Inventing Reality: An Integration of Autobiographical Fiction with Jungian Psychoanalysis to Negotiate a Personal Experience of Trauma

Newsome, Rachel

Abstract

In this article, I offer an après-coup of my transdisciplinary practice-based doctoral thesis, Writing-As-Shadow-Work: An Aesthetics of Jungian Psychoanalysis (2023), to show how the creative licence afforded by autobiographical fiction enabled me to give language to a personal experience of trauma and engage with a Jungian worldview of the psyche that constellates external reality with the inner realm of the unconscious. I share how I employed the invention allowed by autobiographical fiction as a creative strategy to access my personal unconscious and the cross-cultural intuitive knowledge of the collective unconscious as a means to facilitate my ongoing process of recovery from trauma via a sequence of autobiographical short stories. In addition, I reflect on how it was through this process that I was able to expand on the possibilities of autobiographical fiction by employing it as a literary and therapeutic device with the potential to not only represent reality but also invent it.

Citation

Newsome, R. (2024). Inventing Reality: An Integration of Autobiographical Fiction with Jungian Psychoanalysis to Negotiate a Personal Experience of Trauma. Life Writing, 21(4), 685-694. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2024.2409068

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Nov 27, 2024
• Publication Date: Nov 27, 2024
• Deposit Date: Dec 13, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 13, 2024
• Journal: Life Writing
• Print ISSN: 1448-4528
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 685-694
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2024.2409068