BORGES AND JUNG: A Possible Encounter

2) TEACHER
Name and Surname: Santiago Javier Torres
Title: Prof. Lic. In Psychology
Email: santipsico@hotmail.com

 

3) OBJECTIVES.-
3.1) General Objectives.-
Introduce the concepts of Analytical Psychology of C.G. Jung from its application in the work of Borges.

3.2) Specific objectives.-
– Acquire specialized knowledge from the conceptual framework of Psychology
Analytical on his contribution to studies on the work of Borges.
– Understand the importance and analytical interpretation of the symbolisms that are implicit in Borges’s stories.
-Analyze some fundamental concepts of Jungian theory contained in Borges stories.

 

4) FOUNDATION .-
Borges was born in Buenos Aires Argentina in 1899. Writer by profession, his work consists of poetry, essays and stories. Anyone who has approached Borges’s work knows that it is impregnated with concepts and symbols that are repeated both in his work and in culture (different cultures), philosophy and ancient mythologies. Among the symbols and concepts that should be highlighted are time, dreams, immortality, the labyrinth. Each of these and other symbols is related in a special way to Jungian theories. Some of the related Jungian theories are archetypes, the soul, complexes, synchronization, and the collective unconscious.
For Carl Gustav Jung, archetypes are pure semantic content that we represent through different images. Jacobi (1963) tells us that archetypes are a kind of shaped but invisible crystals, to which we associate one or more images. The “form of the crystal” is a pure meaning (for example knowledge) and the content (what will make the crystal “visible”) that we are going to give it will be the archetypal image. Thus, individuals have an intuition of what knowledge is – to cite an example – and it can be represented in the form of different images, such as the sun, the serpent, the father, etc.
Jacobi (1963) tells us that the archetypes are very similar to Platonic ideas, with the difference that these are only “good and perfect”, having their “negative” or imperfect counterpart in our world, the world of becoming. For Jung, on the other hand, the archetypes contain “light and darkness”, they have a bipolar structure. Borges, without knowing it – or knowing what everyone is given to know, something that belongs to everyone’s knowledge – used more than one archetypal representation in his writings, among which we find the labyrinth (it represents the shadow in Jungian theory), the tiger (represents knowledge), the rose (represents the Self, or the maximum archetype), the Shadow, among others.
Borges’s work is extensive, so as not to extend ourselves more than it should, I will try to choose the stories or writings that he considers most appropriate for each topic related to Jungian theories. The analysis of one or two examples will suffice to understand the close relationship of thought between these two men.
The shadow are primitive representations, representations that can be related to our animal life – Jung tells us -, that are kept in the unconscious and are unpleasant for the conscience. Likewise these, despite not being necessarily bad, instill fear and in dreams often appears as an adversary. The stories where Borges uses the labyrinth as an argument are many, among them it is worth highlighting: Asterión’s house, the garden of forking paths, death and the compass. In all these narrations the labyrinth has a nightmare function, an object imposed on reality that confuses us, challenges us, condemns us, all at the same time. Overcoming the labyrinth as an obstacle means – in Jungian theory – an advance in individuation.

Another of the concepts that can be traced in Borges, specifically in his fantastic narratives, is that of the Self, represented by the rose, or the Aleph, a proper name that Borges would have given to this archetype. Jung affirmed that the Self represented the “coherent whole” of a person, which unifies the conscious with the unconscious, and is the product of individuation, that is, the process of integrating the personality. The Self is usually represented by a circle. Between the concepts of Self and Aleph Borgeanos, there are apparently differences. For Borges the “Aleph”, which is found in one of his narratives, is a specific point, under the staircase –and near a step- in a basement of a house, it is the point where all things in the universe, all the things of the past, of the present and of the future, have all at the same time, without interrupting each other, and, from a certain appropriate position, Borges arrives -in the narrative- to observe this point of the universe from where the entire universe it can be seen. Apparently the only thing that the Jungian archetype would have in common with Borges’s Aleph is the representative image, a small circle, a small point. However, Borges’ Aleph does not contain all the things in the universe, it contains the entire universe that we can experience phenomenologically. In this sense, it is the person who experiences the sensation of facing the entire universe at the same time, in the same place. The person who faces the Aleph is knowing everything that could be made known to him, and knowing everything that our soul can know, we end up knowing ourselves completely. It is a literary representation of the confrontation with fears, the confrontation with pleasures and the consequent integration of the personality.