A new project from Jungian analyst and author Tom Singer launched on September 1. The Barbaric Yawp Project, a website of more than 150 AI-produced videos in which figures from history speak directly to the present American moment, drawing on their own recorded thought and writing. From poets, philosophers, scientists, and statesmen, what would these historic figures have to say about our modern times?
The project takes its name from Walt Whitman, who in Song of Myself sounds his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,” the cry of an individual voice refusing to be smoothed away. Each “yawp” is a brief monologue built from the historical record of what a real figure actually thought, said, and did. What might the dead say if given the chance to answer for what was left unfinished? The project frames this act of remembrance as urgent against a backdrop of book bans, emptied archives, and a version of the past in which, as the site puts it, “nothing wrong ever happened.”
The connection to Jung runs through the Red Book. Singer points to a specific image from page 169, painted around 1930, but based on his experiences in 1913, showing a hundred or so faces of the dead massed beside a radiant mandala. For Singer, the pairing was a deliberate integrating the voices of the dead as part of the work of individuation, for both an individual or a culture. The Barbaric Yawp project describes its own method as closer to what Jung called active imagination than to a séance or a forgery. It is a structured way of learning something the waking mind can’t reach alone. Singer stresses that this is offered as an analogy, not a claim that AI-generated monologues are equivalent to Jung’s own practice.
Below you can watch Tom Singer share his thoughts on how he started the project.
The site is organised into three sections: “About,” which lays out the project’s purpose (including two standout yawps, from Whitman himself and an opening Invocation); “Discover,” for browsing ancestors at random; and “Browse,” for searching contributors by name or category. You can explore the full project here, and you can also see it’s coverage in the new ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype – 2026 Issue 3.
For a look at Singer’s published works, including his most recent book, A Field Guide to American Cultural Complexes, you can visit click here.