even more polarised. Nevertheless, some remnants of the mythic meta-narrative
survived. Romanticism was seen as the bridge from the twelfth century to the
nineteenth and during most of the nineteenth century, psychology to the extent that
it was deemed a legitimate sphere of study at all, existed as a mere peripheral
adjunct of neurology and psychological problems were generally attributed to a
disorder of the nerves. However, Harold Bloom suggests that Freud was the most
powerfully suggestive mythmaker of the twentieth century in imagining a new map
of the human mind; a mythologising dramatist of the inner life who, in a proposed
lineage, is fourth in line after Plato, Montaigne, and Shakespeare (Bloom, 1999: 162 -
163 ).
Until the emergence of psychology as an autonomous discipline, the writer
and the psychologist were, in effect, synonymous. When it did emerge, its founders
invariably invoked as their precursors such figures as Sophocles, Shakespeare,
Goethe, Balzac, Stendhal and Dostoyevsky. James Hillman suggests that in all
countries into which psychoanalysis has penetrated it has been better understood
and applied by writers and artists than by doctors and, further, that according to
Freud, psychoanalysis fuses together, though changed into scientific jargon, the
three greatest literary schools of the nineteenth century: Heine, Zola and Mallarme
(Hillman, 1983:3). He avers that modern day depth psychology is a psychology that
“ ... assumes a poetic basis of mind” which he defines as “ ... the persuasive power
of imagining in words” (Hillman, 1983:4).
The nineteenth century also witnessed the emergence of certain individuals
whose ideas re-establish within the meta-narrative a mythopoeic approach to the
human psyche and spirituality. Two in particular, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-
1955) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) make an especial contribution. Teilhard de
Chardin’s formative years were spent as a stretcher-bearer on the western front
throughout the Great War (1914-1919) and what must be seen as his epiphany or
initiation came on the battlefield, as it did for the American poet Walt Whitman.
Jung’s moment of truth came in 1913 when he broke with Sigmund Freud, after
which he was able to develop his ideas about the collective unconscious and
archetypes. Also the work of William James, along with Jung and de Chardin and
others, revealed a vaster and more mysterious inner universe. Jung’s revelation of
the collective unconscious and synchronicity, de Chardin’s Noosphere and James’
religious phenomenon reflected a rapprochement between the Romantic quasi-
mystical tradition and the Enlightenment’s mechanistic and impersonal universe.
ron
(Ron)
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