“Generativity versus Stagnation”: Midlife Crisis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

This paper discusses midlife crisis as a driving force behind the thought and action of the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The whole novel contains a diary written by the English butler Stevens who relates his history of servitude at Darlington Hall and concludes with some revelations about the true nature of his past. Since the butler’s account gives hints to his concern for the extent of his achievement in life, his reassessing act of delving into the past can be taken as an attempt to resolve midlife crisis. Being the seventh stage of Erik Erikson’s developmental psychology, midlife crisis is primarily characterized by the binary “generativity versus stagnation” and the subject’s struggle to decide on the meaning of life. Occurring between 40 and 65, midlife crisis is stimulated by the reconsideration of social demands such as career and marriage. Applying this psychoanalytic approach to Stevens’ experience of midlife crisis, the present research investigates the place of Lord Darlington and Miss Kenton, the former Stevens’ employer and the latter his only love object, as embodiments of the social demands of career and marriage that the butler reviews in his midlife stage. Ultimately, this research discusses the butler’s success in resolving midlife crisis by considering the individuation process, namely self-awareness, self-actualization, and the caring power the protagonist goes through. Keywords: Ishiguro, Erikson, Midlife Crisis, Generativity, Stagnation, Individuation.

Care and Carelessness in the Anthropocene

This article proposes dividing Bernard Stiegler's work into three phases, and that a notion of care develops and deepens as these phases progress. To each of these phases there corresponds a particular relationship to Heidegger's thought: 1) the Heidegger of Being and Time who denies the role of technics in the opening of the possibility of authentic time; 2) as a thinker of the “they” who corrects Simondon's inability to think collective disindividuation while being himself unable to think a genuine collective individuation process; 3) the later Heidegger who indeed approaches the most mysterious and unsettling aspect of tekhnē and who foresees the most threatening aspect of Gestell as a world in which Dasein loses its privilege as the questioning being. Yet this third Heidegger also failed to reflect on what Stiegler puts at the heart of the thought of his third phase: the question of entropy, understood as describing fundamental but diverse thermodynamic, biological, and informational tendencies. For Stiegler, taking care in the Anthropocene necessarily entails reinscribing philosophical concepts, including that of Ereignis, in relation to entropy, anthropy, and the struggle against them. Beyond Heidegger, this also entails addressing the obsolescence and self-destructiveness of the current macroeconomic model.

Individuation in The Seventh Day of Creation: A Jungian Analysis

Jung's individuation process is associated with the shadow, anima, self, sage, and persona archetypes, during which the protagonist achieves self-discovery and self-awareness. Abdel Khaliq al-Rikabi’s The Seventh Day of Creation is one of the most popular Arabic novels in the twentieth century which has postmodern techniques including polyphony and time travel to present two main distinct narratives. If these intertwined narratives are considered separately, one can detect therein the archetypes informing Jung's idea of individuation. Most notably, the function of these archetypes in advancing the author's goal, which is a kind of self-discovery and creation of the novel, could be recognized in the novel’s first narrative, namely, Kitab al-Kotob (Sirah al-Zatiyeh). The psychological analysis of this narrative shows that the author encounters unconscious archetypal elements such as shadow, anima, and sage; toward the end of the process of individuation, he becomes aware of how the form and content of the narrative are created. The first story is Sirah al-Zatiyeh which presents the process of self-discovery of the author himself, undergoes the process of individuation in order to collect the manuscripts of Rawouq. In a three-step process, the novel’s protagonist sets out on a symbolic journey to know himself and achieve self-discovery, after encountering the archetypes of the shadow (Badr and the poet), the anima (Warqa), and the sage (Shabib).

The Heroine’s Journey towards Wholeness as seen in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

This study discusses the psychological journey of the female heroine in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. This paper applies the psychological approach since it is believed to be the most suitable approach to analyze the process of the heroine’s journey towards wholeness. It examines the process of individuation in the main plot of the novel and the characteristics of the process on the heroine’s personal quest. The portrayal of the individuation process is identified through the theory of individuation proposed by Charles Gustav Jung which discusses the process of the individual’s development towards psychological completeness. In order to support the analysis, library research was conducted using the novel as well as the supporting articles from any reliable websites. The result shows that the heroine’s journey can be translated as Jungian’s theory of individuation as there are six characteristics of the process of individuation found within the story. Furthermore, five stages occurred in the heroine’s journey, namely the recognition of the persona, the assimilation with the shadow, the confrontation with the animus, and lastly the appearance of the Self that leads the heroine towards psychological wholeness.

Archetypal analysis of “Cinderella”

Psychologists often use the name of the protagonist of the fairy tale “Cinderella”, which is famous thanks to the brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, for a sacrificial girl prone to dissociation, illusions, and waiting for a prince. This is typical for psychoanalysis. However, such an idea of Cinderella’s character does not fully reflect the essence of the matter. Moreover, it is generally not true. From the perspective of C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology, Cinderella is not a victim or an infantile dreamer and is not a real girl at all. Any tale represents an archetypal process of individuation. This is a collective natural constant of the psyche that excludes individual problems. Cinderella cultivated in herself what the ancient Greeks called “paideia” – the integrity of the personality and inner strength, influence on others. The purpose of the article is to describe the process of Cinderella’s individualization from the position of C.G. Jung’s archetypal approach based on the amplification method. The most relevant sources of recent years on the archetypal analysis of fairy tales are the works by M.-L. von Franz, H. Dieckmann, and C.P. Estés. The novelty of the study consists in the description and analysis of the archetypal images of the collective unconscious, which underlie the process of Cinderella’s individuation and determine her life path. These archetypal images are Persona, Self, Shadow, Anima/Animus, and the symbolic levels of the individuation process can be represented by such alchemical terms as “separation”, “multiplication”, “calcination”, “initiation”, “transformation”, “conjunction”, “solidification”. The levels testify to the character’s inner transformation and, as a result, lead to a happy woman’s destiny. The result of understanding the deep essence of the tale is a psychologist’s analytical work with modern young women, which will lead to positive changes in thinking and behavior.

A Clinical Case Study on the Developmental Process of Addictive Behaviors from a Psychological Perspective: Proposal of Early Prevention Probability

This article aimed at building a comprehensive hypothesis on the origin and developmental process of addictive behaviors based on facts obtained from the author’s clinical experience. A woman with a variety of addictive behaviors was introduced as an instance. Not only childhood adversity which contribution already had been proven in the development of addiction, the author also focused on psycho-social obstruction during adolescence, more specifically, that of constructing peer relationships as well as that of renewing the relationship with parents crucial for passing through the second individuation process (Blos, 1967). Furthermore, how the obstruction related to the adversity during early life was discussed. At the end of the article, reference was made to possible benefits in adulthood brought about by intervening with adolescents who are at high risk of addictive behaviors.