Jung’s Fantasies of Africa and Africa’s Healing of Analytical Psychology

Abstract

Jung’s dreams about Africa reveal the Whiteness and colonialist assumptions typical of the twentieth century educated European. Jung’s visits to Africa and New Mexico, and his dreams are critically discussed, showing how, even decades later, Jung failed to use his own theory of dreaming with regard to his own dreams. The compensatory function of his dreams was never effected, and his transference fantasies of Africa and blackness were reinforced rather than analyzed. There were unfortunate consequences for the development of his thinking and his understanding of the individuation process, since his oppositional thinking in terms of White and Black remained as a concrete transference fantasy as well as a colonialist attitude towards his internal world. The Nguni term ubuntu, will be used to reimagine individuation in more explicitly ethical and socially embedded ways. With regard to the development of consciousness, a distinction is developed between the withdrawal of projections and as a helpful therapeutic issue and as an epistemological approach to the place of meaning. If Jung’s dreams of Africa had managed to “heal” him, Jungian psychology would look rather like it does today, because the way out of Jung’s Colonialism is to be found in Jung’s life and work, especially in his alchemical studies.