Ages of Anxiety: Auden Reading Jung in Times of War

Craig E. Stephenson’s Ages of Anxiety examines how W. H. Auden in his Pulitzer Prize winning poem, The Age of Anxiety, used C. G. Jung’s psychological types to structure and explore his responses to war and the rise of fascism.

This newly revised edition of Stephenson’s 2015 Zürich Lecture Series tracks Auden’s notion of the poet’s responsibilities and of the importance of the symbolic life in a time of conflict. The book tracks how Auden’s poem inspired Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony and how three choreographers (Jerome Robbins, John Neumeier, Liam Scarlett) created dances set to this work, with Jung’s psychology running through all these creative extrapolations like a common thread. In this expanded edition, Stephenson considers how the contemporary essayists Scott Stossel and Roberto Calasso employ Auden’s poem as touchstones for their own explorations of the meaning of anxiety in our time.

Ages of Anxiety will be of interest to analytical psychologists, literary historians, performing arts historians, mental health practitioners, as well as the common reader.

Craig E. Stephenson is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute Zürich, the Institute for Psychodrama, Zürich, and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. His most recent book, The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C. G. Jung (Routledge, 2023) won the NAAP’s Gradiva Award.