Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies
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An Opus con naturam:: Labor, Care, and Transformation in the Garden
Full text linkThis essay proposes that a garden can be a site and an occasion for a labor with nature, an opus con naturam, to play with the alchemical phrase, a collaboration that can potentially transform both nature within and nature without. A garden, that is, nurtures individuation. A garden embeds culture in the land and informs culture with the processes and needs of the land. Like ego and Self, body and soul, reason and instinct, in practice land and culture are not separate or opposed, but interwoven. The garden is a symbol, then, of that connection, a place of healing, retreat, and labor. Frances Hodgson Burnet’s novel, The Secret Garden, illustrates the healing power of the garden, and an analysis of the labor of gardening suggests how that power works
Writing Nature with Darwin, Darwinism and Jung
Full text linkCharles Darwin and C. G. Jung were revolutionary thinkers about the role of human beings in the natural world. While Darwin’s Origins of Species (1859) sought to remove both God and “man” from the centre of the understanding of nature, C. G. Jung, one generation later, aimed to remove the ego from the central definition of human nature. Although both theorists have been explored for their conceptual ideas, neither has been seriously considered as writers, and in particular as writers of nature and human nature. This paper shows how similar these authors are in treating the unknowable in the psyche and history as of major significance. In particular, both writers require the resources of ancient myth, especially of nature as an Earth Mother goddess in order to represent the inconceivable. The paper also looks at the new critical practice of “literary Darwinism,” which, while viable in its own terms, suffers from being neither “literary,” nor “Darwinian.
Book Review: Recovering Feminine Spirituality: The Mysteries and the Mass as Symbols of Individuation, by Evangeline Rand: Coventure Ltd, 1997, ISBN 0879041235
Full text linkHermaphrodite as Healing Image:: Connecting a Mythic Imagination to Education
Full text linkThis exploration considers the question: What healing and transformation might these image-makers bring to education? Through hermeneutic tracking, a telling of the Greek myth of Hermaphrodite’s birth lays the background. Upon this scene, the alchemical process of psychological development is described wherein a bridge is made to the education and the ways that it might come to be informed through therapeutic practices. Here amplification of the images of Hermes and Aphrodite are traced to revision the ways teachers might embrace apeironic learning through a vibrant relationship to the child – Hermaphrodite, the inner child and the actual child in the classroom – and to move toward a more differentiated and androgynous consciousness. Tact, love, care, freedom, eros and the erotic play, embodiment, joy and ethics are some of the characteristics that appear as curative for education reimagined through mythic imagination. 
Unconsciousness and Survival:: Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Full text linkThis reading of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen for what they imply about unconsciousness and survival is based on the assumptions that literature is a primary source for understanding psyche, that literature makes available consciousness about ways collectives are living unconsciously, and that literature continues to unfold aspects of collective unconsciousness through many readers, cultures, and generations. Specifically, Kafka’s story presents to this reader a portrait of humanity’s thriving (in the sense of proliferating) through unconsciousness, and Borowski’s presents vignettes questioning whether physical survival of the species should be the criterion for progress and/or the ultimate priority. Their juxtaposition leads to questions intended to generate reflection on psychological consequences of integrating realization of species mortality
Abstinence vs. indulgence:: How the new ethical vampire reflects our monstrous appetites
Full text linkAs an archetype, the vampire is alive and well in the collective psyche. A closer look can reflect back to us what we deem monstrous out there as well as inform us about the monstrous within. This is fundamental to Jung’s notion of the Shadow and fundamentally an issue of ethics. This paper explores how specific attributes of the contemporary vampire reflect our ethical agon at the beginning of the 21st century, using two popular vampire sagas, the Twilight series and True Blood as examples of the tensions between abstinence and indulgence among a predatory species. This paper explains the elements of the female Bildungsroman literary genre found in both stories, which offers psychologists a particularly fruitful view into ethics and character development, and shows how the central love relationship between a human female and a vampire male dramatizes some of the trickier aspects of relating to the Other in the most intimate manner. The paper concludes by comparing Aristotelian virtue ethics with Jung’s notion of individuation to discern who is the real monster—and who aspires to the classical notion of arête
Book Review: The Dark Enlightenment: Jung, Romanticism and the Repressed Other by D. J. Moores.: Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 9780838642559
Full text linkPossession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche, by Craig E. Stephenson, Routledge, 2009, ISBN 9780415446525
Full text linkLiterature and the Shaman:: Jung, Trauma Stories and New Origin Stories in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Full text linkThe paper first considers the role of Jungian ideas in relation to academic disciplines and to literary studies in particular. Jung is a significant resource in negotiating developments in literary theory because of his characteristic treatment of the ‘other’. The paper then looks at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis whose own construction of archetypes is very close to Jung’s. By drawing upon new post-Jungian work from Jerome Bernstein’s Living in the Borderland (2005), the novel is revealed to be intimately concerned with narratives of trauma and of origin. Indeed, a Jungian and post-Jungian approach is able to situate the text both within nature and in the historical traumas of war as well as the personal traumas of subjectivity. Where Bernstein connects his work to the postcolonial ethos of the modern Navajo shaman, this new weaving of literary and cultural theory points to the residue of shamanism within the arts of the West. 
Ego Readings vs. Reading for Psyche
Full text linkJung claims that visionary imaginative literature, because its source is the collective unconscious, helps the collective psyche self-regulate. Proving Jung’s claim is difficult since shifts in collective consciousness have many causes, but an instance of literature’s playing a part in such a shift is Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book which contributed to collective realization of the inherent limitations of point of view. Sometimes literature contributes to collective consciousness through tales bringing into focus a collective crisis, such as Jorge Luis Borges’s stories “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Library of Babel,” and “The Secret Miracle” which convey the modern dilemma of loss of absolute transcendent truths. Literature, however, cannot bring unconscious contents to consciousness if readers read with rigid ego boundaries, what I call ego readings. Slipping free from ego readings is more likely if one becomes aware that one is so reading. If readers already have experience of psyche beyond ego, they are more likely to be able to read for psyche. Still, even if readers do not have such experience, literature itself can initiate one into the existence of psyche as my reading of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger initiated me. One can become aware of performing ego readings through clues such as habitually discovering in the text what one already thinks, reading for plot, becoming angry at a text, discovering that one has been in denial about a text, and reading to find support for an argument. This latter practice characterizes literary criticism, as illustrated by Jacques Lacan’s, Jacques Derrida’s, and Barbara Johnson’s responses to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Paradoxically, the professional response to literature may obstruct reading literature for psyche. If one can overcome ego resistance to a text, as I suggest through my experience of reading D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner,” one can garner a story’s psychological riches. Still, resistance may arise from ethical concerns, including responsibility to oneself, so that the relationship between self and text requires conscious and conscientious negotiation, an unsettling process as I detail in reference to my reading of Roberto Bolano’s 2666. Once readers are aware of performing ego readings, they can attempt to loosen their ego boundaries through focused attention (an insight emerging from reading Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”), particularly toward numinous moments for characters in a text or numinous responses in themselves. Reading for psyche also is furthered through re-reading, conscious intention, and reflection. For the institutions of literary criticism and of teaching to help readers be open to the contents of the unconscious psyche in literature, teachers and critics need to be aware of the difference between ego readings and reading for psyche. Jungian literature teachers and literary critics can take the lead