Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage explores, from a Jungian perspective, the experiences of victims of another’s hubris that sets them on an involuntary journey to the metaphorical Underworld, a contemporary experience that has roots in mythology.

Relevant topics include exploring the nature of the Underworld, considering the mythology of hubris with modern examples, and the loss of one’s moral compass in the process of seeking power at the expense of others.

Myth and Jungian Depth Psychology provide context for understanding several stories of people who sometimes not only survived their journey to the Underworld but experienced a type of psychological transformation Jung called individuation. The stories derive from people who lived through the Holocaust, American enslavement of Africans, and Japanese internment camps making use of personal diaries, interviews, and/or memoirs in order to ensure their voices predominate in the narrative. This choice is deliberate in that more current work in resilience is grounded in modern trauma and current thinking in traditional psychology. That work is significant and has helped many.

The stories focused upon have for the most part, been overlooked but as we see, themes emerge that are truly relevant for today.