Pacifica Extension and International Studies will offer “Mind of State: Politics, Psyche and Soul in Turbulent Times” on August 28, September 4, 11, 18, 25, October 2, 2024. This six-week course is based on the recent book, Mind of State: Conversations on the Psychological Conflicts Stirring U.S. Politics and Society. I’m delighted to be speaking with co-editors Betty Teng and Dr. Thomas Singer, the instructors of this course. This is Part II of II.
Angela: The course is based on your book Mind of State: Conversations on the Psychological Conflicts Stirring U.S. Politics and Society. Can you tell us a little about the genesis of the book and what its aim is?
Thomas: The book came about from a podcast that three of us—our third partner being Jonathan Kopp, who is a political communications consultant—initiated in 2019. In the podcast there were 29 different interviews conducted over a period of two years. The transcripts of those interviews seemed timely, and Betty spearheaded the podcast, while I participated in the selection of guests and on honing the themes of our inquiry as a producer.
Basically Betty led the charge on the podcast. And I led the charge on making a book about this, as the conversations were still relevant. So the book is based on a series of edited transcripts from the podcast “Mind of State.”
Betty: We felt the need to raise awareness of the psyche of the American circumstance. The term “mind of state” comes from the dichotomy of thinking about psyche and polis, or mind and civics. We interviewed people from both ends of that spectrum, experts in politics and psychology. So the book is an orchestration of different voices around the overlapping and sometimes conflicting fields of politics and psychology. I think we, along with our co-editor Jonathan Kopp, ended up coming up with a dynamic collection—29 interviews in all—of multi-layered evergreen conversations, which we aimed to help people think about, and bear, what can feel confusing and even unbearable in U.S. politics.
Angela: The last lecture of your series will cover “The Importance of Myth in Politics.” Can myths help us in understanding politics?
Betty: It’s really about a Jungian approach to the ways in which myth operates in politics and drives society. Betty Sue Flowers talks about how we went, in the U.S., from being focused on a religious myth to an economic myth. Churches were the monuments and architectural spaces of worship and community, and now we have as our monuments, skyscrapers, and banks. These reveal the dominant forces of what drives not only Americans but global contemporary societies beyond our borders. Jules Cashford talks about how myth and history are getting conflated. Her conversation turned myth and history on its head for me. It was fascinating.
Thomas: We’re using myth in the Jungian sense, not to signify a false story but an underlying deep story that speaks to large groups of people. For instance, we might consider how the theme of death and resurrection in a spiritual leader can get all mixed up with the heroic myth of the second world war, as in the most instantly iconic, recent photograph of Trump. He has blood on his ear and is surrounded by the secret service; behind them, there’s the flag and Trump is fist pumping. From a mythopoetic perspective, people see this as heroic triumph, resurrection, redemption. Many mythological themes are mixed up in that picture. Deep, mythic stories about death, resurrection, saviors. I compare that picture to the famous moment in Iwo Jima where the flag was being raised, an appeal to American patriotism. Images that play to mythic themes are deeply moving, so noticing the manipulation of mythic images is extremely important.
Angela: How does race and discrimination inform the current political system or climate?
Betty: So much of our polarization is about cultural conflicts that are synonymous with identity conflicts. Two social psychologists we interviewed, Susan Fiske and Peter Glick, came up with a model called the stereotype content model, which breaks down our attitudes towards minority groups and how we discriminate differently, depending on our perception of the out-group as competent or incompetent. This correlates with their being threatening or non-threatening.
Therefore, depending on perception, different minority and racial groups evoke different kinds and degrees of prejudice. Fiske and Glick talked about the grievances of people in the U.S. who feel that they have worked hard, waited for their turn in line for success or a good life, and immigrants have “line-jumped” delaying their chance for a good life. The tension around immigration and refugees in this country is about the perception of there being an extreme scarcity of resources. Our contributors look at antisemitism as well, with respect to their finding that groups perceived as highly competent are perceived as threats by the majority group. Their model gives us a way to think about discrimination and stereotypes that operate in the U.S. and elsewhere, and it gives us a tool to think about why race, dominance, othering, and difference stir us in ways that are intense yet might not be fully conscious.
Thomas: What we’ve been discussing today are thumbnail sketches of what the book and the course is all about. But what will make this course unique is that we’ve divided it into five sections and there will be time to discuss these very complex ideas and go into them in depth. In some ways, the book is very challenging because it’s rich in material and goes into much greater depth than we can discuss today. We have wonderful source material.
Angela: Do you have any upcoming projects or work you’d like to share with us?
Betty: This summer I am focused on composing two talks, one for the SF Jung Institute Presidency Conference in October, and a keynote talk for NIP (National Institute for the Psychotherapies in NYC’s biannual conference in April 2025, tentatively titled “Caught in a Bad Romance: Attachment and Rupture in Intimate Relationships.” In 2025, I am also teaching a mini-4-part course on Trauma, Truth, Privilege and Care. I have coming out in early 2025 a paper titled “On the Conditions of Care for Speaking about Racial Trauma in the journal, Psychoanalytic Inquiry. On August 25 of this year, I will be participating on a zoom panel with Jyoti Rao and Kevin Duong on “Psychoanalysis as Social criticism” for The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis.
Thomas: The 2024 C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco Presidency Conference is having its 7th consecutive conference. It should be mentioned in conjunction with this course. I have a new book coming out in August that explores the deeply rupturing traumas in Europe of Brexit and the war in Ukraine. This book is a sequel to Europe’s Many Souls: Exploring Cultural Complexes and Identities. The other thing I’m working on is a guide to the use of ARAS (The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. ARAS.org is an online archive of some 19,000 symbolic images from different cultures since the beginning of human history. Our current projects have been a sixteen-part series entitled “With Ukrainian Jungians,” a quite amazing series of presentations in support of the Jungian analytic community in Ukraine. We have also been exploring the mythopoetic image of Gaia: Then and Now.
Angela: Thank you both so much for your time and your thoughtful answers. I look forward to reading more of your work.
Join us for “Mind of State: Politics, Psyche and Soul in Turbulent Times” on August 28, September 4, 11, 18, 25, October 2, 2024. Register here.
Betty P. Teng, MFA, LCSW is a psychoanalyst and trauma therapist who has worked with survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and childhood molestation at Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s Victims Services Program in Manhattan. She is one of the co-authors of the New York Times bestseller The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and a contributing essayist to Adam Phillips’s The Cure for Psychoanalysis. A new book she co-edited (with Tom Singer and Jonathan Kopp), titled Mind of State: Conversations on the Psychological Conflicts Stirring U.S. Politics and Society has been recently released by Chiron Publications. It is based on the psycho-political podcast, MIND OF STATE, which she co-founded and co-hosted. On the faculty of the Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis’s Trauma Studies program and its One Year Program on Psychoanalysis in the Sociopolitical World, Betty currently sees couples and adults in private practice in New York City.
Thomas Singer, M.D., is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst in private practice in San Francisco. Dr. Singer’s newest book is entitled Mind of State: Conversations on the Psychological Conflicts Stirring U.S. Politics and Society which has been co-edited with fellow contributors to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Dr. Singer is the editor of a series of books which explore cultural complexes in different parts of the world, including The Cultural Complex, Australia (Placing Psyche), Latin America (Cultural Complexes of Latin America), Europe (Europe’s Many Souls), North America ( Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America), and Southeast Asia (Cultural Complexes in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) In addition he has edited Psyche and the City, The Vision Thing, co-edited the Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche series and co-authored A Fan’s Guide to Baseball Fever. Dr. Singer currently serves as the President of National ARAS which explores symbolic imagery from around the world.
Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.
