[soliloquy id=”8195″] The urge to individuation gathers together what is scattered. Carl Jung Collected Works 11 All loose stone was at one time part of the living earth. In walling, I bring stone back together, even if artificially and only temporarily, and reunite it with the earth. Walling puts back what has come…
The Rosarium Philosophorum is a sixteenth century alchemical treatise, with a series of twenty woodcuts. Jung’s comments on the first image, the image with the fountain, include the following: This fluid substance, with all its paradoxical qualities, really signifies the unconscious which as been projected on to it. The “sea” is its…
Consciousness, no matter how extensive it may be, must always remain the smaller circle within the greater circle of the unconscious, an island surrounded by the sea; and, like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of living creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming. Psychology of the…
Source of Image: Kayaking the Unconscious “The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives.” Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious The Psychology of the Child Archetype Paragraph 298 Collected Works 9.1
Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the “subconscious,” usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness. Water is the “valley spirit,” the water dragon of Tao, whose…
Carl Jung, on the Importance of Drawing and Painting It does not suffice in all cases to elucidate only the conceptual context of a dream content. Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve…
Carl Jung — The artist gives up free will… Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process… The artist is not a person endowed with free will…
Carl Jung: A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other…
Carl Jung, on the Effect of Creative Urge on the Artist The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn…