In this course Susan Rowland shares the good news that the creative work we want to do is waiting for us behind the wall of our stuckness. All we have to do is find the door. Opening this door also helps us heal our inner divisions as we reconnect with parts of ourselves that have been split off.
Using the practice Carl Jung developed of active imagination as well as the 12 transformative stages of alchemy, Susan looks at ways we can be hospitable to the images hidden in our psyche and help them take shape in the world. The image may find its body in any artistic medium; writing, painting, music, sculpting, dancing and crafts.
Susan presents the myths of the Sky Father creator and the Earth Mother Goddess as two different ways of looking at how knowledge and art are made; one based on the separation of subject and object, the other based on relationship and immersion in the in-spiritedness of psyche in the world of matter. We learn how our over-emphasis of the scientific world view has left us moderns split off from our creative spontaneity. Susan talks about how we need to approach our art making as well as our inner work toward wholeness with both attitudes, at times stepping back into separateness and at other times flowing into what seems Other to us.
This course is for you if you’ve already spent some time on your inner journey and want to learn about how the processes of individuation and making art are intertwined.
The theoretical framework of this course is punctuated with an exercise in active imagination and an in-depth application of alchemical phases to the creative process. Learn from Susan how to engage with the psyche and how to overcome stuckness in your personal and artistic life.
Course Overview:
Class 1: Starting
In this class Susan assures us that we don’t need to create the images of the psyche for they’re already alive, they only ask that we see and create with them.
Susan discusses how the contemporary emphasis on science and technological education has marginalized art and artists. She shows that art is indeed central to our soul and individuation, as the Romantics, and Jung in their wake, tried to affirm in a moment when Western culture was becoming increasingly rationalistic.
She explores how the gaze of a male artist presenting a female figure became the unquestioned perspective for art and how this has been challenged by contemporary women artists presenting their own realities through unconventional media.
Susan explores the theme of stuckness. Being stuck is what brings us to therapy. It’s also the theme of many fairy tales and myths. She tells how to be on the lookout for imaginal sprouts from the germinating seeds in the unconscious. The psyche presents these images with an inherent order whose goal is to bring the soul back into balance and health. We learn to develop a relationship with an image that is not under our conscious control.
Class 2: Making
In this class Susan discusses the importance of the dialogue between spontaneity and craft.
She presents the two different models of the story of making art in “The Myth of the Goddess” by Baring & Cashford. One model is the Sky Father creator, the other is the Earth Mother goddess The first gives us the image of a disembodied, male creative power acting on inert matter. It emphasizes separateness and hierarchy. The second gives us a feeling of the divinity in matter, the spirit that lives in rivers, trees, rocks and all people. It emphasizes connectedness and participation in the living body of the Mother.
We learn craft and technique through the Sky Father attitude, and we find inspiration and collective energy through the Earth Mother attitude. We need to balance the two attitudes to make art, and we need to know how to separate from unconscious images and integrate them in the journey of individuation.
Susan presents the 12 phases of alchemical transformation as models for this dialogue in art making and individuation.
Class 3: Meaning
In this class Susan takes us deeper into each of the 12 alchemical phases. We learn how the fire of calcination and the blurring of dissolution break down our sense of separateness. We must have faith that the elements or images will start to come alive in the safe place we give them. We hear about the phase of putrid disgust and stuckness with our work and how time is needed to let the work ferment. Susan relates how the finished work of art takes on an autonomous life in the world.
Susan also discusses how art often evokes synchronicity and predicts future events. We learn how making art can become a means of research as it uses both Sky Father skills and Earth Mother sensibilities to explore relationships, matter itself and as a means of social activism.