Irrational Hatred of Obama

I try not to mix my Jung with current events, at least not out loud, but I have been watching the irrational hatred of Obama. First it was amusing watching Jon Stewart spotlight those morons calling Obama every bad thing they could think of. It is tiresome, now. I’m an American expatriate living abroad and find myself often trying to explain embarrassing Americanisms, like McDonald’s, Corporate America and now gun-toting screamers who blame Obama for the end of the world.

We all have our weaknesses and shortcomings, our dark suspicions of ourselves, which if we kept in mind all day would incapacitate us. Instead we bury them, bury them deeply somewhere in the back of our minds. Jung calls these repressed doubts and fears the Shadow. June Singer writes that the shadow “consists of all those uncivilized desires and emotions that are incompatible with social standards… it is all that we are ashamed of.” (Boundaries of the Soul, 165). These desires and emotions build up over time and will eventually explode, usually on to someone else.

For millennia white societies have been exploding their (whacko irrational) fears on to black men. Even Jung admitted that he himself projected his shadow on to a black man. Marie Louise von Franz, looking back at thousands of years of fairy tales, points out that often a black man is invented by an evil character, the black man “being the usual symbol onto who one projects the black side of oneself” (Individuation in Fairy Tales, 13). When you see someone irrationally attacking Obama, pity the fool. He does not know that he is only spouting his own fears about himself.