“África, o fio”: sobre a presença ancestral no inconsciente

Abstract

Questioning the oppositional thinking that ended up exaggerating the differences between Africa and “West”, we intend to 1) approach the sense of ancestry in traditional Africa, specially through the work of the Ghanaian philosopher Kwase Wiredu, 2) present the notion of “ances- tral complex [or image]” in Jung, in order to reflect on the “ancestral presence” in the Jungian unconscious and on its role in psychic dynamics. Our objective is to test a “transcultural communication” between traditional African thinking and Jungian thinking, based on the assumption that there is something common between them. We conclude that a clinic founded on the principle of ancestry does not deny the roots of Jungian thought, on the contrary, it deepens an aspect of Jung’s work that at his time suffered much criticism, given the colonialist look of the European world towards the Africas and the difficulties of the psychology in treating the so-called “religious and anomalistic phenomena” as “psychic facts”.