WINTER PRESS

Jung vs Borg contends the industrial disruption of the outer world has been followed by a post-industrial disruption of the inner world. Prominent plans to merge humans and machines, focused on the joining of minds and computers, are shown to be outgrowths of this disruption.

This perspective propels the book’s critical assessment of the posthuman movement and leads to a depth psychological encounter with the cyborg—an image of human-machine hybridization that stands at the vanishing point on today’s techno-scientific horizon.

Building on its response to the loss of instinct in the industrial era, Jung’s psychology of the unconscious is simultaneously shown to occupy a pivotal position in the increasingly pressing counter-cultural confrontation with the soulless excesses of the post-industrial, digital era.  

Glen Slater is a core faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute where he has, most recently, chaired its Jungian and Archetypal Studies program.

His work as a teacher in depth psychology spans three decades. He has written numerous articles and book chapters in the areas of Jung and film, psychology and religion, and depth psychology and technology.

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Early Assessments of Jung vs Borg

“Many years ago C. G. Jung warned us that without an ‘imagination for evil’ we modern human beings were in danger of becoming instruments of the very evil we abhor. Glen Slater’s brilliant and passionate analysis of online culture and its insidious seductions of hyperreality, virtual companions, and cyber presences—all run by artificial intelligence—opens up that imagination in ways that are both terrifying and illuminating. To become conscious of these dehumanizing forces in our midst and how to combat their dissociative effects on the inner life of the soul should be a major focus of all depth psychological training in the 21st century. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of this book.”

Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., author of The Inner World of Trauma (Routledge, 1996) and Trauma and the Soul (Routledge, 2013).

“Slater brilliantly argues that the future posthumanists are promoting will sever our ties with the deeply human basis of being. To head in this direction is to become psychically “numbed,” a state of minimal being that is already pervasive to the point of being normative. Numbing makes us incapable of being satisfied with the actuality of events. We take residence in left-hemisphere cortical processes, becoming half-brained and cyborg-like. To resist these cyborg prospects, Slater extracts from the psychology of C. G. Jung the most useful bits. An exploration of the natural richness of the psyche and its fabulous imaginative power comprise the natural antidote to a bleak future defined by posthumanism.”  

Ginette Paris, Ph.D., author of Pagan Meditations (Spring Publications, 1986), Wisdom of the Psyche (Routledge, 2007), and Heartbreak: New Approaches to Healing (Mill City Press, 2011).