Cultural Complexes and Phantom Narratives: Working with the Unseen that Exists in Plain Sight: A Course with Samuel Kimbles

"What if your worst fears are the story of our time?"
-Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, In the Wild Wake of the Election

During these times of social and political upheavals, the cultural unconscious is bursting through its expressions and enactments of chronic 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 call Cultural Complexes.  These processes carry the phantom narratives of our collective legacies, ghosts, histories, and their intergenerational traumas. How can the understandings we gleaned from these processes help us to both see and deal with the extreme collective emotional states that are expressed and confront us in plain sight?  What are their clinical implications?

Our focus during this course will be working with and experiencing “within” the cultural veil, the spirit of our times

Samuel Kimbles, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, Jungian analyst, member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and a clinical professor (VCF) in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. He has served as president of the C. G. Jung Institute, San Francisco. He has lectured and presented papers on topics related to the theory and practical applications of analytical psychology nationally and internationally. He is a clinical consultant and has taught at the San Francisco Jung Institute, colleges, and universities, as well as trained mental health and analytic professionals.

Dr. Kimbles’ published work on the Cultural Complex is a significant contribution to the application of analytical psychology to the study of groups and society. His books, The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society (Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles, editors), Phantom Narratives: The Unseen Contributions of Culture to Psyche, and Intergenerational Complexes in Analytical Psychology: The Suffering of Ghosts, explore the themes of psyche in groups and society.