İpek S. Burnett
Against Anesthesia: Aesthetic Response, Psychological Activism, and Participatory Consciousness
War and violence, systemic inequality and injustice, political and corporate corruption, ecological collapse: contemporary life is increasingly shaped by forces that overwhelm perception, diminish feeling, and undermine moral imagination. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton observed, psychic numbing begins as a necessary defense in the face of trauma but can harden into a pervasive disengagement from both the world’s suffering and one’s own inner life. James Hillman identified a comparable condition arising from and continually sustained by the taken-for-granted routines and realities such as screen saturation, artificial lights, noise pollution, tranquilizers, stimulants, microplastics, and more. These currents move quietly through the everyday life, defeating the senses and compromising our capacity to recognize the wrongs unfolding around us. In a capitalist society organized by commodification and consumption, we become reliably functional yet affectively blunted, in Hillman’s words, “a cart horse with blinders.”
Within this context, psychic numbing is neither simply individual nor merely clinical. It is, to borrow from Erich Fromm, a socially patterned, culturally enabled, and collectively sustained “pathology of normalcy.” Psychic numbing isolates individuals, dulling the imagination and will necessary for change. It therefore enables and extends social injustice, economic disparity, democratic erosion, and environmental degradation, perpetuating crisis and prolonging suffering both personal and collective.
For Hillman, reawakening begins in aesthetic response. As he understands it, aesthetic response is not an artistic doctrine or a dogma, but an immediate, embodied mode of attention: noticing, engaging, listening to instinct and intuition, and attending to what is present. The aesthetic response marks the first moment of reanimation, perceiving the wrongness and allowing outrage and anguish to be felt. As the antithesis of anesthesia, it becomes both an ethical and psychological imperative and a movement toward participatory consciousness.
In an age of anesthesia, reclaiming the capacity to feel and to imagine is itself a radical act. This kind of psychological activism is a path beyond the binary of inward reflection and outward political action. It cultivates attention, feeling, and imagination through which we become conscious participants in—and bear responsibility for—the world we inhabit together. For C.G. Jung, this posture reflects an “inner necessity,” a psychic demand for integration, meaning, and renewed orientation to the world.
This presentation begins with a scholarly exploration of psychic numbing as a defining condition of our time, alongside the role of aesthetic response as a psychological and ethical counter-movement. It then moves into a collective experiential engagement, drawing on language, image, sound, and silence to deepen aesthetic response-ability. Through guided active imagination, arts-based and somatic practices, and community-centered approaches, the session explores how the senses and symbolic engagement can open pathways out of dissociation and into embodied, relational forms of participatory consciousness.
İpek S. Burnett, PhD, is a Turkish-American author whose work offers a depth psychological critique of social, cultural, and political issues. Based in San Francisco, she serves on the boards of nonprofit organizations and foundations focused on social justice, human rights, and democracy. Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, Burnett moved to the United States to pursue her undergraduate studies at Brown University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Modern Culture and Media and International Relations. She later received a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, followed by a second master’s and a doctorate in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Although her academic work is rooted in psychology, her writing has long maintained a cultural and critical edge, addressing subjects ranging from xenophobia and racism to militarism and materialism.
Burnett is the author of A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche: The Violence of Innocence and the editor of Re-Visioning the American Psyche: Jungian, Archetypal, and Mythological Reflections. She is also a contributing writer at CounterPunch and has been published in Turkey as a novelist, essayist, and poet. Her work in the nonprofit sector reflects a longstanding commitment to human rights. She currently serves as co-chair of Human Rights Watch’s Executive Committee in San Francisco and sits on the board of 826 Valencia, an organization dedicated to helping under-resourced students develop their writing skills.