Jung and "The Great Gatsby" and encountering the Shadow

Cover art for "The Great Gatsby," designed by Francis Cugat in 1925.

Back in January I had a dream I called "Jungian Eye" and it's a dream I've thought much about and toyed with in the past few weeks. Click here to read it in its entirety. In it, I'm learning about something I call the "Jungian Eye"--an all-knowing/omniscient force--and muse that one could re-read F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" from a Jungian perspective.

I like synchronicity and like to follow the rabbit-hole when it's presented to me, so I went off in search of the book and re-read it to see if anything popped out at me this time around (a few things did!) I also dug a little into Fitzgerald's life and discovered that he mentions Carl Jung several times in "Tender is the Night"--something I didn't know but find very interesting considering Zelda's mental breakdown in 1930.

Much of my reading of "The Great Gatsby" was spent considering the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. I've always been intrigued by these disembodied eyes that exist in the one intersection in the book where illusion and reality rub against each other and elements of Jung's Shadow emerge into the light. Fitzgerald mentions the eyes on the first page of chapter two:

"But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days of sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground" (pp. 27-28).

The eyes see much. They take in Nick Carraway's daily transit from West Egg to New York, witness Tom Buchanan's affair with Myrtle Wilson, see George Wilson's break down upon realizing Myrtle's unfaithfulness, stare at Daisy Buchanan when she accidentally kills Myrtle with Gatsby's car, and look upon George's grief and his resulting decision towards the book's close. They are the eyes that "see everything."

And because Fitzgerald spends so many pages devoted to the clash between reality and illusion, the consequence is that his characters must clash about too, forced to create double lives to accommodate their residence in these two worlds. Fitzgerald's point, methinks, is that it becomes impossible to maintain two identities for very long. At some point, the repressed side will surface and destruction may follow. This, as Jung points out, is not necessarily a bad thing. One can find much gold there, as well as opportunities for integration and wholeness.

The places where this occurs in the book were rather clear to me. Perhaps the best example is the part where Gatsby gives Daisy Buchanan a chance to speak her complete truth about her feelings for him in front of her husband, Tom Buchanan, but she cannot do it and later reacts hysterically, accidentally killing Myrtle due to her reckless driving. Is this one of the Shadow's temper tantrums? Would it have occurred if Daisy could've given her repressed emotions a voice?

"It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, towards that lost voice across the room.

The voice begged again to go. 'Please, Tom! I can't stand this anymore.' Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone" (p. 142)."

Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson in "Owning Your Own Shadow" writes about the importance of giving the Shadow ritualized opportunities for expression so that it doesn't disable the conscious mind to speak its truth at some later, and often rather inopportune, point. Johnson points out that one of the ways to live with one's unwanted elements is to honor what they're trying to tell you in a way that's not hurtful to anyone else, including you. So, what might this look like? One could allow the Shadow element within you to vent out loud about something that bugs you for 5 minutes. You could scream into a pillow. You could paint it out...dance it out. Allow yourself to write a letter and then burn it. Picture it as a whiny small child and listen to what it's complaining about with love.

In his book, Johnson shares the story of having some rather contentious house guests stay for a few days. His cranky feelings towards them build and build and he does nothing to give them an outlet. After his guests left, Johnson still didn't do anything to neutralize his cranky feelings and decides that some beautiful flowers might be a nice pick-me-up reward for surviving the weekend. What happens? He ends up picking a fight with the gardener instead. His point? Because he had not honored his Shadow while he was experiencing distress, it popped out and unleashed itself inappropriately at a later point in time.

So, maybe the "Jungian Eye" then is really about integrating oneself--the conscious I with the unconscious I. The unconscious and the Shadow which resides there don't have to be frightening. Personally, I'm grateful my Shadow exists because it's a blessed guide. No other part of me calls my conscious mind's bluff like it does and I can always trust it to let me know when I'm honoring the unspoken parts of myself and when I'm not. And I find that dreams are a great place to meet the Shadow and to learn from it.

Dreams and Campbell and Jung

I've kept a dream journal for most of the past decade and make it a daily habit to chronicle my dreams upon first waking, trying to capture the wisdom and messages delivered by my subconscious. Over the years, I've noticed that some of the dreams--the BIG ones--involve a journey to an unfamiliar place where I encounter a teacher (sometimes human, sometimes animal) who instructs me in a lesson that usually relates to something I'm struggling with in my waking life. Sometimes the dream lesson feels active, as in I wake feeling the need to act NOW. Sometimes the lesson is passive, as if some aspect of the universe has brought me into the dream to record a truth which may not be mine.

The more I think about these dream patterns, the more I realize they follow the hero's journey as laid out in Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." There are three main phases:

1. Departure -- the hero heeds the call to adventure after some refusal; a guide appears and the first threshold is crossed.

2. Initiation -- the hero encounters some trials and/or tests along the way; meets the goddess and father figure and is tested again; encounters a period of reflection before receiving a boon.

3. Return -- the hero refuses to return but does; he often requires help along the journey; guides and helpers appear to aide him; the hero returns but now must find a way to integrate the new wisdom with his homeland and others past it; learns to live in the moment.

Please click here for the full summary of the steps.

These steps reminded me much of the journey we take each night into the dreamworld. I think Jung would agree. He argued that dreams come from two places: 1. from our own psyches; 2. from the collective unconscious which comprises society, culture and humankind. Sometimes when I have disturbances in my dreams, I take time to reflect if it's something going on within me or if I'm just picking up some larger disturbance in the world. I look to see if the dialogue or dream symbols match anything in my waking life or waking world. I know, I know. This sounds very "Star Wars" with Obi-Wan telling Luke the exact same thing.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force. sound bite Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope sound bites

Let me give an example. On 27 March 2000, I had a dream I called "Empire State Building." I had watched the Oscars before going to bed so it's easy to recognize when those symbols appear:

I am at the Oscars but it was held at the Empire State Building. And I see two buildings right next to each other. One of them filled with water and the other got very smoky or steamy. I'm suddenly in the smoky/steamy building and I feel suffocated. I can't breathe. Finally, the water got out of the building and I could breathe again but I wasn't wet. In the other building, the water let out too but the people there are many floors below me. The other building had a line across it that said "AZ/CO" as if you had crossed into another state for being so many floors below. I am telling an older man that I wanted to go over to that building and try to get in. I see people and I think I know some of them...they're waving at me. The man tells me to go over and visit them but I'm afraid because I am so high up and they're so far below me and I worry that I won't have enough air. The man doesn't think I will and encourages me to stay. The windows fall out of the other building and the building falls down. All this freezing air pours in to my building. I feel as if I'm going to fall. I am afraid.

The dream didn't make any sense then but it certainly gives me the chills now. I don't know if it was a dream of precognition but whenever I have disaster dreams, I usually scroll the news for weeks after.

Linda Hogan in "The Woman Who Watches Over the World" writes:

"Dreaming articulates the terrain of night, the range of a human soul, the geography of the holy, and draws a path to the divine. It is a map of sorts, one unknown to us by day. Dreaming is the point at which we begin to know. We are the dreamed, as well as the dreamers.

When writer Katherine McNamara interviewed Alaska native philosopher and writer Peter Kalifornski, he said that it isn't so much that people travel in dreams, but that the world speaks to people in dreams. What Kalifornski meant, I think, is that the sleeper is connected with the world. We are not solitary in our dreams. The human meets with the rest of nature, plant, animal, and the spirit world. This is why the location of the prey is dreamed by dwellers in the far north. As our elders say when in that state of meeting, that presence, "Something is there, something is about'" (p. 136).

My point is that the dream world is very powerful and it makes sense to pay attention to what we are given there. Not everything may have a meaning but wisdom certainly resides there.

Jungian Eye

I had an interesting dream a week ago in which I was in a 1950s style apartment with faded yellow cotton curtains (the kind your grandmother dutifully washed over decades to get that tactile softness). I appear to be going back to school for a degree but I'm not entirely sure which one. I notice that the campus is filled with women and this makes me wonder if I'm back on a women's campus somewhere. In the apartment, I notice my grandmother in a chair (I'm seeing her from behind) and I see that she's slumped over. I wonder...is she dead? alive? sleeping? dreaming? I'm uncertain as I approach her.

As I move towards her, I realize that I'm learning about something called the "Jungian Eye"--some omniscient presence--and I think to myself, "Hm. Someone could really re-read "The Great Gatsby" from a Jungian perspective."

The dream switches (more of the above theme) and when I finally wake up, I am compelled to search out this book from my youth.

***

I've kept a dream journal for about 10 years now and I'm always surprised and delighted when something new pops up. AND, I'm always *extremely* delighted when I experience a moment of synchronicity. In my reading of the "Descent" (see previous blog entry on this), I came across the following passage which made me pause:

"This cool, objective eye is one basis--perhaps the left brain aspect--of feminine evaluation. It does not get deceived by responsible performance or willed achievement, but finds the ineluctable facts in process, the panoply of emotional vectors that give each moment life, and that pass as others crowd into the present, leaving the individual at the mercy of time and processes over which one has little control, but in which one may find a grounding if one can reverence change itself and find one's own way to move with it. Such vision is transpersonal and a power that can protect--so Athena, gorgopis (bright-eyed) and owl-eyed, wore the Gorgon's eyes on her shield; so Inanna later embodied the "eyes of death" (Descent, p. 34.)

I find it all very interesting, especially since the dreams which have followed this one are all very relational and teaching oriented. And even more interesting that as I glance at the ring I bought myself in Greece last year (imprinted with Athena's owl), I see that one of the characters in "The Great Gatsby" is called "Owl-Eyes."

Okay, universe. I'll bite.