Karl Gustav Jung

The article is a scrupulous review of the latest book by Assoc. Prof. R. Shivachev Perspectives Towards Early Modernity: Psychologism and Symbolism. Chapter by chapter the main author’s ideas are traced and analyzed. But the article has the ambition to transcend the review genre. By stepping on the concrete subject, the theoretical problem of the relationship between the method and its object is posed: when the method imperceptibly begins to emancipate itself from its object and sounds as an object in itself: the analysis of a certain work as a way to reveal the possibilities of the method. The bottom line: studies like this demonstrate the stand-alone va-lue of literary theory. Stopping it from being a servant of literature, an operational toolkit, and turning into an eim in itself, into full-fledged creativity.

The article is part of an extensive study on Dr. Krastev’s text “Art and Religion” (1904). The philosopher criticizes, above all, the differences between these two “actions of the spirit”. Under the influence of the German psychological and philosophical-aesthetic school of the second half of the 19th century, he sees religion and art in the light of modern experimental psychology. Dr. Krastev approaches the much later psychoanalytic research of K. G. Jung and his followers. The present text stops both from deviations. His views on art have been analyzed and a brief critical reading of the theories of T. Lips, K. Groos and K. Lange about psychology of the aesthetic is interpreted by Dr. Krastev. Some connections of modern art with the views of a critic-philosopher are pointed out, as well as the lonely contribution of his study to humanities.