Jungian Dimensions of the Mourning Process, Burial Rituals and Access to the Land of the Dead

This innovative volume on the mourning process, burial rites and intimations of immortality offers diverse Jungian, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, depth-psychological perspectives, written predominantly by graduates and candidates of the CG Jung Institute Zürich.

The themes of this book are particularly relevant as they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic and other environmental disasters, when so many people die without a proper burial and are, thus, not properly commemorated with their status value. The contributors cover a wide range of subjects from their clinical observations attached to grief and loss in the prolonged mourning process, the meaning behind burial rites in cyclical and linear temporalities and an analysis of why certain dead are excluded from becoming ancestors. Unconscious processes such as dreams, archetypes and cultural complexes from the personal and collective unconscious are also presented and explored.

This collection will be of great interest to interdisciplinary academic researchers, Jungian analysts and students, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, anthropologists, cultural theorists and students interested in the mourning process, rites of passage, past and present burial practices and the imaginative, symbolic significance of the land of the dead.

Elizabeth Brodersen, PhD, is an accredited Jungian Training Analyst and Supervisor at the CGJI Zürich and currently a member of the Institute’s Research Commission. Elizabeth received her doctorate in psycho-social psychoanalytic studies at the University of Essex, UK, and works as a Jungian analyst in a private practice in Germany and Switzerland.