Inventing Reality: An Integration of Autobiographical Fiction with Jungian Psychoanalysis to Negotiate a Personal Experience of Trauma.

In this article, I offer an après-coup of my transdisciplinary practice-based doctoral thesis, Writing-As-Shadow-Work: An Aesthetics of Jungian Psychoanalysis (2023), to show how the creative licence afforded by autobiographical fiction enabled me to give language to a personal experience of trauma and engage with a Jungian worldview of the psyche that constellates external reality with the inner realm of the unconscious. I share how I employed the invention allowed by autobiographical fiction as a creative strategy to access my personal unconscious and the cross-cultural intuitive knowledge of the collective unconscious as a means to facilitate my ongoing process of recovery from trauma via a sequence of autobiographical short stories. In addition, I reflect on how it was through this process that I was able to expand on the possibilities of autobiographical fiction by employing it as a literary and therapeutic device with the potential to not only represent reality but also invent it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]