A Psychological Attitude to the Polarization in America

Guns, cats, flags, swords, slogans, cement mixers, snakes, and presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris… On first glance, this collage may seem like an odd compilation, yet all these images have an important place and purpose in the national psyche today. In fact,  the collage is constructed around a basic theory about the behaviors, beliefs and feelings of groups when they feel and/or are under attack.  When you poke a single cell organism, it seeks to defend itself by withdrawing.  When you poke an individual, the individual will seek to defend itself in a variety of ways, the most basic of which are described in the fight or flight reflex.  When a group feels under attack, either physically and/or at the level of what it values the most--its group spirit--it too will seek to defend itself in a variety of ways that include aggressive counter attacks or withdrawal or avoidance or some other attempt to protect and affirm its identity as defined by a set of core values or most essentially, what we can think of as its group spirit which may or may not have a spiritual foundation.  The collage and its theoretical model are one way of thinking about the psychological processes that take over once a group feels that its core values, identity and spirit are endangered or under attack.

In the current polarization gripping the United States, we most often find ourselves aligned with the defenses of the group with which we identify. As individuals and groups, we can also withdraw all together from the conflict and view it as either too painful or too silly or too unresolvable, or as something we need to transcend.  This collage offers a picture of how the polarization we are experiencing between Republicans and Democrats has taken shape.  It is an attempt to define core issues and dynamics that are hotly contested, as we are in the midst of a cultural and political war that not only threatens to break into physical violence but is already destructive at many other levels including legislative, judicial, and the very fabric of social and cultural discourse. 

Trying to sort out and visualize the multiple levels and contributors to the increasing polarization in the United States is like trying to fit together the pieces of a complicated puzzle.  I have found in previous conflicts that have seized our national psyche (see references) it has been helpful to piece together images and words that result in a collage of the kaleidoscopic forces at play.  My collages are based on a theory of cultural complexes. I choose images to see how they might fit together in representing how the theory can be puzzled together in a way that represents the major forces at play.

The Six Fundamental Aspects of the Theory and a Key to the Collage

1.   An overriding concern or dilemma confronting the nation.  In this collage, the postmodern image of the Statue of Liberty by Millie Kutz portrays elegantly and numinously the deep ambiguity and challenges of this historic moment.  We are suspended in a liminal, agitated, and dangerous national dance about what freedom means to us, caught between illusion and reality in which our individual and collective futures are at stake, not being sure what we can trust or where we are headed.  As a wired society, our democracy is being profoundly transformed by how we experience reality and profoundly threatened by lies, disinformation, and very different ideas of who we are and want to be as a people. It is clear that many in our society, as has also happened several times in the past, no longer embrace the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

2. Leaders of the major parties carry and symbolize the conflicts about what is of highest value in dealing with the overriding issues.  In this collage, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the leaders who embody the conflict that is being played out in the national drama.  They are well chosen for their roles as carriers of the spirit and values that they represent:  a multicultural black, Indian American woman representing the progressive values of justice, equality, and freedom vs a wealthy, white, old man who while claiming conservatism paradoxically wants to tear the existing government structures apart in the name of an individualistic, materialistic, and simplistic understanding of freedom which overlooks the collective’s rights to decent education, housing, living wages, health care, and a fair criminal justice system, for all.

3.  The Core Spirit of the Group that the Leaders Represent.  Each of the leaders stands for a core group spirit and is the personal embodiment of that spirit for the group.  The image for the group spirit that Harris carries symbolizes individuals from many different groups striving for a democracy of multicultural diversity that seeks the healing of our society and planet.  The image for the group spirit that Trump carries is represented by a gun, the constitution, the Bible, and the Flag.  It is a nativist and isolationist spirit that seeks to restore America’s exceptionalism and to expel and demonize those who are not deemed to be “real” Americans, however that is defined.  In this vision of the American spirit there are enemies “within” and “without” the nation.    

4.  The Archetypal Defenses that are mobilized to defend the spirit of the group under attack. At the core of this process, I imagine a basic dynamic in which the fundamental unifying vision or spirit of the country as imagined by Harris or Trump is threatened. In the name of this unifying and threatened spirit, impersonal and potent defenses—sometimes hugely aggressive-- are mobilized. This activation taps into enormous collective emotion that fuels the polarizing conflict. The suffering, violence, and destruction endured by citizens is justified by participating in a shared belief and a unifying vision of the nation or the world.  On the side of Kamala Harris and the Democrats, the defenses include women mobilizing to defend their rights to make choices about their bodies, including the right to be childless as recently surfaced in the “childless cat lady response” triggered in reaction to ongoing misogynist attacks on women. https://thomassinger.substack.com/p/the-childless-cat-lady-mythos-and

Another powerful defense of the Democratic spirit has been Kamala Harris’ taking on the role of fierce protector of basic American values as if she were a modern incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga who, as a warrior, could be fierce in her cutting to the quick of deception and criminality.   In this image, Durga is slaying the buffalo demon Mahishasura, depicted in Hindu literature as a deceitful demon who pursued his evil ways by shape-shifting.

Listen to Kamala Harris slicing through to what is direct and essential about a matter:

 “I prosecuted predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

On the other side of the polarizing equation are the defenses that have been mobilized to protect the American spirit envisioned by those who follow Trump.  These defenses are represented in images of a paranoid and conspiratorial attitude that peeks out from the safety of the American flag or that goes on the attack in a direct assault on the seat of American democratic processes at  the Capitol itself, as in the January 6 insurrection.

5. The archetypal instinctual responses that are triggered when such battles erupt

At the very heart and depths of such polarizing conflicts there are primal instinctual forces that come into play. These instinctual forces are symbolized by the two serpents in opposition to one another at the center of the collage.  Every individual has such serpentine energies lurking in the psyche that, like a rattlesnake anticipating attack, awaken in the face of annihilating danger.  These energies are amplified exponentially when they come alive in a group and can act with a venomous and autonomous force that threaten to disrupt whatever established order exists.

6.  Historical and cultural precursors to the current polarizing conflict.  The current polarizing conflicts gripping the nation are not new.  Deeply embedded in the history and psyche of our nation, there have been previous incarnations of these same conflicts that contribute potent self-selecting memories that reinforce one’s preexisting beliefs and experiences, simplistic ideas that tend to see issues in black and white, absolutist categories, and powerful emotions that are highly reactive, highly arousing, and not subject to rational discourse. These historic repetitions reinforce the core beliefs and identities of the polarized groups.  They point to the cyclical recurrence of the underlying, unresolved and seemingly unresolvable core tensions and conflicts in our society, whether they be about immigration, racism, sexism, distribution of wealth, gun control, economic policy, foreign policy, environmental policy and a host of other ongoing political and cultural themes.  The image of the civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s mirrors the reality of the recurring themes that contribute to the current polarization:  access to housing, jobs, voting rights. And the cartoon image from the early 1900s shows the equally strong, negative reaction to the flooding of new immigrants into our melting pot society.

The Collage is constructed with images that portray these six major forces. Each level of the collage represents the various “players” in our national drama.  The collage does not offer an explanation of why the polarization is so intense now.  Many different theories exist about causes and that is a topic for another paper.  The collage does offer a picture of what happens when the various players are aroused into action—it is a picture of the psychology of activated polarizing conflicts or what I call cultural complexes.  It shows the anatomy of aroused archetypal defenses of the group spirit which repeats itself endlessly in the conflicts between warring groups and nations.  Jung noted this when he wrote in his 1936 essay, “Wotan”:

“Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. The life of the individual as a member of society and particularly as part of the State may be regulated like a canal, but the life of nations is a great rushing river which is utterly beyond human control . . .Thus the life of nations rolls on unchecked, without guidance, unconscious of where it is going, like a rock crashing down the side of a hill, until it is stopped by an obstacle stronger than itself. Political events move from one impasse to the next, like a torrent caught in gullies, creeks and marshes. All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught up in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways.” (C.G. Jung, “Wotan,” Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, Vol. 10. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, p. 189)

The archetypal defenses that are mobilized to defend the threatened “group spirit” are primal, and are as potent, even identical with the very forces that bind a group together in its identity. Once the “archetypal defenses of the group spirit” are triggered, the careening violence of whatever comes in the path of the “rock crashing down the side of a hill” seems independent of the specific causes that give rise to the conflict.  We seem to be living in such a moment once again in our country and in the world.  The burden and angst of this moment weighs heavily on all who take their citizenship seriously and worry about future generations.

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References and further resources

1. The Cultural Complex and Archetypal Defenses of the Collective Spirit: Baby Zeus, Elian Gonzales, Constantine's Sword, and Other Holy Wars. The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 20,4 (2002): 4–28.

2. Unconscious Forces Shaping International Conflicts: Archetypal Defenses of the Group Spirit from Revolutionary America to Confrontation in the Middle East, The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 25,4 (2006): 6–28

3. https://aras.org/articles/archetypal-defenses-group-spirit-russia-and-ukraine-axes-destruction

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Thomas Singer, MD, is a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst who trained at Yale Medical School, Dartmouth Medical School, and the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He is the author of many books and articles that include a series of books on the cultural complexes that have focused on Australia, Latin America, Europe, the United States and Far East Asian countries in addition to another series of books on Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche. He serves on the board of ARAS (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) and has edited ARAS Connections for many years.

Ipek S. Burnett, PhD, is a Turkish-American depth psychologist and cultural critic. She is the author of A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche: The Violence of Innocence and the editor of Re-Visioning the American Psyche: Jungian, Archetypal, and Mythological Reflections. She is a contributing writer at CounterPunch and a published novelist, essayist, and poet in Turkey. Based in San Francisco, she serves on the boards of nonprofit organizations and foundations that specialize in social justice, human rights, and democracy. For more information visit: www.ipekburnett.com.  

Allison Langerak Tuzo is the Director of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS). She has worked at ARAS for the past 21 years in different capacities. When not at ARAS, Allison is an active singer and songwriter in New York City.