The Collective Trauma Online Summit sought to explore how much we are haunted by our "cultural shadow"

The video above is the closing plenary of an extraordinary 9-day online event called the Collective Trauma Online Summit. The closing panel in the embedded video includes Thomas Hübl, Monica Sharma, Christina Bethell, William Ury & Robin Alfred (the introductions start at 2.00, and the questions begin at 12.00 mins, where the video above starts). But the conference in full featured voices like U-Lab’s Otto Scharmer, the integral philosophers Ken Wilber and Terry Patten, and many others.

Its organiser Thomas Hübl presents only this blurb on the site:

It is only through the reclamation of our cultural shadow and the integration of collective trauma, that we become a sentient whole, able to make the world anew, together.

So, what is collective trauma and what is a cultural shadow? On the latter, let’s go back to Jung:

The shadow is a term coined by Carl Jung to refer to the parts of ourselves that we suppress or reject. These are the traits that we dislike, often because we believe they are “bad” or “wrong,” or because we were admonished or punished when we exhibited them.

As we reinforced other aspects of ourselves, these disowned parts became incongruent with our perception of who we are, and we continued to suppress them. This shadow is often what’s in our way when we find ourselves engaged in self-sabotage.

Jung: “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”

The blogger above extends their definition of a “cultural shadow”

Collective Trauma, from Saatchi Art

When we repress our shadow, it becomes destructive. This is true on a personal level and on a collective level.

Stephen Diamond writes that

The shadow is most destructive, insidious and dangerous when habitually repressed and projected….The abject negativity and destructiveness of the shadow is largely a function of the degree to which the individual neglects and refuses to take responsibility for it, only inflaming its ferocity and pernicious power.

By pushing the speech — and speakers — we don’t like to the basements and margins, by failing to make room for them at the table of ideas, we give them more power.

Look at the shootings and bomb mailings last week; look just in this calendar year. In every context, the actors are people who were on the fringe, in the shadows, relegated into the darkness of our collective unconscious. They were the people we didn’t want to hear or see or deal with.

What we ignore doesn’t go away; it grows until it emerges and destroys.

We have been interested in questions of collective psychology, its traumas and potentials, a lot on A/UK. Much of our editorialising is concerned with the deep emotional injuries inflicted by our current social and economic system. Ecopsychologist Zhiwa Woodbury wrote entertainingly about it a few weeks ago (and more deeply here), but consider also Alex Evans’s Collective Psychology project, as well as Brian Eno on the collective power of choirs, or Douglas Rushkoff on collective instincts.