as Jungian practitioners, but a paradox of individuation is becoming free of the control of collective norms while simultaneously living within those very norms. In such a conflict it becomes easy to overlook the fact that when the norms we have incorporated into ourselves are from cultures vastly different from the one in which we live, the cacophony can be overwhelming. In this paper, I will draw from postmodern theorists such as Derrida, Foucault and Irigaray in an effort to re-imagine the role of culture in psychodynamic process. The case of a Muslim Iranian man working with a Christian American woman analyst will be used to explore the complexity of a multitude of cultural norms present in the consulting room.