Psychology and Literature--Carl Gustav Jung

Bharathiar University  

MPhil (English) Study Materials  

PAPER II – APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Unit IV

C.G.Jung (Lodge, pp 175-227)

Psychology and Literature

Carl Gustav Jung

By S. Sreekumar

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 –1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy and religious studies. Freud wanted him to be his potential heir to carry on his "new science" of psychoanalysis. However, Jung's researches and personal vision were different from Freud’s and a breach took place between the two.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts like ‘synchronicity’, ‘archetypal phenomena’, ‘collective unconscious’, ‘psychological complex’, ‘extraversion’ and ‘introversion’. He downplayed the importance of sexual development and focused on the collective unconscious: the part of the unconscious that contains memories and ideas that Jung believed were inherited from ancestors. While he thought that libido was an important source for personal growth, Jung did not believe (unlike Freud) that libido alone was responsible for the formation of the core personality.  Jung believed his personal development was influenced by factors unrelated to sexuality. [From Wikipedia] [Scholars please refer to youtu.be/ejnTBs-2cloEI and listen to a BBC ‘Face to Face’ programme with Jung]

Jung and Freud

The main disagreement between Freud and Jung was in the nature of libido [the psychic and emotional energy associated with instinctual biological drives, sexual desire, manifestation of the sexual desire etc.]

·        Freud thought that the nature of libido was sexual,

·        Jung believed that it was more than sexual.

Jung and Collective Unconscious. [this is his main contribution to psychology]

Jung proposed the existence of a ‘collective unconscious’  

Collective unconscious is the racial memory inherited by all human beings. This connects the modern man to his primeval roots. Collective unconscious is manifested in the recurrence of certain images, stories, figures, called the ‘archetypes –‘the psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type’.

An individual attains Psychological maturity when he/she recognizes and accepts the archetypal elements of his/her own psyche. This psyche is described as a triad—‘shadow’, ‘persona’, and ‘anima’—which corresponds to Freudian terms, ID, Ego, and Super-ego. [see notes 1]

Jung and Literature

Jungian psychology has much more affinity with literature than Freudian psychology. [See the works of writers like Eugene O’Neill, Herman Melville etc. T. S. Eliot’s criticism, especially his essay, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent has a close affinity with Jung’s ideas]

The reasons for this are many.

1.Freud was much more scientifically oriented than Jung. Science was seen as inimical to Literature from the Romantic period onwards.

2.Jung was more a visionary believing in religious and even magical traditions. Needless to say that his beliefs were closer to Literature than Freud’s.

3.Jung readily agreed that Literature embodied knowledge. This knowledge was vital to alienated, secularized modern man.

4.Jung’s theory of ‘collective unconscious tied neatly with the anthropological study of primitive myth and ritual initiated in England by James Frazer in The Golden Bough.

5.Out of the fusion of psychology, anthropology and Literature, a kind of literary criticism evolved in which the archetypal patterns became dominant.

Psychology and Literature

·        Psychology, Jung says, is the study of the psychic process. ‘Human psyche is the womb of all sciences and art’.

·        Psychological research tries to explain the formation of a work of art.   [Creative process]

·        It also looks at the factors that make a person an artist. [Creative artist]

A work of art is a complicated product. It is created intentionally and consciously. When we analyze the creative process, we undertake the psychological analysis of a complicated work of art. When we look at the creative artist, we look at the creative human being as a unique personality. It is possible to draw surmises about the artist from the work of art, and vice versa. But these inferences are never conclusive.

The work of art [the creative process]

There is a basic difference between

·        The psychologist’s examination of a literary work, and

·        The literary critic’s examination of the same.

·        What is important for the psychologist may be irrelevant for the literary critic and vice versa. For example, the ‘psychological novel’ may not be preferred by the psychologist as he/she has very little to do as the novel explains itself.

‘The novels which are most fruitful for the psychologist are those in which the author has not already given a psychological interpretation of his characters, and which therefore leave room for analysis and explanation…’. Jung gives some examples

The French novels of Pierre Benolt and the English novels of Rider Haggard.

Conan Doyle’s detective fiction, and Melville’s Moby Dick, “which I consider the greatest American Novel” [Jung]

An exciting narrative without any psychological explanation is the most interesting thing for the psychologist. Such a work is built upon hidden psychological assumptions. It reveals itself to critical analysis. On the other hand, in the psychological novel, the author himself undertakes psychological exposition and illumination. Such novels are interesting to laymen. But novels with hidden psychological assumptions pose a challenge to the psychologist for he alone can analyze its deeper meaning.

Jung takes Goethe’s Faust to explain his point further.

In the first part of the drama, the love tragedy of Grotchen [see notes 2] explains itself. The poet has stated everything clearly. The psychologist has nothing more to add. But the picture changes when we come to the second part of the drama. Here nothing is self-explanatory. Every line adds to the difficulty of the reader as he finds it hard to understand without interpretation.

Jung calls the first type of artistic creation psychological. Here everything is explained so clearly that the psychologist has very little task to perform. The second type of artistic creation is called visionary. Here the work is endowed with deeper meaning and the psychologist has to strive hard to decipher the meaning. The reader may miss the significance of the materials unless the psychologist points it out.

The Psychological mode

It deals with materials taken from ordinary human consciousness. The poet raises the material from the commonplace to the poetic. He brings into the reader’s consciousness things the latter might have overlooked. The poet’s work is an interpretation and illumination of the contents of consciousness. He leaves nothing to the psychologist to explain. No obscurity surrounds the materials as they fully explain themselves. Such works never exceed the boundaries of psychology. All the experiences pictured in them belong to the realm of the understandable.

The Visionary mode

This mode reverses all the conditions of the former. The experiences are no longer familiar. ‘It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind...’ It is a primordial experience that surpasses mans understanding. Nietzsche calls it ‘treason against humanity’. It is ‘a disturbing vision of monstrous and meaningless happenings that in every way exceed the grasp of human feeling…’ Jung further qualifies this visionary mode as something that ‘rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become’. We find this vision in Dante, in the second part of Faust, in Nietzsche’s  Dionysian exuberance [see notes 3], in Wagner’s  Nibelungen ring, [see notes 4] and in the poetry of William Blake. Jung gives further examples and says that the list can be extended.

In the visionary mode of artistic creation we are astonished, taken aback and we demand commentaries and explanations. The experience may be covered with historical facts as in the case of Dante or by mythical events as in Wagner. But the significance of the material is in the VISIONARY EXPERIENCE.

Obscurity of source material in the Visionary mode

This is exactly opposite to what we find in the psychological mode. This obscurity may be intentional.

·        We may suppose that some highly personal experience underlies this ‘grotesque darkness’.

·        The curious images given to explain the vision may be ‘cover figures’ and they may be an attempt to conceal the basic experience’.

·        This might be an experience in love ‘which is morally and aesthetically incompatible with the personality as a whole.  The ego of the poet might repress this experience and make it unrecognizable.

·        Moreover, the attempt ‘to replace reality with fiction must be repeated in a long series of creative embodiments’. This would explain the ‘proliferation of imaginative forms, all monstrous, demonic, grotesque, and perverse’.

Jung’s views of the visionary

The vision is not a substitute for reality. But if we consider the vision as a personal experience, we take away the primordial quality from it and it becomes a symptom [see notes 5] or a psychic disturbance. This in turn prompts us once more to view the world not as chaotic but ordered. The vision, ‘which is a frightening revelation of the abysses that defy the human understanding’ is dismissed as illusion, and the poet is regarded a victim and perpetrator of deception.

·        The visionary experience is something unknown to ordinary men. It has an unfortunate suggestion of obscure metaphysics and occultism.

·        The vision is sometimes regarded as the fantasy of the poet and is understood as a poetic license.

·        Certain poets encourage this view so as to keep a distance between them and their works. Spitteler, for example, stoutly maintained that it was the same for the poet whether he sang of ‘an Olympian Spring or to the theme: ‘May is here!’

·        ‘The truth is that poets are human beings, and that what a poet has to say about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject’. [D. H. Lawrence advises us to trust the tale not the teller].

Jung gives examples for the visionary mode

The shepherd of Hermas [see notes 6]

The Divine Comedy and

Faust by Goethe

In these three works we find a personal love episode which is subordinated to the visionary experience. Here the vision is not something derived or secondary and it is not a symptom of something else. It is true symbolic expression—that is the expression of something existent in its own right, but imperfectly known. The subject of the vision falls beyond human passion.

If these secrets are made public, they are deliberately kept back and concealed.  They are regarded as mysterious, uncanny and deceptive from very early times. They are hidden from the scrutiny of man. He protects himself with the shield of science and the armor of reason.  Human enlightenment [see notes 7] is born out of fear. In the daytime man believes in an ordered cosmos. He tries to maintain faith against the fear of chaos that besets him by night. ‘When we consider the visionary mode of creation, it even seems as if the love episode had served as  a mere release—as if the personal experience were nothing but the prelude to the all-important ‘divine comedy’.

The Night Side of Life [see notes 8]

The seers, prophets, leaders, and enlighteners also were familiar with the nocturnal world. Man has known of it from time immemorial. For primitive man it is an unquestionable part of his picture of the cosmos. Only we have repudiated it because of our fear of superstition and metaphysics. We want an ordered world that is safe and manageable. ‘But even in our midst, the poet now and then catches sight of the figures of the night-world. He sees something of the psychic world that strikes terror into the savage and barbarian.

Jung points out that in primitive cultures there were attempts to give expression to the visionary mode. In Rhodesian cliff-drawings, there is a double cross contained in a circle. In Christian churches and Tibetan monasteries, the so-called sun-wheel is visible. We have to remember that this belongs to a time when nobody has thought of the wheel as a mechanical device. Knowledge about the secrets is handed on to younger men in the rites of initiation.   

For the poet the primordial experience is a source of creativeness. Since his poetry cannot exhaust the possibilities of the vision, but falls far short of it in richness of content, the poet must have at his disposal a huge store of materials if he has to communicate even a few of his intimations.

Psychology cannot elucidate the colorful imagery. It can bring together materials for comparison and offer a terminology for its discussion. According to the terminology what appears in the vision is the COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS.

COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Jung defines Collective Unconscious thus:

We mean by Collective Unconscious, a certain psychic disposition shaped by the forces of heredity; from it consciousness has developed. In the physical structure of the body we find traces of earlier stages of evolution...It is a fact that in eclipses of consciousness--in dreams, narcotic states, and cases of insanity—-there come to the surface psychic products or contents that show all the traits of primitive levels of psychic development.

Jung says that what is of particular importance to the study of literature in these manifestations of the collective unconscious is that they are compensatory to the conscious attitude. They can bring abnormal and dangerous level of consciousness into equilibrium in a purposive way.  

Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought to bear upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living in that age.

‘A work of art contains message to generations of men.  Faust touches something in the soul of every German. An epoch is like an individual. It has its limitations of conscious outlook. It requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer, or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to the attainment of that which everyone blindly craves and expects’.

II. The Poet

Creativeness contains a secret. ‘Creative man is a riddle that we may try to answer various ways, but always in vain, a truth that has not prevented modern psychology from turning now and again to the question of the artist and his art’.

Freud thought that he had found a key in his procedure of deriving the work of art from the personal experiences of the artist. Jung agrees that a work of art, like neurosis, can be traced back to the knots in psychic life. ‘It was Freud’s great discovery that neuroses have a casual origin in the psychic realm—that they take their rise from emotional states and from real or imagined childhood experiences’. The role of a poet’s psychic disposition in his work of art is undeniable.

Freud and Neurosis

Neurosis is a substitute for gratification. It is something inappropriate—-a mistake, an excuse, a ‘voluntary blindness’. Neurosis is an irritating disturbance as it is without any sense or meaning.

·        A work of art is close to neurosis as it can be analyzed in terms of the poet’s repressions.

·        In that sense it is in the company of religion and philosophy.

But we cannot claim that a work of art is only neurosis. ‘The personal idiosyncrasies that creep into a work of art are not essential, in fact, the more we have to cope with these peculiarities, the less is to a question of art’. A work of art should rise above personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet. The personal aspect is a limitation, and even a sin, in the realm of art. An art which is primarily personal has to be considered neurotic.

There is some truth in the belief of the Freudian school that artists are ‘narcissists’. The term implied that artists are undeveloped personalities with infantile and auto-erotic qualities. Jung says that this description is valid for the artist as a person. It has nothing to do with the man as an artist. In his capacity as artist he is ‘neither auto-erotic, nor hetero-erotic, nor erotic in any sense’. ‘He is objective and impersonal—-even inhuman—-for as an artist he is his work, and not a human being.

Every creative person is a duality of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process. As a human being he may be healthy or morbid. We can only understand him as an artist by looking at his creative achievement.

Jung explains his views of the artist thus:

... the specifically artist disposition involves an overweight of collective psychic life as against the personal. Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.

‘As a human being the artist may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is a man in a higher sense—-he is ‘collective man’—-one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.’

Two forces are at war in the life of the artist.

1. The common human being longing for happiness, satisfaction, and security in life, and

2. Someone with a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire. 

Jung believes that an artist has to suffer because of the divine gift of creative fire in him. Each human being is born with a certain capital of energy. The strongest force in them will seize and monopolize this energy, leaving so little for other activities.

The auto-eroticism of the artist resembles that of illegitimate or neglected children. These children have to protect themselves from their tender years from the destructive influence of people who have no love to give them. They develop bad qualities for defence against others and ‘maintain an invincible egocentrism by remaining all their lives infantile and helpless or by actively offending against the moral code or the law’. Art explains the artist. The deficiencies and conflicts of his personal life are not at all important for us. 

It does not matter whether the artist knows that his work is born, grows and matures with him or that he produces the work from the void. His opinion does not change the fact that his work outgrows him as a child its mother.

‘Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current being nothing more than an observer of events. The work in progress becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.

Faust is a symbol that lives in the soul of every German. Goethe has helped to bring it to birth. Faust and Also spake Zarathustra play upon something that is there in the German soul. It is a ‘primordial image’ of the physician or teacher of mankind, the archetypal image of the wise man, the savior or redeemer. It is the archetypal image that lies buried/dormant in man’s unconscious since the dawn of civilization. This image is awakened when the human society is committed to a serious error. When people go astray they feel the need of a guide or teacher or even of the physician to restore the psychic equilibrium of the epoch.

Thus the work of a poet meets the spiritual need of the society in which he lives. The work means more to him than his personal fate. He is subordinate to his work. He has given it form and must leave the interpretation to others and to the future. ‘A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal’.

Every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all. And this is also why the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art—-but at most a help or hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet.

NOTES

1. ‘shadow’, ‘persona’, and ‘anima’

In Jungian psychology, "shadow" or "shadow aspect" may refer to an unconscious aspect of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself. In short, the shadow is the "dark side".

The persona is how we present ourselves to the world. The word "persona" is derived from a Latin word that literally means "mask." The persona represents the different social masks we wear among various groups and situations. It acts to shield the ego from negative images. According to Jung, the persona may appear in dreams and take different forms.

The anima is a feminine image in the male psyche, and the animus is a male image in the female psyche. The anima/animus represents the "true self" rather than the image we present to others and serves as the primary source of communication with the collective unconscious.

2. Faust, Goethe's great dramatic poem in two parts, is his crowning work. Even though it is based on the medieval legend of a man who sold his soul to the devil, it actually treats modern man's sense of alienation and his need to come to terms with the world in which he lives.  Faust was made into a symbol of free thought, anti-clericalism, and opposition to Church dogma.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a consummate and prolific philosopher. While most philosophers warned people of the danger of physical passions, Nietzsche recommended cultivating them as powerful assets. Nietzsche was keenly aware of the unconscious. Spontaneous feelings and emanations from the darker regions of the soul were as  important to him as the work of the intellect, and fully experiencing something like music was nothing less in his eyes than the discoveries of science or the rational mind.

4. Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The scale and scope of the story is epic. It follows the struggles of gods, heroes, and several mythical creatures over the eponymous magic ring that grants domination over the entire world. Robert Donington in Wagner's Ring And Its Symbols interprets it in terms of Jungian psychology, as an account of the development of unconscious archetypes in the mind, leading towards individuation.

5. ‘Symptom’ is a term frequently employed by Freud. He defined it thus:

A  symptom is a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is a consequence of repression’.

6. The shepherd of Hermas is a Christian literary work of the 1^st or mid 2^nd century. It is considered a valuable book by many Christians and considered canonical scripture by some early Church fathers.

7. Human enlightenment—The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the 18^th century. It advocated reason as a means to establishing an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, government, and even religion. 

8. The Night Side of Life—-Lionel Trilling stated that Freud was committed to the night side of life. The term refers to the dark, irrational aspects of the human mind.

S. SREEKUMAR