Joyce & Jung

Although many years have passed since the original conception of Joyce and Jung, both the relevance and the fascination of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and of Jung’s “four stages of eroticism,” remain confirmed as the mutually revisionary narratives of evolution that impact twenty-first century psychoanalytic approaches to literary study. More specifically, A Portrait can be read, not only as an ironic five-act parody of Goethe’s Faust, but even more radically, as a postmodernist revision of Jung’s archetypal narrative of the “four stages of eroticism,” through which Jung reinterpreted Faust as psychodrama in the first part of his introduction to The Psychology of the Transference. Within the Jungian and Freudian discourses of psychoanalysis, the notion of the “four stages of eroticism” provides an iconic register for collective psychosexual evolution, and for individual libido sublimation respectively. Through the “four stages,” Jung translated Freud’s sublimation narrative into other evolutionary narratives—namely, those of psychotherapy, and “Western” history. By reinscribing these evolutionary narratives, Jung contributed to the lingering discourse of modernist anxiety that generated an idealized vision of “Western” civilization as the eternally elusive, luminously resplendent, twentieth-century acme of utopic self-preservation from both the anarchic chaos of accelerating colonial dissolution and the traumatic devastation of world war. In other words, Jung preserved this utopic fantasy of Western civilization in the “four stages of eroticism” as the psychic goal of “individuation” that woman embodies through her function as man’s “anima,” or the feminine soul—specifically, in her most sublimated aspect as the Gnostic Sophia, and the alchemical Sapientia Dei, both of whom personify Goethe’s lyricized notion of “The Eternal-Feminine” in Faust.

These specific ways in which A Portrait revises the “four stages of eroticism” enable us to read Joyce’s novel as a narrative that performs the complex maneuver of simultaneously mocking and celebrating the discourse of mystical experience. I am gratefully indebted to Ewert H. Cousins’s presentation at The Fires of Desire: Erotic Energies and the Spiritual Quest C. G. Jung conference at Fordham University in April 1991, “States of Consciousness: Charting the Mystical Path.” This presentation helped me to schematize the phylogenetic development that Joyce parodies throughout A Portrait. I was equally fascinated by Tomás Agosin’s presentation, “Psychosis, Dreams, and Mysticism in the Clinical Domain,” in which he detailed his final case study of a lawyer whose anima encounter dreams seemed to foreshadow his brain tumor death. Four months after the C. G. Jung conference, Agosin himself died of a pulmonary embolism. I have written Joyce and Jung, therefore, as a process of respectfully remembering the conference dialogue between Ewert Cousins and Tomás Agosin. This writing process also attempted to continue this exchange by moving toward some answers to Agosin’s questions regarding the fourfold development of mystical consciousness that Cousins delineated in “States of Consciousness.” It may be helpful to include Agosin’s questions here.

Thank you for a very wonderful paper, very energizing and helpful. But I wanted to ask you about sex. On the issue of libido—libido on the four different levels—do you need to save the energy of sexual discharge so that you can move from one level onto another? Or can you reach those states through other means? You said ordinary perceptions can sometimes throw you into the mysterium.

The conference exchange between Cousins and Agosin encouraged me to perform a schematic psychoanalytic reading of A Portrait in order to build on the work of Joyce scholars, such as William Hutchings, Suzette A. Henke, Bruce Comens, Chester G. Anderson, and Sheldon Brivic, among numerous others to whom I remain respectfully indebted. William Hutchings coordinated phases of Stephen’s growth in Chapter 4 with four major periods of European history in “Ontogenesis/Phylogenesis: The Pattern of Historical Development in Chapter IV of A Portrait” (JJQ 15 [2]‌ Summer 1978). Suzette A. Henke’s engaging feminist analysis of Stephen’s increasingly gendered consciousness correlated these developmental phases with the four major women in A Portrait (mother, prostitute, Virgin Mary, and Bird-Girl) in “Stephen Dedalus and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Narcissist” in James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (1990), while Bruce Comens analyzed the narrative disruption anxiety that the prostitute and the Bird-Girl embody in “Narrative Nets and Lyric Flights” (JJQ 29 [2] Winter 1991). Chester G. Anderson performed a close Freudian reading of the first chapter of A Portrait in “Baby Tuckoo: Joyce’s ‘Features of Infancy’” in Approaches to James Joyce’s Portrait: Ten Essays (1976) that Sheldon Brivic supported by synthesizing Freudian and Jungian analyses of Stephen’s growth in Joyce Between Freud and Jung (1980).