The Dark Enlightenment: Jung, Romanticism, and the Repressed Other

Enlightenment discourse is generally characterized by an over-identification with favorable aspects of the human psyche and the repression and projection of energies not circumscribed by its sense of selfhood. This psychic split is found in the Enlightenment’s positioning of itself against various others - nature, the body, woman, wilderness, irrationality, affect, uncertainty, chaos, the exotic, and the nonwestern - configurations of which are central to eighteenth-century alterity. The Enlightenment, however, did not recognize the other as a psychic projection of itself. Such a realization would not take place until the emergence of Romanticism, a movement that served not as a repudiation of the proceding historical period, as some scholars have argued, but as Enlightenment’s dialectical self-correction. Romanticism, as this study will demonstrate in Jungian terms, represents the beginnings of a complex, psychological resolution of the eighteenth century’s collective doubting of itself.