November 12 Presentation
Jung & the Southern Complex:
Sleeping with Medusa
Presenter: Dr Craig san Roque
This lecture addresses how it feels to be caught in an unconscious cultural complex. Based on the chapter The Lemon Tree in the Spring Book - an account of a man managing an Aboriginal health clinic coming to recognise how ensnared and paralysed his body/ mind became while sleeping in a cultural complex zone.
This lecture and the professional development symposium is linked to the release of the Spring Publications book on The Cultural Complex in Australasia.The Cultural complex is a concept developed from Jung’s notion of the personal unconscious complex.
Large groups or nation states develop a collective shared ‘complex’ or repetitive patterns of behaviour and attitude which become established as part of the culture. A complex may be harmful, maladaptive and even self destructive. The complex seems to be particularly apparent and virulent around race, ethnic difference, cultural or religious positions and environmental management. Australia has its share of the complexes and we tend to be caught in it or almost unconsciously mesmerised and tongue-tied around a complex.
The working titles of the book (at this time) are ‘Uncertain Places ‘ or perhaps ‘Land of Disappearing Memory’, or maybe ‘Contact’.
Edited by Dowd, Tacey and San Roque, it draws together 11 local writers whose chapters penetrate into the essence of the cultural complex experiences, as felt subjectively in Australia.
Themes include-
David Russell: on colonial history and finding language for feeling
Ute Eickelcamp: on dreams, immigrant and indigenous languages
Alexis Wright: on Fear in Australia
Peter Bishop: on the Nullabor and the early experience of the Australian land
Patricia Please: on salination in the Murray Darling basin
Melinda Turner: on the 2007 Rudd Apology
Tracey Waddell: on the depiction of women in Australian films
David Tacey: on Patrick White, Aussie stupor and the fear of individuation
Amanda Dowd: on migration and the self
Chris Milton: on South Africa, Judaism and Migration to New Zealand, and
Craig San Roque: on civilisation and tensions in Central Australia