Abstract

The concepts of postmodernism and the experience of living in the age of postmodernity have engendered in many North Americans today feelings of alienation, emptiness, and nihilism. This dissertation examines the effects of postmodernism on contemporary psychological concepts of the self and argues that a Jungian and archetypal understanding of the self, read hermeneutically and with the aid of a postmodern lens, could provide a meaningful framework for many whose values and belief systems have crumbled. ;In their quest to think what philosophy has left unthought, postmodern writers attempt to wrestle with the truly radical other. I argue that this other is similar to that which preoccupied Jung in his investigation of the collective unconscious and the objective psyche, and that these concepts have profound significance for bridging the subject-object divide and for healing the nihilism inherent in Western metaphysics and the modern scientific paradigm. ;Jung was marginalized from mainstream psychology precisely because there was no adequate paradigm through which to understand him. It is possible for Jung to be heard by a wider audience in the field of psychology today because much of his work is better understood viewed through a postmodern lens and also because certain contemporary theories of personality development are so much in line with Jung's own. ;This dissertation compares, in particular, Jung's theories of evolutionary consciousness with Kegan's work on adult stage development and shows how Kegan's insights on the struggle to move from what he calls a stage 4 level of consciousness, which he associates with modernism, to a stage 5 level of consciousness, which he associates with postmodernism, has components which are strikingly similar to Jung's concept of individuation. Kegan suggests that we are being forced to be postmodern before we are psychologically ready and that there is yet no adequate holding environment to help us smoothly through the transition. I argue that Jung's psychology of the self, which transcends the human ego and builds a bridge to the other, may provide that holding environment