hermann hesse's siddhartha  

The work of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung was very infl uential to Hermann Hesse.  After making a split with Freud, Jung established himself with his own version of analytic psychology.

After the death of his father, Hesse was treated by a student of Jung, Dr. Josef Lang, and through the association became acquainted with Dr. Jung himself. Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious and archetypes had a significant influence on Hesse’s writing. Siddhartha was written during a time while Hesse was actually receiving treatment from Dr. Jung; therefore, the temptation to analyze Siddhartha through a “Jungian” lens is natural.

Archetypes are symbols and patterns with which we come into contact through art and literature. The meanings of these symbols are hidden in our collective unconscious— which is a type of primal memory. Jung believed that we experienced archetypes as symbols in our dreams, and that by analyzing dreams we could uncover the workings of our unconscious minds.

 In literature, we see these connections through archetypal patterns such as “The Quest.” Writers have created stories over centuries about topics as diverse as humanity itself, but these stories often fall into some familiar patterns. We each define “good” or “bad” on the basis of how it affects us. Each person’s definition is unique, and each individual finds topics or patterns that speak to him or her on some level. Good literature can affect us on a level that is almost primal. These same stories have similar affects on people all over the world. Sometimes we don’t even know why we are affected by a story, only that we are moved. Jung would identify this “effect” as our response to archetypal patterns in our collective unconscious.

In Jung’s work, there are three most basic archetypal figures: the shadow, the persona, and the anima. All archetypal characters (as mentioned later) are merely a manifestation of one or more of these basic figures in varying degrees, just as the three primary colors of red, blue, and yellow combine to make all known colors.

The shadow can be defined as the darkness inside all of us. It is the darker desires that we seek to suppress. In literature, the most common manifestation of this archetype would be the devil. In Siddhartha, the main character has to experience the dark side of himself in order to become whole.

The anima is the life force in us. In men, the anima takes on a feminine quality and likewise a masculine quality in women (known as the ”animus”). Your “anima/animus” is your image of the ideal person of the opposite sex. According to Jung, these characteristics of the opposite sex within us are typically unconscious. In Siddhartha’s dream in “Awakening,” Govinda clearly is a projection by Siddhartha of the feminine within himself. Later on in the story, he meets Kamala, and as she mirrors those aspects within himself, she is his perfect match.

The persona is the mask we wear in society. It mediates between the ego and the outside world. It is the anima and the persona that make up the ego. Both the anima and the ego supply energy that the persona must reconcile with the outside world. In a sense, Siddhartha is trying to obliterate his persona, giving him access to his deeper life-force energy (his anima). In doing so, however, he had never realized the anima within himself nor the shadow. He was unable to fi nd the anima because he had always sought to suppress such drives, and his understanding of it was lacking.

In Jungian terms, to become individuated, you must recognize all aspects of the individual within yourself that distinguish you from others. When your persona is in harmony with this “individuated” self, you are self-actualized and on the road to perfection or Nirvana.

In Chapter Four, “Awakening,” Siddhartha claims that, for all this time, he has been running away from himself, and that the thing he knows least about is himself, this “Siddhartha.” When Siddhartha embraces his shadow (he becomes a merchant, a gambler, and a womanizer) and becomes familiar with his anima (Kamala is as like him as anyone could be), he is then able to begin his true path to perfection.