Papers by Guillemette Johnston
The Romanic Review, May 1, 2001
In Emile, (1) Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes a mythical process of education through which the m... more In Emile, (1) Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes a mythical process of education through which the master reveals to his pupil wisdom that is simultaneously social and natural. The master's part in this myth is to be nature's emissary, since Rousseau wishes to restitute natural directivite (2) in Emile via the master's teachings. The word "myth" describes this process well, because mythology treats of forces similar to those Rousseau wishes to introduce. "[R]epresenting beings who embody under symbolic shape the forces of nature [or] aspects of the human condition," (3) myth brings nature into human form while justifying human subordination to nature, recalling Rousseau's insistence that nature govern human behavior. The master's stagings expose a natural, non-anthropological yet distinctively social discourse. Though Rousseau finds La Fontaine's fables potentially confusing for children, he develops his pedagogic mythology via fable-like, pragmatic "texts"--which I will call myth/fables since they employ elements of both genres--that supply Emile with both active and passive directives through a generic yet metaphoric discourse that avoids negative or "historical" components while exposing nature's code. (4) I will examine this discourse from many perspectives to determine its structure, operations, and effects. First I will locate each discursive element, describing its role and its relations to other elements via concepts from Ferdinand de Saussure (5) and Roman Jakobson (6) as well as from Rousseau's ideas on communication. Next I will examine how Rousseau can restitute the saine, unvarying "ur" text of nature at different times in Emile's growth. Finally, I will typify myth/fables, looking at their representational yet metaphoric structures to see how Emile can receive and assimilate knowledge in spite of their overdetermined poeticity or interpretibility. I will cite Bruno Bettelheim (7) and Vladimir Propp (8) in examining the organicity of these myth/fables, a feature which lets them enhance nature's communication of order, then view interactions involved in their interpretation through concepts derived from Hans Robert Jauss (9) and Paul Ricoeur. (10) In Cours de linguistique generale Saussure outlines the physiology of langue's operations in the speech circuit (sender, message, receiver), but only after distinguishing langue from langage, the general ability to send and interpret signs. One must not confuse social consensus with regard to signs (langue) with the heterogeneous, indistinct capacity for semiologic communication (langage) that appears across "several physiological, physical and psychic domains" (Saussure 25). The distinction explains why "articulating words exercises itself only with the instrument created and supplied by [a given] collectivity" (27), and helps us isolate an important characteristic of langue--its temporality. Words cannot be exchanged in synchrony; speech involves mechanisms of transmission that presuppose exteriorization of psychophysical combinations from one individual to another. Saussure points to each individual's ability to express personal thoughts and to the consciousness and individuality of each participant in describing this non-instinctive acoustic phenomenon. If Saussure identifies sender, message, and receiver as the physiological components of speech, Roman Jakobson, in "Linguistics and Poetics," describes operant functions in the message as an independent element in this circuit. To work efficiently, the message must have a context that the receiver comprehends, use a code that the participants share, and operate via a contact, a physical and psychological connective that each participant can enter. Primary functions are the emotive focus on the sender's sentiments, the conative influence on the sentiments or actions of the receiver, and the referential concentration on context or situation. Of the remaining functions, the phatic emphasizes means of contact, the metalinguistic describes and clarifes the code, and the poetic draws attention to the form of the message itself. …
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PSYART, 2013
abstractRousseau's exploration of human development in Emile presents an approach to human be... more abstractRousseau's exploration of human development in Emile presents an approach to human being that can be compared to Jung's description of typologies and processes of individuation he isolated in analytical practices. We can address this perspective in terms of the spiritual science of yoga. Because of Rousseau's recognition of the balance of nature, the natural man he describes in the second Discourse does not feel divided since his ego is not overdeveloped compared to his inner self, which Jung would call the self of combined, multiple conscious and non-conscious polarities. When Rousseau criticizes natural man's development, it is not humanness that he deplores but the shifting of balance from amour de soi to amour-propre. In Emile Rousseau presents an attempt to balance amour de soi in Emile. The idea of consciousness he presents compares to yogic descriptions of consciousness, where the balanced constituents of mind, ego, and intelligence constitute consciousness.In his book Psychological Types, depth psychologist Carl Jung attempts to identify the psychic functions and attitude types that result from mechanisms triggered by external circumstances and by dispositions within the individual.[1] While recognizing that grouping people into types is "superficial and general [in] nature" (6) and that the results of such an approach "will always be a product of the subjective psychological constellation of the investigator" (9), Jung strives to invent and define terms that will help identify concepts in such a way that the observer will not see too subjectively. The ultimate result of this process will be Jung's famous quaternary system where two attitudes (introversion/extraversion) and four function types (thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting) measure the self-regulatory nature of the psyche. But in order to reach this system of definitions, Jung endeavors to establish an archaeology of the functions and character types via a study of the evolution of western philosophical thought and political systems, concentrating on the oppositions that existed within these systems, especially as regards Christianity. As he puts it, "the works of the ancients are full of psychology, [but] only little of it can be described as objective psychology" (8).A crucial component in Jung's attempt to establish his theory is his contention that if we "go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual. Instead of individuality, we find only collective relationships or what Levy-Bruhl calls participation mystique" (10). The collective attitude hinders the recognition and evaluation of a psychology different from the subject's, because the collectively oriented mind is quite incapable of thinking and feeling outside of its own projections. In other words, what we understand by the word "individual" is a relatively recent development in the history of the human mind and of human culture. Thus in discussing the 18th century and the early Romantic period, Jung concentrates on the development of the superior and inferior functions, by which particular functions come to dominate the ego, casting their opposing functions into the "inferior" position of assimilation into the personal unconscious, so that for example a thinking introvert will have an unconscious, "shadow" side as a feeling extrovert. To explain these developments, Jung chooses to analyze Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Education of Man and to make encompassing statements regarding Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. In other words, for Jung Schiller and Rousseau typify the Age of Reason and its immediate aftermath, demonstrating humanity's loss of a sense of unity and "individuality" as a result of the development of an overpowering collective culture that arises at the expense of nature. Jung thus identifies Schiller and Rousseau as exemplars of a philosophical argument that centers on the problematic of human origins and the loss of man's initial integrity-perhaps that sense of "wholeness" identified by participation mystique. …
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Eighteenth-century fiction, 2012
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South Atlantic Review, 1997
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French Forum, 2002
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Jung journal, Oct 1, 2007
Abstract Guillemette Johnston , “Archetypal Patterns of Behavior: A Jungian Analysis of the Manda... more Abstract Guillemette Johnston , “Archetypal Patterns of Behavior: A Jungian Analysis of the Mandala Structure in the Dialogues of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Jung Journal: culture & psyche, 1:4, 43-68. This study argues that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical work, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, provides a reflection of the process of individuation as described in analytical psychology. Rousseau's Dialogues, a series of fictional conversations inspired by actual occurrences, is viewed in relation to the structural pattern of the mandala, a pattern that Jung saw as offering an archetypal representation of balance in reaction to disturbances of psychic equilibrium. The crisis Rousseau faced while writing the Dialogues involved the merging of introverted thinking with extraverted feeling, bringing conscious ego together with unconscious content. Rousseau articulated this merging through spontaneously creating a literary mandala that joins fiction and reality via three dialogues in which opposing voices interact and gradually move toward reconciliation. Because the Dialogues is only one of Rousseau's autobiographical texts, this study positions the Dialogues in Rousseau's œuvres and gives insight into his understanding of his intentions in writing the Dialogues and other works. It presents a brief biography of Rousseau and also offers background to and a summary of the Dialogues. Finally, it analyzes the Dialogues in light of Jung's quaternary analysis of the psyche.
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This translation of Abdellatif Laabi\u27s poem My Dear Double is accompanied by an essay on the t... more This translation of Abdellatif Laabi\u27s poem My Dear Double is accompanied by an essay on the theme of the double in literature
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English translation of poem by Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi
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Transference, 2020
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abstractRousseau's exploration of human development in Emile presents an approach to human be... more abstractRousseau's exploration of human development in Emile presents an approach to human being that can be compared to Jung's description of typologies and processes of individuation he isolated in analytical practices. We can address this perspective in terms of the spiritual science of yoga. Because of Rousseau's recognition of the balance of nature, the natural man he describes in the second Discourse does not feel divided since his ego is not overdeveloped compared to his inner self, which Jung would call the self of combined, multiple conscious and non-conscious polarities. When Rousseau criticizes natural man's development, it is not humanness that he deplores but the shifting of balance from amour de soi to amour-propre. In Emile Rousseau presents an attempt to balance amour de soi in Emile. The idea of consciousness he presents compares to yogic descriptions of consciousness, where the balanced constituents of mind, ego, and intelligence constitute consciou...
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Romanic Review, 2001
In Emile, (1) Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes a mythical process of education through which the m... more In Emile, (1) Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes a mythical process of education through which the master reveals to his pupil wisdom that is simultaneously social and natural. The master's part in this myth is to be nature's emissary, since Rousseau wishes to restitute natural directivite (2) in Emile via the master's teachings. The word "myth" describes this process well, because mythology treats of forces similar to those Rousseau wishes to introduce. "[R]epresenting beings who embody under symbolic shape the forces of nature [or] aspects of the human condition," (3) myth brings nature into human form while justifying human subordination to nature, recalling Rousseau's insistence that nature govern human behavior. The master's stagings expose a natural, non-anthropological yet distinctively social discourse. Though Rousseau finds La Fontaine's fables potentially confusing for children, he develops his pedagogic mythology via fable-like, pragmatic "texts"--which I will call myth/fables since they employ elements of both genres--that supply Emile with both active and passive directives through a generic yet metaphoric discourse that avoids negative or "historical" components while exposing nature's code. (4) I will examine this discourse from many perspectives to determine its structure, operations, and effects. First I will locate each discursive element, describing its role and its relations to other elements via concepts from Ferdinand de Saussure (5) and Roman Jakobson (6) as well as from Rousseau's ideas on communication. Next I will examine how Rousseau can restitute the saine, unvarying "ur" text of nature at different times in Emile's growth. Finally, I will typify myth/fables, looking at their representational yet metaphoric structures to see how Emile can receive and assimilate knowledge in spite of their overdetermined poeticity or interpretibility. I will cite Bruno Bettelheim (7) and Vladimir Propp (8) in examining the organicity of these myth/fables, a feature which lets them enhance nature's communication of order, then view interactions involved in their interpretation through concepts derived from Hans Robert Jauss (9) and Paul Ricoeur. (10) In Cours de linguistique generale Saussure outlines the physiology of langue's operations in the speech circuit (sender, message, receiver), but only after distinguishing langue from langage, the general ability to send and interpret signs. One must not confuse social consensus with regard to signs (langue) with the heterogeneous, indistinct capacity for semiologic communication (langage) that appears across "several physiological, physical and psychic domains" (Saussure 25). The distinction explains why "articulating words exercises itself only with the instrument created and supplied by [a given] collectivity" (27), and helps us isolate an important characteristic of langue--its temporality. Words cannot be exchanged in synchrony; speech involves mechanisms of transmission that presuppose exteriorization of psychophysical combinations from one individual to another. Saussure points to each individual's ability to express personal thoughts and to the consciousness and individuality of each participant in describing this non-instinctive acoustic phenomenon. If Saussure identifies sender, message, and receiver as the physiological components of speech, Roman Jakobson, in "Linguistics and Poetics," describes operant functions in the message as an independent element in this circuit. To work efficiently, the message must have a context that the receiver comprehends, use a code that the participants share, and operate via a contact, a physical and psychological connective that each participant can enter. Primary functions are the emotive focus on the sender's sentiments, the conative influence on the sentiments or actions of the receiver, and the referential concentration on context or situation. Of the remaining functions, the phatic emphasizes means of contact, the metalinguistic describes and clarifes the code, and the poetic draws attention to the form of the message itself. …
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South Atlantic Review, 1997
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French Studies, 2014
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Papers by Guillemette Johnston
JPSE: Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education
NOTE: Submissions for volume III are now closing. To be considered for JPSE Volume III, please submit by 10 June 2017
JPSE is now actively seeking submissions of papers by members of the Society for the Philosophical Study of Education (SPSE) and others. NOTE: To be considered for JPSE Volume III, works must be submitted by 10 June 2017. Priority will be given to papers delivered at the November meetings of SPSE in Chicago. However, other works, such as interviews, reviews, works in progress, and articles, will also be considered. See the introduction to JPSE Volume II at http://fordham.bepress.com/phil_research/33 for an idea of the editorial strategy and scope of JPSE. Please submit materials as attachments to the editors, Allan Johnston and Guillemette Johnston, at the following email addresses:
ajohnst2@depaul.edu
ajohnston@colum.edu
gjohnsto@depaul.edu
Please indicate " JPSE submission " in the subject line of the email. Documents should be submitted in Microsoft Word doc or docx formats. In formatting, please follow APA guidelines. Please also include an abstract of about 100 words and a list of key search terms with your submission, along with a short bio. JPSE is also looking for qualified readers of submitted papers. If you are interested in reviewing papers submitted to JPSE, please let us know. Interested parties should submit a CV and a writing sample for consideration. When reviewing a paper, readers are expected to exercise academic tolerance and provide constructive support with helpful suggestions, questions, and comments. Disparaging, egoistic, and dismissive feedback on behalf of the reader will not be accepted and will not be sent to the writer unless it is revised. This type of review, we feel, does not serve the purpose of helping to create a safe, respectful, and supportive academic community. We aim at opening minds, not closing them, and being helpful and productive.