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The present volume is like a marvellous miniature depicting one of the open courts that the pioneers of depth psychology used to hold. Beautifully preserved and presented to us anew through the museum-quality literary curating of Craig Stephenson, it is also an example of what the Philemon Series is able to produce through Princeton University Press to supplement what we already have in the Collected Works. Jung's lecture on the French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval , which until now existed only as a one-paragraph abstract in CW 18, The Symbolic Life, is an arresting demonstration of why a symbolic life is both necessary and desirable, so long as the symbol is genuinely connected to the life.
The theme of Jung's essay is how urgently the psyche of a creative person, when confronting the energy of unconscious imagination, seeks to achieve a newfound equilibrium. His subject in short is the psychology of the artist. Jung's craft and empathy in working psychologically with a text that applies the transcendent function for aesthetic effect is impressive; there is an irony in the layering of Jung's creative powers over Nerval's that is not lost on Jung.
Aurélia, the final, visionary text left by Nerval on his own body when he committed suicide at the age of 46, begins with the thrilling pronouncement, ‘Dream is a second life'. Though understandably unwilling to sacrifice his status as an artist contemplating the beautiful logic of unconscious processes, Nerval claims in Aurélia to be exploring dreams that have helped him to recover from a psychiatric illness that required hospitalization. The artist tells us that these dreams have arisen in the midst of a personal romantic drama, one that we discover is already studded with evidence of obsession and delusion. We also learn that the poet had done something in that drama, breaking faith in some way with his beloved, that has caused him to suffer overwhelming guilt.
As he did when analyzing the fantasies of Miss Miller, Jung