Humanities and Social Sciences

Published in the Spring Journal, this article explores what Jungian Analyst Rafael Lopez-Pedraza calls Titanism, or what we might regard as a psychological force working against the archetypal imagination. The article goes on to explore the life and work of Vaclav Havel through his relationship to the Titanic.

Although C.G. Jung  was deeply moved by his encounters with indigenous people , finding those encounters immensely creative, there has been an astonishing lack of dialogue between indigenous people and Analytical Psychology. This  talk is an attempt to recover some of what we have not known about Jung's encounter at Taos and explains why it is important.

The paper explores the fairy tale of Rapunzel and other tales typed as Aarne-Thompson 310. Rapunzel lives a magical, enchanted  life but is also imprisoned and detached. She has great potential but something must happen for that potential to emerge. In this she mirrors a profound crises in our own cultural history.

Our ability to reflect--even to reflect on our reflections--lies at the heart of both psychology and the humanities, but reflection is not a simple matter. Reflection is always distorted by one perspective or another. This paper is a mythopoetic exploration of the image of the mirror, a symbol of the reflective gaze in all of its distortions.

This is an interview with Linda Leonard on psychology and creativity. Leonard is author of Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction and The Call to Create: Listening to the Muse in Art and Everyday life (among other books). She is a Jungian analyst, practicing in Boulder, Colorado. The interview was originally intended for Spring Journal but for reasons I no longer recall was never published.

In this paper, I trace the historical and conceptual dialectic of the Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in order to demonstrate what Nietzsche, in his appended foreword to the text, describes as his “failure” with regard to the German character and the possibilities for German music.  I also discuss the complex dynamics between music and tragic drama, phenomenology and Romanticism, and myth, science, and art in an attempt to show how this incredibly rich text informs and prefigures Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

In this paper, I synthesize the concept of the redemption of time and history as articulated by Walter Benjamin in his “On the Concept of History,” and Erich Auerbach, in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature with the concept of “truth content” in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.  I have selected a section of Auerbach’s book that relates the technique of Marcel Proust in order to show that Auerbach’s historicist approach to literature can be brought into line with Benjamin’s historical materialist idea of redemption and utopia, by way of Theodor Adorno’s idea of an art work’s truth content.  The aim of my paper is to indicate that regardless of the historical methodology, both Auerbach and Benjamin can be reconciled, via Adorno, to the expression of utopia in Proust as evidence of his historical situation.  My main point is that the truth content of Proust’s narrator’s situation becomes clear through Auerbach’s analysis of it—namely, that the novel form is shown to be inhibitive of the content: the relating of a human story.  Proust’s master work, and Auerbach’s interpretation of the author’s utopic ideals, expresses the tension, often indicated by historical materialism, between an individual’s non-linear experience of the past and the so-called objective reality of a universal, standardized, external time.

Chapter IX of Thomas Hobbes’s work of analytic political philosophy contains a chart which sets before the reader an outline for the whole of the work.  While many readers are familiar with Hobbes’s vitriolic sentiments toward the Catholic Church, it is difficult to grasp the fullness of his dissention without understanding his idea of the juxtaposition of the Civil Government and the Kingdom of Religion.  Nowhere is this more lucidly observable than in the beginning of the work, which details the ways in which Civil Philosophy itself must be a sovereign entity for the preservation of a state.  Hobbes characterizes the Catholic Church as an oppositional monarch to the civil state that has no claim to the rights and duties of men, be they subject or ruler, as the symbiotic relationship between ruler and subject needs to exist in a single duality.  The chart in Chapter IX illustrates conclusively that the problem of Religion is its appeal to the individual, when the civil Leviathan must be a cohesive whole born of and greater than the wills and rights of the population.  For Hobbes, the only natural enemy of a created civil community is human mortality and the fear of death, since that is what leads men to religion.