This is of course an impossible task, and the prevalence of unremitting and suffocating modern psychological symptoms — anxiety, depression, mood swings, and a thousand other ways of bureaucratically and biopolitically organizing human suffering — suggests its inadequacy.

Symptoms are experienced as an itch that won’t go away, so we medicate, talk therapeutically, escape; chase thrills, the chatter of unconscious and normative but tense, frantic, manic brands of socializing; sex, alcohol, God, oblivion.

We never ask: what does this symptom want? Whose voice does it belong to? And furthermore: what does it want to change? What violence, whether economic, social, personal, or some combination, does it cry out against? What ideal world does it crave, and whose impossibility mourn? Whose love?

Maybe we’re afraid to take our symptoms seriously because we know how difficult it would be to admit the necessities and concomitant impossibilities of their wants. Maybe we really do exist in an age of “capitalist realism” where any other way of living, any other social order, any other (inter-and-transversal)subjective constitution is intuitively known to be impossible. So why try? Why not shush the needy, needing voice which says “enough! enough!” After all, what can be done? A starving child implores: feed me! And a haggard mother, in a ramshackle house in a deserted neighborhood, angrily tells it to cut the chatter.

Not just impossible, but terrifying. There’s a tension between our wants — our spiritual needs — and our perceived need to survive, what we must do and become in order to survive in a most basic psychological sense. The courtyard haven with its dopamine-injecting furnishings, its relative warmth. The body still shivers but it fears even more the outside, homelessness, friendlessness, addiction.

Asking the psychological atheist to open to God in the face of the Other is like asking the cornered dog to lay down, expose its belly, see if the stranger brandishing a pipe in this dark back alley has more to give than violence and the uncaring channeling of the face and callous hand of the neoliberal marketplace.

Protect your own! You are the one and only. The Other is merely another one and only.

[Adapted from an unpublished paper written during my first year of graduate coursework in psychology.]

[For a great and revealing interview with an excellent black metal artist which echoes some of my thinking, check this out: http://www.invisibleoranges.com/paysage-d-hiver-interview/ ]

“To deny or omit pathologizing from the study of the soul denies the soul this area of its phenomenology, refusing this mode of its life, this language of its expression, this means of reflecting itself.” — James Hillman

At a “black metal” concert, you’re likely to experience a few baseline phenomena: low-lighting, an emphasis on darkness, often held in a basement type setup with minimal stage elevation; hooded or face-painted performers, an emphasis on anonymity or anti-traditional representations of humanity; musical rawness/low fidelity, penetrating and loud instrumentality, an emphasis on lack of polish and on sonic intensity. From the crowd, there will probably be a solemn sort of reverence and acutely focused attention toward the stage and its performers, often mixed with an excited energy and scattered vocal expressions — affirming yells, piercing shrieks. Many will raise their fists or hands in the “devil horns” motion as a gesture of approval. The energy is traditionally “masculine” as it’s conceived in popular culture — forceful, expressive of a general sense of power, though an equally important hallmark of the experience lies in the nuanced and subtle configurations of the music’s rhythmic flow; for all its theatricality and intensity, black metal grounds its spirit in the thick, sulphuric, labyrinthine welter of a guitar, percussion, and vocal-based mosaic.

The genre — a subgenre of heavy metal — has roots in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but first reared its head as a distinct sound and subculture in the mid to late ’80s, with releases from bands such as Venom (who coined the name), Mercyful Fate, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and Bathory (Patterson, 2014). Since that time it’s been, musically as well as ideologically, a consistent and in many ways conservative movement. Despite this conservatism, controversy has also been a regular companion to its development, born out of a largely elitist, misanthropic, reactionary desire to overthrow Judeo-Christian values and reinstate a more pre-Christian paganism, or even a Christianity-derived Satanism. A cursory look at its history, especially in Norway and other parts of Scandinavia, will reveal scattered instances of church burnings, murder, suicide, racism, and a general disregard for normative cultural values and ideals (Patterson, 2014). A spirituality born from this anti-social cauldron of adolescent rebellion (many of its forerunning figures were teenagers when they began) and regressive or transgressive ideologies may seem unlikely, or at least questionable in its ethical dimensions, but rock music — and specifically black metal — as a form of spiritual, archetypal expression, particularly in a secular, post-Christian society, will be explored in the following pages. Scholarship on the socio-political origins and motivations of a heavy metal spirituality has been conducted by Martin Morris (2014) in his essay “Negative dialectics in music: Adorno and heavy metal,” but the focus here will remain largely on an archetypal depth psychology reading of the black metal movement.

1. The Black Metal Concert

The philosopher Charles Taylor has suggested in his book A Secular Age that the “rock concert” is a kind of lingering “religious” gathering in a secular, disenchanted world:

“But at the rock concert […] what is shared is something else. Not so much an action, as an emotion, a powerful common feeling. What is happening is that we are all being touched together, moved as one, sensing ourselves as fused in our contact with something greater, deeply moving, or admirable; whose power to move us has been immensely magnified by the fusion. This brings us back into the category of the “festive”, which I invoked above: moments of fusion in a common action/feeling, which both wrench us out of the everyday, and seem to put us in touch with something exceptional, beyond our- selves. Which is why some have seen these moments as among the new forms of religion in our world.” (Taylor, 2007, pp. 482–83)

The mode of being at a rock concert, and more specifically a black metal concert, even resembles religious rituals of more established spiritualities. Communal attention is directed to the performers on stage, as the “priests” of the gathering. The musicians themselves are often self-describedly not the focus or the direct cause of the event, as priests in the Christian tradition are only receptacles or mouthpieces for the Word of God. Black metal musicians frequently wear “corpse-paint,” a black and white paint mixture that covers the face. The point of this masking of self is to allow the ritual manifestation of a greater intelligence or entity, as explained by “Dagon” of the band Inquisition:

“The ritual paint is more than a tradition in Black Metal and more than a simple image to uphold. It is an image of disconnection from yourself and a manifestation of the occult soul. In essence, you are being turned inside out the moment you put on the paint, just like ancient civilizations have done for thousands of years in rituals of death, war, magic and music. This has carried into modern times and it did not start with Black Metal.” (Williams, 2013)

The black metal concert, like the rock concert for Taylor, is a sort of haven where the “death of God” and the hegemony of modernist reason hold less sway, because personified archetypal forces of the psyche — forces such as frustration, destruction, and despair — are lived communally through movement and through the visceral physical characteristics of the music, from the harshly distorted and amplified guitars to the inhuman shrieks of the black metal vocalist and the ritualistic consistency and frenetic pace of the pounding drums — and to the presentation, to the corpse-paint and other atmosphere-setting theatrics. Participants in the live black metal ritual are “knocked back” by this extremity of sound and conviction (a point to which the paper will return); they are invited and even impelled to join in the dance, the experience, as conduits for the forces of psyche which both Christian and secular society have no name or room for.

The black metal concert travels a path which avoids the trap of reason’s potential to de-legitimize mythical experience or sweep the rug from under it. Its path is physical extremity and in-action communal participation rather than an intellectual theology. There is no litany at the black metal concert; although there may be frequent mention of Satan or anti-Christian sentiments, the primary mode of “worship” is visceral and physical, involving the body first. The music is not a preamble to the sermon, as in many Christian churches; it is the sermon. Destructive archetypal forces are summoned through the body rather than through intellectual abstraction. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2013) describes this movement and this becoming in his book Phenomenology of Perception: “just as the faithful in Dionysian mysteries invoke the god by imitating the scenes of his life, […] the god is there when the faithful no longer distinguish themselves from the role they are playing, […] when their body and their consciousness are entirely dissolved into the myth” (p. 166). For Merleau-Ponty, the expressive “gesture” is not separate from the “intention” — the gesture is the intention, manifested externally. The black metal concert, therefore, provides an experiential stage for spiritual communion between performers and audience; there is a communal beckoning toward the enactment of a myth.

2. The Failure of the Christian Myth

Although Morris has noted the similarities between Christian and black metal religious rituals (Morris, 2014, p. 11), he also notes that the teleological message is inverted. Where Christianity looks to God for salvation, metal presumes no salvation is possible or perhaps necessary; it may seek to affirm and channel demonic forces — e.g. Speedwolf’s song “I Am the Demon” (Encyclopaedia Metallum) — it may seek to drum up a Dionysian revelry, observable in the frantic movement of the concert’s participants — violent head-banging and moshing — but it has no transcendent salvific focus and it is directly opposed to the Christian telos. It is an immanent spirituality, and if it seeks to conjure a presence, if invocation is the goal, it is an invocation of immanent psychical forces.

Hillman states that a religion is successful to the extent that it manages to provide a container for the suffering and pathos of its adherents. He goes on to say that “if, as some report, the Christ vehicle no longer carries our culture’s religious requirements, then it can no longer contain our pathologizings either” (Hillman, 1997, pp. 96–97). What Hillman points to here is an alleged failure on the part of the Christian myth to capture with adequacy the situation of the psyche in modernity. He writes, “because Christ resurrects, moments of despair, darkening, and desertion cannot be valid in themselves […] our stance toward depression is a priori a manic defense against it” (Hillman, 1997, p. 98). The significance of a “metal spirituality” in this contextual light is its focus on negation for its own sake, on its own terms, without recourse to a teleological end-goal of transcendence or salvation. It refuses to engage in what transpersonal psychologist John Welwood calls “spiritual bypassing”:

“These spiritual practitioners […] seemed to be using meditation or their spiritual involvements to bypass certain kinds of personal, emotional ‘unfinished business.’ There is a certain temptation, which I can observe in myself as well, to try to use spiritual practice to rise above the difficulties of unresolved personal problems and emotions. Perhaps this is connected with a movement in us, traditionally called ‘spirit.’” (Welwood, 1984, p. 64)

Rather, black metal is in some sense a phenomenological exploration of the “demonic” side of the unconscious and its archetypal manifestations. It opposes contemporary Christian culture because it cannot find a portal through which to express these archetypal forces. There is perceived to be no room in the Christian myth for modern themes of alienation, depression, hatred, or suicide, which does not simultaneously attempt to repress these valid and perhaps necessary reactions (at least in the realm of the imaginal) to the existential climate (for an elaborated hypothesis on this situation extending into the socio-political realm, see the Morris article). For Hillman, “a complex must be laid at the proper altar, because it makes a difference both to our suffering and perhaps to the God who is there manifesting” (Hillman, 1997, p. 104). For many in the black metal scene, according to their existential and psychological situation, Lucifer and other more pathologizing archetypes appear to guard the “proper altar.” Lucifer/Satan can be named as a “pathologizing archetype” in that he occupies the position in the Christian mythical structure as the being who defies God and seduces Eve into eating the forbidden fruit — he is the defiant one and the one who brings sin into the world. Symbolically, Lucifer is emblematic of rebellion (in tandem with Morris’s socio-cultural treatment) as well as the dark sphere of the psyche related to the concept of sinfulness (with which, traditionally speaking, much of black metal lyricism and imagery is concerned).

American black metal band Woe seeks to invoke the proper altar with the song “Alone in our Failures,” where they bemoan the “positivity myths” and seek archetypal expression of the forces of destruction, which are held within: “A spell for the death of man / A spell for disease we’ve never known / Dispel all myths of hope and joy / Unleash the beast we hold within” (Encyclopaedia Metallum). Importantly, black metal does not create negativity, it merely seeks to give voice to what is already immanently there, chained and silenced. The Finnish band Behexen refers to Jesus Christ as “the impotent king” (Encyclopaedia Metallum), echoing the impropriety of the Christ archetype for their situation. The popular Norwegian band Burzum warns listeners: “Beware of the light / It may take you away / To where no evil dwells / It will take you away / For all eternity / Night is so beautiful / (We need her as much as we need Day)” (Encyclopaedia Metallum).

Behexen turns from denying Christ to affirming Lucifer in the song “Luciferian Will,” where they expound the necessity of immersion in this dark and chaotic archetype: “As for us getting lost is a victory / Inevitable part of the path of your gnosis” (Encyclopaedia Metallum). Behexen and other black metal bands seek, as Hillman implies culture must do, to create a space for depression and other negative elements of the psyche, a space that does not repress, sublimate, or attempt to transform these psychic forces, a space for expression and being that honors the validity of this area of the soul’s phenomenology. The metal concert opens a pathway for this immanent experience of Lucifer, or whatever name is given to the particular archetypal dynamism. Regarding the immanent spiritual experience, Hillman states:

“If Gods reach us through afflictions, then pathologizing makes them immanent, opening the psyche for them to enter; thus pathologizing is a way of moving from transcendental theology to immanent psychology. For immanence is only a doctrine until I am knocked back through symptoms by these dominant powers, and I recognize that in my disturbances there really are forces I cannot control and yet which want something from me and intend something with me.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 105)

This conception of the power of immanent forces is congruent with what Dagon of Inquisition has in mind for the live black metal experience. Although there is no recognition of the act in the sense that archetypal psychology would frame things — a depth psychological perspective — the essence of the experience is intact. It is a channeling of something, some force, whether supernatural or flowing from a realm of unconscious dynamics, and this force or constellation of forces is something which finds little creative expression in modern society, which it may be argued is structurally influenced by the Christian worldview, whether remaining explicitly or thoroughly Christian or not.

3. Spiritual Ethics

As Joel Cotterell (2013) notes in his essay “This is Armageddon — The Dawn Motif and Black Metal’s Anti-Christian Project,” black metal is an adversarial project. Even its “dawn” is symbolized by Lucifer, the light-bringer who opposes the authority of God, rather than a re-emergence of Christ and Christian values (Cotterell, 2013, p. 100). This naturally leads to the question of what will replace the Christian system. However, for black metal, the death of God and Christianity is enough of a project for this moment in history. This may explain the “ethical difficulties” of black metal culture. Though it is resolute in its antithetical mission, it does not posit a “next step” in the sense that Nietzsche does with his allegory of the camel, the lion, and the child (Nietzsche, 1998). For black metal as a whole there is no child, no purified beginning under a new mythical structure. Perhaps, it may be asserted, the whole value of black metal is in completing the project of destruction, in seeing it through, before a new structure is raised. The positing of a new structure prior to the destruction of the old may be what Hillman refers to as the “rage to live,” a kind of “secularized hope” which thinks of life in terms of quantity and medical literalism. It may be argued that black metal is, for Hillman, concerned with “religious hope” — hope which “implies the sacrifice of all hoping” (Hillman, 1964, p. 155). The only way to circumvent a manic defense against psychological death is to die unreservedly to the self. Though some in black metal may take this literally, it is clear from the intentions of a band like Inquisition and many others in the field that a literal, “medical” death is not the topic at hand, but a spiritual death that can occasion a meeting between the small, egoic self and psychological forces which exceed it, forces which can nourish it, forces which can help it into health by killing it off. As Hillman states, “To get over a disease, one must quite literally ‘get over’ it by transcending it, that is, by dying. The only hope for cure lies in the death of the ill personality. Health requires death” (Hillman, 1964, p. 157). It may even be argued that it is not the Christ archetype which fails, but a literalist, materialist culture’s appropriation of this myth, glossing over the death and suffering of Christ, failing to allow it its own space to breathe and give sense to life, because of a total annihilation of any meaning in death in the spiritual sense.

In his book Suicide and the Soul, Hillman discusses traditional approaches to the “problem” of suicide — from domains such as theology, sociology, medicine, and those concerned with law. For Hillman, these social institutions fail to take into account the experience of suicide, or more specifically of suicidal ideation, of imagining suicide. Prevention and restriction are the automatic responses of these domains based on what Hillman calls their “root metaphor” — medicine, for instance, has the preservation of literal biological life as its ultimate concern; it is not concerned with psychical experience. What is required for Hillman, in order to understand the problem of suicide, is to understand its psychological meaning, the “experience of death as met in the soul, its meanings, images, and emotions, its import in psychic life” (Hillman, 1964, p. 55). A similar case can be made for the general, imaginal, experiential meanings of the “morbid” topics explored within black metal. These are not literal explorations of phenomena in the world — when a “depressive” black metal band composes songs, lyrics, and overall imagery concerned with suicide, it is an artistic and “soulful” (psychical) exploration of this phenomenon rather than a medical one. And according to Hillman the ultimate goal of a soulful exploration of this kind is not literal death, but transformation; it is not a saying no to life but a saying no to this way of life: “death appears in order to make way for transformation. […] What is called death by the neurotic mainly because it is dark and unknown is a new life trying to break through into consciousness; what he calls life because it is familiar is but a dying pattern he tries to keep alive” (Hillman, 1964, p. 68). The Swedish band Setherial echoes this interpretation directly in the song “…Of Suicide” — “Ominous void, black as coal / I turn to face myself, a cold and empty shell / A heart of ice, born of lies / The veil is torn, in death I’m reborn” (Encyclopaedia Metallum). Mortuus from Sweden point to a similar truth in “Grape of the Vine” — “With eyes open wide / The fruit is like the grape of the vine / Death becomes the mother of life” (Encyclopaedia Metallum).

If Hillman’s position is assumed to be correct, what does this spell for a society which pushes away as grotesquely taboo all talk and imagination/ideation of topics like suicide, and other similarly dark and stigmatized realms of the soul? The important point, as alluded to earlier in reference to Woe’s lyrics, is that these forces are here, held within, and so the question is not whether or not these forces exist, but what do we do with them, especially if they cannot be controlled:

“No longer is ego able to cope by will power with tough problems in a real world of hard facts. Our falling apart is an imaginal process, like the collapse of cities and the fall of heroes in mythical tales — like the dismemberment of Dionysian loosening which releases from overtight constraint, like the dissolution and decay in alchemy. The soul moves, via the pathologized fantasy of disintegration, out of too-centralized and muscle-bound structures which have become ordinary and normal, and so normative that they no longer correspond with the psyche’s needs for nonego imaginal realities which ‘perturb to excess.’” (Hillman, 1997, p. 109)

Black metal, and especially black metal as live ritual, is a container for dissolution, a quickening and beckoning of the myth of death, of death as imaginal process — ultimately in service of life, but containing no resurrection fantasy implicitly, seeking only spiritual disintegration, falling apart of ego, and the dying of old patterns. Although the genre has faced and continues to face ethical concerns related to a “literal” enactment of some of these imaginal themes, it may be contended that at large, black metal’s subcultural movement has emerged out of psychical necessity; its altar has been raised not as a devotional structure to negativity per se but as a stage for “dealing with” the struggles of existence in a culture which offers few viable alternatives or channels of expression.

References

Cotterell, J. (2013). This is armageddon: The dawn motif and black metal’s anti-Christian project. Helvete — A Journal of Black Metal Theory, 1, 95–101.

Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives. Retrieved from <http://www.metal-archives.com>

Hillman, J. (1964). Suicide and the Soul. New York: Harper & Row.

Hillman, J. (1997). Re-Visioning Psychology. (2nd ed.). New York: William Morrow Paperbacks.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). Phenomenology of Perception. (Donald Landes, Trans.). London: Routledge.

Morris, M. (2014). Negative dialectics in music: Adorno and heavy metal. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 1–18.

Nietzsche, F. (1998). Thus Spake Zarathustra — A Book for All and None. Retrieved from <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm>

Patterson, D. (2014). Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult. Los Angeles: Feral House.

Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Welwood, J. (1984). Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16(1), 63–73.

Williams, R. (2013). Interview: Inquisition’s Dagon. Retrieved from http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2013/10/31115/

One of my favorite TV moments comes in season 4 of the FX show Louie. Two-parter “In the Woods” tackles themes as particular as marijuana use by teens and as universal as having the presence of mind to do things differently than your parents did, to put a halt to cycles of violence. I cry every time I watch the episodes, which is also something of a ringer I put new romantic partners through. Watch this with me! The episodes beautifully explore the struggle around following routinized patterns of behavior you’ve learned from others, versus taking the time and energy — and having the emotional ‘space’ — to figure out what the hell you should do to bring more love into the world. For me, there’s something very ‘pure’ and emotionally affecting around a simple decision, or perhaps an insight, to choose a different path and promote healing, disrupting a system of cyclical violence (in this case, an interpersonal system). The fact of Louis C.K.’s sexually harassing behavior in the comic world adds a tragic twist to what these episodes have meant for me, but I believe they stand on their own, as well.

In the real world, it can be tricky to decide where to ‘intervene’ in some sort of healing process, if you feel called to do that. Maybe you’re a psychologist, a teacher, an artist, a community or political activist. Maybe you’ve decided the world could be a better place and you’re committed to social justice, whatever that looks like. Maybe you suffer and you’re interested in personal healing. Maybe you wonder if the two could meet — if the educator Parker Palmer was right in saying that vocation is where one’s gift meets the world’s need.

My own ‘heritage’ surrounding this question has two axes or lines of thinking. I got my undergraduate degree in English, where I was exposed to a great deal of postmodern and “poststructural” thinking, focused on things like deconstructing the Western view of the self and world, criticizing economic and cultural imperialism, et cetera. I wrote papers on things like culturally available responses to 9/11 in the book Falling Man by Don DeLillo, exploring how different people attempted to cope with the disaster, wrestling with fear, alienation, nihilism.

For my Masters degree in Psychology, I attended the University of West Georgia, a hub for so-called “Humanistic psychology.” Humanistic thinking was originally an outgrowth of the romantic and existential views of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger (against an “objectifying, dehumanizing” movement in the social sciences, which allegedly conceived of human beings as commodities or mechanistic objects — modeling themselves after the natural sciences). It met a powerful ally in the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s, when West Georgia’s program was founded. Continental philosophers like those mentioned became wedded to imported Eastern philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) and, I would argue, a general culture of American individualism and personal growth (see the Human Potential Movement).

Adages like Gandhi’s “be the change you want to see in the world” became a guiding light for a number of counter-culturally minded people, who sought to transform themselves and discover a kind of self that is connected to the earth, to other people, and to “God,” whatever that means (i.e. the “ground of Being” in some Eastern thought, rather than a theistic man-in-the-sky).

I don’t want to do violence to the political efforts of many people in Humanistic psychology, who were often critical of the Vietnam war and undoubtedly sought to bring a different world into existence — one focused on values like self-actualization, creativity, reckoning with mortality, and first-person human experience as fundamentally important, as opposed to so-called “third-person” perspectives such as behaviorism or cognitive psychology.

That said, many have criticized Humanistic psychology for failing to keep up with the sociopolitical times. The social theorist Nikolas Rose pointed out in the ’80s and ’90s that Humanistic values were eagerly absorbed into the same kinds of materialistic business ventures that Humanism traditionally sought to overcome through a revaluation of human existence toward love, community, and meaning (i.e. Heidegger’s critique of the instrumental capitalist notion of “standing-reserve,” the commodification of the earth and its resources toward materialistic, human ends). If a company could align itself with “self-actualization” in such a way that workers felt as though their labor was actually their “existential project,” a creative project of self-becoming and self-expression — well, all the better. Happy, inspired workers are a lot better than existentially frustrated or “mentally ill” workers.

This criticism matters because many argue, rightly I believe, that there are structural problems with Western society as it relates to human fulfillment, both in the “first world” (see: rates of mental illness and suicide, loneliness, et cetera.) and in “developing countries,” which are often exploited for their resources. Socioeconomic forces such as neoliberal capitalism have, for a philosopher like Jurgen Habermas, “over-coded” or invaded the lifeworld (life as it’s lived, for simplicity’s sake) of Western people, turning them into rationalistic, consumeristic subjects. Alternatively, as elaborated by social constructionists, neoliberalism has constructed a particular kind of person who is competitive, individualistic, and concerned with selling their own self as labor, as in the case that Rose makes (see also the work of Ken Gergen).

If an approach to healing does not address those structural problems, and in fact becomes appropriated by them, I have to ask the question: is it really counter-cultural? Will personal transformation really change the world?

There’s a number of potential avenues to explore regarding this question. One might be: is there a social consciousness associated with this personal transformation? Does it have, in the words of the Latin educator and social activist Paulo Freire, an understanding of critical consciousness? Is it merely self-serving, or does it account for the embeddedness of self in a world of relationships, both human and non-human (economic, geographic, architectural, and many others)? Has it lost a critical attitude toward oppressive sociopolitical and economic structures, perhaps including efforts of social activism and the rearrangement of traditional social boundaries (i.e. around issues of class, race, or institutional hierarchies)? It needn’t be blind to these factors, necessarily.

I don’t think that blithely turning away from personal transformation is any better than accepting it uncritically. There’s no doubt for me that a “transformed” person can make waves in the world around them, particularly if they are engaged with the world around them (through art, teaching, psychology, et cetera.). Transformed in this sense means, for me, owning one’s shadow projections in a Jungian sense (i.e., not blaming racial or class-based others for structural problems which always involve the self to some degree), embracing or working toward the capacity to love, following lines of creative self-expression, and other positive Humanistic values.

When faced with the question of whether the ‘proper’ method of transformation and healing is personal or political, I side with both — including a critical attitude toward both. Be critical toward personal growth: ask yourself if this is serving the status quo of the society you live in. Don’t be, like the example given in The New Buddhism by David Brazier, a ship fully prepared to sail, wasting away in a lonesome harbor. Don’t negate your self, but don’t negate the other, either, because they exist in constant relation. Conversely, be critical of too much criticism: ask yourself if this is enacting and reinforcing cycles of violence in the world around you, interpersonally or systemically. Although I do not want to confuse the local and personal with the larger scale of society, I also do not think that the two can be cleanly severed. And on the other hand, I do not want to confuse political activism with the exact same act as loving an other (though in many cases they may coincide, and that is beautiful).