BEEBE, J. (San Francisco). ‘The trickster in the arts’.  The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. Vol.  2, No. 2 (1981).

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This copious and fascinating paper sets out to explore the effect of certain controversial works of art, ‘difficult masterpieces’, calculated to baffle, intrigue, haunt or exasperate by the strangeness and ambiguity of their message. The author likens their disturbing effect to that exerted by an acutely manic patient. Speculating on his own precocious literary attempts, he identifies the rage and frustration underlying the need, at a crucial stage of adolescence, to break free from maternal bonds and discover the trickster in himself. Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe, and the French ‘auteur theory’ of cinema are all discussed in relation to the liminality that marks transitional periods or artistic crises.

More seriously, we are shown the transformative potential released by the trickster archetype, enabling one to fight some external evil or to emerge from a sterile state, precipitated perhaps by some loss, failure or betrayal, and gain a new perspective. Hamlet is examined energetically in this context, and seen as depicting the transition from a maternal to a paternal world, an act of disloyalty or ‘creative disobedience’ calculated to arouse in the spectator or reader ‘an intensity of voyeuristic participation’, a ‘totally questioning frame of mind’. Similarly, Henry James is shown as embarking on the intensely ambiguous theme of The Turn of the Screw immediately after the trauma of an ill-received play and as revealing in his novel, through the governess's paranoid projections, a betrayal of innocence that echoes personal experience—the terrifying destructive effect of a failure by the anima to integrate the trickster. By contrast Leonard