Writing Nature with Darwin, Darwinism and Jung (original) (raw)
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Book Review: Rowland, Susan. The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung
Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies
Susan Rowland's The Ecocritical Psyche is fundamentally groundbreaking. Her previous writings on a range of subjects from Jung and literary theory, feminist revisioning of Jung's ideas, and analyses of Jung as a writer to the relevance of Jung's ideas to the humanities culminates in her bringing Jung's vision of the unconscious as creative to ecological literary studies. To enter this discourse, she shares a trove of theory so well integrated as to open up the field of literary criticism with a model of how to be relevant to the world. Rowland is striving to do nothing less than persuade that reading literature has the power to transform human relations to nature, or, as she often calls it, non-human reality.. .. [L]iterature is part of psychic evolution at the edge of chaos. To write and/or read is to participate in nature's evolution. In the literature of the last hundred years is to be found attempts to reconnect deeply and lastingly with nature's voices. (Rowland 99) The Ecocritical Psyche is, itself, a model illustrating the intellectually fecund power of reading. Rowland uses as frames for her explorations of literature the research of biological theorists including Charles Darwin, James Lovelock, Roger Wescott, and Carol Yoon; materials from the works of historians from fields as diverse as mythology, medieval studies, renaissance studies, and Native American history; positions of cultural critics on complex adaptive systems and on the political sources of understandings of nature; expositions by psychological literary critics on the gothic and the trickster; new perspectives by Jungian theorists such as Jerome Bernstein on Borderlanders, Andrew Samuels on political forms, and David L. Miller on the symbolic meanings of descent into hell; and numerous concepts from philosophers-including meanings of nature analyzed by Kate Soper, the 'field' as elaborated by N. Katherine Hayles, a phenomenological approach to reading and nature described by David Abram, tacit knowing proposed by Michael Polanyi, imagined vs. perceived images as distinguished and evaluated by Gaston
Ecology of the soul: nature in the scientific work of Carl Gustav Jung
Revista Junguiana, 2017
To study the work and biography of Carl Gustav Jung is to realize how inspiring nature was to the development of his scientific and personal worldview. Therefore this paper examines the relevance of nature to the formulation of analytical psychology theories. It searches through 34 volumes of Jung's complete work the quotations in which the term "nature" is used to support concepts of his theory. The 137 paragraphs that were found demonstrate the author conceived psychic functioning was analogous to the functioning of all natural systems.
The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung
2012
The Ecocritical Psyche is about the literature, nature and the human psyche. The book examines the imagination in nature and as taking living form in literature. Uniting literary studies, ecocriticism, Jungian ideas, mythology and Complexity Evolution for the first time, this book develops the aesthetic aspect of psychology and science as deeply as it explores evolution in Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Part of a larger project to re-think what we call ‘human’, The Ecocritical Psyche scrutinises literature to understand how we came to treat ‘nature’ as separate from ourselves. By digging into symbolic, mythological and evolutionary fertility in texts such as The Secret Garden, The Tempest, Wuthering Heights and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the book argues that literature is where the imagination, estranged from nature in modernity, is rooted in the non-human other. C.G. Jung provides the framework of the creative psyche. Drawing upon evolutionary science, the book uses post-Darwinian Complex Adaptive Systems and new research of biosemiosis. In a daring move, The Ecocritical Psyche develops Jungian aesthetics to show how his symbol correlates with natural signifying. Literature is the place where nature talks through symbol and myth. By drawing on major critics such as Gaston Bachelard, M.M. Bakhtin, Andrew Samuels, Lewis Hyde, and Ginette Paris The Ecocritical Psyche offers a ‘green’ understanding of art. The Ecocritical Psyche is unique in its interdisciplinary expansion of literature, psyche, science and myth. Art is the home of a mythical revolution of consciousness that seeks to re-connect us to nature. Here for the first time, Jung finds a home in ecocritical literary theory. Looking at work by leading depth psychologists such as Robert Romanyshyn and Jerome Bernstein, as also theories of art, Rowland simultaneously revisions the Gothic. For its spooky terrain proves to be a rebirth for the ecocritical psyche.
Jungian Literary Criticism: the Essential Guide
Chapter 6 offers Jungian literary criticism for climate change, the Anthropocene, ecocriticism and complexity theory. Jung contributes to ecocriticism by taking the three ways we understand nature, as totality, a binary with culture, and as spectacle, into making consciousness that can be incorporated into literary reading and writing via symbols. The Jungian psyche, as well as literature as a whole, and in genres, can all be regarded as evolutionary complex adaptive systems. Taking complexity into Jungian transdisciplinarity as Dionysian, reveals literature, nature and psyche co-evolving in a way that fosters multiple connected realities: a unus mundus of oneness and multiplicity of being.
2010
The book I wrote on Joseph Campbell's reception of C.G. Jung. Based on my PhD thesis at university of Edinburgh, Religious Studies department, and on archival research done at Joseph Campbell library in Santa Barbara. First chapter available for download. “Going beyond the conventional paralleling of Campbell with Jung, Ritske Rensma argues that Campbell’s view of Jung went through three stages. At first, Campbell granted Jung and Freud equal importance in the understanding of myth. Next, Campbell rejected Jung's view on, especially, the origin of myth in favor of the ethological view espoused by Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. Finally, Campbell came to see the overlap between Jung and the ethologists. An original, scholarly approach to Campbell, one that rests substantially on the scrutiny of unpublished material. Strongly recommended.” Robert A. Segal, Sixth Century Chair in Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen, UK
Human Ecology: nature as archetypal deity
Revista Ártemis, 2018
The term nature, in a broad sense, refers to the phenomena of the physical world and life in general. Complex are their definitions, involving qualities of essentiality, origin, spontaneity, and everything that was not directly manipulated or produced by human action, including the universe itself. Taking into account that the sciences in their entirety have developed through their observation, the objective of this study is to promote the worldview of nature as a foundation for human self-knowledge, since according to the conception of human ecology, humans are conceived as an indivisible part of their environment. Faced with the current ecological constraints, the proposal is justified, above all, by the need to reconnect man with nature in a superficial and deep sense. For that, we used the theoretical revision method (especially conceptual contributions of Arne Naess and Carl Gustav Jung) and Aristotelian deductive thinking to reach the proposed reflections. The results suggest man as being indivisible from nature, reigned by forces, tendencies, instincts, and cycles similar to those of the natural environment. From natural contemplation it is believed possible to formulate deep understandings of human nature, be they biological, psychological or spiritual.
Jung and the Evolution of God (2022)
Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul in the 21st Century - An Eranos Symposium, 2022
C. G. Jung and the Evolution of God. Imagination, Revelation, and Jung’s Answer to Job. Paper presented at the Eranos Conference in May 2022. Full text published in: Jung's Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul in the 21st Century - An Eranos Symposium (Chiron Publicatons, 2022), pp. 297-318. ISBN 978-1-68503-117-6
Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature
Essays collected between 1994 and 2004, exploring the emerging field of literary Darwinism and working toward a comprehensive model of human nature; critiquing poststructuralism, traditional humanism, ecocriticism, cognitive rhetoric, Stephen Jay Gould, and narrow-school evolutionary psychology; offering examples of practical criticism of nineteenth-century British novels and novels depicting paleolithic life.
“Literary Jung: Mythos, Individuation, and Poetics”
Interdisciplinary Discourses, Education and Analysis (IDEA) Journal Issue 1 - Myth: Intersections and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2021
My paper shall discuss Jung’s stance on literature, with the definitive point made that Jung’s approach to literature may be viewed as valid insofar as for him, literature and artistic creativity more generally are not reducible to analytical psychology but are in their totality analogous repositories of the same. The psychological aspect that I explore in Jungian poetics is the formation of such art in the creative self, in what is to Jung a transformative ‘psyche’, for which mythological and alchemical symbols contribute to expressions of the individuation process. Although Jung called for logos in his theories, he stressed the importance of mythos. Logos alone was not enough for understanding the psyche, and in turn, humanity; however, mythos, which can manifest as narrative or poetry with its language of symbolism and imagery, is necessary to reveal the hidden aspects of the collective unconscious in the work of individuals. I shall discuss how, for Jung, myths were narratives that both expressed and shaped the psyche, which is where poetry and psychology meet. Archetypes are not wholly discrete essences separate from empirical experience. Rather, they exist in the empirical world like transcendental truths as the constructors of individual experience.