Lecture: "Topic TBA" by Fanny Brewster, Ph.D., MFA, Jungian Analyst

SPEAKER BIO: 

Degrees 

• Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute
• M.F.A., Creative Writing, Goucher College

 Licenses 

• Licensed Psychoanalyst, New York
• Licensed Research Psychoanalyst, California
• Certified Jungian analyst, C.G. Jung Institute, New York

Dr. Brewster is a Core Faculty member in the Depth Psychology Specialization in Integrative Therapy and Healing Practices. Prior to beginning in this capacity she served as a faculty member in the Clinical Program and as an adjunct faculty working within the Depth, Archetypal and Jungian Psychology (DJA), and Depth Psychotherapy Departments (DPT), while maintaining a New York City private practice.

As a faculty member of the New York C.G. Jung Foundation she has taught classes and given public forum lectures on Jungian related topics. While a Board Member with the New York Analytical Psychology Club, Dr. Brewster developed and led experiential workshops on Dreams, Creative Writing and Mythology. She has given national and international workshops and lectures on Culture, Diversity and Creativity—the Depth Writing Workshop. She has received two Gradiva Award nominations for her writing from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss. (Routledge)

Website

• http://www.fannybrewster.com/

Books Published

Racial Legacies: Jung, Politics and Culture (Focus on Jung, Politics and Culture) (2022) 

by Fanny Brewster  (Author), Helen Morgan (Author)

This essential new book presents a discussion of racial relations, Jungian psychology and politics as a dialogue between two Jungian analysts of different nationalities and ethnicities, providing insight into a previously unexplored area of Jungian psychology.

Racial Legacies explores themes and historical events from the perspective of each author, and through the lens of psychology, politics and race, in the hopes of creating meaningful racial relationships. The historical ways the past has affected the authors' ancestors and their own lives today is explored in detail through essays and dialogue, demonstrating that past racial legacies continue to bind on both conscious and unconscious levels.

This book distinguishes itself from other texts as the first of its kind to present a racial dialogue in the context of Jungian psychology. It will be of great value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and students of Depth and Analytical Psychology.

 Book Reviews 

Brewster and Morgan dare to enter this powerful conversation in exploring the assumptions and challenges about race. Dialoguing from within their own cultural, social-political context exploring European and African diaspora histories as Jungian analysts, they consider the intergenerational context and its relevance for us today. In this important text they create a rich psychological space in which to meet, reflect and share experiences finding a soulful meeting place. This important discussion invites us to re-think and critically interrogate our shared histories, collective memories, psychic disenfranchisement, through radical honesty and to encounter each other through opening dialogue.

Anthea Benjamin, Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Group Analyst UKCP & BACP registered

This is a brilliant and creative piece of work that examines raciality from an Africanist and White perspective. It is also an act of empowerment and response to Jung excising the black experience. A self-identified Africanist, Fanny Brewster, PhD centers Africanist traditions and the healing arts in the treatment room. She takes us on a journey of mapping out her ancestral origins with imaginings of her ancestor standing on a pier. Her poem to her ancestor took my breath away. We are reminded that we are not outside of history as we live these horrors today. This is a valuable model of how to weave cultural Africanist traditions, spirituality and history in an analytic psychological treatment.

Rossanna Echegoyén, LCSW,Founder and Co-Chair of the Committee for Race and Ethnicity at the Manhattan Institute 

for Psychoanalysis

Racial Legacies is the poetic and scholarly outcome of a deep, courageous, transatlantic engagement with racial complex by Fanny Brewster and Helen Morgan. This is an essential book for 21st century Jungians, with two distinct voices to guide engagement with systems of racism and white privilege and their implications for the theory and practice of Analytical Psychology.

Jane Johnson, Senior member British Psychotherapy Foundation and British Jungian Analytic Association

In this unique work, Brewster and Morgan collaborate to intertwine their voices and stories - reaching across the Atlantic bringing the different UK and US cultures into the mix - in the service of exploring our relationships to race. Brewster and Morgan take the field to the cutting edge of where and how analysts need to be addressing race head on in the era following the murder of George Floyd. Their dualogue models respectful interaction while confronting history, theory and politics head on. They rightly alert us: "In our contemporary practice of psychology we must be aware of the racialized foundations of Modern Psychology". Brewster alerts us: "The voice of members of the African Diaspora when expressed says that the whiteness of psychoanalysis does not see them, cannot see them and include their cultural identity of blackness". If Jungian analysis is to dig itself out of its at times racist silo, it needs to pay attention to this book. The authors challenge us to have "sufficient confidence in the robustness of the core principles of psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic theory to trust that they can withstand some rattling". The book ends by turning back on itself to provide a meta view of the writing and process of managing the intrinsic challenges of co-writing from both a black and a white perspective which is profoundly honest, transparent and moving. A model for us all.

Ruth Williams, Jungian Training and Supervising Analyst (AJA). Author of Jung: The Basics (Routledge 2019)

Jungian Analysts Fanny Brewster, an African American Black and Helen Morgan, a Caucasian from England joined in a courageous endeavor to explore the complexities of racism, politics, culture and psychology. Through their trust, mistrust, struggles and openness they display a willingness and vulnerability to hold different perspectives while continuing to talk. This book is a recommended read for those who are interested in understanding how to hold different perspectives while engaging in heartfelt conversations around difficult subject matter. The authors open conversations provide a psychological model that can improve racial relationships and help create a future just society.

Jane Selinske, Ed.D., LCSW, NCPsyA, President C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytic Psychology, NY

I find myself between loud applause and profound sadness and tears as I finish reading Racial Legacies: Jung, Politics and Culture. I am in tears of white guilt, of compassion for the years and years of personal and political struggle on the part of black people. Fanny Brewster and Helen Morgan clarify a picture of how hard it is to address systemic racism without an empathic understanding of the centuries of greed, torture, white power and unconsciousness suffered by Africanist people, particularly in the south of the United States. In her book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson talks of class consciousness as "the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that (they) look like the natural order of things". It is this cruel complacency that Jungian psychology has the potential to expose by helping to make clear the power of unconscious archetypes, such as equating whiteness with goodness and righteousness, blackness with evil and badness. How long must we wait?

Elizabeth Stevenson, M.Div. Jungian Psychoanalyst

The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race  (2019) 

by Fanny Brewster (Author)

In The Racial Complex: A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race, Fanny Brewster revisits and examines Jung’s classical writing on the theory of complexes, relating it directly to race in modern society. In this groundbreaking exploration, Brewster deepens Jung’s minimalist writing regarding the cultural complexes of American blacks and whites by identifying and re-defining a psychological complex related to ethnicity.

Original and insightful, this book provides a close reading of Jung’s complexes theory with an Africanist perspective on raciality and white/black racial relationships. Brewster explores how racial complexes influence personality development, cultural behavior and social and political status, and how they impact contemporary American racial relations. She also investigates aspects of the racial complex including archetypal shadow as core, constellations and their expression, and cultural trauma in the African diaspora. The book concludes with a discussion of racial complexes as a continuous psychological state and how to move towards personal, cultural and collective healing. Analyzing Jung’s work with a renewed lens, and providing fresh comparisons to other literature and films, including Get Out, Brewster extends Jung’s work to become more inclusive of culture and ethnicity, addressing issues which have been left previously unexamined in psychoanalytic thought.

Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this book will be of great importance to academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, sociology, politics, history of race, African American studies and African diaspora studies. As this book discusses Jung’s complexes theory in a new light, it will be of immense interest to Jungian analysts and analytical psychologists in practice and in training.

 Book Reviews 

"Fanny Brewster introduces the construct of the Racial complex into the post Jungian and Postmodern lexicon and discourse in Analytical theory, training and clinical praxis. In so doing, she opens portals through which the light of consciousness emerges and illuminates the shadowed prism of racism and the predicate social construction of the race fiction, living well within and external to Jungian communities. In this seminal book Fanny Brewster contributes to the individuation of Analytical psychology into the 21st century, from her lived personal and professional experience.

The individuation of Analytical psychology requires interrogation of the archetype, shadow and complexes at the core of racism. This she does from the Africa-centric perspective. The Racial complex is a refinement and ethnic differentiation in the human experience of the American cultural complex, if not the broader Western cultural complex. The work is important to treatment of the infectious disease that is the psychopathology of racism. It is essential to the relevance of Analytical psychology in its efforts to heal the wounded soul of the nation. There are bodies on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean. There is blood on the landscape and the hands of American cultural history and psychology. Reparations are needed for all to be made whole. Jung suggests that the first stage of treatment is "confession". This new book invites us to the ‘confessional’ for this difficult and necessary task." - Alan G. Vaughan, Ph.D., JD, Jungian analyst, author of The African Diaspora: Post Modern Views of Jung and Analytical Psychology in Cultural Context (Routledge)

"Dr. Brewster, an Africanist and Jungian analyst, is the most lyrical in her book, The Racial Complex, when she introduces the reader to her world of color vision; ‘brown pecans with streaks of black that have fallen’ into her grandfather’s yard, the bold passionate hue of ‘persimmon fruit hanging from trees,’ and ‘concord grapes lazing across the arbor.’ In her early years, seamless color surrounded by a world of ‘brown people,’ in all ‘shades of rich chocolate,’ contain her, and her comprehension of the world. However, when she comes of age, excursions downtown, introduce a new color, ‘white,’ and color becomes ‘colored.’ The seamlessness of her consciousness is permanently partitioned by segregation, hierarchical categories, worth and worthlessness, same and other. It is this experienced ‘tear’ in the fabric of Brewster’s consciousness that appears to serve as the creative and energetic core of her book, The Racial Complex.

According to Brewster a ‘racial complex’ is formed as a result of multi-generational trauma, and the absorption of an affective field of associated fears, dangers and negative meanings attached to skin color. This is trauma defined as having the impact to divide one’s psyche, and, the potential to heal it. The ‘racial complex’ opens a field in psyche that contains symbolic processes of representation that can widen consciousness retrieving parts lost. In this context, it serves as a space holder that operates at the juncture of the felt presence of the sense of loss of wholeness. It initiates the opening for the return of personal autonomy and agency and the re-appearance in consciousness of past assaults and previously unbearable memories. It is in the broadening of the racial complex to include the healing potential included in the definition of all complexes, that defines Brewster’s important contribution to Jungian psychology, and its inspiration for enlarging Jungian theory to include the social-political context out of which we are all trying to reclaim ourselves." ―Joan Golden-Alexis PhD, clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst

"This book is an appreciation for and extension of Jung’s theory about the complexes, specifically related to the concept and experience of race, and asserts a psychological and cultural dynamic that can be termed: ‘the racial complex.’ In writing it, Brewster joins the quickening crescendo of knowledgeable individuals critiquing the colonialist viewpoint that delineates certain cultures and individuals as being so-called ‘primitives’ versus those more ‘civilized’ by writing from the perspective of the ‘Other.’ Embracing the ‘Other’ from an Africanist perspective joined with the lens of a Jungian scholar, Brewster draws out this dualistic viewpoint to its logical conclusion within the contextual parameters of Jungian thought. What she posits is an opportunity for fruitful dialogue for what has often been a polarizing topic in the clinic, academia, and other contexts.

Brewster reminds each of us that there is only one human race. Her book is bold in its suggestion that we strive to be more conscious by holding the tension of the opposites that comprise a ‘racial complex.’ The invitation is for an engaged dialogue and re-evaluation that supports an emergence of a new conscious experience in relation to the psyche and to that of being human. The resultant conscious attitude could go a long way toward healing the race- based suffering that affects us all. This is an honest and well-informed book that is of value for the individual and the professional." - Marybeth Carter, PhD

"Carl Jung’s theory of complexes is an integral part of his contribution to our understanding of the psyche and the vast domain of our personal and collective unconscious. He made brief mention of a black and a white racial complex. While it would be easy to dismiss his idea of racial complexes as rooted in his own racism, Fanny Brewster brings vast experience, scholarship, wisdom and Africanist cultural sophistication to this idea. After an insightful and very educative summary of Jung’s ideas of complexes, she both deconstructs and furthers his work to explore a racial complex that when explored and enriched can address transgenerational as well as future possibilities of racial identities. In her writing, the flaws in Jung’s thinking become a rich vein of exploration; a psychic adventure which fills the reader with both the trepidation and rewards that greet those brave enough to venture into their own shadow complexes. Fanny’s work encompasses the intergenerational dimension of complexes and the prospect of futures taking shape in the present. The racial complex refers to that "other" who lives under our skin." - William Allured, Ph.D., Brookhaven Institute, USA

"Fanny Brewster enters into highly charged territory bringing the unconscious dynamics of race to the surface with all its concomitant fear and confusion, violence and grief. She helps us understand how our early experiences weave inexorably into a view of race that structures our thoughts, feelings and actions which we then take to be ‘the truth’ but is merely a remnant of repetitive intensities glued together by an archaic structure – a violent god with no concern for the costs of human suffering. By naming and differentiating the essential factors of multi-generational suffering woven into American society she brings forward the possibility of separating us from our unconscious racial assumptions. Dr. Brewster expects us to be uncomfortable as we read her work and that discomfort tells us we’re breaking new ground. She insists that we mine the idea of Race for every level of meaning, no matter how painful – she holds our feet to the fire understanding that only by facing the unfaceable can we grow as individuals and as a society. With her insights strongly in hand we may yet forge a new paradigm of human relations where differences are no longer weaponized.

Dr. Brewster’s book is certainly a milestone in Jungian literature, addressing a difficult and inadequately explored area of Jung’s work regarding indigenous peoples and American people of color." - Joseph R. Lee, Jungian analyst; President of The Philadelphia Society of Jungian Analysts

Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss (2018) 

by Fanny Brewster (Author)

Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss is a powerful exploration of the intergenerational psychological effects of child loss as experienced by women held in slavery in the Americas and of its ongoing effects in contemporary society. It presents the concept of archetypal grief in African American women: cultural trauma so deeply wounding that it spans generations.

Calling on Jungian psychology as well as neuroscience and attachment theory, Fanny Brewster explores the psychological lives of enslaved women using their own narratives and those of their descendants, and discusses the stories of mothering slaves with reference to their physical and emotional experiences. The broader context of slavery and the conditions leading to the development of archetypal grief are examined, with topics including the visibility/invisibility of the African female body, the archetype of the mother, stereotypes about black women, and the significance of rites of passage. The discussion is placed in the context of contemporary America and the economic, educational, spiritual and political legacy of slavery.

Archetypal Grief will be an important work for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, archetypal and depth psychology, archetypal studies, feminine psychology, women’s studies, the history of slavery, African American history, African diaspora studies and sociology. It will also be of interest to analytical psychologists and Jungian psychotherapists in practice and in training.

 Book Reviews 

"Dr. Brewster advances the argument that we, "both whites and blacks," are haunted by the "not telling" of the historical slave stories and their continuing archetypal manifestations. White America, in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, is "poisoned to its soul" by racism, and we are equally haunted by not listening to our black sisters and brothers, past and present. Such listening would be one way to help purge our souls of racism’s poison through empathetic witnessing, a form of archetypal apology, if you will. To do so, we need to counter white fragility by having the strength to turn the pages of books like Archetypal Grief, and not look away from the anguish and anger therein, nor deny our ancestors’ roles in their genesis and the archetypal guilt we carry in our DNA as well." - Jennifer Leigh Selig, PhD, author of Integration: The Psychology and Mythology of Martin Luther King, Jr. and His (Unfinished) Therapy With the Soul of America

"Fanny Brewster provides a necessary exploration of the impact on African-Americans of a devastating evil of slavery, the tearing of children away from their mothers. She writes with passion and power, using the lens of Jungian archetypes in conjunction with her profound understanding of African-American culture, to decipher the complexities of slavery’s aftermath. Considering past, future, and spiritual integrity, she leads us to an understanding of feelings that still reverberate, archetypal grief as a steady-state, pervasive element over a lifetime, within a culture of resilience and survival." - Merle Molofsky, NCPsyA, LP, psychoanalyst, faculty member and Advisory Board, Harlem Family Institute, USA; faculty member, NPAP

"Fanny Brewster throws open the doors of the slave quarters, casts light on the face of unbearable grief, rage and intergenerational trauma. She insists we remember what the culture, and indeed, Depth Psychology, has preferred to forget―the appalling cruelty and systemic evil of American slavery during the 400 years of the African Holocaust, how its social and psychological legacy shapes our world to this day.

The Ancestors speak to Brewster, especially "mothering slaves"―women forced to be "breeders," whose labor in childbirth and in the cotton fields brought them no joy, no increase, no profit. Their bodies were not their own; they were used and abused. Their children were not their own; they were ripped from their breasts. Their families were not their own; they were torn apart. They tell Motherline stories from hell.

Archetypal Grief is strong medicine for the soul. If your heart is open to sorrow, to horror, if your mind is open to seeing through cultural complexes and denial, if your ears are open to "the voice of the Other," if you long for healing, if you want to "be woke," this book is for you." - Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots and The Rabbi, the Goddesss and Jung: Getting the Word from Within

"You birth a child and they die because you are malnourished. You birth a child knowing they are the product of a rape. You birth a child and at adolescence they are maimed, tortured or flogged to death. You birth a child and they are torn from your arms and sold you know not where.

This is the archetypal legacy of the African Holocaust explored by Jungian analyst Dr. Fanny Brewster who challenges us to become conscious of the grief, sorrow, rage as well as the strength and resilience experienced and embedded in the emotional DNA of those "mothering slaves" and handed down to their descendants. The trauma of this legacy affects all and is embedded in all our psyches.

Bring your heart and your soul, your emotions as well as your intellect as you read this searing, scholarly work." - Christine M. Chao, PhD, clinical psychologist, diplomate Jungian analyst, USA

African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows (2017) 

by Fanny Brewster (Author)

African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows explores the little-known racial relationship between the African diaspora and C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology. In this unique book, Fanny Brewster explores the culture of Jungian psychology in America and its often-difficult relationship with race and racism.

Beginning with an examination of how Jungian psychology initially failed to engage African Americans, and continuing to the modern use of the Shadow in language and imagery, Brewster creates space for a much broader discussion regarding race and racism in America. Using Jung’s own words, Brewster establishes a timeline of Jungian perspectives on African Americans from the past to the present. She explores the European roots of analytical psychology and its racial biases, as well as the impact this has on contemporary society. The book also expands our understanding of the negative impact of racism in American psychology, beginning a dialogue and proposing how we might change our thinking and behaviors to create a twenty-first-century Jungian psychology that recognizes an American multicultural psyche and a positive African American culture.

African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows explores the positive contributions of African culture to Jung’s theories and will be essential reading for analytical psychologists, academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, African American studies, and American studies.

 Book Reviews 

"African Americans and Jungian Psychology: Leaving the Shadows brilliantly captures the essence of American Jungian Psychology and its relationship to African Americans. Fanny Brewster has written a ground-breaking book essential to our understanding of Jungian Psychology, and its influence on how we perceive and interact with one another in American society based on racial preconceptions. As we witness the beginning of new political and social movements in our country, this book is uncannily timely in its historical view of African American culture, racial complexes, and the psychological divide due to racial tensions in America." - Laura Wexler, author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America

"In this rich exploration of the psychological legacy of slavery and modern day racism, Fanny Brewster manages to hold to the value of Jung’s ideas whilst also offering a serious critique of the racist roots of some of his concepts. In so doing she offers a crucial and potentially creative challenge to our Jungian community which largely persists in turning a blind eye to these matters and remains predominantly white. Whilst of considerable interest to anyone concerned with the psychology of racism, this book should be essential reading for all who consider themselves Jungians on both sides of the Atlantic." - Helen Morgan, Jungian analyst and Chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council

"Fanny Brewster in her compelling book on African Americans and Jungian Psychology, makes visible what she calls a racial complex that has operated from the beginning birth pangs of Analytical Psychology with Carl Jung’s own blindness to the current cultural context in his theory of archetypal psychology, to the silence of the Jungian community over the past nearly one hundred years to redress and address the blank spaces around race in the development of its theories and practices. The failure to include those forces that continues to generate the expressions of racial tensions and violence that appear daily in our newspaper and social media and the lives of many of our patients of color perpetuates another kind of invisibility.

Fanny’s narrative is a weaving of her fertile imagination in a way that opens Jung and analytical psychology’s relationship to race and its cultural context of the presence of some of the same societal tensions that can be found haunting our analytical thinking and practices. She challenges the reader to locate him or herself in this current narrative so as to have an encounter with the other." - Samuel Kimbles, Jungian Analyst, San Francisco, US and author of Phantom Narratives: The Unseen Contributions of Culture to Psyche

"African Americans and Jungian Psychology is a revelatory, bold, courageous, and fascinating book that provides an examination and a critique of Jungian Psychology. The book champions the inclusion of Africa’s contribution to the field of Jung Psychology, and for inclusion of people of color in treatment utilizing a Jungian psychological approach. African Americans and Jungian Psychology provides the reader with a powerful look into both historical, and contemporary views of Jungian Psychology and its relationship with African Americans. It is the first book of its kind providing insights never before explored." - Juwayriah J. Hassan, Certified Gestalt Psychotherapist, Staff Management Coach and Training Consultant

"This is an exceptional scholarly and penetrating analysis into the Eurocentric roots of Jungian psychoanalysis and the challenges that it faces in order to become more relevant in today’s ethnic and racial divisive world, especially as it pertains to African Americans. Dr. Brewster observes how all of the Jungian complexes have been amplified by later theoreticians, with the one exception of the racial complex; this focused avoidance is what impedes Jungian psychology from any significant contribution to the American racial dilemma. This theoretical negation preempts the required knowledge and therefore empathy required and so beautifully explained by Dr. Brewster: 'When the African American client arrives for psychoanalysis this is the sorrow of generations that arrives with them- there is no way to leave it outside the door.' While this book is specifically illustrative of the challenges for the Jungian school of thought, I believe that it has much for all psychoanalysts to digest regardless of their analytic persuasion. I recommend this book for analysts who understand that issues of race and racism impact the analytic dyad, regardless of their racial composition." - Kirkland C. Vaughans, Ph.D., author of Psychology of Black Boys and Adolescents