The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

Today,” Carl Jung wrote near the end of his life, “we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction.” Jung was addressing what had become, after the conclusion of World War II, the defining conflict of the times. As he saw it, the cold war reflected the state of modern humanity’s psyche, with the Iron Curtain as its prevailing symbol. “This boundary line bristling with barbed wire,” he wrote, “runs through the psyche of modern man, no matter on which side he lives.” Even “the normal individual . . . sees his shadow in his neighbor or in the man beyond the great divide.” Jung went so far as to assert that it had become “a political and social duty” to perceive “the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking at the individual life within.”