ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores Jung and literary forms through archetypes, individuation and myth. Jungian archetypes are form-making properties, producing partly cultural archetypal images that become the generative material for literature in writing and reading. To Jung, myths are stories in psyche and in culture that shape human energy. They work within archetypal form-making and so contribute to literary narrative. The Jungian psyche is cultural because individuation works through archetypal images that are influenced by conscious experience. A Jungian reading of Thomas Wyatt’s sonnet ‘They flee from me’ leads to a detailed study of Jung’s personal myth in Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte. The Jungian Self, dreams and myth are also defined before looking at Jung’s ‘The Psychology of the Child Archetype’, and ‘The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales’, from CW9i. Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche is contrasted with Anne Baring and Judith Cashford’s The Myth of the Goddess for gender, the feminine and feminism in texts. Jungian literary criticism is represented by ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Effective Protagonist by Terence Dawson and Day-to-Day Dante, by Dennis Patrick Slattery. Finally, Nicolescu’s transdisciplinarity is found to enact Dionysus as understood by James Hillman.
