“What if your worst fears are the story of our time”? — Naomi Lowinsky
During these times of social and political upheavals, the cultural unconscious manifests in expressions and enactments of chronic and historic racial injustices, political polarizations, the global pandemic, global warming, social media, and a multitude of other national and international political and cultural problems (which I named “Cultural Complexes”). These processes carry the phantom narratives of our collective legacies, ghosts, histories, and intergenerational traumas. How can the understandings we glean from these processes help us to see, hold and engage with the extreme collective emotional states that are expressed and that confront us in plain sight? What are their clinical implications?
My focus during this talk will be on working and experiencing “within” the cultural veil to both understand and process the spirit of the times.
Learning Objectives
- Give two examples of forms of privilege that contribute to a lack of awareness of the impact of cultural processes on analytic work.
- Describe three common positions that function to express emotional valances in a political and/or social situation
- Through the lenses of the victim, the perpetrator and the bystander, discern and describe similarities and differences between these modes of thinking.
