John Boorman’s “Excalibur” as a Quasi-Jungian and Eclectic Story of Arthurian Psyche

Abstract

Abstract For four decades John Boorman’s “Excalibur” has been either partially analyzed by scholars in Jungian categories or just described as a Jungian-inspired film in more general terms by film critics. The six-stage model of King Arthur’s personal and archetypal development in “Excalibur” was first published by Jungian analyst Al Collins in 1981, but remained unknown in mainstream scholarship. This article describes this significant absence and argues for a shift to significant presence, merging many Jungian approaches to “Excalibur” with Piotr Toczyski’s own depth-psychological vision of Boormanian quasi-Jungian Arthurianism. The scholars globally may get further inspiration to relaunch new interpretations of this classic Arthurian retelling in terms of dynamics of conscious and unconscious, meeting the shadow, coping with anger, underlying projections, withdrawal of projections as the moment of lysis similar to psychotherapy, and the self-awareness of archetypes. The process of projection withdrawal is the hero’s journey on its own, bringing some similarities with well-known Joseph Campbell’s post-Jungian model.