Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jung S Psychology and Deleuze S Philosop
Jung S Psychology and Deleuze S Philosop
Jung S Psychology and Deleuze S Philosop
CHAPTER 6
JUNG AND LITERARY STUDIES FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE, CLIMATE CHANGE AND
ECOCRITICISM
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7052-3451
Abstract
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
way that fosters multiple connected realities: a unus mundus of oneness and multiplicity
Weishaus become literature of climate change with Jungian symbols that enact
Nicolescu’s hidden third, weaving psyche into cosmos. Jung’s work in Answer to Job and
at the Edge of Chaos and Jerome Bernstein in Living in the Borderland show bring Jung
into complexity and chaos theory. Contemporary Jungian literary criticism is represented
by The One Mind by Matthew A. Fike and Rinda West on alchemical gardening. Finally,
Overview
Twenty-first century Jungian literary criticism faces, along with every other academic discipline,
the challenge of climate change as an unprecedented problem for human societies and the planet.
Partly in anticipation, an important direction in literary theory in the latter years of the twentieth
century was Ecocriticism, the study of literature and the environment as introduced in the
landmark essay collection, The Ecocriticism Reader (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996). How can
Jungian psychology contribute to the exploration of literature and non-human nature? Moreover,
can any resulting Jungian ecocriticism contribute meaningful responses to the increasing
warming of the planet? While far from comprehensive, this final chapter of Jungian Literary
Criticism: The Essential Guide will set out principles, properties, and starting points for a
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the
Environmentalist John Muir here takes up the oscillation between atomized and systems thinking
with which chapter 5 ended (Nicolescu 2014: 101-4). Human knowing has swung between
extremes of trying to reduce reality to constituent particles, as in splitting the atom (and treating
considered as systemic. A systems thinking approach to literature, for example, occurs in the
textuality of history and the historicity of texts of New Historicism, and the dissolving of literary
252
Above all, systems thinking undermines the subject/object division of classical sciences with
which this book began. It considers genres rather than single works, and is inimical to dualism
such as that of the opening sentence of this chapter which ended with that Western binary,
human societies and the planet, or humans versus nature. Indeed, the atomizing of nature,
reducing it to so-called elemental constituents, has not only been fundamental to scientific
knowing, it has also encouraged mining, pollution and exploitation of something we call,
indicatively, ‘natural resources’. One value of an ecocritical approach to literature is the way it
shows up dualist and colonial attitudes to the other as nonhuman nature. Calling the nonhuman
natural resources is to conceive of the world as designed for human domination and use. It
To this end, philosopher Kate Soper points out the contradictions in the way the word, nature is
used in English (Soper 1990/2000). The human/nature or culture/nature binary is one of three
knowing in an atomizing sense as well as for capitalist dominion. Regarding nature as other to
human culture means it can be treated as a resource to be chopped up into entities that can be
priced and sold. Yet, Soper shows, there is also a systems use of nature in the term, ‘the laws of
nature’, usually reserved for scientific principles like gravity and the speed of light. The laws of
A final aesthetic use of ‘nature’ refers to our sense of nature as picturesque, a beauty to be
cultivated. Some elements in twenty-first century ecocriticism reject the word ‘nature’ altogether
as too saturated with a binary ethos. This book will not do so, in part because it sees both the
systems and atomistic use of nature as symptomatic of nature’s mythical roots going back to
either a Mother goddess or ancient deities that span the human/nature divide. A Jungian criticism
could investigate, critique, and even demonstrate the value of restoring these imaginative modes.
For example, The Myth of the Goddess by Jungians, Ann Baring and Jules Cashford, mentioned
earlier, suggests that two mythical styles of consciousness haunt modernity. They show ‘nature’
primary in prehistory when the Earth herself was worshipped as divine, the source of all life.
‘She’ was a goddess and a mother, yet not feminine, as opposed to masculine, for she was prior
to all divisions that set up binaries and lead to atomized knowing. Depth psychologists today
understand such a being as the pre-Oedipal Mother, the source of being that is not yet knowing,
for consciousness has not yet occurred through the infant dividing from Her.
Earth mother consciousness is therefore based on connection to the other, whether the other is
the other gender or the nonhuman. In the historical myth, these agrarian goddess worshippers
were captured by invading warrior tribes from the north who brought their masculine god, a sky
father, disembodied, non-earthly, who created the planet as fundamentally separate from
himself. These new sky gods instated dualism and a consciousness based upon separation from
the Divine, the other gender, nature, and even from the body itself. Of course, as the Oedipus
complex reveals, earth mother consciousness of connecting and sky father consciousness of
254
separating are radically dependent upon each other. We cannot connect without first being
However, just because earth mother and sky father ought to embrace each other in individuating
harmony, it does not follow that any particular society will honour both aspects of the divine.
Such a society would recognize embodied connection and sexuality as potentially sacred, as well
as fostering distance, discrimination, conscious rationality and the capacity to form the
subject/object paradigm. Western modernity, as Baring and Cashford show, suffers from a fatal
over-valuing of sky father, the outcome of which is severing, atomizing and duality, with a
consequent devaluing of body, connection, and the essential nurturing of the other as nonhuman
nature.
‘Ecology’, in its name stems from the Greek oikos, meaning ‘home’, a return to the values of
earth mother connectedness. So too is evolution as a so-called scientific (but actually deeply
mythic), evocation of earth as source of all being. So far, a Jungian approach illuminates the
ecology inherent in the term, ‘ecocriticism’. It is time to look more closely at Jung, nature and
ecocriticism for an era desperately seeking to ameliorate the consequences of over emphasizing
the segmenting of reality in ways that have promoted its, and our, destruction.
Ecocriticism
255
Succinctly defining ecocriticism as the exploration of connections between literature and the
physical world, Cheryl Glotfelty goes on to show its radical expansion of literary theory
Ecocriticism expands the notion of “the world” to include the entire ecosphere. If we
everything else,” we must concede that literature does not float above the material world
in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex, global system
Rather than ‘a’ system, this version of what looks like earth mother total connectedness includes
literature as a distinguishable yet thoroughly entangled system in planetary being that embraces
humans and their culture. In fact, although ecocriticism as a recent expansion of literary studies
does ideologically adhere to the notion of an ecological everything connected to everything else,
a tension between the systemizing and the localizing remains. Indeed, one could argue it is
natural for literary studies to continue a tradition of focusing on individual works and/or specific
places, given its history of New Critical concentration on the text as absolute and wholly separate
from other considerations. On the other hand, much ecocritical scrutiny of individual texts and
localities is now oriented to re-evaluating what it means to live as entangled in nature, rather than
Above all, ecocriticism seeks to understand through literature why Western society has pushed
the planet into crisis, and what we can do about it. Fascinatingly, the polarized tendencies
towards locality and totality are distinguished by tones from those founding genres of lyric and
tragedy, comedy and epic. While studies adopt tragic and lyrical devices to reveal the
entangled systems may remind literary scholars of Dante’s Divine Comedy (c.1317). A purgatory
Additionally, I would suggest that the multidisciplinary approach strongly implied in Glotfelty’s
later in this chapter. First of all, it is worth looking closely at potential Jungian contributions.
Ecocriticism differs from previous systemizing attitudes to literature in its inclusion of physical
nature. Adding the ecosphere to literary texts entails regarding language as embodied, as part of
our creaturely evolved being, as well as something cultivated by education. Jungian psychology
Jung is explicit that archetypes possess a bodily dimension in instincts, and yet are not wholly
governed by the body’s own needs. In effect, archetypes are a psychological system that is
entangled with, but not ruled by, body and consciousness. For Jung, human language is
archetypal in bodily gestures and words, for both equally can manifest psychic images. Such
images are archetypal images that make meaning from the interaction of a creative unconscious
with conscious knowing that is culturally shaped. Archetypes are therefore nature (creaturely
A second contribution of Jung to ecocriticism comes in his portrayal of myth as a narrative that
shapes consciousness while also allowing the unknown psyche to inscribe our being. Put another
way, for Jung nature is both inside the human in archetypes and outside in the synchronous
universe. Myth is equally a personal, individual and also cultural language that unites psyche and
nature; it is a language knitting the human into the nonhuman. In this approach to myth, Jung
suggests that making myth psychological is also to make it ecological. Hence, reading myth in
literature has the capacity to become ecological in a Jungian ecocriticism. Myth in literature re-
On the other hand, it is important to engage with those critics who are correct to point out that
myth is part of the problem if it applies to those Christian interpretations of the Bible that see
used and used up. Myth in general is not always, or simply, the promotion of an ecological
vision.
258
Here we need to recall that Jungian psychology is more complex than a collection of isolated,
atomized concepts like ‘myth’ and ‘shadow’. Rather, Jungian psychology is an historical
intervention into Western modernity that sees its psyche as dangerously fragile because it has
exploited the other, rather than embraced it. Individuation is conservatively aimed at a balanced
psyche, and for Jung that meant respecting its nature as containing powers beyond ego control
Ecocriticsm and even ecology, is arguably a process of learning on a planetary scale what Jung
proposed for mental health. As part of a fragile ecosphere, an aggressive part of humankind has
tried, foolishly, to control non-human nature, instead of learning to live with it sustainably. Many
of Jung’s later years were devoted to trying to unpick the dualistic and exploitative aspects of
Christian myth, in works like Aion (see chapter 5) and Answer to Job (1952b) see later this
chapter). Today, one might reflect upon the deeper pattern of his psychology for an ecocritical
approach to myth. While Jung produced a concept of the self that he acknowledged was
connected to monotheism, his simultaneous adherence to many archetypes in the psyche recalls
the multiplicity innate to animism. One version of earth mother worship is an animistic society
who can communicate with trees, rocks, rivers, etc. in their spiritual or psychological form.
For Jung, myth was powerful because it mediated between overwhelming powers of the other
and the frailty of human consciousness. In our greatest mistakes, myth is implicated, but so too is
the possibility of a better relationship to the other, as our nature is indigenous to the planet. Two
further potential Jungian additions to ecocriticism should be mentioned here. One is his
259
insistence on the intrinsic creativity of the collective unconscious, which undoes centuries of
monotheistic characterizing of nature as a mere product, as matter without spirit. Jung’s nature is
in-spirited, which leads to his third historical contribution to ecocriticism (after including bodily
language and re-forming myth by including animism with his monotheism), which is alchemy.
As offered in chapter 2, alchemy was discovered by Jung as a source of symbols, for him,
for nature as inspirited and animistic. Alchemists sought to free the spirit from base matter,
which in material terms was the project to turn lead into gold. However, their process could
never be taken by them as chemical engineering in the modern sense. For alchemists worked in a
cosmos with striking similarities to the ecocritical approach to literature in the sense of seeing
psyche and body – and for them, divine spirit – as part of their work with matter.
On the one hand, history shows alchemy as retaining a lot of earth mother animism in the
modern age. On the other hand, alchemy historically yielded to modern chemistry, which
renounced the sense of a sacred whole. Jung’s volumes on alchemy as proto-Jungian psychology
are revealing as a window into a world seeking a relationship with matter that was not a
subject/object division, and was not under the illusion of ego control.
Alchemy was primarily a discipline of the imagination; it required ritual, prayer, and working
with symbols that were material, spiritual and textual. It speaks to the resources in literature itself
that retain traces of other, under explored, ways to relate to the nonhuman. Jungian psychology
can be a lens to seek in image, symbol, and imaginative texts, very different narratives or myths
260
studies to address: the critical (in all senses) issue of climate change.
By its very foundation of looking at literature and the nonhuman, ecocriticism cannot ignore the
growing planetary crisis of climate change. One response has been literary studies’ contribution
in the arts, history, philosophy, religious studies, etc. is focused around acute issues of our
relationship with nature. Such work is arguably necessary to shift the characteristics of
modernity that cause the earth to warm, the seas to rise, and climate disasters to occur more
frequently. Can the twenty-first century afford to continue the model of atomized education in
which literary studies, for example, is severed from the real condition of much of of its subject
Of course there are real challenges to incorporating what has hitherto been regarded as outside
the discipline, whether it is other disciplines, or the materiality of the nonhuman. Teaching
climate change in literary studies faces resistance, not the least in extremes of despair and denial
in the student population. Ecocritic Scott Slovic perceptively quotes Henry David Thoreau on
Man cannot afford… to look at nature directly… He must look through and beyond her.
To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to
The mythical reference here is rich and complex, not least in the suggestion that classical science
is inadequate to deal with the overwhelming reality of the nonhuman. Medusa as the petrifying
feminine incarnates the darkest aspect of the earth mother, a weaponized nature directed against
human beings. Yet, in the insight of looking ‘through and beyond’ there is an intimation of
mitigating the binary culture/nature to a path towards considering nature and human nature as
part of the same ecosystem. Above all, a literary mythic analysis of this fragment of Thoreau
backs up the notion that skills taught by the humanities are essential in dealing with climate
Teaching climate change to literary students can certainly be done using twenty-first century
texts that directly explore it. However, it can also happen by looking through and beyond what
might be called the traditional curriculum, by reconsidering what is inside or depicted in literary
works as well as what is outside in the conditions producing and receiving them. SueEllen
Campbell, for example, teaches the literature of war in the context of looking at resilience in
times of great peril and transformation. How do characters from very different places and times
react to crisis? Literary works “offer sites for contemplating what happens when the world
changes around us, shaking our understandings of who we are and what we should do”
Recognition of, and responses to, climate change have been dominated by classical science and
are still mostly presented through the subject/object paradigm and its mobilization in the binary
culture/nature. Climate change is something we have ‘done’ to nature and we must stop doing it,
even reverse it. There are the multiple resistances to this paradigm as being dominant, from
science itself in the quantum dimension, and from forms of knowing that make its relative
position visible, such as the humanities and Jungian psychology. Quite apart from all these, there
are yet more problems with continuing the classical scientific approach to climate change.
One problem is that the formidable social, economic, political and psychological shifts required
to address climate change in these terms of reversing how we, (subject) treat nature, (object) just
may not be possible with this model. Secondly, the ecosystem is incredibly complex and
computer modelling fallible. Given that science itself is telling us that subject/object modelling is
only part of the picture, surely even a trust in science entails the kind of re-orientation to it as
The formation of the Environmental Humanities is itself a recognition that the climate and nature
are not machines to be corrected in the interests of the most aggressive species it houses. As
described by philosopher Matthew Kearnes, climate change has been made by the very
historically hegemonic entity that has been most prominent in studying it, the marriage of
science and technology modeled upon regarding the Earth as an inanimate object (Kearnes 2017:
37-45). As he shows, attitudes to what climate actually means are riven with cultural, mythical
and religious assumptions, including those that produced the subject/object dichotomy.
263
technoscientific, reinforcing the conditions that gave rise to the problem, he argues. This problem
extends, Kearnes continues, to cement disciplinary divisions that keep research on climate
change assuming “an autonomous, reified social world, with inputs and outputs, whose causal
mechanisms can be understood from outside” (Kearnes 2017: 39). The dominance of
technoscience produces knowing that assumes binaries, such as assuming that society itself is
entirely suitable for external manipulation. He concludes that the real issue of teaching climate
change is to let it teach us, “to cultivate an affective form of bodily learning” (ibid.: 42) that
again places the student within the ecosystem as embodied imagination. We need to learn to hear
what the planet is telling us somatically; let tacit bodily knowing feed all our disciplines so they
Kearnes goes on to contextualize and modify what has become the major epistemological image
for climate change, the Anthropocene. Proclaiming that human activity has now touched all
dimensions of the planet, from the atoms in the atmosphere to the molecules in the deepest
oceans, the Anthropocene is the Earth’s age of Anthropos, humans. Already problematic, issues
around this conception of climate change, literary studies, and Jung, will be unpacked next.
The Problem with Anthropocene as Image for Where We Are: A Dionysian Response
The Anthropocene is what Jung would call an image becoming a symbol, a conceptualization of
a complex and not fully known condition. In asserting that humans have irretrievably altered the
264
planet, the Anthropocene continues to infer the subject/object division as culture/nature. Humans
have changed nature, not humans as a facet of nature have provoked a speeding up of climate
processes.
disciplinary debate calls for a modification of the Anthropocene: we need “a decentered account
of the ‘Anthropos’ in anthropogenic global warming that though we are influential, we are not
the central players in our own story,” (Kearnes: 41). His call for affective bodily knowing as a
In fact, the ubiquity of the Anthropocene image disguises the way in which it can be recast to
the nonhuman and how indigenous societies may have ways of knowing and being to contribute
to Anthropocene subjectivity.
In this light, in place of simply humanities teaching about climate, pedagogy in the
what Chakrabarty portrays as the entanglement of the species history of humanity and the
However, the postcolonial Anthropocene cannot operate within the current disciplinary
hierarchies around the climate change debate. If technoscience rules, then the Anthropocene
means a binary approach to nature and a scientific model based upon humans as subject and
climate as object. The insightful essay collection, Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, is
transdisciplinary (Siperstein, Hall and LeMenager 2017). Although not including depth
psychology, the book reveals an opportunity for Jung to contribute to this vital convergence of
knowing and being – and how being can be fostered in the climate change era.
In chapter 4 of this book, I argued for a Jungian understanding of Dionysus to be the symbol that
draws us into the disciplinary consciousness structured through transdisciplinarity. While later in
this chapter I will explore transdisciplinarity in the context of climate change and ecocriticism,
here I offer Dionysian interiority as an alternative model for consciousness and academic
disciplines for climate change. For Dionysus is the god of dismembered and re-membered being.
Torn apart by Titans, he is re-membered and becomes the god who spans human nature and
With human nature and nature as one uncontrollable energy, we and the planet risk frequent
dismembering in madness and hurricanes, rising seas, and more frequent wars. Yet Dionysus is
not chaos. Dionysus has rites that enable re-membering into a renewed consciousness of bodily
being and knowing, which is just what the environmental humanities calls for. Those who refuse
Surely Western capitalism, sold on rational ways of knowing that assume nature to be a pliant
resource and fully controllable, has neglected the Dionysian in human and nonhuman nature.
Dionysus tells us that we cannot fully know and can never fully control nature inside and out-
side us. Rather, we can find bodily and non-rational ways of knowing to re-member Dionysus –
Above all, Dionysus provides a consciousness of parts as parts, says Jungian psychologist James
Hillman.
Rather the crucial experience would be the awareness of the parts as parts distinct from
each other, dismembered, each with its own light, a state in which the body becomes
matter may be compared with the distribution of consciousness through members, organs,
Considering this image of Dionysian consciousness in the context of climate change and
ecocriticism further clarifies how it applies to disciplines as parts. Just as the call for decentered
Anthropocene subjectivity is also a plea for disciplines to be re-membered without any one
dominating in tackling climate change, so too Dionysus provides an image for renewed bodily
disciplines would remain conscious of themselves as parts so they can entangle and collaborate
Dionysus is a better characterization than Anthropocene of the climate crisis era, I suggest,
because it removes the temptation for the latter to harden into an exclusively classical science
model treating nature as inert other. Dionysus is not human and not rational. He is a mode of
consciousness that is indigenous to our planet. He tells us that control of the nonhuman is not an
option; we have to find the right rites of participation. These too are provided by Dionysian
consciousness that, if we read the myth in Jungian terms, positions Ariadne as the human
consciousness who learns bodily union with sacred Dionysus (see chapter 3 for Ariadne).
Part of the rites we need are the psyche materialized into academic disciplines as always open to
new knowing. Literary studies, as well as Jungian psychology, are disciplinary parts with forms
such as the novel incarnating plurality, a dismembering and remembering of being – what Jung
called individuation – in reading. Before looking at how literary criticism is this context could
operate, it is time to further the cause of Dionysus against the Anthropocene by looking at a more
Classical science, itself an atomizing of knowing, tends to replicate this epistemology just as
Literary studies had its atomizing period in New Criticism (see chapter 1). While quantum
science opened the sciences to systems, and several literary theories such as Structuralism and
New Historicism did so for literature, Complexity Theory suggests a vision of inter-activating
systems that would potentially take disciplines into the evolving ecosystem.
Complexity Evolution (as challenge to Anthropocene and for Jung and Literature)
268
Complexity science developed within studies of evolution that noticed a problem with
assumptions inherited from Darwin. Neither species competition, nor random mutations that
were either successful and reproduced, or failed and became extinct, are able to account for the
Far more viable is to model evolution through open systems of co-evolving wholes interacting
unpredictably (Shulman 1997). These so-called Complex Adaptive Systems or CAS, do not
correspond to any binary mechanical understanding of nature because any one element can
somehow communicate with all the others. Causality is no longer linear. Complex adaptive
systems evolve and adapt by learning from each other. When two or more CAS encounter each
other their interactions become too complex to be mapped, so the outcome cannot be predicted.
Novelty and creativity, is sparked in nature by CAS inter-reacting to the degree that they can
adapt to future conditions, or find ways to make the best use of scarce resources (Shulman 1997:
107-15).
They are able to make use of energy sources in their environment to sustain
269
themselves as well as grow and develop, so they do not move toward a state
systems… In complex systems, nothing is fixed, but all the agents are
110)
groups, changing ideas, and above all the arts. Genres of all kinds could be considered as CAS.
Computer scientist John Holland, proposes seven basic features of co-evolving complex adaptive
systems (Holland 1994: 3-4). One feature is the ability to function as a group in a non-linear
fashion, meaning that simple causes do not produce simple results. For example, the addition of
one literary work to a genre, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, can have unpredictable results to the
genre of tragedy. It could make us re-evaluate existing as well as future works. This also applies
to other kinds of complex adaptive systems, such as those we call ‘history’. Additionally,
resources flow through the whole system; something touches one element and all receive it; so
that the existence of Hamlet could change the reception of every other tragedy.
CAS are diverse, Holland continues, and can imitate neighbouring systems. Here a play like
Hamlet can be an intervention into historical and political ideas. Complex systems can also use
tags or emblems to recognize, sort, and privilege certain patterns, such as the genre of tragedy’s
promotion of its own signifying, what it considers important; for example, the kind of hero it
provides. In other words, CAS, like genres, signify. Moreover, CAS use building blocks that are
270
constantly re-arranged, which might be a definition of a genre. Finally, says Holland, CAS make
internal models of their world (ibid.), a thought reminiscent of literary theory’s notion that all
texts are at some level about literature itself. Just consider how far Hamlet is about acting!
Returning to the nonhuman, even tiny bacteria exist in complex adaptive systems, enabling them
to model their environment (Shulman 1997: 119). Shulman suggests that complexity science
intimates an “Old One” (Shulman: 141). This would be a source of sentience, ordering and
animation in the evolving web of interacting, spontaneously creative nature. If evolution means a
‘knowing’ in every living cell, including those of human bodies, then there is a kind of
This would be the basis for an “Old One” which has been in the process of
learning for billions of years. Animals, the human body, and consciousness
would be her offspring, and she would be like the Great Goddess of ancient
myth who created the world through her dance. (ibid.: 141)
Complexity science discovers earth mother happily alive in evolution. What it does not discover
is the Anthropocene. Complexity’s intensely systems approach to the world takes the ecological
axiom that everything is connected to everything else seriously; it discovers no human culture
that is not already entangled in Complex Adaptive Systems. CAS are implicated in our evolution
beginning with its ‘primordial soup’. They inhabit and weave cultural systems into natural
While Jung lived too early in the twentieth century for complexity science per se, Jungians such
as Helene Shulman and Joseph Cambray have pointed out that Jung’s collective unconscious
consciousness with historical CAS (Shulman 1997; Cambray 2012). In effect, Jungian
archetypal images strongly resembles accounts of co-evolving complex adaptive systems. Also,
causality. It maps very effectively onto interweaving, complexity producing, spontaneous and
creative connections.
with the body, as well as with cultural, and natural CAS. One way that individuation or evolution
of consciousness operates is through reading: literary images spark into archetypal images.
To regard reading as CAS at work with the ecosystem recalls the vision of Dionysus presented in
dis-membering and re-membering of being, in the open system, the CAS of being human.
Literature is yet another complex adaptive system with smaller CAS nested within like genres.
As a CAS, literature is open to the CAS of historical processes and human consciousness. At one
272
level, works of literature might be the tags or signifying elements of larger collective adaptive
systems such as national or class identity; or, and equally, the CAS of a particular region in its
natural environment. For example I could suggest that the Yorkshire moors partly produced
Wuthering Heights as a spontaneous creative, ordering act, in a way that radically decenters
The typical rendering of the Anthropocene assumes a rational, wholly knowable human history,
innately separate from nature that has intervened into the nonhuman and changed it forever. Such
is not the vision of complexity science, which is of a Dionysian co-evolving dismembering and
re-membering through inter-penetrating CAS. Dionysus does not do dualistic boundaries. Human
culture and nonhuman nature are inextricable. Dionysian CAS means humans and nature
continually and creatively co-create being, and continue to do so in every breath and heartbeat,
Complexity science, while Dionysian, is not a promise that climate change will be
accommodated positively. Perhaps the myth is a communication from the Old One, the earth
mother, that those who do not worship Dionysus will die by his dismembering feminine
maenads. They tore apart Pentheus, who refused the god. Dionysus has to be worshipped
not enough without a collective mobilization. Dionysus in positive form is the renewed
consciousness of bodily instinctual life, detailed above, when we re-member parts as parts of a
never fully rational, knowable whole. Dionysus in dark mode is chaos, which is also the abode of
complexity.
273
Chaos abuts complexity, for its evolution shows spontaneity and creativity inherent at the
meeting of order and chaos. Chaos is unpredictability, where the potential for ordering breaks
down. To feel the presence of chaos risks that creative evolution might spin into sickness and
species suicide, one way of characterizing climate change. Complexity science as a systems
understanding of humans and the nonhuman may well be Dionysian in creative potential. Yet it
also manifests the overwhelming god in the possibility of a savage dis-membering of those
It is time to look at further candidates for a creative adaptive system, academic disciplines
themselves. If academia is a CAS, then disciplines are open to other systems and potentially
impact upon them. These would naturally include the relations between literature and
Treating literary consciousness, a genre, historical identity, and an environmental region all as
kinds of complex adaptive systems affected by other CAS implies different levels of reality.
Indeed, the very notion of complex adaptive systems as fundamentally operating in human and
nonhuman culture runs wholly counter to separate academic disciplines with their own discrete
constructions of the real. In complexity, literature does not represent the environment; it is co-
produced with environmental CAS, and it is co-produced with historical CAS like a class system.
Complexity entails transdisciplinarity and vice versa. After all, transdisciplinarity removed
274
binary subject/object logic by demonstrating the necessity of the between state. In this way the
Classical binary logic confers its patent on either a scientific or non-scientific discipline.
Thanks to its rigid norms of truth, a discipline can pretend to contain all knowledge
within its own field… Complexity literally pulverized this pyramid, provoking a veritable
Complexity pulverizes the pyramid model of disciplines based upon physics understood as
dealing with the most fundamental level of reality, says Nicolescu. It also challenges the
Anthropocene, reliant upon both the classical binary logic of humans outside of nature, and on
physics as the primal level upon which climate change occurs. More radical than environmental
humanities, transdisciplinarity fulfills its most ambitious aims. It then goes further in eradicating
disciplinary hierarchy and separateness in the cause of participating positively in the reality of
complex adaptive systems. Disciplines are CAS and so too is the nature of this planet.
In chapter 5, I quoted all three of Nicolescu’s three logical axioms that replace those of classical
science. The third epistemological axiom is the necessity of working with knowing via
complexity theory. For understanding complexity makes it possible to know the multiple
The epistemological axiom: The structure of the totality of levels of Reality appears, in
our knowledge of nature, of society, and of ourselves, as a complex structure: every level
is what it is because all the levels exist at the same time. (Nicolescu 2014: 207)
This axiom goes further than many depictions of CAS in asserting wholeness as a cosmos, a
level of inconceivable, even unknowable complexity that is all the CAS together. Such
‘cosmodernity’ is what Nicolescu means when he says that there is a manyness implying one,
and a oneness predicated on the many (Nicolescu 2014: 209). Put another way, there is an
unknown, ultimately unknowable, dimension of reality that fulfills the intimations of the
ecologists that everything really is connected to everything else. Nicolescu calls this property the
hidden third. It is factored into transdisciplinary logic as the included middle (such as in the
Jungian-literary symbol as the third between psyche and literature). The hidden third joins the
multiple levels of reality described by different disciplines into a oneness that is also manyness.
The Hidden Third, in its relationship with the levels of Reality, is fundamental for the
It is no coincidence that unus mundus is a term also used by Jung to signify a unity that is both
mysterious and logically complete (Jung 1955-6, CW14: paras. 660-3). On a much smaller scale
it is a unity similar to that of a genre, which feels complete yet is never full or rigidly defined.
Another text can be added at any moment which would subtly change all other members of the
CAS.
276
Essentially, this chapter has an argument – appropriately – on two levels. One level is the case
for transdisciplinary as the expansion of complexity theory for climate change and our relations
with the nonhuman. Part of this case is that disciplinarity needs to understand itself as
transdisciplinary if what some see in the promise of Environmental Humanities (and even of
ecocriticism) is to be fulfilled. On a second, more local level, this book’s offering of Jung for
literary studies rests upon a transdisciplinary foundation. Jung anticipates complexity evolution
and transdisciplinarity; the latter in notions like synchronicity that explicitly reveal the relativity
Jung for literature in an era of climate change can nurture an ecocriticism that participates in the
complexity of the ecosystem as encompassing culture. To really see this promise in action, it
comes down to focus on the symbol in both Jung and transdisciplinarity. For transdisciplinarity,
the symbol is logically the included middle. It makes partially visible the invisible hidden third
It is important to remember that for Jung symbols are images, an item of psychic reality first and
foremost. What makes them peculiarly symbols are their ability to evoke what cannot yet or even
ever, be fully or rationally known (Jung 1921, CW6: para. 818). It is worth looking at two
significant symbols that Jung gives for that mysterious totality of psychic being, the self.
277
Notice that these strikingly different ways of characterizing the same concept occur in adjacent
paragraphs. They also offer some correspondence to Nicolescu’s dialectical way of describing
cosmodernity as oneness imbued with manyness and the reverse. In Jung here we have one
It is not within the scope of this book to reiterate the long literary history of the symbol. Suffice
to say that most literary criticism treats literature as symbolic by finding in it consequences,
meanings and implications far beyond what is completely and rationally contained in the pages
or oral utterance. If a Greek tribe heard their bard declaiming The Iliad as an expression of their
identity that could not be completely encapsulated any other way, then they too would treat
literature as a symbol as Jung understood it. After all, for a symbol to exist, it depends upon the
What is evident is the role of the symbol in complex adaptive systems. For it is surely essential
to the creative organizing potential of a literary CAS that it fertilizes the CAS of the tribe’s
278
identity. The symbol is the concrete means of literary complexity fostering historical complexity.
It does so via the psychological complexity of the Jungian archetypal psyche. Symbols that knit
CAS psyche into literary CAS (and vice versa) also connect with all the other CAS in human-
nature interpenetration. The symbol, whether a small fragment of the text or whole poem does
the work of linking the listeners to each other in the known and unknown dimensions of, for
example, being Greek. In this sense, listening to the poem is both psychological and cultural
For transdisciplinarity, symbols are precise and open (Nicolescu: 34). Not only can ideas be
symbols, they need to be symbols to retain that innate openness to the hidden, unknowable third
that makes them part of cosmodernity. Here symbols are alive; they protect language from decay,
which happens if classical binary logic goes too far, and the hidden third, what Jung would call
the synchronistic dimension of reality, is repressed (Nicolescu: 119-20). Nicolescu like Jung,
notes that the loss of symbols harms persons, communities and epochs for similar reasons.
Jung, literature and transdisciplinarity come together in the symbol as this provides the included
middle between text and reader. In reading, the words are mobilized into psyche just as they are
materialized into writing for the writer. The included middle symbol is not the hidden third per
se, but rather a logical understanding that allows its unknowable potency to be present. Who
specify what aspect of the inter-animating complex adaptive systems spanning literary tradition,
human behavior, and planetary strata may incarnate in any act of reading or writing?
279
Above all, this argument suggests that we communicate with nature when using symbols. It
means that symbols in literature, or literature itself, are an activity within nature, within
ecosystems, including those exhibiting climate change. The symbol is the engine of complexity
literature (as elsewhere) are vitally connected to the health of the planet, for they are part of its
vitality.
With symbols we connect – and not just to our immediate environment. We imagine bodily
senses embedded in our physical spaces around our bodies. Symbols open up the human body to
cosmodern dimensions, meaning where one element can touch everything. What Jungians call
symbols because psychically rooted, and literary critics call symbols because textually rooted,
cosmodernity calls symbols because they make partially visible that mysterious dimension of
reality that connects everything, the hidden third. Symbols convert us from modern beings to
cosmodern beings. For ecocriticism, they place us somewhere and everywhere at the same
moment. We are now actors within complex adaptive cultivation of reality as both natural and
cultural.
devolve into chaos, at least from the point of view of human survival. Cosmodernity calls on us
to participate symbolically, whether the symbols occur in art, or in the ideas and practices of
science. Symbols are the engines of creativity; symbols make order at the edge of chaos.
Symbols are also the complex adaptive systems of climate change trying to teach us.
280
These definitions act as small summaries of the rather complex and knotted argument of this
chapter. They are no longer confined to basic Jungian literary terms as commonly understood,
Synchronicity
Jung’s notion of meaningful coincidence between psyche and material world caused him to posit
an additional scientific principle of meaning in the cosmos beyond the subject/object division of
classical science. Synchronicity implies that archetypal principles of creativity and ordering are
not limited to the psyche, but inhered in other forms of reality. In transdisciplinarity’s
Image
consciousness via an archetypal image pointing towards meaning. Such an image can be somatic,
aural, oral, painterly, verbal etc. An image in literature is a concentration of verbal dexterity,
often a metaphor, to offer something more than a straightforward single meaning. These two
senses of the image can be distinct, yet coincide in Jung’s contrasting of words as signs and as
symbols. Adding complex adaptive systems, we can see images as pathways between bodies,
Symbol
A symbol to Jung is a particular type of image, usually in words, that connects ego to
generally considered as opening up many possibilities for meaning. Add complexity theory to
literature and psychology, and symbols become icons of creative energy transforming psyche
into words, and vice versa. Symbols connect complex adaptive systems. This is taken further by
Symbols reveal the plastic nature of reality. In the inter-related disciplines symbols make reality
Here symbols are the only valid kind of representation that is also an intuition of reality.
Symbols are essential because without them language is severed from (what Jung would call the
archetypal unconscious and what literary studies would call literariness) intuitive, feeling,
imaginative, multiple modes that are vital for keeping the multiple sense of reality alive.
In terms of this Jungian ecocriticism, symbols are the portals to nature. Yes, symbols in literature
Literature
adaptive system. This means, for example, that it has the autonomy and properties of a self
282
organizing system. For example, one element can touch all the others, such as when a significant
work changes, even in a way hardly noticed, the understanding of what literature is and what it
can do.
Literature as CAS is also part of the co-evolution of human consciousness, as well as connected
to many natural CAS. Add transdisciplinarity, and literature stores the intimation of symbol
knowing essential for approaching reality in its true character of multiple realities. Indeed,
transdisciplinarity restores to literature and art equal status with what we call science, as a way of
Ecocriticism
Stemming from conceiving literature as implicated in the natural world and human relations to it,
ecocriticism now envisions complexity and the multiple realities of cosmodernity. Such
ecocriticism could explore the creativity of complex adaptive systems at the edge of chaos. It
might foster ordering principles for an era of climate change in which chaos is disastrous on a
global scale. Such an ecocriticism would enable human CAS to start working with nature’s
complexity, instead of on it. This entail a rejection of the culture/nature binary, so enacting the
recognition that humans are sustained by and subject to the creative complexity of the planet.
These self-organizing, predicting, enmeshed systems produce spontaneity when they interact. By
doing so they embrace what Jung called the collective unconscious of self-organizing archetypes.
There is a clue to this resemblance in Shulman’s image of nature’s CAS as an “Old One” similar
283
to Jung’s million-year-old Self (Shulman: 141). Now, in transdisciplinarity, CAS span multiple
realities. They are the fabric of the one and the many of cosmodernity. Their spontaneous and
unpredictable qualities guarantee that One never becomes a hierarchy of knowing and being.
Anthropocene
It is just possible for the Anthropocene to become an image for cosmodernity. If Anthropos as
the humanities can be decentered (to the extent of being an intersection of CAS in a cosmos that
we can never separate from, or hope to control), then the Anthropocene would be the unruly
child of complexity evolution’s Old One. However, if tied to climate change science dominated
by the subject/object paradigm, the Anthropocene is in danger or remaining stuck in the notion
that nature is the uncreative other we operate blindly upon. In turn, the image risks becoming
what Jung called a sign, meaning a word with too little unconscious psyche. (Jung 1922, CW15:
para. 105). As a sign, the Anthropocene feeds a human hubris that assumes that we can know
Dionysus
By contrast, Dionysus is a dangerous god with the mythical resources to warn us of the illusion
of control, and that ignoring him leads to a terrible dismemberment. By rejecting Dionysus in
favour of over-reliance on rational ideas of separation from the other, we have ourselves
incarnated his savage dismembering of the very planetary CAS that sustained cultural creative
Seen positively, Dionysus is way of relating to the oneness and manyness we find in
storehouse of ancient and modern wisdom about Dionysian processes. It is time to look further at
1) Jung contributes to ecocriticism by taking the three ways we understand nature into the
making of human consciousness in a mode that can be incorporated into literary reading
2) The Jungian psyche, as well as literature as a whole, and in genres, can all be regarded as
3) Taking CAS into Jungian transdisciplinarity as Dionysian, reveals literature, nature and
psyche as co-evolving at the edge of chaos in a way that fosters a sense of multiple
It is the eve of a royal wedding in ancient Athens. The match between Duke Theseus and Queen
Hippolyta of the Amazons is especially momentous because it also marks the end of a war,
literally between men and women, or the Athenian warriors and the Amazons. Unfortunately,
strife between generations erupts when a father, Egeus, demands that Theseus enforces on pain
of death, his choice of Demetrius for daughter Hermia. Hermia prefers Lysander who
The lovers point out that Demetrius has abandoned a former lover, Helena, who is still pining for
him. Victorious patriarch Theseus sides with patriarchy, leaving Hermia and Lysander to run
away together. Demetrius pursues the illicit couple and is in turn followed by Helena. They all
end up in a wood near Athens, which is also the place of dreams and magic. A further group of
Athenians enter the forest, mechanicals or working men. They seek privacy to rehearse a play in
At first sight, A Midsummer Night’s Dream positions nature as other to culture where the human
domain is dominated by politics, war, patriarchy, and the need for erotic desires to accommodate
to these superior sky father divisions. Such cultural forces are sky father because they rely upon
a rigid gender binary that condenses also to the subject/object paradigm. Fathers are full subjects,
daughters, mere objects of their control. Theseus, although he speaks words of love to Hippolyta,
is explicit about decisively winning the war against the other culture of the Amazons.
By contrast the forest is a place where subjectivity is fluid and capable of transformation. Magic
applied in error causes both Lysander and Demetrius to profess love to previously scorned
286
Helena. Hermia is horrified when her lover desserts her and blames Helena, previously her dear
friend. Elsewhere, Bottom the weaver, is partially metamorphosed into a donkey; the Queen of
the Fairies, Titania is enchanted to fall in love with him. Since the play is a comedy, all is made
harmonious by the final act. Only Demetrius remains under a spell so that he weds the woman
who truly loves him. Evidently, the forest is the earth mother’s home. It is animate nature
inspirited with fairies, and where transformative magic reveals matter and spirit as united.
In a sense the play depicts a struggle between a court with sky father values of duality and the
forest earth mother values of plurality. For the King and Queen of the Fairies, Oberon and
Titania are also fighting, this time over the fate of a child, and fueled by their respective
dalliances with Hippolyta and Oberon. And the play is specific that war between masculine and
feminine principles in nature is very dangerous to human dependence upon nature’s seasonal
fertility. Titania tells Oberon that their jealousies and strife has caused climate change in an
astounding anticipation of the twenty-first century. Here Jung’s presentation of the psyche as
Shakespeare.
Sky father duality impacts upon animate earth mother nature negatively, in that what is clearly a
necessary union of balancing gendered energies has decayed into duality far enough to provoke
antagonism. Here it is worth remembering that earth mother, considered alone, is no paradise, as
the propensity of spells to be applied mistakenly shows. A Midsummer Night’s Dream reveals
these mythical forms of consciousness as unbalanced, requiring a true marriage of sky father and
earth mother for desires to be fulfilled in ways that reveal natural and human communities as
inextricably connected. Getting it right in the forest (a bit of sky father ordering) is essential to
getting it right at the court (a bit of earth mother fluidity, in allowing Hermia and Lysander their
desires) and vice versa. Court and forest are mutually co-evolving as the erotic dalliances
demonstrate.
288
Put another way, the play shows complex adaptive systems of social organization around
sexuality, individuating desires, and human-nature connections and distinctions. These all fall
into chaos before they can find creativity and archetypal patterning. What happens to the four
lovers in the forest and to Titania is chaotic; it could also be ugly and tragic. At one point
Lysander and Demetrius are about to fight a duel to the death, Hermia physically attacks Helena
Oberon is both responsible for this chaos and the only one who can solve it by dis-solving
inappropriate spells in the alchemical solve et coagula of theatre. It requires the system in
complex adaptive systems to restore order, and the adaption or flexibility to make it the right
order. Sky father elements leak into Oberon from his human shadow, Theseus, to make the right
blend of mythical consciousness for humans and fairies: they are no longer a wholly distinct
species from each other. It is a truly Dionysian vision of dismembering and re-mending humans
in nature. The ancient god of comedy and tragedy still engenders drama.
It is the mechanicals who remind us of the transdisciplinary aspect of Jungian ecocriticism. Their
final play is hilarious because they are unable to understand and use symbols, the currency of
theatre itself.
LION
(played by SNUG)
Fearful of punishment should Snug make too convincing a lion for the ladies, the actors are at
pains to point out that they are pretending to be ferocious beasts, or a wall, or moonshine. They
have a problem with words evoking more than is physically present on stage (symbols). This
makes for delightful comedy that is spectacularly similar to, as well as dramatically different
from, the preceding theatrical events in which an ancient royal court and a magical wood have
Theatre incarnates multiple realities for the individuation of its audience. It is transdisciplinarity
in action, or, here a symbol-event that is portal to other realities such as those in the psyche. The
theatrical wood near Athens is an opportunity to realize, make real in consciousness, our
complex adaption system co-evolving (what Jung called individuation) with/in nature. In
cosmodernity, art is of equal value to classical science in knowing and being. What intuitive,
Case History 2
290
Technology changes the mediums of literature. Writing revolutionized and marginalized oral
traditions. It was followed by the invention of printing that hugely expanded access to writing.
Today information technologies and the internet morph and challenge the very notions of
literature itself. From the early public world wide web of the mid-1990s, Joel Weishaus, once a
sculptor and always a poet, dedicated his work to the art of writing online. The internet makes
available new resources of direct connection to readers, and the technology enabling a writer to
design the shape of words and pages. How might these opportunities nurture a literature for the
One consequence of direct contract with an audience is the possibility of building large projects
over time that are serialized to readers, a return to nineteenth century publishing familiar to
Charles Dickens’ newspaper serials. Placing visual images next to word-images returns literary
art to the technology last found in illuminated medieval manuscripts. However, it was in his
2005 work The Way North, five years in the making (weishaus.unm.edu/North/Intro.htm), that
Weishaus professed that the combination of words, images, sound and movement restored to
literature what is now being discovered in Paleolithic cave art: multimedia presentations.
Literature and technology are no linear progression, but rather a wheel capable also of spiraling
Begun in mid-2015, Cosmography was planned in ten installments, to end in 2019. This work
introduction.
"The old division of the Earth and the Cosmos into objective processes in space, time,
and mind in which they are mirrored is no longer a suitable starting point for
Cosmography inscribes itself into a medium "too narrowly focused on the specific
which that technology plays only a small role;"(2) while "changes in paradigms occur not
through the efforts of those seeking new paradigms, but from those seeking to expand the
old."(3) I call this genre Digital Literary Art, 'to save a text from its misfortune as a book."
(4)
Working within this practice, Cosmography invokes seven planets in our celestial
neighborhood; plus The Sun, The Moon; and Incognita, a celestial "revelation of hidden
things."(5) There is also my trope of invagination: fragments exhumed from the literary
corpus and transplanted into the body of a living text; plus images and animations, along
with notes for each of the 200 texts that advance us toward a more magnanimous,
Each planet, or celestial revelation, is named for a god the Ancient Greeks so masterfully
imagined. In the Anthropocene, these gods have become symptoms of our foibles,
Cosmography's texts stem from walks in valleys and on mountains where the wild earth
and its inhabitants live "as if nocturnal mysteries were stirring in broad daylight."(8)
1/1/2018)
4- E. Levinas. Quoted in, M-A Ouaknin, The Burnt Book. Princeton NJ, 1995.
7- C.G. Jung, "Commentary on 'The Secret of the Golden Flower." Collected Works Vol. 13. London, 1967.
Weishaus is explicit about the aim of his digital literary art to imagine into the cultural shifts
brought about by technology, not just to treat computers as instruments, or the internet as a
means of storage. His literature is of, and for, the era of a world wide web. Moreover, the work’s
ability to evoke Paleolithic contextualizes the way in which climate change forces us to consider
very long stretches of time over man historical paradigms. If the subject/object paradigm is a
large part of ecological crisis, then literature might want to do what Weishaus attempts: seek
within its traditions (such as cave painting, storytelling and medieval manuscripts) for a way to
the other.
Weishaus’s Cosmography avoids the well worn symbolisms of astrology. Rather, the work is
about finding a home in the solar system by drawing upon myths of the planetary gods, as well
as more modern mythical narratives to be found in many kinds of scientific research, philosophy
293
and the traditions of art and literature. Moreover, in addition to these co-texts cited in the writing
and referenced on notes pages, there is what Weishaus developed and named ‘invagination’.
Here the words of other writers are spliced within his own sentences and denoted by a change in
font, as well as referenced. Referred to above as “transplanted into the body of a living text,” this
is earth mother writing where the text owns its animistic capacity to be a tissue of many voices.
Instead of a sky father author who spills his words as if he were a separate wholly controlling
being, Weishaus’s digital texts embrace textuality, acknowledging and welcoming other voices.
The result is to expand consciousness to a dialogical web of multiplicity and singleness that is
archetypally artful.
That this is transdisciplinary is a recent revelation to Weishaus, who developed his tropes in the
1990s, before the public emergence of Nicolescu’s new academic modality. It is of course a
cosmological practice, infusing its subject: form manifests as content or sky father forming
embraces earth mother fluidity. Indeed, the fusion of form and content extends to the process of
composition explored within Cosmography. The writing begins in nature, where the poet walks,
looks and listens, and takes notes. References to rabbits crossing his path, or the poet meeting
Then, composing at home on the monitor, words themselves become images of the imagination.
They are symbols in the Jungian sense of revealing some (never all) of their wandering into
being. Words that emerged in the wilderness think into ideas, maybe visualizations, scholarly
research, fragments of poetry, mythical figuration. In Jungian terms this can be understood as a
294
form of active imagination from the wilderness to the cultivated psyche. From there, the creative
web emerges in the portal that is the prose-poetry on screen, a poetry that includes visual digital
images, fonts, invaginations, etc. Begun in the body and its intuition, Cosmography roots the
internet into the complex adaptive system of the archetypal psyche sustained, energized, in-
formed by nature.
In beckoning the solar system into ecological literary digital art, Cosmography wraps the earth
into its Dionysian home, one not centered on the wellbeing of human nature. The writing
decenters not only humanity, but also its culture without losing humane wisdom. As Weishaus
puts it, the work is a re-minding of our place in the universe. It is digital art for a necessary
ecological literature. Cosmography shows that literature can do what it has always done, enact
and embody, as well as re-present, who we are and where we are going.
A few hours of rain and signs of coyote, deer, bear and man
to Mars are formidable, but NASA has its eye on a mission to the
planet in the 2030s. Speaking at a hearing the old gods rose and
for an era, or two; then returned to friable earth. (KEEP DIFFERENT FONTS IN THIS
QUOTE!)
In the above quotation from the Mars section, the boiling lava of words coalesces in the printing
of animal tracks enlivened by rain. Composed in a drought stricken land that suggests the
changing climate, an eruption of rain is a rage that is also divine salvation. The invaginated
quotation brings in the Anthropocene classical science understanding of Mars as a possible place
of human exploration in exactly the same historical way that exploration by one aggressive
culture preceded colonization. Each text links to notes, some of the ingredients of this particular
its own myth: “In one of Ray Bradbury’s stories an Earthly colonist of Mars takes his daughter
down to the canal to show her a Martian. She is told to look into the water, and there she sees her
the technological hurdles: I. Sample, "Mars astronauts risk brain damage from cosmic
rays." http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/01/mars-astronauts-risk-brain-
Science fiction, science and poetry are co-texts of this formidable welding of images. Also, this
page includes movement in the morphing of a photograph of the planet itself (The animation not
being able to be shown in book format points out one advantage, and challenge, of Digital
Literary Art.) Mars is offered as many cultural traditions to be woven digitally, differently, into
images that trans-form consciousness. Cosmography’s images are Jungian symbols as portals to
other complex adaptive systems such as those in nature and in literature. It is time to look at
Answer to Job is Jung’s comedy version of the Bible, both in the sense of being written with
humour and also as his Dantean Divine Comedy, a story of redemption through darkness.
Structured as a loose commentary on major biblical narratives, the title is deceptive in that Christ
as the conventional ‘answer’ to Job’s cry against the injustice is not enough.
In Answer to Job, Jung’s God is beset with complicated family relationships. Liable to forget his
first wife, Sophia, who is his eternal feminine, he takes up with a historically incarnated younger,
bride in Israel. God is also afflicted with a troublemaker elder son, Satan, who incites him
against a supremely virtuous human, Job. The good man is stripped of everything and cries out
297
against this unjust and unprovoked malevolence. God later sends his own virtuous son, Jesus, to
In an extraordinary leap of narrative complexity, the God character of Answer to Job is both an
astonishingly unindividuated being and also the collective unconscious of mankind. Jung
plausibly suggests that God’s motives in torturing Job are obscure, even to himself. What this
confused God needs is individuation to find out just who he is before even worse cosmic
disasters befall humanity. God’s individuation is what human beings are here for. Torturing Job
out of ignorance of his own darkness (Satan), God is inferior in consciousness to the outraged
human being. The Bible overall story, argues Jung, tells of one of God’s highly dangerous
attempts to individuate through relations with humanity. We have reached the point of extreme
peril.
Everything now depends on man: immense power of destruction is given into his hand,
and the question is whether he... can temper his will with the spirit of love and wisdom.
Everything now depends upon man because the terrifyingly overwhelming unconscious of God
has been repressed in modernity. We have repressed too much of what is other to the rational
ego, especially the eternal feminine in Sophia/wisdom. That repressed material becomes God’s
dark unconscious incarnated in weapons of mass destruction. These include nuclear bombs that
are God’s dark side, where the shadow of modernity meets our repressed psyche (ibid.: para.
747).
298
Unfortunately, the bible does not end with the well meant sacrifice of Jesus. It continues into the
Book of Revelation, which is easily read as imagining the active consequences of nuclear
weapons. Jung’s story of God’s attempts at individuation in the bible is actually an audacious
reframing of events in order to revise the myth. Answer to Job takes the biblical myth of
apocalypse and, via the basic comedy narrative of individuation, turns it into a myth of
deliverance.
For nuclear conflagration can be averted if we take seriously our task to shoulder the burden of
the shadow of God. Put another way, God is our potential wholeness, what Jung calls the self.
Neglect that psychic potential and it is repressed into a shadow of awesome destructiveness. We
have to deal with what, in Jung’s argument, is the terrible unconsciousness of our age. Believing
only in the reality of matter, we have made matter our god, denying the numinous reality of the
psyche. This becomes a gendered division in patriarchal modernity with Sophia as a disavowed
divinity. Stuck in matter, we make weapons to tear matter apart. Weapons of mass destruction
materialize modernity’s shadow, which is also the shadow of our monotheistic, far too
patriarchal God.
What is peculiarly Jungian about Answer to Job is that it fuses history and myth in a way that
does not privilege either. Its bible is not an absolute that cannot be re-written. The point of
Answer to Job is that the story can change while our participation in it cannot. We cannot ignore
the bible because it is also a major psychic structuring of Western history. Conversely history
Neither history nor the bible are immutable. Both are subject to the deconstructive potentials of
individuation. Jung finds in the bible a way of narrating individuation to encompass both of his
paradoxical notions of the self: as ordering principle and as totality. So the self is, on the one
hand, psychic wholeness beyond comprehension, God seen from the point of view of the
embodied ego who is living a limited life. Secondly, the self is totality, the terrifying potential of
the divine being who struggles for any kind of consciousness (through humans).
Answer to Job shifts a biblical myth of apocalypse to a myth of deliverance via self-creation; that
is, creation by the Self. It is an astonishing work of literature in using a sacred text to write from
various psychic positions. In terms of this chapter on ecocriticism and cosmology, Answer to Job
uses both senses of comedy to splice complex adaptive systems, of history, myth, psyche etc.,
and to span multiple realities, such as the divine and human. Going back to the three meanings of
the word ‘nature’ in English, where this chapter began, Answer to Job could be an aesthetics of
Answer to Job is also Dionysian in demonstrating the dismembering and re-membering forces at
we are to take responsibility for the darkness incarnated in weapons of mass destruction. These
weapons are truly diabolical, as in splitting apart; a stage of alchemy. Fortunately, alchemy,
Jungian myth, and individuation can accept the diabolical as a process, instead of an ending.
Recall, as in re-member the feminine; re-unite with Sophia in a way that cultivates parts as parts,
300
or the many in the one and the one in the many---and a transdisciplinary, Dionysian
More overtly ecological in subject, ‘The Philosophical Tree’, originally written for a botanist’s
multiplicity of disciplinary realities. The essay contains thirty-two tree paintings and drawings by
current and former patients, with Jung’s commentaries on them with regard to individuation,
followed by analyses of alchemical and mythical evocations of the tree as symbol. For the tree in
alchemy can be a true symbol in growing many meanings that remain open to others. It can
signify the growth of the adept, the stages of the work, the uniting of heaven and earth, the
feminine spirit, the spirit in matter, an episode of torture where the cross of Christ is a tree,
Towards the end, Jung insists upon the importance of freeing the multiple potentials of the
symbol for meaning with his technique of amplification, so demonstrating the symbol uniting the
territory of the known or ego, with the ultimately unknowable wilderness of the unconscious
(Jung 1954c, CW13, para. 382). For Jung, alchemy done in laboratories is the same process by
which psychotherapy fosters individuation. The difference is one of historical practice, not
.
301
Jung’s amplification of the symbol infused with his understanding of psychological reality is
textuality as often understood in literary theory. There is no one meaning or ultimate meaning for
a symbol. Rather, it must be allowed to flow over possibilities for signifying that are potentially
endless. Jungian psychology is one way of understanding this quality of the imagination in
symbol form.
Living at the Edge of Chaos: Complex Systems in Culture and Psyche, by Helene Shulman, 1997.
Jungian analyst and philosopher Helene Shulman does a superb job of bringing Jungian
psychology into the context of complexity science and evolution. Pointing out that Jung
anticipates complexity, in the sense of finding the multiple capacities of complex adaptive
systems in his vision of the psyche, she dramatizes this proposition across different registers of
language. So in one register, Jungian psychology can be imagined in the rational explaining
Depth psychology has attempted to model the adult human as two great psychic/somatic
organizing systems: the unconscious one with many interconnected subsystems we share
with all biological organisms, and the conscious ego-organizing system with abstract
language capabilities that only humans seem to have developed. (Shulman 1997: 129)
302
Here is a lucid account of Jung in complexity, showing that the human unconscious links into
transdisciplinarity. Here too the ego-organizing system is open to the unconscious CAS. She
shows that what Jung called individuation is a creative interconnection with the unconscious that
links human knowing and being to the CAS of nature and cosmos. Such clarity is accompanied
cohesion, a many and a one. Every self-organizing life form is an ongoing integration of
building blocks that are themselves integrations of other building blocks, and so on.
Maybe this is why the alchemists spoke of scintillae – many sparks of light in matter, and
why many gods and giants in world mythology have multiple eyes… These multiple
This sense of embodied image as imagination also leads to the Dionysian transdisciplinarity unus
mundus, the one in the many and the many in the one. Symbols in alchemy as in Jungian
psychology are the matter or material of complexity because they matter, have meaningful roles
in the whole system. Living at the Edge of Chaos is an in depth exploration of complexity in the
context of Jung.
Additionally, although not looking at the CAS of literature, this book contains research that
could enrich complexity ecocriticism. For instance, biological complexity offers types of
303
of fluidity: youthfulness and play versus rigidity and structure (Shulman: 147-59). Shulman
demonstrates that the complexity approach is compatible with regarding these organizing
systems as archetypes, citing the ubiquitous child archetype often paired with the patriarchal
senex. Going one step further, I considered pedomorphy and gerontomorphy as organizing
principles framing children’s literature. See below The Ecocritical Psyche (2012).
Complexity theory has hitherto been neglected by literary criticism and ecocriticism. Shulman’s
work is a valuable resource for expanding literary studies in the burgeoning complexity of
Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma
Indebted to Shulman’s book, this work by another Jungian analyst is an exciting development of
ecological crisis. While again not examining conventional literature, this book also introduces
the literary in the different cultural context of the healing stories of the Navajo nation. In a
society where art, religion and healing are united, healing stories are considered to be living
artefacts with the power to knit together a wounded cosmos in a way that restores body and soul.
304
Living in the Borderland therefore offers its own healing story to the afflicted Western reader.
We are afflicted because, as evident in the book of Genesis, Western modernity is built upon an
exceptionally hard ego, made even harder and more fragile by progressively distancing from
nonhuman nature. Psychic evolution seems to have permitted, or even encouraged, this one-
sideness. We now risk species suicide. Fortunately, Bernstein the clinician discerns the seeds of a
psychic revolution in its evolution: the emergence of what he calls Borderland consciousness, or
Borderlanders.
The borderland is the realm where psyche and nature meet and become one. Borderlanders are
those persons for whom the border between human and nonhuman nature has been breached.
Sometimes this can manifest in ways that mainstream society is unable to accept as actuality,
such as when patients claim they feel the pains of a particular animal or of trees that were cut
down for furniture. They are not, as psychiatrists might typically allege, projecting their own
feelings onto nature. Rather their nature and that of cows or trees are one entity that joins at the
borderland.
Bernstein suggests three portals into borderland consciousness. First of all, the self-organizing
evolutionary complex adaptive system is striving to shift modernity from the perils of its
hardened ego. Secondly, some people are ahead of the general population in this CAS; and
thirdly, a traumatic episode can break the carapace of the ego and take it into a borderland state
of consciousness.
305
important resource for taking traditional ecocriticism into complexity in order to plot nature and
human nature. For example, literature is a fertile source of Borderlanders in those characters
experiencing animals, other nonhumans, and the superhuman as talking, or keen to communicate
to humans. Might we start considering genres of fantasy and romance as CAS that herald a
The chanting of myth in ceremonial context is one of the oldest forms of medicine
known. In the context of Navajo medicine, the healing ceremonials invoke the origins of
life in the now and with it the archetypal figures and all the power and mana associated
with them – all of it constellated on behalf of the patient. (Bernstein 2005: 145)
Of course the notion of stories as alive, as intrinsically active in healing the psyche-soma,
implicitly compares Navajo arts to endeavors to bring Jung and literature together. In a
Navajo cosmology is foreign, just as psyche and text are terms for separate phenomena. Living in
the Borderland is an illuminating way of seeing that a lot of what is laboriously assembled as
transdisciplinarity may also found in indigenous societies such as the Navajo, whose literature is
ecologically and cosmologically enmeshed. Bernstein’s book provides another way to rejoin our
nature to nature.
306
The One Mind: C. G. Jung and the Future of Literary Criticism by Matthew A. Fike (2014)
This fascinating and original book of Jungian literary criticism builds on Jung’s interest in
quantum spontaneity and the paranormal, which is expanded into the cosmological vision of
rightly points out that previous Jungian literary critics have neglected Jung’s early excursion into
spiritualism. Also they have not pursued the profound implications of his development of
synchronicity.
The One Mind takes seriously the notion that synchronicity reveals a cosmos of quantum
connectivity, where it is possible imagine investigating literature across time. Such innovative
criticism could even include receiving further texts from an author in the afterlife. This unusual
direction in literary criticism is future oriented via Jung’s teleological psyche as well as by his
appropriate benchmarks for the present study, which seeks to expand the subject matter
provides a foundation, starting point, touchstone, and bridge between science and
psychological approach by highlighting literary connections to the One Mind. (Fike 2014:
2)
Fike’s paradigm shifting intervention into literary studies yields intriguing possibilities, such as
the idea that fantasy literature is, in terms of the underlying psyche-matter unity of being, an
intuited manifestation of human potential that is yet to emerge (Fike 2014: 13). Although sketchy
in how his final future vision might be achieved, Fike posits a planet several centuries ahead
where a reduced human population is living peacefully for it has been transformed by
communicating in three new ways: with the dead, across time, and with Extra Terrestrials. In this
context, The One Mind offers chapters on Hawthorne, Milton, Wordsworth, William Blake,
Shakespeare’s sonnets from beyond the grave, Anglo Saxon poems and contemporary fantasy
writing.
While Fike’s remarkable vision does not precisely match the argument of this book, Jungian
possibilities new to Jungian literary critics, and to literary criticism itself. Fike reminds us that it
is worth considering the potential for literary criticism of critical and metaphysical positions
found within literature itself. Literary studies has also been limited by locating itself largely in
classical science’s subject/object duality. Against such conformity, we have literary theory’s
the other has been rightly scorned in recent decades on ethical and epistemological grounds.
Fike’s The One Mind should be regarded as retrieving from the margins a critical practice that re-
The One Mind aims to encompass Jung’s entire project of restoring to modernity multiple
realities too often marginalized as the feminine, or as the esoteric, or as nature as opposed to
culture. An implicitly transdisciplinary and Dionysian work, it rather downplays the manyness,
or multiplicity in the oneness proposed in this chapter. However, The One Mind deserves to be
celebrated for the courage to imagine a viable, transformed future, for its vigorous imagination.
Finally, just as there will be no sense of separation between human groups or between
humans as a whole and our extraterrestrial neighbours, there will also be no sense of
separation between living persons and those who have migrated back to the realm of pure
spirit…. Whereas criticism in the twentieth century considered the unconscious mind,
criticism in the twenty-fourth century will emphasize the One Mind as the reason of the
continuity of consciousness between life and the afterlife. The result will be the sort of
metaphysical criticism that appears in nascent form in this book… (Fike 2014: 221)
What I particularly like about this book is that there is no question here about what literary
criticism is for: it is for the evolution of human consciousness towards sustainability. While this
book differs somewhat from The One Mind, in celebrating the dialectic between the many and
the one, I salute The One Mind’s scholarly and ethical purposes.
‘An Opus con Naturam: Labor, Care, and Transformation in the Garden’, by Rinda West
This fine article by renowned Jungian ecocritic, Rinda West (see her book Out of the Shadow in
chapter 4), is an example of holistic Jungian-informed ecocriticism. Taking its title from
alchemy’s initially puzzling claim to be a work against nature, contra naturam, West shows how
gardening, literary criticism and psychological work to be one and many. They are together, as
well as separate, in the core narrative of Jungian individuation. All three, gardening, critical work
and psychic endeavor, can be a ritual that immerses us in the unconscious, then draws apart and
remakes being. Gardening is alchemical like the alchemists invoked by Jung because it is about
But the experience is of renewal more than it is of history, of comedy rather than tragedy.
In that way, gardening is a kind of ritualized labor; like poetry, it offers what Robert Frost
called a momentary stay against confusion. Ritual, as I have argued elsewhere, gives
order not only to our relationship with external nature, but also to our conscious
relationship to our internal wildness, the unconscious, the Self. Ritual mediates between
the ego and the numinous; it offers sacrifice to the other and rights our relationship to the
But how does the work of gardening contribute to healing and individuation?... But I’d…
say also the soil connects us with the body, the feeling, and the instincts. Life starts and
ends with soil. Soil is a complex food web, teeming with life. A teaspoon of good topsoil
may contain a million algae, a million fungi, and up to a billion bacteria. (West 2010: 8)
Gardening takes the amazing multiplicity of life described above and infuses it with human
multiplicity. By connecting us to the planet as mutuality, for the garden needs the gardener as
well as vice versa, gardening is also the active psyche cultivating being. West explores the
310
children’s novel, The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett, as an example of the
need for ‘care’, which can be burdensome yet is necessary to sustaining the web of life (West
2010: 8). The whole essay is a rich reinvention of literary criticism to mitigate disciplinary
boundaries as exclusion. She shows instead how the textuality of nature inhabits us.
The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Evolutionary Complexity and Jung by Susan Rowland (2012)
Little need be said to position my book of Jungian ecocriticism here. The Ecocritical Psyche
looks at Jung, alchemy and complexity theory in order to argue for a Jungian understanding of
literary symbols as portals to nonhuman nature. Much of the argument is contained in this
chapter with more detail, aligning secondary sources in complexity, alchemy and literary theory.
The book moreover contains studies of novels by Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, C. S. Lewis and
Frances Hodgson Burnett, as well as a study of Shakespeare framed by ecological research and
his use of magic. Above all, The Ecocritical Psyche seeks a complexity sense of humans in/as
nature in the cause of a Jungian ecocriticism. It points towards a critical practice aimed at
fostering a change in social consciousness that treats the planet as alive, and as the source of
hope.
Any ‘essential guide’ of two rich and complex textualities, like literature and Jungian psychology
can never be complete. For example, while I have tried to suggest key examples of Jungian
literary criticism published hitherto, I have unavoidably fallen short of representing the full
breadth of its diversity and creative energy. Jungian literary criticism suffers from decades of
marginalization, which means that valuable discoveries await the dedicated student.
This book has aimed to cover the essentials of Jungian literary criticism, in looking at Jungian
resources in the psychology, the concepts, the existing heritage of Jungian criticism, and in
pointing to potentials for future expansion. In particular, I have tried to present Jung and
Jungians to new readers prepared to go beyond stereotypical accounts of Jungian ideas that
plague the humanities because they are rarely based on actual detailed research. Jung in the
humanities is misread by being not read. Too often my experience has been of inaccurate
assumptions about Jungian ideas from those who have never dug into any of his works.
Essentially a trickster writer, Jung is a gift to literary criticism because he summoned the
imaginative process into his texts as core methodology for his psychology. Like so much
literature, Jung’s works beckon to realities beyond narrow definitions of what a single academic
discipline ought to do. We presently suffer from political, social and cultural schisms that can be
So Jungian Literary Criticism: The Essential Guide is a plea for essence not essentialism, which
is another way of saying, to know our disciplines as parts of a never rationally completed whole,
a Dionysian transdisciplinarity. Literary studies and Jungian psychology still have work to do as
312
discrete practices, yet are also called to a greater project of envisioning that the manyness,
multiplicity, and multiple realities of knowing and being, may also imagine their oneness; a
oneness indivisible from that multiplicity. In seeking new directions for Jungian literary
criticism, this book opens to an eco-cosmological imagination evoked for the twenty-first
century.
References
Baring, A. and J. Cashford (1991) The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, New York
Bernstein, J. (2005) Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the
Bronte, E. (1847/1990) Wuthering Heights, New York and London: W. W. Norton &
Company.
Campbell, S (2017) ‘Making Climate Change our Job’, in Siperstein, S., S. Hall and S.
LeMenager eds. (2017) Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, London and New York:
Coupe, L. (ed.) (2000) The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, London
Fike, M. A. (2013) The One Mind: C. G. Jung and the Future of Literary Criticism, Hove and
Glotfelty, C. and H. Fromm. (eds) (1996) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Culture, 1972, in Mythic Figures: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, volume 6.1
Holland, J. (1994) ‘Complexity Made Simple’, The Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute, 1994, 9 (3),
pp. 3-4.
Jung, C. G. (1921) ‘Definitions’, in Collected Works, Volume 6, Psychological Types, pp. 408-
86.
Jung, C. G. (1922) ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry’, Collected Works,
Volume 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, pp. 65-83.
Jung, C. G. (1934) ‘Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology’, in Volume 8, The Structure and
Jung, C. G. (1952b) ‘Answer to Job’, in Collected Works, Volume 11: Psychology and Religion:
Jung, C. G. (1954c) ‘The Philosophical Tree’, in Collected Works, Volume 13: Alchemical
Jung, C. G. (1955-6) Mysterium Conjunctionis: An inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of
Jung, C. G. Except where a different publication is noted below, all references are, by volume
and paragraph number, to the edition of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (CW), edited by Sir
314
Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, translated by R.F.C. Hull (1953-91),
London: Routledge, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. The date of my citation is the
Kearnes, M. (2017) ‘Knowing and not Knowing Climate Change: Pedagogy for a new
Dispensation’, Siperstein, S., S. Hall and S. LeMenager eds. (2017) Teaching Climate Change in
Muir, J. (1911/2004) My First Summer in the Sierra, New York: Dover Publications.
Nicolescu, B. (2014) From Modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Culture and Spirituality. New
Rowland, S. (2012) The Ecocritical Psyche: Literature, Complexity Evolution and Jung, Hove
Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kasdan, London, Bloomsbury: Methuen Drama.
Slovic, S. (2017) ‘The Elephant in the Room: Acknowledging Global Climate Change in
Courses not Focused on Climate’, in Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, eds. S.
Siperstein, S., S. Hall and S. LeMenager eds. (2017) Teaching Climate Change in the
Thoreau, H. D. (1841/1906) The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. B Torrey, Volume 6.
January 2018)
West, R. (2010) ‘An Opus con Naturam: Labor, Care, and Transformation in the Garden’,
2017.