Samuel Kimbles

The Jungian Psychotherapists Association (jungseattle.org) sponsored Samuel Kimbles, Ph.D., San Francisco Jungian Analyst, as the speaker for the annual Public Seminar. In his presentation titled Wounds of the past, Tendril of the Future through the Lens of Cultural Complexes, Dr. Kimbles addressed the following learning objectives:
(1) Building upon Jung’s theory of complexes, exploring the concept of individual and group cultural complexes;
(2) Understand the emotional charge of cultural ideas and images clustered around archetypal cores that generate group and individual behavioral patterns;
(3) 4 themes:
(a) Jung’s theory of complexes;
(b) Henderson’s theory of cultural complex and transmission;
(c) Concepts applied to clients and society at large;
(d) Cultural sensitivity and process in which to address activation;
(4) Explore and understand intergenerational transmission of cultural complexes in individual and group trauma.

JPA PE 2010
NOTES IN POETIC FORM

Unusually fabulous autumn day
Windows to verdant vista
Smaller group opens intimacy
Inner/outer reflective hall of mirrors.

Calm, soft-spoken speaker
Captures attention.
Unconscious constellation in group
Yields confronting anxiety
And changed perceptions and behavior.

Attend to our reaction:
What is being constellated in the group?
We affect the group,
The group affects us.
Possible to learn from experiences,
Both individual and group.

Jung: attend to ourselves in the larger collective.
Receptive ears; total transference,
Total countertransference.
Total world surrounds clients.

Jumping archetypes move mere mortals
Via collective unconscious.
Lack of empathy for individuals—
Group sucks us in.
Remember the group we came from.
Return to give back.

Partial personality interrupts the body,
The mouth, the behavior.
Adult tantrums.
Unconscious takes over to solidify,
Concretize group’s survival.
Group identification makes a claim on us.
Danger: don’t lose self by joining others.

FOO background lies between
Personal and collective unconscious.
Undigested ancestral trauma → ghosts and crypts.
Absent presence.
Preservative repression.

Page in a book—torn out & burned,
Yet glimmers and shimmers just out of awareness.
Fantasies try to make sense.
Impact from what is said and what cannot be said.
Kids know better than to ask/say—
Hangs and drifts like psychic fog.
Inhibition to inquire, ask, connect.
If not said, stored as implicit body memory.
Eliminate sight and transform experiences.

Disruption of continuity of meaning
Loss of dreamers, dreams, weavers
Disruption of linking
Ghost images during catastrophes
Fissure in status of being
Primitive agonies,
Unthinkable ways of being
Primal anxieties
Safety, security, survival
Suppression, oppression, repression
Protection: nowhere to go

Work with the narrative we have
Quilting pieces of the past
Hold group and collective content
To engage ourselves and others
So easy to look outward to other culture
Rather than to our internal/local culture
Mine, ownership, possessive
Individual, family, group, culture
Join my culture—
Be like me because it works for me.

Who knows?
We act as if we know
When we know so little.

Ghost, not mourning father in the present.
Crypts provide a container for ghosts.
Stale silences. Unassimilated.
Encrypted: anxious and anxiety about dying.
Encrypted process—
Sealing that which cannot
Be acknowledged, processed.
Encryption results in symptoms.
Protected: sealed away;
Rituals, avoidance, bodily symptoms.
Ann B. Blake, October 12, 2010

Recent Publications

Kimbles, S. (2000). The cultural complex and the myth of invisibility. In T. Singer (Ed.), The vision thing: Myths, politics and psyche in the world (pp. 157-211). London, UK: Routledge.

Kimbles, S. (2004). A cultural complex operating in the overlap of clinical and cultural space. In S. Kimbles & T. Singer (Eds.), The cultural complexes: Contemporary Jungian perspectives on psyche and society (pp. 199-211). New York, NY: Brunner-Routledge.

Kimbles, S. (2006). Cultural complexes and the transmission of group trauma in everyday life. Psychological Perspectives, 49, 96-110.

Kimbles, S. (2007). Social suffering through cultural mourning, cultural melancholia, and cultural complexes. Spring, 78.

Kimbles, S., & Singer, T. (2004). The emerging theory of cultural complexes. In J. Camry & L. Carter (Eds.), Analytical Psychology: Contemporary perspectives in Jungian analysis (pp. 176-203). New York, NY: Routledge.