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WD_228/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0228 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
In considering the nature of artistic creation, Jung distinguishes between two different types of artistic process. The first type is dominated by the conscious mind, and he called it the “psychological mode”, where art is created from the author’s intention to produce a particular result. He suggests the works created more by this conscious “psychological mode” would be understandable in content and form.
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Jung called a different approach to creation, dominated by the unconscious mind, the “visionary mode”. Work created in the “visionary mode” would be more likely to challenge form and to possess content that challenges comprehension – content that possesses what Jung calls true symbols, which are intuitive ideas that cannot yet be better expressed in any other manner. In this mode, the artist creates without consciously directing the process.
-Darrell Dobson/ www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1569
Archetypal Criticism (1900): Places: Switzerland, Continental Europe.
Darrell Dobson, University of Toronto: First published 21 June 2005.
The main proponent of archetypal theory in the twentieth century was C.G. Jung, and the Canadian critic and scholar Northrop Frye utilized archetypal theory in literary criticism, though Frye’s approach differed substantively from Jung’s position. The advent of postmodern theory initially dampened the interest and influence of archetypal theory, but in recent years many writers and scholars have responded to the misconceptions and misrepresentations often found in postmodern critiques of archetypal theory (see for instance, Hauke, 2000; Rowland, 2002). Jung addresses the relevance of archetypal theory in literature and the arts most clearly in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (1966) which contains two significant essays on literature and poetry (first published 1922 and 1930).
In Jung’s archetypal theory, the unconscious mind plays a profound role, and it has a purpose, which is to assist individuals in maintaining a balanced psychological state. When one deviates from one’s particular middle way, the unconscious mind sends signals, which try to get the attention of one’s consciousness in order to alert one to alter one’s behaviour. The language of the unconscious mind is symbolic. It uses images and symbols to convey its messages; its vocabulary and grammar are fundamentally different from rational, conscious thought. It is up to the conscious mind to notice, decode and implement the messages of the unconscious mind in order to move closer to a middle or balanced psychological state, particular for the individual.
The unconscious mind itself has two parts, the personal and the collective. The personal unconscious is specific to the individual, and it is the location of individual repressions and complexes, which are normal, and everyone has them. Jung also describes “the collective unconscious”, about which there is much misunderstanding. The collective unconscious is not an otherworldly or supernatural phenomena; it does not exist on its own, and it has no content. It is distinguished by potential; it is a dimension of the psyche general to all humans and is characterized by instinctive, latent patterns of symbol-making. Jung says,
The collective unconscious shows no tendency to become conscious under normal conditions, nor can it be brought back to recollection by any analytical technique since it was never repressed or forgotten. The collective unconscious is not to be thought of as a self-subsistent entity; it is no more than a potentiality handed down to us from primordial times in the specific form of mnemonic images or inherited in the anatomical structure of the brain. There are no inborn ideas, but there are inborn possibilities of ideas … the existence of which cannot be ascertained except from their effects. They appear only in the shaped material of art as the regulative principles that shape it; that is to say, only by inferences drawn from the finished work can we reconstruct the age-old original of the primordial image. (1966, 81)
Because as a species we all have the same basic bodies, with a shared evolutionary history, and the same basic life experiences (birth, death, seasons, night, day, love) and questions (Why are we here? What happens after we die?), we have common psychological impulses as responses to these situations. According to Jung, the archetypes of the collective unconscious account, for example, for some of the similarities in the myths of ancient civilizations. Similar images or stories resonate with peoples separated by time, place and culture. For example, among a tribe of Californian aboriginal people, there is a story of a man who followed the shade of his deceased wife to the land of the dead and was allowed to return with her on condition that he did not touch her before they had reached home. Anyone familiar with Greek mythology will note the striking similarity to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was the musician who travelled across the river Styx and entered Hades to retrieve his wife after her death. He was allowed to take her but was forbidden from looking back. It is unlikely that the one story had an influence on the development of the other, but even if they did, it is still significant that peoples as different as the ancient Greeks and Californian aboriginals found significance in such similar stories.
Archetypal theory is often misunderstood as privileging the “universal” over the particular. There seems to be a general ignorance of the vital focus on the particular and the situated in archetypal representations. Much confusion about and critique of archetypal theory ignores Jung’s differentiation of the “archetype” from the “archetypal image” (sometimes called the “archetypal idea”). The archetype is unknowable and irrepresentable; it is merely a shared impulse to create pattern; its nature can only be guessed at from an overview of its representations, all of which are located, specific and embodied in dreams, rituals, myths, and art. As the “archetype” is transformed into the “archetypal image” it takes on the characteristics of the individual and/or collective into which it arrives. Archetypal images are transformed by the psyches that create them in order to provide a balancing message for that psyche; the archetype is transformed into an archetypal image that responds to the needs of the specific ego. If the collective or individual psyche, for instance, is patriarchal, the archetypal image may be influenced by that attitude; it may manifest what is happening in order to encourage consciousness of the situation or it may manifest what needs to happen in order to illuminate possibilities that might achieve balance.
The archetype is not defined by the content of any one manifestation nor even by the accrued total of all its manifestations. Archetypes are apolitical; archetypal images are political; archetypes are not ideological; archetypal images are located within ideologies.
The existence of the archetype is inferred from the similarities of these individual manifestations across time, culture, and place, while recognizing and valuing the uniqueness and individuality of each separate manifestation. Any discussion of meaning or relevance of an archetype, in fact, focuses on the relationship between an individual archetypal image and the larger archetypal pattern. This is where archetypal theory varies significantly from the theory of Platonic forms. The archetype does not exist separately from archetypal images, and the point is never to try identify with or to become identical with the archetype. Any discussion of meaning or significance must consider the similarities and differences between the archetype and the archetypal image, emphasizing neither, and focusing always on the unique and particular present relationship between them.
Artistic Process:
Jung was interested in the symbolic expressions of the unconscious mind, and so in addition to addressing the symbolic nature of dreams, neuroses, myths, rituals and religions, he writes directly about the arts. In considering the nature of artistic creation, Jung distinguishes between two different types of artistic process. The first type is dominated by the conscious mind, and he called it the “psychological mode”, where art is created from the author’s intention to produce a particular result. He suggests the works created more by this conscious “psychological mode” would be understandable in content and form.
Even in this conscious “psychological mode”, however, Jung asserts that the conscious mind is not only influenced by the unconscious but also actually guided by it. Jung describes the artist who creates in this manner as a person who may think she is creating freely, but that she is still affected by the unconscious. The poet feels she is swimming along of her own volition, which she is, but at the same time, she is being swept along by an unseen current. This kind of creative experience is one where the artist consciously identifies with the creative process but is still affected by the archetypes of the collective unconscious.
Jung called a different approach to creation, dominated by the unconscious mind, the “visionary mode”. Work created in the “visionary mode” would be more likely to challenge form and to possess content that challenges comprehension – content that possesses what Jung calls true symbols, which are intuitive ideas that cannot yet be better expressed in any other manner. In this mode, the artist creates without consciously directing the process. “While his [sic] conscious mind stands amazed and empty before this phenomenon, he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could not have brought into being”(1966, 73). In this mode, Jung emphasizes not the artist but the creative process that moves the artist. He sees the artist as a reacting subject – reacting to the vital creative urges of the collective unconscious.Because of its challenging form and content, Jung gives Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as an example of the “visionary mode”. Jung also points out one artist can vary between the “psychological” and “visionary modes”, as illustrated by Goethe in Faust, where Jung suggests the first part is exemplary more of the conscious “psychological mode” and the second part, of the unconscious “visionary mode”. The creative process, whether dominated by the “psychological mode” or the “visionary mode”, “consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work” (Jung, 1966, 82), which is then a unique and particular manifestation of the archetypes – interpreted and presented in a manner appropriate for a specific time and place.
The Social Role of Art:
Jung discusses art as a transformative practice for the collectives from which it arises. Because the artist accesses the collective (as well as the personal) unconscious, her work is not a merely personal in nature. It has a relevance to the society from which it originates. As the individual manifestations of the unconscious seek to address an imbalance in the individual so artistic creations give insight into the nature of the collective psychological situation. Jung writes,
By giving [the archetypal image] shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. People and times, like individuals, have their own characteristics and attitudes…very many psychic elements that could play their part in life are denied the right to exist because they are incompatible with the general attitude…Here the artist’s relative lack of adaptation turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path, and to discover what it is that would meet the unconscious needs of his age (1966, 82-83).
Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs.
Individual aesthetic response also represents a process of self-transformation in the life of individuals. Individual responses to art function in a similar way and with a similar purpose as responses to other manifestations of the unconscious mind, like dreams, fairy tales, myths and rituals. Jung wrote, “A great work of art is like a dream” (1966, 104), and he said, “[W]hen an archetypal situation occurs we suddenly feel an extraordinary sense of release, as though transported, or caught up by an overwhelming power…That is the secret of great art, and of its effect upon us” (82). The charged nature of aesthetic response signifies that the aesthetic experience reveals important psychological information regarding the nature of future transformation. The fact that one has a charged aesthetic response is a signifier that there is an aspect of the art object or experience that triggers the individual’s psychology and that one ought to consciously reflect on this object or experience. It carries some import; it seeks to bring vital knowledge to an individual’s consciousness. One should note and reflect on the aesthetic response and approach it in the manner of approaching a dream in Jungian psychology.
Aesthetic response is not predictable nor is it guaranteed to be repeatable. Other individuals will not necessarily have a charged aesthetic response even when encountering the same art object or art experience. So, afterwards, one can reflect, Why did I find that experience or object to be beautiful, moving, or disturbing? Why does it stay with me? Why am I drawn to or repelled by that painting, dance, music, or poem? Other people did not and do not necessarily have the same experience. Why did those visual, musical, or literary representations affect me here and now? If one encounters the same art object or art experience at another time, one may or may not have the same or even a similar experience. One’s psychological position may be different, and so the unconscious does not necessarily attach a charge to the experience in the same way. The nature of aesthetic response is dependent on one’s current psychological position
The arts, characterized from other ways of knowing by their dominant use of symbol and image, are communicating with the same form, in the same language and grammar, and with the same balancing purpose, as the unconscious mind itself. Given Jung’s conception of the profound – and beneficial – transformative intention of the unconscious, we would do well to consider the arts not as marginal or disposable, but rather as central to the human experience: collective, individual and educational. Ann Yeoman, a Jungian analyst, writes, “We may turn to art to learn better how to create and continually recreate ourselves and to remember that the fully and consciously lived life is a life of deeply committed symbolic action” (Yeoman, 1998, 119).
List of Works Cited:
Hauke, C. (2000). Jung and the postmodern: The interpretation of realities. London: Routeledge.
Jung, C. (1966). The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rowland, S. (2002). Jung: A Feminist Revision. Cambridge: Polity Press/ Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
Yeoman, A. (1998). Now or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth. Toronto: Inner City Books.
This article is copyright to ©The Literary Encyclopedia.
-www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1569
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