| Psychologist Carl Jung (1954/1991) wrote that, “true personality is always a vocation . . . an
irrational factor that destines a man to separate himself from the herd and from its well-worn
paths” (p. 175 [CW 17, para. 300]). Similarly, Zora Neale Hurston, in her autobiography, Dust
Tracks on a Road (1942/1991) acknowledges that, “I do not have much of a herd instinct” (p.
252). Much of Hurston’s fiction writing expresses the quest for this emancipation, yet her
anthropological work involved studying the very cultural rituals that often devalued and
imprisoned her true personality. This paper considers the tension between Hurston’s lived
experience and scientific study of culture; and her progression through the depth psychological
individuation process as expressed in her fictional works John Redding Goes to Sea, Drenched in
Light, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. |