‘Loving practice is… the primary way we end domination and oppression’ ~ bell hooks
Artwork: Hilma af Klint, Dove No.1, 1915.
Of all the recent images that have been surfacing of the genocidal attacks on Gaza, the one that’s been haunting me most is the decapitated body of eighteen-month-old Ahmad Al-Najir with no arms and no legs. It haunts me because I imagine his spectral double looking out at the world, eyes, not yet darkened, brimming with wonder. And it haunts me because his charred remains hold up a dark mirror to all the bodies, monstered for political gain, to justify heinous atrocities in the name of protection.
The temptation in the face of this haunting, is to look away, keep the horror at a safe distance. But at the same time, it’s through these images that I’ve been able to even get close to imagining the reality of life with little to no food, water, shelter and safety in the camps and ruins of Gaza. As I do, I find myself asking the same question again and again; how did we end up here? What can be done to stop the suffering – not only in Gaza but Congo, Darfur, Tigray, Yemen, Ukraine and elsewhere, not forgetting the suffering of the Israeli hostages?
In his lifetime Carl Jung witnessed his own fair share of suffering in the form of the Holocaust, the gulags and Hiroshima, alongside the invention of the nuclear weapons, which he viewed as both a literal threat to human survival and a metaphor for the collective shadow of patriarchy and its obsession with power and control.
According to Jung the crisis behind this crisis – the meta-crisis, if you will - is our inability to accept the reality of evil as something that’s part of our psychic make-up rather than separate from it. The problem, in short, is not the existence of evil but our failure to view it as something we’re all capable of, even if we don’t act on it.
As Nobel Prize recipient and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago; ‘The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.’
It is through denying the reality of our innate potential for violence and defending ourselves with claims of purity that, in effect, we become the thing we protest through the monstering of others. So, each and every one of us, Jung claimed, is a ‘potential criminal’ with ‘none of us … outside humanity’s black collective shadow.’
In her recent book Doppelganger, Canadian writer Naomi Klein conducts an extensive investigation into the geopolitical landscape of what she terms today’s ‘shadow lands’ where the line between good and evil is blurry at best. Through a nuanced consideration of both the violent erasure of European Jews during the Holocaust and the ongoing violent displacement of Palestinians dating back to the first Nakba, Klein concludes that it’s possible to be both wounded and wounding, not only individually as Solzhenitsyn suggests, but also collectively.
‘Engaging with the form of Zionism that created the state of Israel in 1948,’ she writes, ‘means accepting that a people, just like a person, can be a victim and victimiser at the same time; they can be traumatised and traumatiser.’
Jung’s answer to our collective denial of this black shadow is that we learn to develop an ‘imagination in evil’, which is something that Fyodor Dostoyevsky examples to chilling effect in his classic 1866 novel Crime and Punishment. Finding himself broke, in the novel a young Rodion Raskolnikov imagines murdering a corrupt pawnbroker and taking her money for himself. He justifies this heinous act by telling himself that he’s more deserving of the old woman’s wealth since he will use it to free himself from poverty and devote his life to doing good deeds. So convinced is Raskolnikov of his moral superiority that he ends up acting on his fantasy and killing the old woman in cold blood with an axe – although, almost immediately afterwards, he’s riddled with guilt.
Meanwhile Raskolnikov’s financial precarity in the novel mirrors Dostoyevsky’s own circumstances at the time of writing it, which seems to suggest that Raskolnikov may well have been a fictional avatar for the great Russian writer and moral philosopher to probe his own interior criminal.
Exploring the hidden lives of our inner Raskolnikovs through the realm of imagination is what Jungian analyst Robert Johnson calls ‘horse-trading’. A form of psychological bartering, ‘horse-trading’ is a strategy to explore where we are at war with ourselves through a process of internal negotiation. Which isn’t to say we should ignore the infrastructural evil of white supremacy and colonialism or ever stop calling for justice.
Instead, it’s to understand that if we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves through bringing our potential inner criminal into awareness so that we are better placed to avoid unconsciously projecting it outward in the form of monstering others.
If Jung proposed developing an imagination of evil as a strategy for owning our shadow, then he also suggested that for genuine conflict resolution to be achieved, we also need ‘a bond of an affective nature, a principle of kind like caritas – the Christian love of your neighbour.’
In his 2023 Booker-prize winning novel Prophet Song, Irish author Paul Lynch puts the principle of caritas into practice with his story of Dubliner Eilish Stack, who goes from corporate microbiologist to refugee in a matter of months as her family is torn apart when the dark forces of a fascist dictatorship takes over the country. Through Eilish’s story, Lynch transforms the experience of something that happens to other people elsewhere into something that could happen to us over here.
It’s only when ‘love stops’, Jung said, that power, domination and violence begins. Where Crime and Punishment is an exercise in an imagination of evil, Prophet Song illustrates the power of developing an imagination in empathy. To help us metabolise the darkness of the times, we need both.
As the smoke thickens over Gaza and more lights go out and more Ahmads are lost to the dense blackness of the strip, as it’s seen from space, I’m remembering my own potential inner criminal while also imagining myself in the boots of those searching amongst the rubble for their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, friends and lovers. And this is how I’m trying to stay connected to the collective soul that cuts through the line and holds us together across all space and time.
Creative Experiments
1. Reflect – What are your thoughts and feelings about the unfolding atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere? What is your relationship with following these events via news and social media etc? How are you balancing staying connected with self-care? What is your heart asking of you?
2. Who are you at war with? Taking inspiration from Crime and Punishment, devise your own form of ‘horse-trading’ by creating a persona who can live out your worst impulses in a parallel fictional situation. Make notes – what did this experiment help you to see about yourself? How did living out these fantasies make you feel? How were you changed by the experience of writing them down?
3. Pick a recent news story about suffering elsewhere that you’ve been affected by. Imagine you are one or more of the people in the story. Re-write the story from their perspective using imagination to put yourself in their boots as much as you can. Make notes again on how this experiment made you feel and how you were affected by writing it down.
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