The popularity of the Russian-Soviet linguist and philosopher, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, in the 1960s, brought about discussions of dialogism and dialogical structures, prompting a creative surge in semiotics, linguistic, structuralism and philosophy. Little known, however, is that about the same time, when Bakhtin was laying the foundations of his metaphysical theories about the ‘unfinished’ (or rather the ‘unfinishable’ self ) – the dialogical interaction between self and other, monologism, polyphony and the carnivalesque in literature – Carl Gustav Jung was pursuing the in-depth dialogism between the conscious and the unconscious mind (Rowland 2005, Smythe 2018). Interestingly enough, both thinkers were primarily concerned with the limitless creativity of the mind, which always already transcends the confines of ‘monologism’ – considered by Bakhtin to be either a ‘single-thought discourse’, specific of conventional (epic) writings, or unique ‘transcendental perspective or consciousness’, informing ‘all signifying practices, ideologies, values and desires that are deemed significant’ (Robinson 2011). Furthermore, as Jungian scholar William Smythe notes, Bakhtin's dialogism comes quite close to Jungian thought as it ‘makes room for “hidden” or “concealed” linguistic voices that are inaccessible’ to the conscious ‘I-positions’, allowing for what was to be later defined by Northrop Frye as the ‘moral unconscious’ (2017: 193) and by Ian Burkitt as the ‘dialogical unconscious’ (quoted in Smythe 2018: 447). Thus, although Bakhtin's ‘dialogic imagination’ emphasised the manifest ‘dialogical nature of language and the social other’, and Jung focused on the hidden ‘dialogical psyche and the imaginal other’, they both ‘made clear that the one realm flows into, and is inflected through, the other’ (Smythe 2018: 453). They both prioritised the creative and sharing aspect of the dialogical exchange, where ‘“the social and the imaginal are contrasting priorities rather than mutually exclusive positions”’ (Rowland quoted in Smythe 2018: 453).

Similarly, the figure of the Trickster has a prominent role in both Bakhtinian carnivalesque and Jungian discussion of archetypes. In Jung's Collected Works– a ‘dialogical field’ in its own right – ‘there is something unmistakably tricksterish in the way that dialogue plays out, where theoretical claims are often at odds with their mode of expression’, and his ability to find eloquent – and subversively carnivalesque – expressions within this ‘sea of unconscious creativity’ (Smythe 2018: 451).