ABSTRACT
Concluding his discussion of associative thinking in the 1952 (1912) monograph, Jung analyses a piece by Anatole France (my thanks to Terence Dawson for translating that piece). It is an anecdote about Abbe Oegger, the ®rst dean of the cathedral of Paris, who was troubled by the question of whether Judas was damned and eventually concluded that Judas was redeemed. Jung makes two general points. One point is that the recurrence of mythic motifs is due to their signi®cation of a typical human situation. `The Judas legend is itself a typical motif, namely that of the mischievous betrayal of the hero'; this `myth is moving and tragic, because the noble hero is not felled in fair ®ght, but through treachery' (1952, CW 5: para. 42). The motif thus expresses a constellation of emotions, motivations and actions, which repeatedly appears in history and ®ction. He notes that, as a general rule, the `mythological tradition . . . does not perpetuate accounts of ordinary everyday events in the past, but only of those which express the universal and ever-renewed thoughts of mankind' (ibid.: para. 42). His other point is that the `mechanism of fantasies in general' involves a
conscious organization of unconscious material: conscious fantasies `illustrate, through the use of mythological material, certain tendencies in the personality which are not yet recognized or are recognized no longer' (ibid.: paras 44±5). The priest's doubts and hopes concerning Judas `in reality revolve around his own personality, which was seeking a way to freedom through the solution of the Judas problem' (ibid.: para. 44). In reality, Jung is analysing a character in a story (even if based on someone who once lived). If it were an autobiographical account by the real Oegger, it might be of interest to narrative psychologists; but Jung's analysis would still be at odds with the ethos of narrative analysis. His analysis of the anecdote lacks attention to how the text communicates certain meanings through its structural, stylistic and linguistic aspects. Jung sees in literature simply further evidence that `the human psyche is the womb of all the arts and sciences' (1950, CW 15: para. 133). This is consistent with his approach to dreams, though with a caveat. In literature, `we are confronted with a product of complicated psychic activities ± but a product that is apparently intentional and consciously shaped' (ibid.: para. 134). In contrast, the sole source of dreams is `obviously autonomous psychic complexes which form themselves out of their own material' (1948a, CW 8: para. 580).
