scholarly journals Archetypes and Creative Imagination in ‘Ode to Psyche’: A Jungian Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-65
Author(s):  
Imdad Ullah Khan

John Keats’ ‘Ode to Psyche’ is steeped in mythology and dream symbolism, which encourages us to understand it from the perspective of depth psychology/archetypal criticism. The odes of John Keats have been studied from historicist, feminist, and biographical perspectives. This paper aims to complement these perspectives by elaborating the mythical dream imagery of the poem as referring symbolically to the process of psychic integration and poetic creativity. The paper also views the poem as exemplifying the need for a complementary ongoing communication between the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the mind to maintain a holistic psyche. Archetypal theory is used to frame the figurative structure of the poem as a symbolic mythical variant of the process of poetic creativity. The paper employs three theoretical constructs, namely syzygy or complementation of opposites; active imagination; and individuation, as a framework to analyze the poem from an archetypal perspective. Employing a depth psychological perspective to understand poetry enhances the aesthetic pleasure derived from reading poetry and enhances the 'healing effect' of poetry by illuminating the psychological connotations of the poem. The paper concludes by attempting to answer two research questions explored in the analysis. First, does archetypal perspective contribute to enhancing readers' aesthetic pleasure derived from reading poetry? Second, what are the theoretical contributions of the current analysis towards contemporary Jungian literary theory?

Corpora ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Wilson

Contemporary depth psychology is under constant pressure to demonstrate and strengthen its evidence base. In this paper, I show how the analysis of large corpora can contribute to this goal of developing and testing depth-psychological theory. To provide a basis for evaluating statements about foot and shoe fetishism, I analyse the thirty-six most frequent three-word phrases (or trigrams) in a corpus of about 1.6 million words of amateur fetish stories written in the German language. Zipfian methods from quantitative linguistics are used to specify the number of phrases for analysis and I argue that these reflect the core themes of the corpus. The analysis reveals three main dimensions. First, it corroborates the observations of the early sexologists that foot and shoe fetishism is very closely intertwined with sadomasochism. Secondly, it shows that genitalia-related phrases are also common, but an examination of their contexts questions Freud's theory that fetishism results from an assumption of female castration. Thirdly, it reveals that the mouth also plays a key role; however, the frequent co-presence of genitalia references in the same texts does not seem to support straightforwardly the most common alternative theory of fetishism based on object relations. Future research could valuably extend this approach to other fetishes and, in due course, to other depth-psychological constructs.


Philosophy ◽  
1936 ◽  
Vol 11 (42) ◽  
pp. 131-145
Author(s):  
W. R. Inge

My subject is the place of myth in philosophy, not in religion. If I were dealing with the philosophy of religion, I should, of course, have much to say on the place of myth in theology; and what I have to say may have some bearing on this subject; but I am not dealing with particular dogmas of Christianity or of any other religion. My thesis is that when the mind communes with the world of values its natural and inevitable language is the language of poetry, symbol, and myth. And, further, that philosophy has to deal with a number of irreducible surds which cannot be rationalized. They must be accepted as given material for reason to work upon. For example, we do not know why there is a world; we cannot unify the world of what we call facts and the world of values; there are antinomies in space and time which do not seem to disappear when we put a hyphen between them. Our reason–some would say reason itself— has reached its limits. We are driven to mythologize, confessing that we have left the realm of scientific fact. We give rein to the imagination, not exactly claiming with Wordsworth that it is reason in her most exalted mood, but hoping that the creative imagination may reveal to us some of the real meaning of questions which we cannot answer.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy

An account of Edmund Burke’s central ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful shows how the emphasis Burke gave to terror helped to shape the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Focusing on examples from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare, the remainder of this essay explores the ways in which Romantic poets both thought about and attempted to represent those elements of the sublime that were instigated by their encounters with the natural world. What emerges as defining about these interactions between the mind and world is how imaginative impulses towards a sense of the sublime often led to a renewed sense of the material world and the very contingencies of existence they sought to transcend. Even Wordsworth’s more reverential response to the natural world as sacrosanct recognises the ‘awe’ of the sublime can be as much consoling as it is disturbing. These disturbing aspects of natural process and the sublime are self-consciously explored in the poetry of Shelley, who subjects notions of transcendence and idealism to sceptical scrutiny. With varying degrees of emphases, the poetry of Byron, Smith, and Clare elide distinctions between nature and culture to acknowledge a sublime more explicitly shaped by temporal and material processes. Finally, a key episode in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is read as exemplifying the many difficulties and complexities of the Romantic imagination’s encounter with, and its attempts, to represent transcendence and the sublime.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-394
Author(s):  
Emelia Quinn

When we encounter the work of Grinling Gibbons, we find ourselves in the presence of multiple non-human animals. However, it is unclear how one should address these presences. On the one hand, for ecofeminist scholars such as Josephine Donovan, the aestheticization of animal death is to be vehemently resisted and the embodied presence of animals recovered by looking beyond the surface: a mode of looking that Donovan terms ‘attentive love’. On the other hand, a re-reading of the philosophical ideas of Simone Weil, upon which Donovan premises her argument, suggests that attention to others requires a mode of radical detachment. These two positions speak in important ways to the dilemmas faced by a vegan spectator. Drawing on Jason Edwards’s previous work on ‘the vegan viewer’, this article seeks to reconcile a vegan resistance to Gibbons’s depictions of animal death, in their spontaneous falling under human dominion, with the aesthetic pleasure generated by Gibbons’s craftmanship. I therefore propose ‘vegan camp’ as a means of reconciling oneself to insufficiency and complicity in systems of violence without renouncing pleasure. Vegan camp is detailed as an aesthetics that acknowledges the violence of humanity and one’s inescapable place within it, dissolving the subjective idea of the beautiful vegan soul to pay attention to the pervasive presence of an anthropocentrism that, in the case of Gibbons, decoratively adorns the sites at which animals might be eaten, worn, or offered up for sacrifice.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-124
Author(s):  
David Trippett

The icon of the machine in early-nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contemporary critiques in which pedagogy and the life of the mind were implicated, but to what extent was education in music composition influenced by this? A number of journal articles appeared on the topic of music and phrenology, bolstered by the establishment of the London Phrenological Society (1823), and its sister organization, the British Phrenological Association (1838). They placed the creative imagination, music, and the “natural” life of the mind into a fraught discourse around music and materialism. The cost of a material mind was a perceived loss of contact with the “gifts of naturer … the dynamical nature of man … the mystic depths of man's soul” (Carlyle), but the concept of machine was also invested with magical potential to transform matter, to generate energy, and can be understood as a new ideal type of mechanism. These confliciting ideals and anxieties over mechanism, as paradigm and rallying cry, are here situated in the context of music pedagogy during the second quarter of the century, with particular reference to amateur musicians and the popular appeal of phrenological “exercise,” and of devices such as Johann Bernhard Logier's “chiroplast.”


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Gholam-Reza Parvizi

The question of image in literary studies and in recent years in Translation Studies is one of the most problematic innature. In the present study an attempt was made to define the nature of translating linguistic constructions – evokingimages in the mind of reader – in English novels and their rendered versions in Persian translations. In this studyseven types of images (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic and organic) in two English novelsand their rendered versions in Persian were analyzed based on two theoretical frameworks, the first one is Jiang’sImage-Based Model to Literary Translation (2008) by which the nature of translation of images were examined andthe other is Chesterman’s translation strategies (1997) which help to systematize translation strategies adopted bytranslators in rewriting the images in English novels. The results have shown that in most of the cases the images thatare intended by original author have been changed in the translations, and the aesthetic experience of the ST reader isdifferent from that of the TT reader.


Author(s):  
Barbara Gail Montero

Although great art frequently revers the body, bodily experience itself is traditionally excluded from the aesthetic realm. This tradition, however, is in tension with the experience of expert dancers who find intense aesthetic pleasure in the experience of their own bodily movements. How to resolve this tension is the goal of this chapter. More specifically, in contrast to the traditional view that denigrates the bodily even while elevating the body, I aim to make sense of dancers’ embodied aesthetic experience of their own movements, as well as observers’ embodied aesthetic experience of seeing bodies move.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Pia Sophia Chaudhari

Dynamis of Healing: Patristic Theology and the Psyche explores possible experiential traces of Orthodox Christian ontology and soteriology in the healing of the psyche, as known and experienced through depth psychology, by examining a possible relationship between theology and depth psychology as mediated through a lens of the sacramentality of creation. Chapter 1 maps the territory for inclusion of the psyche, as understood in depth psychological terms, in discussions of salvation and healing. Chapter 2 explores a central premise of patristic soteriology, giving an outline of the thought of several key church fathers and exploring the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on theosis as a model of transformation. Chapter 3 discusses a possible ontology of healing by looking at St. Maximus’s concept of the logoi of being and clinical insights into the psyche as always seeking to manifest healing qua psyche. Chapter 4 concludes the book by considering the importance of eros and desire from both a theological perspective and a depth psychological perspective.


Author(s):  
Ben Hutchinson

Comparative literature is both central and marginal to literary studies: central because it draws on almost every discipline in the Humanities; marginal because it is not tied to any single tradition, risking being ignored by all of them. For all its past struggles and present debates, comparative literature has an increasingly central role to play in the Humanities’ future. ‘The futures of comparative literature’ explains that in this age of specialists, generalists continue to play a vital role in shaping and supporting the life of the mind. International, interdisciplinary forms of knowledge remain the very essence of modernity. Now more than ever, the aesthetic education of comparative literature is indispensable.


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