"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.” 
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus

ARAS Connections is not the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News or Breitbart. It is a quarterly online journal that “speaks in primordial images" as they appear in the contemporary psyche and culture as well as in the art and myths of earlier cultures from around the world. When the state of the world and its politics fall into crisis as is our current reality, symbolic imagery from the creative psyche spontaneously emerges from the depths to orient us by providing deep feeling and guiding narratives from our own and other cultures. It is at the interface of symbolic imagery and political upheaval that this edition of ARAS Connections focuses.

John Perry, a Jungian analyst of an earlier generation, defined an archetype as “an affect/image”. This edition of ARAS Connections is full of “affect/images” in which our current political realities and our psyches are being emotionally, intellectually and spiritually assaulted with revolutionary reversals in the United States and Western Europe and with human tragedies of unimaginable proportions in countries such as Syria and Iraq. We hope that these images and words will evoke in you "those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.” 

In our last, special Presidential Election edition of ARAS Connections we published seven image rich articles  from the pre election San Francisco Jung Institute Presidential Conference. In this edition, we have added three more articles from our distinguished colleagues in Santa Fe, New Mexico who, just a mere two weeks after the November 8, 2016 election, provided their shell shocked audience with a set of preliminary reflections and images in a post Trump election debriefing. Jacqueline West, Donald Kalsched, and Jerome Bernstein are among our most thoughtful and creative analysts and each provides a perspective that helps us “see” just a bit  more clearly what is happening in our world.

Growing out of a new Jungian activism in the world, Australian analyst Amanda Dowd offers in Adrift a heart rending psychological perspective on the art that is emerging out of the Syrian refugee crisis. This contemporary commentary is a continuation of Amanda’s ongoing meditation on memory, history, and on the links between self, place, and identity that results from the profoundly dislocating experience of migration and displacement. As co-editor of the book Placing Psyche:  Exploring Cultural Complexes in Australia she also explored this theme in another context, namely that of her own experience and that of a large part of the Australian population in her brilliant chapter, “Finding the Fish”.

Finally, Jean Shinoda Bolen, offers a commentary on images from the January 21, 2017 world wide Women’s Marches that drew over 5 million people on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Jean has been in the forefront of Jungian political activism for many years and describes this marriage of inner and outer in the following way: "Activism and individuation (to find a meaningful, inner directed, chosen life-path) come together when the choices we make express who we are and who we are becoming."

As I wrote at the outset, ARAS is not a news organization and it is not a political organization. Having said this, the editors would consider for publication papers using word and symbolic image to present alternative views on the Trump election, the Syrian refugee crisis and/or the world wide Women's Marches. Symbolic and archetypal imagery does not belong to any single political party or political perspective.