Thesis - 2011

THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHETYPES: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

Alexandre Schmitt

Advisor: Prof. Dr. Liliana Liviano Wahba
Key words:Jungian Psychology; Cognitive Linguistics; archetype; symbol; conceptual metaphor.

Abstract:The objective of this study is to review some of the main concepts of Jungian Psychology from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, using, specially, the image schemas theory, the conceptual metaphor theory, the conceptual metonymy theory and the conceptual blending theory, and to introduce Cognitive Linguistics as a field of study that can render important theoretical and practical contributions to Jungian Psychology. Organized in ten chapters, the study begins with a brief introduction where a revision of the Jungian and the psychoanalytic literatures that make reference to concepts from Cognitive Linguistics is made, followed by a chapter that contains a concise historical introduction to Cognitive Linguistics where some of the assumptions of this field of research are exposed and compared to other theoretical approaches to linguistics. The third chapter introduces the concepts of Embodied Realism, embodied mind and Cognitive Unconscious, which support Cognitive Semantics’ ontology and epistemology and, in the fourth chapter, the Image Schemas Theory is exposed with an emphasis on its Kantian inspiration. The fifth chapter succinctly presents the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, including its integrated primary metaphor version, and some introductory aspects of the Conceptual Metonymy Theory. The following chapter introduces the Mental Spaces and the Conceptual Blending Theory. In the seventh chapter, a comparison between the Cognitive Semantics’ ontology and epistemology and its Jungian counterparts is made, including the concept of Cognitive Unconscious and the Jungian unconscious. In the eighth chapter, the equiparation made by Jean Knox (2005) between the Jungian concept of archetype and the Cognitive Linguistics’ concept of image schemas is analyzed. In the ninth chapter, the following Jungian concepts – sign, allegory, symbol, thought, reason and phantasy – are analyzed based on the theories presented in the previous chapters. Some of the conclusions of this analysis, presented in the last chapter of this thesis, are: (1) the opposition between consciousness and unconscious advocated  by Jung in most of his works is not so radical: there is always an unconscious and subliminal dimension in all concepts; (2) the division between directed thinking and undirected thinking as stipulated by Jung in 1911, when his Psychology of the Unconscious was published, cannot be sustained in the face of the researches and formulations of Cognitive Linguistics; (3) Cognitive Linguistics can offer to Jungian Psychology a theoretical basis for the formulation of an embodied theory of the symbol.