This book is intended as an attempt to apply approaches drawn from post-Jungian Depth or Archetypal Psychology to a number of classic nineteenth and twentieth century literary texts. Approached from this psychological perspective such texts - the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth and Keats, and novels such as Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, and Portrait of the Artist - can be seen to offer insights into the dynamics of the Self, the relationship between ego and the 'otherness' of the Unconscious, and the impact of archetypal discourses on the self. In the same way that Jung himself approached dream, the myth and the legend, as a means of charting deeply-ingrained psychological processes, it is possible to read literary texts for the insights they offer into the self, soul and psyche. Such texts can be described as "alchemical", concerned with psychic transformation and the patterns of psychological relations between the ego-bound self, and the "otherness" of archetypal discourses. In reading such texts, as in reading dreams, the reader is participating in these processes, and hence draw for him or herself, greater understanding of the subterranean psychological realities which impinge upon the world of the intellectualising and ego-bound self.
The book draws on the work of two of the most influential post-Jungians, Maria von Franz and James Hillman, and on their combined insights into the working of Soul and Psyche. In particular, it endorses Hillman's vision of a "re-visioned psychology", and his commitment to the "revisioning of psychology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy in terms of the Western cultural imagination". From this perspective the archeypes - Wise Old Man, Puer/Puella, Trickster, Animus/Anima - are to be seen not as transcendent spiritual entities, but rather as phenomenal realities, actively involved in all aspects of the life of the self and of the Soul. In literary texts, as in dream and myth, one can trace evidence of the nature and importance of these "imaginal deities" in the life of the Self, and the impact they have had within the collective imagination.
The book is offered as a corrective to that form of ideological and post-deconstructionist criticism which has become ingrained in recent critical theory. And yet it is also intended as a means of transforming critical theory, encouraging it to move away from the narrowly intellectualising and logocentric/ideo-logical confines of critical interrogation. Jung and his inheritors are, of course, regarded with considerable suspicion within contemporary critical theory, decried as romantic humanists, liberal mystics, or closet essentialists. Notions of the "Collective Unconscious" and "Achetypal patterns" are not currently fashionable for a generation schooled in the hermeneutics of suspicion, and to resurrect them now might well appear to be a retrograde, if not reactionary step. Certainly classical Jungian criticism, with its essentially psychobiographical emphasis, appears deeply unfashionable in an age which has proclaimed the "death of the author". And yet there is continuity between the imperatives of post-Derridean and post-Foucauldian criticism, and the Archetypal Psychologising outlined by Hillman. Both approaches, in their shared suspicion of notions of the universal centred "self", as in their emphasis on text and discourse, encourage an ironic perspective on established rhetorical orthodoxies. Both, furthermore, allow the possibility of transformation of the "what is" to its other, and of re-seeing the evident and the obvious in the light of the hidden and the concealed, whether personal, social, ideological or political.
This book is intended as an attempt to articulate a different way of seeing, to envision these literary texts, as texts, as means through which the otherness of and behind "the real" might be made manifest. And underlying this is the conviction of this book that such an attempt is not simply valuable but also necessary, if literary texts are to be allowed, once more, to become both sacred and truly meaningful.
If you are interested in this project, please contact me at doverr@newi.ac.uk