ABSTRACT
There is something missing in the Australian psyche, and this absence or abyss is what interests David Tacey in this chapter. Cultural development and personal individuation necessitate a dialogue or interaction between conscious and unconscious, but David describes this dialogue as problematical in the Australian context because culture here is so thinly rational and cerebral, denying the existence of the unconscious. As a colonial society, its main imperative has been to impress itself on both landscape and indigenous people, subordinating both to the dictates of a reason and a rule imported from Europe.
Patrick White was chosen as the subject for David's analysis as he is the most prominent and accomplished Australian writer to date, who is widely known internationally and Australia's only Nobel Prize winning author who is known to have read Jung and been influenced by Jungian ideas. However, the nature of that influence is questioned in David's chapter. Jung's writings have, ironically, been drawn in to reinforce and protect the existence of an unconscious Australian cultural complex to extinguish self in a sacrifice to the repressed “other”, whether this “other” be landscape, indigenous people, or the psychological underworld.
