You are a spiritual exercise, an ascetic discipline, an agonizing ritual, an arcane procedure, eighteen alchemical alembics piled on top of one another, where amino acids, poisonous fumes, and fire and ice, the homunculus of a new, universal consciousness is distilled! 

- C.G.Jung, “ Ulysses: A Monologue,”  CW 15, par. 201

James Joyce's Ulysses: there is nothing like it! When Sylvia Beach published Ulysses out of her Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Co., a century ago on February 2, 1922 (Joyce's 40th birthday), did she know what was being unleashed on the world? James Joyce likely did. Carl Jung certainly knew something significant had happened and expressed as much in his essay, "Ulysses: A Monologue" (in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature). Jung compares Ulysses to a transformative, psychological experience, akin to those expressed in alchemy.

In this course, we shall enter the world of the psyche in Ulysses. Indeed, it is a profoundly psychological text. A neurologist, the first reviewer for The New York Times, stated, "I have learned more psychology and psychiatry from it than I did in 10 years at the Neurological Institute." In Ulysses, the inner world of the psyche is contained, laid bare, and released. On one ordinary day, June 16, 1904, mythopoetic patterns and archetypal dynamics, touching the core of human experience, are revealed. Ulysses is a world where language is psyche, and the psyche may discover itself through it.

Suggested Reading: James Joyce's Ulysses

Class Format: Presentation and discussion, with passages being emailed to the class

Week I. Introduction: Ulysses' Structure and Orientation

Week II. Telemachia: Stephen Dedalus-Telemachus and the Lost Hero (Ulysses, Part I, Chapters 1 - 3)

Week III. Odyssey: Leopold Bloom-Ulysses and Exile (Ulysses, Part II, Chapters 1 - 9)

Week IV. Odyssey: The Journey through the Underworld (Ulysses, Part II, Chapters 10 - 12)

Week V. Nostoi: Molly-Penelope and Sophia (Ulysses, Part III, Chapters, 1 - 3)

Mark Napack, M.A., S.T.L., M.S., studied archetypal patterns in comparative literature at Columbia University, after which he applied Jungian theory to the redemption motif in medieval theology for his thesis at Fordham University.  He further studied Jung, psychology, and the history of religion at Loyola and Catholic Universities. A long-time graduate and college instructor, Mark has presented at international conferences and his work has appeared in scholarly journals and books in English and French. Mark Napack, LCPC, is also a Jungian-informed psychotherapist in North Bethesda, MD.