All Work and No Play
Jack’s role as a writer is a significant indicator of his unconscious core. In the film, he is driven by the need to fulfill a goal that he has set for himself--to write a book (or some similarly large writing project). 
Jack, however, has neither the talent nor the discipline to do so: In certain scenes, instead of writing, he engages in mundane activities which help him to forget that there is indeed work to be done. In one such scene, Jack feverishly throws a tennis ball against the wall repeatedly, his unattended typewriter in plain sight. Moreover, aside from his neglect of writing, Jack never does anything that would even suggest “caretaking.” In effect, he seems torn between the responsibilities of a dual role, namely, the Apollonian duties of being a father/provider, and his repressed, Dionysian dream of bohemian achievement, sex, and alcohol.
The only thing Jack is capable of producing is a line that resounds the total lack of rational intelligence his conscious mind once possessed: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” 
Jack’s repetitious mantra, carefully typed in assorted patterns on hundreds of pages, signifies a complete, unconscious regression into the dreams he always had but never fulfilled. Even the diction of his one-sentence masterpiece affirms his return to unconscious chaos: Jack uses the word “boy” instead of “man” or “guy”; or, for that matter, any of a hundred syntactic variations that would de-emphasize the childish tone. Jack, then, has become a shadow of what he once was, transplanted irrevocably into a boyhood of violent instinct, a world in which he can pursue his wishes with impunity. And by the end of the film, Jack has regressed to almost complete inhumanity, capable of only bestial grunts and a hobbling, uncoordinated gait.
Read more:
Representing the Unconscious in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
The Cinematic Unconscious
Mirrors of the Soul
All Work and No Play
Shine On
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