ABSTRACT
There is a frequently cited, but no less compelling, anecdote that is germane to the subject of this chapter. The story tells of a professional conversation between C. G. Jung and James Joyce about the nature of Joyce’s daughter’s mental illness. Joyce, increasingly distraught over his 21-year-old daughter’s apparent descent into schizophrenia, was, in the early 1930s, urged by his patrons to bring his daughter, Lucia, to meet with the eminent Swiss psychiatrist. Joyce, perhaps in desperation, insisted that Lucia’s poetry contained the strands of a new form of literature. Following his examination, Jung, the twentieth doctor to be consulted, told Joyce that Lucia was suffering from dementia praecox and that her poems were “random.”
“How do you know, Dr. Jung?” Joyce asked. Jung replied that her thinking and speech were so deviant and distorted that he could conclude that she was suffering from this particular form of madness. Joyce protested that in his own writing, he purposefully stretched the English language, distorted words, fused though and images. “What is the difference?” he asked. Jung replied that Joyce and his daughter were like two people going to the bottom of a river, but whereas Joyce dove into the deep water, his daughter fell into it. Jung later wrote, “The ordinary patient cannot help himself talking and thinking in such a way, while Joyce willed it and moreover developed it with all his creative forces” [Johnston and Holzman, 1979, p. 16, quoting Ellmann, 1959, p. 692].
