Lopez-Cultural-Anxiety-9783856309213.jpg

 

 

Rafael López-Pedraza

 

 

Cultural Anxiety

 

 

 

DAIMON

VERLAG

 

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Fiona Cairns, Ruth Horine, Robert Hinshaw and Valerie López for their generous editorial contributions to the essays comprising this book, and Michael Heron for his translating of the Duende and Consciousness of Failure papers.

R. L.-P.

 

The chapter “Moon Madness – Titanic Love” originally appeared in the book, Images of the Untouched, edited by Joanne Stroud and Gail Thomas (Spring, Dallas, 1982) and we are grateful to Spring Publications for making it available. “Cultural Anxiety” was delivered as a paper at the Ninth International Congress of Analytical Psychology in Jerusalem in 1983. It was subsequently published in the official Congress Proceedings, Symbolic and Clinical Approaches in Practice and Theory, edited by Luigi Zoja and Robert Hinshaw (Daimon, Zurich, 1986). Both essays were updated for the present publication. “Reflections on the Duende” and “Consciousness of Failure” were translated from Spanish by Michael Heron and appear here in English for the first time.

 

Cover design by Hanspeter Kälin; we thank Pro Litteris, Zurich, and the heirs of Pablo Picasso for permission to use a detail from Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” as a cover illustration, copyright © 1990 PRO LITTERIS, Zurich.

 

Copyright © 2020, 1990 by Daimon Verlag

Am Klosterplatz, CH-8840 Einsiedeln, Switzerland

 

ISBN 978-3-85630-921-3

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

 

Contents

Foreword

Moon Madness – Titanic Love A Meeting of Pathology and Poetry

Cultural Anxiety

Reflections on the Duende

Consciousness of Failure

Bibliography

About the Author

 

Foreword

This small collection of essays is the product of my reflections on two aspects of human nature, two aspects that I consider to be in exclusive opposition to each other. One aspect is our access to archetypal images and consistent life-forms, making possible psyche, emotions and feeling values, and marking our inner processes. The other is a lack of images, a vacuum, a lacuna, out of which come excess and the madness of power.

Not only have these two aspects of human nature been involved in a constant struggle throughout man’s history on earth, but I am aware of their struggle in my own life and relationships, and they have become central to my conception of psychotherapy.

Let me advise the reader that in the following exposition I try not to qualify these two opposites. My position is psychic and therapeutic, grounded in the way our psychic entity is aware of these two opposites and learns how to suffer their irreconcilability.

The material in the essays is taken mostly from literature, poetry and historical events, but it is reinforced by my own practice of psychotherapy. I hope the reader will appreciate that, in general, I have kept the language of the essays as simple as possible, sometimes even rather colloquial, to avoid the melée of the schools of psychology and even Jungian semantics. In doing so I have given, I think, easier access to the images with which I am dealing.