ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 addresses the misreading of Jung as essentialist or anti-historical. In fact, since the Jungian psyche is historical through archetypal images being shaped via conscious bodily being, so too is Jung’s account of literature. Jung proposed that there may be different kinds of literature in relation to historical forces. He even described cultures as multiple, emergent and liable to dangerous strategies of marginalisation. Hence Jungian literary criticism contributes to deconstruction as described by Jacques Derrida and New Historicism according to Stephen Greenblatt as well as resembling literary theory by M. M. Bakhtin. Synchronicity, myth, cultural complexes, archetypes as dialogical or as chronotopes all reveal connections between Jungian ideas about meaning-making in the collective and historical processes in literature. A study of The Tempest by Shakespeare and ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’ by W. B. Yeats precedes looking at Jung on the primitive and his book Aion. Andrew Samuels’s The Political Psyche is evaluated alongside Joseph Cambray on Romantic science. After Jung as a Writer by Susan Rowland, and essays by Jutta Scamp and Albert Gelpi, the transdisciplinarity section shows how complexity theory of inter-related systems pervades Jung and literary criticism, paving the way for Nicolescu’s vision of multiple interdependent realities.
