Breaking The Plates: Fracturing Fictions and Archetypal Imaginings

by Jordan Shapiro, S. Asher Sund, Marcus Quintaes

Four decades ago, archetypal psychology offered a different way of viewing all things psychological. As radical and useful as this move was forty years ago, however, it is time to question the sustainability of tenets like these for our contemporary world. As the highly turbulent 21st Century enters its second decade, it is time to ask ourselves “why archetypes?” and “why images?” This book explores these questions through a variety of topics, ranging from clinical psychology, death, cultural colonialism, paranoia, feminism, ecology, education, capitalism to politics. This book is committed to the fact that an archetypal approach should not estrange us from mundane reality; it should facilitate a stronger, more complex, and more active involvement with it. This is what archetypal studies are setting out to do—yes: to do.

142 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 27, 2011

About the author

Jordan Shapiro, PhD, is father to two children and step-father to two more. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner Amanda Steinberg. He's core faculty in Temple University’s Intellectual Heritage and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies programs. He’s senior fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and nonresident fellow in the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. The New Childhood (2018) received wide critical acclaim and has been published in 11 languages. Father Figure: How to be a Feminist Dad (Little, Brown Spark 2021) offers a norm-shattering perspective on fatherhood, family, and gender essentialism. The New York Time's Book Review called it "utterly mind-blowing." It has been published in 6 languages.