Join us for this virtual Friday Night Lecture
with Pam Behnen MA Jungian Analyst
October 23rd from 7pm-9pm on zoom
With the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAM) in 1962, Harper Lee won a Pulitzer Prize and the novel’s place in the history of the civil rights movement was cemented. Atticus Finch reigned for more than 50 years as an archetypal image in the collective consciousness of America and of the world. Lee never again published until the 2015 release of Go Set a Watchman (GSAW). Reader and critical response was mostly horror and disgust at the revelation of Atticus as a crotchety old racist, along with pity for Lee, whom many assumed had, at the age of 89, lost her senses enough to allow the publication of an earlier and inferior novel.
Together, we will examine Atticus Finch as an archetypal hero image which may have served both to motivate and to avoid change, as well as the shattering of that image in GSAW. In 2015, the unveiling of the flawed Atticus proved synchronous with the emergence of a powerful new civil rights movement: an energy emerging with the protests that followed the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and continues beyond George Floyd and to this very day. We will also see how Tom Robinson, Boo Radley, and the Ewells serve as scapegoats to relieve unaddressed cultural tensions.
I will discuss TKAM and GSAW from two overlapping points of view: as a scholar and teacher of literature (using reader response theory), and as an analytic psychologist. The concept of cultural complexes offers a parallel to some contemporary theories of the construction of racial identities, including whiteness, and suggests analytic psychology may be useful in deconstructing and providing alternatives to a fragile identity based on otherness and scapegoating.
Pamela Behnen, M.A., is a Jungian Analyst practicing in St. Louis, Missouri, where she continues to explore issues of social justice. She serves as Seminar Coordinator of the Memphis-Atlanta Jungian Seminar of the IRSJA and is a founding member of the Heartland Association of Jungian Analysts. Prior to analytic training, Pamela taught English Literature and writing at the University of Minnesota, where she studied Shakespeare and Renaissance History.