How Carl Jung Can Help Argentina Charter A New Political Path

-Essay-

BUENOS AIRES — This year marks the 150th anniversary of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung’s birth. While that might seem a trivial anniversary in Argentina, where we are living through economic turmoil, political tensions and civic fatigue, it might also be precisely the moment to invoke his thinking.

Not out of intellectual nostalgia or devotion to depth psychology, but because Jung, in his quest to decipher the human soul, left us tools to reflect on our collective shadows, historical repetitions and unfinished process of maturing as a political community.

Jung was not a politician nor an ideologue. He was, above all, an explorer of the unconscious and mapmaker of the archetypes that inhabit each person — but also nations. His notion of “shadow” — which is what we deny, repress or reject in ourselves — is not limited to the individual. Nations also have shadows, he said. And when they fail to recognize them, they project themselves violently onto others: onto political adversaries, onto foreigners, onto anyone who thinks differently.

In Argentina, that shadow is long and persistent. We carry a history of fierce antagonisms, messianic promises and cyclical disappointments. We have oscillated, time and again, between redemptive hope and corrosive disenchantment, without taking the time or the maturity to examine our own dark zones.

Argentina’s shadow

Our politics often resemble a field of emotional projections rather than a rational and ethical exercise of power. The adversary is transformed into an enemy, criticism into betrayal, conflict into war, and debate into a symbolic lynching.

Jung warned that when people abdicate their ethical responsibility and delegate judgment to the masses or a charismatic leader, totalitarianism, in its many forms, takes root. He wasn’t referring only to authoritarian political regimes, but also to cultural climates where emotionality replaces discernment, and primitive archetypes — the savior, the apocalypse, the enemy — take over the public discourse. At such moments, democracies weaken not only for institutional reasons but also because the collective soul stops thinking and surrenders to impulse.

We keep repeating, as destiny, what we do not want to accept as history.

Today’s Argentina seems to be moving in that direction. Politics has lost its profound symbolic dimension. It no longer summons, commands or guides; it has largely become a spectacle, a reaction or a distorted mirror of our own fears and frustrations.

In this context, Jung’s categories are not an academic luxury but a compass. They remind us that it is not just about changing names or programs but beginning a process of collective individuation: of integrating our contradictions, ceasing to divide ourselves between “good and bad,” and finally accepting that all transformation begins with the recognition of what we do not want to see.

A compass

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” Jung stated. That powerful and austere phrase could be a motto for our time, because we keep repeating, as destiny, what we do not want to accept as history.

We find it difficult to think in terms of process, continuity or responsibility. We are more seduced by the leap, the break, the refoundation. But any refoundation without self-knowledge is just another cycle, with new names and old ghosts.

Celebrating Jung is not an act of erudition: It’s a provocation. It invites us to stop looking outside for answers we can only find within. It reminds us that politics is not just a matter of structures but of subjectivities. And that a republic cannot sustain itself without citizens willing to look at themselves without masks.

Argentina doesn’t need more heroes. It needs conscious individuals. It doesn’t need more enemies. It needs community. It doesn’t need more diagnoses. It needs integration. Perhaps, as Jung intended, the way out is neither on the right nor the left, neither in the past nor the future, but in that middle ground where the individual embraces his or her shadow. That is the point where one starts building things with others, with humility, courage and humanity.