Jason Whittaker: "Creativity and the Unconscious: Jung, Frye, and William Blake" (Zoom speaker presentation; in-house)

Creativity and the Unconscious: "Jung, Frye, and William Blake"

William Blake, one of the first figures in western art and literature to have invented his own mythology, has long been appreciated by Jungian commentators and psychotherapists as an artist working in the tradition of archetypes. Jung's own relationship to the work of Blake was more complex: clearly fascinated with the earlier Romantic, Jung cited his poetry and art several times in his studies but also wrote in a letter to Piloo Nanavutty that while Blake was tantalising, his works were "an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes."

At almost the same time that Jung was writing to Nanavutty, the Canadian scholar Northrop Frye published his magisterial study of Blake, Fearful Symmetry, which was a revolutionary extension of his theory of archetypal criticism through the works of William Blake. For Frye, Blake's work was indeed "artistic production",…