Fuga ex Vulnere: Political Ideology As A Flight From The Wound That Will Not Heal

“Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves. When vulnerability is the enemy, it is attacked wherever it is perceived, even in a best friend.” ― Gordon Neufeld

Human vulnerability is the active component of transformation and development. Without it, we centralize into a state of empathy blindness and concretized narcissism. Primary mourning is necessary to love something beyond our own ego (Minerbo, 2024). But this requires getting in contact with our wound that has not yet been consciously suffered. Stories such as The Fisher King provide images of this wound that will not heal and the dynamics that come from our flight from our most core, yet inevitable, wounding.

The world of political ideology provides an accessible external platform to rehearse (and reinforce) intrapsychic one-sidedness while gathering a collection of agreeable others toward the phenomenon of “basic assumption dependence” (Bion). This is where a group relies on an unquestionable (and sometimes unconscious) assumption that serves to tightly connect them into a passive and un-self-critical stable unit (for example, a political party affiliation or unexamined adherence to a family system). Unresolved trauma can add rocket fuel to this process such that the adherence to the Rightness of the basic assumption takes on a fundamentalist level of defensive intensity. Soon, two polarized opposing groups begin to form, which rely on a common enemy (i.e. the other group) as the basis of their group identity.

An antidote to these violently polarizing dynamics begins to emerge through the religious impulse as the archetype of receptivity to numinous reality with primary vulnerability as its starting point. This meaning-making function, regardless of the various forms it takes, is as central to the human psyche as identity itself. But attempts to actualize these inner dynamics in the external world often lead to frustrating and confusing conflicts that can escalate beyond imagination.

Please join us for this experiential workshop as we explore this timely collection of dynamics and their antidotes both inside and outside of the analytic consulting room.