The term ‘grotesque’ occupies a significant, if unevenly distributed, place in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning primarily as an aesthetic-psychological category marking the eruption of the distorted, the deformed, and the uncanny into the fabric of ordinary representation. Auerbach’s Mimesis provides the most sustained treatment, tracing the grotesque as a rhetorical-literary phenomenon from late antique prose (Apuleius, Ammianus) through Rabelais and into Romantic aesthetics, where Victor Hugo explicitly pairs the sublime with the grotesque as twin poles of expression. For Auerbach, the grotesque is not mere ugliness but a structuring principle of perspectivistic contrast that destabilizes the reader’s equilibrium, preventing rest on any familiar level of experience. In Jung’s corpus, the grotesque appears in a psychodynamic register: in his reading of Picasso, a figure emerges from the unconscious as ‘horribly grotesque, primeval ugliness,’ marking the encounter with chthonic depths during psychological descent. Jung’s Red Book journals candidly identify Izdubar’s fate as ‘grotesque and tragic,’ and treat the grotesque as one face of truth among many — alongside the comical, the sad, and the evil. Hillman’s mnemonic tradition associates grotesque or pathological imagery with the art of memory, where hideous detail serves genuine psychological interiority. The corpus thus holds the grotesque in tension between literary-formal device and depth-psychological symptom.
for him it is a matter of mixing the sublime and the grotesque. These are both extremes of style which give no consideration to reality.
Auerbach critiques Hugo’s Romantic formula as an antithetical pairing of sublime and grotesque that prioritizes stylistic clash over truthful representation of human life.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
he usually encounters the unconscious in the form of the “Dark One,” a Kundry of horribly grotesque, primeval ugliness or else of infernal beauty.
Jung identifies the grotesque as the psyche’s characteristic form for the chthonic unconscious encountered during psychological descent, exemplified by Picasso’s nekyia into the underworld.
, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966thesis
I hardly dare say that Izdubar’s fate is grotesque and tragic, for that is what our most precious life is… the great, the beautiful, the serious, the black, the devilish, the good, the ridiculous, the grotesque are fields of appli
Jung’s journal entry treats the grotesque as one of many irreducible faces of truth, insisting that the fullness of life requires acknowledging its grotesque dimension alongside the tragic, comical, and beautiful.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
numerous metamorphoses and ghost stories, all of which border upon the gruesome and grotesque, but also many other things — the quality of t
Auerbach locates the grotesque’s literary genealogy in Apuleius, identifying a persistent mixture of rhetoric and realism marked by haunting, gruesome distortion that prefigures later grotesque traditions.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
not a few of Shakespeare’s tragic characters have their own innate tendency to break the stylistic tenor in a humorous, realistic, or bitterly grotesque fashion.
Auerbach argues that Shakespeare’s tragic characters deploy a bitterly grotesque mode as an intrinsic stylistic resource for shattering elevated register from within.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
the grotesque joking of the first theme perpetually thwarts it, partly because it is immediately intercepted and paralyzed by the third
Auerbach demonstrates how grotesque farcicality functions structurally in Rabelais, perpetually disrupting the development of other thematic registers and preventing narrative resolution.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
he is perpetually flung back and forth between provincially piquant and homely forms of existence, gigantic and grotesquely extra-normal events, and Utopian-humanitarian ideas
Auerbach shows that Rabelais employs grotesque gigantism as a perspectivistic device that prevents the reader from settling into any stable experiential register.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Pathological similitudes are especially favorable for helping us enter the halls of memory; to attach these extraordinarily hideous or comic or glorious details to the images of people we know is more helpful yet.
Hillman, drawing on the Renaissance art of memory, argues that grotesque and pathological imagery serves mnemonic and psychological interiorization, linking the grotesque to the soul’s capacity for retention and imagination.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
His strange sense of humor might also be mentioned — what a gesture!, adulatoribus offerunt genua suavianda vel manus
Auerbach highlights Ammianus’s grotesque comic sensibility as a symptom of late antique rhetorical dehumanization, where social ritual collapses into absurd, distorted gesture.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
nothing is more foreign to him than the antique separation of styles… In Rabelais there is no aesthetic standard; everything goes with everything.
Auerbach frames Rabelais’s grotesque as enabled by a wholesale rejection of stylistic hierarchy, permitting the juxtaposition of ordinary reality with the most improbable and distorted events without aesthetic apology.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
a magical and sensory dehumanization. That the sensory vividness of the events should profit from this paralysis of the human is indeed notable.
Auerbach describes the late antique literary atmosphere in Ammianus as one of sensory dehumanization, a context adjacent to the emergence of the grotesque as a mode.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside