earticle

영어

Herzog’s writing in Bellow’s Herzog can be considered as a healing process seen from Jung’s analytical psychology. According to Jung, there should be harmony between consciousness and the unconscious in the psyche. The ego of consciousness controls the realm of consciousness, but complexes and archetypes in the unconscious are beyond the ego’s control. Actually they are autonomous and energy-charged. No communication between these two causes nervous breakdown or insanity. One of the ways to keep harmony between consciousness and the unconscious is active imagination. Active imagination means that the ego falls down to the unconscious to encounter various archetypes, makes them images, and brings them to consciousness by writing or drawing. Moses Herzog, on the verge of nervous breakdown from getting divorced from Madeleine, his second wife, who had affairs with Gersbach, his closest friend, starts traveling to his unconscious by writing letters and notes. In his inner world, he encounters various fragments of emotion called archetypes that want to have their own images to go out to the conscious world. The archetypes he encounters are made images of Mother, Daisy, Madeleine, and Ramona. By writing numerous letters to many different people, he succeeds in reconciling his consciousness with the unconscious. The effective protagonist, Herzog, reflects Saul Bellow’s ego according to Jung’s analytical psychology. Therefore, Herzog’s writing as a healing process is eventually Bellow’s. His writing is strategy to recover the unbalanced relationship between his consciousness and the unconscious.