Submitted by ARASAllison on
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.
