Kimbles - Phantom Narratives Cap 2 Phantom Narratives Unseen But Present

Chapter Two
Phantom Narratives
Unseen but Present
Background
To start with Jung’s contribution to my introduction of phantom narratives,

I pick up themes and images from his doctoral dissertation, entitled “On the
Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena” (1902/1970),
which laid the foundation for some of his most important concepts, including
subpersonalities (autonomous complexes), the representation of an uncon-
scious perception in the formation of imagery and personification; the auton-
omous psyche; the idea of images and hallucinations as potentially healing;
and the mythical. The nineteenth century had witnessed “the emergence of
modern spiritualism, which spread across Europe and Africa. Through spiri-
tualism, the cultivation of trances with the attendant phenomena of trance
speech, glossolalia, automatic writing, and crystal vision—became wide-
spread” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 195). It was in this cultural context that Jung’s
medical dissertation focused on the psychogenesis of spiritualistic phenome-
na. Freud and psychoanalysis were also influenced by the vibrancy of the
occult. Jung felt his approach needed to be differentiated from occult
phenomena, however, in as much as both spiritualism and psychoanalysis
focused on subconscious, dissociated aspects of the personality. Psychoanal-
ysis offered a more medicalized and biological understanding of occult phe-
nomena. For those with more spiritualistic explanations, these subconscious
aspects related to “an inherent spirituality or transcendence” (Gyimesi, 2009,
p. 460). Jung (1902/1970) also put forth the notion of a nonrational life force
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as the center of the human psyche:
If we look back into the past history of mankind, we find, among many other
religious convictions, a universal belief in the existence of phantoms or ethere-
al beings who dwell in the neighbourhood of men and who exercise an invis-
ible yet powerful influence upon them. (para. 570)
It was Freud’s tilt toward a scientific, rational understanding of phenomena

that straddled the fence between the rational and the unknown that put much
of the earlier intuitions about spiritualism into the background for him and
that led to Jung’s marginalization in the larger psychoanalytic community.
I find Freud’s concept of the Uncanny to be a valuable bridge between
Jung’s earlier paper on occult phenomena and the cultural spiritualism of the
late nineteenth century and my concept of the phantom. In his essay “The
Uncanny” (1919), Freud differentiated between the continued presence of
animism in the psychology of so-called educated Europeans, the omnipo-
tence of thoughts based on it, and repressed infantile complexes. Because his
work was anchored in the significance of the drives and the prehistoric past,
for Freud, the manifestation of the uncanny was either a manifestation of
“repressed infantile complexes” or “primitive beliefs” that have not been
overcome: “The primitive beliefs are most likely related to infantile com-
plexes, and are in fact, based on them” (p. U249). Drives and sexuality,
therefore, provided a foundation for intrapsychic causality, the understanding
of psychic reality, and personal biography. Freud’s rejection of the occult
was captured in an exchange between him and Jung: “A bulwark against
what? [Jung asked]. ‘Against the black tide of mud’ and here he hesitated for
a moment, then added—‘of occultism’” (Jung, 1961, p. 150).
The thinking about the uncanny has moved beyond the boundaries of
literature, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis to politics in the twentieth century,
to “alienation as an economic, political, psychological, and existential condi-
tion” (Masschelein, 2011, p. 136):
The uncanny is a key concept to grasp the experience of aesthetic estrange-

ment, political and social alienation resulting from a deeply rooted, disturbing
unhomeliness that characterizes human existence in the world, but tempered
by mild, surrealist undertones and the guise of familiarity. (Masschelein, 2011,
p. 147)
Masschelein (2011) goes on to speak about Derrida who “proposes a ‘haun-

tology’”:
a philosophy of haunting, of the return of the repressed, in which the spectral

takes precedent over being, existence. This new philosophy wants to examine
the intermediated or suspended state of the ghost and of fiction—neither dead
Phantom Narratives Unseen but Present 17
nor alive, neither here nor there—as exemplary for the omnipresence of the
immaterial, the virtual, and the unspeakable in our society. (p.150)
At the same time, the rise of new media, digital technologies, and the increased
virtuality of communication also calls for notions that can capture their imma-
terial yet very strong presence in society, like spectrality, haunting, and ani-
mism. Contemporary society’s dilemmas of xenophobia, immigration, exile,
homelessness, and trauma entail forms of anxiety that are related to the opposi-
tion of the familiar and the strange, to the blurring of boundaries that is threat-
ening and undermining. (p. 158)
How is this alienation made possible and under what circumstances can the
familiar become uncanny and frightening? Perhaps these phantom narratives,
organized by cultural complexes expressed as cultural history and memory
can, at times, produce disturbing feelings that alienate us from the familiar
social world of others, both familiar and unfamiliar. The social and cultural
symptoms of this alienation in contemporary life can be seen in the many
forms of marginalization prevalent today—homelessness, immigration, eco-
nomic disparities, unemployment, and so on. Background to these social
phenomena is
the existence and constraints of social, cultural, and communicational arrange-

ments of which people are unaware, in so far as these arrangements are not
perceived (not “known”), and if perceived, not acknowledged (“denied”), and
if acknowledged, not taken as problematic (“given”), and if taken as proble-
matic, not considered with an optimal degree of detachment and objectivity.
(Hopper, 1996, p. 9)
I introduce the concept of phantom narratives as a hybridized term express-

ing the background ambiguity of subject/object, individual/group, politics/
sociology, and personal biography and cultural history, conscious and uncon-
scious, held together in an affective field. This affective field has a narrative
structure with “deep and buried contents” (Chomsky, 1968) that operates at
the level of the cultural unconscious and is structured by cultural complexes.
In addition, phantoms are images and representations of these complexes.
I employ the term to open a new kind of imaginative space for reflecting on
the changes and impacts that our current historical situation brings to us as
context and content for adaptation and growth at both the group and individ-
ual levels. It is the unbearable, the too muchness, the untranslatable, the felt
presence of the absence that opens the space for phantom dynamics.
Jung (1934/1954), in referring to the opening words of the Dedication in
Faust, says:
“Once more you hover near me, forms and faces”—are more than just an
aesthetic flourish. Like the concretism of the devil, they are an admission of
the objectivity of psychic experience, a whispered avowal that this was what
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actually happened, not because of subjective wishes, or fears, or personal

opinions, but somehow quite of itself. Naturally only a numskull thinks of
ghosts, but something like a primitive numskull thinks of ghosts but something
like a primitive numskull seems to lurk beneath the surface of our reasonable
daytime consciousness. (para. 312)
Two Trains Running by August Wilson—A Phantom Narrative
“There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death.
Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept
responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of any-
one.”
—August Wilson
American playwright August Wilson’s Two Trains Running (1992) is a play

about the black experience in twentieth-century America. The cultural/social
context for the play is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1969—the time following
the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Black Power
movement, the migrations of blacks from south to north in the early part of
the twentieth century, urban renewal and change, the uncertain future con-
nected with this cultural change are all explicitly present in the play’s di-
alogue. The play’s setting is the diner of Memphis Lee. His diner, along with
the rest of the block, is scheduled to be torn down as part of the city’s
community-wide renovation project. Archetypally, the biblical figures of
Prophet Samuel and Aunt Ester are strong presences in the background of the
play.
The dialogue, the temenos for the play, takes place among seven charac-
ters: Memphis; Sterling, an ex-con who embraces the tenets of Malcolm X;
Wolf, a bookie who has learned to play by and with the white man’s rules;
Risa, a waitress who has mutilated her legs to distance herself from men;
Hambone, a lost, disturbed man who each morning yells, “Where is my ham,
I want my ham” (Wilson, 1992, p. 22); and West, the undertaker who pre-
pares Hambone’s body upon his death. Like Risa, Hambone has scars all
over his body. West says, “Man had so many scars. I haven’t never seen
nothing like that. All on his back, his chest . . . his legs” (Wilson 1992, 91).
Finally, there is the character of Holloway, the resident philosopher and
believer in the prophecies of a legendary 369-year-old woman (Aunt Ester)
who, in the play, never speaks directly herself, but whom, at some point, each
member of the group makes reference to seeing. Her age roughly coincides
with the history of Africans in America. In 1619, approximately twenty
blacks from a Dutch slaver were purchased as indentured workers for the
English settlement of Jamestown. They were the first Africans in the British
North America colonies. Hence, Ester as phantom represents their struggle

and heritage as well as the long history and legacy of slavery up to the
current time. She becomes a numinous figure connected to generational dy-
namics and, to my mind, allows the play to burst through its place in time
(Pittsburg in 1969) to reach a profound transhistorical truth about the contin-
uation of intergenerational cultural complexes.
The play flows from the everyday exchanges between the characters,
weaving a tight, interconnected web through being in active communication
with one another. Personal boundaries are permeable, and the background of
slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the
civil rights movement, generates an intergenerational picture of survival,
suffering, and coping. This play, through its vertical and horizontal (time and
space) dynamics, its style and language, allows the interplay between collec-
tive conscious and cultural unconscious to be seen in terms of the web of
their interrelationship. The vertical refers to the massive time period (as
Ester) and allows for a generational continuity across time periods of a spe-
cific racial and socio/political context. It is the crossing of those two dimen-
sions—the vertical and the horizontal—of space and time that allows the
characters in Two Trains Running to express the many different attitudes that
have emerged in the African American community to represent responses to
a history of racial discrimination. Thus, the phantoms of previous times are
re-created, becoming presences that haunt the activities of the play: the an-
ger, despair, and self-berating is reacted to within the racial and social con-
text of such feelings. And yet, underneath these affects, there is a sense of
affirmation and redemption that I feel is embodied in the phantom figure of
Aunt Ester. Not only do the characters speak about personal losses, but also, I
imagine, these losses are intertwined with the background social context of
frustration, anger, hatred, aggressiveness, oppression, and struggle. And al-
though the social politics around race relations have changed—different eth-
nic, racial, and gendered difference groups may align in ways that allow for
more complexity and working room around differences in regard to racial
and social issues—we are constantly working and reworking issues around
grievances; disparity in treatment, for instance, in the criminal justice system
(incarceration, stop and frisk, racial profiling, immigration); education (affir-
mative action); economic differences; persistent unemployment; family
breakdown; and societal disarray. Cultural complex dynamics undergird
these issues and bring with them an affective intensity, for they require
changes at the phantasy level—at the level of the unconscious, that is, our
seeing, experiencing of each other, and engaging the psychotic anxieties that
come with such encounters.
Wilson (1992) does not tell us what Aunt Ester says to the characters who
visit her except to “take $20 and throw it into the river”:
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HOLLOWAY: All he got to do is to see Aunt Ester. Aunt Ester could straight-
en him out. Don’t care whatever your problem. She can straighten it out.
. . . you got to pay her, though. She won’t take no money herself. She tell
you to go down and throw it into the river. Say it’ll come back to her. (pp.
23–24)
It is interesting to reflect on the symbolic nature of the cultural complex in

relationship to Aunt Ester’s advice and role in the play. The seventh Presi-
dent, Andrew Jackson, appears on the $20 bill. A slave owner, he also initiat-
ed the forced relocation of thousands of Native Americans to Indian Territo-
ry. His enthusiastic followers created the modern Democratic Party. Thus, in
his life, he embodied the contradictions around slavery, power, and money.
During his term, the Second Bank of the United States was shut down. For
Jackson, the bank symbolized how a privileged class oppressed the will of
the common American people. So throwing a $20 bill into the river is,
perhaps, a way of sacrificing one’s absolute allegiance to the “almighty
dollar” and bringing one’s faith into balance between social and spiritual
values. The exchanges between Aunt Ester and the other characters (or atti-
tudes) in Wilson’s play can neither be expressed in logical language nor can
Jackson’s contradictory life—these complexities are all reflected in the mir-
ror of the characters in Memphis’s diner.
From this point of view, Ester represents a kind of cultural anima, in the
Jungian sense of a connecting principle for African Americans in the play,
and a way of thinking about and representing the irreducible aspect of per-
sonal suffering and cultural dilemmas around race, class, ethnicity, and gen-
der. As she is never made visible, she represents the phantomatic context for
the play and expresses a phantom quality. Through encounters with her, the
characters are helped to transform the raw beta elements (emotional dynam-
ics) of culture into digestible ideas through which the characters are able to
affirm their humanity within dehumanizing conditions.
Just as within individual psychology we may think about the imago of a
mother or father complex, in cultural complexes, we may think in terms of
phantoms as images of group life that reflect the specific dynamics operating
in groups and individuals through various social attitudes and structures that
are alive in current events. For instance, the history of cultural traumatic
events that have destroyed and disrupted social and cultural patterns, causing
breakdowns in family and social functioning, have created symptoms of
cultural traumas that can be seen in the varieties of learned helplessness,
passivity, and lack of efficacy in relationship to one’s own environment or
world: an expectation of failure, anger, and a shift toward an external locus
of control, self-blame, poor self-esteem, and the generation of invisibility.
All of this occurs within a cultural setting of political, economic, and
institutional power structures that privileges certain groups over others. I like
the term social suffering from medical anthropology and given exposure by
Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (1997). The term allows
me to visualize the structural situations that freeze cultural complexes:
Social suffering results from what political, economic and institutional power
does to people and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves
influence responses to social problems. Included under the category of social
suffering are conditions that are usually divided among separate fields, condi-
tions that simultaneously involve health, welfare, legal, moral and religious
issues. (Kleinman et al., 1997, p. ix)
Another way to translate all this is that it is not only that trauma is perpetuat-
ed by victims, but also that those who are heirs to the benefits and privileges
of the spoils perpetuate attitudes, rituals, and the social machinery that create
these conditions. These are phantomatic effects.
My term psychic presences is meant to convey the experience of intrapsychic

preternatural entities, which present as images or phantoms and which we, in
turn, reify as real. These images of phantoms undergo a transfiguration or
transmogrification as we progress. . . . They evolve into symbolic images that
designate the “presence of the absence” of the object-person, that is, the pres-
ence of the legacy of the experience with the object in its absence. (Grotstein,
2000, p. xix)
Most of the papers on absent presences or intergenerational processes, how-

ever, have focused on how transgenerational processes contribute to organiz-
ing and disorganizing attachment (Cavalli, 2012; Kradin, 2012). My first
hypothesis then is that intergenerational processes are manifested as phantom
narratives that provide structure, representation, and continuity for unre-
solved or unworked-through grief and violence that occurred in a prior his-
torical cultural context that continues into the present.
HENDERSON’S CONTRIBUTION TO PHANTOM NARRATIVES
Joseph Henderson (1990), who introduced the concept of the cultural uncon-
scious, defined it as
an area of historical memory that lies between the collective unconscious and
the manifest pattern of the culture. It may include both these modalities, con-
scious and unconscious, but it has some kind of identity arising from the
archetypes of the collective unconscious, which assists in the formation of
myth and ritual and also promotes the process of development in individuals.
(p. 102)
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For me, the issue in Henderson’s definition has to do with “it has some kind
of identity arising from the archetypes, which assists in the formation of
myth and ritual and also promotes the process of development in individu-
als.”
I introduce the term phantom by way of responding to “it has some kind
of identity arising from the archetypes” and how it is represented in the
individual and the group. Phantom is akin to phantasy in that it is the im-
age(s) that gives specific quality and identity to emotional experiences in
groups. The phantasy and the emotional experience come together in the
phantom, reflecting emotionally charged (Bion’s valence [1961/1983]), af-
fective ties between members of a group or community as they express their
relationships to each other and the group. The cultural unconscious invites an
imaginative orientation to grasp the subjective and social presences, forgot-
ten and lost, that continue to operate as formative forces in our lives at the
level of the individual and the cultural unconscious.
In this and later parts of this chapter, I describe what phantom narratives
are about and how they are related to cultural complexes.
PHANTOMS AS PSYCHOLOGICAL ATTITUDES

TOWARD HISTORY
Cultural complexes involve the patterning of historical processes organized

in such a way so as to provide continuity and a relatively coherent narrative
for group members. It seems to me, however, that this history keeping by the
unconscious in individuals and groups is relatively independent of the con-
scious intention and the goals of the group, and yet there seems to be a
teleological aspect to it also; that is, the history making has an autonomous
character. This autonomy means that there is an independence from space/
time coordinates, reflecting a nonsequential, transpsychic arrangement of
historical patterns as these are related to individual and group complexes.
Jung’s idea of history includes “not only childhood and the immediate
family, but also the larger matrix of culture, generational patterns, and archa-
ic history as embedded in the collective unconscious” (Stein, 1987, p. 61).
His “inclusion of archetypes within the historical nexus leads to the realiza-
tion that the influence of history on individuals is ubiquitous, rooted in cul-
ture and the unconscious, pervasive throughout all segments of emotional
and mental functioning, and is, therefore, fundamental to identity” (Stein,
1987, p. 61).
My initial approach to the history of groups began with my thinking about
intergenerational traumas that I felt were organized around cultural complex-
es. But thinking in intergenerational terms raises the question of how this all
occurs. By what mechanisms does the transmission happen? Since we are
talking generally about the movement from past to present, across time di-
mensions, how do we talk about how, without direct communication, we may
be affected by processes and dynamics from another time and place? Addi-
tionally, what about the intersubjective, the way that relating stimulates and
generates associations and complexes in each other that put us into different
emotional spaces and awaken memories? All of these questions seem to be
related to generational continuity and, of course, to the survival of people,
groups, and/or religions.
SOME OF MY BACKGROUND PHANTOMS
My interest in phantoms comes from several sources of influence. I will

mention only four. For a number of years, I had been working to utilize the
concept of complexes to better understand psychologically a variety of his-
torical, political, and cultural situations as these manifested in therapy and
analysis. From this work, I eventually formulated the concept of cultural
complexes. Cultural complexes, as opposed to individual complexes, are
group based. Like individual complexes, they function autonomously within
each individual and group to organize the attitudes, emotions, and behavior
that make up group life. Their archetypal telos seems to provide both individ-
uals and groups with a sense of belonging and identity within a historical
continuity of shared emotional assumptions.
The first influence came from my study of the unconscious dimensions of
group life. Over the years, I have both consulted with groups and trained
others to read the unconscious dynamics of groups. It is fairly easy to see
what Bion calls the interaction between the more conscious way that group
members function to work with a group task and the unconscious processes
that get going when members’ anxieties generate phantasies that are designed
to create manageable anxiety for themselves. Essentially one sees the vast-
ness and boundlessness of group life.
The second influence on my thinking came from my early work in a child
guidance clinic as a child and family therapist wherein I adopted a family
systems’ approach to the issues presented by my child patients. I often
worked with families and many times with extended family members as well
as previous generations such as grandparents. There, I saw how family myths
and beliefs led to emotional entanglements that bound family members to the
needs and losses of previous generations. It became second nature to adopt at
least a three-generational point of view within any family meeting. There
was the child patient and his or her family, and there was the parents’ family
history, which became part of the contextual understanding of the presenting
problem.
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Not only did symbols and images of family members tend to encode
intergenerational processes, but also in the family unconscious suffering was
shared or carried for each other, and roles and rules were enacted that
protected familial homeostasis and safety, often through excluding and
scapegoating members. I could always find the hero and the villain, the
princess and the dirty old man, and so on. I came to think of this family
unconscious functioning as one expression of the cultural unconscious. At
the family level, the cultural unconscious embodied the interactional energies
occurring within the family constellation, expressed through shared images,
experiences, and roles. Like the cultural unconscious, the family unconscious
revealed a shared emotional field at the group level, expressed through col-
lective assumptions. The family’s emotional life was intermingled with the
cultural unconscious within cultural processes.
The third contribution to my understanding of phantoms grew out of
developing a way to look at intergenerational processes through a Jungian
framework. As a transpersonal psychology, Jung’s psychology serves as cor-
rective to the reductionist approaches of traditional psychoanalysis, which
reduces all human misery and mystery to developmental processes occurring
after birth.
There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ances-
tral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a
period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor. . . . Perhaps
certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as com-
plexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of
the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become
activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin
to dominate the whole mind. . . . The complex will be awakened because the
situation is one in which the individual is best adapted through this ancestral
attitude. (Jung, 1989, pp. 36, 37, 82)
In spite of Jung’s explicit statements that our individual psyche emerges out
of the deeper levels of the unconscious and is derived from the collective,
communal, and social experiences of humankind (essentially this means that
our individual identity is grounded in the symbols, rituals, language, and
shared historical memories of our families, countries, and nations), we still
tend to think in terms of oppositions—inner/outer, psyche/social—and to
understand the outer in terms of individual psychodynamics.
Then I discovered the work of Abraham and Torok (1994), two French
analysts who described a topographical structure called the “phantom”:
It is a structure that grows out of secrets concealed and held. These secrets are
silently transmitted directly into the unconscious of the child. The phantom is
thus a formation totally outside any strictly phased or developmental view of
human behavior. The child haunted by a phantom becomes a living tomb, in
which an unspeakable drama, experienced as traumatic by someone else, lies

buried yet alive, exerting its disruptive influence. It is described as a preserva-
tive repression. Along with the transgenerational transmission of a secret, the
child inherits the unspoken imperative to preserve intact the integrity of that
secret. The carrier of a phantom in analysis is thus always, metapsychological-
ly speaking, “a child in analysis.” To put it another way, the analysis of a
phantom is always a child analysis. At the same time however the psychoanal-
ysis of a phantom is also always an adult analysis—not an analysis of the adult
on the couch but of the adult who concealed the secret. (p. 140)
But whereas Abraham and Torok’s work focused on the phantom within the
intrafamilial situation, I used and extended it to cultural and collective forces
as seen, for instance, in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987). Beloved
functions as a phantom representing the dynamics of slavery and its histori-
cal legacy for the intersubjective family life while simultaneously represent-
ing the cultural complex created around the existence of slavery.
The phantom is an imago: “by this choice of a technical term, that the
psychological factor which I sum up under ‘imago’ has a living indepen-
dence in the psychic hierarchy, i.e., possesses that autonomy which wide
experience has shown to be the essential feature of feeling-toned complexes”
(Jung, 1952/1967, para. 44, fn. 4). Phantoms function like complexes but
through the power of the imaginal. I see phantoms as a model for describing
the unconscious structuring of psychic functioning through the operation of
cultural complexes. The archetypal core and personal experiences may be
split in the carrier of the phantom. The phantom is related to Jung’s work on
spirits and soul. Jung, in “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spir-
its” (1931/1960), compares the experiences of complexes with the primitive
belief in souls and spirits: “Souls correspond to the autonomous complexes
of the personal unconscious, and spirits to those of the collective uncon-
scious” (para. 587). He makes an important distinction between soul com-
plexes and spirit complexes:
Whilst spirits are felt to be strange and as not belonging to the ego, this is not
true of the soul or souls. The primitive feels the proximity or the influence of a
spirit as something uncanny or dangerous, and is greatly relieved when the
spirit is banished. Conversely, he feels the loss of a soul as if it were a
sickness; indeed, he often attributes serious physical diseases to loss of soul.
(Jung, 1931/1960, para. 586)
In short, soul complexes “belong to the ego and the loss of them appears
pathological” (para. 587).
The interaction between soul and spirit at the level of the cultural com-
plex generates phantoms, as previously mentioned, in Beloved, and also in
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Veil, or Duende (1961). Phantoms have an autonomy
that is uncanny, foreign, less likely to feel like they belong to the person but
26 Chapter 2
paradoxically the person can feel deeply related to them. The spirit side of
the phantom is its autonomy; the soul side reflects its interpersonal, familial
history.
The fourth contribution to my interest in phantoms came from John Perry
(1970), who in his article on “Emotions and Object Relations” expanded
Jung’s concept of complexes. He explained how complexes tend to be bipo-
lar or to consist of two parts. When activated, one part gets projected onto a
suitable other whereas the other part gets attached to the ego. For instance, in
the mother complex, the two parts are child and mother. When activated,
depending on the quality of the maternal, a suitable child part is either pro-
jected out and/or identified with, whereas the maternal part is either projected
or identified with. In addition, he began to write about how the bipolarity of
the complexes function at every level of the Self in a kind of participation
mystique.
Around the issue of inherited memory traces, which Jung entertained but
later said he could not find any evidence of, he also stated somewhat ambiva-
lently that he could not rule it out. However, in terms of the transmission of
intergenerational processes, the theory of complexes is a good starting point.
Thinking about the bipolarity of complexes in interpersonal terms leads me
to reflect on the creation of psyche structure through the relationship of
individual and group. Hence, intergenerational transmission is a partially
structured process that has been internalized and perpetuated. Like fish in
water all of this tends to function in the background as “unthought knowns”
(Bollas, 1987). It is, however, represented as a present absence; that is, I
reason, as a phantom.
As history is shared in therapy, complexes, both personal and group, are
constellated. As the narrative gets articulated through personal complexes
and object relations, phantoms become the carrier of what is missing from
the collective—the cultural story. Through the process of bearing witness,
interpretation as holding, we not only open up room to reflect on history but
also become part of the process of making history through our relationship to
the patient. Indeed, we become part of their history (Jung 1948/1980, paras.
635–36). “Rather than a reliance on exclusively conscious strategies,
[Jung’s] psychology works to persuade humanity of the power of the uncon-
scious in matters societal” (Dourley, 2003, p. 148).
PHANTOM NARRATIVES AT A CULTURAL LEVEL
In my paper “The Cultural Complex and the Myth of Invisibility” (2000), I

put the two terms myth and invisibility in the title in order to get at the role of
nonrecognition in the creation of cultural complexes. We are always in the
process of trying to see how others see us; we are always led into taking
others’ points of view toward our self. This is, of course, a reciprocal phe-
nomenon: mutual recognition plays an essential role in the humanizing pro-
cess. If we look for the role of cultural complexes in this process, we have to
first admit that an aspect of their very origin as complexes seems to be in the
rather painful experience of nonrecognition. The original problem reflected
in the operation of a group process is sometimes less how we are seen but
how we are not seen. We all sooner or later fail to be mirrored; that is, our
legitimacy is ignored to the extent that we start to see ourselves as lesser in a
world of privileged others. In other words, the intersubjective context is a
primary basis for the formation of cultural complexes affecting self-esteem in
everyday life.
The complex of invisibility for African Americans—so beautifully ex-
posed in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1956), often cited as the chief
masterpiece of post–World War II American fiction and thus a potent genera-
tor of the countermovement to recognize belatedly African Americans as
having agency, identity, and “culture,”—itself operated as a fiction, generat-
ing a belief that the nonrecognition of the other would make the other go
away, at least as a subject whose agency needed to be taken seriously. There-
fore, the unconsciously supremacist “white” could, by simply averting his or
her gaze, arrogating the right to direct it as he or she chose, destroy the
“person of color” as someone who didn’t deserve being looked at as one
would a fully human subject. What remained was stereotyping, prejudices,
devaluing, and so on, as the only forms of mirroring that some whites would
afford blacks and that blacks would receive. As we all now know, thanks in
part to Ellison’s brilliance, that starvation diet of mirroring leads to the
creation of a self (system) that divides the races beyond any possibility of
mutuality. The belief that it makes the problem of race go away is probably
the most insidious side of the complex of invisibility enacted in relation to
persons of color, creating a veritable myth of invisibility that people of color
everywhere in the world have often had to raise their consciousness and their
voices to contradict. It reflects a breakdown in the relationship between
humans as subjects (accepting one’s own reality) and the reality of the other
(as equal and legitimate). In the Winnicottian sense of living a psychological
“fantasy,” the myth of invisibility reflects a world of relationships based on
unconscious narratives—the identifications, projections, and subjectively
perceived objects of love and hate that psychoanalysis has revealed, those
unconscious distortions that lead to real others being seen subjectively
through the lens of imagined perceptions, which then serve as an insidious
guide for how the individual actually “uses” those “objects” for subjective
ends. When such processes take the lead, there is no “other” who can be
objectively perceived and evaluated; there are only extensions of the self, or,
as Kohut (1984) speaks of them, self objects that are simply excluded if
found wanting (p. 185). This leads to a shocking breakdown of mutuality
28 Chapter 2
between humans as fellow-subjects (each an entity in his or her own right,

with the same entitlement to have the needs of self met), and, rather than the
accepted interdependence that fosters cultural cooperation, cycles of viola-
tion and retaliatory violence regularly ensue.
The issue of nonrecognition within a cultural/political context was pio-
neered in the United States after the Civil War by a number of African
American observers. Jonathan Flatley (2008) draws on the pioneering work
of the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois—one of the founders of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, for
whom the issues of identity and recognition were both central to the fact of
American racism and the key to how that might be mitigated—to add to
psychoanalytic understanding:
Inasmuch as the general “they” or the abstracted “person who sees me” consti-
tuting the gaze is necessarily imaginary, we may conjecture that nothing is so
powerful in forming it as the looks from others that are withheld—the looks
one desires but does not receive. The refused look is not only the one we most
notice and remember but also the one we dwell on precisely because we lack
and miss it. Thus, modifying Freud (and Lacan), we might say that our lost
love objects do not precipitate to form the ego so much as they combine to
form the gaze. Our (bodily) ego, our sense of self, is formed in relation to the
picture we imagine was presented to that lost other. Or, to be more precise, it is
the difference between the image we imagine we did present and the one we
wish had been presented, the image that would have been seen that is crucial
here. We are forever trying to produce the image of ourselves that would allow
us to be seen by that lost, absent other and so to somehow regain not just the
object itself but the sense of a perfect communion we imagine or fantasize
would have been possible there. (p. 125)
The American historical fiction The Butler (Daniels, 2013) portrays the life
of Cecil Gaines, serving as butler to eight presidents over three decades,
during a period of great societal change and unrest in American society (the
1960s to the present). This period spans the dramatic changes in civil rights
and conflicts around the Viet Nam war, and, in many ways, continues today
in the demands for recognition of gay marriage, equal pay for men and
women, and immigration reform. These processes, aside from their civil
(equal) rights implications, are about the demand for human recognition.
Early on in the movie, as part of his interview for the job, Gaines is asked,
“Are you political, Mr. Gaines?” “No,” he answers. Then, the interviewer
says, “Good! We have no tolerance for politics here at the White House. You
hear nothing, you see nothing; you only serve” (Daniels, 2013). This interac-
tion concretizes the missing conscious, mutual, dialectical, and intersubjec-
tive relating necessary for recognition as mutual subjects. The butler remains
a creation of the speaker. The reference to “no tolerance for politics” allows
the political world and all its demands for equality and recognition to remain
in the cultural shadow and not be reflected in the power set up in the relation-
ship between Gaines and the President, which mimics the marginalized and
excluded subjectivity that is being fought about in the streets (as background
in the movie). This split makes for a powerful tension in the movie.
This split in consciousness is the dimension in so much of African
American literature. Consider Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1956),
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Veil, The Soul of Black Folks (1961), Frantz Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks (1952), and, of course, Toni Morrison’s Beloved
(1987), where she shows us through an intergenerational cultural complex
how through slavery she “saw the phantom subjects of history, and imagined
their talk, feelings, and habits, in all their concreteness and contradictions”
(Gordon, 2008, p. 96). Again, the absent subjectivities are what haunt the
present. “The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social
figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and
subjectivity make social life” (p. 8).
The underlying idea in my earlier paper (Kimbles, 2000) on invisibility
was to begin the process of looking in the individual psyche or at those
dynamics in the unconscious that imply introjected lack of recognition and
mutuality at the cultural level. This led me to postulate an implicit, that is,
unconscious or preconscious, group functioning as well, where cultural, so-
cial, and political forces operate to shape our emotional lives and, therefore,
the unconscious we act from every day. My hope was that this process of
analyzing the presence of cultural complexes in the individual psyche and, in
particular, in one-to-one relationships, would open a potential space for re-
flection and the possibility of transitioning out of culturally perpetrated in-
sensibility to the way we can refuse to accept the real fellow humanness of
others, even when we would wish to deny doing so.
In a dream I had, reported in the paper on invisibility, I had been called to
be a consultant to three African American men who were working in a prison
to mentor convicts who were mostly black and under the age of thirty. These
three elders consisted of (1) the first African American president of the
American Association of Black Psychologists, (2) the recently confirmed
American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and (3) my father. They
had become stuck in their efforts to help the population they were trying to
serve, and so I had been called in to consult with them because of my Jungian
orientation. They chose an analytical psychological consultant because they
recognized that their more social/political approach had not been of much
help in their work with young men whose unconscious “attitudes” were more
than evident. I was impressed; however, that a social/political context had
been the focus of their consultation and, therefore, what I, too, would have to
address. The refreshing aspect of their focus for me was that their activities
moved the focus of my intervention away from the predominant bias in
psychoanalytic rehabilitative efforts from an emphasis on purely intrapsychic
30 Chapter 2
and interpersonal dynamics and significantly toward the cultural context in

which these inmates were expressing their incorrigibility. This focus on the
larger context, I realized, had the potential to change how we listen to clinical
processes in the voluntary clinical setting of individual private practice
psychoanalysis (my day job). Although I saw at the outset that their more
sociological approach could correct much prevailing thinking in my own
discipline about clinical phenomena, since they had invited me to contribute
to their enlightenment, I had to ask myself what has an analytical and, partic-
ularly, a Jungian analytical approach to add?
I did realize in the wake of some efforts by African American psycholo-
gists in the 1960s, by feminist psychologists in the 1970s, and gay psycholo-
gists in the 1980s, that an exclusive look at culture’s contribution to individu-
al suffering and self-destructiveness can overlook the many contributions of
individual circumstance to the formation of complexes that arrest personal
development. Nevertheless, I was moved after my dream to carry forward the
lesson of these earlier efforts at a culturally sensitive psychotherapy and
return to their core realization that a predominant individual focus leaves out
the contributions that a larger group has had on the psyches of individuals
and thus tends either to pathologize or to inflate the individual as transcender
of such victimization. The problem, I realized, was the continued determina-
tion to try to work through cultural shadow processes through the heroic
efforts of individuals. Seeing the outer sociology in the inner psyche and
realizing that this relationship between the personal and cultural was ongoing
and not to be undone through simply “recognizing” seemed to me to be an
obvious next step to a more useful way of talking about the place of culture
in the unconscious of all of us. Of course, everyone seemed to “know” this,
though few had come up with a language really adequate to acting on that
knowledge. Again, I had to ask myself, what does analytical psychology, a
discipline built around the practice of individual psychotherapy, have to add?
My work on cultural complexes is my answer to the question that arose in
me in relation to the unconscious call to consult with the elders working with
an imprisoned population in my dream. It has helped me release my clinical
work from the prison of collective thinking about unsolved cultural issues,
which I have come to see needs much more imagination if it is to lead to a
therapy for them. My coining of a new term, phantom narratives—beyond
the now familiar cultural complexes, which I introduced more than twenty
years ago and which has since become rather popular in Jungian psycholo-
gy—is my attempt to make the interrelationship of cultural and personal
shadow in the unconscious of both individuals and groups more explicit. It
constitutes the consultation I was called to offer by my truly vocational
dream.
I will show where my consultation has taken me; that is, to make even
more visible the forces that operate implicitly in all of us, in the parts of
ourselves where cultural complexes most often constellate and, once constel-
lated, begin to operate as autonomous agents, shaping personal behaviors and
social attitudes. I have found that there are three of these phantom narratives
that insidiously work in the background of our cultural complexes, shaping
their ideologies. I call these narratives “phantoms” because they operate
subtly, but I have found it possible, in the chapters of this book, to differen-
tiate them into (1) intergenerational transmissions; (2) the collective shadow
processes; and (3) socially shared suffering. These terms cannot pretend to
embrace all the factors that may eventually be found to influence cultural
complexes, but they do offer a way to help us track the power that inheres in
such complexes across individual psyches, national politics, and time. In this
book, I develop this insight by looking at a variety of contexts in which these
implicit power aspects of cultural complexes operate in individuals, larger
groups, and smaller institutions, ending with cautionary lessons from the
training of psychoanalysts, which was the starting point of these reflections
in my own life.
Coming full circle to that first recognition that the processes that make
some human beings invisible to others are themselves invisible, I want to
emphasize that I have deliberately chosen to call the implicit psychological
gestalts that predetermine the constellation of cultural complexes, phantom
narratives. This term may seem to some unnecessarily redolent of popular
dramatic depictions of the shadow in comic books and musical comedies and
not psychoanalytic enough (despite the pioneering work of Abraham and
Torok [1994] in exploring “phantomatic complexes”), but this terminology is
in accord with Jung’s recommendations for a language that will actually do
justice to the way the psyche itself conceives its processes: “In describing the
living processes of the psyche, I deliberately and consciously give preference
to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking of speaking, because this is not
only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminol-
ogy” (Jung, 1968, para. 25).
I hope to make the psychological justification for my dramatic rendering
of my own current thinking about the phantomatic background to cultural
complexes clearer as I go along through my own narratives of invisibility and
insidious power, which form the leitmotivs of this particular book.
THE PHANTOM NARRATIVE WITHIN

THE CULTURAL COMPLEX
In his essay “Oedipus Revisited,” James Hillman (1987) reminds us that “the
tragedy of Oedipus and the tragedy of the city (Polis) for Sophocles” are
corollary, a central theme of the play. Thus Hillman (1987) points to a deep,
phantomatic narrative in the play that connects the King, city, and its people:
32 Chapter 2
We are dealing, however, with something beyond the symbolic significance of

kingship, and rather with the interpenetration of sickness among the polis, its
people, and the individual. All are sick together: individuals, community, and
government. Private and public cannot be separated. The Gods do not affect
individuals and families alone or only human beings: they affect the land, the
crops and herds, the institutions of state. A city, too, can be pathologized by
mythical factors. . . . The Gods live in the polis. (p. 104)
Looking at cultural complexes through phantom narratives allows us to see

the “Gods in the polis,” that is, the primal level that underlies group life.
These “Gods” are “background narratives” functioning in the unconscious at
the group, institutional, and individual level that connect deep underlying
patterns of belonging (attachment needs)—identifications in individuals to
groups and to the groups in individuals. These interconnections provide the
underlying foundation for cultural life. Or, said another way, “all civiliza-
tions, past and present, owe their existence and endurance to social processes
of archetypal bonding that are expressed formally in their lasting cultural
achievements” (Dourley, 2003, pp. 135–36).
In using the image of the phantom, Abraham and Torok (1994) indicate
that the concept of the phantom suggests “the existence within an individual
of a collective psychology comprised of several generations, so that the
analyst must listen for the voices of one generation in the unconscious of
another” (1994, p. 166). Essentially Abraham and Torok seek to describe
intergenerational processes, involving secrets, unfinished business, and unre-
solved suffering. Whereas Torok and Abraham define these processes in
interfamilial terms, I widen the range of the phenomena they refer to by
connecting their phantom with the theory of cultural complexes, on the one
hand, and the idea of an unconscious narrative as the ideological core of each
such complex, on the other.
Their conception of the phantom, to my mind, is not the same as Freud’s
ideas of “archaic heritage” or “primal fantasies,” where he emphasizes the
primeval experiences of humankind resulting from real ancestral occur-
rences—seduction, parricide, castration, and so on—as well as dispositions
and attitudes. For me, the phantom is a primordial, not necessarily even
historically accurate, image that represents, like Freud’s manifest dream,
condensed dynamic configurations of absent things, images of persons, and
cultural configurations and processes as received before conscious thought
about them is possible. The phantom functions at the level of a traumatized
cultural unconscious. Cultural complexes fold such inevitable distortions into
the collective phantom dynamics that structure our perception of cultural
processes, including the fact of threatening others. This structuring is appro-
priately seen as phantomatic for another reason as well, for it regularly mani-
fests as social suffering, repetitionally traumatic intergenerational processes,
and ongoing political attitudes that severely restrict our capacities to be hu-
man to each other, even in the relative privacy of our own families.
It is a fact the “phantom,” whatever its form, is nothing but an invention of the
living. Yes, an invention in the sense that the phantom is meant to objectify,
even if under the guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap
produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s life. The
phantom is therefore also metapsychological fact: what haunts are not the
dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. (Abraham & Torok,
1994, p. 171)
Since the phantom is not related to the loss of an object of love, it cannot
be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as would be the case with
melancholics or with all those who carry a tomb in themselves. It is the
children’s or descendants’ lot to objectify these buried tombs through diverse
species of ghosts. What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. The
phantoms of folklore merely objectify a metaphor active in the unconscious:
the burial of an unspeakable fact with the love object . . . (it) is a formation of
the unconscious that has never been conscious. . . . It passes—in a way yet to
be determined—from the parent’s unconscious into the child’s. (p. 173)
Jung (1961) also expresses an intergenerational attitude toward the psyche

that draws upon a phantomatic complex:
I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions, which
were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and
more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there was an impersonal karma
within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always
seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my
forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or
perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult
to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a
general (collective nature). It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collec-
tive problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem,
and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order
in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed,
but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the
consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause
of disturbance is there, not to be sought in their personal surroundings, but
rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter
far too little into account. (pp. 233–34)
And further:
We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classi-
cal antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we
have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future
with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots . . . the less we
understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand
34 Chapter 2
ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots
and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only
by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity. (Jung, 1952/1967, paras.
265–66)
Although Freud, Jung, and Abraham and Torok seek to describe the presence
of the past in the present or the effect of the past/absent on present relation-
ships, I use the term phantom narratives to refer to
• The potential space that is created by an attitude toward the cultural un-
conscious that holds and expresses the active historical dynamics that
were formative in the creation of a group’s identity. These dynamics are
the shared events (and experiences) that are narrated through ritual, sto-
ries, and priorities in the present. Phantoms represent the cultural third as
the background and content, the person and his or her group affective
connection. As the psychoanalyst James Grotstein (2000) has observed,
This concept allows us to see that, in virtually every relationship, the partic-
ipants become “haunted,” as it were, by a newly constituted “demon.” That
mysterious third entity, the subjectivity of the relationship itself, ultimately
defines, organizes, directs, controls, manipulates and subjugates each of the
participants. The participants, in turn, find themselves behaving according
to a script or choreography that they do not know they are following, and
they may be bewildered by how they are mysteriously behaving, frequently
projecting blame on the other participant. (p. 169)
• The unthought knowns forming a part of the narrative structure of the

cultural unconscious. A phantom, when we understand it psychologically
as both an image and a process, constitutes the “unthought knowns” (Bol-
las, 1987). Phantoms like this contribute to the generational transmission
of collective identity through the memory of shared events and the use of
rituals and cultural narratives. These events and rituals would be, to use
Bollas’s term, “generational” objects. They open up and keep alive the
attitudes, events, and objects that signify lived-through emotional experi-
ences for a particular group or individuals in the past that are active in the
present as absences; that is, unconscious group dynamics. And they literal-
ly “generate” attitudes that will shape the future.
Cultural complexes, once they disclose their phantomatic cores, allow us to

identify our experience of the past (history), see their manifestations in the
present, and look forward toward the future and the new historical possibil-
ities that are emerging. The challenges and difficulties in diversification and
globalization put pressure on us to discover our potential to change or influ-
ence our cultural narrative and to embody our capacity to carry the tensions
involved in cultural and social change. On the other hand, awareness of

cultural complexes may allow us to situate ourselves in a far more conscious
relationship to social processes and institutions. We already see such con-
sciousness facilitating change in today’s “postmodern” world, and we have
to make room, as it does, for the value of cultural awareness.
Nevertheless, this is not a book about cultural sophistication. It is about
the unconscious with which such sophistication must yet contend if it is to be
truly effective in achieving the progress the world still seeks from its collec-
tive processes. The term phantom narrative is my attempt to point to the
awareness of how cultural complexes tend to function in this background,
silently structuring and altering perceptions, behavior, images (representa-
tions), and affective responses of groups and individuals in groups. These
background narratives are sometimes referred to in experimental social
psychology as implicit attitudes (Banaji & Greenwald 2013; Nosek, Banaji,
& Greenwald, 2002).
SOME RESEARCH RELEVANT TO CULTURAL COMPLEXES

AND PHANTOM NARRATIVES
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Brown v. Board of Education.
This decision made desegregation not just a worthy goal pursued, against
resistance, by a brave few, but also the law of the land, enacted in the very
education of children from the beginning of their entry into a group experi-
ence beyond the family. The social psychological research of educational
psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark played what many feel to
have been a pivotal role in the case. Clark (1939) shared with the court his
“doll studies,” in which he and Mamie Phipps Clark found that black chil-
dren, when given choices, consistently preferred white dolls over brown
ones. In addition, these preferences were due to racial segregation and
showed the psychological damage to children that came from internalizing
the devaluing stereotypes operating at the level of our culture’s attitude to-
ward racial differences. To my mind, this was one of the earliest experimen-
tal demonstrations of the power of a cultural complex to affect individual
self-esteem, and since it influenced the court decision that changed American
society, this recognition also proved to have cultural healing power.
Fifty years later, researchers McKown and Weinstein (2003), in a study
entitled “The Development and Consequences of Stereotype Consciousness
in Middle Childhood,” reported their results: “Results of this study support
our main hypothesis, suggesting that when children from stigmatized groups
become aware of broadly held stereotypes, indirectly activated stereotype
threat can significantly hamper cognitive performance” (p. 510). The re-
search on social cognition “reveal[s] the deep influence of the immediate
36 Chapter 2
environment and the broader culture on internalized preferences and beliefs”

that underlie group cognition, “most notably the strength of implicit attitudes,
the association and dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes, and
the effects of group membership on attitudes and stereotypes” (Nosek et al.,
2002, p. 101). These cognitions are implicit associations. Psychoanalysts
generally refer to such implicit associations as unconscious attitudes. And, in
summarizing their findings, these authors note that implicit cognitions func-
tion automatically and underlie social behavior, and that implicit biases were
notably stronger than their explicit counterparts and sometimes in contradic-
tion to them:
Findings like these reflect the propensity to consciously deny feelings and
thoughts either because of social (external) pressures or personal (internal)
standards. Differences between implicit and explicit attitudes do not suggest
that one is accurate (or real) and the other is not. Rather, they suggest a form of
mental (and often unrecognized) dissociation between implicit and explicit
feelings and thoughts. (Nosek et al., 2002, pp. 111–12)
Consistent with the Clark and Clark’s earlier findings (1939), the study
found that minority respondents reflected the same negative attitudes toward
themselves that existed in the culture at large. Their own implicit attitudes
revealed the influence of the negative attitudes held by the culture toward
those groups, leading the researchers to conclude that “we regard implicit
attitudes to reveal the deep influence of the immediate environment and the
broader culture on internalized preferences and beliefs. The learning context
is the culture, but the repository is the individual” (Nosek et al., 2002, p.
112).
Drawing heavily on neurocognitive thinking, in their most recent work,
Blindspot, Banaji and Greenwald (2013) elaborate on the mostly “automatic
association-making (mental) machinery of the mind” (p. 9). They call the
automatic assumptions “mindbugs,” as they affect perceptions and memories
as these grow out of identifications with the various human groupings (race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and so on). But more important than
these automatic mental mechanisms is the recognition that human groups
within an interdependent world have had, for the sake of survival, to evolve
higher principles of equal rights, social justice, and transparency regarding
power, which activate a type of psychological and social tension between
these automatic mechanisms and higher principles. The concept of cultural
complexes provides a framework for recognizing and relating to the psycho-
logical strain, dynamics, and challenges involved in processing this level of
psychosocial complexity.
This research also provides a kind of experimental validation for the
concept of collective introjections—the tendency to identify with the percep-
tions of negative attitudes held by the culture toward one’s own identity
group (see previous discussion of Clark and Clark). Volkan has labeled this
“the deposited image”: “The deposited image becomes like a psychological
‘gene’ that influences the child’s identity and self-representation, initiating
certain tasks that the child is obliged to perform—though again, without the
parent or other caregiver ever verbalizing the demand” (Volkan, Ast, &
Greer, 2002, p. 36).
Looking at the research on implicit attitudes in group life reveals the deep
influence of both conscious and unconscious, implicit and explicit attitudes
on group life that profoundly affect our relationship to others, to social set-
tings, and to political and cultural life. Consciousness of this background
dynamic is typically constricted by the automatic responsiveness through
stereotyping and identification that this background functioning affords.
Within the discourse of Jungian analytical psychology, this background is
now thought of, thanks to the pioneering work of Henderson (1990), as the
cultural unconscious. Social scientists refer to this area as social (group)
cognitions. There is work still to be done to bridge these conditions because
one postulates unconsciousness and the other a consciousness. My own an-
swer is to recognize that group cognitions, however easy they may be to
verbalize and share among the individuals in the group who buy into them,
are almost always organized not by reason or even direct experience but by
cultural complexes, which function as implicit structures (biases), built on
and propagating phantom narratives. Cultural complexes, guided by such
phantom narratives, then can proceed to structure cultural unconscious activ-
ities through the stereotypes, identifications, and forcefully expressed atti-
tudes that sociologists like to study and deconstruct as forms of irrational
consciousness. Analytical psychology allows us to trace in dreams and more
personal expressions how such cultural complexes appear in the psyche and
thus to give a missing piece of information as to how they actually, working
through symbols, alter the way individuals and groups experience the context
and products of culture. The cultural complexes that are informed by phan-
tom narratives are, to borrow a frame from cognitive science, collective
Internal Working Models (Bowlby, 1973, 1988). Potentially, however, this
concept allows for a sort of metacognizing; it provides a framework for
thinking and reflecting on how we receive and transmit culture in uncon-
scious ways.
LARGER WORLD PHANTOMS
The world we live in today has become increasingly interconnected. There is

a press toward globalization, democratization, capitalization, and cultural
flattening. In some sense, our world has become smaller with relatively easy
access, in superficial ways, to many different cultural situations and attitudes
38 Chapter 2
worldwide. This awareness comes with the recognition of unresolved social,

class, and sexual differences, economic disparities, and racial, ethnic, and
political differences charged with intergenerational traumas and conflicts.
We have many opportunities to witness the traumas to which the struggle
with differences contributes. And, at the same time, our world is shadowed
by collective traumas: genocides, wars, terrorism. Indeed, our time is a peri-
od of great tension.
The matrix created by these multiple changes and tensions reflects in the
analytical/clinical situation as layered and complex intersubjective fields or-
ganized around sameness, otherness, differences, historical valences, iden-
tity, belongingness, and the dynamics of power (obtaining resources for one-
self and/or one’s group) within a drive for recognition. So it is imperative
that as part of this worldwide move that we each become aware of our
cultural complexes—our particular valences—as we appreciate and know
our own culture. Despite many attempts at empires, it has historically proven
enormously difficult to develop a consciousness that the world can agree on,
one dynamic enough to help all of us become aware of our particular local
valences and the inhibiting nature of the cultural complexes that derive from
those valences. Now, however, as we function in this global situation that
takes as its premise diverse and pluralistic societies, it is possible to imagine
just such a consciousness. A postmodern understanding of the challenges of
this period requires an awareness of our particular biases and prejudices and
the dynamics functioning in the present that contribute to nonrecognition and
negation of others in the service of power. The theory of cultural complexes
can give people who can benefit from a self-examining, analytic discourse, a
language to access and develop this form of consciousness that I believe will
be of deep value in this period of humanity’s transition.
Jung’s contribution to this part of my thinking has to do with his descrip-
tion of the emergence of a psychological attitude that would support the
psychological man (and woman) functioning in this contemporary context.
Such an attitude would be the outgrowth of the tension between modernity
and tradition, or as Samuel Huntington (1993), in his often referred to paper
“The Clash of Civilizations,” says:
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world

will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions
among human kind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the
principal conflict of global politics will occur between nations and groups of
different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.
The fault lines of different civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
(p. 22)
Although Huntington’s hypothesis has been criticized as itself an ideologi-

cally driven, rather monolithic, and certainly fixed view of civilization in a
world that is interdependent (a contemporary version of the age-old longing
for “one world”), nonetheless it does capture some of the underlying issues
related to global identity, belonging, and value that are supraordinate to the
clashes of cultural complexes that usually have generated history. It suggests
the image of a world Self, rather like Jung’s alchemical vision of an “Unus
Mundus,” that can integrate the individuation of cultures in a common con-
sciousness that has room for diversity.
Hence, a relationship to these global phantom narratives is emerging, and
this present book is also the product of that particular consciousness.
It is the essence of modern consciousness to be irrevocably structured by the

technological aspects of industrial production. The individual of today trans-
fers the engineering ethos of modern technology and bureaucracy to his per-
sonal consciousness and emotional life. This ethos, characterized by mechani-
calness, reproducibility, and measurability, produces in consciousness the
traits of abstraction, functional rationality, and instrumentality. (Homans,
1979, pp. 201–2)
If “archetypes are structures of tradition,” then cultural complexes are the

dynamisms that structure and make available to us the products of culture
through cultural objects, attitudes, and beliefs grounded in ethnic, racial, and
gendered presentations. “As such their existence and the need for their assim-
ilation constituted the dimension of counter modernization in Jung’s psychol-
ogy; they are symbols rooted in the ancient past that unify modern conscious-
ness and overcome its homeless condition” (Homans, 1979, p. 204).
Forming a relationship to archetypal processes at the individual level
results in “the formation of the self, a core of essential, personal uniqueness
that exists beyond institutions and roles—in short a meta-institutional self”
(Homans, 1979, p. 204). Heretofore, the ability of a group or collective to
develop a consciousness of its limitations has itself been limited to an aware-
ness of cultural differences. I think that developing the theory of cultural
complexes through a consideration of the phantom narratives that form the
ideological cores of such complexes will allow for the development of a
consciousness within the collective that can begin to process its deep and
essential collectivity. This shift from assuming that the personal is truly
personal will also help to reshape our present notion that the personal is the
political. It is truer that the personal is unconsciously political and needs to
take cognizance of that before it can become political in personally satisfying
ways. I thus have had, as a psychologist of cultural complexes, to reformat
the movement from psyche at the level of the individual to psyche at the level
of the group in a way that stresses their inevitable interrelationship. In the
light of the possibility of global war, and its even more insidious phantom,
40 Chapter 2
the reality of global warming, such a shift, I feel, is a necessity if we are to

survive as a species. The emotional center of that shift is developing a con-
sciousness that is able to recognize the other in a mutual respecting relation-
ship even as we recognize that each of us has his or her phantoms and has
emerged from a group that has insisted we respect them.
The social philosopher and critical theorist Axel Honneth’s work (2003)
adds to my own conclusions and helps to complete the loop in my thinking
between the human need to belong and have an identity, and the drive for
recognition with its relationship to political processes—an intersubjective
emphasis that connects the personal, social, and political. Honneth shifts the
struggle for recognition to include the elimination of inequalities and to
preventing disrespect. In talking about recognition, Honneth goes on to say
the following:
What we face first and foremost . . . is a multitude of politically organized

efforts by cultural groups to find social recognition for their own value convic-
tions and lifestyles. . . . In the highly developed countries of the West, the
women’s movement and ethnic and sexual minorities increasingly resist disre-
spect and marginalization rooted in an institutionalized value structure constit-
utively tailored to the idealized characteristics of the white, male, heterosexual
citizen. The struggle thus aims to change a country’s majority culture by
overcoming stereotypes and ascriptions in a way that can also in the end win
social recognition for one’s own traditions and way of life. (pp. 117–18)
Marie-Louis von Franz (1976) mirrors this attitude as she speaks about
Jung’s work as expressing a new image of man as the Anthropos: “a symbol
that unites the inner Self of the individual with the Self of mankind as a
whole” (p. xi). She goes on to say, “We cannot tell what society will look
like when a majority of people will have realized this, but it can only be
realized if les droits de l’homme [that is, the Rights of Man] are guaranteed,
so that the individual can give himself to the task” (p. xi).
The processing of cultural complexes, and the phantom narratives embed-
ded in them that are forever stirring toward new intrusions into our lives,
cannot proceed without the even more essential human-making process,
available to us all, of mutual recognition—that is, consciousness of the other.
To know that where phantoms are threatening our interconnectedness, hu-
mans can relate to each other, opens up and motivates human action in a way
that transcends the need to emphasize ethnic, racial, and cultural differences.
In short, the self that evolves out of social interactions can become con-
scious as well as unconscious in intersubjective processes, but this will re-
quire relationship with the longing for a transcending Self within the phan-
tom, or it will simply regress into the same shadow phenomena we have
always known in our dealings with each other.
PHANTOMS AT THE CULTURAL LEVEL
A phantom in the cultural context is an imago that represents intergeneration-

al forces and is a way to understand the psychic processes (1) concerned with
history and time through providing continuity; (2) related to kinship libido
(race, ethnicity, religion, group affiliation); (3) that mediate the need to be-
long and have an identity within the human family system and/or a specific
group; and (4) organized by cultural complexes that tend to function as a
kind of homelessness complex, giving rise to the experience of the uncanny.
Cultural complexes create narrative containers for phantoms with affect and
image. Phantoms represent the archetypal spirit of the group referred to by
Singer (2003) as the “Archetypal Defenses of the Group Spirit.” The emer-
gence of phantoms is related to the
spirits of nature, but not the psychic factors that correspond to them, such as
suggestibility, lack of criticism, fearfulness, propensity to superstition and
prejudice—in short, all those qualities which make possession possible. Even
though nature is de-psychized, the psychic conditions which breed demons are
as actively at work as ever. The demons have not really disappeared but have
merely taken on another form: they have become unconscious psychic forces.
(Jung, 1945/1970, para. 431).
I take this complicated set of thoughts from Jung to describe a type of

dynamism operating at the level of the collective, generating processes (atti-
tudes, prejudices, discrimination, and so on) that need to be encountered,
taken on, and worked with. Our identities are formed within these created
contexts. A phantom is my term for how all this gets represented in terms of
both historical processes and during the process of forming individual and
group identities.
I realize that the concept of the phantom may constitute a certain kind of
difficulty as we sort out the differences among symbols, images, and com-
plexes (personal and cultural) as understood in Jungian psychology. At best,
“Jung’s approach is demanding because of the way it allows psychic phe-
nomena to emerge and forces confrontation of the figures through which the
unconscious expresses itself” (Humbert, 1996, p. 47). Further, “the psyche
and its rootedness in the body, in society, and in the cosmos elude the full
grasp of consciousness. The categories Jung proposed are, like the images of
the ‘other,’ mediators of relationship” (Humbert, 1996, p. 47). The phantom
is such an image as it mediates relationship to certain kinds of presences in
the personal, historical, and cultural experiences of groups and individuals
that are barely known and articulated. As image, the phantom is a living
entity that affects us emotionally and “actualizes and organizes a meaning
that takes on all the characteristics of fact” (Humbert, 1996, p. 39).
42 Chapter 2
The following are some key points emphasizing generational processes

and phantoms:
• Generational issues are enfolded in complexes that function over time and
outside a phased developmental view of human behavior. Though related
to time, generational processes may be nonstratified, nonlinear, and irra-
tional.
• Generational processes are typically experienced as claims made by histo-
ry on the individual and group to develop through specific cultural sym-
bols and rituals within a specific historical framework.
• The child is a mediator for ancestral processes as socialization through
identification operates on preverbal levels—in other words, implicitly and
unconsciously through affect states.
• Generational processes are carried as psyche structures and not simply as
memory traces.
• Absences, absent presences, voids, negative identities, all can embody
“psychic matter.” They are entities from the third realm of group life as
expressed through the cultural unconscious. Positively, this becomes, to
use Winnicott’s term, “transitional space” and, negatively, a dead space as
the past becomes closed out and dead.
• Cultural complexes are represented by phantoms or images of “what is
usually invisible or neglected or thought by most to be dead and gone.
They recover ‘the evidence of things not seen’” (Gordon, 2008, pp. 194-
95). The phantom is an image of what is missing at the level of the group,
but has dynamic relevance to the current contemporary situation.
SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS
Let me state again Bion’s idea that we are social animals and, as such,
participants in the world as individuals and as members of a group. The
group has its own dynamism and unity that is separate from the individual,
but mysteriously linked to each person’s individuality. We develop through
our relationship with, and through our encounters with, that other dimension
that is both living within and without. This relationship is organized by
cultural complexes.
The cultural complex is a way to understand how the dynamic inter-
relationship between the two poles (individual and group) manifest in real
time in the context of the history of social suffering caused by political
traumas. The structure of feelings, memories, and images make up the inner
and outer landscapes where Gordon (2008) says, in her description of Luisa
Valenzuela, Toni Morrison, and Sabina Spielrein, “[they] possess a vision
that can not only regard the seemingly not there, but can also see that the not
there is a seething presence” (p. 195). So the movement from cultural com-
plexes to phantom narratives is a movement toward images and processes
that come together to animate the psyche in the service of bringing “the
double articulation of the history of individuals upon the unconscious of
culture, and of the historicity of those cultures upon the unconscious of
individuals” (Foucault, 1973, p. 379). We are drawn into another imaginative
intrasubjective mode of being with the social world and ourselves. And when
intergenerational processes are added, the foliage become dense, and we
know the rhizome goes down even deeper. It is easy to get confused and lost
amid this terrain.
How the collective manifests in the group through complexes is the focus
of this book. Groups and individuals live with traumas, developmental chal-
lenges, and function autonomously with varying degrees of consciousness.
Jung’s major contribution was in his introduction of the term primordial
image (or archetype) (Jung, 1960/1981, pp. 4–6), but are there archetypal
configurations that underlie cultural changes that manifest initially as cultural
complexes? And can cultural change happen without some change in group
development? Are phantoms cultural figures that prefigure cultural change?
Cultural complex awareness allows for a kind of unconscious work at the
level of culture, or, as Gerhardt and Sweetnam (2001) say in their commen-
tary on Bollas’s work, we may “complexify our subjectivity while leading to
an inherent rapport with the world” (p. 6). A complexified consciousness
requires a kind of intersubjectivity and intrasubjectivity that is concerned
about and recognizes the other as subject.
The phantom is a symbolic image for framing affective activity at the
level of the cultural unconscious for making present the absent/present fig-
ures, processes, and dynamics related to both the individual and the group
that are invisible. The phantom’s ontology is ambiguous, both present in
silence, yet absent and literally unreal, though psychically real. The phantom
carries the past as present; it makes demands on us that grow out of an alive
history (see Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Mark [1993], where hauntology
replaces ontology).
Finally, stretching the concept of the cultural complex opens the cultural
unconscious to the animation of the psyche at the level of cultural life.

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Chapter Two

To start with Jung’s contribution to my introduction of phantom narratives,

as the center of the human psyche:

It was Freud’s tilt toward a scientific, rational understanding of phenomena

The uncanny is a key concept to grasp the experience of aesthetic estrange-

Masschelein (2011) goes on to speak about Derrida who “proposes a ‘haun-

a philosophy of haunting, of the return of the repressed, in which the spectral

the existence and constraints of social, cultural, and communicational arrange-

I introduce the concept of phantom narratives as a hybridized term express-

actually happened, not because of subjective wishes, or fears, or personal

Two Trains Running by August Wilson—A Phantom Narrative

American playwright August Wilson’s Two Trains Running (1992) is a play

North America colonies. Hence, Ester as phantom represents their struggle

It is interesting to reflect on the symbolic nature of the cultural complex in

My term psychic presences is meant to convey the experience of intrapsychic

Most of the papers on absent presences or intergenerational processes, how-

HENDERSON’S CONTRIBUTION TO PHANTOM NARRATIVES

PHANTOMS AS PSYCHOLOGICAL ATTITUDES

Cultural complexes involve the patterning of historical processes organized

SOME OF MY BACKGROUND PHANTOMS

My interest in phantoms comes from several sources of influence. I will

which an unspeakable drama, experienced as traumatic by someone else, lies

PHANTOM NARRATIVES AT A CULTURAL LEVEL

In my paper “The Cultural Complex and the Myth of Invisibility” (2000), I

between humans as fellow-subjects (each an entity in his or her own right,

and interpersonal dynamics and significantly toward the cultural context in

THE PHANTOM NARRATIVE WITHIN

We are dealing, however, with something beyond the symbolic significance of

Looking at cultural complexes through phantom narratives allows us to see

Jung (1961) also expresses an intergenerational attitude toward the psyche

• The unthought knowns forming a part of the narrative structure of the

Cultural complexes, once they disclose their phantomatic cores, allow us to

involved in cultural and social change. On the other hand, awareness of

SOME RESEARCH RELEVANT TO CULTURAL COMPLEXES

environment and the broader culture on internalized preferences and beliefs”

LARGER WORLD PHANTOMS

The world we live in today has become increasingly interconnected. There is

worldwide. This awareness comes with the recognition of unresolved social,

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world

Although Huntington’s hypothesis has been criticized as itself an ideologi-

It is the essence of modern consciousness to be irrevocably structured by the

If “archetypes are structures of tradition,” then cultural complexes are the

the reality of global warming, such a shift, I feel, is a necessity if we are to

What we face first and foremost . . . is a multitude of politically organized

PHANTOMS AT THE CULTURAL LEVEL

A phantom in the cultural context is an imago that represents intergeneration-

I take this complicated set of thoughts from Jung to describe a type of

The following are some key points emphasizing generational processes

SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

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