Post-Jungian Criticism: Theory and Practice

Introduction: Situating Jung in Contemporary Critical Theory

In all areas of production, from the Middle Ages until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the development of technology proceeded at a much slower rate than the development of art. Art could take its time in variously assimilating the technological modes of operation. But the transformation of things that set in around 1800 dictated the tempo to art, and the more breathtaking this tempo became, the more readily the dominion of fashion overspread all fields. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project The present place of Jungian theory and archetypal criticism in the academy can hardly be sketched without mention of fad and fashion. From the introduction of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and archetypes, authors were drawn to its rich, varied symbolism and critics to the power of its hermeneutics. From the publication of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957 to the first murmurs of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the early 1970s, archetypal criticism was one of the most frequently discussed theories in literature classes.1 While failing to eclipse New Criticism, it certainly rivaled psychoanalytic and Marxist criticism. In the current state of critical theory, a terrain where undergraduates typically learn more theory than graduate students of a 1 Introduction Situating Jung in Contemporary Critical Theory ������ GEORGE H. JENSEN generation past, theorists rise to superstardom and then are attacked from all sides, and new theories emerge at what seems to be a dizzying tempo; it is difficult to appreciate Frye’s prominence and the one-time stamina of archetypal criticism. And yet, now, Frye is rarely read and archetypal criticism seems to have lost its glitter. Perhaps so. It is out of fashion, yet still present. While archetypal criticism might not appear on the pages of Diacritics or New Criterion, might not announce itself in the subtitles of recent studies of prominent authors, an enormous volume of work appears each year. Intriguingly, even works that do not claim to practice archetypal criticism still employ Jungian terminology (archetype, persona, anima, animus, shadow) or a transparent paraphrase (recurrent patterns, mythic motifs, the evil twin, or the feminine side of a male). How can we explain this apparent contradiction , where archetypal criticism is passe and unavoidable? WAYS OF READING, MISREADING, AND NOT READING JUNG A partial answer is to understand how Jung is read and not read. We might begin with a comparison to readings of Freud. Most scholars would agree that the inclusion of a traditional reading of Freud’s work in the current climate of poststructuralism and postmodernism is problematic : He embraced positivism (for example, see Freud Standard Edition 1: 283–346). His model might be described as intra-personal, rationalist , and even mechanistic (Volosinov 80). His focus on sexuality is often considered reductive, aspects of his work are sexist (Jacoby 62), and his abandoning of the seduction theory raises questions about his character (see Crews, Masson, and Mahony). Yet, scholars like Lacan, Kristeva, and Rorty still read Freud with a hermeneutic of faith, selecting passages or themes and reworking them into robust theories. In contrast , too many academics read only segments of Jung’s works, find a few passages they cannot accept and dismiss his entire model of the psyche , which is arguably far more comprehensive than Freud’s.2 Those who have read about Jung in a psychology textbook, sampled The Portable Jung, or know of Jung only through the academic equivalent of gossip, might describe him in a number of unflattering ways. He was the cognitivist who studied memory,3 the structuralist who wrote about transcultural archetypes or developed a taxonomy of types (Baird 45), the liberal humanist who studied alchemy (Rowland 4), the Kantian phenomenologist who studied categories of mind, or the modernist who attempted to establish the mind as a foundation for knowledge (Rowland 5). When we look to the man, and not to his Collected 2 George H. Jensen Works,4 we find him described as a cult leader among the theosophists, a follower of the “volkisch” movement in Germany, or the flake who wrote about parapsychology and presaged the New Age movement (Noll passim). We even find charges of sexism and anti-Semitism.5 We could add other views of Jung, those frequently cited by scholars who read deeper into his works. He was a skeptic—open-minded yet not naive—who felt that there might be a psychological truth in occultism, alchemy, or UFOs. He was an...