On July 25, Thiasos (the Brazilian workshop of shared imagination) hosts an online event with Stephen Garratt. The talk takes as its focus his chapter Journey to the Interior: Jung and Colonialism, published in The Second Handbook of Jungian Psychology, which he co-edited with Renos Papadopoulos and which was released earlier this year.
The subject is not an abstract one for Garratt. Born and raised in South Africa during apartheid, he grew up inside a settler-colonial society and, as a student, was an anti-government activist and a conscientious objector to miltary conscription. That early exposure to the mechanics of racial hierarchy has informed a research interest that has developed over many years, of which the Handbook chapter is the fullest expression to date.
The chapter examines Jung as a figure of his imperial century rather than a figure apart from it. Garratt traces how Jung sought evidence for his theory of the “Objective Psyche” through an expedition into rural Kenya, employing more than forty porters, in the belief that he had found a culture untouched by European civilisation. The chapter describes the shifting projections this fantasy produced: the colonised idealised first as the “noble savage,” and later, as the projection broke down, recast as threat or “dangerous infection.” Garratt situates this within the broader intellectual history of analytical psychology, arguing that concepts such as the “primitive psyche” carried the evolutionary hierarchies of their era rather than standing apart from them.
The chapter also identifies a counter-strand in Jung’s work. Garratt points to Jung’s insistence, against the psychiatric orthodoxy of his time, that patients’ inner worlds deserved to be taken seriously rather than corrected — an early refusal, in effect, to colonise the unconscious. Drawing on Papadopoulos’s account of Jung’s lifelong “problematic of the other,” the chapter distinguishes between the exotic, distant Other that Jung revered and the familiar, proximal Other he devalued, and reads this distinction as central to how colonial domination operates more generally.
From this historical grounding, the talk turns to the present. Garratt argues that the colonising impulse finds a contemporary expression in the self-help and self-improvement industry. Drawing on Foucault’s account of “technologies of the self” alongside Jungian critiques of ego inflation, he suggests that self-improvement culture extends the same rational, controlling ego that once claimed authority over colonised peoples onto the unconscious and instinctual life within the individual.
The talk closes by extending this argument to the present moment of AI-driven optimisation, proposing that the recursive self-improvement demanded of human beings today echoes, and is increasingly bound up with, the recursive self-improvement built into the technology itself.
Aware of the Brazilian context of this presentation, Garratt will be suppplementing the largely African/European focus of his paper with material and perspective from the Brazillian exprience of colonialism. While acknowledging that the literature is new to him he intends to draw, in particular, on Lélia Gonzalez’s concept of amefricanidade, Neusa Santos Souza’s Tornar-se Negro, and Abdias do Nascimento’s writing on branqueamento and quilombismo – work he expects will complicate as well as support parts of the chapter’s original argument.
Thiasos will host the conversation on Zoom on Saturday, July 25, at 10:00 a.m. Brasília time. It follows a book discussion earlier this year at the University of Essex, where Papadopoulos spoke to his own chapter on the shadow and theories of the Other in the same Handbook. You can read our article covering his talk here.
The event takes place tomorrow on July 25 at 10am UTC-3 via Zoom. To register, email encontrosthiasos@gmail.com