The Society for Anxiety and the Postmodern Condition

Eliezer Shimeoni (E. S.) chairs the Society for Anxiety and the Postmodern Condition (SAPC).

By his friends, he is variously referred to 'as es', or as 'es' (that is it, or id), or sometimes, in Hebrew, as esh, that is, fire.

He has recently been the subject of a fictitious account, the novella Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return, by Erel Shalit.

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Should psychologists and psychoanalysts speak about politics?

Should clinicians and mental health professionals remain with in the closed vessel of the consulting room, or should they step outside these confines and express themselves regarding trends that are taking place in society and the world, about elections and candidates, about democracy and the characteristics of different regimes? Psychoanalysts such as Freud, Jung, Winnicott, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Erich Neumann and others have often stepped outside the consulting room and looked at the world and society around them. C.G. Jung writes in his preface to "Essays on Contemporary Events," The storm of events does not sweep down upon him [the doctor] only from the great world outside; he feels the violence of its impact even in the quiet of his consulting-room ... As he has a responsibility towards his patients, he cannot afford to withdraw to the peaceful island of undisturbed scientific work, but must constantly descend into the arena of world events, in order...

Imitation and the Archetypal Adult

In The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey , I mention five pathologies that I relate to the idea of the Archetypal Adult. In this brief presentation I mention an additional one, which Jung speaks about – imitation. In the Red Book he writes, “The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship.” In Two Essays in Analytical Psychology he writes, "The human being has one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility from the collective point of view, is immeasurably detrimental from the standpoint of individuality; the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology can never dispense with imitation, for without it the organization of the masses, that of the state and of society, is quite simply impossible. Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and moral contagion." Imitation is a sh...

Haruki Murakami – “The Meaning of Shadows”

This month, November 2016, Haruki Murakami received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award. He refers to Andersen’s tale “The Shadow” (you can read the story here ), which is woven around the Faustian theme of losing, or selling the shadow, then being overtaken by it (see below an excerpt from Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero’s Path ). Murakami warned against excluding outsiders and rewriting history. “No matter how high a wall we build to keep intruders out, no matter how strictly we exclude outsiders, no matter how much we rewrite history to suit us, we just end up damaging and hurting ourselves,” Murakami said. Both individuals and societies need to face their shadow; “we have to, when necessary, face our own shadows, confront them, and sometimes even work with them,” he said in his acceptance speech. And he is of course right, because if we don’t face the shadow, however difficult and aggravating that may be, the shadow has ...

Anxiety and the Postmodern Condition

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