Arts of the Imaginal World: Rejuvenation & Psychic Creativity

Creative practice has a rejuvenating effect. We feel more whole, more insightful and more in touch with our deep psyche. Creativity and art release and focus archetypal energy. C. G. Jung shows how art-making aids psychological individuation. The arts have a long history of materializing the psyche for the collective. A helpful archetype is Dionysus, that breaker of boundaries, including those between humans and nature. This god requires collective worship. Dionysian energy dismembers psychic being, and re-members it as symbols. Doing art follows such a Dionysian process. This lecture proposes that taking Dionysus seriously seeds a third rejuvenation of being, one where creativity dances between knowing and being. Here art and clinical practice are generative partners. My novels, the Mary Wandwalker Mysteries, are my own Dionysian engagement with the world.