The Primitive Within: Colonization in Reverse

Excerpt-David Tacey-Edge of the Sacred

Colonization in Reverse

Jung was interested in the phenomenon that is popularly called 'going native' and in more intellectual terms might be called 'colonization- in-reverse'. After several trips to North America, during which he observed the ways in which former Europeans had adapted to American conditions, he intuited that the land itself had somehow claimed its new inhabitants. The colonizers had in turn been colonized, even indigenized. This appealed to Jung's understanding of the psychological process, given that the colonizing project was the work of the heroic ego, and the opposite process, colonization-in reverse or indigenization, was operating at an unconscious level, and was not even on the horizon of awareness.

As a depth psychologist, Jung was alert to the ways in which unconscious dynamics could overturn, subvert or replace the goals and aspirations of the ego. The colonizing ego thinks that the 'New World' nation is new, that it is virgin territory, which the ego is able to conquer and control. But while the nation is new, the land itself is ancient and powerful. In Australia, for instance, the British colonists referred to the land as terra nullius, the 'empty land', possessed by no-one and available for appropriation. This proved to be a disastrous illusion in terms of the destiny and wellbeing of the Aboriginal cultures.

For the colonizing powers had overlooked the fact that the land, vast in size and without visible monuments, was already imagined and possessed by Aboriginal Dreaming traditions that the colonists failed to understand. Moreover, the Aboriginal tradition is the oldest continuous cultural tradition in the world, and recent estimations suggest that the indigenous people have lived on the land for more than fifty thousand years. The Australian national anthem claims that the country is 'young and free', but the continuing Aboriginal presence looks on with scorn and derision at the hubristic colonizing project.

Numerous works of Australian literature and visual art have exploited this opposition between an ego that is unaware of the land, and the ancient indigenous culture that has been ignored, forgotten or misunderstood. There can be no more perfect example of a psychic system at war with itself, with the ego seizing control and the ancient, underlying reality having little or no regard for the ego's designs. Eventually, the earth makes its presence felt through various cultural disturbances and psychological complications. The film Picnic at Hanging Rock is a cinematic masterpiece which makes use of this grinding tension between the colonial overlay of society and the unconscious substratum of ancient and denied realities. Needless to say, the ego's ignorance of prior and deeper realities leads to tragedy, as the society finds itself at the mercy of the earth which claims living sacrifices in the spirit of vengeance and retribution.

Just as depth psychology became aware of a collective unconscious through symptoms that disturbed the conscious sphere, so the New World nations have become aware of prior, deeper, ancient realities by disturbances in the social field. The society is new, and thinks of itself as in control of its own destiny, but it has to reckon with a prior and deeper claim on its life, which only gradually begins to surface from the depths of its experience. In time, the land has to be respected as having a life and will of its own, quite independent of the designs of the colonizing ego. This kind of maturity and insight is hard won, and does not come easily to a new nation full of its own dreams and aspirations. Gradually, a second or alien will begins to impress itself upon the society, and make its presence felt with peculiar and unerring force.