Each news cycle seems to cast different characters into similar situations. Oppositional defiance holds our political discourse captive and greed has sent the economy through the ringer. What’s off in our collective psyche?
I’m struck by this analysis of greed by the psychotherapist Harry Guntrip:
“Instead of reacting with anger, he can react with an enormously exaggerated sense of need. Desire becomes hunger and hunger becomes greed, which is hunger grown frightened of losing what it wants.” Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, pg. 26.
In this we catch a glimpse of how the anger which gets expressed in the vitriol and intense hatred we see unfolding in the political arena is a different reaction to the same reality fueling the greed. But what are the hatred and the greed a reaction to?
“What is the meaning of hate? It is not the absolute opposite of love; that would be indifference, having no interest in a person, not wanting relationship and so having no reason for either loving or hating, feeling nothing. Hate is love grown angry because of rejection. We can only really hate a person if we want their love.” Ibid. pg 26.
The question this leads us to is simple to articulate, but difficult to answer: what rejection complex, manifest in hatred and greed, is the American psyche bound up with? To put is another way, how is our myth changing?
Finding Entry to The Red Book of Jung
Initiation yes, but to what?
State of My Union
Adjusting process, even slightly