Psyche, and the Collective Unconscious
Carl Jung’s Mystical Journey in ‘The Red Book’
Carl Jung, the renowned Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, made significant contributions to the understanding of art and its psychological dimensions.
Key aspects of his work related to art & the psyche:
Collective Unconscious + Visual Art:
Jung proposed the concept of the collective unconscious, which suggests that certain universal symbols and archetypes are shared across cultures and generations.
Visual art often taps into these archetypal images, providing a means for individuals to express and explore their inner worlds.
Jung believed that art could reveal latent memories from our ancient past and help us understand our responses to the environment.
Art = Self-Revelation:
Jung encouraged his patients to engage in artistic expression, not as a judge of their work, but as a personal voyage of self-discovery.
The act of creating art allowed individuals to unravel hidden aspects of their minds and release repressed memories.
Artistic Impulse + Meaning:
Jung believed that art itself had no inherent meaning; instead, it was the artistic process that mattered.
Artists grappled with an “artistic impulse,” akin to a kind of madness—an irresistible force that drove them to create.
Through this process, artists found temporary relief and a way to express their psychological condition.
Jung’s own experiences as both a psychologist and an artist informed his understanding of this delicate balance between completion and incompleteness in artistic expression.
🎨 Jung’s exploration of the psyche through art is a game-changer.
Creativity, symbolism, and self-expression…
His approach to art was deeply rooted in his theories of the unconscious mind and symbolism.
Jung believed that art was a powerful medium for expressing the unconscious, serving as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious realms.
He saw artistic creation as a process that tapped into universal symbols and archetypes, which he termed the collective unconscious.
This perspective allowed for a unique interpretation of visual art, providing insights into both the artist’s psyche and broader cultural meanings.
Jung’s own artistic endeavors, such as his Alchemical Tower at Bollingen, exemplified his belief in the transformative power of creative expression. This personal project was a physical manifestation of his inner psychological journey.
In analyzing artworks, Jung developed a method of symbolic interpretation that became a tool for understanding an individual’s mental functioning and social behavior.
https://alchemist.data.blog/resource-library/
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c12e0abbb1a4739517739a5023334eea93961a34
His approach to symbolism in art emphasized the importance of psychic content and its vital role in human life and culture.
Jung’s ideas have influenced various fields, including music composition. His cognitive functions system has been used to understand different composers’ psychological tendencies and creative processes.
This application of Jungian theory demonstrates the enduring relevance of his ideas in interpreting artistic creation across various mediums.
Liber Novus
The Red Book
Carl Jung’s Liber Novus, also known as The Red Book, was recently unveiled in a complete English translation by Norton. This translation was first published in a facsimile edition in 2009, followed by a smaller “reader’s edition” in 2012. Since then, there have been several exhibitions showcasing the book.
Art critic Peter Frank describes it as resembling a Bible crafted by a medieval monk, particularly noting the intricate Gothic script that Jung meticulously used for his writings.
Despite Carl Jung’s reluctance to consider himself an “artist,” it is noteworthy that his Liber Novus has been displayed in museums and served as the core of the ‘Encyclopedic Palace,’ a survey of visionary art featured at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Jung’s intricate paintings depict him as every inch an artist, akin to medieval monks or Persian courtiers. His artistry was devoted not to divine or royal glorification, but rather to celebrating the potential and significance of humanity.
One could more accurately say that Jung’s book was dedicated to the mystical unconscious, a much more nebulous and oceanic category. The “oceanic feeling”—a phrase coined in 1927 by French playwright Romain Rolland to describe mystical oneness—so annoyed Sigmund Freud that he dismissed it as infantile regression.
Freud’s antipathy to mysticism, as we know, did not dissuade Jung, his onetime student and admirer, from diving in and swimming to the deepest depths.
The voyage began long before he met his famous mentor.
At age 11, Jung later wrote in 1959, “I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing how to differentiate myself from things; I was just one among many things.”
Jung considered his elaborate dream/vision journal—kept from 1913 to 1930, then added to sporadically until 1961—“the central work in his oeuvre,” says Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani in the Rubin Museum introduction above. “It is literally his most important work.”
And yet it took Dr. Shamdasani “three years to convince Jung’s family to bring the book out of hiding,” notes NPR. “It took another 13 years to translate it.”
Part of the reason his heirs left the book hidden in a Swiss vault for half a century may be evident in the only portion of the Red Book to appear in Jung’s lifetime.
“The Seven Sermons of the Dead.”
Jung had this text privately printed in 1916 and gave copies to select friends and family members. He composed it in 1913 in a period of Gnostic studies, during which he entered into visionary trance states, transcribing his visions in notebooks called the “Black Books,” which would later be rewritten in The Red Book.
You can see a page of Jung’s meticulously hand-lettered manuscript above. The “Sermons,” he wrote in a later interpretation, came to him during an actual haunting:
The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew that something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a‑quiver with the question: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought/’ That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones.
The strange, short “sermons” are difficult to categorize. They are awash in Gnostic theology and occult terms like “pleroma.”
The great mystical oneness of oceanic feeling also took on a very sinister aspect in the demigod Abraxas, who “begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.”
There are tedious, didactic passages, for converts only, but much of Jung’s writing in the “Seven Sermons,” and throughout The Red Book, is filled with strange obscure poetry, complemented by his intense illustrations. Jung “took on the similarly stylized and beautiful manners of non-western word-image conflation,” writes Frank, “including Persian miniature painting and east Asian calligraphy.”
If The Red Book is, as Shamdasani claims, Jung’s most important work—and Jung himself, though he kept it quiet, seemed to think it was—then we may in time come to think of him as not only as an inspirer of eccentric artists, but as an eccentric artist himself, on par with the great illuminators and visionary mystic poet/painters.
Resources
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c12e0abbb1a4739517739a5023334eea93961a34
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c150d64f8faa6243b5cdf116b9422bb29b0bb48
https://www.independent.com/2019/02/04/art-carl-gustav-jung/
