Jung and the African Diaspora (Carl Gustav Jung) (Critical Essay‪)‬

... the dream may not be warning Jung to avoid 'going black' but inviting, encouraging or challenging him to do so. (Adams qtd. in Marian, 1997, p. 184) Jung feared and yet echoed Africa. In his famous 'barber' dream C.G. Jung feared 'going black' and literally panicked for his life while witnessing a Bantu ngoma ritual (Jung, 1989, p. 272; Hill, 1977, p. 129). Despite detailed attention to world mythologies, Jung had little actual contact with traditional peoples and wrote little of African mythology outside oversimplified reductions to an original primitive mind (Pelton, 1989, pp. 228, 233). However, ironic parallels exist between Jungian concepts and the mythology of Africa or the African Diaspora.* Diaspora mythologies are now widely understood as a unique living syncretism of response to centuries of African slave trade and the 'middle passage.' Jung imagined psychological wholeness as a corrective to collective imbalance. However, in Sacred Possessions, Olmos and Paravisini-Gerbert, offer Diaspora mythology as the world's first true multicultural experiment; a synthesis of traditional West African religions infused with New World Catholicism (Olmos, 2000, p. 1; Thompson, 1983, p. 163).