Dr Fabiana Lopes da Silveira

Dr Fabiana Lopes da Silveira was a Visiting Research Fellow in 2023-24

Dr Fabiana Lopes da Silveira is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the State University of Campinas (Brazil), where she is working on the FAPESP-funded project 'Jung, the Philologist: The role of Classical Philology in the Foundations of Analytical Psychology' (grant number 2022/04222-7). She is also a member of the Theory of Philology Centre at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IdEA) of the same university. Her DPhil in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford was fully funded by the CAPES Foundation (Ministry of Education, Brazil), and her doctoral thesis on literary aspects of Greco-Egyptian alchemy is under contract with Oxford University Press for publication as part of the Oxford Classical Monographs series. From 2021 to 2023, she worked as a Fixed-Term Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature at the Federal University of Paraná (Curitiba, Brazil). During her stay at the IAS, also funded by FAPESP (grant number 2023/05981-1), Fabiana worked on Jung’s refiguration of the Philemon myth in the Red Book.

“Legendary and unreachable”: Jung’s refiguration of Philemon
FAPESP grant number 2023/05981-1

There is a widespread misconception that Jung would have derived most of his psychology from Freud. Another common misjudgement about Jung is disregarding him as a mere occultist whose work lacks any sort of intellectual rigour. My project intends to contribute to challenging such notions by investigating an underexplored aspect of Jung’s works, namely the role played by his wide-ranging reception of Greco-Roman literature (as well as classical scholarship dedicated to it) in the articulation of his ideas. A closer look into Jung’s writings reveals not only the great breadth of his repertoire of ancient sources, but also his close familiarity with the work of a series of professional philologists of his time (such as Albrecht Dieterich, Richard Reitzenstein and Károly Kerényi). In light of the evidence that Jung’s relationship with antiquity is not as amateurish as often assumed, I will examine Jung’s refiguration of the Philemon myth in the Red Book. This investigation will examine how Jung’s Philemon:

1. refigures Philemon in relation to both Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VIII.611-724) and Goethe’s Faust;
2. relates to ancient Hermetic and Gnostic writings which were receiving considerable scholarly attention at the time;
3. informs Jung’s theory of the archetypes, in particular the archetype of the old wise man.

This project is part of the larger project 'Jung, the Philologist: The role of Classical Philology in the Foundations of Analytical Psychology' (FAPESP grant number 2022/04222-7) and is aligned with recent scholarship that challenges misconceptions regarding Jung’s work by setting it in its wider intellectual context.