The Mariner ’s Way of Individuation: An Insight into the Jungian Principle of Acausality

Abstract

As a Romantic poet who was especially interested in the workings of the mind, Coleridge, in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , has dealt with notions, ideas, and images that lend themselves to a Jungian reading, specifically from the perspective of the principle of synchronicity which is to be the focus of this analysis. The theory of synchronicity, being the principle explaining the concurrence of psychic states and external events which bear no causal relationship, could be employed to bring up a novel interpretation of the poem. The causally unrelated but meaningful succession of events in the course of the poem, finding expression through the archetypes, helps the Mariner get a deeper insight into the universe and further his movement in the process of individuation—the quest for self-realization. The synchronistic events of the poem take place on a bed of poetic expressions of the primordial images mediating between the Mariner’s psyche and the world outside, resulting in his inner growth through the process of individuation, wherein, the Mariner comes to the realization that nature and he form an inseparable part of a greater system which is unified through the flow of an invisible spirit—the collective unconscious.