Rider Haggard

The Seba library treats Rider Haggard in 6 passages, across 4 authors (including Jung, C.G., Jung, Carl Gustav, Beebe, John).

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Haggard has identified with Holly. He, like Holly, has probably not seen the importance of his love affair, and when that happens, when a person has an emotional experience and refuses to take it seriously enough, it means a piling up of material in the unconscious.

Jung argues that Haggard’s unconscious identification with the repressed character Holly reveals how an unresolved love affair generated the compensatory anima figure of She through accumulation of unconscious material.

Jung, C.G., Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, 1989thesis

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There are excellent descriptions of this type in H. Rider Haggard’s She (London, 1887) and Pierre Benoît’s L’Atlantide (Paris, 1920).

Jung nominates She as the preeminent literary illustration of the contained feminine type and the anima as an overwhelming archetypal presence in a man’s psychology.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Development of Personality, 1954thesis

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He offered her H. Rider Haggard’s novel, She, which Jung would later cite as an example of the anima archetype in literature (1959/1977, ¶545). Freud describes She as ‘a strange book, but full of hidden meaning.’

Beebe documents that Freud himself recommended She to a woman patient and recognized its hidden significance, connecting Haggard’s novel to Freud’s own anima dynamics and anticipating Jung’s later canonical citation.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017thesis

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