Original Article

A Jungian approach to understanding

‘us vs them’ dynamics

Thomas Singer
C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco
Correspondence: 2536 Clay Street, San Francisco, CA 94115, USA.
E-mail: tsinger@batnet.com

Abstract Trigger words have the power to activate deeply entrenched cultural
complexes, at the core of which are archetypal contents including those of the
‘hero’ and ‘shadow.’ The activated cultural complexes have embedded in them
potent, negative affects and stereotypical thinking/imagery. They stimulate very
old memories, fears, hatreds and traumas. These psychic contents can be projected
onto individuals and groups to create ‘us vs them’ splits.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2009) 14, 32–40. doi:10.1057/pcs.2008.49

Keywords: cultural complex; trigger words; hero; shadow; archetype

Part 1: 14 April 2008

14 April 2008 will not go down in the history books as a ‘day of infamy’ or
even as a memorable day for most people. But I took note of it because I was
stunned by a synchronistic set of political events that suggested to me that
potent forces were at play in the ‘cultural unconscious’ of the ‘collective
psyche.’ You will have observed that I am already fairly deep into Jungian
territory by casually introducing into the discussion the terms synchronicity,
cultural unconscious and collective psyche. These are ideas that most
Jungians are comfortable with, but that are perhaps less familiar to other
psychoanalytic traditions. They are an integral part of the Jungian natural
habitat, which, as a younger Jungian analyst, I likened to what I fondly said
of growing up in St Louis: ‘This is the swamp I grew up in.’
Freud tended to denigrate the Jungian microclimate as a regression to the
‘black tide of occultism’ – partly because Jung was seen as a mystic who
believed in an acausal connecting principle (synchronicity) that linked events
by a coincidence in time, space and meaningfulness if not in the linear
causality of A leading to B. Jung also postulated a larger sphere of

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unconscious content and activity beyond the personal unconscious, which he

called ‘the collective unconscious’ (where the archetypes dwell). More recently
elaborated in the Jungian tradition is an intermediary realm between the
personal and the collective unconscious, a domain we call the ‘cultural
unconscious.’ This is where forces in the group psyche (clan, tribal, national,
ethnic, religious and so on) beyond the personal exert their influence. The
collective psyche is that elusive thread of psychic reality that in its opinions,
beliefs and deep emotions links and divides people in sometimes mysterious but
very real ways.
To root these lofty and slippery notions of synchronicity, cultural unconscious
and collective psyche in everyday reality, I shall narrate what happened on and
around 14 April 2008 and then give you an interpretation of those events in
terms of the Jungian model of the layering of the psyche as it expresses itself
in ‘us vs them’ dynamics. Not every one of the four events I am going to
describe actually happened on 14 April, but they all seemed to break through
into the national media on that day. This flood of synchronistic events was a
precursor of a surge of ‘us vs them’ activity in the collective psyche that was
almost sure to resurge in the final October/November days of the national
election if Barack Obama prevailed in the Democratic primaries.

Event 1: ‘Boy’

At a Lincoln Day dinner hosted by the Republican Party in northern Kentucky,

Congressman Geoff Davis (2008) said the following of Barack Obama: ‘I’m
going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.
He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat
to this country.’ Calling a black man a ‘boy’ is just about the same as calling
him a ‘n-gg-r.’ Deeply offensive, it harkens back to the so-called Jim Crow South
when ‘boy’ was the term used by Southern whites to assert their racial
superiority. Of course, it also marks a clear division between black and white
people, which goes to the heart of the archetypal ‘us vs them’ split in the
American psyche and in American history. Was Davis’s calling Obama a ‘boy’ a
slip of the tongue? Is Obama really a ‘boy’?

Event 2: ‘Obama Bin Laden’

In the same time frame that Geoff Davis was calling Obama a ‘boy,’ the
Chairman of the Associated Press, W.D. Singleton, was fielding questions
directed to Barack Obama at the podium of the annual AP luncheon in
Washington DC (Brattleboro Reformer, 2008). The final question that Singleton
put to Obama concerned Afghanistan and the threat that ‘Obama bin Laden’
posed to US troops stationed there. Obama corrected Singleton, ‘That’s Osama
bin Laden.’ Singleton quickly replied, ‘If I did that, I am so sorry.’ Obama then

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went on to say, ‘This is part of what I have been going through for the past
months, which is why it is impressive that I am still standing here.’ Was
Singleton’s confusing ‘Obama’ with ‘Osama’ a slip of the tongue? Is Obama
really a terrorist or linked with terrorists? Is he a Muslim?

Event 3: ‘Elitist’

Improbably, at the same time Obama was being called a ‘boy’ and being
confused with ‘Obama bin Laden,’ none other than Senators Hillary Clinton
and John McCain were attacking Obama as an ‘elitist.’ These charges came on
the heels of Obama’s saying at a San Francisco fundraiser that rural
Pennsylvanians were ‘bitter’ over their demoralizing economic decline. McCain
was quoted as saying, ‘These are the people that produced a generation that
made the world safe for democracy. These are the people that have fundamental
cultural, spiritual, and other values that in my view have very little to do with
their economic condition’ (Intrepid Liberal Journal, 2008). Calling a candidate
‘elitist’ has a long history that taps into a potent American tradition of
resentment for those who are well-to-do, well-educated, and, perhaps worst
of all, ‘intellectual.’
The Economist (2008) magazine highlighted the tradition of calling one’s
rival an ‘elitist’ in a fine article on Richard Nixon’s contribution to the art of ‘us
vs them’ politics:

Nixon understood in his marrow how middle-class Americans felt about

the country’s self-satisfied elites. The ‘silent majority’ had been disor-
iented, throughout the 1960s, by the collapse of traditional moral values.
And they had boiled with righteous anger at the liberal elites who
extended infinite indulgence to bomb-throwing radicals while dismissing
conservative views as evidence of racism and sexism. Nixon recognized
that the Republicans stood to gain from ‘positive polarization:’ Dividing
the electorate over values. He also recognized that the media, which had
always made a great pretence of objectivity while embracing a liberal
social agenda, could be turned into a Republican weapon. He encouraged
Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, to declare war on the ‘effete corps of
impudent snobs’ in the media, with their Ivy League educations and
Georgetown social values.

Event 4: ‘Marxist’

To round out the list of potent ‘trigger words’ that surfaced about Barack
Obama on 14 April was Joe Lieberman’s suggestion that Obama was a

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‘Marxist.’ Lieberman did not actually say that Obama was a Marxist. He said it
was a good question to ask if Obama was Marxist (Think Progress, 2008).
Of course, questioning whether or not someone is a Marxist is just a stone’s
throw from the McCarthy era of the 1950s, the Cold War, and the deep
American fear of communism. Being a Marxist is just about as un-American as
being a ‘boy,’ an ‘elitist’ and a ‘terrorist.’ A single word in the form of a question
is all it takes to raise one of the greatest fears Americans have known in the past
century.
To summarize: On 14 April four separate trigger words surfaced in the
national media that called into question whether Barack Obama was like
anyone we had ever known before as an American presidential candidate.
Have we ever elected as President of the United States a black, terrorist,
communist from Harvard? He is not one of ‘us,’ so he must be one of ‘them.’

Part II: A Jungian Model of ‘Us vs Them’ Dynamics

I chose to focus on the surfacing of these four trigger words in the national
media on 14 April 2008 because they so clearly demonstrate how trigger words
are manipulated by politicians to activate cultural complexes in the collective
psyche. Once a cultural complex has been touched, it can easily generate ‘us vs
them’ dynamics in different groups of people as a consequence of the potent
emotions and stereotypical beliefs that are embedded in the complex through
long and repetitive histories. This section of the paper focuses on how Jungian
theory conceptualizes this phenomenon.
The Jungian model of the psyche can be visualized as being divided into layers
of both contents and activity. Figure 1 sketches the layers of the psyche that can
be imagined to exist in both the individual and the group psyche. Keep in mind
that the diagram can be turned upside down, depending on which group one
identifies with, so that what is ‘us’ becomes ‘them’ and what is ‘me’ becomes
‘not me’.
In the deepest layers we postulate the collective unconscious, where the
primal human potentials for experiencing the inner and outer worlds take
shape. These typical patterns of behavior, emotion and image are impersonal
in that they occur in all people with variations from culture to culture, even
though they are often experienced as the most intensely personal events in one’s
life. They occur around the world and are relatively timeless responses to such
themes as birth and death, good and evil, youth and age, male and female,
light and dark. One such pair of archetypal forces is what we call the Shadow
and the Hero. The two are often pitted against one another in stories as old as
the Bible and as new as Batman.
The Shadow as an archetypal force, or even as a character emerging from
the collective unconscious, can be imagined as the dark reflection of light or as

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Figure 1: A Jungian model of unconscious ‘us vs them’ dynamics.

the opposite of what is consciously valued as good or noble. The Joker is the
shadow of Batman, as Satan is the shadow of God. ‘Us vs them’ dynamics
invariably draw upon the archetypal energies of the Shadow and Hero to split
people into opposing groups that see one another as enemies. If one sees or
projects onto another individual or group the archetypal Shadow, it is quite
likely that simultaneously the archetypal Hero is being projected onto the ego
of the projecting individual or the group to which he or she belongs. Sports
and politics are two arenas in which this kind of ‘natural’ projection or psychic
activity occurs everyday.
The Shadow emerging from the collective unconscious does not usually
appear in ‘pure’ form. Rather, the Shadow dresses itself up in the familiar
clothing of cultural styles and traditions. As the contents of the collective
unconscious are called ‘archetypes,’ Jungians designate the contents of the
cultural unconscious as cultural complexes. The complexes of a given
culture are built up over time and multigenerational experiences, some of
which have been traumatic. Deeply embedded tribal memories, patterned
behaviors in the form of rituals and strong beliefs based on repetitive
experiences are the stuff of cultural complexes. Perhaps most potent, when
cultural complexes are activated, very primitive, destructive affect states of

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fear, hatred and murderous rage – as well as more positive affect states
of joy and sharing – are generated in individuals and groups of people.
These affect states are intensified exponentially in the shared emotional life
of groups.
Listen to the thoughts of Stamp Paid in Toni Morrison’s (1987) Beloved as
he describes the way in which what I would call a cultural complex takes on a
voice in the cultural unconscious – a ‘mumbling’ voice that, in its very
inarticulateness, communicates the most dreadful feelings and fixed beliefs that
trade on fear, hatred and distrust as their fundamental currency:

[He] believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house

was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed,
like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a
livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors,
the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In
addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of
the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. White people
believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.
Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes,
red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they
were right. The more colored people spent their strength trying to
convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human,
the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something
Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled
the jungle grew inside.

But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from
the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them.
And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded
the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed
and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted
to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming
baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their
own. (p. 234)

That is as good a description of how a cultural complex actually lives in the

psyche as I have come across. And, to understand how trigger words activate
cultural complexes and generate ‘us vs them’ dynamics, just imagine the
emotions and fantasies that are detonated instantaneously and automatically in
both blacks and whites when the word ‘boy’ brings to mind ‘a jungle’ and its
‘swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red
gums ready for their sweet white blood.’ What does that suggest to whites?
What does it suggest to blacks who may or may not know, ‘It was the jungle

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white folks planted in them y the screaming baboon lived under their own
white skin; the red gums were their own?’
From a Jungian perspective, each of the trigger words that I cited from 14
April 2008 operates in the realm of the cultural unconscious by detonating
cultural complexes. And each of the cultural complexes activated by these
trigger words touches on a core of the archetypal shadow as it has expressed
itself in the American collective psyche over generations: ‘Boy,’ ‘elitist,’
‘Marxist’ and ‘terrorist’ have all been associated with strongly negative affects
in mainstream America, in an America that at this moment in our history can
easily be divided into ‘us vs them’ America. ‘Us’ America does not embrace
elitists, terrorists, Marxists or blacks.
Elitists are viewed as isolated, privileged, arrogant and out of touch with
populist, middle and lower class America. Terrorists are viewed as ruthless,
destructive and most dangerous to America. Marxists and communists have
been the traditional enemies of the American way of life for close to 100 years.
And blacks have been viewed and treated as inferior and dangerous for the
entire life of our country. Think about it: that one leader should be labeled
all four of these shadowy ‘boogeymen’ on one day by four congressional
leaders and the Chairman of the Board of a major news source is staggering,
beyond belief.
This all occurs at the level of the group psyche, where archetypal contents
dressed up in the garb of suitably ugly cultural complexes are projected onto an
individual. The effect of such unconscious projections is to target an individual
and those who identify with him or her as different from those who see
themselves as ‘us,’ as ‘Americans.’ What is deeply disturbing about such
processes is how primitive and effective they are. By the time these dynamics
reach the level of the individual psyche, it is most natural for citizens to identify
with ‘us,’ with the ‘hero,’ as opposed to ‘them’ or ‘the shadow.’ In the case of the
four names that Obama was called in the elementary school playground of
recent American politics, ‘us’ means white (vs black boy), patriot (vs terrorist),
free-market capitalist (vs Marxist) and populist (vs elitist).

Conclusion: The Transcendent Function

To summarize the Jungian notion of how ‘us vs them’ dynamics are generated:
Trigger words have the power to activate deeply entrenched cultural complexes,
at the core of which are archetypal contents including those of the ‘hero’ and
‘shadow.’ The activated cultural complexes have embedded in them potent,
negative affects and stereotypical thinking/imagery. They stimulate very old
(sometimes centuries – if not millennia – old) memories, fears, hatreds and
traumas.

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The only antidote to the toxic influence of ‘us vs them’ dynamics that I can see
truly working in social and political life is the emergence of new, authentic
attitudes in leaders and their populations (not necessarily in that order) that
show how polarizing opposites at the core of ‘us vs them’ dynamics can be
contained and even transformed – whether it be among blacks and whites, rich
and poor, men and women. In the Jungian tradition, we call the appearance
of this phenomenon in individuals the transcendent function. It is a symbolic
attitude out of which grows a new way to hold previously polarized opposites.
In group life and the collective psyche, we get occasional glimpses of the
transcendent function in extraordinary leaders such as Martin Luther King and
Nelson Mandela. Although we do not know if he will rise to their stature,
Barack Obama argued throughout his campaign for just such an attitude in
which we transcend our differences of race, class, regions, religions and other
polarizing differences. Indeed, Obama sees this new attitude as the only way
Americans will be able to come together to solve the country’s considerable
problems with health, education and other issues. This symbolic attitude was
most explicitly stated in Obama’s 18 March 2008 Philadelphia speech on race,
in which he was able to probe both black and white fears and resentments in a
non-polarizing way that pointed to reconciliation rather than fueling ‘us vs
them’ reactions. Obama’s Philadelphia speech is an excellent example of how
‘us vs them’ dynamics can be transcended through bringing the opposites of
black and white into dialogue rather than manipulating them to further divide
people against one another. Many in America and around the world yearn for a
new way to hold the tensions between rival clans, tribes, religions, ethnic
groups, regions and nations without their degenerating into ‘us vs them’
dynamics.

Postscript: 29 October 2008

The following report from fivethirtyeight.com brings this discussion of ‘us vs

them’ dynamics full circle and can be seen as the direct result of what first broke
through in the national media on 14 April 2008:

McCain Miami Rally, Getting Ugly Down Here

After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting
McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony
Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an
angry mob y People were screaming, ‘Terrorist! Communist! Socialist!’
Sorando said when we caught up with him, ‘I had a guy tell me he was
gonna kill me.’ Asked what had precipitated the event, ‘We were just
chanting ‘Obama!’ and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd
suddenly got crazy.’ (fivethirtyeight.com, 2008)

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About the Author

Thomas Singer is a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst from San Francisco.

He is the author or editor of several books and papers, including The Vision
Thing, The Cultural Complex, Who’s the Patient Here?, A Fan’s Guide to
Baseball Fever, and Initiation: The Living Reality of an Archetype.

References

Brattleboro Reformer. (2008) http://www.ibrattleboro.com/article.php/20080415104623591,

accessed 01 November 2008.
Davis, G. (2008) http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hol=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_
ENUS275&q=Geoff+Davis++Obama+btnG=Google+Search, accessed 01 November
2008.
The Economist. (2008) http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?
story_id=12260881, accessed 01 November 2008.
Fivethirtyeight.com. (2008) http://www.fivethirtyeight.com, accessed 29 October 2008.
Intrepid Liberal Journal. (2008) http://intrepidliberaljournal.blogspot.com/2008/04/mccain-
clinton-are-calling-obama.html, accessed 01 November 2008.
Morrison, T. (1987) Beloved. New York: Vintage Books.
Think Progress. (2008) http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/14/Lieberman-its-a-good-question-
to-ask-if-obama-is-a-marxist, accessed 01 November 2008.

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