Jung as a Writer: the path to Ecocriticism
via M. M. Bakhtin and Alchemy1

Susan Rowland

My argument is that more attention needs to be paid to the way that C. G. Jung wrote. For the style of an important thinker is not just an adornment to his core precepts. Rather it is integral to the matter of the writing. So given Jung's profound impact on psychology, the history of ideas and culture, it is important to consider the kinds of expression that convey his unique perspective. However, in the case of Jung I believe that there is something special, and hitherto neglected, in the need to examine the art of his prose.

For Jung believed and wrote as though he believed that the thinking and discriminating mind - conventionally used to produce non-fictional argument - was situated within a sea of unconscious creativity. To him this inner world of unfathomable and inexhaustible creativity is one of the most important aspects of the human mind. So it is not enough just to write about it in a rational, logical manner. Jung thought that psychology writing should aspire to the greatest authenticity by including unconscious psychic creativity within writing, not limit it to outside, to what psychology is about. Truly, Jung's works aim for a fidelity to psyche-logos, words that respond to the whole of the mind and not just its well-mapped territories. Crucially this means that the emotive, the poetic, the mythic and the sacred forms of writing that he adopts are aspects of the psyche-logos, not something other to it.

My metaphor of the mind as a landscape, and psychology as a form of mapping the unknown, is indicative of the sheer range and ambition of Jung as an experimental writer of modernity. For Jung proves to be persistently fascinated with the psyche as a form of space and time, contemporaneously with the investigations of Einstein in physics and M.M. Bakhtin in cultural theory, to name only a few.  

So when looking at the writing, we need to remember that Jung is not just describing the creativity of the psyche, his words also enact and perform it. Jung put the expressive, creative nature of the psyche first. The ability of anyone, including himself, to produce a comprehensive science of the psyche, even to describe psychic processes accurately in words - comes second to the innate property of the human mind to be mysterious. Ultimately, the psyche confounds the essentially cultural divisions of science and art, will reveal them to be culture.

The moment one forms an idea of a thing and successfully captures one of its aspects, one invariably succumbs to the illusion of having caught the whole... One has taken possession of it, and it has become an inalienable piece of property, like a slain creature of the wild that can no longer run away. It is a magical procedure such as the primitive practises upon objects and the psychologist upon the psyche... he never suspects that the very fact of grasping the object conceptually gives it a golden opportunity to display all those qualities which would never have made their appearance had it not been imprisoned in a concept. (CW8.: para. 356)

Here Jung uses a suggestively ecological simile to warn against an over-reliance on conceptual thinking. It is an illusion amounting to a 'primitive' magical procedure to believe that the psyche can ever be wholly comprehended. Moreover, such a rational process is not a neutral form of observation. Rather it intervenes, distorts and has fatal consequences for some aspect of the nature of the psyche.

Such a mode of writing cannot help being, in part, literary. This is not to allege that Jung was, or considered himself to be, the author of fiction. Rather, his psychology needs to be understood in terms of its aesthetic qualities. And these qualities, in the Jungian approach, are not a detraction from its identity as 'psychology'; they are basic to it.

Jung, Bakhtin and the dialogical Archetype

During the 1930s, two very different thinkers each developed a sense of a fundamental division in culture. The division was between a unifying force that tended to homogenise meaning, push it towards one-ness, structured in perpetual tension with a de-centralizing, dispersing energy that produced plurality and difference. The two thinkers were C.G. Jung and  Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. The latter's most important work, The Dialogic Imagination, only appeared in English in 1981, yet was written, in Russian, in the 1930s (Bakhtin, 1981: xxiv).

For Jung, the powerful division found a home in the theory of archetypes. His volume, Psychology and Alchemy, first published in English in 1953, is based on two lectures given in the 1930s. A hypothesized unifying energy, unknowable in itself, is the impetus towards similar forms of cultural expression and meaning. Yet this centralizing energy of the archetype can only be represented by the archetypal image. These images are signs of difference in that each one, although born of the archetype, takes on the colouring of its particular historical moment. In dreams, archetypal images mediate the unknown domain of sublime archetypes to an encultured subject; they are a speck of embodied time.

Dreaming an archetypal image expresses the continuum of body-psyche-culture in the constant structuring and de-structuring of the human subject, which Jung called 'individuation'. Archetypes therefore, are at one pole sublime creative energies, at the other, the lived moment contaminated by personal, cultural and historical context. Archetypal images are part of the dialogue of social exchange. The image pole of the archetype is the dimension of plurality and difference as the centralizing sublime energy is embodied via the multiple discourses of any particular society.

So archetypal images are not restricted to dreams. In the Jungian scheme all cultural activity, by extension all human activity, has an innate archetypal core that can only ever be manifest in the plurality of archetypal expressions. If dream archetypal images are part of the dialogue between known and unknown parts of the mind, then more public images in art extend the dialogue to the social. Ultimately all cultural products and myths take part in exchanges between conscious and unconscious - all express the dichotomy inherent in the production of meaning, between a drive to sameness that is simultaneously only realizable in difference. In a sense, archetypal theory enacts the realization that  meaning is an attribute of the other; such meaning structures subjectivity as the individual's participation in social representation.

Bakhtin gave the term, 'the dialogical imagination' to the formation of culture through the creative entwining of centralizing and decentralizing forces in language as socially active. I suggest that Bakhtin's dialogics clarifies tensions within Jung's writing between his dialectical ideal of opposites, frequently referred to, and the plural voices clamouring in his writing.

Raya A. Jones has posited a connection between Bakhtin's dialogical approach and Jung's archetypal theory (Jones, 2002, 2003). I want to take this link in a different direction by considering Jung through texts, (Bakhtin is a critic of literary texts) in the light of dialogical thinking, in order to take Jung into ecocritical arguments about culture and nature.

I am not suggesting here that Bakhtin and Jung had hit on exactly the same ideas. Jung deals in a dialogic psyche while Bakhtin locates most of his dialogics in language. This enables Bakhtin to elaborate a far more materialist conception of social interaction. Jung regards materialism as an unnecessary metaphysical choice, while Bakhtin's paradigm of language and social representation is of a constant battle. For him centralizing energies that aim to standardise meaning and linguistic form are at war with centrifugal forces of dispersion and difference as language is embodied in actual social situations.   

The key Baktinian terms for his scheme are the centripetal forces of language that are inevitably manifest in 'centrifugal' expressions, and the resulting complexity and diversity, which he called 'heteroglossia'. Essentially Bakhtin sees language and culture as layers of heteroglossia in which centrifugal social diversity is limited by centripetal drives. If centripetal forces could exist in pure form in culture, then they would constitute a 'unitary language', a cultural structure of absolute meaning that is identical with power.

Fortunately, unitary language can never be purely present. Dialects and cultures of the powerful come closest to embodying unitary language, yet its purity is an impossible ideal in the face of concrete social experience. Power dreams of unitary language, but its reality is always contaminated by heteroglossia to a lesser or greater degree.

A unitary language is not something given... but is always in essence posited... and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of the heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystallizing into a real, although still relative, unity - the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary language, 'correct language'. (Bakhtin, 1981: 270)

So centralizing forces in language and culture are necessary lest social polarisation causes the heteroglossia (linguistic and cultural diversity) to fragment into mutual incomprehension. The drives that seek a unitary language limit heteroglossia into intelligibility, while the drive producing heteroglossia fragment the awe-ful purity of power. Bakhtin regards any language or culture as irretrievably diverse: diversity in language is the articulation of diversity in society through class, race, gender, occupation etc., and diversity within the individual through multiple social roles and the unconscious. What makes communication or dialogue possible within all this fragmentation is what must somehow exist, a unifying centralizing energy, always operating in tension - dialogically - with the realities of social and psychic dispersal. Any form of social expression, any utterance, is a dialogue between the absolute specificity of that moment in that person, place, society etc., and the forces of centralisation that limit singularity. This is the dialogic imagination.

It is possible to say something very similar about archetypal theory. The polarity in the archetype between its irrepresentable essence and the particularity of its every representation in archetypal images, is equally a condition for language and culture to be regarded as dialogic. Of course, there is an apparent difference between Jung and Bakhtin in that the latter assimilates diversity in representation to the mechanics of social power. The ideal of a unifying language, is, to him, an engine of social hierarchy. Elites aim for a monopoly of meaning production. The most banal example of an unitary language is the notion of a 'standard' form in everyday use by government, to which all regional dialects, idiolects and individual idiosyncrasies must defer in order to speak to power.  

Bakhtin himself gave an intriguing list of social languages that aspired to centripetal functions. Religion, art and philosophy are prime sources of the mobilising of power via the centralisation of meaning. Examples included Aristotle's poetics, and the medieval Church's one language of truth (Bakhtin, 1981: 271). In the realm of literature, Bakhtin finds that poetry is particularly redolent of centripetal drives. Hence the explicit part played by lyric and epic verse in sustaining aristocratic values. By contrast, the novel is the true child of centrifugal pluralism. It is against the nature of the novel to be confined to one form of social language; it therefore embraces the dialogic imagination rather than is polluted by it. Where heteroglossia is most evident, there is to be found the greatest challenge to the centralizing tendencies of power. To Bakhtin, the novel’s articulation of diversity was cause for celebration (Bakhtin, 1981: 259-422).

For Jung, on the other hand, it is easy to see that he was more on the side of the politically conservative centripetal pole of the dialogical archetype. Certainly he produces his own attempt at unitary language (that impossible ideal) in the concepts and practices of analytical psychology. Also, he emphasises the centralizing tendency in individuation as a positive healing process. This emphasis is replicated in cultural terms in a frequently expressed desire for renewal in religious symbolism that could culturally re-invigorate the centripetal dynamics of the archetypal imagination. In gender terms, this means that he tends to downplay his recognition of the need for greater feminine symbolisation in the cause of shoring up masculine cultural forms.

However, what is most basic to Jung's position, as opposed to its conservative social colouring, is his sense of the psyche's dimension of the unknown, and its crucial role in all knowledge making. This is what I am calling here, the dialogical aspect of the psyche. For both Bakhtin and Jung, pure unitary language/archetype is the impossible, irrepresentable, engine of representation. The only material existence it can have is a mediation of its sublime energies as it mediates difference.

Jung's overt desire for centralizing is a way of underlying the dialogical nature of the archetype because it is explicitly a centre of un-knowing to which the ego becomes subordinate. Consequently the centre can never be wholly manifest: it can only be posited by images dialogically engaged its un-image-able being. His treatment of alchemy is a fascinating instance of his belief in a dialogical psyche finding expression in a dialogical notion of psychological doctrine. For what is at stake is both Jung's dialogical structuring of archetypes and the founding of his psychology with its centripetal claims to be a 'unitary language'.

Jung, Alchemy and Ecocriticism

Jung's writing about alchemy is writing about texts. Although he alludes to its mythological origins in ancient Egypt, he never strays far from analysing an amazing variety of works emerging from Europe in the early modern era. In focussing upon a specific period in the complex history of alchemy, Jung is stressing certain key features as innate to his understanding of the art.

For Jung, alchemists worked on matter and mind simultaneously: they had no sense of division between the two activities. The popular view that they were straightforwardly aiming to convert lead into gold purely for monetary gain was never a sufficient explanation for him. Rather alchemists worked to produce a base substance known as the prima materia, and operated upon it to achieve a higher 'golden' form known by such names as 'spirit', 'elixir of life', 'philosopher's stone'. There was general agreement that the transformation would proceed by stages. Originally four stages are mentioned: blackening, whitening, yellowing, reddening (Jung, 1944/1953, CW12: para. 333). These are reduced to three around the fifteenth century by omitting the yellowing. Jung attaches importance to the fundamental switching between four, the number of the elements of that period, and three, with its echoes of the Christian trinity. More on the relationship with Christianity below.

Intrinsic to alchemy is a centrifugal drive into heteroglossia. Although there are common laboratory operations and general agreement on the stages, alchemy texts work by multiplying images for its powerful substances. There is an overabundance of terms for the potent initial prima materia, and for the final object of desire, the lapis or stone. Even these two items themselves are not always separable, in a crucial clue to alchemy's frustration of modernity's belief in the logic of so called 'inert' matter. It possesses a 'poetic' bias, as I shall show.

For one alchemist the prima materia was quicksilver, for others it was ore, iron, gold, lead, salt, sulphur, vinegar, water, air, fire, earth, blood, water of life, lapis, poison, spirit, cloud, sky, dew, shadow, sea, mother, moon, dragon, Venus, chaos, Microcosm. (ibid.: para. 425)

This heteroglossia is, for Jung, the best evidence of the centrifugal pole of the archetype. Alchemists, all unknowing, had projected their unconscious psyche into matter. Therefore they needed their own individual symbols for the unknown substance before them. The framing argument of Psychology and Alchemy is that these early modern texts bear are evidence of archetypal symbolism by way of alchemy's investigation of the then relatively unexplored domain of matter and the material world.

As is shown by the texts and their symbolism, the alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change. (ibid.: para. 564)

Jung is acutely aware of the historical specificity of this 'psychic' evidence. He carefully traces alchemy's transmutation into chemistry in the eighteenth century as the study of matter parted company with the excitation of the psyche (ibid.: para. 332). Alchemists regarded themselves as 'philosophers' working with texts and ideas; study was obligatory. Yet it was necessary that alchemical philosophy has a material dimension of working in a laboratory. When that link was broken modern chemistry developed and the psychic work, according to Jung, had to wait for its re-emergence in analytical psychology.

Jung's Alchemy and Analytical Psychology

Alchemists did believe that they were in a state of projection. They held that there was a divine spirit imprisoned in matter. It was their task to release or produce the spirit/lapis etc., through successive transformations of the matter of the prima materia. Through study and physical chemistry together alchemists sought to invoke a third realm between mind and matter, between philosophy and chemistry. This space, in which the prima materia and the lapis may be realised, is known as, 'the intermediate realm of subtle bodies... ' (ibid.: para. 394).

The medium of the subtle body or 'subtle reality' is the place of the Jungian symbol. As part of their work, alchemists believed in an imaginative power in the human mind that had the capacity to transform matter. In describing this potency at work through symbols, Jung allows himself to reach beyond alchemy as projection to conceive of it instead as a psychic continuum between inner self and outer world.

The imaginatio, as the alchemists understand it, is in truth a key that opens the door to the secret of the opus... The place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality which can be adequately expressed only by the symbol. The symbol is neither abstract nor concrete, neither rational nor irrational, neither real nor unreal. It is always both... (ibid.: para. 400)

Despite this sympathy with the alchemist's pre-Cartesian holism, most of Psychology and Alchemy stays firmly within the frame of projection. Indeed, the governing trope of projection serves to emphasize the intrinsic heteroglossia of alchemy. For if alchemists are projecting the unknown contents of their own psyches, it is unsurprising that they do not understand each other, since each projection/archetypal image must be uniquely nuanced for that individual (ibid.: para. 401). Moreover, there are times when alchemists do not even comprehend their own symbolism, so greatly is it saturated with the unknown within.

In this Jung's alchemists are artists rather than scientists. They do not produce a public code to be deciphered and held as common knowledge property. Alchemy is not primarily oriented towards exercising wide cultural influence as a centripetal social language. Rather, its centripetal dimension inheres in the broad agreement in three alchemical stages, the philosophical outlook, and the concrete dimension in the desire for money or transcendence. These aspects are almost obscured by centrifugal symbolic images in their texts. Alchemists make works of art, or, at least individual texts built with their own analogies (ibid.: para. 403). A centripetal set of conventions serves to license and limit centrifugal analogies producing heteroglossia as a kaleidoscope of images.

If the alchemists work by analogy, then it is this method that embodies the active transforming principle of the imagination. Jung explains that just as multiple sense impressions distil an idea, so the primal substance finally condenses an ethereal spirit: the analogy is a material cause; a process of the mind working upon matter (ibid.: para. 377). In effect, alchemists employ what Jung calls 'active imagination'. For the alchemists, the active power of the imagination transforms matter. For Jung, active imagination transforms the matter of the psyche (ibid.: para. 394).

Amplification is a particular species of analogy that Jung considered important both for himself and the alchemists. An organ of spatiality in Jung's thinking, amplification enlarges a phenomenon until it reaches intelligibility (ibid.: para. 403). It is a process of assimilation of psychic experience such as a dream into textual and cultural experience by using myth or a discourse. So amplification is an interesting link between the notion of territorial expansion and the production of meaning. But what can it do for nature?

Jung's Alchemy and Nature

Creating a psychic connection to matter is not the same as making a connection to the natural world as something to be respected in its own right. A great deal of exploitation and environmental degradation has occurred in the name of exploring the matter of the biosphere. After all Jung identifies alchemy as the begetter of natural science that treats nature as a silenced and inert object of study. Alchemy's relation to chemistry can be construed as legitimating the torture of nature to force her to give up her secrets. Boiling organic extracts in test tubes may appear to be an unpromising basis for a new ecocriticsm, if by that we mean a revolution in structuring the human relationship to nature!

And yet the story of alchemy, as Jung tells it, crucially complicates the descent of the Christian logos from transcendent God, to scientific abstraction, to cybernetic codes. In short, I am suggesting that Jung's alchemy deconstructs man's so called 'superiority' to nature from within Christian culture. In the discourse bequeathed by western Christianity, nature is silent. It is a symbolic presence only, an 'object' mediated by language and symbolic systems designated as purely human. Nature does not speak; culture speaks of and for nature.

There is an alternative position to nature as mute and it is characteristic of some pre-Christian societies and some contemporary non-western ones. To believe nature to have voices, to be capable of dialogue, is the attitude of animism. A perspective that holds all the phenomenal world to be animated, not just the biological, animism regards rocks and trees, rivers and animals as possessing articulate spirits. Such spirits are capable of entering into communication with humans under certain conditions.

Historically, the Christian Church was implacably opposed to 'pagan' animism. Not only was God a 'sky-father', his proclaimed transcendence of nature was shared, to a large degree, by the resulting definition of 'man'. Lynn White Jr. argues that the eradication of animism allowed Christian culture to treat nature as a despised resource (White Jr, 1967/1996).

The spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man's effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled. (ibid.: 10)

By moulding 'man' in the image of a sky-father god absolutely divorced from natural processes, western Christianity created a new human subject. 'Man' requires himself to be defined against those elided inferior terms, 'woman' and 'nature'. In particular, the construction of man silenced nature, replacing the pluralism of animated nature's many voices with a mute realm for 'his' indefinite expansion.

In response to such thinking, Christopher Manes calls for the lethal fiction of 'man' to be swept away and replaced by a different conception of the human subject: 'Homo Sapiens: one species among many millions of other beautiful, terrible, fascinating - and signifying - forms' (Manes, 1992/1996: 26).

However, the overthrow of the western subject needs to be accompanied by a radical overhaul of one of 'his' most centripetal languages: science. Lynn White Jr traces the evolution of modern science as a direct descendent of Christian theology (White Jr., 1967/1996: 111-12). To early Christian culture, God may be transcendent of nature, but he also made it and so its study was legitimate. So-called 'natural theology' took two forms. In the early Church and the Orthodox East, nature was constructed as a symbolic communication from God to Man. For example, the behaviour of animals was regarded as embodied sermons. So nature was viewed aesthetically as a source of meaning and revelation.

A contrary movement began in the Latin west by the thirteenth century, which shifted natural theology into the attempt to understand the mind of God through experimental investigation of his creation. The mind of God, or the logos, became identified more and more with the knowledge of science. In a sceptical age, the identification of logos/truth with the divine is discarded. Just as modern science is a continuation of natural theology in pursuit of logos, so its creation, technology, is a consummation of the Christian practice of dominating nature as an object. Logos, as rational knowledge transcendent of nature, has mutated conceptually from the mind of God, to the knowledge of science, to the principles and codes of modern technology. Yet it is still arguably a Christian patriarchal tradition in which present day (so-called secular) attitudes to science, technology and nature, are mired (White Jr., 1967/1996: 12).

Unsurprisingly, part of the process of alienation from nature can be understood by examining textual practices. The Christian Church produced the notion of logos, of reason transcendent of matter and nature by its form of reading, explains Christopher Manes (Manes, 1992/1996: 20). In doing so, of course, it created the outlines of rational 'man' as the powerfully pervasive fiction of the human subject.

Exegesis established God as a transcendental subject speaking through natural entities, which, like words on a page, had a symbolic meaning, but no autonomous voice. It distilled the veneration of the word and reason into a discourse that we still speak today. (ibid.: 20)

In Bakhtinian terms, the textual practice of the Church was a major engine of its centripetal drive to create a unitary language of power. Of course, the Church never achieved a purely unitary language as that is not possible in the face of social complexity. Yet exegesis, the mode of reading for the one truth, for the transcendent mind of God, became a potent construction of the notion of authorship as authority that still informs reading practices today.

Nevertheless, reading for logos or singular truths, is now challenged by literary theories such as poststructuralism that regard texts as inherently plural, so containing many voices. In fact, it could be argued that poststructuralist reading is a return of animism - with the many voices of nature shifted to texts: '[a]t one time nature spoke; now texts do...' (ibid.: 19)

So poststructuralist reading can be regarded as a form of animism. It seeks dialogue with many textual voices and treats meaning as something to be negotiated rather than extractable as a whole, and inherently transcendent of textual matter. On the one hand, the return of animism is a welcome development for the ecocritic. On the other hand, its restriction to human language remains a problem. The question stubbornly lingers: how to get from texts to nature, to hear the authentic voices of the 'other' from beyond human technological culture.

Poststructuralism as a project and ecocriticism overlap. Together they share the critique of objectivity, of the assumption that thinking can stand outside the 'object' to be studied. For if the critic is always part of a larger system (such as language or 'nature'), then rather than powerful centres of meaning such as God, reason, logos, we need to think in terms of networks of interrelated systems. Consequently, the traditional human subject or 'man' is no longer the centre of meaning and value: 'man' and his logos are de-centred and meaning is dependent upon a relation with the 'other'. Bakhtin's dialogics is one model of meaning constructed mutually, although his is, in part, a description of the effect of unequal distribution of power, and only in part hints at more plural possibilities.

Unfortunately, establishing a dialogical relationship with texts is not enough. Ecocritics want to go further and reconstruct the animism of nature. It is necessary to extend dialogics into the natural world as a way of articulating difference in a relationship. Something like an optimistic version of Bakhtinian dialogics is called for in order to do away with the annihilating binary of nature versus culture. The notion of centrifugal plurality replaces the fiction of a single inert 'other', and enhances the chances of bringing the non--human into the production of meaning. Patrick D. Murphy sees Bakhtin's theory as fruitful for ecology's vision of the planetary ecosystem as a field of inter-animating relationships, including the human (Murphy, 1995/2000).

But Bakhtin did not extend dialogics to the non-human, limiting his analysis to a description of the operation of human language and power. So ecocriticism is left with an immense challenge. If the animation of nature through the dialogical imagination is to be conceivable at all, then language (in the broadest sense) has got to be re-thought as no longer exclusively human. And logos, the rational language of knowledge constructed as transcendent of its object, will need to be re-configured as one mode of knowing among a network of others, rather than lauded as the supreme form of cognition.

So returning to alchemy, although medieval alchemists claimed to be loyal members of the Church, their trade carries a counter-cultural charge. While apparently adhering to the transcendent redeemer in the ether, above material earth, they nevertheless also located a divine source in the phenomenal world (ibid.: para. 356).

 Additionally, alchemy dramatically alters the Christian construction of divine-human relations. Christianity offers the saviour God of every human soul. By contrast the alchemists saw themselves in the divine role; they are called to be redeemers of the god trapped in matter (ibid.: 420). On the one hand Jung discovers or recreates his own favourite myth of the necessary human redemption of divine unconsciousness from the matter of the psyche (see Chapters 2 and 6). On the other hand, what Jung does not overtly say here is that alchemy challenges orthodox religious hierarchies.

For alchemy deconstructs Christian transcendence. No longer is God only to be found only 'above' man, and therefore licensing a version of his creature as similarly transcendent of nature. No longer is the human, 'man', in the sense of imitating the logos (as transcendent reason) alone, thereby denying his eros (as connectivity to earth, matter, body, soul). A god in nature as well places human beings in nature too. Ecocriticism's 'homo sapiens' live in Jung's alchemy.

Consequently, the nature symbolism in Psychology and Alchemy is indicative of, if not fully embracing, eco-logic. For example, Mercurius is the transforming substance in humanoid form, sharing attributes with 'serpent, dragon, raven, lion, basilisk, and eagle' (ibid.: para. 173). Although Mercurius can take Christian form as Virgin clasping dying son, 'he' is also a green lion, a tree, and birds whose flight signify fantasies (ibid.: paras. 305, 498-9).

It goes without saying that Christian priorities make significant inroads into alchemical symbolism. Mercurius is also associated with the devil and Jung mentions animal symbolism in a series of dreams as showing a 'lower' aspect of the psyche. It is not only the Christian colouring of the alchemical writing that weights Jung's commentary towards the traditional hierarchy of man above nature. However, the exposition of animal symbolisms as intertwined with Christian, and Mercurius's dual devil-savour aspects, means that Jung is fully aware of the way that alchemy breaks up the linear, distinct, and transcendent, in favour of a network of interanimating symbols that refuses to fix a hierarchy of divine, human and nature.

The important point here is that Mercurius is not reliably or inevitably the higher form over the animals in incarnating the stuff of alchemy. Rather the innate substitutability of images where any can stand for each 'other' deconstructs simple 'man' based hierarchy. The emphasis on minerals and the philosopher's stone extends the network to the phenomenal world: all are animate.

Bakhtin had a name for this kind of deconstruction of centripetal categories: carnival. And although, the heavy presence of Christian culture within alchemy texts constellates a bias towards the human as the source of meaning, alchemy nevertheless represents a vital fracturing of Christianity's drive to become monolithic, or a unitary language. A particular focus of Psychology and Alchemy is an exploration of the attempt to fuse alchemy and Christianity in the extensive analogy between the lapis and Christ. Jung is aware that the alchemical-Christian combination is both contradictory and potentially explosive.

He admits that if the alchemist had any sense of his unconscious then he would have had to recognize Christ as a symbol of the self, and his own role in redeeming the God (ibid.: para. 452). Even Jung's extensive analysis of alchemy's parallel between the object of the quest and Christ cannot force alchemy to unite with orthodox Christianity. Indeed, Jung does not want it to. A dialogical relationship between alchemy and the official Church will serve his purposes of firstly, generating his analytical psychology, and secondly, for his larger project of redeeming modern culture.

The result is a portrayal of Christianity, for all its centripetal drives to power, as saturated with heteroglossia. Here alchemy takes its dialogical position. As part of the heteroglossia of Christianity, the legacy of alchemy can be read two ways. One inheritance is its decent into chemical science and its transmission of Christian logos into becoming, in turn, the dominant language over its religious relation. A second, more obscure inheritance remains a counter discourse that Jung's text allows to surface: a de-stabilising of Christian dominance that preserves the possibility of hearing the voices of nature.

Significantly, the lack of realism in alchemy's natural symbolism is an indication of the psyche's participation. True, animals, stones and birds, are not imaged in alchemy for themselves and invited to a genuinely dialogical relationship. Rather, they feature as a 'way' to the sacred for man. Yet it remains a path that acknowledges the participation of nature in the phenomenon, in the being of humanity. Alchemy is an expression of the continuum of human identity into the phenomenal world: human animation reaches out to an animate nature. Alchemy was a material/psychic practice of aesthetic engagement that knew no bounds to the self in both the conventional and Jungian sense.  Jung's alchemy, makes it impossible to deny the importance of the non-human in the very roots of our being.

Therefore alchemy as Jung portrays it is not a simple source of ecocriticism. In the first place, the kind of dialogics it exhibits is overtly in the interest of the human over the non-human. The repeated insistence of alchemy as psychic projection is a theoretical expression of alchemy as self-interest, from the point of view of a Cartesian self (subject severed from world as object), as opposed to alchemy's attempt to regard subjectivity in continuum.

Secondly, alchemy veers away from ecocriticism by bearing the marks of the Christian impetus to remove the divine from immanence to transcendence, despite its intrinsic embrace of the phenomenal. Locating the sacred in matter does give alchemy a stake in the non-human. Unfortunately, the alchemist's understandable tendency to make analogies and amplifications to Christianity as a narrative pushes alchemy in the direction of exploiting matter and nature in the orthodox cause of restoring the sleeping god to his true transcendence.

Yet, in the path to ecocriticism, alchemy vividly demonstrates a native heteroglossia to Christianity as culturally embedded. Alchemy is liminal to Christianity in that it represents heteroglossia within Christian cultural expression and functions as a marginalized 'other' to its norms. So it even preserves a trace of animism within the Christian domain.

More significantly still, Jung provides the animism of texts. He liberates alchemy's many voices in multiple readings and quotations. His textual animism is then explicitly linked to the tongues of the other in the phenomenal world. This crucial matrix occurs because alchemists worked in the laboratory as well as the scriptorium, but most importantly because they believed (like some ecocritics) that imagination possesses material properties. The symbol brought into being subtle reality between consciousness and the world. Rather than language and texts seen as pre-structuring reality in a way that renders its non-human qualities as 'outside' signifying, Jung's alchemy suggests an animated matrix in which textual voices form part of a dialogic web of interanimating presences: human, textual and non-human.

So my thesis is that a work such as Psychology and Alchemy works as textual matter rather than just as the argument I have abstracted from it (in a thoroughly non ecological manner!). A work of human nature, it has its own eco-logical being: it is an entity with its own unique shape, offering psychotherapy for the voices of another age; a treatment of texts.

Note

1. This paper is adapted from a chapter in my book, Jung as a Writer (Routledge, 2005).

References

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist. Translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Coupe, L. (ed.) (2000) The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, London and New York: Routledge.

Glotfelty, C. and H. Fromm. (eds) (1996) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press.

Jones, R.A. (2002). 'The necessity of the unconscious', Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32: 345-66.

Jones, R.A. (2003). 'Mixed Metaphors and Narrative Shifts: Archetypes', Theory & Psychology 13, no. 5: 651-72.

Jung, C. G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (CW), edited by Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, translated by R.F.C. Hull (1953-91), London: Routledge, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. The final date of my citation is the date of the English text.

Manes, C. (1992) 'Nature and Silence', in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds) (1996), pp. 15-29.

Murphy, P. D. (1995) 'Ecofeminist Dialogics' in L. Coupe (ed.) (2000), pp. 193-7.

White Jr., L. (1967) 'The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis', in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds) (1996), pp. 3-14.

Susan Rowland, Reader in English and Jungian Studies, University of Greenwich, UK: s.a.rowland@greenwich.ac.uk