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Psyche & Imagination - Online Abstract
Academic Presentations
James Barrett
Blank Misgivings and Mutual Recognition Carl Jung and Ted
Hughes’ Projects for Presence and Relationality
‘Blank misgivings’ refers to lines from Wordsworth’s
Intimations of Immortality, “Blank misgivings of
a creature moving about in worlds not realised”. ‘Mutual
recognition’ is a conception of the relational psychoanalyst
Jessica Benjamin and refers to a state of presence and aliveness
in which one is part of, not apart from, world; a state of simultaneously
relating to oneself and to others, like Jung’s idea of individuation
but with its relationality made explicit.
The two phrases might be envisioned as a collective journey and
a destination yet to be realised. The journey is of course personal
but what we think of as personal or even relational is also a disclosure
of psyche as world; thinking of Jung’s more courageous conception
of psyche to refer to the fabric of world/universe held together
by synchronistic associations of meaning, rather than psyche as
a discrete organ of the individual. This journey is the subject
of Jung’s analysis of Christianity in Answer to Job,
which Ted Hughes’ continues in his analysis in Shakespeare
and the Complete Goddess of Being. Together they present a
mythology we are collectively living as a slowly developing drama
of reactive annihilation whose potential teleology is a capacity
for juxtaposition and co-existence. These analyses of myths, both
psychological and literary, show us a potential for the animating
effect of one’s own attention as a recognised participant
in an animated universe.
What psychoanalytic studies and practice may have to offer academic
literary studies is that meaning involves engagement with the ground
of ones being in the present moment (the apparently ordinary stuff
of feelings, memories, body sensations, phantasies, presence of
dreams) and, that such presence of being is constantly and always
relational, a dance with someone else or between different aspects
of psyche. This perspective introduces to the giving or listening
to an academic paper, for instance, the question, ‘What is
to be learned from this unique occasion, with this speaker, with
this audience’? I extend the concept of relationality as employed
psychoanalytically, to literary theory and practice. I raise the
question ‘what does practice consist of in literary studies’
and suggest practice is a relationship between the reader and the
text, and theory a reflection on the process of that relationship.
An affinity of psychotherapeutic and literary approaches helps
the idea of interpretation as poetic resonance. Psychoanalysis’
debt to literature is total, psychotherapists are clinical poets.
In the consulting room I often find that the language of insight
has an apparently ordinary quality when it comes after daunting
states of non-communication. Often a hair’s breadth away from
the obvious, such insight has a power that is poetic.
James Barrett is a Jungian Psychotherapist and
is currently researching links between the work of Ted Hughes and
Carl Jung.
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