“Desindividuation” in Blake’s “A Poison Tree”: A Jungian Perspective

Abstract

According to the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, literature, like dreams and myths, could be an outlet for the unconscious drives—personal and collective. William Blake’s “A Poison Tree” is a case in point. The incidents in the poem, aesthetically, uncover a range of dynamic factors that constitute human inner personality such as Shadow, Persona, Trickster, Anima and Animus. According to Jung, these archetypes ought to be realized by the ego—the conscious part of the psyche. Only then, a person could reach a state of wholeness and self-realization—“individuation”. To give the reader an insight into the value of this psychic harmony and balance, the poem, paradoxically, performs a mental situation in which the psyche undergoes a state of “des-individuation”, wherein the ego is weak, unbalanced and driven by autonomous energies. The study, however, through the analysis of the metaphoric and symbolic structure of the poem, will demonstrate, as Jung believes, that the psyche is not static; its paradoxical mechanisms could, yet, interplay and reach a synthesizing phase.