Henry Thoreau and Carl Jung: More Day to Dawn

Abstract

My thesis investigates Thoreau from a Jungian perspective, concentrating primarily on Walden, with additional analysis of Thoreau’s biography and A Week On the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. I apply Jung’s concept of archetypes (specifically, the Anima, Shadow, and Self archetypes) to the self-made American mythos that Thoreau intended to establish, using as a starting point the popular trope of Thoreau as an --Y΄American romantic‘ in order to investigate the intersection of American transcend-entalism and Jungian therapy, in which one seeks to arrive at a true sense of Jungian Self. Overall, this work seeks to re-contextualize Thoreau’s psychology, following his account of his own transcendence and processing it in terms of Jung’s depth psychologyspecifically, linking the Jungian concept of individuating into a true sense of Self.