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CHAPTER 6

JUNG AND LITERARY STUDIES FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE, CLIMATE CHANGE AND
ECOCRITICISM

Author: Susan Rowland

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

regarded as evolutionary complex adaptive systems. Taking complexity into Jungian

transdisciplinarity as Dionysian, reveals literature, nature and psyche co-evolving in a

way that fosters multiple connected realities: a unus mundus of oneness and multiplicity

of being. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare and Cosmography by Joel

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

in alchemy proves to be psychological ecology. Post-Jungians, Helene Shulman in Living

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,

The Ecocritical Psyche by Susan Rowland explores Jung’s ecocriticism.

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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

Jungian ecocriticism effective for a post-carbon age.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the

universe. (John Muir 1911: 248)

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

literary works as individual wholes), to looking at phenomena as primarily organized, to be

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
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boundaries found in Structuralism and Deconstruction, as well as literature organized in genres

(see chapters 4 and 5).

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

cements the human/nature binary as domination as well as an epistemological approach.

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

meanings, she demonstrates; it represents a structuring fundamental to classical scientific

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

nature are those that organize and sustain.

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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’

as mythically, theologically and historically founded. A systems perspective on nature was

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
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separating are radically dependent upon each other. We cannot connect without first being

separated, and vice versa.

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.

Jung, Literary Studies and Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism
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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

(Glotfelty & Fromm, 1996: xviii).

Ecocriticism expands the notion of “the world” to include the entire ecosphere. If we

agree with Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology, “Everything is connected to

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

in which energy, matter, and ideas, interact. (Glotfelty 1996: xix)

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

dividing oneself from it.

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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

despoliation of places or the strategies of colonial exploitation of persons and nature in

Shakespeare, for example, Glotfelty’s vision of ecocriticism building a cosmic vision of

entangled systems may remind literary scholars of Dante’s Divine Comedy (c.1317). A purgatory

of environmental sin just might lead to a paradise of ecological grace.

Additionally, I would suggest that the multidisciplinary approach strongly implied in Glotfelty’s

proposal of ecocriticism is analogous to an epic in its envisioning of a complex, cultural as well

as epistemological totality. This ecocriticism is crucially proto-transdisciplinary, as I will show

later in this chapter. First of all, it is worth looking closely at potential Jungian contributions.

Jung, Nature, Myth and Alchemy for Ecocriticism

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

also regards language as embodied, because meaning is co-produced by an archetypal embodied

unconscious and its self-organizing interaction with consciousness, known as individuation.

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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

being) becoming culture. One Jungian contribution to ecocriticism is a psychological undoing of

the binary nature/culture over language.

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-

makes us as part of nature.

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

Genesis, for example, as de-legitimating non-human nature, making it merely an object to be

used and used up. Myth in general is not always, or simply, the promotion of an ecological

vision.
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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

that must be creatively wooed, rather than repressed.

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
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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,

primarily in writing, as he studied Renaissance publications. He came to see alchemy as a source

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
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of ecocritical transformation. Now it is worth looking at what ecocriticism is encouraging literary

studies to address: the critical (in all senses) issue of climate change.

Jung, Literary Studies and 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

to what is known as Environmental Humanities, in which multidisciplinary research and teaching

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

material, living in or with nature?

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

facing the reality of nature (Slovic 2017: 162).

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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

stone. (Thoreau 1841: 45)

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

change on the scale of whole societies.

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”

(Campbell 2017: 21).

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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

described in this book via transdisciplinarity?

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.
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Ways of combatting climate change at intergovernmental levels are overwhelmingly

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

may learn to listen.

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
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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.

Kearnes’s philosophical critique of the technoscience dominance of the climate change

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

characterization of an Anthropocene subjectivity includes animation by multiple ways of making

meaning. This call is an implicit invoking of transdisciplinarity (ibid.: 42).

In fact, the ubiquity of the Anthropocene image disguises the way in which it can be recast to

shape different epistemological and disciplinary approaches to climate crisis. To Kearnes a

decentered Anthropocene is postcolonial, capable of acknowledging different constructions of

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

Environmental Humanities might be re-characterized as cultivating dispositions toward

what Chakrabarty portrays as the entanglement of the species history of humanity and the

earthly histories of the world. (Kearnes 2017: 42)

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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

a powerful call for Anthropocene to be re-made in a non-hierarchical mode, implicitly

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

nonhuman nature as one continuum.

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

to worship Dionysus, die by the lack of Dionysian knowing.

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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 –

in the sense of reconstructing, a new consciousness of being part of the ecosphere.

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

conscious of itself as a composite of differences… The distribution of Dionysus through

matter may be compared with the distribution of consciousness through members, organs,

and zones. (Hillman 2007: 28)

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

consciousness that would be manifested by academic disciplines treated as parts. Academic

disciplines would remain conscious of themselves as parts so they can entangle and collaborate

without being commanded into one rationalized hegemony.

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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

systems approach to disciplines and climate change.

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)
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Complexity Evolution is not the Anthropocene

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

planet as it is in the time needed to reach its present condition.

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).

The conditions for complex systems arise spontaneously in the natural

world anywhere that interconnected networks of multiple agents act in

parallel… These networks… have the capacity to reproduce themselves and

adapt to changing conditions through feed forward models and feedback.

They are able to make use of energy sources in their environment to sustain
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themselves as well as grow and develop, so they do not move toward a state

of entropy. Many natural phenomena can be modelled as complex

systems… In complex systems, nothing is fixed, but all the agents are

reaching to each other’s actions in a constantly changing landscape. (ibid.:

110)

Complexity is not confined to nature, as opposed to culture. Rather, it frustrates the

subject/object paradigm in being equally applicable to human phenomena such as politics,

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
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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

intelligence in nature that has been evolving with/in us for millennia.

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

systems, including in consciousness. CAS also return us to Jung.

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Complexity Evolution, Jung and Literature

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

resembles a collective adaptive system of archetypes. Human embodiment thereby co-evolves

consciousness with historical CAS (Shulman 1997; Cambray 2012). In effect, Jungian

individuation where archetypal energy is creatively transformed with culture by producing

archetypal images strongly resembles accounts of co-evolving complex adaptive systems. Also,

Jung’s synchronicity as meaningful coincidence adds an additional principle to mechanical

causality. It maps very effectively onto interweaving, complexity producing, spontaneous and

creative connections.

Jung’s archetypal unconscious operates as a CAS to produce and support levels of

consciousness. It provokes individuation, which is a dissolving and remaking of consciousness

every day, as in dreams. Individuation is an evolution of consciousness as an act of integration

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

chapter 3 in relation to academic disciplines. Complexity evolution also is a form of Dionysian

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
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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

human responsibility for its writing (Bronte 1847).

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,

and in every poem we read or write.

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

collectively; understanding of complex adaptive systems moulding planet and consciousness is

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.
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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

systems sustaining the planet.

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

psychology, and how we respond to climate change through them.

Jung, Literature and Transdisciplinarity for Climate Change

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
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binary subject/object logic by demonstrating the necessity of the between state. In this way the

psyche and the literary mutually in-form each other.

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

disciplinary big bang! (Nicolescu 2014: 99)

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

structures of reality in their different levels.

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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

understanding of unus mundus described by cosmodernity. Reality is simultaneously a

single and a multiple One. (Nicolescu 2014: 209)

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.
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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

of the subject/object paradigm.

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

that connects everything.

Symbols as Jung, Literature, Complexity Theory, Transdisciplinarity and Nature

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.
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If it were possible to personify the unconscious, we might think of it as a

collective human being... a human experience of one or two million years,

practically immortal. (Jung 1934, CW8: para. 673).

The collective unconscious, moreover, seems to be not a person, but something

like an unceasing stream or perhaps an ocean of images... (ibid.: para. 674).

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

incredibly aged being versus the multitudinous ocean of multiple images.

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

observer to have a symbolic attitude (Jung 1921, CW6: 818).

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
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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

individuation. But it is also more.

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?
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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

evolution and transdisciplinary wholeness in multiplicity; multiplicity in wholeness. Symbols in

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.

We participate in climate change as a dangerous episode in complexity evolution that might

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.
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Key Definitions for Eco-Cosmodernity

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,

but rather to what this book aims to accomplish.

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

cosmodernity, synchronicity is a recognition of quantum spontaneity and the intercommunication

of complex adaptive systems. It proposes existence on multiple levels of reality.

Image

A Jungian image is a manifestation of psyche, where the archetype seeks realization in

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,

psyche and texts.

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Symbol

A symbol to Jung is a particular type of image, usually in words, that connects ego to

unconscious in standing for an otherwise unrepresentable meaning. Symbols in literature are

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

transdisciplinarity, which sees symbols as constructing a permeable membrane of knowing.

Symbols reveal the plastic nature of reality. In the inter-related disciplines symbols make reality

visible in a system always open to new knowing.

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.

Symbols are vital to knowing and being, its vitality.

In terms of this Jungian ecocriticism, symbols are the portals to nature. Yes, symbols in literature

are nature and human nature communicating.

Literature

In Jungian ecocriticism, enhanced by transdisciplinarity, literature is a hugely important complex

adaptive system. This means, for example, that it has the autonomy and properties of a self
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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

knowing and being in cosmodernity.

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.

Complex Adaptive Systems

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
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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

completely and absolutely what we are harmfully doing to the planet.

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

CAS of human flourishing. Fortunately, Dionysus is not mere chaos. As a god, he is an

autonomous eternal cosmic energy that can be creative as well as destructive.

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Seen positively, Dionysus is way of relating to the oneness and manyness we find in

cosmodernity’s inter-animating complexity. Jungian psychology provides skills to know

Dionysus as inside and outside ourselves. Crucially, in literature we have an accessible

storehouse of ancient and modern wisdom about Dionysian processes. It is time to look further at

how this might work in Literary Criticism.

A Summary in Three Sentences

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

and writing via symbols.

2) The Jungian psyche, as well as literature as a whole, and in genres, can all be regarded as

evolutionary complex adaptive systems.

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

connected realities: a unus mundus of oneness and multiplicity of being.

Literary Case Studies

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (1595)

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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

reciprocates her affection.

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

honour of the royal wedding. Privacy, they do not find.

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
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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

teleological, so that visionary literature can be prophetic or future oriented, is manifested in

Shakespeare.

Titania: Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea

Contagious fogs, which falling in the land

Have every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents.

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,

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The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.

The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,

And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.

The nine-men’s-morris is filled up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable.

The human mortals want their winter here.

(Act 2, sc1, L. 81-101.)

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.
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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

and Titania is wooing a donkey.

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)

You, ladies, you whose gentle hearts do fear

The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,

May now perchance both quake and tremble here,

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When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.

Then know that I, as Snug the joiner, am

A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam.

For if I should as lion come in strife

Into this place, ’twere pity on my life. (Act V. Sc. 1, L. 216-23)

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

been presented on bare boards.

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,

imaginative knowing is in the language of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when understood as a

weaving of symbols, open to the never fully rationally knowable cosmos?

Case History 2
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Cosmography. Digital Literary Art by Joel Weishaus 2015-2019 Internet.

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

twenty-fist century, not just transmit the existing print-based tradition?

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

back into distant, even unknowable states of consciousness.

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Begun in mid-2015, Cosmography was planned in ten installments, to end in 2019. This work

combines Weishaus’s pioneering mode of art-and-as-scholarship to bring into being eco-

cosmological and transdisciplinary literature. Here is a substantial quotation from the

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

understanding the universe, science, or ourselves."(1)

Cosmography inscribes itself into a medium "too narrowly focused on the specific

workings of novel technologies rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in

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,

transdisciplinary sphere. (6)

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,

accomplishments, insights, passions, and "diseases."(7) On ground level, most of

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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- R.N. Anshen, Introduction to B. Lovell, Emerging Cosmology. New York, 1981.

2- A. Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet." http://jstchillin.org/artie/vierkant.html (Accessed

1/1/2018)

3- R. Schenk,The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance. Lewisburg PA, 1992.

4- E. Levinas. Quoted in, M-A Ouaknin, The Burnt Book. Princeton NJ, 1995.

5- A. Faive, Access to Western Esotericism. Albany NY, 1994.

6- See, B. Nicolescu, Editor, Transdisciplinarity–Theory and Practice. Cresskill NJ, 2008.

7- C.G. Jung, "Commentary on 'The Secret of the Golden Flower." Collected Works Vol. 13. London, 1967.

8- W.F. Otto, The Homeric Gods. Boston, 1964.

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
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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

horses and riders are likely to be actual events.

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
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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.

Mars' temper erupts!!

screaming adjectives, vomiting verbs, and the severed

limbs of nouns who answered trumped up calls to plug

the boundless tides of pandemonium.

A few hours of rain and signs of coyote, deer, bear and man

are fixed in the mud, in the Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age,

Enlightenment, Anthropocene, as every species wallows in

its own myth of reality.

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So, when storms should be thundering down, fields are almost

dry. Digging deeper, the technological hurdles of sending humans

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

ran over pebbles, detoured around obstinate boulders, puddled

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

complex adaptive system.

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

own reflection.” F.Turner, Tempest, Flute, & Oz. New York,1991.

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-

damage-from-cosmic-rays-say-scientists (Accessed 8/5/2015)

the old gods: J. Weiners. From, "Billie."

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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

Jung’s own literature for its eco-cosmological properties.

Further Reading in Jung and Jungians

Answer to Job by C. G. Jung (1952b)

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
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against this unjust and unprovoked malevolence. God later sends his own virtuous son, Jesus, to

die, but this sacrifice is not sufficient repentance for C. G. Jung.

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.

(Jung 1952b, CW11: para. 745)

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).
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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

cannot be ignored because it is still psychically potent in the modern condition.

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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

nature. It certainly deconstructs binaries of culture/nature in showing human nature as

inextricable from an-other in the divine.

Answer to Job is also Dionysian in demonstrating the dismembering and re-membering forces at

work in human/divine, or conscious and unconscious relations. Humans have to be decentered if

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,
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or the many in the one and the one in the many---and a transdisciplinary, Dionysian

consciousness may taste endless instinctual life.

‘The Philosophical Tree’ by C. G. Jung, 1954c, CW13.

More overtly ecological in subject, ‘The Philosophical Tree’, originally written for a botanist’s

festschrift, combines material on Jung’s psychotherapy with alchemy, in a characteristic

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,

transformation and the life process, and much more.

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

intrinsic difference (ibid.: para. 385).

.
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Jung’s amplification of the symbol infused with his understanding of psychological reality is

profoundly literary. It is a form of combining psychology and literature by insisting upon

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

power used most often for complexity.

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)
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Here is a lucid account of Jung in complexity, showing that the human unconscious links into

multiple CAS of nature in a way described from the perspective of disciplines as

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

by another register embracing of Jung’s mythopoetic symbols that he found in alchemy.

Self-organization seems to require both a principle of transformation and a principle of

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

luminosities are always in the process of reorganization and reintegration on a higher

level. (Ibid: 140-1)

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
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organizing systems called pedomorphs or gerontomorphs that exhibit contrasting characteristics

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

climate change debates.

Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma

by Jerome Bernstein (2005)

Indebted to Shulman’s book, this work by another Jungian analyst is an exciting development of

evolutionary complexity in terms of Ecopsychology and multicultural perspectives upon the

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.
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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.
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By blending Jungian psychology, complexity evolution, Navajo medicine stories, and an

enlightening chapter on Environmental Illness Complex, Living in the Borderland is an

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

necessary social-psychic revolution? Ought we to be re-evaluating the Western literary heritage

as a repository of healing stories?

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

disciplinary inheritance founded so closely of the subject/object division of classical science,

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.
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Further Reading in Jungian Literary Criticism

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

oneness. Without looking at complexity, complex adaptive systems or transdisciplinarity, Fike

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

writings that begin cosmological envisioning.

It is precisely because Jung imbricates science and metaphysics that he provides

appropriate benchmarks for the present study, which seeks to expand the subject matter

and methodology of literary criticism. Jungian psychological criticism appropriately

provides a foundation, starting point, touchstone, and bridge between science and

metaphysics. In short, my goal is to complement and upgrade that traditional

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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

Literary Criticism: The Essential Guide, it is nevertheless a wonderful demonstration of

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

recent rejection of marginalization, which includes other modes of knowing. Marginalization of

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-

unites science with its metaphysical origins.

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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

Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies Vol. 6, No. 5, 2010

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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

decay, fertility, death, and rebirth as renewal.

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

cosmos. (West 2010: 5)

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
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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.

Epilogue: Jung for Literary Studies in the Twenty-first Century

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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

traced to our over-emphasis on disciplinary splitting and vice versa.

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
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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.

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