Jung as a Writer

Susan Rowland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317710479
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Jung as a Writer traces a relationship between Jung and literature by analysing his texts using the methodology of literary theory. This investigation serves to illuminate the literary nature of Jung's writing in order to shed new light on his psychology and its relationship with literature as a cultural practice.

Jung employed literary devices throughout his writing, including direct and indirect argument, anecdote, fantasy, myth, epic, textual analysis and metaphor. Susan Rowland examines Jung's use of literary techniques in several of his works, including Anima and Animus, On the Nature of the Psyche, Psychology and Alchemy and Synchronicity and describes Jung's need for literature in order to capture in writing his ideas about the unconscious. Jung as a Writer succeeds in demonstrating Jung's contribution to literary and cultural theory in autobiography, gender studies, postmodernism, feminism, deconstruction and hermeneutics and concludes by giving a new culturally-orientated Jungian criticism.

The application of literary theory to Jung's works provides a new perspective on Jungian Psychology that will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of Jung, Psychoanalysis, literary theory and cultural studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Jung and literature

‘Poetry’ CW15, ‘Psychology and Literature’ CW15, ‘Ulysses’ CW15

If it were possible to personify the unconscious, we might think of it as a collective human being… having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, practically immortal.

(Jung 1931/1960, CW8: para. 673)

The collective unconscious, moreover, seems to be not a person, but something like an unceasing stream or perhaps an ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind.

(Jung 1931/1960, CW8: para. 674)

Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly a work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking.

(Jung 1922/1966, CW15: para. 130)

Introduction

Introducing this book

In this book I aim to explore the works of C. G. Jung by looking at how he wrote them. Why devote such attention to Jung’s writing style? Of course every writer who has something to say will find it affected by his or her means of saying it. So given Jung’s profound impact on psychology, the history of ideas and culture, it is important to consider the kinds of expression that convey his unique perspective. However, it is the contention of this book that there is something special, and hitherto neglected, in the need to examine Jung’s prose.

For Jung believed and wrote as though he believed that the thinking and discriminating mind – conventionally used to produce non-fictional argument – was situated within a sea of unconscious creativity. To him this inner world of unfathomable and inexhaustible creativity is one of the most important aspects of the human mind. So it is not enough just to write about it in a rational, logical manner. Jung thought that psychology writing should aspire to the greatest authenticity by including unconscious psychic creativity within writing, not limit it to outside, to what psychology is about. Truly, Jung’s works aim for a fidelity to psyche-logos, words that respond to the whole of the mind and not just its well-mapped territories.

My metaphor of the mind as a landscape, and psychology as a form of mapping the unknown, is indicative of the kinds of thinking this book will look at. For Jung proves to be persistently fascinated with the psyche as a form of space and time. First of all, however, I will introduce some of the basic approaches I will be using and offer those readers new to Jung a guide to the most significant Jungian ideas.

Jung has often been criticized for his writing style. At times given to what appears as self-indulgent digressions, many of his essays seem to constitute an excursion around his topic rather than the crisp, tightly focused abstract prose modern culture has been conditioned to call ‘science’. Indeed, the struggle to define ‘scientific writing’ when addressed to the vagaries of the human psyche is the subject of much of Jung’s unique style. Roderick Main has comprehensively analysed Jung’s attitude to science, especially in relation to religion (Main 2000, 2004). It will be one of the tasks of this book to look at how ‘science’ is used as problematic textual terrain; how it becomes a literary domain constructed and, often, deconstructed in the works.

Jung as a Writer uses methodologies devised in the discipline of literary studies in order to explore Jung’s writing. My purpose is to show that literary techniques can provide a valuable perspective on Jung because the notion of creativity was fundamental to his conception of the psyche. In writing, Jung is not just describing the creativity of the psyche, his words also enact and perform it. It is possible that here we have a clue to Jung’s constant revision to his texts. For perhaps, for Jung, a piece of writing was only truly valid if it retained a trace of the spontaneity that he believed to be integral to psychic functioning.

Take, for example, the first two quotations at the head of this chapter. Situated close together in an essay that purports to be introductory, they would appear to be going in different directions. If I wished to summarize them, I could say: on the one hand, the collective unconscious is like a mythical ageless being; on the other hand, it is not like a being, it is like an ocean, a flow of images. Readers new to Jung could be forgiven for finding such – essentially literary playing with metaphors – unhelpful. Why tell stories of the collective unconscious instead of offering a neat definition? What is the collective unconscious? What is it really like?

Fortunately for Jung’s durability in the psychological community, he did provide ‘proper’ definitions and offer firm ‘concepts’. Shortly I am going to make use of this kind of writing and give an outline of the key ideas for those unfamiliar with his work. However, the juxtaposition of these two quotations illustrates something very important: Jung put the expressive, creative nature of the psyche first. The ability of anyone, including himself, to produce a comprehensive science of the psyche, even to describe psychic processes accurately in words, comes second to the innate property of the human mind to be mysterious. Ultimately, the psyche confounds the essentially cultural divisions of science and art, will reveal them to be culture. The unconscious is like a mythical being; no, the unconscious is like an ocean of flowing images. It is an attempt to evoke in writing what cannot be entirely grasped: the fleeting momentary presence of something that forever mutates and reaches beyond the ego’s inadequate understanding.

Such a form of writing cannot help being, in part, literary. This is not to allege that Jung was, or considered himself to be, the author of fiction. Rather, his psychology needs to be understood in terms of its aesthetic qualities. And these qualities, in the Jungian approach, do not detract from its identity as ‘psychology’; they are basic to it.

Just a quick note about the structure of this book. The following chapters concentrate on large topics such as ‘Gender’, ‘Myth’, ‘Nature’, ‘Culture’ and ‘Argument’ by focusing on major Jungian works. These chapters often fall into two parts because I am doing two things. First of all I will be drawing out the implications of Jung’s way of writing on a subject; constructing an argument about what is presented. Second, I will examine the organization of Jung’s text directly, the how it is written. Of course it is integral to my project that there can be no real separation between content and form. Therefore the chapters constitute an attempt to realize a whole, by a discussion of parts that belong together in an aesthetic entity.

So while the overall scope of the book is to understand the extent and consequences of the combination of aesthetic and scientific writing, individual chapters will pursue discrete but related themes. After introducing Jung’s core ideas, the rest of Chapter 1 will examine his role as a literary critic. Chapter 2 takes ‘myth’ as its subject since it is a form of representation that Jung wanted at the heart of his psychology. Naturally, myth is a key expression of the tension in Jung between narrative and conceptual expression. Therefore Chapter 3 looks at this dichotomy as one between dialectical or oppositional thinking, and storytelling, in the complex area of gender. Desire and control come together in the fascination with the feminine as spectral.

As a result of this study, the perspective of Chapter 4 on Jung’s form of ‘argument’ is able to explore his use of rhetorical versus logical methods. This chapter also uncovers the key role played by textual criticism or hermeneutics, in the building of the psychology. So later, Chapter 5 on ‘nature’ develops Jung’s textual sense with the help of theories of ecocriticism (devoted to rethinking the relation of ‘man and nature’). Now able to show Jung as a dialogical thinker and author, I explore how Jung’s writing reaches out to the ecosystem in ways that could excite (post)modernity.

Chapter 6 turns to history and the writing of the self as the discourses of the imagination. Jung as a Writer develops by analysing Jung’s imagination as progressively more plural and spatial, as the tension between literature and science drives him into experimental and fantasy modes. Always he seeks to enlarge the psychic home of modernity, so in Chapter 7, I look at his understanding of culture and ethics in the context of science, gender and religion. Ultimately, Jung’s struggle with writing is with a modernity historically framed by exclusion. In Chapter 7, the critique of modern culture is polarized between issues of visibility and intelligibility. The book ends with a reversal, in that the art of Jung’s writing provides a Jungian approach to art. The Epilogue gives a new Jungian criticism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in order to demonstrate Jung’s writing as a reading of the psyche as an organ of meaning in space and time.

Jung for literary studies?

Literary studies or the discipline of ‘English’ has neglected Jung to its own detriment. On the one hand, a form of Jungian literary criticism exists that draws upon the conceptual Jung; the one that offers definitions abstracted from the writings and applied to fictional texts. Such criticism often ignores the aesthetic quality of Jung’s own prose. On the other hand, the explosion of literary theory in the latter part of the twentieth century has drawn almost exclusively upon Freudian and Lacanian psychic principles.

In an era of philosophical and ethical approaches to literature, it seems perverse to exclude Jung, as the ‘other’. Jungian literary criticism needs to be brought into modern literary theory and literary theory needs to look at what and how Jung actually wrote. Not least because Jung’s specific essays on literature reveal him to be deeply concerned with literature as cultural production, as the third quotation at the start of the chapter demonstrates.

The rest of Chapter 1 will provide a guide to the key concepts, an analysis of the essays on literature, and then will look at Jung’s surprising and fantastic act of cultural criticism of Ulysses by James Joyce (Joyce 1922). Readers familiar with Jung might like to skip the next section and move on to the works on literature and art.

Introducing Jung: A guide to key concepts

In addition to this brief introduction to Jung, I would recommend the novice to consult Andrew Samuels’s ground breaking Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985), and A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (Samuels et al. 1986).

To begin with the founding principle of Jung’s psychology is to realize that the unconscious is superior to the capacity of the ego to comprehend it. The unconscious is characteristically spontaneous and creative. It often acts independently of cognitive structures brought to bear by the ego and it is ‘collective’ because it contains structuring principles inherited collectively by mankind. These elements Jung came to call ‘archetypes’.

A common misconception is that archetypes are inherited images, inherited content. They are not. Archetypes are inherited principles for certain kinds of generic meanings. Those meanings actually generated, or images produced in dreams, will depend to a great extent on the culture and personal history of the dreamer.

In addition to the superior spontaneity of the unconscious, Jung believed that the psyche was developing forwards towards some goal; it is teleological. The reason that the collective unconscious is so playfully active is that it is leading the more limited ego – that part of myself that I know and can control – into greater forms of consciousness possible through relationship with the unconscious. The notion of a teleological goal-oriented psyche is a fundamental difference between the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jung. Freud believed that the unconscious was dominated by the repression of infantile sexual fantasy.

Jung largely accepted Freud’s pioneering concept of the Oedipus complex in which the child structures its ego-unconscious relationship through repressing forbidden incestuous desires. However he regarded the unconscious so produced – looking backwards into the archaic vestiges of infancy – as a less significant ‘personal unconscious’. It is the task of adult subjectivity to realize ever more of the collective inheritance of archetypes that drive the psyche forwards.

The name Jung gave to the lifelong, complex relationship between ego and archetypal energies is ‘individuation’. A person individuates, becomes more individual and less conventional, because archetypes compensate for the biases of the ego, whether they be cultural or personal obsessions. The collective unconscious of archetypes is devoted to opposing and compensating rigid opinions, tendencies and modes of functioning in the ego. Therefore the psyche is a dynamic, self-regulating mechanism. By drawing upon its own ‘other’, it aims to heal itself of one-sidedness.

Jung held that ideally the ego’s role is to become a satellite of the most enigmatic and numinous archetype, which he called the ‘self’. Therefore it is very important to understand that the word ‘self’ has a totally different emphasis in Jungian language than in everyday use. The self is one’s identity as mystery. It is a state of being transcendent of, but not disconnected from, cultural forms. The second and sixth chapters of this book deal with some of Jung’s radical and experimental attempts to write about the self.

The ego’s goal is connection with the self yet other archetypal factors also play a powerful role in the individuating psyche. For compensation of the ego’s personality may begin with opposition. Jung gave the generic name of the ‘shadow’ to those psychic images of the opposite qualities that the ego rejects as its conscious identity. Hence the shadow’s capacity to generate images of horrifying and morally reprehensible modes of behaviour with seemingly annihilating potency. The shadow is that which the ego has no wish to be; the darkness in the soul it has no wish to live out. It is therefore that which the ego must understand as its own potential, its own ‘other’ side. Too often the inner psychic shadow is projected ‘outside’ onto another person, race, culture or history. Only by recognizing the shadow as a figure within the psyche is the danger of demonizing the other avoidable.

A less potentially catastrophic form of psychic compensation is that of gender. On the one hand, Jung was essentialist on gender in believing that sexual identity bestows an unproblematic gender identity. Such a position leads him to state sporadically that women have less rational characteristics than men (see Chapter 3). On the other hand, the starkness of this position is problematized by the role of the founding principle of the creative psyche. For by producing radically different psychic gender images, individuation constantly undermines conscious gender identity. Archetypes are androgynous. They are as capable of manifesting feminine as masculine forms. The logic of individuation through compensation entails that men need to be in dialogue with feminine images in their psyche, women with masculine images. Jung called the feminine image within the psyche of a man, the ‘anima’; the corresponding male figure in the psyche of a woman, the ‘animus’.

It is important to remember that the unconscious is the leadi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Jung and literature
• 2 Myth: Representing the self in auto/biography
• 3 Gender: The dialectic of anima and animus
• 4 Argument: Writing beyond tragic science in ‘On the Nature of the Psyche’
• 5 Nature: Alchemy and ecocriticism
• 6 History: Time, space and chronotope
• 7 Culture: Ethics, synchronicity and the goddess
• Epilogue: Hamlet and Psyche
• References
• Index