Reading/Misreading Jung: Post-Jungian Theory

Abstract

Rereading/Misreading Jung: Post-Jungian TheoryRowland, Susan. 2001. Jung: A Feminist Revision. Cambridge: Polity Press. $70.95 hc. $29.95 sc. 200 pp.Jensen, George H. 2002. Identities across Texts. Ed. David Jolliffe and Michael William. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. $52.50 he. $22.95 sc. 239 pp.Jung's attitudes to women, blacks, socalled primitive cultures, and so forth are now outmoded and unacceptable. He converted prejudice into theory, and translated his perception of what was current into something supposed to be eternally valid. Here, too, it is the responsibility of the post-Jungians to discover these mistakes and contradictions and to correct Jung's faulty or amateur methods. When this is done, one can see that had a remarkable capacity to intuit the themes and areas with which late twentieth century psychology would be concerned: gender; race; nationalism; cultural analysis . . . . Recognizing the soundness of Jung's intuitive vision facilitates a more interested but no less critical return to his texts. This is what is meant by correction of Jung's work and also critical distance from it. (Andrew Samuels, and the post-Jungians)Jungian theory is ripe for deconstruction and in some ways uncannily anticipates poststructuralist thought. I have described individuation as romance but it is equally valid to draw out its deconstructive implications. . . . By applying deconstructive insights to psychology, the resulting romance produces a postmodern Jung haunting his logocentrically inclined texts. (Susan Rowland, C. G. and Literary Theory)Jung's model of the psyche . . . could be described as postmodern, a view of the self that recognizes diversity and difference rather than unity and coherence . . . .The self, argues, is a plurality with a core identity; it is both a and an I. But Jung's work is not often read in this way. To bring this aspect of Jung's system to the fore, I will be suggesting a way of rereading-what I have called an intentional misreading-Jung's major concepts. Qensen, Identities across Texts)This review of Susan Rowland's Jung: A Feminist Revision and George H. Jensen's Identities Across Texts proceeds from an assumption that the varieties of poststructuralist and social-constructionist thought have, by now, largely completed themselves and, having taught us what they can, stand themselves in need of correction, qualification, and critique: such is the way of all mature theory. Questioning what lies beyond, scholars have begun to ask what social-constructionism has forgotten, ignored, or gotten wrong. Into this new, post-poststructuralist intellectual environment, the individual has reentered discussion: not as the solitary, Romantic consciousness once theorized by liberal humanism, but as situated in gender, race, and culture. Returning to explore questions of psychology, personal agency, and selfidentity, we might find it timely to reconsider C. G. Jung, one of the psyche's first great explorers. But we cannot return to the same, high-structuralist who once loomed over criticism. We are left, rather, to reread concepts through lenses provided by poststructuralism.While offering different perspectives-Rowland writes as a British feminist and literary critic, Jensen as an American composition theorist-both authors belong to an emerging field that analytical psychologist Andrew Samuels has broadly termed post-Jungian .As Rowland remarks in her earlier C. G. and Literary Theory: The Challenge from Fiction (2001), theoretical approaches such as feminism . . . can make very necessary criticisms of the cultural biases deeply embedded in ideas (188). At the same time, she adds, Jungian theory has been an unjustly neglected resource in the development of literary studies (188). It is this double conviction that marks Rowland's and Jensen's work as post-Jungian: specifically, that concepts need to be critiqued by, as well as reintroduced to and incorporated within, poststructuralist thought. …