Individuation and Liberty in a Globalized World

Stefano Carpani, M.A., M.Phil. is an Italian sociologist (post-graduate of the University of Cambridge) and psychoanalyst who trained at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zürich, accredited analyst CGJI-Z/IAAP, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytical Studies at University of Essex. He works in private practice in Berlin in English, Italian, and Spanish. He is the initiator of the YouTube interview series Breakfast at Küsnacht, which aims to capture the voices of senior Jungians. Since 2017, he has collected more than 70 interviews. He is among the initiators of Psychosocial Wednesdays, a digital salon modeled on Freud’s Wednesday meetings in Vienna and Jung’s meetings at the Psychological Club, which features speakers from various psychoanalytic traditions, schools, and associated fields. He is the author of numerous papers and edited volumes, including Breakfast at Küsnacht: Conversations on C. G. Jung and Beyond (Chiron, 2020—IAJS book award finalist, for "Best edited Book"); The Plural Turn in Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies: The Work of Andrew Samuels (Routledge, 2021); Anthology of Contemporary Classics in Analytical psychology: The New Ancestors (Routledge, 2022); Lockdown Therapy: Jungian Perspectives on how the Pandemic Changed Psychoanalysis (Routledge, in print, July 2022).

[This book] is a stunning collective meditation on the notions of individuation and freedom in the 21st century. Are the archetypes of individuation and freedom both timeless while, at the same time, constantly evolving and variable in the individual and specific cultures and eras? Does an individual "individuating in the 1920’s" look like an individual "individuating in the 2020’s"? What does individuation look like in a "fluid" society, in a "paranoid" society, in an "individualized" society? Do cultures individuate and what does that look like? These are some of the questions that this book raises with finely tuned scholarship, diversity, depth, and a graceful movement back and forth between psychology, sociology, philosophy and history.Thomas Singer, MD. Author and EditorThe over-arching thrust and importance of Stefano Carpani’s extraordinary and ingenious edited collection is to return to the idea of something on a psychological level that can survive whatever the social order may hurl at it. Hence, his shrewd nuancing of the tensions between ‘individualization’ and ‘individuation’, and many other related aspects of his writings. Carpani’s project is extremely ambitious because he seeks to add a Jungian dimension to psychoanalytically informed psychosocial studies. That said, this is not a Jungian book, though at times one can but wonder at what intellectual life would be like if there had been a Jungian Frankfurt School, so to speak. And this adds to the value of the book as a whole: To show how interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are, in our time, pretty much the only forms of disciplinarity that work. It follows that we need to allow ourselves freedom to travel the route mapped out by the book.Andrew Samuels, former Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex. Author.

• Preface Introduction: Absolute Freedom is 'Freedom After Freedom' 1 Dreaming Your Future. Dreaming Your Freedom 2 In Defense of the Freedoms of the Self 3 The paradox of metaphor 4 The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Complex Theory and the Numinous in the Development of History (A neo-Jungian approach) 5 The Impossibility of Freedom: From Psychoanalytical Conceptions to Political Objections 6 Individuation, Textuality, and Sexuality in Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia 7 Mysterium Dissociationis: The masculine in crisis towards new forms of thought and relationship. 8 False Start: A neo-Jungian Critique of Self-Help 9 Natality, Individuation and generative social action: From amor mundi to social generativity 10‘Roots in a pot’: The identity conundrum in global nomads. 11 The Necessity of Guilt: a Freeing Movement of the Soul Towards Individuation 12 Floating and Taking root: individuation and floating in contemporary traumatic conditions 13 Paranoia, politics and the tyranny of the identical: Is there civilization in the transitions we are crossing? 14 The applicability of analytical psychology in China: how a Western psychological lens might be adapted in the East