The One Mind

C. G. Jung and the future of literary criticism

Matthew A. Fike

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134611966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The One Mind: C. G. Jung and the Future of Literary Criticism explores the implications of C. G. Jung's unus mundus by applying his writings on the metaphysical, the paranormal, and the quantum to literature. As Jung knew, everything is connected because of its participation in universal consciousness, which encompasses all that is, including the collective unconscious. Matthew A. Fike argues that this principle of unity enables an approach in which psychic functioning is both a subject and a means of discovery—psi phenomena evoke the connections among the physical world, the psyche, and the spiritual realm.

Applying the tools of Jungian literary criticism in new ways by expanding their scope and methodology, Fike discusses the works of Hawthorne, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and lesser-known writers in terms of issues from psychology, parapsychology, and physics. Topics include the case for monism over materialism, altered states of consciousness, types of psychic functioning, UFOs, synchronicity, and space-time relativity. The One Mind examines Goodman Brown's dream, Adam's vision in Paradise Lost, the dream sequence in "The Wanderer, " the role of metaphor in Robert A. Monroe's metaphysical trilogy, Orfeo Angelucci's work on UFOs, and the stolen boat episode in Wordsworth's The Prelude. The book concludes with case studies on Robert Jordan and William Blake. Considered together, these readings bring us a significant step closer to a unity of psychology, science, and spirituality.

The One Mind illustrates how Jung's writings contain the seeds of the future of literary criticism. Reaching beyond archetypal criticism and postmodern theoretical approaches to Jung, Fike proposes a new school of Jungian literary criticism based on the unitary world that underpins the collective unconscious. This book will appeal to scholars of C. G. Jung as well as students and readers with an interest in psychoanalysis, literature, literary theory, and the history of ideas.

1

A TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO HAWTHORNE AND THE PROBLEM OF MATERIALISM IN EISELEY

A statement that Jung makes in his Zarathustra Seminar resonates meaningfully with the plight of Hawthorne’s Goodman Brown:

You know, to the late Christian you can convey the idea that one ought to be interested in oneself in the way, say, of a schoolmaster or a doctor. They understand that one needs some education of the soul, some loving care of one’s own spiritual welfare, provided that the body is excluded. The thing people are most afraid of is not so much the soul, which to them is practically non-existent, but the body. That is what they don’t want to see, the animal or the evil spirit that is waiting to say something to them when they are alone. That is exceedingly disagreeable. So even if they agree that one could be a bit more careful with oneself, it is only with the guarantee that the body is excluded and has nothing to do with it. The body is the darkness, and very dangerous things could be called up. It is better to play the piano in order not to hear what the body says.¹

At its core, “Young Goodman Brown” is a story that enacts the psychological and spiritual consequences of failure to acknowledge the physical body. As Jung understood, “Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose” (CW 13, 229/184; emphasis in the original).

Although much has been written about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” from a Jungian perspective, even some about the role of the body, I was able to discuss numerous unnoticed connections in my article on the story. Some of its highlights, as well as my newer insights, appear below to illustrate the standard Jungian approach to literary criticism. Whereas shadow and anima engage with Goodman Brown’s personal unconscious, elements of his “dream journey,” especially the presence of a Jungian quaternity, point toward greater unity via the collective unconscious: one psyche is a microcosm of all others, and there is no “Other.” In contrast to a Jungian analysis of “Young Goodman Brown,” Loren Eiseley’s “The Secret of Life,” my subject in another article, displays a disturbing materialism, which does not accord with an archetypal or metaphysical approach. But as we shall see, Jung’s comments on nature inform both Hawthorne’s story and Eiseley’s essay in important ways.²

“Young Goodman Brown”

Previous criticism. The remarks of other psychological critics, many of them Jungian, provide an appropriate beginning. Richard P. Adams notes that a male must encounter the shadow, the anima, and the wise old man in this order; and he emphasizes sexuality’s role in “the transformation from childishness or adolescence to maturity.” Reginald Cook stresses that the forest represents the unconscious, both personal and collective; and he believes that the title character enacts a failed version of what Joseph Campbell calls the hero’s journey—descent, encounter, and return. Richard Predmore stresses “the elements excluded from the Puritan consciousness,” which emerge as compensatory projections of the shadow and anima. For Michael Tritt, the two parts of the projection process—locating evil in others and believing oneself to be without fault—explain the isolation that Brown suffers for the rest of his life. Edward Jayne, noting that the Browns’ marriage is unconsummated, proposes that the story’s initial images—the “threshold” and Faith’s “pretty head”—anticipate Brown’s sexually-charged encounter in the forest. Finally, D. J. Moores advances a reading of Brown’s shadow in terms of the Puritans’ hostility to nature, natural impulses, and the body.³

Shadow and anima. Since the shadow is not evil but merely inferior, the goal is to acknowledge and integrate it, to defang its negatives and incorporate its strengths (CW 11, 134/78). But Brown’s encounter with the shadow, rather than propelling him toward wholeness, constitutes an enantiodromia, which Daryl Sharp defines as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”⁴ In the opening sentence, “Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into a street of Salem village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife” (65).⁵ The threshold image anticipates Jung’s ominous statement in Psychology and Religion that the encounter with the shadow involves crossing “the threshold of the unconscious and [taking] cognizance of those impersonal forces which make you the unconscious instrument of the wholesale murderer in man” (CW 11, 86/49; my emphasis). Jung views Protestantism as a particularly insufficient barricade against unconscious content because of its loss of sacred images and rituals (CW 11, 75/43). His emphasis in Psychology and Religion on Protestantism’s disintegration as a church (CW 11, 85/48) anticipates Michael J. Colacurcio’s comment on Brown’s status as a third-generation Puritan, which signals an erosion of the standards required for full church membership.⁶ It is bad enough psychologically that Brown is a Protestant, worse that he is a third-generation Puritan, and ominous that he intentionally casts off such outer restraints as the Puritan church still provides in order to encounter his shadow alone at night in the “unconverted wilderness” (73). In other words, Brown casts off the one-sided Puritan persona of the “good man” in order to swing to the opposite in pursuit of “his present evil purpose” (66).

Along with anticipating Brown’s imminent confrontation with his shadow, the opening resonates powerfully with another part of his unconscious that he has failed to integrate—the anima. Leaving his wife behind means not only that he abandons his protective religious faith but also that he sets aside his anima. On the one hand, there is perhaps some logic in Brown’s departure from his wife, as Jung observes: “It is normal for a man to resist his anima, because she represents … the unconscious and all those tendencies and contents hitherto excluded from conscious life” (CW 11, 129/75). On the other, setting out on his own is a critical mistake because “the anima plays the role of the mediatrix between the unconscious and the conscious” (CW 10, 715/378). Allegorically, Faith represents the anima, which he needs to integrate; literally, she is a helpmate in the individuation process. Without her, he sets out in ways that are both strange and precarious to encounter the unconscious on his own.

Within the linkage of the anima and the unconscious, Jung also asserts a wider, more mercurial nature for the anima in the following statement:

Like the “supraordinate personality,” the anima is bipolar and can therefore appear positive one moment and negative the next; now young, now old; now mother, now maiden; now a good fairy, now a witch; now a saint, now a whore.

(CW 9i, 356/199)

It is hard to imagine a more appropriate summary of the role of anima in “Young Goodman Brown,” for the feminine archetype manifests in nearly all of these ways. She is both young like Faith and old like the matrons whose spectral representations Brown encounters in the woods. The narrator explains,

At least there were high dames well known to her “the lady of the governor,” and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should espy them.

(72)

The anima is both a maiden like Faith and the mother whose spectral form Brown sees just before the dream ends. There is no hint of the anima-as-fairy in the story, but Hawthorne mentions such supposed witches as “the Quaker woman” lashed “so smartly through the streets of Salem” (67) and Goody Cloyse who “was accused as a witch and was in prison awaiting sentence in 1692 when the witchcraft persecutions ended.”⁷ Faith’s spectral presence marks her as guilty by association; that and her pink ribbon make her, in Brown’s estimation, a whore.

At the beginning of his journey, Brown calls Faith “‘a blessed angel on earth’” and after this one night will “‘cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven’” (65). Several of Jung’s statements support Frederick Crews’s belief that Brown views Faith “more as an idealized mother than as a wife.”⁸ First, “The odour of sanctity may be far reaching, but to live with a saint might cause an inferiority complex or even a wild outburst of immorality in individuals less morally gifted” (CW 11, 130/76). What is Faith if not a saint? What is Brown’s journey into the forest if not “a wild outburst of immorality”? A second statement that illuminates Brown’s inner reflection appears in Jung’s discussion of initiation rituals in primitive cultures: “Because the mother is the first bearer of the soul-image, separation from her is a delicate and important matter of the greatest educational significance” (CW 7, 314/197). Jung seems to share with Freud the notion that a young male needs to separate from the mother and align with the father, but here that separation is shifted from young childhood to the bridge from adolescence to adulthood. A bit later, Jung describes the consequences of failing to undergo a ritual transformation:

The modern civilized man has to forgo this primitive but nonetheless admirable system of education. The consequence is that the anima, in the form of the mother-imago, is transferred to the wife; and the man, as soon as he marries, becomes childish, sentimental, dependent, and subservient, or else truculent, tyrannical, hypersensitive, always thinking about the prestige of his superior masculinity.

(CW 7, 316/197)

The passage informs the changing psychological landscape in which Brown sees himself as a man who intends to cling to his wife’s skirts after his night of decadence in the forest. Although he has made the physical transition from mother to wife, he has merely transferred his dependence onto his mate. Failure to integrate the maternal anima results in dependence, and dependence eventually results in resentment. The journey into the woods transforms his initial goal of subservient piety into a hypersensitive psychological tyranny that blights the rest of his life. He swings from Puritan morality to a confrontation with evil but never makes it all the way back.

Jung’s third statement that bears meaningfully upon the spousal relationship portrayed at the story’s opening relates to the order in which a man must do his inner work. In the individuation process, the difference between shadow and anima is quite pronounced. Jung writes, “If the encounter with the shadow is the ‘apprentice-piece’ in the individual’s development, then that with the anima is the ‘master-piece’” (CW 9i, 61/29). Specifically, a male must make his shadow conscious before he can have a successful contra-sexual relationship precisely because shadow and anima are largely distinct. “Primitive” initiation rituals provide a support system for dealing with shadow integration before one marries; but in a more “civilized” culture like Puritan New England or our own modern culture, the lack of a clear demarcation means that shadow work and anima work—the “apprentice-piece” and the “master-piece”—occur simultaneously. Or in Brown’s case, he has attempted anima work in marriage before confronting his shadow in the woods.

The “dream” portion of the story bears out this tangled web of shadow and anima, particularly in details related to those whom the Puritans have harmed. Shadow is projected onto the Native Americans and the anima onto the supposed witches. As a result, Brown’s enantiodromia, his blasphemous swing to the opposite of his everyday morality, does not yield to coniunctio, “the union of opposites and the birth of new possibilities,”⁹ or what Jung himself in “Psychotherapists or the Clergy” calls a “reunion of the warring halves of the personality” (CW 11, 526/342). Brown descends to encounter the opposite of his Puritan persona; but in fixating on the sin in others and never affirming his own shadow, he thwarts the potential for individuation that his reunion with Faith represents. The black mass—one of Marie-Louise von Franz’s illustrations of the collective shadow¹⁰—is a compensatory stage where Brown interacts with projections of his personal unconscious. But regarding projection, he misses a key point. The devil says:

By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bed chamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.

(74)

Ironically, the remark contains the seed of its own undoing: the perception of others’ sin, says the devil, arises from the existence of sin in one’s own heart. The devil is peddling projection by calling attention to that very psychological mechanism, and Brown misses the full significance of this revelation by focusing instead on the planetary blood stain.

Quaternity. Until my work was published, no one had forged a connection between the black mass and Jung’s concept of the quaternity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, plus “the fourth aspect which represents the reprehensible part of the Christian cosmos” or “the evil principle” (CW 11, 105/61 and 103/59). Elsewhere Jung calls “the fourth function … the undifferentiated or inferior function which characterizes the shadow side of the personality” (CW 10, 775/408). As an illustration of the compensatory nature of the unconscious, the fourth person corresponds to the unconscious and balances the Trinity. For example, the devil’s snake-like staff represents the shadow, as Jung states in the first English version of The Integration of Personality: “Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it.”¹¹ Jung also asserts “how great an importance was attributed to the quaternity by the American Indians” (CW 11, 99/57). Such persons—“the Indian priests, or powwows,” as the narrator calls them (72)—are of course present at the black mass. The forest realm of the Native Americans, then, sets the stage for the main encounter with “the fourth aspect,” the natural, sexual, instinctual, and demonic contents of the dream. In particular, the imagery at the black mass anticipates the quaternity symbol that Jung recognizes in a patient’s dream: “This is the pec...