James P. Driscoll

By drawing on the opposing ideas of Carl Jung and Karl Marx, James Driscoll's develops fresh perspectives on urgent contemporary problems. Jung and Marx as thinkers, Driscoll contends, carry the projections of archetypal complexes that go back to the hostile Old Testament brothers Cain and Abel, whose enduring tensions shape our postmodern era. Because Marxism elevates the group over the individual, it is made to order for bureaucrats and bureaucracy's patron archetype, Leviathan. Jungian individuation offers a corrective rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic's affirmation of the ultimate value of free individuals. Although Marxism's promise of justice gives it demagogic appeal, the party betrays that promise through opportunism and a primitive ethic of retribution. Marxism's supplanting the Judeo-Christian ethic with bureaucracy's "only following orders," Driscoll maintains, has created the moral paralysis of our time. As Jung and writers like Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elias Canetti have warned us, the influence of our ever-expanding bureaucracies is a grave threat to the survival of civilized humanity.The primary issues Driscoll addresses include the natures of justice and the soul, individuation and freedom, and mankind's responsibilities within the planetary ecology. Religion, ethics, economics, science, class divisions, immigration, financial fraud, abortion, and affirmative action are also explored in his analysis of the powerful archetypes moving behind Jung and Marx.

The Devil and Dr. Fauci is an unsparing critique of what author James Driscoll calls the "Drug Testing, Licensing, and Marketing Complex," or DTLM. Quietly dominating America's healthcare industry, the DTLM poses threats comparable in magnitude, if not in character, to those of the Military-Industrial Complex. With a satiric scalpel reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's, Driscoll eviscerates the DTLM's avatar Dr. Anthony Fauci, our age's version of the archetypal Dr. Faustus. He exposes Fauci's pivotal position in the DTLM, at whose core is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA, Driscoll asserts, has long played Mephistopheles to Fauci's Faustus, with grave consequences for American healthcare.Dr. Driscoll's book is the first to upbraid the DTLM, FDA, and Fauci for exacerbating the Covid-19 crisis. Seeking to maximize profits from patentable vaccines, they rigorously suppressed off patent prophylaxis and treatment alternatives. This was but one of many DTLM follies that raised Covid's death toll and increased its socio-economic devastation. Other prominent follies were the mask posturing, arbitrary lockdowns, and closing of churches and schools that the DTLM and its political allies used to distract from their sacrifice of public health to their own agendas.We may never know if the Chinese deliberately released the Covid-19 virus, or if they created it. Yet the world now knows the destructive potential of gain of function technology. Similar epidemics or worse will strike us. To survive next time, we will need radical reforms in the FDA and transparency for the DTLM. But the opaque FDA bureaucracy, Driscoll concludes, is only one instance in our greater problem of deficient oversight within all of our increasingly powerful and ever less accountable federal bureaucracies.

The Devil and Dr. Fauci is an unsparing critique of what author James Driscoll calls the "Drug Testing, Licensing, and Marketing Complex," or DTLM. Quietly dominating America's healthcare industry, the DTLM poses threats comparable in magnitude, if not in character, to those of the Military-Industrial Complex. With a satiric scalpel reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's, Driscoll eviscerates the DTLM's avatar Dr. Anthony Fauci, our age's version of the archetypal Dr. Faustus. He exposes Fauci's pivotal position in the DTLM, at whose core is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA, Driscoll asserts, has long played Mephistopheles to Fauci's Faustus, with grave consequences for American healthcare. Dr. Driscoll's book is the first to upbraid the DTLM, FDA, and Fauci for exacerbating the Covid-19 crisis. Seeking to maximize profits from patentable vaccines, they rigorously suppressed off patent prophylaxis and treatment alternatives. This was but one of many DTLM follies that raised Covid's death toll and increased its socio-economic devastation. Other prominent follies were the mask posturing, arbitrary lockdowns, and closing of churches and schools that the DTLM and its political allies used to distract from their sacrifice of public health to their own agendas. We may never know if the Chinese deliberately released the Covid-19 virus, or if they created it. Yet the world now knows the destructive potential of gain of function technology. Similar epidemics or worse will strike us. To survive next time, we will need radical reforms in the FDA and transparency for the DTLM. But the opaque FDA bureaucracy, Driscoll concludes, is only one instance in our greater problem of deficient oversight within all of our increasingly powerful and ever less accountable federal bureaucracies.

No dramatist has treated identity in as many ways and in such depth as William Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s Identities, James P. Driscoll shows how the Bard used history, comedy, tragedy, and romance to develop comprehensive treatments of personal identity.Driscoll’s innovative study examines four aspects of identity: the conscious, social, real, and ideal. Drawing on Jungian psychoanalysis, Driscoll explores how Shakespeare’s plays dramatize a crucial need for self-knowledge and foreshadow larger identity issues. Sexual identity and the archetype of the outcast provide new perspectives on The Merchant of Venice. Hamlet’s quest for self-knowledge mirrors parallel quests that Jung found mythic heroes pursuing. Iago shrewdly exploits Othello’s racial outcast status and confused conscious and social identities to convince him that Desdemona’s real identity has changed. In Twelfth Night, as in the other romantic comedies, family, relationships, love, friendship, imagination, disguise, and time and place all shape identity. Measure for Measure is a profoundly political drama showing the interdependence of love and knowledge in the quest to understand real identity and achieve ideal identity. King Lear treats identity both archetypally and realistically to create a uniquely powerful tragic vision of the self and divinity.From Falstaff to Shylock, Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Lear, and Prospero Driscoll offers original insights and perspectives on Shakespeare’s most fascinating characters. This new volume will hold great interest for students of Shakespeare and all English literature, along with all those concerned with the enduring issues of identity.

In Shakespeare and Jung - The God in Time literary critic and philosopher James Driscoll presents original arguments for the existence and nature of God. He traverses the boundaries of art, philosophy, psychology, and religion to draw on Shakespeare, Carl Jung, and A. N. Whitehead to define and illuminate the interconnections of God and time.Time’s irreversibility and continuous creation of novelty makes it the medium and engine of order, value, and meaning. Time connects and differentiates all, thereby making reality relational and allowing for feeling, thought, art, and science. Shakespeare, the writer with the greatest insight into human nature, dramatized the primacy of time in our lives. Time is the de facto God of Shakespeare’s worlds. Shakespeare anticipated our own age when time began to displace eternity as the ground of reality. Jung gave us a new map of the psyche and terminology to explore more deeply the human condition, bound as it is in time, and the nature of deity. Driscoll carries Jung’s insights further into the three paradigmatic revelations of the Western Godhead: The Book of Job, the Gospels, and Shakespeare’s King Lear. Shakespeare the artist grasped the dynamics of the Western Godhead giving us a singular revelation of its dominant archetypes, Yahweh, Job, Prometheus, and Christ.The archetypes of the Western Godhead shaped the development of art, science, and technology and energized the ideals of progress and freedom. The West advanced rapidly in science, the arts, and human rights because of the unique archetypal dynamics of its God in Time.