Analytical Psychology and Literary Criticism

Author(s): Marie-Louise von Franz

Source: New Literary History , Autumn, 1980, Vol. 12, No. 1, Psychology and
Literature: Some Contemporary Directions (Autumn, 1980), pp. 119-126
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 Analytical Psychology and Literary Criticism

Marie-Louise von Franz

IT IS INEVITABLE that psychology should deal with literature, sin

both spring from the same womb: the human psyche. The gre
new discovery in psychology at the beginning of the century w
Sigmund Freud's discovery of the unconscious, which, however
conceived as purely personal, belonging to the individual alone
harboring repressed, mostly sexual material. C. G. Jung added to t
discovery the detection of a still deeper layer of the unconscio
which is transpersonal, common to whole groups of people or e
mankind in general. He called it the collective unconscious or object
psyche. I will concentrate in this paper on the role of the latte
literature. Jung himself has dealt in several lectures with the
lationship of psychology with literature.1 Insofar as a great amount
literature endeavors to describe the world of human passions,
eternal experiences of joy and sorrow, love, power, hate, intrigue, a
transcendence, it is psychology, and it often describes these realms
the human lot so masterfully that psychology not only has nothing
add to it but can even learn from it. Insofar as the writer or artist uses
his own conscious experience of human life in his work, he is in-
voluntarily also a psychologist; if he is a truly gifted artist, he finds the
best possible expression for what he wants to say, and no psychologist,
therefore, can add much insight to it.2
The creative process, however, is a great mystery which we cannot
"explain." But we can describe certain of its features. What the
psychologist can observe, if he has an opportunity to analyze a cre-
ative person, is that in most creative achievements an autonomous un-
conscious psychic reality intervenes, unpredictably and as if from
nowhere, into the work. An unconscious dynamism, which Jung calls
the "objective spirit," begins to influence the writer and even often
imposes upon him forms of expression which he does not intend to
use consciously. This can happen in various degrees. Some artists feel
that they themselves mainly give gestalt to what they write, that they
consciously choose every word, every turn of the story, drama, or
poem. Others feel that they are completely under the dictate of an
unknown force, and every word which they write is a surprise to
them. But this is only how the writer himself feels; even in the former
case the unconscious factor may also have influenced the work, only

Copyright© 1980 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia

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120 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the writer acquiesced so completely to it that he di

as a "foreign" force. The more a work of art is dicta
unconscious, the more it tends to take on a dreamli
symbolic, visionary character. And it is the latter whic
the psychologist's intervention, because it is g
evidently understandable but puzzling and myster
of the depth psychologist deals mostly with exactly
the unconscious psyche, the psychologist may som
help the reader to some better understanding. Jung
of this kind of visionary writing: The Shepherd of
second part of Faust, Nietzsche's Zarathustra ex
Ring, Tristan, and Parsifal, Spitteler's Olympian
nerotomachia of the monk Francesco Colonna,3 E. T.
"Der goldene Topf,"4 and, in a more restricted for
She and Ayesha, Benoit's Atlantide, Alfred Kubin's
Meyrink's Das griine Gesicht, Bruno Goetz's Das Reic
lach's Der tote Tag, James Joyce's Ulysses, and many
One could add that Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" w
written from the unconscious that when the author was disturbed he
could never continue or end it, and that Robert Louis Stevenson "saw"
several scenes of his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a dream. Stevenson also
knew consciously that he wrote from an inspiration of the uncon-
scious. In a letter he writes: "I am still a 'slow study' and sit for a long
while silent on my eggs. Unconscious thought, there is the only method:
macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look
in-and there your stuff is-good or bad."6 Barbara Hannah has also
shown that all the Brontes wrote from pure inspiration from the
unconscious. In her introduction to Emily's works, Charlotte Bronte
says:

The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not
always master-something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.
He may lay down rules and devise principles ... and then, haply, without any
warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent to
"harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in the furrow"-when ... it sets
to work on statue hewing, and you have a Pluto or a Jove, a Tisiphone or a
Psyche, a Mermaid or a Madonna, as Fate or Inspiration direct. Be the work
grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent
adoption. As for you-the nominal artist-your share in it has been to work
passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question-that
would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your
caprice. If the result be attractive the World will praise you, who little deserve
praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little
deserve blame.7

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ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LITERARY CRITICISM 121

Some writers change from one type of writing t

Goethe's Faust, as Jung points out, is in its first part p
understandable and needs no comment in this respect,
is "visionary" and describes things from the "nightside o
are normally concealed from us and which we fear and
are fascinated.8 We also find such a combination of both kinds in
Apuleius's Metamorphoses. In this work there is a psychological no
telling the fate of the hero Lucius, who becomes an ass, and then th
is a series of inserted tales (for instance, that of Amor and Psyche
which reveal the compensatory process or development in the coll
tive unconscious. Both strands culminate and become one in Lucius's
great final visionary experience of the goddess Isis at the end of th
novel.9 These visionary inserts hint at the greater hidden world be
hind our everyday life. Jung writes: "The poet now and then catch
sight of the figures that people the night-world-spirits, demons, a
gods; he feels the secret quickening of human fate by a suprahuman
design, and has a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings
the pleroma."10 In Bruno Goetz's Das Reich ohne Raum, first publishe
in 1933, the world catastrophe caused by the German mass psychosi
is anticipated in all its details.
It is already clear from the few titles noted that the psychologist
does not necessarily concern himself with the artistic quality of som
works of art. This concern he has to leave to literary criticism. For hi
even mere trash sometimes contains interesting symbolic motifs whic
point to unconscious collective processes. Criminal stories and-
nowadays-science fiction are often a rich ore for the psychologis
who finds in them indications of what is going on in the psych
underground of our society.
In his paper "Flying Saucers," Jung analyzes a trashy story (of
flying saucer landing) by an obscure and very naive Italian write
Angelucci, side by side with the remarkable science fiction story of
Fred Hoyle, "The Black Cloud."1 In spite of all the differences b
tween them, both stories deal with despair and the feeling of im
pending catastrophe under which we live nowadays, desperatel
looking out for some extraterrestrial solution to come to us.
Discerning between seemingly conscious psychological writing and
visionary art is only a preliminary step. Closer investigation shows th
many seemingly purely personal psychological novels or dramas are
in fact also inspired by the unconscious. When the writer naivel
surrenders completely to the latter, he does not always feel a frictio
with that other power which makes the decisions. In such cases h
work has a kind of double nature: psychologically, there is an imme
diately comprehensible surface, a perfect drama of human passions

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122 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

and experiences, but underneath one can detect

tern as well, a dimension in depth which reaches in
eternal, numinous, forever mysterious powers. Sh
an example of this kind of writing. This double lay
ble in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it exists also i
The reverse can also be true. Joyce's Ulysses is se
visionary, but a nihilistic bias flows through it as w
due to a conscious trend in the writer's personality.
not only the "theatrical gesture of a Herostratus b
ples, but an earnest endeavour to rub the noses of o
in the shadow-side of reality." The "atrophy of fe
tory to too much false feeling in the society.12 Sin
(September 1932), the present bloodshed in Ireland
a beastly brutality still lives under our idealistic att
in Ireland. More recent German literature is also full of such works of
ruthless coldness-they want to wake us up to see our true shadow.
In speaking of the contribution of the unconscious to literary
works, we must point out a definite difference of approach between
the Freudian and Jungian schools of psychology. Both schools deal, in
contrast to other schools (for instance, behaviorism, sociological
psychologies, etc.), with the phenomenon of the unconscious psyche of
man. But according to Sigmund Freud the unconscious processes in
the psyche and their symbolic manifestations ultimately point to the
personal problems of the writer, to his Oedipus complex, for instance
(Leonardo da Vinci), or even to some neurotic problem. According to
C. G. Jung all truly creative products stem, on the contrary, from a
transpersonal layer of the unconscious (which he called the collective
unconscious or the objective psyche) and therefore express a collec-
tive problem of a whole group of people. The artist himself may be
sound, neurotic, even psychotic (Nietzsche!), a bourgeois, a rebel, or
whatever else he chooses to be, but if he is a true artist it is not that that
he writes about; he expresses hidden processes in the collective
psyche. Those processes are generally compensatory to some ruling
collective attitudes and are meant-as dreams are meant-to have a
healing effect on the society. (In primitive societies the storytel
therefore also often the shaman or medicine man of his tribe-still
another connection between literature and psychology.) The healin
effect might also consist in calling one's attention to dangerous, si
constellations in the unconscious. Just as the individual often needs
psychologist to help him or her understand his or her dreams, the
psychologist might be useful by interpreting such collective symbo
dreams which some artist has expressed and formed but not
plained. Sometimes an artist might even have such resistances to t

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ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LITERARY CRITICISM 123

content of his own product that he rejects its psycholog

tation, and the psychologist must dig up the gold in
against the artist's own wish. But more frequently the arti
no idea himself of what has been said through him and is
impressed if one can show it to him. What the psycholog
kind of hermeneutics which can naturally be deep or sha
point or beside it. If it is good, it will help the artist's w
message over to the public and in this way, remaining tac
background, promote its healing impact.
Jung compared the creative process to a plant which
autonomously, using the artist's personality as its soil. T
growth often absorbs so much psychic energy that the in
not have enough strength left for his own life and develo
causes many artists to be childish, eccentric, or even aut
personal lives, but, as Jung shows, it would be wrong
these traits in him; they are the price he has to pay for b
being the instrument of a spirit which reaches beyond h
Greek archetypal figure of the artist is the limping
Hephaistos, who is laughed at by all the other Olympians
ing, which makes him more human than the other gods,
what all truly creative people know: the woundedness
through the creative impulse. The other archetypal c
society of gods is the "wounded healer"-Paieon, Mach
etc.13-again an example of a certain parallelism betwe
and the healer. Both in their own ways take upon the
suffering of their group and create an answer for it.
According to the Jungian outlook we have to disting
between the personal makeup of an artist-his persona
problems or neurosis (if he has one)-and his creation. If
neurotic or has a more destructive character, this should n
oned as the artist's problem only. If his work is widely r
safely conclude that he describes a collective illness, lifts
realm of general conscious awareness, which is the first
discovering a solution. When the symbolic creation of an
up from an especially deep layer of the collective uncons
not be understandable at all to the contemporary pub
changes, constellations, disappearances, and reconstell
chetypal symbolic contents in the collective unconscio
dreds of years to reach public conscious understanding. T
some such creations have no success in the artist's lifetime and are
only discovered later, when the message which they contain has c
closer to general consciousness. In every period one may also disco
in such works a "new" meaning, one which was not seen before th

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124 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

time was ripe. Such art is often in a true sense prophe

one can never discover exactly what the vision of the a
ing at, as in the case of the fourth eclogue of Vergil, where
a child, or savior of the world, is predicted. Was it
contemporary political constellations, or was it a pr
birth of Christ? The philologists never came to a cl
Viewed from the standpoint of depth psychology, it w
both. It was a vision which is typical for times of disor
distress and confusion, a sudden glimpse that a heali
new god-image, was preparing its appearance in the
human psyche. Vergil probably saw or felt this himself
ing a definite real person in mind.14
Interestingly enough, this image of a divine child
savior also appears sometimes in the visionary stori
writers, for instance, in Le petit Prince of St. Exupery or i
ous boy called "Fo" in the novel of Goetz. In both cases
symbolic figure of a puer aeternus lures the author or hero
into death. This means that a rebirth of the god-image
pen. The godchild figure even becomes obstructive
example.15 It is remarkable that both works were writ
Second World War; it is as if there was an attempt in
unconscious of that time toward an inner renewal, which became
abortive and ended in destruction. The healing image or impulse was
not strong enough to come through.
In analyzing such products of literature, psychology, from its field
of knowledge, can thus render some ancillary service to literary crit-
icism. A practicing psychotherapist is daily confronted with human
problems and most often with human tragedies (or comedies, for that
matter). In time he acquires a very broad view or spectrum of human
situations. In the Jungian approach he does not apply any external
means to help or heal his client but looks out for healing processes in
the depths of his patient's unconscious, mainly by means of his
dreams. This method could be compared with internal medicine,
which uses no surgical interference but only supports the existing
natural healing tendencies in the body. In his practical efforts to
interpret dream images, the Jungian psychologist first asks for the
associations of the dreamer, and if these are nonexistent or meager he
adds the "associations of mankind" to the image, i.e., known similar
mythological and religious images. This proceeding is called amplifi-
cation. In fact it is not different from what many writers of the vi-
sionary type also do. In order to give form to the numinous but
mostly dim and amorphous first intuition which grips their imagina-
tion, they add to it, i.e., associate with it, all they know from literature,

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ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LITERARY CRITICISM 125

many of them being very well read. Thus "Dante dec

rience in all the imagery of heaven, purgatory,
brings in the Blocksberg and the Greek underworl
the whole corpus of Nordic myth, including the
Nietzsche resorts to the hieratic style of the bard and
Blake presses into his service the phantasmagoric wor
Old Testament and the Apocalypse."'6 In using
amplification, the psychologist simply joins his effort
creative person by possibly adding further, elucidati
then comes the second step, which he does alone
psychological interpretation, which consists in extrac
amplified material a new meaning, a formulation or t
imagery into specific, knowable, psychological terms.
doing this well, it evokes in the patient (or, when int
the reader) a vivifying "Ah ha!" reaction. It is as if t
rents meet and create light. The danger of such a pr
the illusion may sneak in that one's interpretation is d
only true one. It never is, for as Jung has pointed out
Psychological Types, a symbol "is the best possible expr
still unknown"; it shapes and "formulates an essen
factor, and the more widespread this factor is, the m
effect of the symbol, for it touches a corresponding
psyche."17 It provokes unconscious participation, and
effective it must embrace and contain that which relates to a consid-
erable group of men. It then has a redeeming effect. Therefore any
psychological interpretation can only be an "as if." It can never
exhaust and in this way "kill" the product of art, but it can help to
keep it alive and filled with ever-new meaning by reconnecting it with
the spirit of a changing world, where art products often become out-
dated because the reader can no longer make a connection between its
symbolic content and his own life problems.
The word hermeneutics comes from Hermes, the name of the mes-
senger who commutes between the world of the gods (the archetypes
of the collective unconscious) and the world of man. He is forever
versatile and a master of the word (logos). He quarrels and makes
friends with his brother Apollo, the god of art (and of medicine), and
is, like Apollo, the "musagetes," the lover of the muses. The artist's
eternal but heavy task is to bring into form that which assaults him
from the depths of the psyche. Hermes, the herald, helps the artist to
communicate it to all men. That is how I see the possible collaboration
of depth psychology and writing. As for its relationship to literary
criticism, it is clear that psychology can only provide the latter with
certain information and experiences which the literary critic mostly

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126 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

does not have, but it can never replace his painstaking scientif
tigations or aesthetic evaluations. These things the psycho
rarely capable of doing, because his task is to help people, whic
most of his time and energy. Neither of these fields of know
has, in my opinion, the last word. This remains with the arti
looked at more closely, not even with him, but with his unco
autonomous genius.

JUNG INSTITUTE,
KUSNACHT

NOTES

1 "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" and "Psychology a

ture," both in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, tr. R. F. C. Hull, Vol. XV o
Works, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler (New York and
Princeton, N.J., 1953-), pp. 65-83, 84-105.
2 Examples, for instance, would be Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks,
the novels of Balzac, Victor Hugo, Stendahl, etc.
3 A Jungian interpretation has been written by Linda Fierz, "Le songe de Poliphile"
(1952), multigraphed.
4 Interpreted by A. Jaffe in C. G. Jung, Gestaltungen des Unbewussten (Zurich, 1950).
See also her excellent interpretation of Hermann Broch's The Death of Vergil in Studien
zur Analytischen Psychologie, 2 vols. (Zurich, 1955), II, 288 ff.
5 Interpreted by M.-L. von Franz in Bruno Goetz, Das Reich ohne Raum (Zurich, 1962).
6 Barbara Hannah, Striving towards Wholeness (New York, 1971), pp. 40 ff.
7 Ibid., pp. 195-96.
8 Cf. Jung, "Psychology and Literature," pp. 95-96.
9 Cf. M.-L. von Franz, The Golden Ass (New York, 1970).
10 I.e., in the collective unconscious. Jung, "Psychology and Literature," pp. 95-96.
11 Civilization in Transition, tr. R. F. C. Hull, Vol. X of Collected Works, pp. 311 ff., 418
ff., 426 ff.
12 Cf. Jung," 'Ulysses': A Monologue," in Collected Works, XV, 109 ff., 119-20, 122.
13 Karoly Kerenyi,Asklepios, tr. Ralph Manheim (London, 1960), pp. 76-86,96-99.
14 Cf. E. Norden, Die Geburt des Kindes (Darmstadt, 1958). Norden rightly proves that
this child means no definite real person.
15 Cf. my forthcoming Puer Aeternus. For Goetz, see Frank F. Eaton, "Der Dichter
Bruno Goetz," Rice University Studies, 57, No. 4 (Fall 1971), 33-37.
16 Jung, "Psychology and Literature," p. 97.
17 Psychological Types, rev. tr. R. F. C. Hull, Vol. VI of Collected Works, pp. 473 ff., 477.

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