Writing-As-Shadow-Work: An Aesthetics of Jungian Psychoanalysis

Newsome, Rachel

Abstract

Taking a personal experience of Jungian psychoanalysis as a starting point, Writing-As-Shadow-Work: An Aesthetics of Jungian Psychoanalysis shows how I integrated the concepts and practice of Jungian psychoanalysis with creative life writing to develop fresh possibilities for writing on difficult mother-daughter relationships and related trauma. An inter-disciplinary practice-based body of creative and critical research that draws on the diverse fields of creative writing, Jungian studies and related depth psychology, trauma theory, mother-daughter relationships in feminist thought and the literary studies of autobiographical and short fiction, this thesis stages an intervention into the under-explored territories at the intersection between Jung and literary studies, and between short fiction and writing on trauma, alongside the adjacent culturally taboo subject of cruel mothers, to demonstrate how I developed the distinctive mode of writing-as-shadow-work via an inter-textual cycle of surrealist autobiographical short stories.
While the challenges of representing the traumatic experience remain a dominant concern in the field of writing on trauma, Writing-As-Shadow-Work offers a literary aesthetics of Jungian psychoanalysis that views trauma as both a source of suffering and an opportunity for growth in order to expand on existing modes that explore how writing can be a container for working through. Just as physical shadows and their metaphorical counterparts are porous, permeable and shapeshifting, this thesis examples how writing-as-shadow-work is a porous, permeable and shape-shifting approach to enacting Jungian psychoanalysis on the page. It explains how, through the extensive journey entailed in this process, I synthesised the multiple resonances between the Jungian individuation process and the characteristics of the surrealist autobiographical short story to arrive at an original mode of creative life writing: ‘the shadow memoir’.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: May 22, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 3, 2023
• Keywords: Creative Writing, Jungian Psychoanalysis, Shadow Work, Trauma, Autobiographical Fiction, Short Stories, Mother-Daughter Relationships
• Award Date: Jun 2, 2023