Occupy Psyche

Book excerpt: A contribution to the growing cannon of literature on the Occupy Movement, this collection of essays engages Jungian, archetypal, and depth psychological ways of understanding how Occupy is living in the collective imagination, or, how psyche is occupying collectives through the movement. The tension between the 99% and the 1% is amplified by some authors through images of the Villain and the Hero, Positive/Negative Father Complex, the body-head split, and notions of ensouled action versus degrees of soulessness. Other authors indwell the between spaces with storytelling, embodied imagining into the fractured skull of Scott Olsen, and questions of how to situate movement and its edges. Working alchemical stones of hope, this book is a dynamic conversation into the unconscious complexes of Occupy that remembers to cast a critical eye on the potential failings of its own epistemological structures.