Psychology and Literature

(Abridged)

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

 

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 by studying: i) the Creative process and ii) the 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. We consider the creative artist as a unique personality. It is possible to make surmises about the artist from his work and conversely. But the inferences are never conclusive.

1. The work of art [the creative process]

There is one difference between the psychologist’s and the literary critic’s examination of a "literary" work. What is significant to the former may be irrelevant to the latter, and vice versa. Take, for example, the psychological novel. The psychologist may not prefer it, as he has very little to explain since it explains itself. The most fruitful novels (for the psychologist) are those in which the author has not provided interpretation. Such works leave ample room for analysis and explanation.

Novels with hidden assumptions pose challenges to the psychologist, as he alone can analyse their deeper meaning. To illustrate this distinction, Jung discusses Goethe’s Faust.

In the first part, the drama 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. Here, nothing is self-explanatory. Every line increases the challenges, making it hard for the reader to understand without further explanation.

Jung calls the first type of artistic creation psychological, where everything is explained clearly, so 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 must 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’s work is an interpretation and illumination of the contents of the human mind. He leaves nothing to the psychologist to explain. No obscurity surrounds the materials as they fully expound 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 strange, and these originate "from the hinterland" of the human mind. Jung qualifies this mode as something that tears from top to bottom the curtain upon which there is the picture of an ordered world.

We find this vision in Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner, and William Blake. The visionary model of artistic creation astonishes and shocks us, compelling us to seek commentaries and explanations to grasp its meaning and intent.

Examples of the visionary.

The Shepherd of Hermas, The Divine Comedy, and Faust

In all three works, the visionary experience takes precedence over love. Here, the vision is not derived or secondary, nor is it merely a symptom of something else. Instead, it stands as a genuine symbolic expression. The subject thus transcends human passion.

Human enlightenment is born out of fear. In the daytime, Man believes in an ordered cosmos. He tries to maintain faith against the fear of the chaos that besets him by night.

The Night Side of Life.

The seers, prophets, leaders, and enlighteners 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. 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.

For the poet, the primordial experience is a source of creativity. His poetry cannot exhaust the possibilities of the vision but falls far short in richness of content. Psychology can bring together materials for comparison and offer terminology for discussion. The Collective Unconscious is part of the terminology.

Collective Unconscious

Jung defines the Collective Unconscious thus:

"We mean by Collective Unconscious, a certain psychic disposition shaped by the forces of heredity; from it, consciousness has developed".

Jung says that in the structure of our body, we find "traces of earlier stages of evolution". 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".

"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."

When the "collective unconscious becomes a living experience," it influences the "conscious outlook of an age", and the event becomes a creative act important to everyone living in that Age.

A work of art is a 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” that the collective unconscious provides.

II. The Poet

Creativity 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 the key to a work of art is in the experiences of the artist. Jung agrees that a work of art, like neurosis, can be traced back to the knots in psychic life. The role of the psychic disposition of the poet in his work of art is undeniable.

Art and Neurosis

Neurosis is a substitute for gratification. A work of art is close to neurosis as it expresses the poet’s repressions. Thus, it is close to religion and philosophy.

We cannot claim that a work of art is 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. The "particular" is a limitation, and even a sin, in the realm of art. A purely 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. In his capacity as an 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 personal life, while on the other, 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 achievements.

Jung explains his views of the artist thus:

The artist is under an overload of “collective psychic life," as opposed to 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 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 a collective man—, one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of Mankind. To perform this difficult task, he has 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.

i) The ordinary human being longing for happiness, satisfaction, and security in life, and ii) someone with a ruthless passion for creation that may go so far as to override every personal desire.

Jung believes that an artist suffers because of the divine gift of creative fire in him. Each human being is born with a capital of energy. The stronger force 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 protect themselves 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 in his personal life are not significant.

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 truth that his work outgrows him as a child outgrows its mother.

Human life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious, as opposed to the active will. The conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current. It becomes 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 who 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 lies in the human unconscious since the dawn of civilization. People need a guide, teacher, or even a physician to restore the psychic equilibrium of the epoch.

The work of a poet meets the spiritual needs 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".

[1795]

 

 

THANK YOU

Dr S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor, Govt. Arts College, Coimbatore-18

Revised —27/01/26

     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.