Reflections on images from Hell: The Siege of Mariupol and the defence of the Azovstal Steel Plant.
We are approaching the second anniversary of one of the most consequential and dramatic moments in what has become a grinding conflict with little sense of any conclusion in sight: the siege of Mariupol and the Azovstal Steel plant (24 February to 20 May 2022). At the time of the siege, several remarkable photographs emerged from inside the steel plant, one of which captured, in an unusual juxtaposition, the dualities that can, at times, characterise even the most brutal conflicts. A soldier, standing in a space that would have been a simulacrum of hell itself, is illuminated from beyond the confines of the plant, his arms outstretched, prayer-like, in what must be both joy and despair. A few feet from the soldier, on a remnant of some industrial machinery, one can imagine an altar set with the implements of the sacraments. It is a remarkable, one would have to say, archetypal image.
In his book, A Terrible Love of War, James Hillman attempted to understand war through the lens of his own archetypal psychology, and Wolfgang Giegerich followed Hillman with several probing essays on the presence of nuclear weapons in relation to the psyche. Of course, Jung himself falls into the Red Book by way of a series of visionary experiences foreshadowing the First World War. Anthony Stevens wrote about war from yet another point of view, but beyond those works, the Jungian community has not, to my knowledge, undertaken to subject war as a lived, archetypal presence to the kind of reflection afforded other archetypal patterns.
Using the siege of Mariupol and the Azovstal Steel Plant as a starting point, this presentation will reflect on the nature of war as archetypal and the emergence of mediating symbols amid the hell depicted in the images from the siege. Some personal background may be included in the presentation.