Psychoanalytic Readings

Résumé :

The strong influence of the psychologist C. G. Jung on Ted Hughes has been amply demonstrated by the critics as a shared belief in the way myth works by appealing to a ‘collective unconscious’ that is apparently shared by human beings across cultural differences. Freudian psychology, on the other hand, focuses on the personal unconscious and its formation through childhood experiences and anxieties which can follow common patterns to produce, for example, the Oedipus Complex – a desire, at its most extreme, to murder the father and marry the mother. The difference, not to say the disagreement, between the Jungian and Freudian schools of psychoanalysis is at the heart of Hughes’s own critique of the modern world, which is an ideological ‘mental fight’ (to borrow a phrase from William Blake). Given this emphasis on Jung’s influence, it is worth looking at Hughes’s work from the perspective of the French theorist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who was much influenced by Freud, firstly because it is a sound method to look at Hughes from without, as well as from within his own set of references, and secondly because this is most likely to cast an additional light on the nature of his intellectual commitment. For Hughes was a polemist of sorts, questioning taken for granted assumptions in our culture, as nearly all great poets have been, and to side with him, by simply adopting the polemical positions he defended, is certainly not the only way to assess his achievement.