Abstract: ‘Beyond the Monomyth: Jung and the Children’s Book in the Adult Imagination’, Andrew Peter McCormack

I developed my interest in Jungian theory and children’s literature when I began investigating literature which embeds the children’s book within adult storyworlds. My meta-level analysis of the children’s book in the adult cultural imagination evidenced a deep relationship between core Jungian concepts and the construction and consumption of the children’s book, which I argue has come to function as an inheritor to myth, legend, folklore and the fairytale in providing a shared lexicon of images by which individuals and communities come to and continue to understand themselves and one another.

My research evidences how four core Jungian concepts - that of the complex; the inner or eternal child; the shadow; and the collective unconscious - are illustrated, dramatised, and challenged by cultural depictions of the children’s book in adult fiction, thereby demonstrating the deep interconnection between Jung and the children’s book. This thesis seeks to reveal and explore the depth of the relationship between Jungian theory and the children’s book, which has been overshadowed in both the literary academy and the popular imagination by an undue focus on the monomyth template - or hunting for iterations of the hero’s journey - developed by post-Jungian thinkers, and a reductive dilution of Jungian concepts de-contextualised from Jung’s own rich, multi-faceted and challenging philosophy and psychology.

Frank McLynn asserts in his 1996 biography of C.G. Jung that Jung ‘never wrote anything significant on child psychology’, and ‘always found the subject a bore’ (517). A significant gap in the literature evidences an acceptance of this misreading of Jung’s work, which this thesis seeks to address. The publication in 2010 of Children’s Dreams, notes from Jung’s seminars on the subject given between 1936 - 1940, provided me with a methodological as well as conceptual starting point for this project. It is true that Jung did not analyse the dreams of children per se, but his attention to the dreams of children as remembered by them in adulthood speaks to my thesis that the symbolic children’s book functions in parallel to the remembered childhood dream: as a nexus of images and ideas of significance to one’s self-perception and interaction with others in broader social networks and cultures throughout the life cycle. Children’s literature scholarship and childhood studies, too, are in the midst of a deepening engagement with cross-generational networks and the phenomenon of recursive adult engagement with the culture of childhood. Thus this intervention speaks in a timely way both to Jungian communities and to scholars of children’s literature and culture. I challenge McLynn’s assertions that Jungian theory is of little interest to scholars of children’s literature and the culture of childhood, and its inverse: that children’s culture offers little foothold for the serious Jungian scholar. My method for analysis draws upon the recent work of Jungian literary theorist Susan Rowland, whose conviction ‘that Jungians can aid the study of literature while literary critics can similarly inform Jungian psychology’ (2019: 1) offers an alternative to the monotonous monomyth method - or what Terence Dawson terms ‘instant Jung’ (2008: 290) - responsible for Jung’s recent relative elision from the literary academy. Jung is conspicuous for his absence, in particular, from the field of psychoanalytic children’s literature scholarship: the 2000s saw the publication of Karen Coats’s Lacanian study Looking Glasses and Neverlands (2004), and the 2010s Kenneth Kidd’s Freud in Oz (2011), which address Jung’s influence in the field only cursorily. Kidd’s assertion that ‘not a few Jungian analyses of the fairy tale and other genres are vulgar and reductive, missing out on the complexities of Jung’s actual discourse’ (2011: 11) articulates part of the challenge I aim to meet in this project, in bringing Jung’s actual discourse into dialogue with contemporary texts of significance to the study of children’s literature.

As my analysis will show, the neglect of Jung within the academy of children’s literature has not impeded the potential for the relationship between Jungian theory and the children’s book to flourish in the hands of artists and authors. The children’s book functions, instead, in the adult imagination as a particularly rich site for the dramatisation of the maturation process, and thus as a literalisation of Jung’s concept of individuation, or the integration of consciousness and the unconscious in the achievement of psychic selfhood. By contextualising the symbolic children’s book within adult culture I interrogate the potential this provides for interaction between real children and the remembered child of the now-adult reader and author. The index of the children’s book can be read as a focalising point within the life cycle: a multivalent nexus offering the potential for the reader’s self-knowledge to deepen and change while the text remains ostensibly the same. In Jungian teleology, one looks back so as to look forward, and one looks forward so as to better navigate the present. The implications of my work suggest the Jungian lens as one of crucial significance to understanding children’s literature: what it has done, what it is doing, and what it might yet go on to do.