Recently, many patients have expressed that things feel heavy and bleak now in the world. There seems to be “something in the air.” What they’re speaking to is a general cultural angst whereby people feel grim about a lot of things—the economy, racism, sexual violence, politics, the environment, and more. This cultural angst is the felt mood or experience of our times. While not everyone feels somber, my patients are naming something real.
The American Psychological Association’s 2026 Stress in America report found that 74 percent of adults identified the future of the nation as a significant source of stress. The shared sense of unease, dread, or anxiety about the direction of our society has numerous sources that may be understood as a crisis of trust.
Societal advancements like artificial intelligence (AI) and social media fuel excitement, coupled with skepticism or disdain because it’s no longer entirely clear what’s real or true. These same advancements are liberating in their efficiency, yet they push us to simplify through reaction buttons and character limits. Nuance flattens, reflection and discernment can be compromised, and there may be no time or space for complexity. That becomes the background layer of our cultural experience, forming what we call “the cultural unconscious.”
What Is the Cultural Unconscious?
You have likely heard about the personal unconscious—an individual’s memories, experiences, and perceptions that are forgotten, repressed, dissociated, or never fully registered but still leave an imprint. Perhaps you’ve heard of the collective unconscious, a shared psychological inheritance. It’s a reservoir of collective patterns, instincts, and experiences around what it means to be human, regardless of the time or place.
Lesser known is the concept of the “cultural unconscious,” the psychic space between the personal and the collective. It’s less universal than the collective unconscious but broader than the personal unconscious. Essentially, it bridges the two. Often, when we speak of culture, we mean what we’re aware of—think celebrities, lingo, and touchstones like 9/11. However, culture also has an unconscious aspect, often reflected in intense emotional responses.
The cultural unconscious is a collection of shared images, concerns, and unprocessed material in a group’s psyche. It can activate at the same time across many people, explaining why certain news stories, topics, and trends spread like wildfire, and everyone wants to weigh in.
In both the Lindsay Clancy case and the Cornell 7 case, many respond with their personal stories. These news pieces have activated the cultural unconscious partially because they touch shared archetypes and experiences—that of the good/bad mother and also the all-too-common experience of sexual violence. Approximately 800 people are harmed by sexual violence daily, according to RAINN, the anti-sexual violence organization and operator of the National Sexual Assault Hotline.1 And sexual violence is not limited to a particular gender, meaning almost everyone either experiences it themselves or knows someone who has.
How Cultural Complexes Take Hold
When a charged issue, such as sexual violence, touches the culture, many people become activated, or, in common parlance, feel “triggered” or “dysregulated.” My colleagues, psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Thomas Singer, and psychologist and Jungian analyst Sam Kimbles, identified and developed scholarship on “cultural complexes.”2 Just as a person can feel “taken over” by a complex (which you can read about in relation to the mother complex, feeling triggered, and the father complex), so, too, can a culture be taken over.
A reminder: Complexes are triggered by certain themes, carry strong emotion, act with autonomy, and pull people into reactions they can’t easily step back from. With a cultural complex, it takes hold of the people who comprise a group. When many are activated, it shows up in collective behavior, such as public outrage, scapegoating, polarization, or dogmatism.
We are struggling culturally to tolerate ambiguity and complexity, especially psychological complexity. Instead of holding conflicting realities, we hunker down with diagnoses, moral judgments, polarized views, and “all-good, all-bad” places. I am not asserting that diagnoses lack validity or that objective distinctions between good and bad behavior don’t exist. Rather, I emphasize how certainty in judgment, labels, and categories can be defensive, protecting us from discomfort and quelling our anxieties, especially during these charged times, while foreclosing reflection, curiosity, and understanding.
Unconscious Essential Reads
We live in cultural times where commentary and judgment dominate over reflection and understanding; where certainty is valued over curiosity. When we feel overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unsure about our cultural reality, we don’t contain it. It develops into a crisis of psychological containment and gets enacted through splitting, projection, intolerance, rigidity, and polarization. It manifests as a specific cultural complex such as the victim-perpetrator complex. To be clear, there are victims and perpetrators. Real harms have occurred, and we cannot brush them aside under the guise of a psychological mechanism. But the way it seizes the culture with such intensity suggests a complex is activating culturally.
People who have no connection to Lindsay Clancy or the Cornell 7 are expressing exceptionally strong opinions. Why? One explanation is that culturally, we haven’t learned to hold or integrate both poles of the victim-perpetrator complex. It can be easier to identify with one pole and disown the other—for instance, avoiding our own capacity for harm or “perpetration” or, conversely, our own vulnerability or “victimization.”
When these news stories arise, many people project their disowned self onto the “other,” which is why some call the Cornell 7 “monsters,” while Jane Doe is being ripped to shreds and receiving death threats. Each side is treated wholly as “right” or “justified,” rather than recognizing that humans are complicated and nuanced. Anyone who complicates the picture or raises those points feels threatening to people in the throes of the victim-perpetrator complex.
I am not challenging the desire for justice or accountability. I am drawing attention to the psychological toll of the cultural angst expressed through the complex, evident in the rigidity, intensity, speed, and attitude of total certainty. Such reactions diminish our capacity to embrace ambiguity and complexity, and to recognize there may be more than two sides to a story.
Responding to Cultural Complexes
One path forward is to begin recognizing and relating to the grip of cultural complexes—in this case, holding both poles of the victim-perpetrator complex. Each of us contains some capacity for vulnerability and for harm. Relating to each side of the cultural complex is a first step. Overidentifying with one pole of the complex does no one any good and often makes the world feel heavier and grim. To counter that, we need nuance and discernment. Yes, the world can be heavy, but it can also be light and joyful. You can acknowledge one while not discounting the other.
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