ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 describes a new Jungian literary criticism that acknowledges the legacy of literary theory and the full extent of Jungian psychology as a psychology that is also cultural criticism. It shows that the potential for linking Jungian psychology and literary studies lies in their mutual dedication to creativity as foundational to meaning. Both literary studies and Jungian psychology have a critical attitude to the making of meaning: Jung in the role of the unconscious, literature in its interrogation of what makes a text literary. However, the two academic disciplines have different starting points: Jungian roots are in the intrinsic creativity of the psyche; literature begins with the text as material, collective or linguistic object. In fact, both fields of study struggle with the prevailing subject/object division in knowing. After definitions of Jung on psyche or soul, ego, unconscious, collective unconscious, libido, Jungian image, sign versus Jungian symbol, his literary categories of psychological and visionary, the chapter ends by looking at his sophisticated sense of the ontology and epistemology of academic disciplines.
