Ressentiment in Aboriginal Mythology
Jung and the Alice Spring’s Dog Story in Conversation with Girard and Nietzsche:
a theoretical appraisal of the psycho-social dynamics of violence.
The lecture is inspired by the three-way conversation in 2000 concerning the Dog Story which led Craig San Roque, a Jungian psychologist to write down his reflections and collect them into a cartoon book, The Long Weekend in Alice Springs.
Nikolai explores how Friedrich Nietzsche’s insights (1848-1900) into the psychopathology of ressentiment, René Girard’s mimetic and scapegoat theory (MT) and Carl Jung’s idea of cultural complexes (1875-1961) shed light on the dynamics of the recurring cycle of violence which have afflicted the human psyche since homo sapiens emerged from its previous proto-human beginnings.
This psychopathology will be discovered to be repetitive, autonomous and stubbornly resistant to consciousness. All three theorists will be harnessed to determine why the cycle of greed, deception (and self-deception) and violence, in Girard’s term of reference, the “scandal” that it is, is seemingly impossible to overcome.
In other words, how to bridge the reality gap contained in the oft repeated caveat, “This is not who we are but it is what we do.”