Can you do depth psychology with a blues guitar? Mark Winborn shows us how with his song “My Rowdy Days“. Many of you will know Mark as the host of the Members Gala, the open mic nights showcasing the performing talents of Jungian colleagues, that have become a feature at the IAAP Congresses. Mark’s new song explores how we make peace with the parts of ourselves we’ve outgrown. The music video, created by Winborn himself, pairs reflective lyrics with visual imagery that deepens the psychological resonance.
Creativity, imagination, and expression have been central to the Jungian approach from the start. For Jung, the unconscious is fundamentally creative. His Red Book remains the clearest example of an analyst engaging directly with unconscious material, using painting, calligraphy, and imaginative writing as legitimate paths to psychological insight. Through the practice of active imagination, Jung framed creativity not as optional self-expression, but as a necessary encounter with the psyche’s autonomous life. The transcendent function, he argued, depends on giving images and symbols space to emerge through creative form.
Over the years Jungian.Directory has featured the creative efforts of a growing number of Jungians.
From Page to Stage: Theatrical Experiments
Murray Stein and Henry Abramovitch have taken a different creative path: the stage. Their audio play Eranos, available on YouTube, dramatizes a 1947 gathering at the legendary Eranos conference center in Ascona, Switzerland. The play imagines conversations between Jung, Aniela Jaffé, Erich Neumann, Rabbi Leo Baeck, and Eranos founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn as they grapple with questions that remain urgent today: What is evil? How do we recover from collective trauma? Is a new myth needed for our time?
Published by Chiron in 2025, the book version includes essays by the ensemble of Jungian analysts who performed the piece, along with reflections from the authors and invited contributors. Stein and Abramovitch previously collaborated on The Analyst and the Rabbi, which dramatizes the 1946 meeting between Jung and Rabbi Leo Baeck—a historic encounter that has been both performed on stage and filmed. These theatrical works demonstrate how the dramatic form can illuminate psychological and historical complexity in ways that scholarly prose cannot.
Detective Fiction as Depth Psychology
Susan Rowland has pioneered Jungian Arts-Based Research (JABR) through her Mary Wandwalker mystery series. Beginning with The Sacred Well Murders (2022) and continuing through The Alchemy Fire Murder (2023) and Murder on Family Grounds (2024), and most recently The Swan Lake Murders (2025), Rowland uses the detective genre to explore marginalised women as heroines navigating literal and symbolic violence. Her protagonist is described as a “triple goddess detective,” weaving together stories that examine family trauma, climate emergency, and the shadow of patriarchal institutions.
JABR itself represents an important methodological development—a non-hierarchical approach that treats creative work not as illustration of theory, but as a legitimate form of psychological inquiry. By placing creativity at the heart of knowing and being, JABR offers researchers and practitioners a framework for engaging the psyche through imaginative expression rather than purely analytical methods.
Henry Abramovitch has also ventured into fiction with Panic Attacks in Pistachio: A Psychological Detective Story (Chiron), a thriller told in the first person that explores panic attacks, loss, and the process of individuation. The protagonist receives help from imaginal figures including Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, ultimately discovering the hidden connection between childhood trauma and his panic attacks. As Murray Stein notes in his endorsement, it’s a rare example of an analyst’s creativity extending successfully into the novel form.
Pop Psychology
Peter Demuth offers yet another example of the analyst-artist: a clinical forensic psychologist and Jungian analyst who has released eight full-length albums of original introspective folk-pop music and performs regularly in the Chicago area. Like the other analysts featured here, Demuth demonstrates that creative expression and clinical work aren’t separate vocations but complementary pathways to understanding the psyche’s depths.
These contemporary projects extend that insight into new territories. Whether through blues music exploring shadow integration, theatrical dialogues confronting historical trauma, or detective fiction examining cultural complexes, Jungian analysts are demonstrating that depth psychology and creative practice aren’t separate vocations, but complementary expressions of the same impulse toward wholeness.
For those interested in exploring these projects:
- Mark Winborn’s “My Rowdy Days”: Watch on YouTube
- Murray Stein & Henry Abramovitch’s Eranos: Available as audio play and book (Chiron Publications, 2025)
- Susan Rowland’s Mary Wandwalker mysteries: The Sacred Well Murders, The Alchemy Fire Murder, Murder on Family Grounds, The Swan Lake Murders (Chiron Publications)
- Henry Abramovitch’s Panic Attacks in Pistachio: A Psychological Detective Story (Chiron Publications)
As these analysts demonstrate, sometimes the most profound psychological insights don’t arrive through clinical observation or theoretical refinement; they emerge when we pick up a guitar, step onto a stage, or let a fictional detective follow a trail of clues into the unconscious.
The question of why Jungians create art was explored directly in a March 2025 IAJS seminar titled “Why are Jungians Writing Novels (doing art)?” featuring novelists Susan Rowland, Erik Goodwyn, and Frank N. McMillan, with Ipek Burnett as moderator. The panelists discussed whether fiction allows analysts to express what’s difficult to capture in case studies, whether writing novels resembles clinical sessions in its embrace of spontaneous imagery and active imagination, and whether Jungian novels might be “doing therapy with the world.” The recording is available to IAJS members through their online seminars archive.