Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies
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Generational Attention: Remembering How to Be a People
Full text linkIn the aftermath of World War I C. G. Jung responded to the destruction wrought by humankind by imagining humanity as a single, semi-conscious being. Jung imagines a naturalistic God capable of helping us remember how to be a people by using an awareness of all of human history to guide the species’ decision-making. As a psychologist I use Jung’s image to cultivate this “generational attention” in progressive political groups, particularly helping them cultivate the “public emotional intelligence” necessary to bind themselves to one another as a human community. Today the Jungian community can contribute to the articulation of a uniquely Jungian political psychology by following this image and by integrating a more differentiated feeling function in our organizations as we go
Jung, History and His Approach to the Psyche
Full text linkThe continued existence of analytical psychology in the academy has largely depended on applications of analytical psychology to other disciplines. These attempts at “applied psychoanalysis” are in danger, however, of becoming examples of “wild psychoanalysis.” To remedy this, applications need to work at the interface of the two disciplines in question, building a firm foundation as the basis of dialogue. In this paper, I address the application of analytical psychology to the discipline of history by first exploring the ways in which ‘history’ and the historical method influenced, and found expression in, Jung’s psychology. Given the extent to which Jung evoked ‘history’ and depended on it as a hermeneutical framework, Petteri Pietikainen’s argument – that a revision of archetypal theory needs to occur if analytical psychology is to conduct meaningful analyses of culture – requires deeper consideration
Re-reading Sophocles’s Oedipus Plays: Reconceiving Vengeance as Cultural Complex
Full text linkSophocles’s Oedipus plays depict failed integration of self-knowledge as worthy of divinization. Acting out vengeance is the evidence of Oedipus’s failed integration. Oedipus’s task of integration pivots on grasping in what sense he can be understood as guilty. His plight demonstrates that ignorance is part of unconsciousness and, contrary to Jung’s attitude toward ignorance, requires some kind of coping with responsibility. Vengeance was a conscious value among the ancient Greeks. In Sophocles’s last play, Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus acts out vengeance against his sons, and Sophocles divinizes this acting out through having Oedipus join the goddesses, the Furies. This divinization suggests that vengeance is archetypal, depending on culture only for images of manifestation. I argue that Oedipus’s acting out of vengeance can be read as symptomatic of a cultural complex. I identify the situation leading to his acting out as his failure to imagine how creatively to take responsibility for his parricide and incest. Reading Oedipus’s acting out as failure to integrate his self-knowledge opens up the question of what successful integration could have entailed. I turn to work by Edward C. Whitmont to suggest what acceptance of responsibility for deeds not intended might look like. Finally, I turn to work by Gottfried M. Heuer to address the issues of power and love raised by Oedipus’s dilemma. In order to read these plays in terms of Jung’s concepts of visionary literature and of integration, I critique and discard two literary critical concepts used in previous criticism of Sophocles’s plays: 1) that the intention of the author determines meaning in a text; and 2) that no framework beyond those given in a play may be used to interpret meaning. 
Book Review: Rowland, Susan. C.G. Jung in the Humanities: Taking the Soul’s Path.: New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2010. ISBN 9781935528-029.
Full text linkReading for Psyche:: Numinosity
Full text linkBecause of imaginative literature’s extensive renderings of numinous experiences in symbolic forms, a focus on numinous moments in a text can yield an ever-unfolding understanding of the complexity of the factors affecting both positive and negative transformation. Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” illustrates typical optimism of religious treatments of numinous experiences with regard to transformation; E. M. Forster’s “The Road from Colonus” exemplifies non-integration of a numinous experience; and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle offers a vision of integration of numinous experiences as shared in the realm of psyche. These three works are analyzed to demonstrate that each literary treatment of numinous experiences potentially offers specific understanding of the complexities of integrating or failing to integrate numinous experiences; therefore reading literature with a focus on its renderings of numinous experiences is a revelatory approach to reading literature for psyche
Book Review: Rowland, Susan. The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung.: New York: Routledge, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-415-55094-9
Full text linkInteracting Narratives:: Acknowledging the Self in the Construction of Professional Knowledge
Full text linkIn narrative approaches to teachers’ professional knowledge, identity (one’s story to live by) is generally understood to be constructed and reconstructed through conscious intention (Chosen Narratives) and through contextual influences (Life Narratives). It is possible and necessary to go further, to describe a third fundamental influence. Using the concept of Self Narratives allows teachers and teacher educators to acknowledge and work with the inevitable and powerful unconscious dynamics that influence their teaching practice and the ongoing construction and reconstruction of their professional knowledge. The concept of Self Narratives integrates the theories and practices of depth psychology, particularly Jungian analytical psychology, into narrative approaches to teachers’ professional knowledge. Recognizing the unconscious mind as profoundly influential is a position overlooked by more familiar schools of educational psychology, and a Jungian perspective considers the unconscious mind as ultimately helpful and holistic, a position that varies from other schools of depth psychology
Symbols of Transformation, Phenomenology, and Magic Mountain
Full text linkWhen C. G. Jung partnered with Sigmund Freud, he already had a broad knowledge of world mythology and an understanding of the unconscious formed largely from Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s Dionysian energy of nature, or physis. Unwilling to reduce this unconscious—matrix of dreams, myth, and literature—to Freud’s infantile sexual libido, Jung’s break with Freud was inevitable. His long suppressed ideas emerged in Symbols of Transformation, a mythically enriched study of regression in service of development, which rejects Freud’s limited libido. This paper uses Heidegger’s phenomenology to purge remaining traces of psychic encapsulation from Jung’s significant archetypal insights and demonstrates the modified Jungian articulation in the context of Thomas Mann’s novel, Magic Mountain, a study of hermetic individuation. Not only does this paper use Jung’s insights to clarify the labyrinthine development of the novel, thereby taking sides in a literary debate about its meaning, but it uses Mann’s artistic insights to expose limitations of Jungian theory
Symbols that Transform: Trickster Nature in Detective Fiction
Full text linkC. G. Jung\u27s 1911 volume finds a home in the English edition of his Collected Works as Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (1956). This paper will argue that Jung here offers insight into symbolism that can augment and expand his notion of symbol and myth as engines of psychic transformation. While Symbols of Transformation\u27s subtitle, “An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia,” indicates a clinical approach, my paper will develop Jungian symbols and myth in a popular cultural form, detective fiction. It will show how detective fiction adopts the ancient trickster myth to generate symbols that re-shape modern consciousness in its relation to non-human nature. The trickster myth itself has a possible antecedent in humans evolving through and with, the practice of hunting. For the modern urban person, detective fiction supplies the hunt and here the Jungian symbol demonstrates its potency for realigning both human nature, and humans and nature. As well as Jung, this paper draws on Lewis Hyde\u27s remarkable Trickster Makes This World (1998) and offers case studies of two novels overtly attuned to hunting through the figure of the dog. These novels are Arthur Conan Doyle\u27s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and a recent creative response to it in Nevada Barr\u27s Winter Study (2008) set among mythical and actual wolves. 
