Modern Man's Conflict with His Collective Unconscious: A Psychoanalytical Study of Ford Madox Ford's Characters in The Good Soldier

With its publication in 1915, Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier (2002) unveils several layered visions of shifting attitudes of the modern era. It bears deep and intriguing commentary on the social and psychological situations during the period of transition when the world was heading toward the First World War. This article aims to undertake a study of this novel in terms of how it brings forth modern man’s psychological conflicts by effectively revealing the stark contrast between the characters’ social appearance and their internal desires. It intends to investigate the workings of personality archetypes that Ford’s characters unintentionally adopt in this novel with an exclusive theoretical underpinning of Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious and his Archetypes of personality. The study finds out how individuals suffer psychologically when society undergoes transitions and how it affects their social relationships. The purpose of this study is to highlight the fact that Ford’s characters are having unbalanced archetypes because of the deterioration and disillusionment prevailing in Pre-war modern society. It makes their personalities confused and to behave ambiguously and unconventionally, consequently causing their relationships to collapse and their lives to suffer.