Freud, Jung and Joyce

Contemporary Review, July, 1994 by Liam F. Heaney“…..For Freud the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ was through dreams.(3) Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, (1939), is a novel with a distinctive, elaborate dream-form. Indeed, it explores the dreams and nightmares of H. C. Earwicker, the central character, offering a slowly shifting kaleidoscope of connections and associations with his apparently amorphous waking existence. The novel employs puns, word-play and Freudian slips in a multitude of languages, ancient and modern. There can be little doubt that both these novels exploit an in depth and contemporary understanding of the psychology of dreams and their connections with myth. ///…Jung proposed that the dreams, fairy stories and religions of different cultures and individuals had common themes. These emerge from archetypes in the ‘collective unconscious’. Archetypes are thus seen as universal, symbolic representations of a particular person, object or experience.