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 In early 1955 while waiting for the galley proofs of ''The Deer Park'', Mailer comes to understand that ''Lipton’s Journal'' is showing him the way forward as a rebel artist. “Doing my analysis in the way proper for me . . . is through creativity—taking into self, synthesizing.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/379|#379]]}} He comes to see that in our psychic duality (“the polarity, the double”) the conscious and the unconscious reflect one another in the manner of “a dialectic.” Mailer puts it this way: “What I believe is true of psyche and of dialectic” is that “as we plumb . . . the unconscious, states of consciousness appear.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/440|#440]]}} As a psychotherapist, June Singer describes the therapeutic process, likewise, as the “dialectic between ego and the unconscious” that has the potential to “result in a transformation of the personality.”{{sfn|Singer|1972|p=29}} Jung called this nourishing and rebalancing of consciousness “''mysterium coniunctionis''”—wholeness of self through the synthesis of opposites. “My mind is deeply dialectical,” Mailer later writes. “The whole journal has been a dialectical illumination.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/491|#491]]}} Right to the end, this duality/dialectical theme reappears in Mailer’s journal. “We dip into our er, our collective wisdom,” Mailer says, and return to the world “with insights . . . colored by our S.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/606|#606]]}} (“Er” becomes one of Mailer’s words for vital force in the unconscious, just as S becomes his shorthand for Society/Sociostasis). This vital duality within us, this “lore of the mind-body . . . is the source of all creativity to us.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/645|#645]]}} The exploratory processes, his adventures, in ''Lipton’s'' will become ever more the processes of his later books, just as archetypal imagery will reflect that creative narrative process. “The novel goes from writer’s-thought to reader’s-thought by the use of an oblique (obliging) symbol, expression, or montage,” Mailer writes. The creative process must be authentic (that is, autonomously archetypal), fed by the unconscious, not constructed by the rational mind alone. And that is why Mailer says he can’t write a fully outlined novel knowing “what I want to say,” because “it comes out too thin, too ideated. My best scenes are the ones where I didn’t know what I was doing.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 22, 1955/698|#698]]}} Those interested in pursuing a detailed analysis of how archetypes function and cohere throughout Mailer’s writings (up to 1980) may refer to {{harvtxt|Begiebing|1980}}, ''Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Work of Norman Mailer''.
+Jung, like Mailer, began to profoundly adjust his life and work as a result of his experiment in self-analysis. Within a year of beginning his journal he resigned in 1914 from the medical faculty of the University of Zurich and as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association so that he could focus on what he believed was his more creative work on the collective unconscious and its historical manifestations in world art and religion. And he would thereafter focus his therapeutic work with his patients on their confrontation with the deepest unconscious material in their own search for psychic integration and balance. “It will be no joy,” Jung says of “my transformation . . . . But a long suffering since you want to become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest.”{{sfn|Jung|2009|pp=188–189}} He later writes, “Incidentally, musn’t it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom . . . at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best?”{{sfn|Jung|2009|p=235p=188–189}} In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer put it this way: “Postulate a modern soul marooned in constipation, emptiness, boredom and a flat dull terror of death . . . . It is a deadened existence, afraid precisely of violence, cannibalism, loneliness, insanity, libidinousness, hell, perversion, and mess, because these are the states which must in some way be passed through, digested, transcended, if one is to make one’s way back to life.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|pp=269–270}} ''An American Dream'' is Mailer’s first fully realized fictional narrative of such de- cent and transcendence, a modern re-telling of the ancient heroic journey.
+For both Freud and Jung, making one’s way back from the depths to life requires the integration of one’s dualities. But one must first recognize the dual nature of one’s personality and allow each element of the duality its time, place, and energies. Jung saw his own dual personality, on the one hand, as the accomplished schoolboy, his failings and ineptitudes, but also his love of and success with science. The second personality was the man full of theological reflections, in communication with nature and cosmos, the lover of art and humanities. Jung found psychiatry a means of integrating his interests in both science and art, his rational self and his intuitive self. For Mailer the personal duality is most readily expressed, as he wrote in ''Lipton’s'', “the neurotic little boy”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/228|#228]]}} and “the sweet clumsy anxious to please Middle-class Jewish boy”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/187|#187]]}} who will go to Harvard to pursue his scientific interests, but who began studying American literature in 1939 and, as he put it in ''Advertisements for Myself'', realized he wanted to become “a major writer.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=27}} But through ''Lipton’s'', he will go on, more importantly, to become a rebel writer challenging his society and, in Jung’s words, “his time.”
+Mailer’s Jungian discoveries and sympathies{{efn|We know that Mailer read some Jung. In fact, Jung’s ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' received an asterisk signifying its importance in the bibliography at the end of ''Castle in the Forest''. We know that his library contained Barbara Hanna’s ''Jung: His Life and Work'' (1991), but we don’t yet have a full list of what other books about or by Jung Mailer owned or consulted over the decades. Mailer’s Provincetown-study library is for now stored at the Mailer Center before being donated to Wilkes University, after which transfer we should have an index to the collection, including further works by Jung (Mailer archivist J. Michael Lennon tells me there are more in his email to me on 3/3/18). We know Mailer was contemplating a sequel to ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (''Harlot’s Grave'') with a Jungian protagonist. Moreover, Susan Mailer reported at a Mailer Society conference that her father questioned her (his psychotherapist daughter) rather pointedly about Jung in the 1970s. In January of 2007, during one of his last interviews, Mailer told Michael Lee in ''Cape Cod’s Literary Voice'' that he decided “on my own” that it’s as if “an unconscious was lent to us, almost like a Jungian notion” but “I didn’t have to read Carl Jung to decide this.” Mailer’s 2007 “notion” that “the unconscious taps into a deeper realm of knowledge that we possess,” if the unconscious “trusts you,” is also close to a classical sense of the Muse. Nonetheless, we have no firm evidence yet that he had read much or any Jung by 1955, although it’s obvious from the journal he knew about Jung, as so many knew generally of Freud and Jung (among other psychoanalysts) at the time. My speculation is that Mailer came to his self-analytic journaling technique by his own path, not by Jung’s, whose own journal wasn’t published till 2009. I offer this speculation (or challenge?) even though there are so many striking similarities between the methods and goals of both men and their journals. More archival work still might, of course, turn up some evidence of Mailer’s reading of Jung in the 1950s.}} stem in part from Mailer’s problem with Freudian psychoanalysis as it was generally practiced. Freudianism, in Mailer’s words, was a kind of “ideational lobotomy,” severing man from his deeper world, his soul, and leaving him adjusted to, marooned in, the “dead world of society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/35|#35]]}} He accuses one New York psychoanalyst of being afraid of “taking a wild plunge off the Freudian board into the oceanic unconscious,” a plunge Mailer is himself now taking through his journal.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/529|#529]]}} Mailer, who mentions in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that he once considered abandoning writing for a career as a psychoanalyst,{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=108}} sees himself through ''Lipton’s'' as “embarking on the second Freudian expedition into the unknown,”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/159|#159]]}} just as Jung did in his journal, as well as in his decades of studying comparative anthropology.{{efn|See Jung’s ''The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature'', where Jung fully credits Freud with his bold accomplishment: “Like Nietzsche, like the Great War, and like James Joyce, his literary counterpart, Freud is an answer to the sickness of the nineteenth century.”{{sfn|Jung|1966|p=37}} I would add Marx to this list. “The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by constant moralizings.”{{sfn|Jung|1966|p=34}}}}
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