Psyche and the Arts

Jungian Approaches to Music, Architecture, Literature, Painting and Film

Susan Rowland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134071500
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Ethnopsychology

Does art connect the individual psyche to history and culture?

Psyche and the Arts challenges existing ideas about the relationship between Jung and art, and offers exciting new dimensions to key issues such as the role of image in popular culture, and the division of psyche and matter in art form.

Divided into three sections - Getting into Art, Challenging the Critical Space and Interpreting Art in the World - the text shows how Jungian ideas can work with the arts to illuminate both psychological theory and aesthetic response. Psyche and the Arts offers new critical visions of literature, film, music, architecture and painting, as something alive in the experience of creators and audiences challenging previous Jungian criticism. This approach demonstrates Jung's own belief that art is a healing response to collective cultural norms.

This diverse yet focused collection from international contributors invites the reader to seek personal and cultural value in the arts, and will be essential reading for Jungian analysts, trainees and those more generally interested in the arts.

Chapter 1
Psyche and the artist:
Jung and the poet

Edmund Cusick

ART, IMAGINATION AND PSYCHE: A JOURNEY BY WATER

I offer this paper in two guises, partly as a creative artist, partly as a Jungian critic. What I hope to do is to put some of my own work in the context of Jungian themes, and make some observations about how a Jungian understanding of the life of the psyche informs my own experience as an artist. It is by invoking the creative alchemy of artist and critic that my work introduces this volume of Psyche and the Arts.

I would like to begin by taking as starting point a work of art, and a myth, which resonates with meaning for me as an artist: the myth of Hylas. Hylas himself is not so much a mythic figure as a footnote in someone else’s story: in particular, Jason’s. He was, tradition tells us, one of the Argonauts, who was sent to get water, before the Argos departed from Mysia. Arriving at the pool Hylas was seduced by a nymph who dwelt there, and drawn into the water, never to be seen again.

The painting is by the pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse and is entitled Hylas and the Nymphs. The original hangs in the Manchester City Art Gallery, and a detail from it is reproduced to form the cover of my poetry collection Ice Maidens (Cusick 2006). From a Jungian perspective, the painting does not so much invite interpretation as plead desperately for it. Hylas is pictured on the brink of the pool, staring into the eyes of the nymph: pale, beautiful, adolescent. Below the waist her body dissolves from view into the water. It would be hard to find a better image of anima possession. The overwhelming nature of his experience, and his own helplessness before their siren call, is reinforced by the multiplicity of the image – six more nymphs surround Hylas, each with the same seductive gaze.

It is an image which, I believe, offers a wealth of meanings, and which has a particular resonance for the male artist. From the point of view of the Jungian critic it has a cautionary meaning. Hylas bears a striking resemblance to classical imagery of Aquarius – but this water bearer is never going to rise to pour out the waters of inspiration. He is rather about to be consumed by them. In this sense Hylas could be seen as standing as a type of the critic. The work of the psychological critic is based on the assumption that we can contain the unconscious within the grasp of rational understanding – but consciousness in fact is, of course, itself the contained, not the container.

For the artist, contact with the archetypes may be held – expressed or embodied – through the emergence of the work of art, but cannot by definition be brought under rational control. In one tradition it is said that as soon as Hylas touched the lip of his pitcher to the water’s surface, the nymph rose from the pool, with one hand embracing his neck to kiss him, while with the other grasping his arm to pull him under. For me, it is a detail that I find enormously evocative. The first movement comes from consciousness, but once the water is invited to rush in, it will continue to the point of salvation or destruction. The surge of energy into the archetype is mesmerizing, and unstoppable.

Hylas’ story has an appeal at another level. The mapping of narrative structures has become a preoccupation of the twentieth-century cultural industries – nowhere more so than in the world of screenwriting. At the heart of the commercial orthodoxy regarding the structuring of plot is the hero’s journey, an idea derived from Christopher Vogler (1999), who is informed by Joseph Campbell (1949) who in turn, of course, is informed by Jung (1953–91). The hero’s journey is a pattern of events discernible within any heroic plot – which is to say, any Hollywood film: the call to action, the refusal of the call, the meeting of a mentor, and so forth, which charts the rise to maturity of the hero. Hylas is on a hero’s journey, but it founders at the first step.

There is, however, more to the complexities of life than the schematics of personal growth through endeavour. We may respond to the myth of quest, trial and achievement, but we sense the truths in other stories: Orpheus turning back at the gates of Hades, Narcissus unable to break from his reflection, Persephone succumbing to the taste of the underworld. They haunt us because their journeys were arrested.

To my mind there is a particular appeal to poets for such myths. Since the age of narrative poetry has passed, we have learned to value verse precisely for its capacity not to drive us forward, but to abandon outward progress – to stand still and explore for us, the readers, the depth of meaning in a single scene, a single image. For this we borrow a word from religious experience: epiphany. An image will come alive in poetry if it resonates with readers, and the greatest of poets find and evoke images whose meanings ripple outward to touch an entire generation: Wordsworth’s daffodils, Eliot’s wasteland, Larkin’s empty church, Hughes’ fox by night. Waterhouse’s work bears the stamp of his own generation. His paintings are pregnant with images of women and water, their brooding and enigmatic presence shot through with a peculiarly fin de siècle blend of intense yearning and the sense of spiritual presence. Ophelia (in Tate London), and Echo and Narcissus (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) have both, at different points in history, passed into popular consciousness and been reproduced on a huge scale.

What I believe is remarkable about ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’ is that the artist has a physical presence inside the painting, rather than only the implied presence in the gaze which frames our own. Hylas, poised on the brink of immersion into rapture, offers us identification with the protagonist – we cannot help but feel the beauty of his seductress – but at the same time the picture contains and contextualizes Hylas, simultaneously placing us outside his experience.

ANIMA

Inasmuch as many of the poems in Ice Maidens¹ wrestle with engagement with the feminine they are, I hope, in the tradition of this painting – offering the reader to the chance to inhabit the perspective of the male artist, but also to stand outside it. One poem, ‘Waterhouse’, addresses this complex explicitly:

• Waterhouse
  
  Beneath the water’s face he finds
  in these green depths the soul refracts
  like light, sees in his rippling eyes
  the world within, self upon bright self
  breaking to his sight.
  So the artist turns from love
  to the lure of water and illusion,
  the gaze of painted creatures
  meeting his own gaze.

• The women he desires he bathes
  in this same stream, flowing
  from canvas to canvas, making
  of them mermaids, sirens. They gleam
  between tall reeds, milk-white naiads
  playing among the waterlilies,
  dragonflies. Imploring pools lap
  at their child’s breasts. Just once,

• as Hylas, he came to the brink
  of caressing these pink-nippled
  girls, the nymphs he thirsted for.

• Yet as their hands, cold as river
  pearls, reached to draw him
  down, he knew some colours
  move only in water, are seen
  only by those who drown.

In his discussion of visionary art Jung speaks of extraordinary poetry which may shatter the conventions of literature, and defy even the comprehension of its own author. The hallmark of such poetry is that it deals exclusively with content from the collective unconscious. I cannot claim to write visionary art, but I would suggest that any art which evokes an unconscious archetype will, while not being sucked into the maelstrom that is visionary experience, nonetheless feel the ominous pull of its undertow. For the individual artist, the image which triggers intercourse with the anima, may appear to be both accidental and mundane, but once triggered, the energy of the archetype may erupt in ways that are unpredictable and compelling. In the language of the poet, rather than that of the analytical psychologist, I would put it this way: there are poems which more or less do as they are told, and poems which leave you no choice but to do what you are told, refusing the neatness of logical progression or the closure of your intended conclusion. It may be that to get involved with nymphs in any situation, or any century, is always dangerous. My own experience is reflected in this poem.

• At Vindolanda
  
  floods spill through tarpaulin shrouds, burst
  over lawns and paths. Oaks bend
  before storm water’s weight. Three girls run across the ruins,
  feet sodden, their faces masked and glinting
  in clear plastic macs, pearl eyed
  with rain. Exhumed from these earthworks
  the first letter between women, its cursive script
  stripped from centuries of mud’s discretion: I offer
  prayers for you, Lavinia, at the temple of the nymphs.

• All along the wall, each mile fort has its shrine,
  each villa a sacred well: the legions surrendering
  to the cold communion of the springs, drinking
  in the lapping voices of outlandish spirits,
  till every river’s name invokes a Goddess.

• The girls twirl in a swirling hail, hold up
  cupped hands, squeeze under ropes, splash
  in the open dig. Their plebeian feet
  churn the quarters of centurions and priests.
  The sky falls, whirling down to three wide open
  mouths. Prised from fresh dredged graves,
  the statues are paraded under hot museum lights:
  Local Deities, Water Spirits, Nymphs of the Springs.
  Between this water and the sculpted stones,
  some living thing that we have lost. But here,
  in Vindolanda among the nymphs,
  I remember how on the frontier

• of sleep you came to me, night by night, holding me
  breathless, appearing then as you were, once,
  in the azure glare of underwater lights: the crossed straps
  scarring your pale shoulders; the wet veil of hair
  slashed across one cheek; tight drops
  scaling your tensed thighs, reptilian,
  beautiful; the cup of shadow offered
  at the hollow of your collar bone; you,
  balanced, as herons balance on the brink

• of killing. Or some discarnate thing,
  which, as you dived, you yielded to,
  till your blue nails tore the water’s skin,
  splayed across the tiles; and after them your face
  rising, broken and baptised
  in the mosaic flickering of light.

• My clothes are a shell of water.
  There is no one here, no-one but the three girls,
  splashing, unafraid; above, the pregnant clouds,
  piling and coiling, murmuring in the soft breath
  of gods that is like the sound of boulders
  falling. The tarpaulins stretch
  to bulging pouches, growing.

MYTH AND THE IMAGINATION

Myth is the natural territory for the Jungian. A sequence of poems in Ice Maidens deals with the Arctic, which for me is the land of myth. In a historical sense, the far North quite literally is the unconscious – the great region of the unknown, of which enormous tracts were unexplored even into the last century. The archipelago of Sp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Psyche and the artist: Jung and the poet
• PART I Getting into art: Jungian (immanent) criticism
• PART II Challenging the critical space
• PART III Making/interpreting art in the world
• Glossary