The Dark Night of the Soul

One of the earliest expressions of the archetype of the Dark Night of the Soul is the epic convention of the "descent into hell."Generally speaking, this early meta phorical expression involves the hero's journey into a netherworld where he meets the inhabitants of the place of darkness who provide him with a series of awakenings to the reality of human existence.Often, the truths he learns take the form of ethical advice concerning his conduct in the world of the living.The pagans, who dealt almost ex clusively with externalities or objective reality, presented this archetypal experience as a journey into a dark land of even darker spirits.However, in the introspective, psy chologically-oriented twentieth century, the metaphorical journey must be inward, a journey into the darkness at the heart of the individual psyche.For this reason, more recent expressions of the archetype of the Dark Night of the Soul resemble the treatment of darkness expounded by Saint John of the Cross in his treatises. .In his' Ascent of Mount Car mel and The-Dark Night of the Soul, Saint John examines in great detail the psychological effects which characterize the archetypal experience: a discovery of the true dark nature of human existence, a loss of ability to perceive ex ternal reality through the senses, a tendency to lose direct v vi contact with the world of objective fact, a sense of aliena tion from everything except the self, and a close examina tion of the inner self which leads to an intense boredom and, eventually, the inertia of accidie.The many recurrent expressions of these ideas through out literature indicate the archetypal nature of the experi ences which Saint John describes as the Dark Night of the Soul.C. G. Jung, in devising his theory of personality, particularly his ideas concerning the "Shadow" archetype, re cords these same types of experiences.In addition, many modern writers have shown a similar interest in these same psychological experiences and have, consequently, employed symbols, images, and ideas which are directly related to the archetype of the Dark Night of the Soul.Friedrich Nietzsche employs the archetype to formulate his aesthetic theories about the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses in the artist and, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he indicates an interest in the knowledge to be gained from this archetypal experience-More over, many modern authors utilize the archetype to present their particular moral vision of the world.Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Julien Green's The Dark Journey, and Charles Williams' Descent into Hell all involve a use of the archetype as a means of expressing the author's particular moral vision.Yet other modern writers utilize the arche typal experience to present their ontological visions.Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night and Samuel Beckett's Moiioy employ the archetypal mode to explain ontology.CHAPTER I has also become an important aspect of two areas of study which have had a tremendous impact on twentieth-century lit erary art.One of these areas is, obviously, psychology; the other is aesthetics.These two areas seem to come very close to merging into one body of thought in a great deal of the writing of Carl Jung.For example, Jung's comprehensive study of the nature of the psyche provides for a very defi nite possibility of the occurrence of aesthetic experiences on the part of each and every man.The individual, that is, can share something of the creation of a work of art.As Jung sees it, the appeal the artist makes to the unconscious part of the audience's psyche through a work of art comes directly from the unconscious part of the artist's psyche.This sharing of unconsciousness produces, according to Jung, the most meaningful and lasting art.In the detailed explanation of archetypes and the responses to them, Jung shows how this psycho-aesthetic op erates.The artist, in Jung's view, speaks in primordial images . . .with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is trying to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realms of the ever-enduring.He transmutes our per sonal destiny into the destiny of mankind, thereby evoking in us all those beneficent forces that have always enabled mankind to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the^longest night.That is the secret of effective art.Careful note should be taken to see that Jung insists that 2 Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung {New Haven, 1971), p. 24.All further references to Jung are from this same text.Jacobi's book, with a foreword written by Jung, is a synthesis of all of Jung's writings.the artist can be a strong guiding light in helping the more ordinary individual to cope with "every peril and to outlive the longest night."In relation to the specific archetype of the Dark Night of the Soul, the artist, it seems, has al ready come to terms with the darker aspects of his existence and can be an actual and experiential aid to the man who is just beginning his journey into night.Jung is specific in stating that it is not only through the knowledge of dark ness and the consequent artistic expression of that knowl edge that the artist communicates to us.In addition, the artist "speaks in primordial images . . .with a thousand voices"-images which are part of man's psyche at birth and which manifest themselves in a multitude of ways.The art ist, as Jung sees him, helps to bind each man to every other man through a brotherhood of unconsciousness.He construes a "collective unconscious" which is "the deep, dark centre of our unconscious, which can never be made wholly conscious, which bursts forth with elemental force like foreign bodies, eternally incomprehensible and never wholly assimilable by the ego" (p.33).The unconscious "bursts forth" by means of archetypal images.The artist, as it were, penetrates the "deep, dark centre" of his own psyche in order to gain a more accurate and more thorough knowledge of his own being.And by recording the images he finds in that center, he com municates his knowledge to us by appealing to an actual pre knowledge of those things which already exist in our uncon scious or our portion of the "collective unconscious

Aesthetics · Archetype · Art · Epistemology · HERO · Literature · Original sin · Psyche · Soul · Theology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Jungian Analytical Psychology · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

• Image and Meaning in Also sprach Zarathustra

  Peter Wolfe•Modern Language Notes•1964

  Add to list

• A Note on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

  Janko Lavrin•The Russian Review•1969

  Add to list

• Archetypal Patterns in Poetry

  Foster P Boswell, Maud Bodkin•The American Journal of Psychology•1936

  Add to list