Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst, 1960 Oil on canvas, 27-7/8 x 16-1/8 in. Private collection. From Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys; Janet Kaplan Whether Varo herself ever sought psychiatric help is undocumented. Her letters to unknown psychiatrists, filled with descriptions of ridiculous imaginary crisis, and pleas for help, were surely written in jest, as was her proposal…
The Science Of Remedios Varo Excerpts from The New York Times-Science Forum In “Harmony,” the distinctly androgynous scientist is seeking to create a “theory of everything,” using a musical staff, as an organizing device. The scientist strings onto the staff vegetables, animals, stones, pyramids, a scrap of paper with pi written out to…
Creación de los aves, 1957 From: The Science Of Remedios Varo Excerpts from The New York Times-Science Forum A woman with the feathers and face of an owl in one hand wields a paintbrush that extends from a violin hanging where her heart should be. In her other hand she holds a magnifying glass that…
The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. (From Christ, A Symbol…
The problem with Greek Mythology is that the Greeks didn’t have glaciers to use as a metaphor: this was not a problem in Scandinavia. In this northern mythology, slow waves of glaciers flow out of the cold, seething cauldron of Hvegelmir. What a great metaphor for the strength of the life force; as Dylan Thomas…
Would you sacrifice an eye to the external world so that you could have an eye to the internal world and the Collective Unconscious? In Norse mythology, Mímisbrunnr (Old Norse “Mímir’s well”)is a well associated with the being Mímir, located beneath the world tree Yggdrasil. The god Odin once placed one of his eyes within…
From Encyclopedia Mythica Niflheim (“house of mists”) is the far northern region of icy fogs and mists, darkness and cold. It is situated on the lowest level of the universe. The realm of death, Helheim is part of the vast, cold region. Niflheim lies underneath the third root of Yggdrasil, close to the spring Hvergelmir…
You gotta hand it to the Norse myth-makers — a huge serpent eating corpses and gnawing at the root of the World Tree is a bit of a nightmare image. According to Jung, the beginning of psychological work starts with the alchemical stage of the nigredo, the “point of maximum despair.” In images, it is…
Boris Yeltsin, the first popularly elected President of the Russia Federation, was well known for his predilection for vodka. What was not so well known was that he both an ophiologist – a collector of snakes – and a shrewd manipulator of the foreign currency exchange, where he would regularly bet against the ruble in…