Artistic Method 3

The Conversation Between Depth Psychology and Culture

The word “conversation” implies an interaction, a give and take, a back and forth; and this back and forth aptly describes the relationship between depth psychology and culture, and art in particular. From the beginning, depth psychology has been influenced by and has influenced culture: obtaining insights from culture; exploring culture through a depth psychological perspective, explicating itself through culture; and having an effect on culture. In what follows, I first explore art and the origins of depth psychology, then the cultural conversation between depth psychology and culture, and, lastly, I discuss movies as examples of a depth psychological praxis.

Art and the Origins of Depth Psychology

Both Hillman and Freud acknowledge a debt to artists. Freud is reported to have said: “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.” Indeed, Hillman (1983b) begins his book Healing Fiction with a quote from Giovanni Papini’s 1934 fictional interview of Freud:

I am a scientist by necessity, and not by vocation. I am really by nature an artist . . . . and of this there lies an irrefutable proof: which is that in all countries into which psychoanalysis has penetrated it has been better understood and applied by writers and artists than by doctors. My books, in fact, more resemble works of imagination than treatises on pathology . . . in all great men of science there is a leaven of fantasy, but no one proposes like me to translate the inspirations offered by the currents of modern literature into scientific theories. In psychoanalysis you may find fused together though changed into scientific jargon, the three greatest literary schools of the nineteenth century: Heine, Zola and Mallarmé united in me under the patronage of my old master Goethe. (p. 3)

Hillman points out that this fictional interview more clearly shows “what psychotherapy is actually doing, than do the elaborations of Freudian theory” (p. 3).

Hillman often relies on artists instead of psychologists to illustrate his ideas (Hillman & Ventura, 1992). For example, Hillman uses Picasso and the poet Wallace Stephens to discuss image, imagination, and his acorn theory. After quoting Picasso about image, Hillman goes on to quote Wallace Stephens regarding the fact that we can never get outside the imagination: “the absence of imagination had/ Itself to be imagined” (p. 63). Hillman himself adds: “your life is the ongoing operation of imagination; you imagine yourself into existence, or let’s say, an image is continuing to shape itself into the oak tree you consider your reality” (p. 63). In his latest book, A Terrible Love of War, Hillman (2004) frequently turns to poems and literature to capture the essence of a topic under discussion. Odajnyk (1984) argues that Hillman is really an artist who uses psychology as his medium.

Depth psychology’s beginnings were realized through art. Freud, after reading Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos realized “I am Oedipus” (Downing, 2002, lecture). This same play and its sequels, as Hillman (1995) points out, have profoundly inspired depth psychological theory. Jung was greatly influenced by Freud’s reading and followed in a more polytheistic trajectory. Where Freud saw one myth, Jung saw many. Indeed myths led to the notion of the collective unconscious, and Jung’s search for the myth he was living. Joseph Campbell (1968), in turn, was influenced by Freud, Rank, and Jung and as a result wrote The Hero with A Thousand Faces, a book that has had a tremendous effect on Hollywood, most notably George Lucas, the director of Star Wars. Christopher Vogler, when he worked for Disney, crafted a “seven page memo” about Campbell’s book. This memo, along with Vogler’s subsequent book, The Writer’s Journey (1998) are used by many of the Hollywood studios in evaluating and reworking material (Vogler, 1995, cassette).

The work of Max Ernst provides another instance of depth psychology inspiring art, which, in turn influenced depth psychology. Max Ernst was a surrealist artist who worked with collage and frottage. Ernst was influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis, and many of his collage images explore psychoanalytic themes (Warlick, 2001). Ernst, in turn, influenced Lévi-Strauss (1988), who credits Ernst with being the inspiration for his concept of bricolage. As have seen, the concept of bricolage has had an effect on many, including D. L. Miller (1996, online), Hillman (1992) and anthropologist Victor Turner (1988), who first influenced me.

While Freud and others were inspired by art and in turn had an effect on art, similarly, we will see that depth psychology explores culture and uses culture to explain itself. Although Freud and Jung realized that civilization was a problem, they had no real method of working with civilization (Hillman, 1983c, p. 130). Hillman has taken the cultural ball and run with it. Hillman, too, has been influenced by art, so before discussing further the conversation between depth psychology and culture, I will briefly digress to consider a few of Hillman’s thoughts about art and depth psychology. Hillman desires psychological theory to function like art:

I want theories that blow the mind, as art can, not settle our minds. And the value of the psychological theory lies in its capacity to open the mind, take the top of your head off like a good poem or voice in song. (Hillman & Ventura, 1992, p. 69)

Hillman has suggested an artistic paradigm for therapy and remarks that psychology must be comfortable with the poetic basis of mind. He writes of imagination:

If our methods are to meet the madness in America, that eruptive violence, there must be madness in our methods. And since our methods are our own personalities . . . then we therapists must admit the idiosyncratic craziness that is inherent to the poetic basis of mind, its fountain of strange imaginings. Our obligation to the soul calls for outrage and outrageousness, no warm support for compromising mediocrity. (Hillman & Ventura, 1992, p. 97)

Art has inspired Hillman’s theory as well. He credits Picasso’s painting Le Jeune Peintre (The Young Painter) as the brainchild for his “living backwards” theory. Picasso painted it when he was 91, a year before he died. In speaking about Le Jeune Peintre, Hillman remarks:

When I first saw this painting—and it was a big one, nearly a yard tall—I had that frisson Andre Malraux says leaps from one work of art to another via the human person. This haunting, simple image turned out to be the initiatory experience for my theory of life lived backwards. Here is the invisible Picasso caught on the canvas, a self-portrait of the daimon that inhabited him all his life. At the end, it emerges and shows itself . . . This image also presents Corbin’s basic premise about ta’wil, or the art of interpretive reading, how to read life itself; we must “read things back to their origins and their principle, their archetype.” . . . Because the primary activity of the psyche is imagining. My point here is that we humans are primarily acts of imagination, images. Jung says, “The psyche consists essentially of images.” . . . What we are really, and the reality we live in, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but—get the demeaning nothing but—the poetic imagination going on day and night. We really do live in dream time; we really are such stuff as dreams are made of. (Hillman & Ventura, 1992, pp. 61-62)

Grof has also been influenced by art and is himself an artist. Through his own art, as well as that of his co-researchers and patients, Grof has chronicled nonordinary state experiences. In these creative expressions, Grof was able to see patterns and themes emerge that resulted in his notion of systems of condensed expression, or COEXes. These COEXes relate to the different stages in the birth process (Grof 2002b). Indeed, it was the descriptions of one of these stages of the birth process—Basic Perinatal Matrix II (BPM II) when the uterus contracts but the cervix is not yet open—which led me to Grof’s work during a Google search.

Now that we have seen a few examples of depth psychology’s influencing and being influenced by art, I will turn to how depth psychology has explored culture and how it uses culture to explain itself.

The Cultural Conversation

Depth psychology has a long tradition of discussing culture. Freud, Jung and Hillman all wrote essays about culture. D. Bell (1999) writes “This dual quality, where psychoanalysis, Janus-like, looks both inwards to the workings of the mind and outwards to culture and society is not accidental but is central to what psychoanalysis is” (p. 2). The cultural relevance of psychoanalysis runs throughout Freud’s work in Totem and Taboo (1913/1975), The Future of an Illusion (1927/1962b), “Humor” (1927/1962a), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930/1962). Freud also created his own myth in Totem and Taboo. Freud explores art specifically in “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914/1975) “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” (1910/1975), and “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913/1962). Freud’s work, D. Bell continues, “generally speaking, illuminates the content of works of art and literature showing how they give expression to struggles and conflicts within our inner world” (p. 7).

Freud’s lecture on “the place of daydreams in the creative work of the imaginative writer, the Dichter . . . was also, aside from a few hints in the Interpretation of Dreams, the first to apply psychoanalytic ideas to culture” (Gay, 1998, pp. 306-7). Gay, in discussing this lecture, which was later published in 1908 as “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” writes:

Freud took one of his characteristic acrobatic leaps connecting one range of human experience to another. Parallel-hunting is a dangerous sport, especially if it presses inferences beyond their capacity, but valid parallels may discover hitherto unknown relationships, and even better, unsuspected causal connections. Freud’s leap was of this last sort: every child at play, he argued, behaves like a Dichter “in that he creates his own world for himself, or more correctly put, transposes the things of his world into a new order that pleases him.” In playing, the child is very much in earnest, but he knows that what he makes is an invention: “The opposite of play is not seriousness, but reality.” The poet or novelist proceeds in very much the same way; he recognizes the fantasies he is elaborating to be fantasies, but that does not make them any less momentous than, say the child’s imaginary playmate. Children find play enjoyable, and since humans are most reluctant to forgo a pleasure they have once enjoyed, they find a substitute as adults. Instead of playing, they fantasize. (p. 307)

In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (Freud, 1908/1975), Freud links play, art, and bricolage (without using the term), when he speaks of transposing the things of his world into a new order.

In 1910, Freud told Jung “I am more and more penetrated by the conviction of the cultural value of YA” and “I could wish for a bright fellow to draw the justified consequences for philosophy and society from it.” Gay (1998) notes “the time to apply the discoveries of psychoanalysis outside the consulting room was at hand . . . the prospects for a psychoanalytic interpretation of culture made him [Freud] euphoric” (p. 310). Jung, Rank, and Abraham were enamored with cultural interpretation, and Gay relates “applied psychoanalysis was a cooperative venture almost from the start. Freud found this widespread interest agreeable, but he needed no urging from others to put culture on the couch” (p. 312). Freud has had an indelible impact on culture; Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World (Winer and Anderson, 2001) contains essays chronicling Freud’s impact on the humanistic studies: literary criticism (Emmett & Veeder, 2001); American cinema (Gabbard, 2001a); drama (Sander, 2001) and the visual arts (Trossman, 2001). The psychoanalytic journal Imago was dedicated from its inception mainly to the application of psychoanalysis to culture.

Melanie Klein used art to explain some of her theories, and wrote three papers with predominantly literary themes all dealing with the work of art itself and not with the author. D. Bell (1999) notes that Klein’s (1955) “On Identification” deals with projective identification using Julian Green’s novel If I were You; that Klein uses the Oresteia and Ravel’s opera, The Magic Flute to illustrate clinical phenomena in “Reflections on the Oresteia” (1963); and “Infantile Anxiety Situations as Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” (1929) respectively (pp. 14-15).

Denney (2002) notes that Jung wrote about cultural phenomena, and cites such examples: on synchronicity (1951/1981, 1952/1981), Flying Saucers (1958/1970), and Psychology and Religion (1958/1989), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1934b/1978), Psychology and Literature (1950/1978) and Picasso (1934a/1978). Jung also wrote about the relationship of poetry to analytic psychology (1931/1978) and conducted an extensive seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra from 1934-1939 (1988). Jung’s disciple, Erich Neumann (1959) wrote The Archetypal World of Henry Moore. Also many Jungian journals, such as SALT, Psychological Perspectives and Spring all address cultural issues.

Jung’s (1964) final essay, “Approaching the Unconscious,” was published in 1964 after Jung’s death as the introductory essay in Man and His Symbols. This book, which Jung edited (and after his death von Franz) uses over five hundred pictures of art through the ages, from cave paintings at Lascaux to Godzilla in order to illustrate Jung’s ideas. The book also contains an article by Aniella Jaffé (1964) on “Symbolism in the Visual Arts,” which mentions Max Ernst, and shows some of his artwork.

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