Response to Sanae Kawai’s Ripples of Physis

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay honors the creative work of Sanae Kawai and her collaborators who produced a remarkable documentary film called Ripples of Physis. Viewers are invited to witness the ancient Japanese art and craft of karakami as practiced by the Senda family. For over four-hundred years, they have continued making paper by hand, imprinted with wood block patterns born of the interplay between the elemental world and human hands inspired by the power and mystery of the Infinite. The slow pacing of the film conveys a sense of the eternal as does the resonant sound produced by contemporary composer Fred Frith. As a result, viewers become part of a reverberating system. Theories of emergence as well as contemporary ideas from neuroscience are offered as guiding principles for understanding the film and for analytic practice. Psychoanalytic and Jungian understandings of the unconscious are differentiated from the procedural nonconscious, which is imagined as a scaffold for the emergence of forces from both the personal and collective levels activated through environmental interchange. Intersubjectivity and inner-subjectivity are discussed along with what can be a Jungian contribution to psychoanalytic thinking by considering interobjectivity, intuitively understood as “moments of meeting” at the fundamental archetypal level. The film, in itself, has a quiet healing presence that goes far beyond words and is a testament to the value and profound meaning of Jungian amplification through art and craft.