Reviewed by Aline Soules
The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis Through Metaphor
by Regina Colonia-Willner
Lexington Books
August 2024, Gardcover, 150 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1666944457
“In creation you are created.” These words by Carl Jung appear on the cover, as a sub-title on the title page, and as a heading for Chapter 2, where Willner writes that Verena Kast chose that same phrase as a title for a seminar she teaches at the C.G. Jung Institut in Küsnacht, Switzerland. In that chapter, too, Colonia-Willner quotes the phrase, “A metaphor represents a powerful creative impulse,” from A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, another way she stresses the universality of metaphor.
In the Preface, in Chapter 1, and again in Chapter 9, “Concluding Comments,” the author gives the book’s six “core messages and key takeaways,” too long to quote in a review, but worthy of the reader’s attention. The essence of these is the importance of metaphor in both poetry and psychoanalysis; however, metaphor ranges beyond that, and Colonia-Willner offers extensive examples from both fields to illustrate her points.
In her first chapter, she refers to metaphor as “the threshold of consciousness,” explaining that “the use of metaphor goes back to the beginning of human thought.” She offers “recent” examples, e.g. from the epic of Gilgamesh, and speaks of visual metaphor, e.g., the cave paintings at Lascaux.
In chapter 3, she centers on the Incas, how they grouped constellations into “luminous” and “dark,” how they focused “on the darkness between the stars and named the shapes they discerned there, which they believed were alive.” She believes they represent “opposites in the personal and collective unconscious.” The Incas viewed the sky as a “life-giving river where the shadows of foxes, toads, partridges, and serpents come to drink.” Colonia-Willner references fairy tales in this chapter as well, although she devotes chapter 6 entirely to this subject.
In the next chapter, Colonia-Willner speaks of the power of images, explaining how metaphor can encompass opposites and is always a combination of abstract and concrete and other opposites. Jung considered the image as “a condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole, and not merely, or even predominantly, of unconscious contents pure and simple.” In the sub-section on “astonishment and imagination,” she quotes Wisława Szymborska, who described poems as “not parades of the known but rather failed attempts at knowing.” There is a psychoanalytic aspect to this belief in searching and exploring the unknown about the self or humans or the world at large.
In chapter 5, Colonia-Willner speaks of poetry as a “healing resource.” Szymborka’s view from the previous chapter leads into that sense of and purpose for poetry. Jung acknowledged the role of poets in his Poetry and Collective Unconscious, believing that poets “are always the first to divine the darkly moving mysterious currents and to express them, as best they can, in symbols that speak to us.” In other words, metaphor. In this chapter, she quotes Bly and Sze and Bass, among others, but she also devotes a sub-section to “music, rhythm, embodiment,” quoting Miles Davis: “It takes a long time to learn how to play like yourself.” Again, the search for self.
Chapter 6, the longest chapter, is devoted to “metaphor and individuation in fairy tales,” although the main title is “The Green Sandal of Cinderella.” While a full sub-section is devoted to an interpretation of Cinderella as “a story of feminine individuation,” if there was any doubt about the universality of metaphor, it is laid to rest in this chapter, which explores the conscious (the tales, orally or on the page) and the unconscious (the dreams). The universality is also reflected in the global nature of fairy tales, although this chapter focuses on German tales more than on any other culture’s lore.
In chapters 7 and 8, the author focuses more on analysis, both “groundbreaking neuroscience” and her “own practice,” although there are still some references to poets.
She then offers her “Concluding Comments,” ending with her own poem, “Wild Beauty,” originally published in The Cortland Review.
The connection between poetry and Jungian analysis is clearly presented; however, a reader would be justified in coming away from this book with two ideas: that the book is aimed more at psychoanalysts, not poets, despite the extensive references to poets’ thoughts and citations from their work, and that the link between poetry and Jungian analysis is less a link and more a continuous flow, as they infuse each other. At the risk of using a metaphor in this review, it is like positioning oneself at the mouth of a river where the tide flows in and out and the fresh and salt waters are in continuous exchange.
About the reviewer: Aline Soules’ poetry, fiction, and book reviews have appeared in Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, and others. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and also has her MA in English and MSLS in Library Science. Online: https://alinesoules.com