An Education of the Soul: Literature and Archetypal Imagery

An education of the soul deals with cultivating the dimensions of humanity that formal education based on the classical scientific paradigm tends to exclude: feeling, imagination, memory. It seeks to intertwine theories that are permeable to the notion of the soul as the psychic entity that generates the images that anchor and mediate our experience in the reality of the world. Among them are Gilbert Durand's General Theory of the Imaginary, C.G. Jung's Analytical Psychology, James Hillman's Archetypal Psychology, and José Carlos de Paula Carvalho's Factual Education. The text is permeated by an invitation to dialogue between Pedagogy and Depth Psychology, the latter understood here, literally, as the Language of the Soul. The heart of the text, however, lies in the revisiting of three classics of literature that served as formative readings, in the sense of cultivating the author's soul, a process that was complementary, concurrent, antagonistic, and cooperative with her schooling during her teenage years. Thus, Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron," and Emily Brönte's "Wuthering Heights" emerge, recovered from subjectivity and mediated by the images of the soul and the imagination of culture.