Legendary and unreachable: Jung's refiguration of Philemon

• Grant number: 23/05981-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: September 24, 2023
• End date: March 21, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Isabella Tardin Cardoso
• Grantee: Fabiana Lopes da Silveira
• Supervisor: Sonu Shamdasani
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University College London (UCL), England
• Associated to the scholarship: 22/04222-7 - Jung, the Philologist: the role of Classical Philology in the foundations of Analytical Psychology, BP.PD

Abstract

Shamdasani (2005) argues that depth psychology has been the victim of a myth, according to which it would have been a "solitary creation" of S. Freud and C. G. Jung. This has contributed to the common misconception that Jung would have derived most of his psychology from Freud. Another common misjudgement about Jung is disregarding him as a mere occultist whose work lacks any sort of scientific rigor. This proposal intends to challenge such notions by investigating an underexplored aspect in Jung's works, namely the role played by Jung's wide-ranging receptions of Greco-Roman literature in the articulation of his ideas. Although the ubiquitous presence of Greco-Roman material in Jung's intellectual output is widely acknowledged, it has received little critical attention; this is due in part to the aforementioned misrepresentations of his work. Yet a closer look into Jung's writings reveals not only the great breadth of his repertoire of ancient sources, but also his close familiarity with the work of a series of professional philologists of his time (such as Kerényi, with whom Jung published two works about archetypes of the collective unconscious). In light of the evidence that Jung's relationship with antiquity is not as amateurish as often assumed, I shall examine Jung's reception of the Philemon myth in the Red Book. This investigation will examine how Jung's Philemon: 1. refigures Philemon in relation to Ovid's Metamorphoses (VIII.611-724) and Goethe's Faust; 2. may relate to ancient Hermetic and Gnostic writings which were receiving considerable scholarly attention at the time; 3. informs Jung's theory of the archetypes, in particular the archetype of the old wise man. This proposal is aligned with recent scholarship that challenges misconceptions regarding Jung's work by setting it in its wider intellectual context (e.g. Shamdasani, 2012; Bishop 2008 & 2009; Monahan, 2009). (AU)