A duoethnographic exploration of colonialism in the cultural layer of the objective psyche

Abstract

Using a duoethnological approach, supported by Jung’s theory of archetypes and the layered objective psyche, the paper demonstrates how a duoethnological encounter can lead to new formulations of archetypal theory that challenge attitudes to diversity. The paper arises from the authors’ desire to explore the shame and pain of colonialism, initially in a diversity workshop and later by way of duoethnological dialogue, using transcripts of recorded conversation between the authors as well as email exchange. Notions of a colonizer archetype and ethnic shadow are presented and elaborated. The six conceptualized themes in relation to the exploration of colonialism in the cultural layer of the objective psyche are as follows: (1) Belonging, (2) The layered psyche and our understanding of difference, (3) Facing the ethnic shadow, (4) The colonizing archetype in the consulting room, (5) The exploration of colonial structures in the psyche and, lastly, (6) Valuing emancipatory encounter. These themes support an argument for the praxis of societal and internal encounters in order to raise the colonizer archetype and split off shadow material to consciousness, in the hope of bringing about a personal and cultural shift away from oppression.

One thing remains constant about our humanity … that we must never stop trying to tell stories of who we think we are. Equally we must never stop wanting to listen to each other’s stories. If we ever stopped it would all be over.

(Behar 2003, p. 37)

Introduction

As authors, one of us is a White British man [SB] and the other a Black British man of African heritage [DC]. This paper began as an exercise in duoethnographic encounter, and led to an exploration of colonialism in the cultural layer of the objective psyche. The catalyst for this was a moving experience during a diversity training in which we explored our different lived experiences, heritage, and impact on our therapeutic practice.

We began by identifying experiences where we felt most challenged, focusing on the history of colonialism and how this affects us. We agreed that we would use the Jungian theory of the layered psyche and archetypes to support the duoethnographical model of inquiry, along with African Ubuntu philosophy, introduced by DC. Ubuntu centres upon humanity, community and belonging to create empowering, dialogical and therapeutic spaces for encounter; affirming others as dignified persons and by placing the humanity of each participant at the centre of the encounter, it argues that it is soul‐to‐soul connection that enables a sense of belonging (Ukpokodu 2016). We noted that to expand our sense of belonging, we must look at what is split‐off in the psyche, what has not been kept in consciousness. The notion of the colonizing archetype emerged as key to our interpretative frame, seeing historical colonialism as a manifestation of this archetype.

Our focus on diversity, whilst personal, arises also from the apparent failure within psychotherapy to effectively address the large, intergenerational and global problems the world is currently experiencing with regards to racism, othering and social injustice (Behar‐Horenstein & Feng 2015), as well as the evident need to decolonize the curriculum (Smith 2012; Charura & Lago 2021).

Clarification of terms

Before developing the paper further, we will contextualize and clarify the following theoretical terms and concepts:

Psyche: We will use Jung’s definition of the term as ‘the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious’ (Jung 1921, para. 797). Unconscious material and processes, following Jung, are encountered in dreams, fantasy and the symbolic imagery of myths, religions, ritual, and fairy tale.

The cultural layer of the objective psyche: We consider Jung’s hypothesis of the layered psyche (Jung 2012) to be a rich area for further exploration. We contend that the cultural layer supports the family and tribal layer that are closer to consciousness, with the cultural layer containing processes, images and the psychic energies that undergird the stability, customs and distinctiveness of cultures (Tacey 2012). For example, a client from the US, resident in the UK, remarked recently that he doubted he would ever become fluent in British humour.

We conjecture that humour, like shame, embarrassment and attitudes to death and dying are all conditioned by the energetic patterns with which the cultural layer of the psyche has underpinned generations of peoples. That is not to say this is always static. Like all psychic forces, these too are prone to change as they meet with conscious manifestation on the one hand, and the irruption of deeper archetypal forces on the other. This latter point is important to our overall argument, as we later suggest that phenomena like Black Lives Matter emerge in consciousness as a reaction to damaging and decaying cultural layer forces, and that such reactive, conscious movements are supported by deep archetypal shifts.

Archetypes: are understood to be the deep patterns of the collective unconscious that shape perception and so shape the world we perceive. By ‘the colonizer archetype’, we name a pattern that manifests in all forms of oppression and inequality, and we focus on the polarized opposites of colonizer – colonized, which, we argue, seems to be shifting by way of increasing consciousness of the shame and pain in the colonized and colonizer.

The Self as archetype of diversity

We acknowledge that Jung first used the term archetype in 1919 in his paper Instinct and the Unconscious, in which he argued that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves. He stated: ‘the collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images’ (1919, para. 136‐38). This can be understood as ‘patterns of instinctual behaviour’ (Jung 1959, para. 44); he added, ‘there are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life’ (ibid. para. 48). We conjecture therefore that Jung’s writing on the archetype of the Self can also be thought of as the archetype of diversity.

For Jung the Self is both the totality and unity of all opposites, as well as the internal, psychic, energetic pattern that seeks wholeness through the fragmentary and partial nature of human consciousness. As the archetype of diversity, we suggest that the Self contains the potentiality for all forms of human cultural expression, and within this the tendency for oppositional positions to polarize. Indeed, Jung (1916/1957) saw the necessity of such polarization for activating the transcendent function, that innate capacity for opposites to be reconciled, in part through the symbolic images that emerge from the unconscious (see Jung 1916/1957, para. 145).

Issues of diversity can hence be seen as manifestations of the Self working towards wholeness, with the very conflicts of diversity becoming elements the psyche uses to bring about a greater wholeness in the cultural layer of the psyche where, as we shall see, the power of the colonizing archetype has such dominance. As we demonstrate, in the holding of tensions in the duoethnic encounter, the initial prevalence of one pair of opposites (black – white) refracts into a crystal‐like constellation of multiple opposites, each offering the potentiality for creative resolution by the activation of the transcendent function.

Engaging with a duoethnographical approach in our process

Duoethnography is a new, evolving form of inquiry, which was first described by Norris and Sawyer in 2003 (Norris & Sawyer 2004; Breault 2016). Norris and Sawyer (2012, p. 12) state that any duoethnographies might be considered ‘collaborative field testing’. We understand duoethnography as a way of bringing together elements of autoethnography, autobiography, self‐study, life history and more.

The material for this paper thus arose over a two‐year period following a diversity workshop. We met monthly via Zoom, recording our dialogue and used email to share reflections. We analysed the dialogue for themes and key statements, while further weaving our co‐constructed narratives into a coherent dialogue which has cumulated in co‐authoring this paper. Thus, we disrupted personal beliefs and metanarratives and, as posited by Norris and Sawyer, we juxtaposed our personal, solitary voices with the voice of another, through which ‘neither position can claim dominance or universal truth’ (2012, p. 15). Our co‐reflections produced a transformative experience for each of us.

The paper includes some direct quotes from our dialogue to demonstrate the trustworthiness of our process, to offer insights which are of clinical relevance, and to advance an innovative theoretical perspective on colonialism in the cultural layer of the objective psyche.

Early in the process SB shared:

I was born and raised as a white male in the southeast of England. I had reached my 50s and had never visited Liverpool. That was a cultural omission that I put right in the autumn of 2018. On arrival I headed to the International Museum of Slavery situated in the Albert dock. That museum presented me with centuries of cultural avoidance: the shame of millions of black people’s lives exploited, ruined, violated, murdered and their sophisticated cultures obliterated. Why? To satisfy my ancestors’ and, by way of hereditary influences, my own, greed.

He continued, sharing the stark fact that British ships accounted for 50 percent of slave transportations, with half of these sailing from Liverpool (Tibbles 2018; Olusoga, 2016):

Liverpool left me cold, sorrowful and deeply aware of the shame that was emerging from the cultural layer of the psyche; shame that desperately needed addressing and relating to.

Wanting to explore further this emerging unconscious material, SB invited DC to facilitate a diversity training session for a London‐based, Jungian organization.

Diversity training session: deep encounter

Later, in the duoethnographic dialogue SB shared his experience from that diversity training session:

You (DC) created a space that I felt could contain the feelings emerging from that split off part in the cultural layer of the psyche. I had to acknowledge that in me was the slave trader, the plantation owner, the importer, and manufacturer, the one who did not see the humanity of the traded people, who did not see the richness of the African cultures from which they were abducted.

Being British I have a root that flexes to the dead white men who got wealthy this way and the whole culture that profits from their relentless greed. Sitting face to face with you, in an exercise of seeing the otherness of one’s partner, it became overwhelmingly evident that the West faces total spiritual bankruptcy if we cannot value, respect, cherish and dare I say love the ancestors and contemporaries of those we have killed and ruined.

Continuing the duoethnographical dialogue

DC shared of his own background:

I am of Zimbabwean heritage, (formerly ‘Rhodesia’) a colony named after Cecil Rhodes, a leading figure in British expansion into Southern Africa. The narratives which inform my being are thus introjected from Afrocentric values and from the oral, archaeological dialogue with the elders that I remember, such as my great grandmother, Nana T. She once said to me that as a child she had two questions about being colonized: ‘Why?’ and ‘what will it take to end it?’ Although I was only a child when I met her, I find myself asking the same two questions in 2021.

Early memories of thinking about diversity

I was only seven years old when I met Nana T. She was a small lady, with coral grey hair, her eyes glittered as clear as the local stream. A few of us of her grandchildren and great grandchildren gathered around her for the evening story time. In the shadows of the homemade lamp, made from a wick of old clothes, she began to speak. ‘You live in the city, do you? With a rainbow of people’‐ she was referring to the diversity of people in the city. ‘I was only about your age when they came …. The white people …. We had no care in the world, we never used to wear clothes …. when we first saw them, we were afraid. I will never forget it …. they had no knees, and they had no ears!’ As children we were gripped by her story. We enquired what she meant and later understood that their long hair and trousers were a new experience to the local indigenous people first seeing white people. ‘We trusted them wholly, and gave everything, but look where we are’. She left all of us in silence wondering what it meant. I now realize she was referring to the questions that emerge from being colonized: ‘Why were we different? Was I different?’

An example of one duoethnographic response to each other from one of our recordings is DC’s following response:

It moved me deeply to hear your experience of going to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. I had been to the museum myself a few months earlier and had felt deeply sorrowful as I looked upon the shackles and learnt more about the slavery. My family have narratives of slavery, colonization and oppression. Thus, I have obviously known about slavery as a genocide, and sensed it as one of the most transgenerationally traumatic experiences for black people and even more personally for my family. There is something about visiting the museum and then speaking to you that has triggered deep emotion and many questions in me.

Such examples of our duoethnographical dialogues and encounter offer a bedrock for the perspectives we will now discuss.

Jung in Mexico, Africa, and reflections of spending time with indigenous people

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes of his first trip to North Africa in 1920:

[this] was where I had longed to be: in a non‐European country where no European language was spoken and no Christian concepts prevailed, where a different race lived and a different historical tradition and philosophy had set its stamp upon the face of the crowd.

(Jung 1963, p. 238)

He wanted to ‘see the European from outside’ (ibid).

In 1925 Jung undertook a five‐month trip to Uganda to spend time with the tribal people on Mount Elgon. Earlier that year, while in the US, he had visited the Native American Indian people of New Mexico. Here he had the well‐documented conversation with chief Mountain Lake, who gave a non‐white perspective of white people: ‘The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We think they are mad … they say they think with their heads’. When Jung asked what the Indians think with, Mountain Lake pointed to his heart (Jung 1963, p. 248). This made a great impression upon Jung, bringing him to face the European ethnic shadow of colonialism:

This Indian had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind. I felt rising within me a shapeless mist, something unknown and yet deeply familiar. And out of this mist, image upon image detached itself: first Roman legions smashing into the cities of Gaul … I saw the Roman eagle on the North Sea and on the banks of the Nile …. [later] came Columbus, Cortes and the other conquistadors who with fire, sword, torture, and Christianity came down upon these remote pueblos dreaming peacefully in the sun …. It was enough. What from our point of view we call colonization … has another face – the face of a bird of prey seeking with cruel intentness for distant quarry.

(Jung 1963, p. 250)

This is an important backdrop to Jung’s long trip to Africa (see Jung 1963; Bair 2004; Hannah 1977 and Burleson 2005 for details of the whole trip). From the accounts of the trip available to us, it was what we might call an immersive experience for Jung. He and his party stayed on the mountain for two months, in which time Jung was given access to the ways of the people. As Barbara Hannah notes, here Jung’s ‘No. 2 personality’ found connection with the ancient ways of life so totally different from that of the European. It was here though, that Jung decisively discovered what he came to believe was the myth of humanity, to bring consciousness to creation:

Man is indispensable for the completion of creation; in fact he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non‐being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

(Jung 1963, p. 256)

Seeing Jung’s experience as a duoethnological encounter, we note how Jung states that he needed the experience of Africa to bring him inwardly something indescribable and yet of great meaning, as the previous quotation demonstrates. Further, we take from Jung’s writing the following three supports for duoethnographic encounter.

First, we suggest the significance of relationship: Jung found he was able to relate with the Mount Elgon people. Second, the overriding value given to what the other brings to the relationship; it was, it seems, the quality of the lives of the tribal people that so deeply affected Jung. Third, his understanding of the layered psyche and, within this, the significance of the archetype of the Self as the holding of opposites in a unity rather than only in polarization (Jung 1963, p. 143).

Duoethnographic and theoretical reflections on a critique on Jung

Aware of the growing criticism of Jung’s white, Eurocentric approach to people from diverse communities, we shared our concerns that using a Jungian frame to support the duoethnographic approach would lay us open to the same critique that has rightly been levelled at Jung (Dalal 1988; Morgan 2013; Brewster 2013). However, we also recognized our reluctance to place the paper in the slipstream of recent criticism, not because we disagree with such criticism, but because the main thrust of this paper is to share a process that we believe could help to reshape attitudes to diversity in the psychotherapeutic and analytic communities.

To be congruent with our duoethnographic methodology, we discussed this area of Jung’s work, and our own feelings about it in relation to diversity, culture and colonialism. Here are extracts from this dialogue:

DC stated:

for many years I have thought about and at times felt wounded by some of Jung’s descriptions of those of African heritage like myself, and like my grandmother. Worse still I have been hurt also by the defences, attacks, and denial I have faced from those with whom I have attempted to dialogue about Jung’s relationship with the African diaspora and his theories regarding the collective unconscious and lowered consciousness in African people/those from diverse communities. At times, colleagues have said to me I have ‘misunderstood what Jung meant’, or that they needed to explain to me ‘what he meant’ or indeed that he was just a man of his time.

SB voiced his appreciation of the 2019 Open Letter (Samuels 2019) that acknowledged the lack of regard in Jung of the psyche of black people but also pointed out the ongoing structures of discrimination and white domination in many psychotherapeutic and analytic groups and trainings:

Of greatest importance, however, is whether I can see that I too can manifest the same attitudes of oppression and hierarchy that at times limited Jung’s view of those of other culturally layered backgrounds. As a white man, if I point the finger at Jung, I must also point it at myself. And what our dialogue is revealing, what we are reaching into, is that we come to a more profound understanding of each other if we can hold in consciousness the pain and shame caused by the colonizer archetype and face this material in the cultural layer of the psyche.

Hence, we concur with Samuels (2018) that naming Jung ‘colonial’ and ‘racist’ and leaving it there is simplistic, as is merely arguing that Jung was simply of his time. We value Kimbles’ exploration of collective shadow processes (Kimbles 2014) and his argument that the dynamics around belonging, othering, shadow, identity politics etc., enter the superego of our collective consciousness long before one is conscious of how they inform development of our attitudes toward self and others. We take the view that Jung would not have escaped these dynamics, given his context and the evidence we note in his theories, approach and beliefs towards different others.

Therefore, while recognizing that using Jungian theory to support our duoethnographic exploration can be seen as problematic, we here aim to write in the same spirit as that of the address of Namfundo Lily‐Rose Mlisa at the 21^st Congress of the IAAP held in Vienna in 2019 (Mlisa, JAP 2020). Mlisa spoke as a traditional African health practitioner and western‐trained clinical psychologist, who had participated in dialogue with Jungian analysts, facilitated by Peter Ammann. In her address, she named Jung as one of her ancestors, ‘without hesitation I thank our ancestor, Carl Jung, for providing traditional health practitioners with a western relevant theory that explains our deep hurt during our spiritual journey’ (ibid.). In the same session, Peter Ammann referred to Jung’s journey to Kenya and Uganda, stating that he considered Jung to be a ‘participant observer’ and argues that [Jung] ‘allowed himself to be deeply affected and changed by the African experience’ (ibid).

While we recognize the shortcomings and failures in Jung’s work on race, we uphold the view that some of his duoethnic encounters were transformative for him, and it is this that we focus on here. In this way we see some of Jung’s recorded encounters as being informative for the sort of duoethnographic encounter we consider necessary for a creative and transformative approach to diversity. Furthermore, we draw on Kimbles’ (2014) assertions that cultural consciousness awareness, that comes through an understanding of cultural dynamics manifesting through cultural complexes and cultural phantoms, can lead to a deeper understanding of self and others.

Responding to the theme of belonging: ‘They had no knees, they had no ears’

Having offered the above critique, we return to our dialogical process in relation to our grandmothers. We could naively argue that they were simply people of their time, but we decided to revisit their experiences further as backdrop to exploring how we might stretch our belonging to those who present as different to us. We were surprised to find some similarities in the experiences of grandmothers.

SB reflecting on DC’s account of Nana T’s childhood difficulty in placing the white newcomers, wondered if as a child Nana T might have asked, ‘Why are they different to us?’ and continued:

Might the reversal of this question in itself, be a sign of accumulated oppression by the time you, as her grandchild, heard her story?

My own maternal grandmother, Nan J, was born, raised and lived her 82 years in the East End of London. One of 13 children, she was raised in working class poverty and would tell us stories of not having shoes to wear to attend school and helping her mother with washing which she ‘took in’ to earn some money. The small local grocery shop she ran with my grandfather from the front room of their rented terraced house, was condemned as an unfit dwelling in the 1960s. In my teens, Nan J bemoaned the coming of ‘the Pakis’ who ‘were taking all our jobs’. The arrival of people from the Indian subcontinent to Tower Hamlets in the 1960s might have caused Nan J to ask similar questions as those that we conjecture Nana T might have asked as a child. Nan J, as far as I am aware, never had a deep personal encounter with someone of Indian or Pakistani origin.

Were Nana T and Nan J having similar experiences of exposure to difference? Without a doubt, Nana T’s was markedly different in that the colonizers came to profit from trade and slavery and would eventually take over the government of the country, exporting and imposing British rule. The people Nan J saw as different, came to bring labour to a nation that needed a workforce. There is however a connection: difference equated to dominance on the one hand and disregard of culture on the other. In Britain, ‘come to work here on our terms’; while in Zimbabwe, ‘we will rule you and benefit from your land’. Diverse communities from the British commonwealth were not welcomed because of the vibrancy of their cultures, while the earlier colonizers disregarded the indigenous cultures they met. Here we noted how material from the cultural layers of the colonized and colonizing psyches were impacting the family layers for each of us. This made a strong impression.

Can we stretch our belonging to those who present as different to us?

Ubuntu philosophy and Jungian psychology centre upon human flourishing. That is assumed. But many of us belong to narratives of abandonment, violence, trauma, hatred, rejection and suspicion, each truncating flourishing. Belonging can also create division: I support one club, you another. I belong to one tribe, you to another and so long as we proffer the appropriate gifts, maintain appropriate customs, we can tolerate each other.

Our current capacity for a sense of belonging is, we might argue, far too limited for the forms of life that have emerged in the last century. Declarations of human rights that we all claim to share failed miserably in the 20^th Century. We cannot simply decide to belong to that quaint idea of the ‘global village’, as the decisions of rationality are swiftly undermined by that other great power, non‐rationality, mostly split off in the human psyche.

In relation to this, in another encounter, SB asked:

What is it in the psyche that leads me, as a white man raised in UK, to behave in ways that will be offensive to people from diverse minority communities? The experience of the Museum of Slavery in Liverpool brought up in me at least some connection with the tremendous suffering of the people who were trafficked into slavery, lost their lives, were separated from their places of origin, and treated as non‐human. This pain inflicted by my white ancestors did not feature in the dominant narrative of my belonging, but has been unconsciously present in its split off form. Just as the plantation owners sat in their country estates with no thought to the suffering of the men and women who worked to bring them their riches, neither does the contemporary culture of dominance cultivate ritual spaces for expression of remorse over such atrocities. The pain of suffering of others caused by ourselves (or our ancestors) is split off. But the surviving collective ego is diminished in that there is receding cultural space for feeling the pain of others. Paradoxically, if I bring something of this pain into consciousness, this might well temper the desire to dominate and oppress, harm and diminish, when these arise (as they inevitably will).

Current research suggests that between 70,000 – 30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens managed to expunge all other human types – Neanderthal, Denisovan, Homo erectus, Homosoloenis etc. (Harari 2015) – from the planet. We cannot here go into the competing explanatory theories, but we contend that the fault line that leads to the dominance and eventual destruction of those we collectively consider to be different from ourselves lies deep in the unconscious.

The pressing question for the future of humanity is whether collectively we can stretch our belonging to those who present as different to us. This demands the conscious integration of the non‐rational urge to, at very best, dismiss the other who is different, at worst to destroy them. To enable this, we will need to plot this urge, from the deep layer of the psyche (from where, we suggest, it motivated our early sapiens ancestors), and see how it emerges in the cultural layer of the psyche, enabling some clarity on how this becomes a determinant in the views and actions of individuals and institutions in the contemporary world.

The layered psyche and our understanding of difference

We understand the layered psyche to be layers of collective conditioning that each influence the ways we react and respond to life. As new‐born infants we already come into the world influenced by our genetic inheritances (van der Kolk 2003; Charura 2018), and upon this, these layers then rapidly create a conditioning that become the ways in which I meet the world. The ‘I’ referred to in language in the singular, we discover to be a multidimensional construction based upon an untold number of layered conditionings.

It appears that many features of the cultural layer of the psyche are now beginning to press upon the collective consciousness, bringing certain repressed, yet conditioning features to the forefront of public debate. The #MeToo movement has highlighted abusive male attitudes to women that have been harboured in the cultural layer, while the Black Lives Matter movement has done the same with the issues of racial violence. The removal from public spaces of statues of men active in colonialism and the Extinction Rebellion actions focusing on the unsustainability of rampant materialism are also revealing conditioning dynamics in the cultural layer of the psyche.

Facing the ethnic shadow

We concur with Schulman and Watkins (2003) who argued that through his encounter with chief Ochwiay Biano, Jung realized that he had to go beneath the surface and face his ethnic shadow as a white colonialist. We suggest that this requires a two‐level dialogue: one with others who have carried the burden of the oppression of the colonizing archetype, the other, an internal dialogue with the energies and images that arise from this archetype.

As a black psychologist, DC has been engaged in many encounters, including in diversity training and in the therapy room, in which there is resistance, denial, or distortion in facing one’s shadow. It is difficult to hold different parts of psyche, and in particular the ethnic shadow and colonizing dynamic on which we are here focusing. We note the capacity to split ideas from action, psyche from culture, as a means of avoidance. For some black people there can be a projection onto the ‘bad colonizer and slave trader’, whilst denying the colonizer within the cultural layer of their own psyche, in which slave trade, tribal wars and oppression of different others has been part of their own societies for thousands of years.

The complexities of our age burden us to face the ethnic shadow, if we are to enter the mess and fray of participation, solidarity and responsibility (Shulman & Watkins 2003). Thus, we see depth work in this context as engaging with the inner process of forging greater awareness, working through the ethnic shadow to see the archetypal dynamic of colonizer/colonized, active in all forms of oppression of the other.

The colonizing archetype in the consulting room

When we invite a client into the consulting room, they enter the therapist’s territory. Opening our territory to the unknown other (the client), can be seen as an opposite movement to the colonizer’s imposing upon, and taking from, the territory of the colonized. But how far is the consulting room a truly de‐colonized space? What is being shared? What is non‐negotiable? While boundaries on inter‐action aim to create a safe space for the client and therapist to work within, our contention is that, in so as far as the client is seen and experienced as an ‘other’, then, ipso facto the colonizing archetype is prone to constellate in the dynamic of ‘other (colonized) – colonizer’. It is our assertion that until recently this dynamic has been hard to reveal because of the white hegemony in the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. We are aware that our work has links to Benjamin's (2004) conceptualization of doer‐done to, however we are working primarily in the cultural field and do not have space to explore the overlaps and differences with her conceptualisation here.

In psychotherapeutic practice we can colonize, for example, by implicitly demanding that the client see their intrapsychic world in the way we do, through the lens of the modality of our training, requiring them to learn our language. We can colonize when offering interpretations that are not let go of when there is no resonance; by invasions of the client’s space through interruptions; by fixing of internal narratives that psychologically position the other in a specified space that makes sense to us, ‘he is caught in the mother/father complex, she is stuck in early trauma’. This latter dynamic can also manifest in supervision, when the supervisor and supervisee fall into the hands of the colonizing archetype and ‘oppress’ the client material with their own interpretative narratives, instead of working from within the imaginal space where the client‐therapist emergent material can live on in the supervisory field. These examples aim to reveal how the colonizing archetype can creep into the analytic space, creating a new hegemony that oppresses the therapeutic field.

The analyst will need to work out for herself, and with each individual client, how the colonizing archetype is liable to emerge, noting the possibility for the projection of aspects of the ethnic cultural shadow onto the other. The moment we find a negative thought or feeling arising about the client, we must do our own work, to track its aetiology and watch how far it is seeking to be projected. The psychic energy that accumulates around this will alert us to the possibility of the enactment of the colonizer‐colonized splitting. Working with this dynamic, we suggest, carries the potential for personal and collective transgenerational and trans‐cultural healing.

For such healing, it is necessary that the colonizing archetype does emerge and become conscious. At such a moment, the art of the therapist is to hold the poison, know it and yet not use it to harm the other, but instead to see the health in the venom by recognizing it as a manifestation of psychic energy, toned by the archetype. When we see energetically, we can bring a particular manifestation of psychic energy into alchemical transformation. In this way, the movement of energy that is flowing towards colonizing the other is restrained and placed in the inner vas (vessel) of conscious awareness, where it is held, bringing about a breaking down to the original energetic component. This liberates psychic energy from the dominating patterning of a particular archetypal shaping, such as the pervasive colonizing archetype on which we are here concentrating.

Decolonizing the therapeutic field

In the early stages of therapeutic work, the analyst’s territory is safely offered as a place where the client’s narratives of pain, shame and wounding trauma can be spoken and felt. The personal human story and attendant feelings and emotions are reverenced by the Ubuntu informed therapist, as we belong through our humanity. Later, as the work stabilises, opening into the imaginative space becomes fertile ground for a truly non‐colonized space, wherein the shared mundus imaginalis provides the freedom to explore the emerging material in a non‐colonizing way.

In each therapeutic relationship, the imaginal field is created anew and is reverenced as both parties symbolically ‘take the knee’ to the emergent material. Attuning to the wisdom and insights emerging in the therapeutic field by listening with the ears of the heart is material pertinent to the individuation of each participant, as well as for the movement of the collective consciousness in which we each participate.

Awareness of the pain and shame by colonial structures in the psyche: the gift

It seems apparent that western collective consciousness is being pressed to face the extremely painful ethnic shadow aspects of the cultural layer of the psyche. For SB, pain and shame emerged as the emotional components of the archetypal polarization of colonized‐colonizer, witnessed in the museum of slavery. The recognition of the pain in the colonized, meets the split‐off shame in the psyche of the colonizer. Here something quite remarkable can happen – the realization that within the colonizer’s shame dwells a colossal pain of blind inter‐generational wounding. While in the pain of the colonized, lies the inter‐generational shame of the loss of the dignity of one’s life and culture. The pain and shame that appear to be fixed at either pole of the archetypal dynamic can become shared experiences, creating a deep human connection capable of reconciling the colonized – colonizer divide, which is the gift of the transcendent function.

We suggest that the experience of recognizing the commonality of pain and shame enables connecting with what appears as unknowable to each other. We discover that we each hold something of the other, and here lies the potential for a profound healing of the wounds split off in the ethnic cultural shadow. For what I banish from my consciousness and project onto the othered other diminishes us both. In othering you, I other aspects of myself.

The colonizing dynamic within the psyche

Whether or not we agree with dismantling statues of dead white men that adorn universities and public squares, these statues are symbols of the colonizer archetype. As stated earlier, this has manifested across cultures and ages, and we have argued that this lies very deep in the objective psyche. If the strategy of early Homo sapiens, referred to earlier, illustrates this and was instinctive in our very early ancestors then, following Jung (1919), this instinct would be mirrored in the psyche as an archetypal energy, taking shape in numerous forms and images, the central feature being that of domination. If this is the case, then we will see this not only working out collectively in the social history of nations, but also within the dynamic of the individual psyche. We suggest that this is the case.

When the infant separates from mother at birth, whatever the attachment form taken, whatever style of nurturing is provided, it could be argued that the activation of the colonizing archetype provides psychic energy for the strengthening of this separation, such that the sense of being a separate and distinct ‘I’ comes to colonize the internal space of consciousness. In this way we want to suggest that colonizing is, in itself, a force within nature. Hence it is so pervasive.

Becoming accustomed to this sense of ‘I’, we unquestioningly refer to it in a reified way, such that it is only by careful observation that we see how it manages to sustain its place in the intra‐psychic dynamic. When we observe, however, we see that there are many centres of energy, inner personalities, complexes, that are each vying to move into a more dominant (colonizing) position. Jung’s pioneering work in establishing the existence of complexes within the psyche is relevant here.

Using the Word Association Test (WAT), Jung evidenced that certain stimulus words did not elicit a spontaneous response, and the time lapse was recorded (Jung 1909). Jung hypothesized that this time lapse was due to the stimulus word provoking a complex to attempt to enter consciousness. This is not the place for dwelling on the WAT, it is however an illustration of how complexes attempt to dominate the psychic space that we call consciousness. This goes on all the time; this is observable if one attempts a simple concentration exercise like holding one’s attention on a candle. Within a very short space of time, certain thoughts or feelings will begin to invade (colonize) the space within which the object of concentration is being held. The practice of meditation is initially about noticing this colonizing phenomenon. It seems then that the colonizing archetype provides the psychic energy to provoke complexes to seek dominance of consciousness.

Jung saw ‘the ego’ as a complex also, one that organizes conscious perception through the four functions of sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling (Jung 1921). So, rather than a reified ‘thing’, ‘ego’ describes forms of functioning habitually taking place within the psyche. We know from reports of people in psychosis that this functioning can be occupied by archetypally driven complexes that determine speech and behaviour, so we could say that consciousness has become colonized by the activated archetypes.

These processes that habitually occur in the intrapsychic space are manifested, through projection, in the inter‐personal and collective space. We are at a time when the Self (here used in the sense of the archetype of order), appears to be seeking to bring to consciousness the split off shame of the colonizing archetype that manifested in British imperialism. This comes about with a growing awareness of the intrapsychic colonizing dynamic and the realization of the split‐off other polarity of the archetype (the pain of the colonized).

The upsurge in consciousness of the inhumane and brutal treatment of the colonized has brought into sharp focus a very deep and shameful aspect of the ethnic collective shadow of the white European psyche. We believe that this is a rare historical moment that needs to be navigated sensitively and boldly. This demands a stretching of consciousness, such that the horrors inflicted on cultures and people ‘other’ than us can be seen and felt, enabling the spilt‐off shame to also emerge.

On emancipatory encounter

In line with Norris and Sawyer (2012, p. 12) who stated that any duoethnographies conducted should invite reconceptualization of the past to bring about new insights into the old stories, we both concurred that after two years of dialoguing, regenerative transformations have taken place. We can see how our encounter has fulfilled some deep, almost inexplicable longing in each of us.

DC reflected:

For me it was to face and name the feelings I have frequently suppressed about being a descendent of the colonized, as well as the parts of myself which have been introjected from the colonizer dynamics I have encountered throughout life and how these emerge from my own psyche and can be colonizing of the other.

While SB shared:

In our encounter, I could feel the not‐so‐distant ancestors in the family level of psyche feeling totally threatened by your otherness. This was healing in itself, as I could feel how defended they were against their lack of openness to the other in the East London Black and Asian communities. And in being other to you I could also feel a sense of forgiveness for the white oppressor in the cultural layer of psyche, which I now see has been a source of guilt feelings all my life.

DC continued:

Hearing and receiving this opened the field towards the unknown other, in what was experienced as a safe space for us both … I began to see how a part of my psyche (shame) colonizes the part of me which should be free and feel worthy of being.

We both agreed that in engaging with diversity, the ‘unknown other’ carries unconscious material that can be met through encounter. So, fear of encountering the unknown must be faced; recognizing that the unknown is such because it has been split off from consciousness and unconsciously projected onto the other. Fear has a place in the dynamic of the colonizing archetype.

From our experience of encounter, we suggest that by working with fear, as one opens to the other and so facing what we fear in the shadow, change emerges. The humanity that the ethnic shadow sought to other, becomes the way towards a deeper sense of my own humanity. We recognize the complexity in this process, as the other can become a commodity to enhance our own growth: you are useful to me because in you I see what is not integrated into consciousness. Another kind of colonialism! However, in terms of diversity work, and in therapy informed by the notions of the colonizing archetype and the layered psyche, it is our contention that encounter becomes a creative path wherein discrimination can transform into the catalyst for growth and emancipation from fear.

Returning to the Ubuntu philosophy cited earlier, my belonging is found in being the other to you. Through this, a whole new paradigm of therapeutic working evolves, one in which mutuality of concern for each other moves us into the soul‐to‐soul realm and away from the colonial attitudes of self‐gain only.

Charura, D. , and Bushell, S. (2023) A duoethnographic exploration of colonialism in the cultural layer of the objective psyche. J Anal Psychol, 68: 27–47. 10.1111/1468-5922.12878.