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American University of Prague Prague Humanities Institute _______________________________ “Thou Must be Thyself”: A Jungian Shakespeare __________________________________________ A Doctoral Thesis Presented To the Faculty of the Graduate School of Humanities in Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Doctor in Jungian Psychology _____________________________ By Aleksandra Vujovic (February, 2021) AMERICAN UNIVERSITY Graduate School of Humanities September, 2020. This dissertation prepared under my direction by Aleksandra Vujovic entitled: “Thou Must Be Thyself”: A Jungian Shakespeare, has been accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor in Jungian Psychology. _________________________________________ Dr. Robert A. DeGray, Ph.D. (Faculty Advisor) “Thou Must be Thyself:” A Jungian Shakespeare CONTENTS CONTENTS................................................................................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 6 The Jungian Art - Psychology Relation .......................................................................................... 6 Chapter One .................................................................................................................................. 13 Shakespeare and Jung - A Visionary Connection ......................................................................... 13 Chapter Two.................................................................................................................................. 57 The Jungian Persona ..................................................................................................................... 57 Richard II ................................................................................................................................. 60 1&2Henry IV ............................................................................................................................ 70 Henry V .................................................................................................................................... 82 Chapter Three................................................................................................................................ 87 Archetypal Patterns of Masculine and .......................................................................................... 87 Feminine ....................................................................................................................................... 87 King John ................................................................................................................................. 95 Hamlet .................................................................................................................................... 106 Coriolanus .............................................................................................................................. 118 King Lear ................................................................................................................................ 135 Chapter Four ............................................................................................................................... 151 The Concept of Individuation in C.G. Jung ................................................................................ 151 Troilus and Cressida .............................................................................................................. 165 The Winter’s Tale................................................................................................................... 184 Timon of Athens ..................................................................................................................... 192 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 210 WEB BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 225 “I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality“. Carl Jung “Shakespeare is not only my Poet, but my Philosopher also. His anatomy of the human heart is delineated from nature, not from metaphysics; referring immediately to our intuitive sense (...) No author had ever so copious, so bold, so creative an imagination, with so perfect a knowledge of the passions, the humours, and sentiments of mankind. He painted all characters, from heroes and kings, down to inn-keepers and peasants, with equal truth, and equal force. If human nature were quite destroyed, and no monument left of it, except his Works, other Beings might learn what man was, from those writings.” Elizabeth Griffith “[P]syche is essentially conflict between blind instinct and will (freedom of choice).” Carl Jung INTRODUCTION The Jungian Art - Psychology Relation “What can analytical psychology contribute to our fundamental problem, which is the mystery of artistic creation? … Perhaps art has no ‘meaning,’ at least not as we understand meaning… Perhaps it is like nature, which simply is and ‘means’ nothing beyond that. Is ‘meaning’ necessarily more than mere interpretation - an interpretation secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning? Art, it has been said, is beauty, and ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art.” Carl Jung “It is obvious enough that psychology, being the study of psychic processes, can be brought to bear upon the study of literature, for the human psyche is the womb of all the sciences and arts.” 1 In that way Jung defined the relation between psychology and literature2: psychology approaches man from a scientific point of view while literature deals with the phenomenon of man from the stand point of art. Due to its dramatic quality, “literature enables us not only to observe people other than ourselves but also to enter into their mental universe, to discover what it feels like to be these people and to confront their life situations. We can gain in this way a phenomenological grasp of experience that cannot 1 Jung. The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. CW 15. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler. Bollingen Series XX, Princeton University Press, 1971, par. 133 2 Jung discussed the relation between psychology and art in general saying that the connection between the two “arise from the fact that the practice of art is a psychological activity and, as such, can be approached from a psychological angle. Considered in this light, art, like any other human activity deriving from psychic motives, is a proper subject for psychology. (…) Only that aspect of art which consists in the process of artistic creation can be a subject for psychological study, but not that which constitutes its essential nature. The question of what art is in itself can never be answered by a psychologist, but must be approached from the side of aesthetics.” The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. CW 15. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler. Bollingen Series XX, Princeton University Press, 1971, par. 97 be derived from theory alone”. 3 Paris summed up nicely the inter-relation between psychological theory and literature, and the why it should be used in literary analysis: “Theory provides categories of understanding that help us to recover the intuitions of the great writers about the workings of the human psyche, and these intuitions, once recovered, become part of our conceptual understanding of life. We gain greater insight into human behavior because of the richness of artistic presentation. Even the most sophisticated theories are thin compared to the complex portrayals of characters and relationships that we find in literary masterpieces, and they are thinner yet, of course, when compared with the density of life… great writers have intuitively grasped [this phenomenon] and have presented it in more impressive forms than a psychiatrist can hope to do.”4 These words find their confirmation in Jung’s assumption that “[t]he phenomenology of the psyche is so colorful, so variegated in form and meaning, that we cannot possibly reflect all its riches in one mirror. Nor in our description of it can we ever embrace the whole, but must be content to shed light only on single parts of the total phenomenon.”5 In this respect, Jungian criticism seeks to interpret the patterns of literary protagonists’ behavior in terms of Jungian human psyche theories. Its focus is on Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious with archetypal contents which influence both individual and collective behavior. Jungian archetypal theory is, therefore, a valuable mode of criticism precisely because it sheds light on both the conscious and unconscious processes taking place within the human mind and in that way provides an additional angle for literary analysis. The manner in which we