I once attended a lecture by a financial expert in which he recounted a long, protracted, and difficult dialogue with his father about world politics. At the end, his father summed it all up: “Well, it’s really all about economics.” Then, a few years later, the same father and son had a second conversation. The father summed it all up again, but this time the conclusion was: “It’s really all psychology.”

In this short essay, I would like to offer some ways in which politics is really all about psychology, and more specifically: How might a depth psychology that takes account of Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious be relevant to our contemporary socio-political problems? What I am NOT going to do here is engage in a defense of my own political viewpoint, which in any event would not be terribly interesting! Instead, I would like us to imagine together a different type of political conversation, one that goes beyond the emotionally driven certainties dividing the United States today, one that does not reduce to identifying what team we are on, a discussion that you will not find on either MSNBC or FOX.

In my experience, most of what goes by the name of political discourse today is very rarely about tax policy, foreign policy, or any policy. Much more often what we call “politics” seems to be a seething cauldron of projected personal and archetypal psychology, a projection screen on which we experience and defend our deepest values and hopes – and defend against our deepest fears – a story of saviors and devils, good and evil, often told as if these qualities exist on only one side of the political aisle. The good ones, of course, are our group; the bad ones are the other group(s). A psychology of politics, I suggest, is different than this. Psychology has political implications, but it transcends political ideology or party affiliation because it is an inherently human endeavor. Which political team has a shadow, the liberals or the conservatives? Which team is doing the projecting, is possessed by complexes, or is enacting defenses against re-traumatization, the Democrats or the Republicans? I have to say such questions seem to me patently ridiculous. My starting point is that good and evil, compassion and power, individual rights and collective needs, are tensions that inhabit every human heart. Perhaps this seems theoretically obvious? And yet, one must admit, it sure does not seem obvious when one feels the heat of contemporary political discussions.

What can Jungian psychology contribute to our socio-political problems? I would like to begin to answer this question by paraphrasing Einstein’s famously insightful observation that problems cannot be solved on the same level of consciousness that created them. With this in mind, I will offer in this little essay three depth psychological themes that I see as starting points towards a new political dialogue. These are the concept of shadow projection, the capacity to think symbolically, and the way in which dreams respond to social and political events. At the end, I will tell you a dream of my own, one of the most powerful dreams of my life, a dream I had 10 days after 9/11 as I wrestled with the problem of war.  

Shadow Projection

The very first thing I ever learned when I opened a book about Jungian psychology was that we all have a shadow side. The theory is simple: Aspects of ourselves that are incompatible with our conscious values tend to get repressed. When this happens, these contents are inevitably projected outside and seen in other people. Jung called this shadow projection.

Jung saw war and political tension as stemming from shadow projections; when these happen on a collective scale, they act like gasoline poured out on the fires of conflict, releasing huge reservoirs of split off emotional energy in large numbers of people. For Jung, WWI and WWII are graphic examples. In her book on active imagination, Encounters with the Soul, Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah recounts a discussion with Jung about whether there would be a third World War. Jung’s answer was yes. Yes, that is, unless more people take back projections off their perceived enemies and bear the resulting tension of opposites within themselves.

I remember vividly that when Jung was asked in a discussion if he thought there would be atomic war, he answered: “I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of opposites in themselves. If enough can, I think we shall just escape the worst. But if not, and there is atomic war, or civilization will perish, as so many civilizations have perished before, but on a much larger scale.” (p. 8)

Hannah continued, “This shows the tremendous value which Jung set on standing the tension between the opposites, and, if possible, uniting them in ourselves. For if we project the dark opposite beyond the Iron Curtain or onto the terrorists, for example, we are failing to contribute the grain that we might place on the positive side of the world scale of peace or war” (p. 8-9). Again, the theory is simple, seemingly too simple: When we take back shadow projections – when we are honest with ourselves, I would say – we work on both our own transformation and the transformation of society. But doing this is the trick. The theory is easy; the practice is almost impossibly difficult. Jung’s antidote to socio-political insanity reminds me of something that G. K Chesterton said about Christianity in his book What’s Wrong with the World (1910), “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried” (Part I, ch. 5). We shall return to this point.

Do we see shadow projections operating today in our political theater? Well, let’s not start there. My fear is that opening our discussion with examples from contemporary politics would set off emotional reactions that would derail our line of inquiry. Rather than naively stepping into the cauldron of today’s super-charged events by bringing up Trump or Harris or other issues that confront us in 2024, I would prefer to deliberately take a step back, a step back in time, to hopefully gain some perspective, distance, and perhaps more openness to the ideas I’m suggesting in this short offering.

Instead, let’s begin our exploration of how shadow projections infiltrate political dynamics with Reagan's March 8, 1983, speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida; here we find Reagan’s first recorded use of the phrase "evil empire."

So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil. They preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Four years earlier, on November 5, 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, was quoted as saying that “America is the great Satan [emphasis added].” Jumping ahead some 25 years in time, the religious rhetoric is still hotly bantered around and the archetypal or religious projections of good and evil as powerful as ever. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, for example, President Bush labeled the nations of North Korea, Iraq, and Iran “regimes” that formed an “axis of evil.” Before the fatefully tragic invasion of Iraq, Bush told us that, “Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.” The Middle East, however, is generally convinced that the President of the United States is the great threat to world peace, the one who, always carrying a briefcase with the nuclear codes, could at any moment destroy the world in fire. Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the chief commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, responded to Bush by stating that the true axis of evil is the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. And a few years later, in a September 2005 speech to the United Nations, newly elected President Ahmadinejad stated that the President of the United States sought to promote “state terrorism” based upon the “logic of the dark ages” and divide the world into “light and dark countries.” Ahmadinejad’s impression was affirmed by Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, in a 2006 address to the United Nations General Assembly where he famously proclaimed that Bush “is putting at risk the survival of the human species” and called Bush, “the devil” repeatedly. “The devil came here yesterday,” Chavez said to the United Nations, referring to Bush’s appearance at the same podium the day before, “and it smells of Sulphur still today.”

These are some ways that archetypal or religious projections live inside of politics at the highest global level. Their effect is not to encourage dialogue, clear thinking, or related feeling, but to buttress one’s own power position.

Taking the global perspective back down a notch to the domestic plane, on a smaller scale it seems that politicians in the United States know that if they can paint their rivals as embodiments of the shadow of their base this adds emotional conviction to their arguments. Their rhetoric does not necessarily have to be religious to be effective although that does also happen. For example, in a 1996 Memo to the GOPAC Newt Gingrich wrote that following negative words should be deliberately used by Republicans to describe Democrats: “Anti – flag, family, child, job …” “bizarre” “betray” “decay” “destroy” “destructive” “devour” “failure” “insecure” “pathetic” “selfish” “shallow” “sick” “stagnation” “they/them” “traitors.” Is this not a projected symbolic self-portrait of the Republican shadow? These are demonizations intended to generate emotional reactions in the Republican base. And it works! If we are sincerely convinced that another person or group of persons is the embodiment of our own shadow – for example if our conscious value is loyalty to the country and the Democrats are traitors – than all reason and objectivity, all capacity to see the human reality of these people, quickly goes out the window.

The quality of shadow projections varies for the right and the left because the shadow is always the antithesis of a group’s consciously held values. But the left projects the shadow also. For instance, listen to the following negative characterizations of Mitt Romney during the 2012 Presidential election: “lack of empathy” “inhumane” “insensitive to animals” “bad for women” “rich and indifferent” “just what you would expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account” “extreme on issues” “plastic” “fake” “insincere.” Is this not a projected symbolic self-portrait of the liberal shadow? These characterizations of what counts as “bad” are different that Newt Gingrich’s because they zero in on qualities that are incompatible with the conscious values of liberals – compassion and empathy. The qualities change but the process is the same; the shadow is exteriorized in a clichéd way as if power and greed and lack of empathy were not a general human problem but only a problem that Republicans have. I remember many Democrats were disappointed when, during the first debate against Barack Obama, Mitt Romney appeared to be quite human, even likable, rather than as a cliched embodiment of that guy with the monocle from the Monopoly game. Today, of course, Mitt Romney is an embodied example of Republican sanity and reasonableness for many Democrats.

I will repeat this point throughout: It is one thing to intellectually acknowledge the very simple Jungian theory of the shadow, i.e. qualities that one despises and rejects in oneself may appear in our perceived enemies. It is quite another thing, however, to live this realization, to truly drink it down to the dregs, to feel it. How does it feel to be the thing you’ve fought against your whole life?

Nobody wants to consider this. Here is where dreams can be helpful. Dreams can point us toward that realization. A liberal political activist once dreamt he was fishing in a boat with Dick Cheney, the man who at that time, more than any other, was for him the embodiment of the dark side, as in a Star Wars fairytale – Darth Cheney. But they are in the same boat together! A sniper in the Gulf War dreamt after returning home that the war was still going on and he was in a battle. He peered through the scope of his rifle, looked through the cross hairs, and who did he see? His brother was in those cross hairs. These types of dreams are shocking if they penetrate us; they are compensatory dreams, dreams that show us what we do not know, do not want to know, but need to know.

To repeat again, the theory is simple: If more people could take back their negative projections the world would be a better place. We would have a better chance at dialogue, relatedness, and truth. Who can disagree with that? We do not need more sophisticated or complex ideas. What we do need is a capacity to live the theory, to apply it, to bear it.

It is hard that the human soul, not the soul of only the Republicans or the Democrats, not the soul of only the terrorists or of Trump, is a reptile as well as a butterfly. The animalistic dimensions of human nature are there, within us all, and they can be dangerously exacerbated if we have too much naïve faith in the power of rational enlightenment, benevolent preaching, or good will. I offer the following example, another dream, this time the dream of John Adams, the second U.S. President in the years 1797-1801. Adams had the following dream in 1790 and reported it 22 years later to his friend Benjamin Rush.

I dreamed that I was mounted on a lofty scaffold in the center of a great plain in Versailles, surrounded by an innumerable congregation of five and twenty million, at least, of the inhabitants of the royal menagerie. Such a multitude is not to be described or enumerated in detail. There were among them the elephant, (the) rhinoceros, the lion, the hyena, the wolf, the bear, the fox, and the wildcat, the rat, the squirrel, as well as the calf, the lamb, and the hare. There were eagles, hawks and owls of all sorts, and storks and cormorants and crows, and ducks, geese, turkeys, partridges, quails, robins, doves, and sparrows. There were whales, sharks, dolphins, as well as cod, mackerel, herrings, and even minims and shiners.

My design was to persuade them to associate under a free, sovereign, ‘annimatical’ (‘self-acting’ or ‘self-animated’) government, upon the unadulterated principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity among all living creatures. I had studied a long speech, arranged it in exact method, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with an exordium and a very pathetic peroration, according to the most orthodox rules of the most approved rhetoricians. Throwing my eyes round and gracefully bowing to my respectable audience, I began:

“My beloved brothers! We are all children of the same Father who feeds and clothes us all. Why should we not respect each other’s rights and live in peace and mutual love!?”

I had not pronounced all these words before the elephant pouted his probiscus at me in contempt, the lion roared, the wolf howled, the cats and dogs were by the ears, the eagles flew upon the turkeys, the hawks and owls upon the chickens and pigeons. The whale rolled to swallow twenty at a mouthful, and the shark turned on his side to snap the first he could reach with his adamantine teeth. In a word, such a scene of carnage ensued as no eye had ever seen and no pen or pencil ever described.

Frightened out of my wits, I leaped from the stage and made my escape – not, however, without having all my cloths torn from my back and my skin lacerated from head to foot. The terror and the scratches awakened me and convinced me forever what a fool I had been.” (Zarrow, S. (2010). Friendship and Healing – The Dreams of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, p. 47)

This amazing dream is most certainly a compensation for Adams’ one-sided Enlightenment values – liberty, equality, fraternity. Adams is challenged not by an enemy outside of himself but by his own unreasonable power shadow. He obviously took this dream extremely seriously for, as he says in the letter to Rush, the dream “convinced me forever what a fool I had been,” and he writes this 22 years after having had the dream in the first place. In the dream, Adams wakes up.

If peace cannot be attained by benevolently preaching enlightened philosophical ideals what, then, is the solution? What can we do? If you have followed me up to this point, then the conclusion seems inevitable: We – me and you – must confront the problem of honestly confronting ourselves. Perhaps this seems too little, not effective, but even it is only, as Barbara Hannah writes, a grain of sand that we might place on the positive side of the world scale of peace or war, it is a real contribution and one that we can actually accomplish.

Symbolic Thinking

In addition to taking back our own shadow projections, Jung’s answer to socio-political insanity also involves the capacity to think symbolically. In a letter to David Cox in 1957, Jung writes the following, “we are threatened with universal genocide if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death.” (Jung, Letters Vol. II, p. 586) In other words, destruction and transformation is in the cards these days; the only question is whether our collective death will enact itself concretely in the outer world or symbolically within the self. Revisiting again Einstein’s observation that problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them, we can consider the socio-political value of thinking symbolically as opposed to literally.

Here is an example of what I think Jung means, just one example, by no means exhaustive. Consider the phenomenon of what is labeled, from the perspective of the United States, radical Islamic terror. From the Muslim perspective, the terrorists are not terrorists, they are martyrs. “Is there an art that is more beautiful, more divine, more eternal than the art of the martyr’s death?” asks the former President of Iran Muhammad Ahmadinejad. The martyr does not act out of personal motives but sacrifices himself for a higher purpose. “I praise what longs to be burned to death” Goethe writes in his poem “The Holy Longing.” Ahmadinejad agrees. But there is a vast gulf between these two men! Why? Because Goethe is speaking of symbolic death as a process of inner transformation, not of literal murder or suicide.

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person or else keep silent,

For the mass man will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive,

what longs to be burned to death.

…

And so long as you have not experienced this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest on a dark earth.

We are headed for literal genocide if we cannot work out our symbolic death. Here we can reflect on the difference between the poet, the terrorist, and the martyr. The poet, like the terrorist or martyr, is caught up in a sacred desire to be burned to death. The Sufis, however, as poets, are not homicidal or suicidal. Why? Because, like Goethe, the Sufis engage death and renewal as a symbolic realization that, unworked, remains in the terrorist and martyr raw psychosis.

There is vast difference, in other words, between poetic and fundamentalist faith. Fundamentalism, in both its religious and political forms, transforms the outer world into a symbolic world without knowing what it is doing. It thus becomes a type of madness and a dire problem in our world today. Our current political landscape is filled with unrealized symbols – angels and devils, heroes and villains – what we often call “politics” is a fairytale landscape populated with archetypal images rather than human complexity and paradox. I do not need to give examples; I’m sure you can think of your own. And again, while it is easy to see this in our most hated enemy group, my suggestion is that all of us, not just one group or another, are susceptible to this type of madness. When gripped by it, we are not helping things.

Collective Dreams

So far, we have explored the ideas of shadow projection and of thinking symbolically in socio-political contexts. I will end by turning our attention again to dreams, specifically to collective dreams, i.e., dreams that respond to world events, that apply to many people and are not only personal. I offer, in this context, a dream of my own, a dream I had 10 days after 9/11. The emotional context of this dream was shock, and the burning question within me was, “what can I, one little person on the periphery of world events, do about the problem of war?”

In this context, I had a long dream of which I will tell you part.

It is night and I am at a gathering of men, like some kind of secret society, outdoors in a parking lot. We have all driven there. I am going to give a lecture to this group. At one point ,two men are talking about the situation in the Middle East, with Afghanistan. They are having an argument about it. One is my friend. I realize that my friend knows half the story from the United States side, and the other man knows the other half of the story from the Afghan side; they each have half the truth. As I realize that, I consider that it is my job to somehow unite them. They need to come together. I begin to prepare a lecture, to give a lecture to this group. But then I am told what must actually happen for this reconciliation of the United States man and the Afghan man to occur. A ritual must take place, and I must participate in it. I must, first, cut my right hand with a dark iron blade and drain the blood into a chalice and then, second, drink my own blood from this chalice. It is like a Black Mass, the Christian communion but reversed. I can go through with the first step of this dark ritual; I cut my right palm and drain my blood into the chalice. But I cannot go through with the second step. I cannot drink my own blood. I can’t bear it, it’s too much and the whole thing is too overwhelming.

The image of turning oneself into a circulatory process is found all over the place in alchemical symbolism, most famously as the uroboros, the snake with the tail in its mouth, a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. Many years later, however, I discovered a strikingly exact parallel to this bizarre dream in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis. In the section entitled “Regeneration of the King” where Jung discusses the problem of war, we find the solution proposed by my dream!

If the projected [sociopolitical] conflict is to be healed, it must return into the psyche of the individual, where it had its unconscious beginnings. He must celebrate a Last Supper with himself and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood, which means that he must recognize and accept the other in himself. But if he persists in his one-sidedness, the two lions will tear each other to pieces. Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ’s teaching, that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to rend others also? (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14 par. 512).

In short, the message of the dream, a message that I hold within myself today as my best wisdom, is that if I want to help the world problem, I can start by extracting, containing, and integrating the psycho-physical life of my body, rather than projecting my inner fires onto the terrorists or engaging in a naïve purely mental solution, like giving a lecture about how we should all listen to each other and get along. Again, the theory is simple. It is easy to understand. But who can do it? I had this dream 23 years ago, and at that time the challenge of drinking my own blood as a religious ritual (not literally mind you but symbolically!) was terrifying.

Is it dangerous to encounter the archetypal depths of the unconscious within ourselves? Might it not disrupt our collective adaptation? Might it not overwhelm us? Yes, yes, and yes. Another common objection to psychological solutions to political problems is that they are impractical. But what if enough people do not bother to take back their shadow? The result will be what it always has been, a state of perpetual war. The United States will always be the great Satan; Iraq, Iran, and North Korea will always be the axis of evil. Again, while I am deliberately steering clear of any references to the current political situation in the United States, it should not be too difficult to apply what I am saying to contemporary events and contemporary players in the 2024 election – if one can bear it. That is up to you. 

Jung’s answer to the question “what can I do?” about socio-political insanity begins with confronting the madness within. As we face our own shadow, learn to think symbolically, and listen to how our dreams respond to world events, we might then engage with collective conflicts on a different level of consciousness from that which created them. I am not pretending this is a solution to the vastly complex problems in the world today. But I am suggesting that it could be a starting point.

Thomas Elsner, JD, MA is a certified Jungian analyst practicing in Santa Barbara, CA, a graduate of the Jung–Von Franz Center for Depth Psychology in Zurich, a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Study Center of Southern California, and co-chief editor of the journal Psychological Perspectives. As a core faculty member and highly respected lecturer at Pacifica Graduate Institute for many years, he taught courses on depth psychology and alchemy. Thomas has lectured and led workshops nationally and internationally. His work on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," was chosen for the distinguished annual Fay Lecture series in analytical psychology; the book will be published summer 2024.