Arthur Colman, M.D., is a training analyst in private practice in Sausalito, a member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California. He is also a consultant to groups and organizations in the United States and Europe. Pilar Montero, Ph.D., is an analyst in private practice in San Francisco and Sausalito and a member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. In addition to her clinical work, she is a social psychologist and has worked extensively as a depth group consultant. For the past 20 years, Dr. Montero and Dr. Colman have worked together consulting to groups .from a depth perspective. During the past year they have consulted to organizations in Mexico, Brazil and Israel as well as various venues in the United States on problems of scapegoating.

Helmut: Pilar and Arthur, I would like you to share some thoughts on your South African visit; an interview which I would like to do for all those members that missed the opportunity to listen and work with you during your April visit.

P & A: We like that. This first visit has been exciting and stimulating, especially in engaging with a variety of groups throughout South Africa. Following various requests, we look forward to return to do what is our specialty, run experiential group workshops towards awakening consciousness in groups.

Helmut: Now, working at group consciousness sounds to me like individuation. In Jungian terms the focus is on the individual and individual development on his/her path towards wholeness. But do groups individuate?

P & A: We believe—and have been able to demonstrate this in our 30 years of group work with organizations, ranging from Institutions to NGOs, Government Departments to Fund Raisers, Industry to Environmental Groups—that Jungian Psychology and its usual focus on the individual and individual development is also relevant to the problems of groups, institutions and political systems. We thus work with Jung's beliefs in the collective unconscious, individuation process, shadow and archetypal approaches for example.

Helmut: Can you be more specific?

P & A: Jung's insights and his methods may be extremely important in today's nuclear and environmental age, where every individual's survival is hinged to the happenings or consciousness of a larger group.

Helmut: Yes, I think I have got the feel of what you are hinting at, when I participated in one of your workshop groups. The group, just like individuals, became conscious of I guess issues of shadow material, which would have been a barrier to generating more trust and openness. The latter would have helped to put more energy into the creative and functional, rather than into defences and denial. So, do complexes then get constellated in groups as well, say as a group complex, and how do you suggest one deals with them?

P & A: We, or say the group consultant (or healer) would see and experience the group as being in an alchemical vessel. In gently allowing the group to make its issues visible—experienced as irreconcilable opposites—by naming and facing and exploring them, these may hopefully be resolved within the safe place of the therapeutic setting. Groups, like individuals, become conscious and whole only by exploring their deepest, most profound elements—their victims and heroes, their scapegoats and messiahs. Developing group consciousness then works towards integrating scapegoats and understanding central patterns of behavior.

Helmut: Do say a bit more about scapegoating?

P & A: This is an important issue. In general, from a millennial perspective it seems that the quest for the development of the individual as the supreme force in mankind has happened at the expense of cataclysmic inter-group conflicts and large group scapegoating dynamics—the mass destruction of world wars and regional wars, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, genocide and environmental degradation and just think of what is happening in Africa at this point in time?

Helmut: Are you saying that scapegoating—already referred to in ancient Sanskrit and Hittite texts— has been an unconscious device in order to serve the hoped for, but specious unity of nationhood or group cohesion? Is this like a shadow mechanism at work?

P & A: Yes, by all means, but it needs psychic work—integration of shadow figures—if the process of individuation, individual or group, is not to be held hostage to the presence of the scapegoat.

Helmut: So is the scapegoat function an essential one in personal and group dynamics?

P & A: Yes. From the collective perspective scapegoating is one of the major ways that groups eject its dissident and unworkable parts (the scapegoat) much like the kidneys excrete toxins from the body. It is vital for physiological functioning, but toxins need to be taken note of and “managed,” not so? And here we see a critical connection between the growth process in individuals and in groups, for scapegoats not only deter group development, but also hamper integration of shadow perspectives—a necessary step in the individuation process.

Helmut: Talking individual and group or collective, what then is their relationship? Are we a product of the collective or is the collective a product of us, their group members?

P & A: From the individual's conscious perspective, most of the collective is largely unconscious or at least unknown. Each of us, however, is acutely aware of the collective's presence, as it manifests in one or another of the sub-units, which defines us as individual, couple and family.

From the perspective of the collective, the multiplicity of sub-units serve the species' potential. For example, the individual has particular importance as a medium for consciousness, just as the small group serves the body politic and social creativity and the couple manifests conjugal love, biological reproduction and parental roles. From this point of view, post-modern in flavor, we are all part of systems of something bigger, smaller or relatively equal to us.

Helmut: Has Jung not suggested, that increasing each individual's consciousness (through therapy, analysis, self-actualization, spiritual development) inevitably leads to more collective consciousness?

P & A: If we have learned anything about the psychology of our species this century, it is that collective behavior is not the sum of individual consciousness. Our own work has tended to demonstrate the lack of any direct relationship between individual and collective creativity or maturity .Thus our quest is directed to look at a psychology of human connectedness in exploring collectivity, interconnection and reflected consciousness, in ways that include and transcend our individual natures and so seeks to understand our human psyche in its ecological context.

Helmut: So you are drawing attention to the need of understanding and working with group consciousness, because of the collective nature of the post-millennium world?

P & A: Yes, the culture of individuality is crumbling. Societies around the world are in various stages of coping with accelerating changes brought about as we all know by rapid population growth, and technological and communal innovation. These changes are all emphasizing worldwide interchange and interconnection on an unprecedented scale with inevitable pressures on the hegemony of the individual's role in our culture.

Helmut: Well, if artists are the “seers” of things to come, today's recurring images of symbolic dissolution and fragmentation as broken bodies and separate body parts in current movies and other visual arts, or the disconnected rhythms and harmonies of so much of our popular and classical music, absolutely presage the dismemberment of the culture of individuality. Would Jungian psychology not expect the constellation of unconscious opposite forces -a sort of enantodromia effect?

P & A: That is part of our human heritage. Some subgroups are responding by reaffirming unchangeable religious beliefs and traditional ways of organizing social behaving. Terrorism sponsored by fundamentalist societies, most severely threatened by worldwide human interconnection, is a dramatic example of the acting out of the most negative psychological response. On the other hand, there are coping strategies that emphasize innovative healing forces and new artistic and relationship forms whose aim is to reconnect the individual within a web of powerful collective connections. This is notable in the art form of the movies, which joins hundreds of cooperating artists in the extraordinary growth in cross-national and company global economies; and most graphically, in the success and multi-societal comfort with the “web mind” of the internet.

Helmut: Yes, due to the incredible advances in today's world communications, the world has indeed become a “global village,” an unus mundus. So you are comfortable that the power of the internet could in fact be a “healing” or at least act as a cultural bridging force? This would talk directly to one of our challenges in the new South Africa.

P & A: Yes, success in the business world of today requires retraining in subtle intercultural and intergroup fluencies thought irrelevant even 20 years ago. Formal preparation for new roles and relationships may seem inadequate, but learning in this environment rarely comes from traditional institutions. It is in that context that we can appreciate how the collective works to fill unconscious needs. Thus the peculiar developments of the internet chat rooms, in which partial and fantasy identities are de rigueur, for example, could be understood as necessary simulations for similar requirements in everyday work and family life.

Helmut: Intercultural and intergroup relating skills require a sense of human interconnectedness, not so? Is this not a product of increased consciousness in groups.

P & A: This is where Africa has a lot to teach. Your African philosophy of Ubuntu, a person being a person through another person, comes to mind immediately. But also being exposed to the opposites of harmony and harshness of the African wilderness, which we were fortunate to experience in the Umlani camp so kindly facilitated by the Schiess family, reminded us so vividly that the human collective is the wilderness of our species, with all its potential for beauty and creativity, passion and chaos. Human groups tamed by task, structure and roles are the collective's attempt to domesticate its own wilderness and provide individuals with portals to this wilderness. When we come together in groups, we do so most of the time as herd animals, for we too are creatures who feel too scared to be really alone for even a few hours. We quiet our fear within family, social and work groups that make sense to us and shun the wilder, raw and inexplicable aspects of our collective.

Helmut: So we have the task to become more conscious of our unconscious need and potential for interconnectedness, in order to value and honor the important role of being a consciousness—carrying sub-unit serving the collective. Bridging the individual-collective dualism is then not a loss (of ego identity) but carries a meaning, that of acknowledging the state of interconnectedness?

P & A: Here is the ecological challenge of increased consciousness. Today the world decries the loss of wild animals, of tropical forests, of land turned to desert, of destruction of the ozone layer, whilst harvesting and consuming relentlessly, ignoring the toxic and destructive side effects of the products we enjoy. It is possible, that experiencing and appreciating that we are our own wilderness, not individuals separate and apart from nature, will eventually help us contain our predatory relationship to systems which we falsely view as disconnected and therefore fair game.

Helmut: Do you see some contribution by the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in awakening consciousness in the new South Africa? Is there a scapegoat issue?

P & A: Yes indeed. We understand that the objective of the TRC was somehow to heal the wounds of the past. The options of punishment by victors of a struggle or a blanket amnesty dispensation would not have achieved anything in this direction. Naming and facing shadow issues of power, control, exploitation, neglect, silencing, secrecy, corruption, to name but some, by making them visible helps resolve the tensions and feelings around these issues. Scapegoating, in this case the Black population, has constellated the complex of racism. Facing it would be the therapeutic approach towards a catharsis. Of course, if racism can be overcome, you might find that rivalry amongst subgroups, differences within groups, new power issues, etc will raise new scapegoating manifestations.

Helmut: Does Jungian Typology relate in any way to groups?

P & A: Type is not a fixed thing. Human preferences change over time, as a person develops, achieves increased consciousness and individuates. Type preferences also seem to be driven by persona considerations. That does not deny the usefulness of psychological type in many situations of needing to understand the human psyche. Human and group development will always be a development of the inferior junction. That is where change is required. We could imagine, that if members of a coherent collective, a group or subgroup completed a type questionnaire, that the group's persona would find its dominant expression.

Helmut: Your lectures and workshops during this visit have aptly demonstrated the power captured in group consciousness, the potential to liberate creativity, to facilitate change, to bridge culture and social differences and to foster group development. It felt to me like experiencing the, hidden gold in shadow dynamics—real transformation. We are grateful for your initiative and generosity in making the time and effort available to work with us and look forward to more future work, in raising consciousness in groups.

P & A: We feel excited by the kinds of people we have met and working in South Africa with more diversity and an experiential stance would be our hope and next objective. You see, there is a similarity to analysis and looking at your South African experience. From a psychological perspective, healing and transformation come through suffering and there has been too much suffering already. Hopefully we will be able to contribute to the healing.

Helmut: Hamba Gashle. Go well, Pilar and Arthur, and thank you for such introspective perspectives.