Dear all, Volume 6 and 7 of Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies have received some updates since their original publication. Inez Martinez’s fascinating article, “Reading for Psyche: Numinosity” has just been added to Volume 7.
I am including below the table of contents and abstracts from Volume 6 and 7 so that you might see the additions and the entire range of marvelous academic work being published in the JJSS. JJSS is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, and all of this material is freely available on the society website at www.thejungiansociety.org.
I look forward to seeing many of you at the next JSSS conference in Chicago in July of 2013.
My best to all,
Darrell Dobson
Table of Contents and Abstracts Peer-Reviewed Academic Articles Hermaphrodite as Healing Image: Connecting a Mythic Imagination to Education
Alexandra Fidyk, Ph.D.
University of Alberta, Canada
This exploration considers the question: What healing and transformation might these image-makers bring to education? Through hermeneutic tracking, a telling of the Greek myth of Hermaphrodite’s birth lays the background. Upon this scene, the alchemical process of psychological development is described wherein a bridge is made to the education and the ways that it might come to be informed through therapeutic practices. Here amplification of the images of Hermes and Aphrodite are traced to revision the ways teachers might embrace apeironic learning through a vibrant relationship to the child – Hermaphrodite, the inner child and the actual child in the classroom – and to move toward a more differentiated and androgynous consciousness. Tact, love, care, freedom, eros and the erotic play, embodiment, joy and ethics are some of the characteristics that appear as curative for education reimagined through mythic imagination.
Unconsciousness and Survival: Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Inez Martinez, Ph.D.
This reading of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen for what they imply about unconsciousness and survival is based on the assumptions that literature is a primary source for understanding psyche, that literature makes available consciousness about ways collectives are living unconsciously, and that literature continues to unfold aspects of collective unconsciousness through many readers, cultures, and generations. Specifically, Kafka’s story presents to this reader a portrait of humanity’s thriving (in the sense of proliferating) through unconsciousness, and Borowski’s presents vignettes questioning whether physical survival of the species should be the criterion for progress and/or the ultimate priority. Their juxtaposition leads to questions intended to generate reflection on psychological consequences of integrating realization of species mortality.
Table of Contents and Abstracts
Peer-Reviewed Academic Articles
Interacting Narratives: Acknowledging the Self in the Construction of Professional Knowledge
Darrell Dobson, Ph.D.
In narrative approaches to teachers’ professional knowledge, identity (one’s story to live by) is generally understood to be constructed and reconstructed through conscious intention (Chosen Narratives) and through contextual influences (Life Narratives). It is possible and necessary to go further, to describe a third fundamental influence. Using the concept of Self Narratives allows teachers and teacher educators to acknowledge and work with the inevitable and powerful unconscious dynamics that influence their teaching practice and the ongoing construction and reconstruction of their professional knowledge. The concept of Self Narratives integrates the theories and practices of depth psychology, particularly Jungian analytical psychology, into narrative approaches to teachers’ professional knowledge. Recognizing the unconscious mind as profoundly influential is a position overlooked by more familiar schools of educational psychology, and a Jungian perspective considers the unconscious mind as ultimately helpful and holistic, a position that varies from other schools of depth psychology.
Symbols that Trans-form: Trickster Nature in Detective Fiction
Susan Rowland, Ph.D.
C. G. Jung’s 1911 volume finds a home in the English edition of his Collected Works as Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (1956). This paper will argue that Jung here offers insight into symbolism that can augment and expand his notion of symbol and myth as engines of psychic transformation. While Symbols of Transformation’s subtitle, “An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia,” indicates a clinical approach, my paper will develop Jungian symbols and myth in a popular cultural form, detective fiction. It will show how detective fiction adopts the ancient trickster myth to generate symbols that re-shape modern consciousness in its relation to non-human nature.
The trickster myth itself has a possible antecedent in humans evolving through and with, the practice of hunting. For the modern urban person, detective fiction supplies the hunt and here the Jungian symbol demonstrates its potency for realigning both human nature, and humans and nature. As well as Jung, this paper draws on Lewis Hyde’s remarkable Trickster Makes This World (1998) and offers case studies of two novels overtly attuned to hunting through the figure of the dog. These novels are Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and a recent creative response to it in Nevada Barr’s Winter Study (2008) set among mythical and actual wolves.
Symbols of Transformation, Phenomenology, and Magic Mountain
Gary Brown, Ph.D.
When C. G. Jung partnered with Sigmund Freud, he already had a broad knowledge of world mythology and an understanding of the unconscious formed largely from Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s Dionysian energy of nature, or physis. Unwilling to reduce this unconscious—matrix of dreams, myth, and literature—to Freud’s infantile sexual libido, Jung’s break with Freud was inevitable. His long suppressed ideas emerged in Symbols of Transformation, a mythically enriched study of regression in service of development, which rejects Freud’s limited libido. This paper uses Heidegger’s phenomenology to purge remaining traces of psychic encapsulation from Jung’s significant archetypal insights and demonstrates the modified Jungian articulation in the context of Thomas Mann’s novel, Magic Mountain, a study of hermetic individuation. Not only does this paper use Jung’s insights to clarify the labyrinthine development of the novel, thereby taking sides in a literary debate about its meaning, but it uses Mann’s artistic insights to expose limitations of Jungian theory.
Reading for Psyche: Numinosity
Inez Martinez, Ph.D.
Because of imaginative literature’s extensive renderings of numinous experiences in symbolic forms, a focus on numinous moments in a text can yield an ever-unfolding understanding of the complexity of the factors affecting both positive and negative transformation. Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” illustrates typical optimism of religious treatments of numinous experiences with regard to transformation; E. M. Forster’s “The Road from Colonus” exemplifies non-integration of a numinous experience; and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle offers a vision of integration of numinous experiences as shared in the realm of psyche. These three works are analyzed to demonstrate that each literary treatment of numinous experiences potentially offers specific understanding of the complexities of integrating or failing to integrate numinous experiences; therefore reading literature with a focus on its renderings of numinous experiences is a revelatory approach to reading literature for psyche.
Book Reviews:
C.G. Jung in the Humanities: Taking the Soul’s Path by Susan Rowland
D.J. Moores, Ph.D.
The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung by Susan Rowland
Inez Martinez, Ph.D.
Masculine Shame: from Succubus to the Eternal Feminine, by Mary Y. Ayers
Susan Rowland, Ph.D.
Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, Volume 6
Table of Contents and Abstracts
Peer-Reviewed Academic Articles
Hermaphrodite as Healing Image: Connecting a Mythic Imagination to Education
Alexandra Fidyk, Ph.D.
University of Alberta, Canada
This exploration considers the question: What healing and transformation might these image-makers bring to education? Through hermeneutic tracking, a telling of the Greek myth of Hermaphrodite’s birth lays the background. Upon this scene, the alchemical process of psychological development is described wherein a bridge is made to the education and the ways that it might come to be informed through therapeutic practices. Here amplification of the images of Hermes and Aphrodite are traced to revision the ways teachers might embrace apeironic learning through a vibrant relationship to the child – Hermaphrodite, the inner child and the actual child in the classroom – and to move toward a more differentiated and androgynous consciousness. Tact, love, care, freedom, eros and the erotic play, embodiment, joy and ethics are some of the characteristics that appear as curative for education reimagined through mythic imagination.
Unconsciousness and Survival: Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Inez Martinez, Ph.D.
This reading of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen for what they imply about unconsciousness and survival is based on the assumptions that literature is a primary source for understanding psyche, that literature makes available consciousness about ways collectives are living unconsciously, and that literature continues to unfold aspects of collective unconsciousness through many readers, cultures, and generations. Specifically, Kafka’s story presents to this reader a portrait of humanity’s thriving (in the sense of proliferating) through unconsciousness, and Borowski’s presents vignettes questioning whether physical survival of the species should be the criterion for progress and/or the ultimate priority. Their juxtaposition leads to questions intended to generate reflection on psychological consequences of integrating realization of species mortality.
Table of Contents and Abstracts
Peer-Reviewed Academic Articles
Abstinence vs. Indulgence: How the New Ethical Vampire Reflects our Monstrous Appetites
Elizabeth Nelson, Ph.D.
Pacific Graduate Institute, CA
As an archetype, the vampire is alive and well in the collective psyche. A closer look can reflect back to us what we deem monstrous out there as well as inform us about the monstrous within. This is fundamental to Jung’s notion of the Shadow and fundamentally an issue of ethics. This paper explores how specific attributes of the contemporary vampire reflect our ethical agon at the beginning of the 21st century, using two popular vampire sagas, the Twilight series and True Blood as examples of the tensions between abstinence and indulgence among a predatory species. This paper explains the elements of the female Bildungsroman literary genre found in both stories, which offers psychologists a particularly fruitful view into ethics and character development, and shows how the central love relationship between a human female and a vampire male dramatizes some of the trickier aspects of relating to the Other in the most intimate manner. The paper concludes by comparing Aristotelian virtue ethics with Jung’s notion of individuation to discern who is the real monster—and who aspires to the classical notion of arête.
Writing Nature with Darwin, Darwinism and Jung
Susan Rowland, Ph.D.
Pacific Graduate Institute, CA
Charles Darwin and C. G. Jung were revolutionary thinkers about the role of human beings in the natural world. While Darwin’s Origins of Species (1859) sought to remove both God and “man” from the centre of the understanding of nature, C. G. Jung, one generation later, aimed to remove the ego from the central definition of human nature. Although both theorists have been explored for their conceptual ideas, neither has been seriously considered as writers, and in particular as writers of nature and human nature. This paper shows how similar these authors are in treating the unknowable in the psyche and history as of major significance. In particular, both writers require the resources of ancient myth, especially of nature as an Earth Mother goddess in order to represent the inconceivable. The paper also looks at the new critical practice of “literary Darwinism,” which, while viable in its own terms, suffers from being neither “literary,” nor “Darwinian.”
An Opus con naturam: Labor, Care, and Transformation in the Garden
Rinda West, Ph.D.
Oakton Community College, IL
This essay proposes that a garden can be a site and an occasion for a labor with nature, an opus con naturam, to play with the alchemical phrase, a collaboration that can potentially transform both nature within and nature without. A garden, that is, nurtures individuation. A garden embeds culture in the land and informs culture with the processes and needs of the land. Like ego and Self, body and soul, reason and instinct, in practice land and culture are not separate or opposed, but interwoven. The garden is a symbol, then, of that connection, a place of healing, retreat, and labor. Frances Hodgson Burnet’s novel, The Secret Garden, illustrates the healing power of the garden, and an analysis of the labor of gardening suggests how that power works.
Cultural Complexes in Professional Ethics
Johanna Fawkes, Ph.D.
Professions predicated their ethics on idealized self-images and fail to engage with the shadow aspects of the occupational group, this paper argues. Ethical approaches emphasize rules and rationality, though more recently postcolonial and postmodern ethics have opened a space for a Jungian contribution. The paper conceptualizes professions as psychic entities, with an idealized persona, a disowned shadow and the potential for integration, suggesting this as an ethical foundation. Finally, it applies this approach to the emerging profession of public relations (PR). The research approach is hermeneutic, interpreting professional and public relations ethics through the lens of Jungian writing.
Darrell Dobson, Ph.D.
President, Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies
Editor, Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies.
editor@thejungiansociety.org
www.thejungiansociety.org