Why are Jungians Writing Novels (doing art)?

 A conversation with Erik Goodwyn, Frank N. McMillan and Susan Rowland and the audience. Moderated by Ipek Burnett

While novelists such as James Joyce, H.D., Herman Hesse, Doris Lessing, Saul Bellow etc. produced fiction influenced by C. G. Jung, today Jungians are writing novels. Why?

Is it because clinical Jungians can put into the novel what is hard to express in case studies? Or might it be a desire to learn from the creative range of Jung’s Collected Works? After all, texts such as Aion and Answer to Job, become nonfiction novels in explorations of narrative symbolism.

Or are Jungians writing novels because of the process even more than the product? Might the act of writing a novel in some way resemble a clinical session in the embrace of spontaneous imagery, practices resembling Jung’s active imagination, respect for what wants to come through and the capacity to embrace synchronicities?

G. Jung never published his own picaresque novel, The Red Book, citing ethical questions about art. It is true that work with persons brings in considerations that do not apply to fiction.

However, Jungian artists also have ethical relationships with autonomous psychic images and the archetypal energies of the imagination. Moreover we are ethical in producing artwork, something in dialogue with the world beyond ourselves. Art has ethical frameworks and just perhaps, Jungian novels are doing therapy with the world.

We three Jungian novelists invite the audience to join our debate about Jungian novels, and if desired, to open the discussion to other art forms. Although we will mention our books at the end, this seminar will not be a series of presentations but rather an exploration between us, our moderator, Robin McCoy Brooks and YOU.

About the Novelists:

Erik Goodwyn is a psychiatrist who has listened to the dreams and fantasies of suffering people from in both military and civilian settings.

He is a veteran and a scholar published in anthropology, dream analysis, mythology, ritual, philosophy, and archetypal psychology. He has been invited to give lectures in Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and all over the United States. His passion is the imagination in all its manifestations, which is why he is also an author of fantasy fiction.

He feels the symbolic and fantastical imagery of the imagination is the only way to depict some of the most important and mysterious truths of the human soul, as depicted in his Raven’s Tale series.

Frank N. McMillan is an award-winning author, educator, and speaker. He has taught physical and cultural geography at the college level for over 30 years.

An Honorary Member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), he founded the McMillan Institute for Jungian Studies in Houston, Texas, and is a co-founder of Academy of Imagination Inc, a Silicon Valley startup. He currently serves as a trustee for Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and the Jung Center in Houston.

His novel The Young Healer won the 2012 National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) Foundation’s Children’s Book of the Year contest and was a 2015 Mark Twain Readers Award finalist.

Released in 2018, his thriller The Lost Girls is set in the dark underworld of human trafficking. His nonfiction work Finding Jung is a rich and deep exploration of one man’s personal encounter with the objective psyche. And it all began with a dream lion that came in the night.

Susan Rowland was the founding Chair of IAJS and has taught at Pacifica Graduate Institute since 2010. She is author of books on Jung, gender and the arts including Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002) and with Joel Weishaus, Jungian Arts-Based Research and the Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico (2021).

Susan uses Jungian art practice to explore feminine heroism, trauma, and the climate emergency through writing the Mary Wandwalker mystery series. The Sacred Well Murders (2022) followed by The Alchemy Fire Murder in 2023, linking alchemy, America and wildfires. Murder on Family Grounds was published in 2024 with The Swan Lake Murders due in 2025.