Remembering Dionysus

Revisioning psychology and literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman

Susan Rowland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415855839
• eBook ISBN: 9781317209614
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Literature

Dionysus, god of dismemberment and sponsor of the lost or abandoned feminine, originates both Jungian psychology and literature in Remembering Dionysus. Characterized by spontaneity, fluid boundaries, sexuality, embodiment, wild nature, ecstasy and chaos, Dionysus is invoked in the writing of C. G. Jung and James Hillman as the dual necessity to adopt and dismiss literature for their archetypal vision of the psyche or soul. Susan Rowland describes an emerging paradigm for the twenty-first century enacting the myth of a god torn apart to be re-membered, and remembered as reborn in a great renewal of life.

Rowland demonstrates how persons, forms of knowing and even eras that dismiss Dionysus are torn apart, and explores how Jung was Dionysian in providing his most dismembered text, The Red Book. Remembering Dionysus pursues the rough god into the Sublime in the destruction of meaning in Jung and Jacques Lacan, to a re-membering of sublime feminine creativity that offers zoe, or rebirth participating in an archetype of instinctual life. This god demands to be honoured inside our knowing and being, just as he (re)joins us to wild nature.

This revealing book will be invigorating reading for Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, arts therapists and counsellors, as well as academics and students of analytical psychology, depth psychology, Jungian and post-Jungian studies, literary studies and ecological humanities.

1
Introduction

Getting started with C. G. Jung, James Hillman and literature

Getting started with this book

This book proposes a relationship between psychology and literature in the work of two psychologists devoted to the visionary power of the imagination, C. G. Jung and his revisionary successor, James Hillman. Both thinkers belong in the tradition that sees the unknown and unknowable part of the psyche, commonly called the unconscious, as source of meaning, feeling and value. Both regard literature, and the arts overall, as authentic evidence of an intrinsically creative psyche, or soul. However, they also find literature problematic to their psychology, even as they adopt explicitly literary resources for writing it. The figure of that transgressive god, Dionysus, will prove indigenous to the psychology-literature conundrum.

An essential part of the sacrificial act is dismemberment… the Dionysian mystery tradition.

(Jung 1968, CW13: para. 91)

In the majority of my cases, the resources of consciousness have been exhausted; the ordinary expression for this situation is: “I am stuck”… the theme of many a fairytale and myth.

(Jung 1933: 70–1)

At root of the problem of literature (here defined as imaginative writing in genres such as poetry, drama and the novel), and the writing of Jung and Hillman, known respectively as Jungian and archetypal psychology, is that of two mutually implicated yet different academic disciplines. Defined broadly as discrete fields of knowledge independently organized, disciplines validating scholarly endeavour proliferated in the later nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries. New in this era was psychology itself, in becoming detached from philosophy and theology. At much the same time there emerged a discipline devoted to the study of vernacular literature, which was grown from the previous focus in universities on writing in Latin and Greek.

In the English-speaking academic world the new degree in literary texts became known as ‘English’, although much later many adopted Literary Studies, or just Literature, to avoid some of the complications of this designation in a postcolonial era of world ‘Englishes’. This book will use the latter two terms for the same reason. The notion that political colonialism might affect a particular construction of knowledge, a discipline, was most overtly debated in the later years of the twentieth century. However, much earlier colonial struggles were perceptible within universities and scholarly circles as the many new disciplines struggled for legitimacy, resources and prestige.

Calling the competition for status between disciplines colonial is more than a reference to the common spatial metaphor of knowledge, as ‘fields’. Colonialism within and between disciplines rather points to the union of knowledge and power. Competitions for supremacy among the disciplines for being acknowledged as producing the best, most economically or spiritually valuable kinds of knowledge are, at the same time, struggles for cultural power.

For example, if materialist science is regarded as the superior knowledge of a particular society, then that not only determines how resources are shared out in the university, but it also shapes ideas about education and social policy. Ultimately, it supplies the vision of reality held by most citizens. Hence the argument that frames this book is that the contest and construction of disciplines such as psychology and literature in the nineteenth century is part of a greater series of changes in knowledge that deeply affects modern society today.

One attempt to explore this historical and social intimacy of disciplines and power has already been mentioned. Postcolonialism is an attempt to diagnose how far largely unconsidered assumptions about ethnicity, and the grandiose delusions of the most dominant nations, not only drove political strategies, but also the knowledge that underpinned them. Alongside the political approach, a further way to address the splintering of knowledge into disciplines was the idea of inter-disciplinarity studies. Here more than one discipline is employed at the same time, with the aim of stitching together antithetical positions on what something like psychology or literature is supposed to be doing, and on what their fundamental assumptions is based.

A particular problem with the so-called interdisciplinarity approach is that stitching up the jagged edges of disciplines can too easily become a ‘stitch up’ in which one disciplinary vision or methodology simply colonizes another. Such a move, such as when a psychology uses literature as raw data, instead of material with capacities and histories of its own, actually replicates colonialism rather than resists it.

While I cannot pretend that this book will entirely avoid such a privileging of one discipline over another, it is the aim of Remembering Dionysus to generate a new approach to the multidisciplinary environment of writing with imagination, and to apply that new perspective to the work of Jung and Hillman. For I plan to combine a recent initiative known as ‘transdisciplinarity’, currently being offered mainly from a science perspective with the mythical insight of both these psychologists (Nicolescu 2005). Chapter 2 will consider the transdisciplinary in conjunction with Hillman’s dissection of Jung’s motif of the dismembered Dionysus; a god reborn from parts.

So Remembering Dionysus is devoted to investigating the literary in the writing of Jung and Hillman in the context of the disunited disciplines of their own respective psychology and literary studies. If the body of knowledge has been torn apart, how fares this ancient god in a twenty-first century all too familiar with a dismembering violence?

The rest of this chapter will outline how literature and psychology came to be different disciplinary approaches to the imagination as a way of knowing. But, first of all, I will introduce the work of Jung and Hillman for their building of a psychology dedicated to the innate creativity of the psyche.

Getting started with C. G. Jung

Given that the unconscious is the unknown, uncontrollable part of the psyche, Jung believed that it had a profound effect on what we know and how we know.

Nobody drew the conclusion that if the subject of knowledge, the psyche, were in fact a veiled form of existence not immediately accessible to consciousness, then all our knowledge must be incomplete, and moreover to a degree that we cannot determine.

(Jung 1960, CW8: para. 358)

Since we cannot know what our limited consciousness is missing, then what we claim to perceive about the universe can only be partial. Mystery is not only part of our being, it is also part of our knowing. Taking seriously such a proposition, Jung further argued that his psychology had to be seen as a hypothesis or model rather than a pretence to have found the ultimate and fixed truth (Jung 1960, CW8: para. 381). His ideas were a pragmatic way of working with mental properties, rather than the way to unquestionable knowledge. Crucially, imagination and creativity are prime tools for psychic investigation.

One of Jung’s most foundational hypotheses was that human beings possess, probably by inheritance, common psychic capacities for generating images. These capacities he called ‘archetypes’, and they could only be known by their manifestation as archetypal images. These images would also be influenced in content and form by an individual’s history and culture. Images here mean any psychic inscription in consciousness such as dreams, emotions, exciting unbidden thoughts, bodily sensations, etc. Archetypal images are the matter of innate psychic creativity. They are how the psyche makes experience out of archetypal shaping energy meeting the world.

All humans possess the same archetypes as inner creative drives. Jung called this common inheritance the ‘collective unconscious’. Within the person, the archetypes of the collective unconscious possess a goal-oriented or teleological impulse towards wholeness and meaning. This indicates that the psyche is in a constant creative process of seeking balance through ever greater connections between archetypal generators and a person’s actual archetypal image-made life.

Jung named as ‘individuation’ this continual weaving, severing and relating between the conscious part of the mind, or ego, and the unconscious realm of archetypes. Jungian psychotherapy is supposed to facilitate individuation by liberating the self-healing teleological direction of the psyche towards ever greater meaning, feeling and value. He was ambivalent about whether individuation required the assistance of psychotherapy, while suggesting that modern conditions rendered the practice invaluable.

What does characterize individuation for everyone, and by extension culture itself, are common themes of resistance, ‘stuckness’, in conflict, love and sexuality, meaning and aging. The ‘shadow’ was what Jung called those negative forces that trap the blithe ego, including what we deny in ourselves on moral or hypocritical grounds. To counter ‘stuckness’, individuation operates by means of compensation. The unconscious manifests what the ego is strenuously denying. Hence, the shadow can be extreme evil or extreme good. It can perversely implant divine faith in the soul of the atheist, or the terror of meaningless annihilation in a person full of life’s joys. The shadow is ‘other’ to who we think we are. It typically forms a stark version of what Jung liked to see as the psyche’s tendency to work by opposites.

Yet another version of opposites is that of gender. On the one hand, Jung took an essentialist view of gender by being sure that a male body denoted a masculine ego, and vice versa. On the other hand, such essentialism is also entirely untenable in Jungian psychology. For individuation means that the collective unconscious dimension of archetypes is more essential to being than the ego’s culture-coloured preferences. And the psyche individuates by integrating what is ‘other’ to the ego. Often what is other is the other gender.

Archetypes are androgynous, equally able to manifest feminine, masculine, and even transgender forms. They are not limited to a society’s stereotypical notions of gender propriety because they are not limited at all. As archetypal images, archetypes are immanent in being contingent, historically and bodily influenced, and never absolutely defined, because of the core mystery of the psyche. Archetypes (and through them, archetypal images) have a transcendent pole of limitless creative possibility. They may also have existence beyond the human psyche, as we will see later.

Meanwhile, Jung liked to try to stabilize his notion of gender by offering an unconscious feminine archetype in a man that he called the ‘anima’, and a complimentary masculine figure in a woman he named the ‘animus’. Yet individuation means that these opposites are not stable; they must be integrated. For Jung, fidelity to his organic and creative idea of the psyche means that gender is fluid, partially culturally constructed, and not restricted to heterosexual presuppositions. Regardless of Jung’s personal preference, many genders and various sexualities are possible in his intrinsically creative psyche.

Another archetypal figuration important to Jung’s work he named the Self, which he tended to describe as the goal of individuation. This Self is far from the ego-dominated ‘separate’ identity assumed by the word ‘self’ in English. Rather, the Self has a dual sense of being the archetype of organization within the psyche, and the potential, expansive totality of it. The Self is the mythical centre, or heart of being provided by the dynamic, even divine archetypes. Archetypes are divine to Jung because they are limitlessly creative. They create us; they take the lead in making meaning and being out of the awkward material of conscious embodiment.

The Self suggests that wholeness and oneness of being can be made or found when the contingent and cultural ego becomes a satellite to this unknown divinity. It is not surprising that Jung in a Christian or post-Christian society saw the Self as an image of God, or even suggested that it was the actuality of God within humans. The Self is where monotheism, here the belief in one God making a world separate from himself, finds a home in Jung’s psychology.

One result of this implicit adherence to monotheism in the importance of the Self, whether as ordering archetype or wholeness as the goal of being, is a foundational dualism in his work. Jung is here heir to a long tradition of dividing up experience into dual, or often opposite, qualities. Older than Ancient Greek philosophy, dualism intensified in the emphasis on rational faculties in Western modernity. So, just as we habitually divide time into night and day, we distinguish ‘good’ by defining it in relation to ‘evil’, and experience into ‘inside-psyche’ versus ‘outside-world’. Psyche is considered a property of ‘inside’, although Jung was among other theorists of the unconscious to notice that it could be projected unwittingly, without conscious knowing, onto things or other people ‘outside’.

Nevertheless, dualism is far from the inevitable response to human attempts to know the cosmos. Mythical alternatives to dualism will be considered in Chapter 2. Here it is worth noting that in two key and related areas, Jung moved to a more holistic position of seeing psyche, body, matter, spirit and cosmos as vitally interconnected. These areas were alchemy and synchronicity.

Alchemy is more than its popular reputation as the practice of transforming cheap lead into valuable gold. It is believed to originate in prehistoric attempts to quickly ‘ripen’ metals found in the womb of Mother Earth, but by the time of the European Renaissance it was a non-dualistic practice seeking to unite the emerging science of chemistry with religious, artistic and philosophical realms. Alchemists laboured in an interactive field that conjoined body, spirit and matter. The gold they sought was both material and divine. Everything united in the symbol that was produced in the reading and writing of their enigmatic texts and in mystical laboratory rituals.

To Jung, his discovery of Renaissance alchemy books was a key moment in finding historical validation for his psychology. Initially, he decided that the alche-mists were so intimately and somatically involved with their experiments because they had unknowingly projected their individuating psyches onto the chemicals. Changes within (in the psyche) were being conducted by facilitating changes without (in the laboratory). However, Jung later came to credit something closer to alchemy’s original holistic vision, with his development of the theory of synchronicity.

Synchronicity is another approach to those so-called coincidences when an apparently psychic event is linked to a material one in a meaningful way. There is no rational, material causal explanation to such events. For example, a dream may accurately predict an event, or show something happening at a distance too great for the ordinary senses of the dreamer to perceive. To Jung this indicated an additional factor to conventional scientific ideas of cause and effect. He called such phenomena oriented towards meaning ‘synchronicity’, in order to show that relations of space and time were involved. A particularly suggestive aspect of his examination of synchronicity was to see it as a kind of creativity between psyche and matter, or, acts of creation in time (Jung 1960, CW8: para. 965).

In the late volume of his Collected Works on alchemy, Mysterium Conjunctionis, Jung speculated that synchronicity referred to what the alchemists sensed in the vision of matter, spirit and psyche as inextricably co-creating (Jung 1970, CW14: paras. 759–70). For synchronicity, distinctions of inside and outside no longer apply. Consciousness itself is caught up in a web of connections, as the deep psyche has a ‘psychoid’ quality. By this Jung meant both a hypothetical point where psyche and matter meet, and the mind/body connection, where archetypes meet soma as bodily instincts enter psychic realization. The psychoid unconscious makes possible a notion of alchemy largely as the alchemists envisaged it: generating an interactive field in which archetypes are organizing energies that span soul, body and world (ibid.: 787–8).

Another way of exploring the potential of Jungian archetypes is condensed in Jung’s memorable line: ‘the Gods have become diseases’ (Jung 1967, CW13: para. 54). Again, a historical viewpoint gives depth to Jung’s naming of archetypes as those overwhelming psychic powers that in one age might be called Aphrodite or Saturn, and in another, irresistible passion or a crippling depression. Archetypes are gods, in that they do not die because the archetypal unconscious is collective; it is reborn, or re-animated in every human (and in a synchronicity pervading the cosmos). They are gods and goddesses in that they create us. Moreover, they creat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Getting started with C. G. Jung, James Hillman and literature
• 2 The feminine, Dionysus and transdisciplinarity
• 3 Dionysus ignored, or how to save Jung from The Red Book
• 4 Dionysus remembered, or saving The Red Book from Jung
• 5 Dionysus and magic: The zoe of ‘active imagination’ for/as ‘close reading’
• 6 Dionysus, dismembering and the sublime: ‘Feminine’ creativity in destruction in Jung and Lacan
• 7 Dionysus liberated?: Revisioning psychology (and literature) with James Hillman
• 8 Conclusion: Dionysus reborn in psychology and literature
• Glossary
• References
• Index