Collective forms of Adveristy: narratives, traps, effects and therapeutic endeavours

Severe Forms of Collective Adversity (SFCA), such as wars, are not only destructive and dangerous but, due to their highly intricate complexity, create a wide range of predictable and unpredictable effects and consequences. Their evident effects are so concrete and painful that they easily deceive us into believing that we fully understand them and their impact.

This leads us into even more perilous positions of epistemological confusion, essentially, forgetting that far from being the authors of a story, in effect, we are the dramatis personae of a network of immensely powerful archetypal stories, much bigger than us. Moreover, the lethal ‘archetypal radiation’ that SFCA exert promote simplistic and polarised formulations that distort reality.

In this presentation, using Jungian insights along with my analytical and field experience, I will endeavour to identify some of these complexities, and will elaborate on how they directly affect everyone involved in SFCA, (i.e. sufferers and carers, commentators and bystanders), severely impacting on our therapeutic conceptualisations and approaches as well as on our very individual stance and identities.

These webinars form part of the #WithUkrainianJungians (#WUJ) Project which invites the international Jungian community to gather once a month as a community for 16 months in solidarity with our Ukrainian colleagues and any other colleagues whose people are facing erasure. The webinars are led by eminent Jungians in collaboration with some of our Ukrainian colleagues. The purpose is to build a strong container to hold our Ukrainian colleagues - and any other colleagues whose community is facing erasure - during a time of immense trauma.

Other projects to participate in alongside the webinars:

• ARAS image project
• Film project