Abstract
Abstract This essay argues that bringing Marxist and Jungian thought together can be surprisingly fruitful. While both traditions are ultimately concerned with human flourishing, they focus on different aspects of reality which would need to be combined for genuine emancipation: the social and the individual, the conscious and the unconscious, objectivity and subjectivity, modernity and ancestrality, science and spirituality. After briefly discussing divergences and convergences between the two authors, I present fragments of a Jungian-Marxian anthropology, around the depth of social struggles, the relations between ideology and archetypes, the psychic costs of capitalism, and Degrowth as the possible political project of this synthesis. If one takes human and nonhuman flourishing seriously, one can only go post-capitalist and seek to reorganize society around a slower pace, a simpler life, and more sharing and caring. The essay ends with a plea to bring back the soul to the core of radical activism.
Highlights
This essay is an attempt to bring together the Marxist analysis of socioeconomic processes and Jungian depth psychology
A synthesis of Marx and Jung is likely to bring us to unexpected territories— something that shouldn’t be surprising given the core of their respective approaches: after all, both Marx’s dialectical and Jung’s alchemical endeavours are expected to generate novelty from the synthesis of opposites!
This essay proposed that a synthesis of Marxism and Jungian psychology can help nurture radical emancipation
Summary
This essay is an attempt to bring together the Marxist analysis of socioeconomic processes and Jungian depth psychology. After a brief exposition of some of the key divergences and convergences between Marx and Jung, I propose four fragments of a Jungian-Marxian anthropology, around (i) the multi-layered nature of social conflicts, (ii) the relationship between ideology, mythology and the unconscious, (iii) the psychic costs of capitalist development, and (iv) ecology and Degrowth. Linking Fredric Jameson’s Marxist analysis of ideology and Jungian psychology, Rushing and Frentz (1991) underlined the key role of the cultural unconscious in this interconnection They define the cultural unconscious as “the site of a collision of psychic energies from two separate origins—the archetypes from the collective unconscious and the repressed contradictions from oppressive social formations” (ibid., 391). There is here ample material to enrich a Marxist analysis of capitalist development
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