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SUSAN ROWLAND
1. All references are, by volume and paragraph number, to the edition of The Collected Works of C.G.
Jung (CW), edited by Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, translated
by R.F.C. Hull (1953-91) (London: Routledge & Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press).
2. Basarab Nicolescu, “Transdisciplinarity — Past, Present and Future.” Available at http://cetrans.
com.br/textos/transdisciplinarity-past-present-and-future.pdf. Accessed October 2016.
402 SUSAN ROWLAND
The existence of parts of the mind not fully knowable or controllable, what
Jung called “the unconscious,” means that no one rational system can claim to
subordinate all knowledge to its paradigm. We cannot know how much we are
missing or misconceiving by applying only a part of ourselves to understanding
the world and human beings. Moreover, the way we approach knowing has
ecological implications.
The moment one forms an idea of a thing […]. One has taken posses-
sion of it, and it has become an inalienable piece of property, like a
slain creature of the wild that can no longer run away. (Jung, CW8:
para. 356).
There is no standpoint outside the psyche from which to view it with scien-
tific detachment. If there is a nature of the psyche, it is one in which we are
always caught up. Our conscious faculties do not encompass all that is real
nor all that we are. Hence there is no epistemological boundary between
the unknown human and the nonhuman. Situating the Anthropocene as a
knowable and measurable intervention into nature is a privileging of part of
human beings; it is a theory based on cutting out what is wild and unmap-
pable in ourselves.
Jung’s metaphor of the slain creature says more than that psychologists stalk
the psyche from within. Like all metaphors it is a comparison that problema-
tizes as well as likens. Here the various parts of the metaphor are the “idea of
a thing,” “inalienable piece of property,” and “slain creature of the wild.” The
metaphor spans the meaning making about psyche (idea), culture (property)
and nature (creature). To seize upon a definitive idea about the psyche is to
grasp it proprietarily. Such a greedy manoeuvre is equivalent to killing a wild
animal that has no means of escape.
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 403
What is striking about this metaphor is the link it makes between control of
meaning and despoliation of the natural world. In this, it represents an insight
that is more than ecological; it is ecocritical, in the sense of the body of criti-
cism and theory that addresses how literature carves up the world into “natural”
and “cultural” categories. To raid the psyche in the form of claiming an idea as
fully known, to claim ownership of a psychic idea, does two things. It slaughters
indigenous creatures then insists that the dead creature represents some psychic
truth. To imagine that one knows something absolutely about psychic nature
is to stake one’s claim to a dead land.
For Jung something extraordinary happens to writing and images that evokes
the deep unconscious. Such cultural signs — Jung calls them symbols3 — are
so imbued with psychic energy that they burn through the systems of commu-
nication we believe keep human language separate from nature. Rather, the
Jungian symbol gestures towards ecocritical and scientific theories that nature
speaks to us through the body and the imagination. This paper will show how
Jung’s work can aid a revisioning of human creativity as deeply embedded
within non-human reality.
Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism is a branch of literary studies that puts a critical focus on the rela-
tionship between culture and nature in a textual context. It contains a number
of controversies and debates. For some ecocritics these include the rejection
of the term “nature” itself as too ideologically saturated. I take the contrary
view in suggesting that infusing the political drive of the word “nature” is a
mythical substrate that embodies an “otherness” to culture worth retaining and
excavating.
Moreover, ecocriticism struggles with the question of what is “natural” in
products of the imagination. Could all examples of artistic media exhibit a
connection to the environment? In such a framework, a red plastic sculpture
in a windowless gallery could be read symptomatically for its overt disguise
of ultimately planet-extracted materials that we call “raw”. By this attitude, all
3. For symbols are images that point to something not yet fully known, or not knowable in any
other way (Jung 1921, CW6: para. 819). Jung called symbols “living” when they manifest some-
thing not accessible to consciousness except by means of this pregnant expression (CW6: 816).
Symbols are also remarkably pervasive. “Since every scientific theory contains an hypothesis,
and is therefore an anticipatory description of something still essentially unknown, it is a symbol.
Furthermore every psychological expression is a symbol if we assume that it states or signifies
something more and other than itself which eludes our present knowledge.” (ibid.: 817).
404 SUSAN ROWLAND
literature throughout history has some sort of link, even if it strenuously denies
it, to non-human nature.
An important counter to the possible all-pervasiveness of ecocriticism is to
stress its critical focus. Historically, the emergence of radical and theoretical
writing about nature and literature owes much to the publication of The Ecocriti-
cism Reader edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm in 1996.4 This
work marks a major development in the rise of ecocriticism within literary
and cultural studies.
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 conclude 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.5
4. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Ecology (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1996).
5. Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, xix.
6. William Rueckert, ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’ [1978], in Glotfelty
and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, 108.
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 405
In fact, both Glotfelty and Rueckert are making the important assumption
that language is corporeal, of the body. It is important because much of literary
theory argues that language is a system that is ultimately self-referential: it is
not connected to anything outside itself.7 Although some literature claims to
represent “the world”, or “nature”, such claims are a fallacy to those assuming
that language is exclusively culture.
What such critics fail to consider are ideas of language rooted in the body.
Implied in such a figuring of language are notions of signifying as not an exclu-
sively human property. After all animals call to each other, whales make music
so why do we not credit them with language? Here Jung’s ethical vision of the
slain creature again has something to offer. What if the creature talked back?
What exactly can Jungian psychology do for ecocriticism?
7. Postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory has tended to adopt the assumption of the non-
signifying “other” while dismantling its claim to epistemological authority. My work argues that
poststructuralism needs to be seen in the mythical context of a return to animism consequent upon
the rise of evolutionary theories based on an emergent Earth (evolution as a theory being a return
to ancient myth of a divine planet where matter and spirit co-exist together). See The Ecocritical
Psyche: Literature, Complexity Evolution and Jung (New York & London: Routledge, 2012).
406 SUSAN ROWLAND
aside by the implications of Jung’s most important principle, the creativity and
unknowability of the unconscious. Jung thought that the unconscious actively
tried to engage the ego in a lifelong relationship that he called individuation. The
unconscious typically engages the ego via compensation of ego biases. There-
fore it enlists the passions of the “I”, by compensating for its bodily gender.
The “anima” is the term Jung gave to a man’s unconscious femininity; the
“animus” to the unconscious masculinity of a woman. One falls in love with
members of the opposite sex when they incarnate aspects of one’s own inner
“other”. Although Jung assumed heterosexuality, what is crucial to individua-
tion is complementarity. So that there is no intrinsic reason why a woman might
not possess an anima and/or find “otherness” in other women or vice versa.
Complementarity, or compensation, also has a darker side. Evocatively, Jung
gifts humanity with a “shadow”. This unconscious archetypal figure is formed
through what we repress, what we do not want to be. Such discarded material
meets the innate creativity of the archetypal unconscious and produces a dark
energy. Animas, animuses and shadows stalk our dreams. They dis-member the
completeness that the ego likes to pretend to. A dream for Jung is a concrete
picture of a psychic situation. It is not a disguise; it offers no hidden message.
Rather, as communication from the unknown powers of the unconscious, it is
to be trusted for itself. So it is not surprising that Jung suggested that literature
inspired by the archetypal unconscious has a social and collective compensa-
tory function: it acts within the culture like a dream to the individual (CW15:
para. 161).
Individuation is a process of subjectivity. It is the way we make conscious-
ness by learning to attend to the source of being in the unconscious. It also
has a goal. Jung saw the psyche as teleological, goal-oriented. The ego is
moving towards an ever greater relationship with a superior archetype he
called the self.
Ultimately, Jungian ideas portray the psyche as rooted in the body and to the
unknown nature inside us, the unconscious. In fact, the sum of his notion of
archetypes and teleology is to posit a creative nature within human beings. My
argument is that Jung’s work on the human unconscious as nature is poised to
expand possibilities for literature and ecology.
To Jung, non-human nature is connected somatically and psychically to us
through the unconscious that is also our body. We have limited rational senses
of our bodies; much is beyond our everyday intimations. Jung saw the unknown
psyche as materialized in the body as well as having immaterial properties. In
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 407
this sense, his archetypes encompass the fundamental workings of the body
and its creaturely existence on the planet and in the cosmos.
Indeed, Jung came to see a deeper unconscious connectivity between psyche
and cosmos that he named synchronicity. When dreams appear to predict events,
or the psyche intuits truths it cannot possibly know, such as sensing a catas-
trophe before it happens, or as it happens too far away to apprehend it by usual
means, these events are linked by meaning rather than causality are synchro-
nous. Such a theoretical construct gives voice to very ancient stories of human
ecology that have returned to us disguised as evolution.
For documented in books such as The Myth of the Goddess by Ann Baring
and Jules Cashford is a structuring of modern consciousness predicated on
the unequal relationship of two mythical structures.8 From the monotheistic
religions we have the channelling of dualism into a disembodied divine mascu-
line creator who forms all creation as separate from himself. Consciousness
as a consequence is based upon difference, rendered by psychoanalysis in the
generation of identity in the baby’s separation from the mother’s body.
However, a contrary structure of consciousness based on connection stems
from pre-monotheistic and animistic religions that regard nature or the planet
herself as divine. Here matter is inspirited, dualism gives way to a network
of interconnected being, or, as we might call it, an ecology that includes an
ecocritical psyche. Arguably the theory of evolution itself is a return of this
principle of the sacred, all-generative (and so divine) planet. Humans need
both types of consciousness. To exist at all, we have to separate from a primal
pre-consciousness bond to the mother. Yet to make meaning we are urged to
connect to others, including those others within us as the unconscious, to the
planet as our home and therefore to see ourselves ecocritically.
Jung’s psychoanalysis is here invaluable in tracking both the thorough
severing from the unconscious other in modernity and in offering pathways to
re-connection. What is exciting in his work is how perceptively he enacts that
spirit of reconnection in his writing that draws on the non-rational, the mythic,
poetic, and dramatic in order to re-plot modern consciousness.9 Very concretely,
Jung’s theories and the writing that germinates them is a plot in both narrative
and trickster modes. His writing re-plots our approaches to the nature we cannot
fully or rationally know, in our bodies and in the nature that sustains them.
8. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (New York
and London: Vintage, 1993).
9. See my book, Jung as a Writer (New York & London: Routledge, 2005) for Jung enacting his
psychology in writing.
408 SUSAN ROWLAND
What unites ecocriticism and Jung therefore are three insights that challenge
the way the Anthropocene continues the disastrous tradition of nature as other.
Firstly, that the earth is ecological or simply so inter-penetrated as to make no
sense to see humans as separate from nature. There is no objective nature “out
there”; we are always within her embrace. Secondly, our language does not
describe nature; it intervenes in it. Our metaphors penetrate the very stuff of
life. Thirdly, Jungian synchronicity posits the living world as mutually commu-
nicating, with an unconscious processing.
So I am suggesting that Jung offers a plot or a framework that provides ways
into writing and nature without pre-scribing the outcomes. He does so because
his core principles entail an epistemology that has to be open to the unknown
life of the other if it is not to kill it. The Anthropocene, by contrast, belongs too
thoroughly within the monotheistic myth of consciousness based on division.
By designating the planet as fundamentally changed by human actions, it erects
yet again a dualist structure, here of humans versus planet.
The assumption of the Anthropocene matters because it ignores other under-
standings of matter, that our bodies may be forms of knowing deeply inter-
woven with the planet. Thinking of the earth animistically is to see multiple
consciousnesses of which we are only one of many varieties. Here we envision
the imagination stemming from the unconscious as a way of knowing imbued
with nature and not always divided from it.
Rather than leave the Anthropocene mired in dualism and simply propose
Jungian psychoanalysis as a possible means of also including a holistic or
network model, I want to develop an arguably related mythical paradigm
emerging in new theories of transdisciplinarity. For there are Jungian and
archetypal understandings of myth that offer an ecological rejuvenation of the
academy itself.
Transdisciplinarity
“Transdisciplinarity” has been most helpfully theorized by Basarab Nicolescu.10
He proposed a framework at the Congress of Transdisciplinarity in Brazil
in 2005, later published as “Transdisciplinarity — Past, Present and Future”
(Nicolescu 2005). Nicolescu rejects the totalizing project inherent in some
other constructions of transdisciplinarity and dismisses any possibility of a
10. See Nicolescu’s Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, trans. by Karen Claire-Voss (Albany SUNY
2002). In this article I take details from the Congress Address: “Transdisciplinarity — Past,
Present and Future” (Nicolescu 2005).
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 409
Here is education in the domain of complexity theory that positions the human
within and part of the creativity of non-human nature. Nicolescu’s Eros is Earth
Mother in knowing and synchronous in epistemology. And yet, I suggest that
even more significant to transdisciplinarity than the Earth Mother creation
myth is the fate of the god who spans energies human, natural and supernatural:
Dionysus the dismembered.
412 SUSAN ROWLAND
12. James Hillman is best known as a pioneer of a post-Jungian psychology he called “Archetypal
Psychology.” The main departure from Jung is to argue for a more fluid, protean polytheistic
psyche of goddesses and gods. See Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper &
Row, 1975).
13. James Hillman, “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings,” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture,
1972, 191-205; reprinted in Mythic Figures: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman,
Vol 6.1 (Putnam, Connecticut: Spring Publications Inc., 2007), 15-30.
14. Hillman, “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings,” in Mythic Figures, 28.
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 413
only basis for knowing. It is psyche activated by words in touch with the body,
feeling, imagination, and spirit.
Finally, we must notice that this symbol as included middle is an engine
of complexity in the sense that it is a portal between human and non-human
nature. Jungian symbols are scraps of the dismembered Dionysian body. They
materialize zoe. They are the animated sparks that embody rejuvenation of
being in literature and culture, in dreams, and intuitions. With symbols we
know as Dionysus’s human bride, Ariadne, experiencing with him the fullness
of instinctual life in more than ecocriticism, as all our learning is renewed. I end
by suggesting that the Anthropocene model be enlivened by transdisciplinary
Dionysus.
Pacifica Graduate Institute