Revealing the Other Side - News Release

May 22, 2012

Just Published by Fisher King Press

Lifting the Veil
by Jane Kamerling and Fred Gustafson

The veil is not just a female garment to hide, protect, or humble Muslim women, but the curtain behind which resides the feminine principle, repressed in both East and West. Beneath the veil resides the unconsciousness of both cultures that become manifested in the politics of today.

The veil has emerged in the twenty-first century as an international symbol that holds a variety of meanings. The veil can be understood as merely the customary dress of Middle Eastern women, a religious expression, or a political statement. For some women donning the veil represents male dominance. For others the veil signifies self-determination and independence in reaction to the threat of Western ideology. The veil powerfully holds the polarity of attitudes and beliefs and invites the projections of psychological complexes in both Western and Islamic societies, fueling conflict between and within each culture.

To lift the veil of ignorance, it is necessary to understand both the Islamic and Western world views. Many Westerners know little about the history of the cultures, religions, and nations of the Islamic world. History classes in the U.S. are focused on American and European history and how Europe discovered, influenced, conflicted, and shaped American culture. Within that specific framework, everything the West knows about the world and its history tends to be viewed through a Western lens, influenced and molded within Christian ideology. All else is viewed as foreign and risks the possibility of being misunderstood since it seems different and is evaluated within our limited worldview.

From a historical and psychological perspective, Lifting the Veil explores and expands our knowledge of Islam, and the repressed feminine principle within both Eastern and Western cultures.

Jane Kamerling, L.C.S.W. is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst and member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts and Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts. She is a faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and has designed and co-directed the Clinical Training is a senior analyst who has lectured both nationally and internationality on the relationship of Jungian psychology to culture, mythology and religion. She has a full time analytical practice in Chicago.

Fred R. Gustafson, D. Min. is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst (Zurich) and member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts. He is a senior training analyst with the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and a clergy member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He has lectured both nationally and internationally on subjects related to Analytical Psychology and religion. He is the author of The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln: An Ancient Image for Our Present Time, Dancing Between Two Worlds; Jung and the Native American Soul and The Moonlit Path: Reflections on the Dark Feminine.

Lifting the Veil 
First Edition
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Fisher King Press (May 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1926715759




Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, and a growing list of alternative titles. www.fisherkingpress.com

Tom Singer on Lifting the Veil

On Lifting the Veil

by Thomas Singer, MD

In her chapter “The Symbol of the Veil,” Jane Kamerling writes in this book of her seeing an Arab woman standing alone on top of a hill as night approached in the desert forty-five years ago: “Hidden under the robes that concealed her body was a world unknown to me.” This becomes the central, symbolic image of the authors’ quest of Lifting the Veil. Many meanings of this multivalent and potent symbol emerge in the journey to unveil to Westerners the foreign world of Arab Muslims. There is one potential, perhaps unintended, meaning of “Lifting the Veil” that occurred to me while reading this unique study. Could it be that the title of the book also boomerangs back onto the long veiled Jungian tradition of only looking at the world through our own very particular point of view—which is frequently quite blind and deaf to what is happening around us?

The point that I want to underline in this preface is that our own Jungian veil is being lifted in this book and others like it that are beginning to appear in our literature. This veil is our longstanding attitude toward the outer, collective world. Burned by his disastrous experience of speaking out on the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and his ill timed foray into discussing the still intriguing notion of national character, Jung and his followers for the next fifty years or so remained relatively quiet, perhaps even in retreat from, political, social, and cultural issues in favor of a primary, introverted focus on the individual and the individuation process. Most commentary about more collective matters used the theory of archetypes to explain what was happening in the psyche of the world. Over time, it has become rather tiring to me to see in our tradition how most collective events are reduced to or interpreted as some appearance of the Shadow or the Self or the Hero or the Feminine. The mention of archetypal patterns in collective life has begun to sound to me as if we can’t stop building our own theoretical Walmarts on the outskirts of increasingly homogenized urban and rural landscapes. As with globalization itself, the Jungian vocabulary for describing the world has become less and less meaningful as the particularity of place, landscape, history, economics, ethnicity, and every other distinguishing cultural characteristic gets ignored or glossed over in our universalizing, archetypal constructs.

This book reverses that trend by taking into account those levels of the psyche that Jung himself had outlined in a 1926 diagram of the psyche in which he displayed an almost geological/evolutionary vision of the psyche. At the very top of the diagram was the tiny ego, embedded in the family. In successive layers of the psyche as it plunged underwater, Jung indicated ever deepening realms in the following order: clans, nations, large groups (European man for example), primate ancestors, animal ancestors in general, and, at the very bottom of the human psyche lay the “central fire.”

The vast middle range of the psyche which included everything between clans and large groups that Jung himself diagrammed in 1926 was mostly ignored by those next generations of Jungians who followed in his footsteps. Their emphasis has been on the individual above and/or the archetypal realm in the lower depths which presumably emanate out of the “central fire.” I believe it is fair to say that the Jungians have mostly veiled themselves from taking into full consideration the reality and importance of the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the psyche as it resides in individuals, clans, tribes, nations, and the world.

This book is not only making an effort to unveil the world of Arab Muslims to the Western world, it is participating in the unveiling of Jungians and the Jungian point of view to a much broader way of understanding the psyche of individuals and groups. It takes into account the vicissitudes of place, history, culture, and all those forces that shape the psyche of the collective and the individual.

If Jung was right that the human race hangs by the thin thread of the human psyche, exploring and understanding the cultural or social level of the psyche in all its complexities and differences is an essential undertaking in making that thread a little stronger. Our misadventures in the Middle East bare ample evidence to how costly it can be when we fail to understand how different Americans and other westerners are from much of the world. This book takes a big step in the direction of exploring and understanding these essential levels of the human psyche and I salute Jane Kamerling and Fred Gustafson for their effort at “lifting the veil.”

Lifting the Veil will begin shipping on May 15, 2012

Advanced Orders Welcomed

Thomas Singer, M.D. is a Jungian Diplomate Analyst with the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, California. He currently serves as Editor of the Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Culture Series for Spring Journal Books and his new contributions in that series appear in Psyche and the City: A Soul's Guide to the Modern Metropolis, Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche and Placing Psyche: Exploring Cultural Complexes in Australia.                                   

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 

and a growing list of alternative titles. 

www.fisherkingpress.com

Lifting the Veil

Fisher King Press to publish 
Lifting the Veil

by Jane Kamerling and Fred Gustafson

Available May 15, 2012 - Advance Orders Welcomed

Lifting the Veil: Revealing the Other Side brings awareness to the unconscious and underlying dynamics that are reflected in the history and present day conflicts between the Islamic and Western worlds. The devastation and shock of 9/11 reached every community in America. It raised questions never before considered. Inspired by that event, research became critical to organize our thinking and make sense out of nonsense and organization out of chaos. Political literature addressing the dynamics leading up to the catastrophe of the collapse of the Twin Towers has been prolific as the urgency to understand the Islamic world has increased. International relations theory offers a variety of concepts of why and how nations may respond to one another for expansion, defense or peace. These theories develop with objective quantifiable equations and leave no room for immeasurable, subjective variables. Perception is one of those variables that can not be left out of the equation when looking at what motivates nations and international diplomacy. As Jungian analysts, Gustafson and Kamerling analyze an underlying psychological dynamic that fuels the conflict between the west and the Islamic world. They have distilled information from a variety of readings, interviews, documentaries and personal experiences in the Islamic world.

Jane Kamerling, L.C.S.W. is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst and member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts and Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts. She is a faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and has designed and co-directed the Clinical Training is a senior analyst who has lectured both nationally and internationality on the relationship of Jungian psychology to culture, mythology and religion. She has a full time analytical practice in Chicago.

Fred R. Gustafson, D. Min. is a Diplomate Jungian Analyst (Zurich) and member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts. He is a senior training analyst with the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago and a clergy member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He has lectured both nationally and internationally on subjects related to Analytical Psychology and religion. He is the author of The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln: An Ancient Image for Our Present Time, Dancing Between Two Worlds; Jung and the Native American Soul and The Moonlit Path: Reflections on the Dark Feminine.

Product Details
* Lifting the Veil: Revealing the Other Side
* First Edition,160 pages, Paperback and eBook editions
* Publisher: Fisher King Press (May 2012)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1926715756
* ISBN-13: 978-1926715759

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including 

Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting-Edge Fiction, Poetry, 

and a growing list of alternative titles. 

www.fisherkingpress.com