Jung's Theory of Neurosis - Collective Neuroses in Politics

Collective Neuroses in Politics

Jung saw the divided psyche in the normal individual reflected in the neurotic nature of global politics, and vice versa.

If, for a moment, we regard mankind as one individual, we see that the human race is like a person carried away by unconscious powers; and the human race also likes to keep certain problems tucked away in separate drawers . . . Our world is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic, with the Iron Curtain making a symbolic line of division. . . . It is the face of his own evil shadow that grins at Western man from the other side of the Iron Curtain (Jung, 1964:85).

Read more about this topic:  Jung's Theory Of Neurosis

Famous quotes containing the words collective, neuroses and/or politics:

    Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    The neuroses parody the virtues.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.
    —G.M. (George Macaulay)