Abstract
A problem with case studies is that no matter how individually illuminating they may be, they might at the same time fail sufficiently to link the phenomenal and the noumenal, and so render the examples isolated or simply anecdotal. In this chapter, I will respond to this objection by arguing for the universality of the concepts drawn from my case study on the interrelatedness of Navajo culture and design. This will necessitate progressing from theology to psychoanalysis in order to pave the way back to Bloch. Its destination is a broader Utopian critical theory that embraces many familiar and commendable values, but without the need for God. This progression will involve an investigation of archetypes and psychoanalysis. This will further enable me to speak of a collective consciousness, not only among the Navajo, but also of humankind. Central to this is the communication of abstract ideas in visual form, and the understanding that our cultural texts are our unconscious writ large.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Peter Gay, Freud (New York: Anchor Books, 1989): 128.
Freud’s complete works remain in press today as Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , 24 vols. (London: Vintage, 2001). The Interpretation of Dreams was first published in 1900 and comprises volumes four and five of the complete works; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life followed in 1901 and comprises the sixth volume.
See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper, 1969).
See Richard Howells, The Myth of the Titanic , second ed. (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Here I also argue for the importance of understanding the related concept of ‘social amnesia’ (see especially 186–8).
Roseann S Willink and Paul G Zolbrod, Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996): 74.
Anthony Berlant and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, Walk in Beauty: The Navajo and Their Blankets (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977): 146.
Gladys A Reichard, Weaving a Navajo Blanket (New York: Dover Publications, 1974): 156.
Evelyn Payne Hatcher, Visual Metaphors: A Formal Analysis of Navajo Art, ed. Robert F Spencer, American Ethnological Society (St Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1974): 179–80.
Cited in Robert Aziz, C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990): 38.
See, for example, Richard P Sugg ed. Jungian Literary Criticsm (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992; reprint, second paperback).
CG Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ed. Herbert Read, et al., trans. RFC Hull, second ed., vol. 9, part 1, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).
Cited in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, ed. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Phronesis (London and New York: Verso, 1989): 28.
For more on my own thinking about the applicability of theories of myth to contemporary cultures, see Richard Howells, The Myth of the Titanic (London and New York: The Macmillan Press and St Martin’s Press, 1999), especially chapter 2.
John Bebe, ‘The Trickster in the Arts,’ in Jungian Literary Theory , ed. Richard P Sugg (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992; reprint, second paperback): 302–11.
Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008): 3ff.
Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, ed. Martin Jay and Anton Kaes, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice, Weimar Now: German Cultural Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991): 313.
See, for example, Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Geoghegan, ‘Remembering the Future,’ in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch , ed. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (London and New York: Verso, 1997): 20.
Jack Zipes, ‘Introduction: Toward a Realization of Anticipatory Illumination,’ in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Studies in Contemporary German Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988): xviii.
Ivan Boldyrev, Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism , Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014): 118.
Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays , trans. Andrew Joron, Meridean Crossing Aesthetics (Palo Atlo, California: University of Stanford Press, 1998): 403.
Exceptions include a brief reference in Jan Relf, ‘Utopia the Good Breast: Coming Home to Mother,’ in Utopias and the Millennium , ed. Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann, Critical Views (London: Reaktion Books, 1993).
See also occasional references in Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2007).
Elizabeth Wright and Edmund Wright, eds, The Žižek Reader , Blackwell Readers (Malden, MA and London: Blackwell, 1999): 1.
Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Sympton! second ed. (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2001): xxiii.
Nick Crossley called it ‘a convenient fiction’. See Nick Crossley Key Concepts in Critical Social Theory (London: Sage, 2005): 192.
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture , ed. Rosalind Krauss Joan Copec, Annette Michelson, October Books (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992): vii.
TS Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948).
Slavoj Žižek, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London and New York: Verso, 1992): 126.
Donald Meltzer and Meg Harris Williams, The Apprehension of Beauty (Strath Tay: Clunie Press for the Roland Harris Trust, 1988): xi–xii.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Richard Howells
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Howells, R. (2015). Archetypes, the Unconscious, and Psychoanalysis. In: A Critical Theory of Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137446176_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137446176_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-68579-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44617-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)