Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 15: Spirit in Man, Art, And Literature by Jung C. G. Hull R. F.C. Adler Gerhard

Author:Jung, C. G., Hull, R. F.C., Adler, Gerhard [Jung, C. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1966-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

1. The Work of Art

[136] There is a fundamental difference of attitude between the psychologist’s approach to a literary work and that of a literary critic. What is of decisive importance and value for the latter may be quite irrelevant for the former. Indeed, literary products of highly dubious merit are often of the greatest interest to the psychologist. The so-called “psychological novel” is by no means as rewarding for the psychologist as the literary-minded suppose. Considered as a self-contained whole, such a novel explains itself. It has done its own work of psychological interpretation, and the psychologist can at most criticize or enlarge upon this.

[137] In general, it is the non-psychological novel that offers the richest opportunities for psychological elucidation. Here the author, having no intentions of this sort, does not show his characters in a psychological light and thus leaves room for analysis and interpretation, or even invites it by his unprejudiced mode of presentation. Good examples of such novels are those of Benoît, or English fiction after the manner of Rider Haggard, as well as that most popular article of literary mass-production, the detective story, first exploited by Conan Doyle. I would also include Melville’s Moby Dick, which I consider to be the greatest American novel, in this broad class of writings. An exciting narrative that is apparently quite devoid of psychological intentions is just what interests the psychologist most of all. Such a tale is constructed against a background of unspoken psychological assumptions, and the more unconscious the author is of them, the more this background reveals itself in unalloyed purity to the discerning eye. In the psychological novel, on the other hand, the author himself makes the attempt to raise the raw material of his work into the sphere of psychological discussion, but instead of illuminating it he merely succeeds in obscuring the psychic background. It is from novels of this sort that the layman gets his “psychology”; whereas novels of the first kind require the psychologist to give them a deeper meaning.

[138] I have been speaking in terms of the novel, but what I am discussing is a psychological principle which is not restricted to this form of literature. We meet with it also in poetry, and in Faust it is so obvious that it divides the first part from the second. The love-tragedy of Gretchen is self-explanatory; there is nothing the psychologist can add to it that has not already been said in better words by the poet. But the second part cries out for interpretation. The prodigious richness of the imaginative material has so overtaxed, or outstripped, the poet’s powers of expression that nothing explains itself any more and every line only makes the reader’s need of an interpretation more apparent. Faust is perhaps the best illustration of these two extremes in the psychology of art.

[139] For the sake of clarity I would like to call the one mode of artistic creation psychological,2 and the other visionary. The psychological mode works with

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