Psychology and Literature Carl Gustav Jung (Detailed Summary) Revised

  

Psychology and Literature

Carl Gustav Jung

 

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 –1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and the founder of analytical psychology. His work influenced psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy and religious studies. 

 

Freud wanted Jung to be his potential heir to carry on his "new science" of psychoanalysis, but the research and personal vision were different, and a breach took place between the two. 

 

Jung created 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 inherited from ancestors. Jung thought libido was a source of personal growth but did not believe (unlike Freud) that libido alone was responsible for forming the core personality. 

 

[From Wikipedia] [Scholars may refer to youtube/ejnTBs-2cloEI to listen to the Face to Face programme (BBC) with Jung]

 

Jung and Freud

 

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

• 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.  

That is the racial memory inherited by all human beings. That connects the modern man to his primeval roots. The collective unconscious gets manifested in the recurrence of some images, stories, and figures called the archetypes –"the psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type."

 

An individual attains Psychological maturity when he recognizes and accepts the archetypal elements of his psyche, a triad—shadow, persona, and anima that correspond 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 O’Neill and Melville. Eliot’s criticism, especially his essay, Tradition and Individual Talent, has a close affinity with Jungian ideas]

 

The reasons for this are many.

1. Freud was much more scientifically oriented than Jung. Science was "inimical" to literature from the Romantic period onwards.

2. Jung was more visionary, believing in religious and even magical traditions. Needless to say that his beliefs were closer to literature than those of Freud.

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

4. Jungian 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, created intentionally and consciously. When we analyze the creative process, we undertake the psychological analysis of a work of art. When we look at the creative artist, we consider the creative human being 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 difference between the psychologist’s examination of a literary work and the literary critic’s examination. What is relevant for the psychologist may be irrelevant for the literary critic and vice versa. For example, the psychologist may not prefer the psychological novel, as he has very little to do since it explains itself.

 

The novels most fruitful for the psychologist are those in which the author does not give a psychological interpretation of his characters. These leave room for analysis and explanation. Jung gives some examples--the French novels of Pierre Benoit 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 interesting for the psychologist. Such work rests on hidden psychological assumptions. It reveals itself to critical analysis.

 

On the other hand, the author undertakes psychological exposition and illumination in a psychological novel. Such novels interest the amateur. But works with hidden psychological assumptions pose a challenge to the psychologist as he only 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 Gretchen [see notes 2] explains itself. Goethe explains 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. He finds it hard to understand without interpretation.

 

Jung calls the first type of artistic creation psychological. 

 

Everything is explained so clearly that the psychologist has no task to perform. The second type of artistic creation is called visionary. Here the work is endowed with deep 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 but a "strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland" of the human mind, a "primordial experience" that overtakes human understanding, and "a disturbing vision of monstrous and meaningless" happenings beyond human feeling. 

 

The visionary mode tears from top to bottom the curtain upon which there is the picture of an ordered world.  It allows us 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 the Dionysian exuberance of Nietzsche [see notes 3], in Wagner (Nibelungen Ring) [see notes 4] and in the poetry of William Blake. The list is extendable.

 

In the Visionary mode of artistic creation, we are astonished, taken aback, and demand commentaries and explanations. Historical facts (as in Dante) or mythical events (as in Wagner) may cover the experience.  But the significance of the material is in the VISIONARY EXPERIENCE.

 

Obscurity of source material in the Visionary mode

In the psychological model, there is no obscurity. The vagueness may be intentional.

• We may suppose that some highly personal experience underlies the ‘grotesque darkness’.
• The curious images that explain the vision may be ‘cover figures’ or an attempt to conceal the experience.
• The experience might be in love “morally and aesthetically incompatible” with the personality. The ego of the poet might repress this experience and make it unrecognizable.
• Moreover, there may be repetitive attempts to replace reality with fiction. That would explain the ‘proliferation of imaginative forms, all monstrous, demonic, grotesque, and perverse’.

 

Views of the visionary

The vision is not a substitute for reality. But if we consider it a personal experience, we take away the primordial quality, and it becomes a symptom [see notes 5] or a psychic disturbance. That prompts us again 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 an illusion, and the poet is 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 fantasy and is understood as a poetic license.

·      Certain poets encourage this view 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 of the visionary mode

 

The shepherd of Hermas [see notes 6]

The Divine Comedy and

Faust by Goethe

 

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

 

If these secrets are made public, they are deliberately kept mysterious, uncanny, deceptive and hidden from human scrutiny. A man protects himself with the shield of science and the armour of reason. 

 

Enlightenment [see notes 7] is born out of fear. In the daytime, man believes in an ordered cosmos and tries to maintain faith against the fear of the 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 wheel belongs to a time when nobody has thought of it as a mechanical device. Knowledge about the secrets reaches the younger men through 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 the richness of content, the poet must have at his disposal a vast store of materials if he has to communicate even a few of his intimations.

 

Psychology cannot elucidate the colourful imagery. It can bring together materials for comparison and offer terminology for its discussion. Accordingly, 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 an abnormal and dangerous level of consciousness into equilibrium in a purposive way”. 

 

Great poetry draws its strength from the life of Mankind. 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 in 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 to deriving the origin of a 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 the psychic disposition of the poet in his work of art is undeniable.

 

Freud and Neurosis

 

Neurosis is a substitute for gratification, inappropriate (a mistake, an excuse, a ‘voluntary blindness’), and an irritating disturbance as it is without any sense or meaning.

 

A work of art is close to neurosis (when analyzed based on the poet’s repressions). 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... 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. Uniqueness is a limitation, and even a sin, in the realm of art. A primarily personal art 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. As an artist, he is "neither auto-erotic, nor hetero-erotic, nor erotic..."  ‘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 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 human being longing for happiness, satisfaction, and security in life, and

2. Someone with a ruthless passion for creation 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 some capital of energy. The dominant 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 meaningful to us.

 

It does not matter whether the artist knows that his work is born, grows and matures with him or that he produces it from the void. His opinion does not change the reality that his work outgrows him as a child does his 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 in the German soul. It is a ‘primordial image’ of the physician or teacher of Mankind, the archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer. That archetypal image "lies" buried/dormant in the unconscious since the dawn of civilization. This image awakens when human society is committed to serious error. When people go astray, they feel the need for a guide or teacher or even a 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. It means more to him than his fate. He is subordinate to his work. He has given it form and must leave the interpretation to others and 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 1st or mid-2nd 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 18th 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.

Dr. S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor of English

Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian Universities. They do not substitute the originals.  The students must necessarily go through the original texts. The writer hopes to help the students from the underdeveloped areas of our country.