The Failure Of Self-Cure:the Pursuit Of The Individuation In Absalom,Absalom!

The thesis is devoted to analyzing William Faulkner's characterization in Absalom,Absalom! and interpret it mainly from Jungian theory.Based on his theory,characters can be read in such framework of those Jungian analytical psychological concepts as the persona,the shadow,and the individuation.Bewildered in their anamneses,these characters afflicted by their mental disorders raise their voices filled with tragic loss and yearning for deliverance.To treat the traumas,figures in the work strive for their own self-completion and anchor their hope on the therapy through external or internal intervention.But in the context of history and culture in that time,what they want to solve is turned into a fairly intractable enigma full of contradictions against that specific background of the nineteenth-and-twentieth-century American South.This thesis is comprised of five main parts.The introduction is designed to present the current researches on Absalom,Absalom! abroad and at home and the main ideas about it.Further,it will explain the motivation and possible value of analyzing the novel using Jungian psychological theory.The first chapter aims to have a close look at the psychiatric disorders afflicting the main characters.Here,obsessive-compulsive disorder,depressive disorder and bipolar disorder are viewed as the main performances of their psychological disorders.With the intention of interpreting these mental symptoms for clarity,each of them will be expounded focusing on one representative role.The second chapter is to analyze the characters' main attempts of actualizing the self-completion to appease the pain and disorder tormenting them all the time.They do it mainly with the methods of external and internal therapy.Both methods are complementary opposites,but the latter carries more weight in the process of self-completion.As the names imply,external therapy is one method of external intervention by which the characters expect to gain access to the self-completion.The Civil War as a typical matter is given more attention in the part,for most impressively and dramatically,each of them,though with different anamneses,chooses to take bets on the war to serve each other's intentions.And internal therapy concerns about a search of the unified self by their own inner adjustment.This very search for unity is actually the quest for the individuation,a key concept in Jung's personality development theory.The third chapter moves on to their therapy outcome and the causes of it.The result of all their attempts is a complete failure in their self-completion.Under the double-influence of inner world and social circumstances,these obscure people have no enough power to change much of their outside existent environment,which ought to make sense of the failure in the self-completion via the method of external therapy.But what is the reason for the failure in the individuation that can be realized from inside? What accounts for such a collective failure? As the individuation is a process in a spiral rising way,we can see clearly that the immediate cause of the failure is their indulgence in some fantasies too much that leads to a halt at some fixed point.Preoccupied by such idiohypnotism carrying them astray,the individuation can hardly be satisfied.Judged from the perspectives of culture and historical criticism,this failure in the individuation is not a coincidence.Behind the failure in the individuation,it is the society that bears the greatest responsibility.The keynote of the novel is not only the downfall of several families,but an elegy of an age beyond the limit of individuality.Therefore,personal struggle for the individuation is doomed from the start if only one is living in the time.In the conclusion a brief summary is presented,followed by some reflections on this paper and the possible further research on this area.By the devices of Jungian psychology,the paper attempts to fathom characters' inner world in depth,which carries significant meanings to find underlying interactions between personal psychology and social dominant ideologies.In such a research,it is helpful to look into individual-society dialectical relations,which I hope will be conducive to society's reflection on itself and individuals' figure-oriented self-adjustment on his or her personality connotation.