The Ecstatic and the Archaic: An Analytical Psychological Inquiry

177 Pages·2018·2.1 MB·English

by  Paul Bishop

THE ECSTATIC AND THE ARCHAIC
The word ‘archaic’ derives from the Greek arkhaios, which in turn is related to
the word archē, meaning ‘principle’, ‘origin’, or ‘cause’; the notion of ecstasy, or
ekstasis, implies standing outside or beyond oneself, a self-transcendence. How
these two concepts are articulated and co-implicated constitutes the core question
underlying this edited collection, which examines both the present day and antiq-
uity in order to trace the insistent presence of the ecstatic amid the archaic.
Presented in three parts, the contributors to this diverse book take the concept
of the archaic in an entirely new direction. Part I, ‘Ecstasy and the psychological’,
covers topics including Jung, Freud, ancient psychotherapy, desire, and theatre.
Part II, ‘Ecstatic-archaic history’, considers Ludwig Klages, Orestes and Dionysus.
Finally, Part III, ‘Ancient ecstatic in other worlds’, examines Luo Guanzhong’s
Three Kingdoms and Enki at Eridu. The collection offers a distinctive contextualisa-
tion of the dimension of the archaic in relation to the ecstatic experience.
The Ecstatic and the Archaic will appeal to readers interested in the relationship
between ancient and postmodern worlds, and in how the past manifests itself in the
present. It will be of great interest to academics and students of Jungian and post-
Jungian ideas, classical religions and the history of ideas, as well as practitioners of
analytical psychology and psychoanalysis.
Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University of
Glasgow, UK. His previous publications include On the Blissful Islands, Analytical
Psychology and German Classical Aesthetics, volumes one and two, and, as editor, The
Archaic: The Past in the Present and Jung in Contexts: A Reader (all Routledge).
Leslie Gardner is Fellow at the Department of Psychosocial Studies, University
of Essex, UK, and author of Rhetorical Investigations: G.B. Vico and C.G. Jung and
co-editor of House: The Wounded Healer on Television (both Routledge). Gardner
co-founded the International Association of Jungian Studies and established the
International Journal of Jungian Studies.
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THE ECSTATIC AND
THE ARCHAIC
An Analytical Psychological Inquiry
Edited by Paul Bishop and Leslie Gardner
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2018 selection and editorial matter, Paul Bishop and Leslie
Gardner; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Paul Bishop and Leslie Gardner to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Bishop, Paul, 1967- editor. | Gardner, Leslie, 1949- editor.
Title: The ecstatic and the archaic : an analytical psychological
inquiry / [edited by] Paul Bishop and Leslie Gardner.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050157 (print) | LCCN 2017054737
(ebook) | ISBN 9780203733332 (Master e-book) | ISBN
9781138300538 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138300545
(pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis and religion. | Ecstasy. | Jungian
psychology.
Classification: LCC BF175.4.R44 (ebook) | LCC BF175.4.R44
E37 2018 (print) | DDC 150.19/54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050157
ISBN: 978-1-138-30053-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-30054-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-73333-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
CONTENTS
Contributors vii
Preface ix
Leslie Gardner
Introduction 1
Paul Bishop
PART I
Ecstasy and the psychological 17
1 The stream of desire and Jung’s concept of psychic energy 19
Raya A. Jones
2 The characters speak because they want to speak:
Jung, Dionysus, theatre, and therapy 28
Mark Saban
3 Ancient psychotherapy? Fifth-century bce Athenian
intellectuals and the cure of disturbed minds 43
Yulia Ustinova
4 Antiquity and anxiety: Freud, Jung, and the impossibility
of the archaic 56
Alan Cardew
vi Contents
PART II
Ecstatic-archaic history 77
5 I must get out (of myself) more often? Jung, Klages,
and the ecstatic-archaic 79
Paul Bishop
6 Ecstatic atoms: The question of Oresteian individuation 97
Ben Pestell
7 Monetised psyche and Dionysiac ecstasy 117
Richard Seaford
PART III
Ancient ecstatic in other worlds 127
8 History, philosophy, and myth in Luo Guanzhong’s
Three Kingdoms 129
Terence Dawson
9 Enki at Eridu: God of directed thinking 147
Catriona Miller
Index 161
CONTRIBUTORS
Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages in the School of Modern
Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow. He edited The Archaic: The
Past in the Present (2012) for Routledge, and his most recent publications include
On the Blissful Islands with Nietzsche & Jung (Routledge, 2016) and Ludwig Klages
and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit (Routledge, 2017).
Alan Cardew is a Senior Fellow at the University of Essex, a Member of the
Athens Institute for Education and Research, and a Member of the Foro di Studi
Avanzati in Rome. At Essex he was Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary
Studies in the Humanities and Director of the Enlightenment. He has written on
Heidegger, Jung, Cassirer, and Nietzsche, and his recent publications have been on
the idea of the protrepticus and the sublimity of origins.
Terence Dawson spent the larger part of his academic career in Singapore. Now
retired, he continues to pursue his interest in the relation of Jungian theory to
literature and the other arts. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal
of Jungian Studies, the co-editor with Polly Young-Eisendrath of The Cambridge
Companion to Jung (2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, 2008), and the author
of The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Ashgate, 2004), as
well as of wide-ranging articles on English and European literature.
Leslie Gardner is a Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic
Studies, University of Essex, where she obtained her Ph.D. She published Rhetorical
Investigations: G.B. Vico and C.G. Jung (Routledge, 2010); and has published chap-
ters in several volumes, most recently in Jung and the Question of Science, edited by
Raya A. Jones (Routledge, 2014) and in a forthcoming film handbook edited by
Luke Hockley. She co-edited (with Luke Hockley) House: The Wounded Healer on
Television (Routledge, 2013) and (with Fran Gray) Feminist Views from Somewhere
viii Contributors
(Routledge, 2017), and she has convened conferences on ‘(Dis)enchantment’ and
‘Ecstatic archaic thought and analytical psychology’ in London. She co-founded
the International Journal of Jungian Studies with Renos Papadopoulos.
Raya A. Jones is a Reader in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.
She was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association
for Jungian Studies (2003–2009) and chaired the IAJS Second International
Conference in 2009. She is the author of Personhood and Social Robotics (Routledge,
2016), Jung, Psychology, Postmodernity (Routledge, 2007) and The Child–School
Interface (Cassell, 1995), editor of Jung and the Question of Science (Routledge,
2014), Body, Mind and Healing after Jung (Routledge, 2010), and co-editor of
Jungian and Dialogical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Cultures and Identities
in Transitions (Routledge 2010) and Education and Imagination (Routledge,
2008). She has published numerous journal articles on Jungian and postmodern
approaches to the self.
Catriona Miller is a Senior Lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University where
she teaches television script writers and media students. She publishes in the field
of film and television studies, with a particular interest in Horror, Cult TV and
Science Fiction genres from a Jungian perspective. She is currently working on
a joint book The Heroine’s Journey: Female Individuation on Screen for Routledge.
Ben Pestell holds a Ph.D. from the University of Essex on divine contact and myth-
ical thought in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. He serves on the executive committee of
the Centre for Myth Studies at Essex. He is co-editor of Translating Myth (Legenda,
2016), and has published on Aeschylus and contemporary classical reception.
Mark Saban is a senior analyst with the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists.
He recently co-edited (with Andrew Samuels and Emilia Kiehl) Analysis and Activism:
Social and Political Contributions of Jungian Psychology (Routledge, 2016). Recent papers
include ‘Jung, Winnicott and the divided psyche’, Journal of Analytical Psychology (61(3),
June 2016; and ‘Two in one or one in two? Pushing off from Jung with Wolfgang
Giegerich’, in Journal of Analytical Psychology (60(5), November 2015).
Richard Seaford is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek at the Unversity of Exeter.
He is the author of numerous papers and books on Greek drama, Greek religion,
Greek philosophy, Greek society, and on the interrelation between them, most
notably Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
Yulia Ustinova is Associate Professor at the Department of General History,
Ben-Gurion University of Negev, Israel. Her current research is entitled ‘Mania:
Alteration of consciousness and insanity in Greek culture’, and her publications
on Greek religion and culture include The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom:
Celestial Aphrodite and the Most High God (Brill, 1999) and Caves and the Ancient
Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth (Oxford
University Press, 2009).
PREFACE
Leslie Gardner
In this volume, we look both to contemporary times, and back to the ancients, to
trace the insistent presence of the ecstatic, as it presents itself in – what is deemed
to be – an archaic frame of mind. This self-aware state of being transports the mind
and emotion out of their ordinary and sensible states. Psychologists, classicists,
philosophers, and literary theorists have focused on such ancient thought and its
bearing on contemporary analytical psychology to explore in this volume its tena-
cious and compelling hold.
Walter Benjamin associated intoxication with that ‘ecstatic component [which]
lives in every revolutionary act’, adding that this component ‘is identical with
the anarchic’.1 As Michael Löwy points out in his discussion of Benjamin’s essay
‘Surrealism’ (included in One-Way Street and Other Writings), intoxication is ‘an
expression of the magical relationship between the ancients and the cosmos’.2
Löwy proposes that Benjamin implies that ‘the experience (Erfahrung) and the
Rausch that once characterized that ritual relationship with the world disappear in
modern society.’ The notorious concept of ‘profane illumination’ is Benjamin’s
alternate phrase for the ubiquitous experience of transcendence in a mystical world
without God.3
Exploring the ecstatic state in the same geographical frame as Benjamin’s were
such psychoanalysts as C.G. Jung, who looked to ancient constructs to try and
evoke that supra-rational and distinctly human mode. They found the ecstatic-
archaic mind still in evidence in the modern world, despite wondering at its
diminished power. And as Richard Seaford has also reminded us, there is a vital
connection between how the ecstatic state played out in ancient classical times and
in psychological contemporary applications.
The papers given at the original colloquium in London at the Freud Museum
have been expanded and substantially revised for publication. While building
on an earlier volume edited by Paul Bishop (The Archaic: The Past in the Present,