Many Americans today feel overwhelmed and overburdened by the relentless flood of conflicting narratives surging through society.
Every headline, opinion page, or dinner-table discussion seems to throb with urgency, distortion, and division. The more implausible the story, the more powerfully it grips the psyche. We are living in a crazy-making environment.
Here is an unsettling truth: much of what we are reacting to isn’t coming from real people at all. It comes instead from cultural complexes—impersonal forces made up of raw emotion, inherited trauma, and mythic stories. These complexes often masquerade as individuals, with people acting like puppet-like mouthpieces of their narratives.
Cultural complexes are composed of powerful emotions, selective memories, symbolic images, simplistic thoughts, and stereotyped behaviors. They function like splinter personalities of the American psyche—subpersonalities that walk and talk as if human, but in reality are psychic fragments possessing individuals and groups like mutating viruses. One of the greatest challenges we face is how to remain a real person—how not to be absorbed into a cultural complex as our primary identity.
These complexes are autonomous. They don’t ask for conscious permission to take hold of us. They possess. They trigger. They distort. Most destructively, they do not dialogue. They do not compromise. They clash like mythic titans in the group and individual psyche, vying for the soul of the individual and the soul of the nation. They are everywhere: in our institutions, in our media, in our homes—and inside us.
Featuring more than 100 symbolic images and text, A Field Guide to American Cultural Complexes: The Battleground of the Splintered American Psyche identifies the common species of cultural complexes that populate the American political, social, and psychological landscape. These complexes are
splinter personalities of the American psyche. When triggered, they behave like nuclear-powered sources of potent emotion, black-and-white thinking, self-reinforcing memory, and stereotypical behavior.
Praise for A Field Guide to American Cultural Complexes
“This is a book that has captured our individual and national psychic moment. Full of insight, mythic implications, clinical experience, and historical resonance. If you read and absorb this book you will have a deeper understanding of our world. It’s that simple."
BILL BRADLEY, Former US Senator, NBA Basketball Champion, and Author
“I have been a critic of the theory of the cultural complex. But the sheer chutzpah of this project blew away my intellectualized resistances. Now I get it. This is one of the most original and compelling studies of the American political psyche that has come our way for some time.”
ANDREW SAMUELS, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of The Political Psyche
“Tom Singer’s Field Guide makes visible the invisible forces driving mass polarization. . . . With compassion and urgency, he offers both a psychological and ethical lens through which to understand—and address—a dismembered American psyche.”
CAROLYN BATES, PhD, co-editor-in-chief, Journal of Analytical Psychology
“Innovative and thought-provoking—a way of looking that helps us understand the divisions in our society and how ‘performative politicians’ take advantage of them.”
BETTY SUE FLOWERS, former director, LBJ Presidential Library, and editor of The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell
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