Jungian Theory: A Brief Overview, I

From the start, Jung’s work included an interest in myth, symbolism, ritual, and the numinous.[1] Jung became a student of Sigmund Freud in 1906, however, the mentoring relationship ended in 1913 because of their professional differences.[2] Jung’s central issue with Freud’s method of psychoanalysis was its exclusivity and one-sided interpretations, which, he felt, left Freudian…

Overcoming Psychological Struggle: Introduction

Murray Stein refers to Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) as an “explorer and mapmaker” of the psyche and describes Jung’s psychotherapeutic method as a “map of the soul” focused on the psychic interplay between wounding and healing.[1] Through experiences of conflict (large and small), the world wounds an individual and severs the inner connection…

3 More Objections to Jungian Literary Criticism

My previous post outline three objections against a Jungian approach to literary analysis. This post offers three more: Objection 4: Jungian literary criticism is nothing more than source hunting, or finding the external sources of a text. While “[t]he discovery of the presence of mythic elements is a beginning,” Brown states, “identification [of these mythic…

3 Objections to a Jungian Approach to Literature

My previous post presented two examples of a Jungian approach to The Master and Margarita and offers my addition to a Jungian interpretation of the novel. Gareth Williams warns that while “some of the more puzzling issues raised by the novel” may be interpreted psychologically as Bulgakov’s desire to express “this or that painful aspect…

Previous Jungian Scholarship on The Master and Margarita

Previously, I answered the question: Why did I choose Jung as the methodology for my investigation of The Master and Margarita? In short: because Jung’s view of healing from life crisis involves the psyche’s attempt to adapt the individual’s perspective through archetypes and symbols that project the problem into a visible format (i.e., through dreams,…

Why Jung?

My previous post introduced my alternative interpretation of The Master and Margarita: as part of Bulgakov’s process of psychological adaption to and recovery from persecution in the Soviet Union. This post focuses on why I chose the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung as the tool of my interpretation. Jung called the process of psychological…

An Alternative View

My previous series of post provided an overview of scholarly views of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The forthcoming series of posts will lay out my approach to Bulgakov’s novel, an alternate position that complements past scholarship. My interpretation of The Master and Margarita investigates the possible psychological and spiritual function the novel may…