Alice Walker's fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of joy (1992), marks a new beginning for an author/activist who explicitly appropriates Carl Jung's archetypal patterns of the ego, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the Self in a psychological process that promises individual harmony and wholeness for those earnestly seeking self-knowledge and well-being. It is worth noting that at the beginning of her writing career, Walker embraced the national ethos of protest, resistance, and liberation that defined the revolutionary 1960s, and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, especially in th...
