Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) September 8, 2024: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University.
I have taken various hints from Ong's work in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" in the carefully organized anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (1991, pp. 194-209).
In it, I take certain hints from Ong and discuss the brilliant Jungian Erich Neumann (1905-1960) who published a marvelous synthesis of Jung's wide-ranging work in his big book The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated by R. F. C. Hull, with a "Foreword" by Jung (1954). I first heard of Neumann's book from Dr. Raymond Benoit in a graduate course in English that I took from him at Saint Louis University. Subsequently, I read Neumann's book. I have re-read Neumann's book several times over the years.
In it, Neumann describes eight stages of psychological growth. In broad terms, I see the ten-year war in The Iliad as aligned with stages four, five, and six of ego development that Neumann describes. I see Odysseus's ten-year journey back home as aligned with stage seven in the eight stages of ego development that Neumann describes.
Now, for Ong, the term secondary orality refers to the orality accentuated by the communications media that accentuate sound (e.g., television, telephone, radio, tape-recorders, and the like). The resonances of secondary orality register on the human psyche and resonate with memories and pattern of primary orality at the level of the collective unconscious in the human psyche.
In terms of Neumann's eight stages of consciousness, primary orality represents the historical manifestation of what Neumann refers to as stages one through three of the development of ego-consciousness. In effect, Neumann writes about these early stages in his other big book The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, translated by Ralph Manheim (1955).
In Ong's book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (1971, pp. 10-11), he makes the following statement about Erich Neumann's Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness:
"The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with it tail in its mouth, as well as be other circular or global mythological figures [including Nietzsche's imagery about the eternal return?], (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., "married" within one's psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [such as Nietzsche's overman] - or, more properly, personalism - of modern man [sic])."
Ong also sums up Neumann's Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in his (Ong's) book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981, pp. 18-19; but also see the "Index" for further references to Neumann [page 228]), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
Now, in my recent OEN article "Emily Wilson on The Iliad" (dated August 23, 2024), I discuss both Emily Wilson's 2023 translation of The Iliad and her 2018 translation of The Odyssey -- in connection with the thought of Walter J. Ong:
In Neumann's terminology, I align what Ong refers to as secondary orality with what Neumann describes as stage seven in the eight stages of ego development.
Consequently, I would also align Odysseus's ten-year journey in The Odyssey with Neumann's stage seven in the development of ego consciousness. In The Odyssey, the goddess Athena, the goddess of war, is, in effect, Odysseus's guardian angel.
However, there are other goddesses that Odysseus encounters in his ten-year journey back home - and not all of them are benign. I see Athena and the other goddesses in The Odyssey as representing the collective unconscious in our psyches.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
