Book reviews

Edited by Lucinda Hawkins and Joe McFadden

Pilar Amezaga, Gustavo Barcellos, Áxel Capriles, Jacqueline Gerson,

and Denise Ramos (Eds.). Listening to Latin America: Exploring CulturalComplexes in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.New Orleans, Louisiana: Spring Journal Books, 2012. Pp. 289. Pbk. $26.95

This book is about the deep interior of the Latin American psyche and aboutthe powerful emotional reactions elicited by the frequently constellatedcomplexes of entire cultures that are clamouring to be heard. The book iswritten by a multiplicity of local authors, each one a practitioner in the frontline of the field of mental health care in their respective countries. The authorsare Jungian analysts or in analytic training. Each writer demonstrates aneducated sense of geography, history, sociology and anthropology. This is anothersuccessful book that belongs to the Analytical Psychology and ContemporaryCulture series edited by Jungian analyst, Thomas Singer.The articles in this book are grouped according to each of the Latin

American countries listed in the title. In spite of the implied complexitiesand multiplicities, this work manages to have a solid cohesiveness, not onlyof style but of content. The themes within each culture are linked with eachother in what appears as a remarkably organized sequence. In addition, theaddressed cultural complexes of every country link with each other in avariety of ways ultimately to form a long cultural chain of complexes thatimprison vast areas of the Latin American psyche.There is a common thread in these cultural complexes that emerged as a

result of the brutal imposition of the culture by the conquerors and colonizers,mostly Spanish and Portuguese, but also others. Conquerors and colonizers, asnoted by the authors, saw the natives as barbarians, denied their humanity anddeclared them uncivilized. In addition, the shadows of the ‘civilizers’ wereprojected on to the ‘natives’ who accepted and carried them with passivity,resignation, docility, and even at times with misplaced pride. There was noenergy left to reject the projections or to enforce their withdrawal. Thiscontinues into contemporary times. From these attitudes, and the impositionof foreign cultural mores, a number of complexes have arisen with a misplacedsense of inferiority or superiority, various prejudices about race and social class,

0021-8774/2013/5803/433 © 2013, The Society of Analytical PsychologyPublished by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12022

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2013, 58, 433–441

appellations of gringo and foreigner, and an imposition of isolation and socialexclusion. Even today these complexes are seated deep within the Latin Americanpsyche and continue to manifest themselves with a pervasive repetition of thevictim/perpetrator dynamic.This book is an eye opener, one distilled from the Latin American psyche with

great mastery, and one that points out the need to deal with these matters notonly locally but, hopefully, abroad as well. Locally, as said by one of theauthors, ‘we [Latin-Americans] continue to behave in a submissive way thatgives to the abusers, and recruits the necessary forces, constantly to supportre-enactment of the trauma’. The acting out of the victimization complex, asdescribed in the case of the ‘sicariato’ in Colombia, continues unabated. It isnot imposed by foreigners but, by the same locals, in this case the Colombians.The tendency to remain unconscious of the historical traumas leads to a sado/masochistic attitude of the psyche and ignores the telos or purposiveness ofthe negative complex that could lead to transformation and consciousness.In this book it is regrettable to find significant misspellings in some proper

names. The misspelling of the country Colombia as Columbia is seen twice,one in the leading map of the book and in the title page of its chapter. Brasiliathe capital of Brazil is misspelled as Brasilio in one of the South America maps.In another map, a non-Latin country, French Guiana, is misspelled as Giuana.These misspellings caused in this reviewer, also of Latin origin, a visceralreaction of discontent, criticism and sadness.Perhaps I interpreted the disregard of the spelling as a possible passive

attitude of the editors who should have caught the errors when reviewing thebook proofs. I asked myself if there was a deeper meaning to the oversight.Could it be that a pervasive inferiority cultural complex was at work thatprevented the authors from claiming the correct spellings? Do we feel we mustaccept these mistakes that tamper with our identity, so the Latin American criescontained in this book can be published in English?I believe this book to be a gem that belongs in the library of every Jungian

analyst. We are all exposed to the cultural complexes that consequently haveindividual expression found in our patients who arrive in our consulting rooms.

Alvaro A. GiraldoInter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts /

Medical University of South Carolina

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Mary- JayneRust andNick Totton (Eds.).Vital Signs: Psychological Responsesto Ecological Crisis. London: Karnac Books, 2012. Pp. xxii +314. Pbk. £22.19.eBook £17.49

Sally Weintrobe (Ed). Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalyticand Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 255.Hbk. £90.00 / Pbk. £27.99

Climate Change: are we psychotherapists bothered? I urge you to read thesebooks; if we are not bothered, we should be. Most of us know that globalclimate is changing; many believe it is at least partly man-made; most feelhelpless about it. These two challenging, hopeful, timely books deal with thecrucial issue of our environmental crisis; they both contrast with, and complementeach other. Vital Signs has an introduction and twenty chapters by differentauthors, andEngaging with Climate Change has an introduction and ten chaptersby different authors, each followed by commentaries by other authors, and areview barely scratches the surface of these two complex and dense books.Vital Signs provides psychological responses to the environmental threat, nature

and humanity’s relationships with nature from Jungian and other psychotherapistsand ecopsychologists, including personal, subjective experiences; Engaging withClimate Change contains perspectives about climate change by psychoanalyticwriters, sociologists, social policy academics and others, with amplifying orchallenging short responses, which makes for a deeper analysis.Vital signs are medical measures of health and of response to treatment; the

book covers a wide and fertile range of ideas and experiences about the healthof the planet. The editors introduce the diverse and emerging discipline ofecopsychology, which sees the planet as an eco-system of which humanity isonly a part. Given the huge emotional shift needed before change can happen,they wonder if ecopsychology’s main role might be to deal with life after aclimate holocaust.Social research provides two useful chapters: Susan Bodnar gives us expressive

quotations from interviews to illustrate attitudes to climate change, and TomCrompton gives an account of ‘intrinsic’ goals (concern for personal growth,affiliation to others) and ‘self-transcendence’ values (concern for others’ andnature’s welfare), which research links with concern for the natural world. He usesthesefindings to consider how to promote concern about the environment and givesan ethical analysis of attitudes towards others and the environment, compared tothe self-seeking attitudes of ‘extrinsic’ goals and ‘self-enhancement’ values.How far humanity is part of nature is a key question, and Vital Signs

expresses a range of views. Viola Sampson describes her emotional connectionwith the seasons; G. A. Bradshaw suggests that biological consciousness, arelationship with the natural world, means ending our de-connection withnature; Margaret Kerr and David Key describe emotional experiences ofwilderness, arguing that ‘the unconscious is nature’, and Peter Chatalos also

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sees the ‘ecological unconscious’ as the ‘core of the mind’. Kelvin Hall showshow human-animal communication enhances therapeutic processes.But what is Nature? Martin Jordan disputes a view of man and nature as

opposed; nature, culture and mind are mutually immersed and emergent, andnature is a series of unfolding events; the self mirrors nature as a relationalprocess of becoming; subject and nature are a complex assemblage.Joseph Dodds echoes Jordan’s idea of nature culture and mind as one, drawingon Deleuze/Guattari’s three ecologies. Nature is not a balanced system, thendisturbed by human intervention, but frighteningly, liberatingly, non-linearand chaotic. Mary-Jayne Rust suggests that our diverse views of naturerepresent our projections of ourselves as wild, savage or vegetative, the wholeanimal, vegetable and mineral spectrum.Spiritual themes emerge. PaulMaiteny draws on themajor religions to ask us to

experience ourselves as part of a larger whole; Sandra White explores themes ofsacrifice through the story of Adam and Eve; Hilary Prentice sees eastern spiritualtraditions, indigenous peoples’ resistance to environmental assaults, and psycho-therapies responding to trauma, abuse and neglect, as remedies for our splitbetween inner and outer lives. Mick Collins, William Hughes and AndrewSamuels link the collective andMarcuse’s one-dimensional modern consciousnesswith the individual and Jung’s one-sided consciousness. Individual psychoticspiritual emergencies give us experience of a collective spiritual emergency; theauthors seek deep transition (their italics) through deep learning, deep citizenshipand democracy, deep culture and ecology, and deep occupations.Increasing awareness of climate change and nature is the subject of chapters

by Randall and Key and Kerr. Randall sees contemporary society as sufferingan identity crisis, evaded by consumer activities that confirm the individual’sfragile sense of self. Her Carbon Conversations project helps people with theemotional impact, guilt and loss, of climate change. Key and Kerr’s NaturalChange Project consists of workshops in wilderness areas, intended toencourage people to a transpersonal, interconnected sense of self and a moresustainable life, through personal experiences, influencing their own culturalsettings, and achieving structural change through leadership roles.Complexity and self-organization are the subjects of a number of chapters.

Dodds describes self-organization as what happens when patterns emerge fromlower levels without order imposed from above; systems theory provides theconcept of negative feedback under which systems tend to return to a state ofbalance, until a tipping point is reached and the system self-organizes into anew pattern. This helps in understanding both individual psychologicalprocesses and collective human responses to climate change. Chalatos drawson Bateson’s notion of ecosystems having mind-like properties, involving self-organizing processes, to understand an unconscious connection between thehuman psyche and nature, while Nick Totton sees spontaneity as part ofecological awareness and the world as a complex and self-organizing systemwhere everything responds to everything else.

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Sally Weintrobe identifies the underlying themes of Engaging with ClimateChange as conflict, social justice, and theories about hidden underlyingstructures. Our pathological relationship to nature and the earth as a motheris explored from every conceivable angle. The book could have been called‘Denial; or, Not Engaging with Climate Change’; the denial of climate changeand the interplay between paranoid-schizoid and depressive thinking unitethe book’s chapters. Paranoid-schizoid splitting underlies our anxiety, ourseparation from nature, our treating the planet as a mother to be exploitedand our perverse attitudes that disregard the Other, while depressive feelingsunderlie feelings of loss, ‘social melancholia’, guilt, reparation and forgiveness.Weintrobe identifies the anxiety underlying negation and disavowal and believesdisavowal stems from realistic and narcissistic anxiety about climate change:capitalist culture colonizing our minds so we see ourselves as consumers andseparate ourselves from nature regardless of cost. Paul Hoggett sees today’s socialand economic policies and culture as having perverse elements, and findsperversity in the position of hard-line climate sceptics, in our avoidance of climatechange, and in ‘virtual’ unattainable emissions-reduction targets. RosemaryRandall explores self-deception about ecological debt; Renée Aron Lertzmandisagrees that people are environmentally apathetic but believes they areambivalent about climate change; she found powerful experiences of loss underher research participants’ ‘social melancholia’ and guilt about environmentaldegradation. For her, fear and guilt are obstacles to reducing carbon emissions.John Keene sees denial in our readiness to discharge toxic waste into theenvironment, like our ruthless abuse of our mothers as infants, and in our hopethat we can avoid guilt and depression about the damage we do. He seeswidespread splitting and conspiracy theories and basic-assumption groupthinking. Michael Rustin argues that both the denialist, ruthless exploiters ofnatural resources, and those morally outraged by them are in split, paranoid-schizoid positions. He sees grounds for hope in an alternative, steadily improving,depressive attitude towards the environment, and the main contribution ofpsychoanalysis as understanding these anxieties. Weintrobe sees our attractionto animals as splitting off and denying our underlying cruelty. Randall seesecological debt as taking an unfair share of resources and argues that the shockof recognizing it leads to guilt, possible reparation, and forgiveness; she illustratesthis through Pip’s emotional maturing in Great Expectations.It is helpfully framed by Clive Hamilton’s history of denial, and by Stephan

Harrison’s summary of climate science. Hamilton places climate-change denialin a succession of historical instances including denial of the theory of Relativityand of Nazi Germany’s belligerence in the 1930s. Harrison outlines thecertainties and uncertainties of climate science and the difficulty of predictingthe future, due both to limitations in scientific models and to unpredictablehuman responses to future climate changes.The dialectical format provides interesting opportunities to compare the main

chapters and their commentaries. Perhaps the most illuminating amplifications

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are those that challenge the author and offer alternative points of view.Ted Benton comprehensively challenges Michael Rustin’s explanation ofsocial processes by intra-psychic processes and his linking environmentalistpositions to a paranoid-schizoid position. He disputes Rustin’s view ofeconomic developments that have been beneficial but with unintended harmfulenvironmental consequences; for him, social movements have had to fight forthese benefits against fierce opposition from the developers. He frames Rustin’s‘developments’ as produced by capitalist carbon technologies over 200 years,amplified over the last 30 years by global neo-liberalism. Rustin in his responseagrees that explanations based on unconscious structures of mind are difficultbut arguably better than no explanation. We are presented with a choicebetween depth-psychological and politico-economic perspectives.Likewise, Stanley Cohen questions Hoggett’s ‘anti-denial’ critique, proposing

that the concept of a gap between knowledge and belief about climate changeand of one between belief and action, is instead a ‘flowing, fluid narrative’ ofmoral panics, regulations, claims, counter-claims and denials, and John Steinertraces the concept of perversion back to a denial of death, and cautions againstintolerance of difference leading to opposing sides in the climate debateresembling each other. Margaret Rustin refers to primitive, even psychotic,underlying intolerable anxieties to qualify what she sees as Randall’s accountof depressive anxiety about climate change; while Bob Ward proposes thatclimate change has been framed along leftist lines calling for penitence forcarbon-energy profligacy; he proposes linking action on climate change to widerbenefits like electric cars, beyond Randall’s ecological debt. Bob Hinshelwoodaugments Keene’s psychoanalytic account of obstacles to caring for the planetwith an awareness of social culture, and reminds us, like Rustin and Steiner,that group processes can polarize two sides, such that ‘therapists’ see ‘exploiters’as greedy and self-seeking while ‘exploiters’ see ‘therapists’ as do-gooders,manufacturing blame.This short account is intended to give some impression of the great wealth of

original and thought-provoking ideas contained in these two books. Thoughthe explicit tone of both is up-beat and positive, it is difficult to avoid sensingan underlying anxiety among almost all the authors. This might of course justbe this reviewer’s projection.Unfortunately both use abominable jargon and neologisms: ‘dark’ or ‘deep’

ecology, ecopsychoanalysis, ecopsychosomatics, enantiodromia, liminality,Samhain, Borderland consciousness, autopoeisis. Though ecopsychology isforging new thinking and language, even complex thinking can be expressedin plain English.One participant in my own research into attitudes to climate change

commented on people who ‘don’t really like the human race, and . . .wish tosee [it] punished for our sins’. This is an extreme view, but it does reflect howuniversally we assume that humanity’s needs override those of other species.As the author of Genesis says (1: 27–28):

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So God created man in his own image. . .and said unto them,Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and havedominion . . .over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

However, we only observe the injunctions that suit us; we multiply massively,from 1 billion humans in 1800 to 4 billion in 1980 and today 7 billion,seven-fold in a bit over 200 years. We subdue the earth, but do notreplenish it, and have dominion over every living thing, casuallyextinguishing species; we mine unsustainably, we cut down forests, we acidifyand over-fish the ocean. Ecopsychologists do not say how far we have to go tobalance the wellbeing of the animal, vegetable and mineral world with that ofhumanity, on our miraculous, exquisite, fragile, small blue planet.

Robert TollemacheThe Lincoln Clinic and Centre for Psychotherapy

Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven. The Archaeology of Mind: NeuroevolutionaryOrigins of Human Emotions. New York, London: WW Norton, 2012.Pp. 562. Hbk. $55.00

This book updates and attempts to popularize Panksepp’sAffectiveNeuroscience:The Foundations of Human and Animal Behaviour, published in 1998. In TheArchaeology of Mind, Panksepp and his co-author, psychotherapy clinicanLucy Biven, aim to explain why his neuroscientific research on basic emotionalsystems is relevant to all mental health professionals. The essence of their case isthat primary-process emotions arise from subcortical emotional action networksin the brain. These subcortical systems are shared across all mammalian species,so understanding how they function helps us to recognize ‘how much allmammals share in the ways that they emotionally respond to the world’. Theauthors argue that there are seven primary-process systems—SEEKING, FEAR,RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY—always written in capitalsto signal that they designate ‘specific functional networks of evolutionarilyvery ancient regions of our brains’. These networks underpin and feed intothe secondary emotional learning systems and tertiary conscious emotionalexperiences, which are the most easily recognized aspects of human emotionand which psychologists usually study.The authors make the case that we cannot have a credible theory of mind

without a credible understanding of the basic emotional feelings we inherit asevolutionary tools for living. They argue that this perspective narrows thedistinction between emotional and physical disorders, and that the mind and brainare one thing, which they call MindBrain. They go on to suggest that currentpsychiatric diagnostic categories such as schizophrenia, autism and depression

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are actually conceptual umbrellas for a host of overlapping MindBrain problems,which could be understood more accurately as manifestations of disturbances ofthe seven basic subcortical emotional systems. One of their major criticisms ofboth cognitive-behavioural and psychoanalytic psychotherapies is the failure torecognize this wealth of research on the neuroscientific basis for emotion andmotivation, for example failure to identify SEEKING as a basic emotional urgeor to distinguish between FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF as distinct causes of anxiety.One of the authors’ repeated themes is that this model for emotion is not

speculative but has a sound empirical basis, specifically through a ‘triangulated’method of research that:

focuses equally on our understanding of i) the mammalian brain ii) the instinctualemotional behaviours of other animals and iii) the subjective states of the humanmind. Such triangulations are the primary means by which we can investigate theneural underpinnings of affective life in our own species as well as in other animals.

(pp. 23–24)

The essence of this argument is that experimental direct manipulation of specificsubcortical brain systems in mammals induces distinct emotional behaviours,which can be reliably identified; these emotional behaviours are accompaniedby affective experiences that are themselves the ‘rewards’ or ‘punishments’ thatcontrol animal behaviour. For example, when the areas of a rat’s brain thatform the neural substrate for the SEEKING system are stimulated by electrodes,the rat will endlessly seek to induce the stimulus, even to the point of death. ThisSEEKING experience is itself the reward. Humans can display the same distinctemotional behaviour, in the form of addictions; but they also can describeverbally their emotional experiences when behaving in similar ways, and thiscomplements and confirms the emotional nature of the animal observationsand so provides information about how affects are organized in human andall mammalian brains.The authors are particularly critical of researchers who see emotional arousal

in animals as merely a set of behavioural and physiological responses that aredevoid of affective experience. They argue passionately that emotionalbehaviour is always accompanied in mammals by raw affective feelings, a formof affective consciousness whose evolutionary role is to provide a value systemThe second approach to emotion that they single out for criticism is the view

that the subjective experience of emotions depends on our ability to conceptualizeand describe in language our physiological experiences, in other words, thataffects are created when the neocortex ‘reads out’ our physiological responses.This is the essence of the ‘James-Lange’ theory of emotion. They cite a range ofresearch that demonstrates that human babies born without a neocortex(anencephalic) and experimentally de-corticated animals show normalpatterns of emotional responses. In this context, Panksepp extensively critiquesthe ‘read-out’ theories of emotion of Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux andEdmund Rolls. But he highlights the fact that Damasio now appears to accept that

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animals do have emotional feelings, rooted in subcortical brain systems, in otherwords that he has apparently come round to Panksepp’s view.The last chapters (12 and 13) explore the implications of this model of the

mind for psychotherapy, and it is disappointing that the clinical co-author, LucyBiven, was not involved in writing them. The focus is on forms of therapy thatare intended to encourage positive affects, for example, by developing theSEEKING and PLAY systems to counter depression and anxiety disorders.Panksepp describes these as affective balance therapies (ABTs), aimed at ‘moredirect and more precise beneficial interventions within the primal affective livesof individuals’ (p. 434). He is not a psychotherapist himself and does not discusshow this might become operational; certainly he does not consider cognitivebehaviour therapy the treatment of choice, because it is not targeted directlyto core emotional states. He advocates dynamic emotion-focused approaches,such as those of Habib Davanloo and David Malan, sensorimotor approaches,EMDR and well-targeted pharmacotherapy. But his discussion of theimplications of his model for psychoanalytic psychotherapy is very limited,and the views of an experienced psychoanalytic psychotherapist would havebeen especially useful.This book is not easy to read; the writing style and frequent repetition of

points interrupt the flow of complex discussions. Despite this, it offers a veryvaluable updating of an essential, richly researched neuroscientific perspectiveon our emotional lives. The major difficulty for psychotherapists is that mostof us do not have the neuroscientifc expertise or research skills to evaluate thediffering models offered by Panksepp and others such as LeDoux and Damasio.Each makes a powerful and convincing case, and we must wait for furtherresearch to sway the arguments one way or the other. Until then, we can onlyfamiliarize ourselves with key issues in the debates.

Jean KnoxSociety of Analytical Psychology

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