Strange Adventures (Sercombe, 2016)

 Elizabeth’s PhD research was on human transformation at different life stages in the representations of women protagonists in the works of French author Pierrette Fleutiaux.  Following the successful defence of her thesis in 2009, she spent another five years extending the remit of her research into the leadership archetypes of Pioneer, Queen, Artist and Grandmother in Fleutiaux’s work.  The completed research, a world first and reviewed as ‘original’ and ‘unmissable’, was published as Strange Adventures: Women’s Individuation in the Works of Pierrette Fleutiaux.
This work draws on existential philosophy and psychology to reveal the lived experience of transformation, and of the leadership of transformation, in the portrayals of the narrator-heroines. 
At first glance, a work of academic criticism might seem to have little to offer to the everyday life experiences of those of us who are students, working professionals, parents, retired, unemployed, entrepreneurs, global megastars.  How does what is discovered about fictional people apply to real people? 

Yet in the recognisable experiences of fictional characters, we can see at a slight distance patterns of similarity and difference that illuminate and bring insight into our own experience.  We have the chance to experience empathy and kinship with those whose perceptions we might not otherwise encounter, and to experience the journey into the unknown, albeit in a mediated and relatively safe form.  We can experience a clash that makes our own ways of being become more visible, as choices and habits which we have formed and which are not inevitable or merely ‘the way things are’.

For example, Fleutiaux’s heroines are distinctive in navigating seasons of disintegration and chaos in ways that enable them to become deeper, more whole and more substantial as human beings, more truly themselves, and to find ways of making a fruitful contribution to the world, in contrast to many other fictional models who go round in circles, or lose themselves in other people or addictions or despair.   What in the Fleutiaux universe and characters, we might ask ourselves, helps them do this, and how could we learn from that ourselves?

Using Jungian and existential worldviews, Strange Adventures unravels these questions, discovering stories where we all have a part to play in the making and unmaking of the world, and where our own growing to maturity is a desirable and collaborative work.  These underlying maps enable greater hope and freedom than philosophies which make the world seemed closed, or predetermined by factors that cannot be controlled.  Yet at the same time, they acknowledge the givenness of the world that we start with, and that we have to use the material of what is already there to make the new thing.  To believe that we can start from scratch, or impose our wishes over the existing order without collaboration, is to work from a basis that is highly precarious, as it is based on denial or repression.  We all have work to do, and some of that is to collaborate in renewing the world, and some of that is to collaborate in the renewal of ourselves. 

The discoveries of Strange Adventures include a vision of human beings where we are continually making, or have the chance to make, something of what the world makes of us, and where, in Jungian terms, we have a chance to follow the inner guide of the unconscious, what Jung called ‘vocation’, into becoming more and more fully who we truly are, as individuals and as humanity.

These elements of Strange Adventures form the underlying beliefs about human identity, and the mystery of the individual, alongside the profound importance of honouring each person as unique and significant.