Jung, Heidegger and a Phenomenological Amplification of Edgliness: An Interpretive Inquiry into Being-with-Boundaries

Abstract

This research explores edges, boundaries and borders. Presuming that modern experience is mediated through the negotiation of boundaries that are constructed unconsciously, this work compares, contrasts, employs, and encounters the writings of Carl Jung and Martin Heidegger. It gives attention to the way each thinker deals with the limitations that subject-object metaphysics impose on conceptions of self and other, consciousness, experience, body, psyche, and Being. Combining phenomenological hermeneutics, poetic auto-ethnography, and critical cultural analysis, this work offers an imaginative textual analysis of Jung’s psychology and Heidegger’s philosophy. Adopting the term edgliness, this dissertation encounters the ambiguous and often contradictory experience of living with boundaries. It is not about theory, or concepts, or other containable ideas that are imagined like tangible contents either placed into a vessel called understanding or unpacked with the X-acto knife of comprehension. Instead, it is about concepts that are not easily graspable. One cannot hold on to them. One cannot dissect them or open them up. It is about a kind of methodological order, a process of forming. It is about a way of thinking that emerges when Jung and Heidegger are held up together along the edges, the seams, where the two thinkers join forces.