Constructing the collective unconscious

Abstract

Innovative attempts at collating Jungian analytical psychology with a range of 'post-modern' theories have yielded significant results. This paper adopts an alternative strategy: a Lacanian vantage point on Jungian theory that eschews an attempt at reconciling Jung with post-structuralism. A focused Lacanian gaze on Jung will establish an irreducible tension between Jung's view of archetypes as factors immanent to the psyche and a Lacanian critique that lays bare the contingent structures and mechanisms of their constitution, unveiling the supposed archetypes'a posteriori production through the efficacy of a discursive field. Theories of ideology developed in the wake of Lacan provide a powerful methodological tool allowing to bring this distinction into focus. An assembly of Lacan's fragmentary accounts of Jung will be supplemented with an approach to Jungian theory via Žižek's Lacan-oriented theory of the signifying mechanism underpinning 'ideology'. Accordingly, the Jungian archetype of the self, which is considered in some depth, can begin to be seen in a new light, namely as a 'master signifier', not only of Jung's academic edifice, but also -and initially-of the discursive strategies that establish his own subjectivity. A discussion of Jung's approach to mythology reveals how the 'quilting point' of his discourse comes to be coupled with a correlate in the Real, a non-discursive 'sublime object' conferring upon archetypes their fascinating aura.