If archetypes are patterns, the obvious question is: patterns of what?
January 16, 2021
Hunting archetypes
16January
AuthorLeif Frenzel
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology. His recent interest is Jungian psychology, especially synchronicities and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.
January 9, 2021
Chorismos troubles
09January
Several of my difficulties in understanding the supposed “psychological relativity” of time and space had to do with the weird nature of the collective unconsciousness, as Jung conceives of it. Let’s catch up with some of that.
January 2, 2021
Is psychological time relative? (And if so, then to what?)
02January
In the synchronicities essay Jung refers us to his earlier article on "Der Geist der Psychologie." He states that there he has “presented synchronicity as a psychically conditioned relativity of space and time”. What does that even mean?
December 26, 2020
The hypocritical mirror-critic
26December
Returning from his year-long stay on a Greek island, the protagonist of The Magus makes an intermediate stop in Rome. But he compares his impressions unfavorably with those he had in that other Mediterranean world: The sun shone as certainly, the people were far more elegant, the architecture and the art much richer, but it was as if the Italians, like their Roman ancestors, wore a great mask of...
December 19, 2020
Alexandria, spacetime, and the nature of mystery
19December
The architecture of Durrell’s "Alexandria" tetralogy is constructed in analogy to the idea of four-dimensional spacetime in the theory of relativity. Durrell calls this “the relativity proposition”. How does this work in terms of plot layout?
December 12, 2020
The misclassification of experience
12December
What is the difference between mysticism and empiricism?
December 5, 2020
Death: walking into the mirror
05December
There is a rather special use of mirror imagery in Justine, when Durrell’s narrator reflects on his last conversation with the writer Pursewarden (which had taken place immediately before the latter committed suicide). The fact that this was our last meeting has invested it, in retrospect, with a significance which surely it cannot have possessed. Nor, for the purposes of this writing, has he...
November 28, 2020
Meeting in the mirror
28November
We have already seen two roles that mirrors play in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet: they indicate a certain self-awareness (a ‘reflectiveness’, we might say with a somewhat tired pun) in a character, and they expose a distance, even separation between their inner worlds when they interact. In other words, Durrell has his characters perceive things in mirrors (or ‘as’ in mirrors) when he wants to...
November 21, 2020
Things that happen in the mirror
21November
‘Mirror’ is one of Durrell’s words; mirrors are one of his images: they appear throughout the Alexandria tetralogy, in various functions. 1. When the narrator’s relationship with Melissa starts, her previous lover is jealous (to the point of following him around with a pistol in his coat). The two men fall into a pattern of staring and ignoring each other when they meet. But then something...
November 14, 2020
Mirrors: metaphors of self-awareness
14November
When reading a book that uses poetic language, we might stumble from time to time over a sentence: though inconspicuous at first, still something about the metaphor seems not quite right. And closer inspection can then reveal a surprisingly deep idea behind a simple choice of phrase.