Joyce & Jung

the long version

In this posthumous but positive textual reconciliation, Hiromi Yoshida synthesizes the seemingly oppositional discourses of James Joyce and Carl Gustav Jung as she works chapter by chapter to excavate the psyche of Stephen Dedalus. She surveys the iconicity of the biblical Eve, the classical Helen, the medieval Virgin, and the Gnostic Sophia before correlating each of these embodiments of anima phenomenology to Stephen's mother, the Nighttown prostitute, the Virgin Mary of sodality worship, and the Bird-Girl. Thus, she moves towards the conclusion that Stephen's ironic passage through Jung's "four stages of eroticism" culminates in the Marian over-identification that is symptomatic of autoerotic repression. The illustrations in the book are particularly interesting and well-chosen.