 3 Apr 2004 @ 17:08, by Tom Bombadil
Le Ciel Traqué (The Hunted Sky) (1951), Yves Tanguy, Oil on canvas, 39x32 in.
"Is that which science call the ‘psyche’ not merely a question mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon man...?”
C. G. Jung: Modern Man In Search of a Soul
Jung looked at artistic creation in two ways: psychological and visionary.
In his own words, Psychological art "deals with material drawn from the realm of human consciousness—for instance with the lessons of life" (love, family, environment—the realm of everyday life experience) while Visionary art "derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind" (happenings beyond the grasp of human understanding—such images, which are not from everyday life, may be cold or foreign.)
"Is [Visionary Art] a vision of other worlds, or of the obscuration of the spirit, or of the beginning of things before the age of man, or of the unborn generations of the future?"
Jung believed that these visions are a manifestation of the Primordial Mind: "in a return to the state of participation mystique," to that level of experience at which it is Life, the Mind dreaming the minds dreaming the Mind, who lives, and not the individual.
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