Jennie’s presentation is called “The Heart in Exile: The Religious Function and the QAnon Conspiracy Theory”
The religious function is the heart of the psyche, pumping the life-blood of archetypal themes into psychological experience through symbols and images. This flow brings with it meaning and self-understanding through personal, numinous experience. When this image flow is obstructed by fundamentalism and/or conspiratorial thinking, the individual is disconnected from personal numinosity but not from the ceaseless injection of mythic images. The substitution of lesser experiences can occur in search of the ecstatic fear and fascination to be found in immediate contact with the heart of the psyche. This can create a condition analogous to exile for the symbolic function, a wandering repression projected onto people, political parties, and other “god” substitutions. The QAnon conspiracy is an example. The mythic images streaming through the Q-anon phenomenon function as a compensation to the fundamentalist attitudes which can create a sense of disconnection from intrinsic meaning. The graphic mythic themes are attempts to return the heart from its exiled condition and to its proper place at the center of the psyche. I will explore the mythic themes of QAnon and how, out of exile, they might be able to play a role in re-connecting the psychic heart to the symbolic function and thus the person to their own numinous experiences.
About Jennie
Jennie Wiley has an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and an MA in Depth Psychology, Jungian and Archetypal studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is a psychology professor for the SUNY system at Herkimer College and teaches both on campus and in the College in Prison program. She is the author of Hosting Radical Otherness, published in the journal Quadrant and Metaphor, Metaphysics, and Sphota published in the International Journal of Humanities, Art and Social Studies. Wiley is a dissertation candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute studying the QAnon conspiracy theory.