The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: A Journey towards Individuation

Abstract

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: A Journey towards Individuation

The strategy of my dissertation project is to take the fictional character of the Ancient Mariner as a particular test case of psychic processes and move towards a general delineation of timeless human psyche. The tool of my analyses is Jungian analytical psychology the preference and choice of which can be argued on many counts. Jung’s emphasis on the extraordinary importance and potential of the human unconscious and with it its archetypal contents are remarkably fitting into the body structure and course of narrative of the Rime. Notwithstanding the equal plausibility and currency of Freudian psychology for literary analyses, Jung’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the unconscious has added a new dimension to human psychology. Contrary to Freud’s theory, which considers the unconscious as a repository of the infantile repressed contents, Jung believes that the unconscious is a sufficiently potential half of the Self that positively and constructively helps and regulates the conscious half. The archetypal contents of the unconscious, according to Jung, if rightly understood and assimilated in the conscious workings of the psyche, may reveal unspeakable human truths. Although symbolic pattern of the Rime has been extensively analyzed by critics and commentators in their respective historical perspectives and mind-sets, a general comprehension of it is only possible through experiences that are legible to an eternal human mind. The basic structure of the human mind (psyche) is invariably the same since time immemorial. Its eternal constituents remain intact no matter how many revolutions may occur in histories, cultures, religions, or civilizations. These constituents, though, may acquire temporal dimensions, their general and universal structure retains its permanence.viii

Providing a super structure of eternals, a creative artist helps the eternal reader or spectator (of all times, generations, creeds) to read or watch his/her story in the matrix of that structure. Reading the Rime in the backdrop of a long history of its ancestors, beginning with Homer, Dante, Virgil and that may continue to the last shreds of human history, a familiar thread of parable runs through all its courses of readership. A famous quote from Alexander Pope “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” remarkably expresses every thoughtful reader’s response to the Mariner’s narrative. This response of an all time familiarity points to something that is universal in nature. This work focuses on these universal factors and presents them with justifications rooted in Jungian psychology. “How would it be done” is a taxing question while taking into consideration a psychoanalytic detour of the Rime.