Content area
Full Text
Jungian Patterns in Ulysses Jean Kimball. Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce's "Ulysses". Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. xiv + 202 pp. $39.95
FOR MORE than two decades, Jean Kimball has been a significant figure in Joyce circles, delivering papers at national and international symposia and publishing a series of well-regarded essays on Joyce's relationship to Freud, Jung, Rank, and psychological theory in general. In this study of Ulysses she focuses on ways in which Jung's concept of the process of individuation might explain aspects of the novel that resist analysis on the level of realistic plot: the fact, for example, that Bloom seems to "remember" thoughts that Stephen had earlier in the day. Other scholars have seen in Ulysses the operation of Jungian synchronicity, but Kimball rather imaginatively takes the concept a step further, applying it to parallel episodes, both in 1909, in which Jung and Joyce were forced to confront aspects of themselves that shocked them and seemed at odds with their conscious understanding of themselves. In Joyce's case the episode was his fit of jealousy when Vincent Cosgrave falsely claimed to have had an affair with Nora five years earlier; in Jung's case it was his stunned recognition that his treatment of his patient Sabina Spielrein had been tainted by his sexual desire for her. In both cases the men discovered in themselves the work of unconscious, repressed forces with which they needed to come to terms. Jung called the repressed element the Shadow, a concept that became central to his psychological theory; Joyce, in Kimball's view, personified the belatedly recognized unconscious forces in himself as Leopold Bloom.
As outlined early in the book (16), the four main characters of Ulysses represent aspects of the Jungian model of mind: Stephen the Ego, Mulligan the Persona, Bloom the Shadow, and Molly the Anima. Basically, the Persona is the part of itself that the Ego (conscious mind) recognizes and accepts: in this case, a posture of detached irony. Conversely, the Shadow is what the Ego refuses to acknowledge: the powerful undercurrent of unconscious urges. For men, the Ego is masculine, rational, and it must accept the irrationality of the Shadow before it can enter into a healthy relationship to its feminine...