For those persuaded of having had their consciousness informed by unconscious psyche through dreams, symptoms, emotions, complexes, visions, ideas, and who thereby have opened to Jung’s ideas about psyche, Dr. Martinez offers a literary way to make a life’s path of seeking understanding of psyche.

A student of imaginative literature, which Jung claims manifests unconscious psyche to compensate collective limited perspectives, Dr. Martinez began by writing a series of articles suggesting how to escape ego readings in order to read to discover the interactions of unconscious psyche and consciousness. She focused on works manifesting a developing self (Radclyffe Hall’s fictions, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), shadow integration (personal and collective, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”), and numinosity. She then began to focus on stuck places in collective psychology. Using Jung’s ideas about unconscious psyche, her subjects included the legacy of vengeance (The Oedipus plays), a mother complex rooted in the helplessness of slavery (Toni Morrison’s Beloved), the survival function of collective unconsciousness (Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,”) an individualistic shadow of the American Dream (Herman Melville’s Moby Dick) and the power of the imagination to enable experiencing life in matter deadened by materialistic culture (Isak Dinesen’s “The Blue Stones”). While pursuing this scholarly writing seeking to offer readers a way to read for psyche, Dr. Martinez also wrote poems, her own writing gift from unconscious psyche. In this presentation, she will synthesize her scholarship and poems.