Jungian Psychology and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Essay

As the Heart of swarthiness snakes its way into the savage follows of the African continent, Joseph Conrad exposes a psycho-geography of the incarnate unconscious in the entangling metaphoric realities of the serpentine Congo. Conrads novella descends into the unknowable darkness at the heart of Africa, taking its narrator, Marlow, on an underworld jaunt of individuation, a modern odyssey toward the center of the Self and the center of the Earth. Ego dissolves into thought as, in the interior, Marlow considers his double in the powerful image of ivory-obsessed Kurtz, the dark shadow of European imperialism. The dark meditation is graced by personifications of anima in Kurtz black goddess, the viciously magnificent consort of the underworld, and in his porcelain -skinned Persephone, innocent intended of the upperworld. Though Dr. Jungs discoveries were not known to Conrad, (Hayes, 43) who wrote this master work mingled with 1898 and 1899, Heart of Darkness presents a literary metaphor of Jungian psychology. This paper explores the dark rule of Conrads Heart of Darkness as metaphor for the Jungian concepts of the personalized and the collective unconscious, as a journey of individuation, a meeting with the anima, an encounter with the shadow, and a descent into the mythic underworld. Like Conrads Marlow, who is propelled toward his African essential despite ample warning and foreboding, I have been drawn beyond the classic analysis of the Heart of Darkness, embarking down an uncharted tributary, scouting parallels between Marlows tale and Jungs own journeys to Africa, and seeking murky sixth sense into the physical and the metaphorical impact of the dark continent on the row and the landscape of depth psychology. Africa,... ...Aniela Jaffe. New York Random House, 1989. Jung, C.G. Two Essays on analytical Psychology. R.F.C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton Princeton U. Press, 1977. Lord, George de Forest. Trials of the Self Heroic Ordeals in the E pic Tradition Hamden, Conn. Archon Books, 1983. McLynn, Frank. wagon of Darkness The European Exploration of Africa. New York Carol & Gey, 1992. Mellard, James. Myth and warning in Heart of Darkness, Tennessee Studies in Literature 13 (1968) 1-15. Miller, David. Hells and Holy Ghosts A Theopoetics of Christian Belief. Nashville Abingdon Press, 1989. Smith, Evans Lansing. Rape and Revelation The Descent to the Underworld in Modernism. Lanham, Maryland University Press of America, 1990. Spivack, Charlotte. The Journey to Hell Satan, The Shadow, and the Self. Centennial Review 94 (1965) 420 - 437.