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Although the Demontange Saga is fiction, St. Lucia is a real place with a wonderful story of its own. We are psychotherapists with an intimate knowledge of psychological processes and motivations. The columns in this section provide insight into the settings, culture and characters in our works as well as perceptions about the writing process... We want to share this material and our perceptions with other authors but believe that many of our readers will find these columns of interest as well.
Recently we took back all our rights to A Dream Across Time and are now self publishing the Demontagne Saga. It is very gratifying to have the entire publishing process under our control.
If you would like to see what we have been up to and to see some of what we are dealing with as we move to self publish, go to our blog at http://letmedigress.blogspot.com. We want it to be interactive so join in. The columns from the Author to Author section will also appear in the blog.
At the end of the latest column, you'll find clicks for past columns.
Column 20
Carl Jung's Concepts in the Demontagne Saga
When I was in graduate school I was taught that the development of intellectual abilities ended some time before the twentieth birthday. There was a leveling off of intellectual development at around age 18 and abilities remained reasonably stable until there were age related declines late in life. It was also assumed that the achievement of adult status meant that there was little in the way of development in general.
We now know that maturation of the brain goes on much longer with development of the executive function in the frontal cortex going on until at least the mid twenties. Overall, there has been little work on adult development. It was as if we became an adult and that was that. There were a few people who did a little work on adult stages and development but there was very little interest because it had been declared that there was nothing to study.
Of course, if there had been more interest in the work of Carl Jung, there might have been wider study of personality development during adulthood. And, we must not forget that Gail Sheehy completely stole the show from psychology and psychiatry in her amazing book, Passages. She wrote about adult stages of life. I won't go into her wonderful work. You can almost surely still find it at the library and it will probably speak a great deal to you about how life changes as you go through adulthood.
As to Jung, he did not believe that human personality development ever ceased. Or if it did, it required analytic intervention by a skilled professional because the cessation was highly problematic.
Jung believed that in our early years we develop a primary personality function which is, in a sense, our own guiding principle. We then enhance it with an auxiliary function. There is a further organizing principle seen in attitudes which are introversion or extraversion. These functions, auxiliaries and attitudes are called types because the type which a person is is much more important than how much of that type the person exhibits.
The complexity of this system is beyond what we can go into here. But Jung conceptualizes our personality as being organized like a wheel with a line through the middle which denotes the separation between the conscious and the unconscious. Our job as adults is to raise more and more of this wheel into consciousness so that we may become increasingly whole in relating to the world. The intuitive dreamer comes to appreciate ordinary reality. The rigid person who believes in thought and systems only comes to appreciate the richness of feelings. The shy introvert becomes more skilled in social settings.
As the wheel rises it brings with it other attributes such as the relatively undifferentiated woman who dwells deep in a man (his anima) and the undifferentiated man who dwells deep in a woman ( her animus).
How do we apply these to the Demontagne Saga. Remember that in A Dream Across Time Jamie tends to be spacey and gets lost in her art. Over time, in her adult life, she becomes a consummate businesswoman. Her wheel is rising and she now has control of her intuitive artistic self and her more "reality" oriented business self becomes organized. Andre begins from a business and financial orientation and what Jamie seeks is the development of his intuitive side and his feeling commitment.
In A Circle of Dreams we come to know Jamie’s daughter, Lissa. What is striking about her is that at an early age she appears to have unusual access to all parts of her personality. Her sister, Yvie, has more difficulty precisely because she cannot seem to gain full command of her primary personality function. Each child has their own problem to solve. Lissa is burdened by too much too soon and Yvie is burdened by not enough soon enough.
Jung also brings to our attention universals he found in mythology. In both books we see the display of the archetypes of the Wise Old Man (Marcus), the Earth Mother (Bertille) and the tree of life where the children develop (Father Samaan). By the way, don=t expect us to be able to explain all the symbolism in our books. We are intuitive types and are often clueless as to what is going on. It just happens to us. But we actually get the books finished because we have auxiliary functions.
Enter Hans Friendrich in A Circle of Dreams. He is a Jungian analyst and scholar who helps to bring some order to the developing chaos. He brings his wisdom and tools including use of mandalas to enlighten Jamie, Andre and us. I will leave a fuller explanation of what he does to his column.
These comments provide a sampling of how Carl Jung’s insights into mythology illuminate the meaning of our books. How you view their presence in the books is revealing of your personality type. If you think we began with his systems and then developed the story and the characters you would reveal a strong thinking type orientation. You work from a system. In fact, as I said, we are intuitive types and so the story materializes and takes on a life of its own. Later on we figure out what components may have fed into the development of the work.
Ain't it fun? Isn't human diversity and complexity wonderful?
Past Columns
Column 1 - St. Lucia
Column 2 - Jamie Elliott
Column 3 - Andre Demontagne
Column 4 - Paul and Danielle
Column 5 - Marcus Deroche
Column 6 - Bertille Deroche
Column 7 - What It's Like Living in the Tropics, Part 1
Column 8 - What It's Like Living in the Tropics, Part 2
Column 9 - Taylor, Clarisse and Barbara
Column 10 - How Does Our Writing Partnership Work?
Column 11 - Goal, Motivation, Conflict and Creativity
Column 12 - Family Life is a Saga
Column 13 - Toward A Circle of Dreams; I don't believe in ghosts.
Column 14 - A Book Walked in the Door
Column 15 - Every Woman Knows This Story
Column 16 - The Bridge
Column 17 - Why the Mystical Element in A Dream Across Time?
Column 18 - Gaia and myth in the Demontagne Saga
Column 19 - Carl Jung, Mythology and the Demontagne Saga
Column 20 - Carl Jung's Concepts in the Demontagne Saga
Column 21 - Martinique
Column 22 – Janine-Yvette Demontange (Yvie)
Column 23 – Anne-Clarisse Demontagne (Lissa)
Column 24 - Philippe Diamant Demontagne (Philippe)
Copyright© 1987-2006 Annie Rogers LLC dba Bivens and Jensen Publishing. All rights reserved |
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