Senioris visio: C. G. Jung’s Refiguration of Philemon

Abstract

Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book (2009) is a literary record of a period of self-experimentation Jung carried out between 1913 and 1916 by means of a technique he would later call ‘active imagination’: Jung would allow himself to ‘drop’ into a fantasizing state and then observe the images that emerged from the unconscious. If he happened to encounter a talking figure, he would try and interact with them. One of such figures was Philemon, an intriguing reinvention of the models from both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Goethe’s Faust. Jung’s refiguration of Philemon illustrates Jung’s engagement not only with these two works, but also with late antique magical, alchemical and Hermetic writings, as well as classical scholarship dedicated to them. Even though it is widely recognized that Philemon played a central role in Jung’s psychological formulations after his break from Freud in 1912, this figure seems to have received no sustained attention in the scholarship on the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in depth psychology. This article offers an investigation of how Jung’s refiguration of Philemon relates both to Jung’s psychological research prior to his first encounter with this character and to the path it followed after this encounter took place with regard to the archetype of the ‘wise old man’.