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This article is an editorial introducing a special issue of the Journal of Analytical Psychology on the topic of psyche and politics. The issue is a result of a conference held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, titled "Do we really have the answer? A psycho-political agenda for interdependence: Bridging wish and actuality in an unhinged world." The conference aimed to explore the intersection of analytical psychology and political activism, and the articles in the special issue discuss various aspects of this relationship. The authors argue that the interest in this topic has emerged due to the historical relevance of fear and the evolving nature of psychoanalysis as a discipline. They emphasize the importance of understanding the connection between the inner world of the psyche and the outer dynamics of politics. The articles cover a range of themes, including paranoia and fragmentation, the role of psychoanalysis in dealing with crises, the influence of American patriarchy on mass shootings, the perspective of queer analysts, the concept of analyzability, the impact of war on mentalization, intergenerational traumas, and the analysis of modern artists. The authors believe that this special issue is urgent and necessary in order to better explore the relationship between psyche and politics and gain a profound understanding of both. [Extracted from the article]

Humanity continues to experience serious violations of human rights, and the recent critical events, like the COVID‐19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, seem to have directly or indirectly intensified the occurrence of violations of human rights like torture, enforced disappearances, human trafficking, gender‐based violence and war crimes. Can analytical psychology make a significant contribution to the prevention, treatment, remedying such violations, from the individual level to the most macro level of socio‐political systems? I will support the thesis that the Jungian concept of soul has a special role in such an endeavour. My proposal is that when a social terrifying threat, like in the case of widespread social violence, is perceived at the social level, the functioning of the individual Self and society may change dramatically. In particular, both lose their containing function and are subjected to an unconscious massive collective pressure to align themselves to a specific kind of functioning that I call monolithic functioning. It is the splintering of what I call the reflective triangle, which is illustrated here, and has an effect on societal, groupal, interpersonal and intrapsychic levels. Some vignettes from a clinical case of a patient who suffered torture and gender‐based violence are presented to illustrate how these human rights violations affect the three levels mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In very rare cases, individuals survive the atrocities of abduction, imprisonment and torture that are part of the hallmark of enforced disappearances. Cases of people who survive torture and seek asylum in a third country help us understand some important aspects related to the crime of enforced disappearance. In the psychotherapy of torture survivors, at an early stage and for a long time, words often do not convey the core of the patient's experience. Survivors usually have tormented bodies in which individual and collective violence, hatred, anger, guilt and shame are painfully inscribed. Corporeal countertransference becomes the only possible way for a therapist to get in touch with a survivor's experience through a kind of body‐to‐body communication. The centrality of the body in these therapies suggests that the body is the involuntary recipient and container of mass political atrocities and, for this reason, the place where, in the case of horrific social violence, the possibility of social "knowing" is stored and can be retrieved. Thus, when it comes to forced disappearance, the determination of the relatives to get to the truth through the discovery of the remains of their disappeared demonstrates the importance of the body as the final witness of what happened, beyond any possible manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper investigates the relations between displacement, home, trauma and the self in the experience of refugees, which has become an issue of unexpected and far-reaching proportions in recent times. It questions to what extent and under what conditions displacement in the world may be traumatic and how trauma may be considered the effect of an inner displacement. Refugees' lives are marked by forced migration that is related to a certain suffering due to the changes in their family, relational, social and cultural lives. The paper explores the extent to which these changes can represent a break so significant as to be traumatic. It outlines the way in which traumatic experiences can produce an inner displacement and reorganization of one's mental life that leads to a focus on traumatic complexes. Under the most severe traumatic conditions, this can be understood as a displacement of the central axis of Self, in which the ego complex yields its position to other complexes, with a deep change in the organization and functioning of self. The experience of refugees highlights the way in which we live in a matrix of conscious and unconscious links between inner and outer worlds that need deeper and simultaneous consideration to understand their implications and mutual resonances for the psyche. Clinical cases of refugees will illustrate some aspects of these interconnections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a tentative understanding of the characteristics of the extreme traumas, elsewhere called 'complex PTSD', that some refugees and asylum-seekers bring into therapy. It suggests that these kinds of traumas suffered during adulthood may involve a disintegration of the self and a loss of 'psychic skin'. This conceptualization is derived from the treatment of a refugee who survived multiple extreme traumas and with whom efforts were made in therapy to identify a complex methodology making use of supplementary therapeutic tools in addition to individual psychotherapy. The case demonstrates how the disintegration of self implies not only a deep somato-psychic dissociation, but also a loss of intrapsychic and interpersonal space. In the treatment this was worked through via repetition of the victim-aggressor dynamics at multiple levels. In the end, the therapeutic context was structured like a set of concentric layers, creating a 'bandage' over the patient's wounds whilst his 'psychic skin' was able to regenerate. The conditions triggered by extreme traumas in refugees challenge some of the cornerstones of individual psychoanalytic technique, as well as the idea that individual therapy may be thought of as existing in an environmental vacuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]