In the Presidential election of 2024, we were once again reminded that sound bite sloganeering trivializes substantive issues with mind numbing repetition. By the time the election was over the words “abortion”, “inflation”, “illegal immigration”, “gun control” seemed to have lost all soul and depth. They had become trigger words to collective emotion, hollowed out vehicles for manipulation while strangely seeming to have lost all meaning. Restoring meaning, depth, soul and symbolic resonance are among the many reasons why ARAS undertook the publication of Politics in a Traumatized World:  Dystopia and the Creative Imagination - Papers from the 2024 C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco Presidency Conference. These papers have taken on added relevance as a result of the outcome of the election which has left many of us disoriented as is if wandering in the wilderness. What was that all about? It is our belief that these papers are even more important now because they reembody and resacralize fundamental issues that the campaign drained of meaning and depth. In an almost shamanic-like recovery of soul these papers, taken individually and as a whole, reverse the deadening effect of the election and restore the human issues and their fundamental value to us which will not vanish. In the words of Olga Tolkachek from her Nobel prize winning novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, these papers are offered as a prayer to the human community: 

 “It’s a good thing that God, if he exists, and even if he doesn’t, gives us a place where we can think in peace. Perhaps that’s the whole point of prayer—to think to yourself in peace, to want nothing, to ask for nothing.”

ARAS is honored to publish the papers from the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco’s 7th consecutive Presidency Conference which has been held every four years since 2000. We also published the papers from the 2020 conference which was a joint effort with the international Analysis and Activism group. Some may wonder why ARAS, an organization devoted to the study of archetypal images that span cultures and history, would focus on a political election. There are a few reasons. Our U.S. politics have become inseparable from cultural conflicts and these conflicts often touch on archetypal themes embedded in cultural complexes. These cultural complexes express themselves in symbolic images and policies, such as the building of a wall to keep dangerous “others” out of the United States or the threat of the rise of authoritarianism in America and abroad triggering fears of repressive dictatorships, symbolized historically by Hitler or Stalin. There is a precedence for the focus of Analytical Psychology on such matters with Jung’s 1968 publication of Man and his Symbols as a seminal precursor that linked symbolic images with political upheaval. In this sense our publication of these papers is in very good company in the Jungian tradition.

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