Health Notes

Jungian psychoanalyst, author, and men's movement pioneer Guy Corneau dies

by Charlie Smith on January 6th, 2017 at 7:17 AM
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      A well-known Montreal psychoanalyst and author has died, generating a wave of media coverage in Quebec.

      Chicoutimi-born Guy Corneau is the author of Lessons in Love: Transformation of the Spirit Through Intimacy, as well as The Search for Masculine Identity and Absent Fathers, Lost Sons.

      He was 65.

      His passing came two weeks after his sister, famous Quebec painter Johanne "Corno", died in Mexico at the age of 64.

      Corneau was a pioneer in the Canadian men's movement, bringing them together in groups to discuss their feelings and how they coped with various struggles. 

      His books put the ideas of 20th-century Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung in a modern context, exploring how unconscious aspects of the Self could motivate behaviour.

      In Jungian psychology, the "Self" describes the entire personality, including the conscious, the unconscious, and the ego.

      In 2001, he explained to the Georgia Straight how the "Shadow", as Jung referred to the unconscious, played a role in gay bashings. 

      Corneau maintained that "homophobia is motivated by a homosexual dimension" within the assailants.

      At the time, he revealed that within some men's groups, some straight men "have very intense projections against the gay men".

      According to Corneau, it's because they are “very much afraid of aspects of themselves that are too sensitive”.

      That's because these sensitive feelings were often frowned upon in their families as they were growing up. In effect, they became forbidden. Hence, they were driven into the Shadow.

      “So they started to repress it within themselves in order to be recognized as real men,” Corneau said.

      Through a Jungian lens, he said that gay bashers were actually projecting parts of themselves that they couldn't acknowledge onto others. And they despised what they saw in these other people, who, in effect, become mirrors of this part of their Self.

      “I find that very often the real enemy in this situation is people think in terms of either-or,” Corneau said. “We cannot think about it that men cannot be homosexual or have to be only heterosexuals.”

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