Mythotheatrics: Archetypal Psychology as Theater in the Hauntings of Don Quixote

Elliot-Gartner, M. (2003). Mythotheatrics: Archetypal Psychology as Theater in The Hauntings of Don Quixote (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2003).

This production-style dissertation interprets archetypal psychology, in particular the work of James Hillman, as an aesthetic of psyche which is personified and animated theatrically through the fiction of Don Quixote. The reality of psyche is expressed as fictional or imaginal. This means recognizing the subjective side alongside the objective side of the world. The two sides are reciprocally related and give birth to various visions of the world, one of which is the vision of knight errantry.

Don Quixote is an ironic hero. He is a caricature of the heroes found in myth, and he is the opposite in character to what archetypal psychology refers to as the heroic ego. Don Quixote, interpreted nonliterally, reveals archetypal patterns and rhythms belonging to the mythology of Dionysus: the topsy-turvy underworld of carnival in which the rules of the daily world no longer apply.

This study intentionally cultivates a Dionysian understanding of the world that does not support a dualistic perspective. A Dionysian consciousness overturns the division of mind/body and emotion/reason found in the fictions of concretization such as empiricism, positivism, or scientific methods, which separate subjective value from a so-called value free objective reality. The perspective presented here sees the world as open to different modes of expression, one of which is the imaginal.

The choreographic imagery of the production of this dissertation portrays both the cultural aspect of psyche and its polytheistic character, rather than the literal expression of particular people’s lives. The imagery is a composition in space with emotional bodies in motion. The premise is that written and spoken language alone may not be able to convey as much subliminal and subtle meaning as they do when wedded to an emotional body. This study acknowledges the equality of the emotional body with the mind by understanding it as equal to mind. Also, metaphorical thought is understood to be connected to emotional body and is not seen as a mere prior step to thinking nor as separated from it. The stage provides a poetic place where the invisible may be made visible by an aesthetic performance based upon “exteriorizing the interior” through emotional bodies in motion.