Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 124
•
Trim: 6½ x 9⅜
978-1-4422-3189-4 • Hardback • July 2014 • $107.00 • (£82.00)
978-1-4422-3190-0 • eBook • July 2014 • $101.50 • (£78.00)
Samuel Kimbles is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst, as well as associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
Epigraph: “Interview with a Phantom: Cornelius Gurlitt Shares His Secrets”
Introduction
Chapter One: From Jung’s Complex Theory to Cultural Complex theory and Phantom Narratives
Chapter Two: Phantom Narratives Unseen but Present: Background
Chapter Three: Phantoms Travel: The Journey to African—Cultural Melancholia in Black and White
Chapter Four: Cultural Complexes and Collective Shadow Processes
Chapter Five: Cultural Complexes and the Transmission of Group Traumas in Everyday Life
Chapter Six: Social Suffering through Cultural Mourning, Cultural Melancholia, and Cultural Complexes
Chapter Seven: A Cultural Complex Operating in the Overlap of Clinical and Cultural Space
Chapter Eight: Chaos and Fragmentation in Analytic Training Institutes
Bibliography
Samuel Kimbles’s Phantom Narratives is a masterful work that explores the significant ways in which we are the creations of invisible ('phantom') narratives. The book compellingly develops an understanding of the ways in which invisible cultural phenomena powerfully influence both what we think and the way we think. This form of acculturation limits our ability to understand one another, both in our individual relationships and in groups. The book comes to life not only clinically, but also as a penetrating commentary on important contemporary social issues. This is an outstanding piece of clinical and theoretical work.
— Thomas H. Ogden, MD, The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; author of Coming to Life in the Consulting Room and Reclaiming Unlived Life
That culture is all over psyche is hardly a new discovery, but the specificity of the images that linger to express what has been imposed upon our emotional lives by the cultural past can be startling. Samuel Kimbles is not afraid to take an interest in such phenomena. He knows how to let each phantom tell its story. Because he doesn’t slight the gravitas of what cannot bring itself to be forgotten, he is convincing when he claims that the cultural past may well be sticking around to haunt us because it wants us to imagine a different future.
— John Beebe, MD, University of California, San Francisco