recognition that growth is a life-long process, a quest, during which conscious and
unconscious connect primarily through symbols and archetypes.
Jung assumed a personal unconscious consisting of memories and images gathered
during a life-time, for the archetypes, as experienced by the individual, are in and of the
world. This personal unconscious is raised to consciousness when the analysand
connects the personal with the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is an
a priori existence of ‘organising factors’, the archetypes understood as inborn modes of
functioning, rather like a grammar that generates and structures the infinite variables
of symbol formations whose recurrence is to be understood again as archetypal (Jung
1964:67). Archetypes are ‘without known origin; and they reproduce themselves in any
time or any part of the world—even where transmission by direct descent or “cross-
fertilisation” through migration must be ruled out’ (69). Jung, too, believed that dreams
are meaningful and can be understood (102) as their specific images connect with
archetypes whose force can suddenly overwhelm the dreamer. Such an experience
contrasts with the conscious use of representing archetypes through culturally defined
images and motifs. Jung’s own metaphoric use of archetypal images such as shadow,
anima or animus and self, blurred the distinction between archetype as a grammar and
archetype as symbol.
Jung, whose theory has been criticised for demanding a vast amount of knowledge of
myth, did not perceive the unconscious as an instinctual and libidinal battleground,
although he posited a ‘primitive psyche’ in the child which functions in dreams and
fantasies comparable to the physical evolution of mankind in the embryo (1964:99). In
Jung’s ‘Psychic conflicts in a child’ (1946/1954:8–46), the child-patient, obsessed with
the origin of babies, fantasised that she would give birth if she swallowed an orange,
similar to women in fairy tales whose eating of fruit leads to pregnancy. The child-patient
was eventually enlightened by her father, but Jung concludes that, while false
explanation are not advisable, no less inadvisable is the insistence on the right
explanation, for that inhibits the freedom of the mind’s development through
concretistic explanations which reduce the spontaneity of image-making to a falsehood
(34).
Because the essential nature of all art escapes our understanding, Jung did not
perceive literature as psychopathography. We can interpret only ‘that aspect of art which
consists in the process of artistic creation’ (1931/1966:65). While he admits that literary
works can result from the intentionality of the author, they are also those that ‘force
themselves on the author’, reveal his inner nature, and overwhelm the conscious mind
with a flood of thoughts and images he never intended to create: ‘Here the artist is not
identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or
stands outside it, as though he were a second person’ (73). An author may, for a time,
be out of fashion when, suddenly, readers rediscover his work, because they perceive in
it archetypes that speak to them with renewed immediacy (77). We can, therefore, only
discuss the psychological phenomenology in a work of literature.
It is evident how readily children’s literature, especially when it has components of
fantasy, connects with Jungian theories. Marie Louise von Franz (1977, 1978) has
written comprehensive studies of fairy tales which the Jungian critic tends to see as
‘allegories of the inner life’ that meet ‘the deep-seated psychic and spiritual needs of the
PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM 89