Think Outside the Box! Jung, Lévi-Strauss, and Postcolonialism (Individual, Society, and Institutes): Spectrum of Psychology and Sociology

A resemblance of the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss and Carl Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious has been discussed occasionally; however, Levi-Strauss, following in the footsteps of the foundation of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, stressed the group dynamics of structural anthropology; whereas Jung’s psychology is an individual psychology. How is it possible for an individual psychologist to be a psychologist of the collective unconscious? Is the psychology of the collective not a group psychology? Even if it is possible to extend the individual psychology to the larger whole of the collective, is it not a grandiose fantasy of an individual relating to the larger whole without an objective observation of group dynamics? A single cultural complex cannot be isolated from other groups of cultural complexes as they are libidinal flow of economy and exchange of symbols and signs. That complexity is a compound, composition of the collective unconscious. Cultural complex/unconscious is meaningless unless it is analyzed as a web of economy and exchanges of signs and symbols among bundles of other cultures. Jung’s interpretation of culture and mythology is a psychological operation of creation of meanings, and it works within social settings and contexts of Jungian psychology and psychotherapy as Gordon Lawrence’s concept of social dreaming suggests. The question is not “what is mythology?” but “how can we approach the mythology of not one’s own?” Do we impose one’s own mythology on others’? Or do we analyze others more objectively as systems of thought, as social dreaming?