Reply to Susan Rowland

Susan Rowland and I began publicly discussing Jung's essay on ‘Archaic man‘1 (Jung 1970a, paras. 104-47) at the IAJS (International Association for Jungian Studies) conference of July 2006 at the University of Greenwich, and we continued our discussion on the IAJS website. I appreciate her willingness to respond in print to my interpretation of the essay.

To begin with, I do not see how Rowland is interpreting the essay in terms other than those of authorial intent. After all, she is continually seeking to figure out what Jung means to be saying. Even if ‘Jung is quite capable of adopting “other” authorial personas than the Christian logos’, each of those personas is, for her, still intended.

In the history of modern literary criticism, which I daresay Rowland knows better than I, authorial intent was what the New Critics of the 1940's and 1950's opposed. The identification of the meaning of a work with its author's intent was pronounced an outright fallacy by New Critics William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their 1946 essay ‘The intentional fallacy’. The shift of focus away from the author peaked in the 1970's and 1980's with the reader-response criticism of Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes, Wolfgang Iser, and the Freudian Norman Holland. The authority of the reader replaced that of the author.

But how ‘reader-oriented’ is Rowland's own approach? While she maintains that ‘the reader is the necessary other person in its [the essay's] exchange of ideas and secreting of meaning’, surely the inclusion of the reader is, for her, Jung's intent. The reader is expected to get, not to set, Jung's meaning. When Rowland asserts that Jung's ‘aim is to get the reader to acknowledge the historical and archaic in him/herself’, she is clearly analysing the essay according to its author's purported intent.

There are three possible ways in which a reader can be involved. In the tamest sense the reader is the intended audience of Jung's essay. But every author involves the reader to this