Freud, Jung and Joyce: conscious connections

Contemporary Review, July, 1994 by Liam F. Heaney

In 1900, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. This work explores the underlying nature of dreams. It sets out Freud's theory of the unconscious and of repression. He attempts to show how mental phenomena like dreams and neuroses are a result of conflict between different mental processes. The latent content (the underlying meaning) and the manifest content (that reported by the dreamer) of dreams are outlined and discussed. For Freud the 'royal road to the unconscious' was through dreams.(3) Joyce's Finnegans Wake, (1939), is a novel with a distinctive, elaborate dream-form. Indeed, it explores the dreams and nightmares of H. C. Earwicker, the central character, offering a slowly shifting kaleidoscope of connections and associations with his apparently amorphous waking existence. The novel employs puns, word-play and Freudian slips in a multitude of languages, ancient and modern. There can be little doubt that both these novels exploit an in depth and contemporary understanding of the psychology of dreams and their connections with myth.

Jung proposed that the dreams, fairy stories and religions of different cultures and individuals had common themes. These emerge from archetypes in the 'collective unconscious'. Archetypes are thus seen as universal, symbolic representations of a particular person, object or experience. They are images and constellations of feeling which crystallise universal human experiences and which have somehow been passed on through the generations.(4) Such archetypes may express themselves as images which recur in mythologies and dreams, for example, the 'great mother', 'the wise old man' and 'the wandering hero' or they may take the form of a dynamic process, such as, a particular way of behaving in response to certain situations.(5)

Thus, to take a more immediate example from cinema screen and story, the archetypal image of good is represented by the strong and fearless Batman, while the archetypal images of innocence and evil are depicted by Vicki Vail and the Joker respectively.(6) Jung went on to argue that neurosis was treated by integrating the individual consciousness with the archetypal symbols of the collective unconscious. Jung further indicated that disunity of the personality resulted in mental illness, while mental health was characterised by order and unity.(7)

Although, Joyce vehemently denied being influenced by the ideas of Freud and Jung, referring to them derisively as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, his writings indicate that not only was he very familiar with the substance of their ideas and theories but that he could also apply them when exploring the minds of his characters. Lionel Trilling, (1951), proposed that: 'James Joyce with his interest in the numerous states of receding consciousness, with his use of words which point to more than one thing, with his pervading sense of the interrelation and interpenetration of all things, and, not least important, his treatment of familial themes, has perhaps most thoroughly and consciously exploited Freud's ideas.'(8)