Jung, the trickster writer, or what literary research can do for the clinician

Abstract

This paper aims to show how literary scholarship can contribute to clinical debates by offering different methods of reading and interpreting works by Jung. Firstly, as texts form much of the means by which Jungian ideas are transmitted and worked upon, literary research offers methods of examining the way we read for authority and orthodoxy. Secondly, it is invaluable to look at the way in which Jung actually wrote. Jung portrays a dynamic psyche in action in his writings. His works are not only about a creative archetypal psyche, they enact and perform this creativity in the way in which he uses words. The rich playfulness demonstrated in The Collected Works is an example of a writer as a mythmaker of the psyche, one who absorbs unconscious creative energies into his writing in ways that dissolve modernity's cultural boundaries of science and art. In addition, the aesthetic component in Jung's writing is not a decoration of his ideas. Rather, his 'literary' qualities are themselves forms of argument about the fragile state of modern subjectivity. Using his essays on 'Synchronicity', and the 'Trickster', the paper will show these works to be responses to three related crises that still face clinicians and scholars today: the problematic role of the hero myth as an individuation narrative, the nature of 'science', and the crisis of western modernity itself in desperate need of psychic healing. The paper will show that where writing on synchronicity aims to individuate science by adding a 'feminine' Eros to its Logos biases, the Trickster essay is designed to ameliorate modernity by providing frameworks to make visible marginal or excluded material. In these works Jung tries to rejuvenate the modern world by re-connecting traditional symbolic systems with the psyche through myth as a language of psychic relating.