İpek S. Burnett is a Turkish-American writer and psychologist who uses Jungian ideas to examine American democracy, violence, and innocence through a social justice lens. In this article, she suggests that American democracy is in what C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, called individuation: “the lifelong, nonlinear journey toward self-awareness, integration, and wholeness.” She argues that this process requires citizens to move beneath national myths into painful histories, contradictions, and shadow material in order to cultivate a more honest, loving, and inclusive democratic life.

Burnett draws on Adrienne Rich’s poem Diving into the Wreck to frame democratic renewal as a deep-sea descent beneath idealized stories—the “New World,” Manifest Destiny, the American Dream—toward what she calls “the thing itself and not the myth”: genocide and land theft, slavery and racism, structural inequality, and exclusions embedded from the outset, beginning with the Declaration’s limitation of rights to propertied white men.

I find her framing of democratic development as a lifelong, unfinished process of integration—conscious and unconscious, personal and collective—particularly clarifying. It invites the inclusion of shameful ancestral legacies and cultural trauma without paralysis. Yes, there is work to be done, and that work becomes more manageable when it is named plainly.

"For democracy to function effectively, it demands citizens’ commitment and engagement in shared visions. As in psychotherapy, partaking in collective purpose and responsibility necessitates trust, tolerance for frustration, complexity, and compromise. Even dissent, a key component of a healthy democracy, requires respect for difference, disagreement, and diversity. All of this makes empathy and moral imagination critical for a healthy democracy. These relational and ethical imperatives that sustain civic duties are deeply psychological. Without a strong psychological foundation, which both supports and is supported by healthy social conditions, democracy cannot function."

ARTICLE: Diving Into the Myth

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