Joyce and Jung: The Four Stages of Eroticism in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce and Jung offers a provocatively original chapter-by-chapter analysis of Stephen Dedalus’ psychosexual growth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The author frames this within the Jungian soul-portrait gallery known as the four stages of eroticism in which Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia are the soul-portraits of Western civilization, drawing the collective eros into the psychic field to be witnessed as universal spectacle. In James Joyce’s twentieth-century classic, Stephen’s soul-portraits are the mother, the prostitute, the Virgin Mary, and the Bird-Girl.