Depth Psychology Research Articles

My Art by the Numbers

The author explains his affinity for numbers as it relates to his work as an artist spanning his long career. This affinity helped him invent one of the first systems for making four-color digital prints. Having been only recently introduced to the book Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz, the author finds that he is in full agreement with her depth psychology theories on number. Recounting a synchronicity that he experienced while writing this paper helped the author to understand Jung’s concept of the unus mundus, as explained by von Franz in Number and Time. He speculates that number archetypes must have evolved in human consciousness over very long periods of time and writes about the number zero as a “recent” example. The author also describes his experience of a spontaneous mathematical vision that led him to create an algorithm, which in turn led him to realize that crystals having fivefold symmetry could exist in nature, which was considered impossible at the time. The author discusses his new inventions of quasi-periodic and random tile patterns, which were inspired by 15th-century Islamic tile patterns, as they related to the aperiodic patterns invented by Roger Penrose in the 20th century. He speculates about the ability of artificially intelligent computer software to be able to generate random quasi-periodic patterns. Lastly, the author recounts a synchronistic experience that occurred during the month of his 72nd birthday, in which his work with numbers is seemingly reciprocated by nature.

An Introduction to Marie-Louise von Franz’s Number and Time

Number and Time: Reflections Leading toward the Unification of Depth Psychology and Physics, by Marie-Louise von Franz (1974), explores parallels between the understanding of psychological healing in Jungian psychology and the theory of subatomic particles in quantum physics. Von Franz compares number symbolism in dreams with the mathematical structure of matter to link these two realms of life. The parallel role of numbers in the psyche and in matter is described to explain the interrelationship of our inner images and the outer world, as well to represent fundamental processes of personal development.

THE POLYTHEISTIC PSYCHE: RE-IMAGINING SOUL AND SELF IN JAME'S HILLMAN'S ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY

This article examines the notion of psychological polytheism in the context of Jungian depth psychology. The author focuses on the concept of the “polytheistic psyche” which American psychologist and philosopher James Hillman, founder of the post-Jungian

THE POLYTHEISTIC PSYCHE: RE-IMAGINING SOUL AND SELF IN JAME'S HILLMAN'S ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY

This article examines the notion of psychological polytheism in the context of Jungian depth psychology. The author focuses on the concept of the “polytheistic psyche” which American psychologist and philosopher James Hillman, founder of the post-Jungian

The weariness of the hero: depression and the self in a civilization in transition

AbstractAccording to the World Health Organization, depression is currently the leading cause of disability, which is of great concern worldwide; however there is much dispute about depression and its causes. This article raises the hypothesis that depression could be related to an increase or inflation of ego‐consciousness, which, in turn, is inseparable from the development of modernity. The ‘hero’, symbol of this historical process of self‐consciousness and autonomy, stands now wearied and disoriented. The paper outlines how, in this cultural scene, certain ideas from Carl Jung's and James Hillman's depth psychologies may be useful in addressing the issue: the rediscovery of figures of the other through the analysis of the unconscious (Jung) and associating with others in groups imbued with communal sense (Hillman) could help the depressed individual to mitigate his or her inflated ego‐consciousness. These are two complementary ways of experiencing the conglomerate nature of the self, thus promoting the process of individuation.

Engaging the Paleolithic Images of Chauvet Cave

The prehistoric artists of Chauvet Cave likely never imagined their drawings would be discovered 35,000 years later, inspiring scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines. Scholarship thus far has focused primarily on artistic techniques and material cultural remnants. Although these quantitative studies have revealed important data suggesting the cave’s use as a ritual space, the history and ceremonies of these ancient humans remain a mystery. This article demonstrates that depth psychology may be a valuable discipline for gaining further understanding of the cave’s ancient images. Depth psychologists have argued that the modern human unconscious retains vestiges of the archaic human psyche. In order to explore that premise, the author applies C. G. Jung’s technique of active imagination to selected Paleolithic images from within Chauvet Cave, amplifying the resulting materials in order to better contextualize them within the collective unconscious. Although this qualitative exploration cannot conclusively establish an accurate portrayal of what specific rituals were performed within the ancient cave, it offers potential insight into archaic elements that persist within the modern human psyche. The 1994 rediscovery of Chauvet Cave thus becomes not just a clue to our past, but a remarkable window upon our present.

About the Ability to Be in Two Places at Once

Summary In 1915 the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin describes in his famous work on figure-ground perception, the phenomenon that when you look attentively at a picture, a second, virtual ego arises, breaking away from the viewer-ego to wander around in the picture along the contours of the depicted. In 1982, German Gestalt psychologist Edwin Rausch expanded this observation of the emergence of a second phenomenal ego to the conclusion that not only does a second phenomenal ego emerge, but with it a second phenomenal total field, ie a second phenomenal world with its own phenomenal ego and an own phenomenal environment of this ego. Several years ago, I proposed a multi-field-approach in psychotherapy building on this research. This approach involves three levels: First, the level of phenomenological observation and psychological analysis of the conditions that determine the formation of such a second total field (and even further total fields), regardless of whether this occurs spontaneously or intentionally or as a result of external influences. Second, the level of explanation of various psychic processes, which in the field of psychotherapy have been explained so far mainly on the basis of depth psychology, and the conceptualization of the therapeutic situation and therapeutic processes from a Gestalt psychological perspective. Third, finally, the level of practical application of such insights on the development of appropriate procedures and interventions that can promote or defer the emergence of such second or multiple fields in psychotherapy. The present article introduces the multi-field approach, especially at the first level, and refers to research and discussion on mind wandering, imagining, daydreaming and dissociation.

Depth Psychology in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera

The essay first shows that Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands aligns with many Jungian psychological concepts, including the shadow, the collective unconscious, the unus mundus, and active imagination. It then reads the text through the lens provided by James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, a book she considers “instrumental.” His personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing, and soul-making or dehumanizing—a reworking of the Jungian individuation process—provide relevant analogies for Anzaldúan thought, particularly her conocimiento process. Using Hillman as a lens helps to schematize her broad array of subjects. Despite depth psychology’s relevance to Borderlands, however, the essay argues that Anzaldúa’s Borderlands re-visions Re-Visioning Psychology by emphasizing expanded states of awareness, body wisdom, and the spirit world in order to provide a more inclusive vision of the psyche than Hillman puts forth. Thus, the essay demonstrates that Jung—as well as Jung-via-Hillman—contributes more to the hybridity of Anzaldúa’s work than has been previously recognized.

General Editor's Introduction to Volume 13

General Editor's Introduction to Volume 13

Talking Drama, Teaching Writing

Talking Drama, Teaching Writing

Racionalnost u religiji

The author begins by first presenting Freud’s critique of religion and then Jung’s supplement encapsulated in his teachings concerning depth psychology. He explains the psychological approach to religious contents and the complementary rational attitude. He goes on to give a dynamic elaboration of the afore-mentioned supplementary attitude and to give a short perusal of Hegel’s motivation for a philosophy of religion. Religious reason is supplemented by creativity and love while querying and the method of questioning are given precedence over the mere giveness of facts as answers. The author concludes his articles with a brief review of trust as it is thematized through the history of philosophy and as it is acccepted in religion with all the ambiguity and wavering of the concept and die attendant behaviour.

Beyond Narcissism

ABSTRACTSince Freud’s essay on Narcissism, our reading of the Narcissus myth has been instrumental to identifying a specific type of personality disorder that has been increasingly seen as characteristic of modern and postmodern Western societies. But what if this reading of the ancient myth was, in itself, a narcissistic misreading? In this article, the author addresses one of her primary research interests: how a comparative reading of medieval hermeneutics of the human experience and of Jung’s depth psychology may offer us a deeper understanding of the workings of archetypal imagination. This article explores the ways in which premodern visionaries, poets, and artists from different cultural traditions consciously engaged with the images staring at them from the depths of the unconscious in an approach that resonates with Jung’s own. Those images of the depths, it turns out, deeply engage the masculine conscious side of the psyche in the retrieval of its feminine, life-restoring counterpart.

O estetyce psychologii głębi. Gastona Bachelarda teoria marzenia poetyckiego

Gaston Bachelard’s concept of dream is analysed in the paper. The main aim of the article is to show a strong dependence of his theory of dream on Freud’s and Jung’s depth psychology. In order to prove this conclusion, a historical comparative analysis was undertaken of the theoretical relationship between psychoanalysis and Bachelard’s phenomenological theory of poetic dream.

Walking With Elephants: A Case for Trans-Species Ethnography

This paper argues for the development of new methodologies for studying animals and human-animal relationships that take qualitative and hermeneutic considerations into account. Drawing on the traditions of anthropology, depth psychology, and somatic studies, the paper advocates for the use of a trans-species ethnography that situates the researcher as a participant-observer in the field, in relationship with the subjects of study. This theoretical framework is illustrated by case study in the form of the author’s fieldwork on human-elephant communication at an elephant sanctuary in Cambodia.

기도와 신비적 체험에 대한 심층심리학적 이해

이 논문의 목적은 종교심리학의 주요 연구분야 중의 하나인 기도와 신비적체험에 대한 심층심리학적인 이해를 통해 종교행위와 심리치료가 공유하는 인간 내면세계 치유의 동기와 과정을 밝히는데 있다. 연구의 방법론으로 연구자는 기도와 신비적 체험에 대한 종전의 신학적 입장을 떠나서 특정 신앙적 가치관이나 교리와 믿음의 고백을 근간으로 하지 않는 정신분석적 대상관계론과 사이코드라마의 이론들이 제시하는 기도의 동기와 과정 그리고 신비적 경험에 대한 문헌들을 살피었다. 대상관계론적 이론들은 기도자로 하여금 기도의 자리로 오게 하는 인간 내면의 동기를 밝히어 기도자의 내면적 욕구의 결핍이 투영(projection)으로 이어지는 정신적 역동과 이에 따른 기도 대상의 내면화(internaliza -tion) 과정을 설명한다. 사이코드라마로 시작된 드라마치료의 경우에는 기도의 실제적 행위 속에서 기도자가 자신안의 내면화된 대상과 만나 어떻게 감정의 정화를 경험하며 내면적 변형(transformation)에 도달하는지 그 신비적 경험을 ‘잉여현실’(surplus reality)의 이론에 입각하여 설명한다. 결론적으로 종교적 행위와 심리치료 영역이 서로 공유하는 기능이 크다는 사실과 인간 마음의 치료라는 공통의 과제를 향하여 상호 교류와 대화 그리고 보완책들을 나눌 수 있는 가능성의 지대함을 다시한 번 확인하게 된다.

If it is Not for All, it is Not for Us: Reflections on Racism, Nationalism, and Populism in the United States

Contrasting the leadership styles of Donald Trump and Barack Obama, this essay discusses the complex roots that foster and feed racism, nationalism, and ethnic fears. The work of African American social critics and artists, sociologists, and Eric Berne’s writings on group psychology and existential life positions are drawn on to illustrate the psychological and social depths that underpin and motivate racial, ethnic, and nationalistic bias and hatred. The author describes efforts to address and work through some of the social and economic consequences of racism through the efforts of his own community. The forces contained within the contemporary rise of nationalism and populism are complex. These can be—and must be—seen from multiple points of view.

Personal Freedom Beyond Politics and Human Rights: Women, Religion and Freedom in the Arab World

This article explores the issue of what constitutes freedom for women living in the Arab world. Central to the concerns addressed in this article is the issue of religion as a cultural force that defines the perceived limits of freedom. Ultimately, the issue addressed in the paper will be how best to understand the ways Arab women perceive their freedom and constraints without attempting to speak for them, or imposing a Western definition of freedom on their situation. In order to do this, a theoretical framework provided by dialogical liberation theory and depth psychology will be recommended.

Thomas de Quincey's Stage-Work: Theater, Reading, Body, Affect

This essay contributes to a growing number of studies that find in the work of Thomas De Quincey major contributions to the general practices, values, and blind spots of literary criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, this essay argues that he aspires to create an embodied reading practice by underwriting his general theory of literature with his writings on drama. De Quincey values the theater as a place for phenomenal effect, and his literary criticism attempts to formulate a mode of textuality that can replicate, or at least approximate, the material effects of stage-work, thereby implicating the reader’s perceptive body in the reading process. He, however, arrives at the impasse between the sensorial body and literature, an aesthetic medium completely mediated from the empirical world. In order to make the sensitized body the primary target of literature, De Quincey has to invent an interior space that obviates the problem that the body puts to reading, and he calls this the “subconscious.” This essay not only demonstrates how De Quincey creates his literary theory of dramatic writing in conversation with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and contemporary discourses about the stage. It also proposes that De Quincey fashions a formative critical practice that enlists techniques of the stage to sensitize and spatialize the reader’s body. The problems, inventions, and solutions that he discovers prove that embodied reading can be possible only when supplemented by a notion of depth psychology.

Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage by Jacob Gallagher-Ross

Reviewed by: Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage by Jacob Gallagher-Ross Dorothy Chansky Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage. By Jacob Gallagher-Ross. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; pp. 248. On the morning I started this review, Dictionary. com's "Word of the Day" was transmundane, defined as "reaching beyond or existing outside the physical or visible world." The everydays in Jacob Gallagher-Ross's stunning, highly original book are relentlessly dependent on the physical or visible (and auditory) world in which we are enmeshed, yet they are simultaneously the stuff of magic, epiphany, and wonder—precisely the transmundane. Gallagher-Ross's four chapters plus a coda parse the alchemical workings of an unexpected quintet of artists whose deployments of the ordinary yield what the author unabashedly calls the re-enchantment of the quotidian. The book opens with the iconic question posed by Emily Webb at the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town: "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?" (3). Gallagher-Ross is neither interested in nostalgia nor traditional American realism, which depends on a representation strategy built on "a consensus view of what constitutes the real" (48) and that privileges "hegemony over the quotidian" (7). His subjects locate art in the ordinary, "finding meanings in habitually invisible or abject phenomena" (27), mostly bypassing narrative and eschewing "reified depth psychology" (29). They work with the idea that "the world [End Page 435] we know is a shifting point orbited by uncountable minds, all an equal claim on reality" (60). If I have understood Gallagher-Ross's project, then, his detailed and perceptive descriptions of the work of Wilder, Lee Strasberg, Stuart Sherman, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Richard Maxwell expose only half of the materials from which they spin their gold. The overlooked materiality and aurality of the quotidian come to life and acquire significance in the theatre only when these intersect with the other half of the ingredients: the subjectivities—no two alike—of the spectators whose sensibilities the material components can awaken to wonder and to feelings too easily brushed aside in the glut of sensory overload that too often passes for all there is of the everyday. Accordingly, "reimagining spectatorship" (35) drives both the objects of study and Gallagher-Ross's own thinking. The rubric under which all the unexpectedly magical everydays in the book take place is technology. Wilder used speed and the passage of time to explore and inspire new ways of seeing. In Pullman Car Hiawatha and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, via movement in modern vehicles (trains and automobiles), the ever-changing landscapes—natural and human-made—rushing by and visible through windows prompt ever-shifting responses. In Our Town and The Long Christmas Dinner, putative mimesis is undone by the time travel the playwright uses to remind us that "everything solid melts away into time" (70). Gallagher-Ross's takeaway is that "the act of perception, of noticing, creates the aesthetic experience" (67). Life may be precious and fleeting according to Wilder, but that idea is of little consequence absent an audience to ratify it. Strasberg's influence on American acting training is, refreshingly, not the focus of the chapter called "Mediating the Method"; rather, Gallagher-Ross examines how Strasberg's relentless use of tape recorders coupled with his awareness of the importance of film work for his trainees brought "orphan sounds into theatrical speech" (76). You want "truth"? The unvarnished version is captured—warts, tics, and all—best by the wholly impartial means of the electronic recording device. Ironically, "the Method's immediacy was deeply mediated, its mediations intended to provide access to unmediated reality" (82). This mimesis was in the service of portraying truthfully a world increasingly noisy, distracting, and chock full of mechanically produced stimuli. Sherman's weird and wonderful performances present what Gallagher-Ross labels (borrowing from philosopher Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei) an "ecstatic quotidian" (105ff.). Sherman called the pieces "spectacles" (ibid.), offering a rich series of them between 1975 and his death in 2001. His strategy was to use commercially produced items such as plastic figurines, fake...

Becoming homo sapiens sapiens: Mapping the psycho-cultural transformation in the anthropocene

Abstract If it is true that humans are about to leave behind the environmental conditions we have known for the 150,000–200,000 years of our species’ existence, then we are now changing the context in which we have evolved to date. This means Homo sapiens will have to co-evolve further with the climatic and environmental conditions it is creating through its planetary impact in the Anthropocene. Given the rapidity of the changes humans have set in motion, however, this next evolutionary phase may be cultural rather than biological, reflected in behaviors, practices, artifacts, institutions and underlying values and worldviews, and, therefore, psychological. Such a psycho-cultural transformation is frequently called for, but rarely explored in detail. This paper presents a model of psychological transformation from the fields of depth psychology and anthropology known as an archetypal death-rebirth process. Applied to a cultural transformation, the model offers a frame to interpret this time of unprecedented environmental and cultural endings. It gives purpose and meaning to the suffering involved in transformations and, crucially, offers hope through the vision of renewal. Its tripartite progression of severance, threshold, and reincorporation provides a map for navigating the terra quasi-incognita of this transformation that tells us what to expect and therefore how to respond. Finally, it offers an explication of how a transformation far more profound than changes in actions and policies may allow us to become the truly wise humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, our species’ name denotes we could be.