Racial Consciousness

I want to, for a minute, explore the recent dream theme of unconscious attitudes toward race. The psychic facts of my experience indicate that the unconscious intentionally differentiates on a racially discriminative and gender-normative basis. Race and gender have undeniable symbolic associations in dreamtime: The feminine as feeling function; the masculine as judging function; Black people as shadow, Arabs as criminal, Hispanics as laborious, and Asians as wise. Certainly, many of these particular racial and gender associations may belong to the dreamer’s intra-subjective context and many of them may also belong to the collective unconscious. Yet the fact remains that the psyche uses race and gender to symbolically express functions and types. It would be pretentious of the ego consciousness to deny this fact. Granted, the laws of representation and meaning in the lower world are not the same as the middle or upper worlds. For example, the feeling basis of life in the middle world seems to tend toward radical acceptance of the equal value of all life. The basis for life in the upper world seems yet more radically transpersonal. Yet it would be a mistake to superimpose the values of either ordinary or extraordinary consciousness onto the subconscious, and vice versa. The unconscious deserves, screams, to be treated as an independent dimension of existence, subject to its own laws, dynamics, and culture. In any other case, the suppression of the reality of the unconscious is known to lead to symptoms. Attacking any unconscious position as illegitimate, de-meaning the unconscious, is met with reciprocal, de-meaning, strikes against ego consciousness. Why should it be any different ethnic, racial, and gender lines? The post-modern, rather Western, obsession with cultural homogenization, as seen in the progressive dissociation from all ethnic, racial, and gender context, can only result in the destruction of the psychic life. The very soul of human culture depends to a certain extent on ethnic, gender, and racial judgements that are inherent and healthy to the functioning of society. All life, human and non-human, is of equal value and the symbolic differences that are projected into ego consciousness matter too. It would be a mistake to throw out the baby with the bathwater.