While Carl Jung’s teachings focused on the transformation of consciousness, Emily Dickinson defined her life and work with these words: “My business is circumference.”
Jung was only eleven years old when Dickinson died, and he probably never encountered her poetry, yet she put into metaphor key understandings that later became the foundation of Depth Psychology.
Commenting on many of Dickinson’s poems through a Jungian lens, this lecture will bring together the minds of two geniuses.
With an awareness of the unnamed Self, Dickinson wrote: “Alone I cannot be.”
Acknowledging the complexity of the psyche, we have from Dickinson such lines as:
“Our lives are Swiss—
The things we thought that we should do/ We other things have done
But since Myself – assault Me –/ How have I peace”
Both Dickinson and Jung were fascinated with the workings of the mind and of thought. They were both daring in their writings, perhaps mystics, intuitive, admired Jesus, rejected formal religion, read deeply, honored their solitude, and manifested their creative potential.
