Ending Delusions of Superiority: Race and Eugenics, Part II: Opposing Racism in Jungian Psychology and Psychoanalysis

Two Jungian Analysts Working Together to End Racism and Dehumanization

Sep 03, 2025

Polly Young-Eisendrath, PhD with Christopher J. Carter PhD, LP, NCPsyA (guest author)

In Part I of this conversation, I introduced some of my personal experiences in regard to colorblindness and Christopher responded with some of his ideas about how and why colorblindness might not work to end racism in 2025. To review, all our ideas and assumptions rest on the fundamental fact that race is a social construct that does not exist biologically or genetically. Racism does exist —through harmful attitudes and actions motivated by racialized beliefs.

For those who are not familiar with the scientific facts about “race,” here is a brief summary:

· Race is a socially constructed category used to classify people based on superficial characteristics, primarily skin color, facial features, and hair texture. These ideas are shaped by and used for social, political, and economic forces.

· There are no clear genetic boundaries that separate humans into distinct biological races. Human genetic diversity exists on a spectrum not in discrete groups.

· The racial categories we use in the US today (e.g., black, white, Asian, mixed) were created in specific historical contexts—like slavery, colonialism, and segregation—not from biology or science.

Over the past three decades, I have deepened my study of racism, slavery, white supremacy, and colorblindness (the ideal or aim of functioning without delusions of race in our beliefs and perceptions; see Coleman Hughes’s work for foundational understanding and historical roots). I have also expanded the precision of my knowledge of how and why human beings dehumanize, oppress, abuse and kill other humans based on stereotypes, implicit bias, confirmation bias, blame, and other widespread habits that are not instinctual, but are socially acquired.

Christopher and I have also been working and thinking together about the best ways to combat racism in today’s psychological and social contexts, especially in relation to depth psychology and psychotherapy.

I completed my training to become a Jungian analyst in 1986. Christopher completed his in 2021. In each of our trainings, as far apart as they are in time, we were shocked by the racism in some of Jung’s writings, along with the lackluster responses of some contemporary authorities in the Jungian community to address the problem.

Both of us have written and published about our experiences, recommending corrective actions to address racism in analytical (Jungian) psychology and to guarantee greater inclusiveness of ethnic diversity in Jungian associations and writings. Christopher and I embrace the potential universality of analytical psychology to describe and address what characteristics and conflicts that exist across all human groups and societies. This aspect of Jungian theory assumes that archetypes are universal physical and mental imprints or constraints that are embedded in the biological and psychological functioning of our human species.

The theory of universal archetypes intensifies the need to oppose racism, dehumanization, and other delusions of superiority that rest on genetic determinism. I have carried this ethos of opposing racism and dehumanization into creating the non-profit Center for Real Dialogue (for more, visit www.realdialogue.org) in which we educate in ways of speaking, listening and relating that enhance equality, dignity, and respect for diverse viewpoints, ethnicities, and people.

Part II: Opposing Racism in Jungian Psychology and Psychoanalysis

Here we turn our attention to a concern of grave importance: how and why racism is still a part of some aspects of Jungian psychology and psychoanalysis. For example, why do some Jungian analysts and psychotherapists continue to believe that “the shadow” (disavowed aspects of oneself that are acted out and attributed to another) is symbolized by a black person in a white person’s dream? Or the idea that some types of people — those people who are “primitive” or child-like — are missing “layers” of consciousness or insight? Or that the “creative individual” is a unique genius who stands above, rather than depends on, others? Such assumptions of superiority/inferiority of genetic abilities continue to be expressed by clinicians and others.

To be clear, we are not interested in blame or attack. Neither of us has an axe to grind. Instead, we are devoted to ending racism and self-deceptions about “racial” superiority through which various groups are pitted against other groups, claiming things about the “others,” such as “They are animals” or “They are primitive” or they are “childish and uninformed.”

This type of dehumanization has been reinforced through the “scientific” framework of race theory and eugenics in Western Europe and the United States. All of this needs to be seen and known explicitly so that we can work together to end racism and dehumanization. Without seeing or knowing what it means, even casually, to use terms like “blacks” and “whites,” many of us unintentionally support racist categories, even while intending to end racism and ethnocentrism.

CC: I agree, Polly. I will add that unless we understand that race is the cornerstone of racism and that race is fundamentally racist, we perpetuate the systematization of racism. Each individual who uses a racialized label, as a referent to self or others, in a way that implies that race is a given truth, actively participates in racism. This occurs in virtually every setting, even amongst family and loved ones.

It is also important to note that the term black has a complicated development amongst descendants of the African Diaspora. The descendants who were born on US soil (whether free or enslaved) did not all identify with Africa as their homeland. As a collective, we were racialized by others as “black” and we had to learn to work with this term in identifying ourselves because race developed into a major standard of categorization in Europe and the US.

It is important, I believe, to differentiate the ethnic referent from the racial referent although they are historically linked. When I write of ethnicity, I tend to write African-American or Black (capitalized). When I write of the racial referent, I use the lowercase b, to refer to the racial term. Each individual has to determine how they wish to be identified and in which ways it feels right to identify others. I find identifying others as they opt to be identified is the most ethical. Psychoanalysis demonstrates the personal and social benefits an individual feels when they are witnessed, particularly when a therapist serves as a good-enough and consistent-enough mirror.

When I write of descendants of the African Diaspora, I capitalize the first letter, as I tend to do with any other ethnic referent. The racial referent for descendants of Western Europe – white -- does not get capitalized, however. White is not an ethnicity. It is a color. Under the American “caste system,” racialized white carries the delusion of bio-ethnic superiority which I believe to be an identification with the positive aspects of archetypal White, the symbolic meaning of the color “white.” Glorifying the archetype of White is to see it as pure, innocent, and light while downplaying its negative meanings such as frozen, icy, bloodless, or dead.

PYE: What you are saying makes so much sense, especially about the terms “white” and “black” and what they came to mean in the US. Your comments open insights into unconsciously using the terms “black and white” – even in such phrasing as “black-and-white thinking” in regard to racism. The assumption is that black is negative and white is positive. And yes, this is a one-sided meaning of the archetype of White.

Racism in Jungian Training and Practices

PYE: In 1987, I published a paper in a Jungian journal entitled “The Absence of Black Americans as Jungian Analysts.” I wanted to call it “the absence of Afro-Americans” but the editors would not allow that title because “Black people live in America who are not of African descent.” I agreed to the change although, even back then, I did not like the contrast of Black vs White that the title implied. I had already studied Franz Fanon and James Baldwin who wrote about attributing colors to the meaning of being human.

My paper was an attack on the de facto racism (evidenced by the absence of African-American colleagues), I had found in American Jungian psychology during my training and development as an analyst. I heard colleagues repeatedly claim, for example, that seeing a black person in one’s night dream (REM) was an experience of “the shadow” if the dreamer was white. But there was no categorical meaning for seeing a white person in a dream. Why would a black person symbolize a category of meaning while a white person would not? That seemed to me to be blatantly racist. I recall that I repeatedly offered that critique, but others in my training cohort did not seem to grasp what I was saying.

I was also shocked by the racism in some of Jung’s writings. For example, here is Jung talking about the white American identifying with the “colored man”:

It would be difficult not to see that the colored man, with his primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike directness, his sense of music and rhythm, his funny and picturesque language, has infected the American ‘behavior.’ As any psychologist and any doctor knows, nothing is more contagious than tics, stammering, choreic movements, signs of emotion, above all laugher and peculiarities of speech…Racial infection is a most serious mental and moral problem where the primitive outnumbers the white man. (CG Jung, 1930, original in English)

When I finally read Jung’s essays on America and its racial diversity, I was shocked by the implicit racism, but I was more shocked that my colleagues were not upset and/or didn’t seem to understand. For these reasons, I wrote and presented my paper at a Jungian conference in 1986 -- in Birmingham, Alabama, no less. I have difficult memories of that event. The next year the paper was published.

Every teacher or analyst (including my own, Dr. June Singer) that I approached about the problem of Jung’s racism would say some version of the following: “Well, Jung was a man of his times. He was Swiss and European and he didn’t understand what happened in America.” I would say “What about now? Shouldn’t we clearly criticize and deconstruct what he said, and write about how we’ve changed the theory?”

In response to all this, I would frequently hear the comment: “You don’t seem like a Jungian” or “That’s not depth psychology.” The assertion that I was not Jungian was belied when Cambridge University Press invited me to be the senior editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jung which came out in two editions: 1999 and 2008. If Cambridge University identified me as an expert on Jung, then I must know what I was talking about!

While I was outraged by the racism, I could see also how aspects of analytical psychology offered correctives for racism. For example, the theory of psychological complexes: that people enact unconscious and unintentional aspects of themselves and then project their motivations into others, attributing to others aspects of themselves. The Jungian theory of complexes expands some of James Baldwin’s ideas about how we are, in fact, often speaking about ourselves when we make attributions about others.

Later, I also worked together with a group of Jungian analysts/colleagues to produce, sign, and publish a letter protesting racism in Jung’s work, and in analytical psychology in general, vowing to transform the problematic issues. A few conferences were held on these topics, but little actually changed, as far as I could tell.

But when I got to know well two of my (five) African-American colleagues —Christopher Carter and Fanny Brewster — I became involved with studying your/their work. You have both published books and articles and have organized larger movements and conferences to transform the racist implications of analytical psychology in both clinical work and cultural applications. From your published works, I have also learned a great deal more about the painful history and the suffering that have transpired in Jungian training programs in relation to racism.

CC: I deeply appreciate your friendship and your apparent non-stop drive toward a greater understanding of what it means to be human, to understand one’s own subjectivity, and to learn to communicate beyond one’s own snow globe, to borrow one of your terms.

I remember feeling a bit more welcomed into the field of psychoanalysis when I was introduced to your article, “The Absence of Black Americans as Jungian Analysts” (1987) around the time I was studying at Princeton Theological Seminary (1988-1992) and researching doctoral programs.

I next encountered your work after learning that my doctoral advisor and mentor, Ann Ulanov, contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Jung (1999/2008) that you edited. This book was released right on time for me, as I had been on an extended sabbatical from my doctoral program and I was preparing for final examinations for the Master of Philosophy portion of the doctoral program (Union Theological Seminary/Columbia University), before writing a dissertation.

I was the second African-American to graduate from Union Theological Seminary’s Psychiatry & Religion doctoral program. I think I was the first descendant of formerly enslaved Africans. It is as though Young-Eisendrath was an accompanying spirit along my path to becoming the fifth Jungian analyst of African American ancestry, following analysts Samuel Kimbles, Alan Vaughn, Fanny Brewster and Allison Avery.

As an analyst-in-training at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (NYC), I also had the privilege of taking a course that you facilitated, Polly, based on your book Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path (2019). While the class was held remotely, it was the first time that you and I met.

On a preconscious level, your 1987 article affirmed that I could contribute to the field of psychoanalysis, even though African Americans were very under-represented. There are certainly many analysts who seek peace, justice, inclusion, equality and greater access to resources, globally, but too many of them still face hell-bent aggression from those who continue to embrace colonialist paths to secure land or resources for themselves, on every continent.

PYE: I was inspired by reading your recent journal article, “The Current Role of Analytical Psychology in Maintaining Fictitious Boundaries that are Promoted through the Race Lie: A call to dismantle the virtual wall that exists through attitudes of white supremacy” (2024). I have a more precise awareness now of the history of racism in depth psychology and psychoanalysis, Christopher.

To be continued in Part III: The Trance of Eugenics — Here’s a preview of our third and final installment:

The Trance of Eugenics

In Part III, we focus on psychology and psychoanalysis in relation to racism and eugenics. Many people are not familiar with the eugenics movement that was part of American psychology at its beginnings. Here is a short passage I copied from Open AI that reviews the meaning of eugenics:

Eugenics is the belief or practice of trying to improve the genetic quality of a human population by encouraging the reproduction of people with traits considered "desirable" and reducing or preventing reproduction among those with traits considered "undesirable."

The term, coined in the late 19th century by Francis Galton, has been associated with both “positive eugenics” (promoting births among people seen as genetically “fit”) and “negative eugenics” (restricting or discouraging births among those seen as “unfit”).

Historically, eugenics influenced public policies such as forced sterilizations, marriage restrictions, and immigration controls—often grounded in racism, ableism, and classism. These practices peaked in the early to mid-20th century and became infamous due to their use in Nazi Germany’s racial programs.

PYE: Here, I turn my focus to a perspective I have expanded since reading your paper, Christopher. It involves Charles Darwin and the meaning of “superiority” in psychological theories about human evolution. I have begun to see the role played by “natural selection” in racism in the history of psychology.