The Art of Psyche: Active Imagination and Art

Maria Taveras
Start Date: 10/04/2024
Scheduled course
Online

Overview

We will explore the intimate relation between the art of psyche, active imagination and art. Our main focus will be on the role of active imagination in the psychic origin of artistic creation. Jung defines active imagination as a technique for evoking images from the unconscious and then actively engaging those images. By creating a series of dreams, visions, and spontaneous images during course we will have the opportunity to observe the creative process in motion, in visual forms of the collective unconscious psychologically speaking in terms of the symbolic, compensatory, amplification, and unconscious complexes. We will read what Jung (as well as others like Marie-Louise von Franz) have written about active imagination. We will view images that Jung actively evoked from his unconscious and then painted in his famous Red Book – an important example of “Outsider Art.” In experiential exercises, we will have an opportunity to create our own art from images that emerge from the unconscious in our own active imaginations. As a group, we will have an opportunity to show, share, and discuss together the art that we have all actively imagined.

5 consecutive Wednesdays, 6:00 – 7:30 pm Eastern Time, USA via Zoom.

On completion of this class, you will be able to:

  1. Discuss the difference between Jung’s technique of active imagination and Freud’s technique of free association.
  2. Describe Jung’s technique of active imagination – how actively to evoke and engage images from the unconscious.
  3. Describe how to use Jung’s technique of active imagination to create art from images that emerge from their own unconscious.
  4. Explain how active imagination is actually “interactive imagination” – a technique that induces an altered state of consciousness in order to enable the ego and the images that emerge from the unconscious to interact creatively.
  5. Use these concepts to directly embody the relation between art and psyche and to discuss the uniquely personal experience of the creative process.
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