Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Carl Jung's Principle of Opposites

Carl Jung was a pioneer of psychoanalytic theory along with his former partner and mentor, Sigmund Freud. Though Jung split from Freud and diverged onto his own unbeaten trail of psychoanalysis two years before his decease, they are both highly revered for the myriad of ways in which they developed the understanding of the mind. Parallel to this period, Joseph Conrad penned and published the novella Heart of Darkness, which tackled much of what Jung had found about the psyche and its inner workings. In Heart of Darkness, both Marlow and Kurtz are representations of strong reoccurring archetypes within human myth, religion, and folklore. They work together to epitomize one of Jung’s Cores of Personality: the Principle of Opposites. The Principle of Opposites states that both sides of opposite pairs—good and bad, light and dark, joy and despair, et cetera—are present to complete the other. In this way, Marlow and Kurtz are opposite replications of each other in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; they are doppelgängers that complete each other, as in Jungian theory.

Marlow is the raconteur of Heart of Darkness, and therefore is one of the more crucial characters within the plot. He embodies the willingness to be valiant, resilient, and gallant, while similarly seeming to be cautiously revolutionary. He is, seemingly the epitome of bravery, going into the jungle. Marlow’s voyage is, in essence, a “night journey into the unconscious, the confrontation with an entity within the self” (Guerard 38). The ominous coast is an allegory for the idea of the unconscious mind. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship […] there it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering” (1...

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...Works Cited

Burke, Colleen. "Colleen Burke - Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - A Metaphor Of Jungian Psychology." 15 Nov. 2011. .

Conrad, Joseph, and Paul B. Armstrong. Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006.

Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard U. Press, 1958.

Hughs, Richard E. The Lively Image: Four Myths in Literature. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1975.

Jung, C. G. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1., 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 54-72).

Lord, George de Forest. Trials of the Self: Heroic Ordeals in the Epic Tradition Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1983.

Spivack, Charlotte. "The Journey to Hell: Satan, The Shadow, and the Self." Centennial Review 9:4 (1965): 420 - 437.