Dear Membership,
Sulagna Sengupta’s seminar will begin on April 23rd and end on the 28th. Her one hour ZOOM presentation will occur on April 24th at 8 am SAST (South Africa Time), 7 am BST (London time), or 2 am EDT (NYC).
A ZOOM invitation will be posted in the coming week. Stephen Farah will moderate. Stephen will post the link to Sulagna’s ZOOM lecture following the seminar.
Below is a section of the introductory chapter (draft version with bibliographic references in endnotes), which will be followed by a brief Zoom talk on another chapter. We hope that members will be able to access both:
Introduction: The anima and animus may well be on their way out in Jungian scholarship. Masculine and feminine being in ambivalent territory, where is the place of the animus? It would be a pity still if these concepts were not employed at least once to understand the lived realities of a world far away from Jung’s, so to speak. Within that context, my perspective is not just of a Jungian academic, but one who has worked before with dis-privileged communities in India. A part of that experience hinges on this work. The inhering tensions of caste, class, race, religion, politics and economy make any exploration of psychic life intriguing, and I have used the notion of the animus to examine that context of women’s lives in India. The theoretical constructs of Jungian psychology have been used to view inter-psychic and intra-psychic processes. At some point during my analysis, I realized that the animus is not just a personal, subjective experience. It involves culture and is shaped by it, as much as culture is shaped by the personal. I hope this opens up deliberations about the other as it navigates a track between analytical psychology and India.
Bio: Sulagna Sengupta is a Jungian scholar based in Bangalore, India. She is currently doing her PhD in Jungian Studies at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK working on the Indian epic, The Ramayana. https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/SENGU21508/sulagna-sengupta
Sulagna’s most recent articles are ‘Cultural Other in Jung’s India’ in International Journal of Jungian Studies (IJJS), Vol. 12, Issue: 1, Feb 2020 and ‘Earth, Ecology and Feminine in ‘Exploring Depth Psychology and the Female Self, Leslie Gardner & Catriona Miller(ed), Routledge, 2020. A recent conference lecture she delivered was ‘Decolonizing Jung’ at the Freedom Day Global edition, 2020 https://freedomday.com.br/
Her upcoming papers are ‘Katabasis in an Indian Myth’ in Paul Bishop, Terence Dawson and Leslie Gardner’s edited book ‘Descent of the Soul: Katabasis and Depth Psychology’ Routledge, 2021 and ‘Decolonizing Jung: Analytical psychology in contemporary India’ in Psychology and Behavioural Sciences international journal. This chapter is from her forthcoming book ‘Animus: A Concept Revisited’.
Sheltering across the world,Robin McCoy BrooksIAJS Seminar Chair