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Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
It is curious that a work of literature which Jung (1934, trans., p. 12) has described as ‘a human document of our time and still more; it is a secret’ has been, to my knowledge, totally neglected by Jungian interpreters with the exception of Jung himself.
About James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), to which Jung referred, Edmund Wilson (1931, pp. 219-20) wrote:
‘… the more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perceptions of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives.’
The importance of Joyce's writing is based upon the assumption that artists ‘in their principal works and deepest inspiration create from the very depths of the collective unconscious’ (Jung, 1921, trans. p. 237). Jung writes (1934, trans. p. 12), ‘Like every true prophet, the artist is the unwitting mouthpiece of his time … the spirit of the age is his prompter and whatever this spirit says is so, for it is a fact of contemporary consciousness.’ The extent to which Ulysses has become established as a classic of modern literature attests to the fact that the novel's secret is something to which the collective psyche does respond. Of further psychological interest, from my personal observation, is that so many people read and even reread Ulysses,