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A Jungian Study of ShakespeareThe Collective Unconscious and Beyond in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Jungian Study of Shakespeare: The Collective Unconscious and Beyond in A Midsummer Night’s Dream [As noted in the introduction, Jung’s theory of poetry, laid out in two essays, presents a direct challenge to Freud. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” states that “a work of art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one.” Jung goes on to claim that “although a psychology with a purely biological orientation can explain a good deal about man in general, it cannot be applied to a work of art and still less to man as creator.” These statements constitute the crux of Jung’s critique of Freudian literary criticism. He is wrong, of course, in the second: the exploration of literature from a psycho-biological point of view—what Jung calls “personal criteria”—does not exclude the possibility that art may also be “supra-personal … a thing and not a personality” and that it can also “be judged by personal criteria” (CW 15,107–8/71–72). “Psychology and Literature” correctly states that there are indeed two partially overlapping categories of artistic creation: the psychological, which always arises “from the sphere of conscious human experience” and is presumably amenable to medically based critique; and the visionary, which may reflect both the personal unconscious and the elusive realm of the collective unconscious (CW 15, 139–41/89–90, 152/97).] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Jungian Study of ShakespeareThe Collective Unconscious and Beyond in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2009
ISBN
978-1-349-37690-2
Pages
15 –39
DOI
10.1057/9780230618558_2
Publisher site
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Abstract

[As noted in the introduction, Jung’s theory of poetry, laid out in two essays, presents a direct challenge to Freud. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” states that “a work of art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one.” Jung goes on to claim that “although a psychology with a purely biological orientation can explain a good deal about man in general, it cannot be applied to a work of art and still less to man as creator.” These statements constitute the crux of Jung’s critique of Freudian literary criticism. He is wrong, of course, in the second: the exploration of literature from a psycho-biological point of view—what Jung calls “personal criteria”—does not exclude the possibility that art may also be “supra-personal … a thing and not a personality” and that it can also “be judged by personal criteria” (CW 15,107–8/71–72). “Psychology and Literature” correctly states that there are indeed two partially overlapping categories of artistic creation: the psychological, which always arises “from the sphere of conscious human experience” and is presumably amenable to medically based critique; and the visionary, which may reflect both the personal unconscious and the elusive realm of the collective unconscious (CW 15, 139–41/89–90, 152/97).]

Published: Nov 10, 2015

Keywords: Artistic Creation; Primary Imagination; Latent Content; Manifest Content; Unconscious Mind

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