The final 2025 issue of ARAS Connections explores the intersection of inner and outer worlds across four diverse contributions, as introduced by editor Tom Singer.
Johanna Baruch opens with Painting at the Intersection of Psyche, Science, and Mystery: A Journey into the Cosmos through an Inner Landscape, which examines the creative process through the dual lens of cosmic exploration and inner psychological landscapes. Baruch shares her artistic practice of engaging with deep space telescope photographs, describing how the materiality of paint becomes a medium for expressing the relationship between her inner cosmos and the vast universe. She emphasises the partnership between artist and medium, exploring how the blank canvas becomes both receiver and respondent in creating new life through art. Her article includes images from various artists across time alongside photographs from space telescopes, offering insights into the alchemy of the painting process.
Thomas Singer presents his new book A Field Guide to American Cultural Complexes: The Battleground of the Splintered American Psyche, which analyses the powerful impersonal forces shaping contemporary American society. You can read more on this in last week’s featured post on Jungian.Directory.
Nanae Takenaka contributes New Additions to the ARAS Permanent Collection, introducing the first three archetypal commentaries in a series drawing on her expertise in Japanese folklore, mythology, and culture. Takenaka, visiting the United States from Japan, provides scholarly insight into archetypal dimensions of Japanese cultural images, expanding the archive’s global reach and cultural diversity.
The issue concludes with a summary of Joseph Henderson’s 1993 lecture On Depth Psychology, Time and Eternity, delivered to the San Francisco Friends of ARAS. Henderson focused on the timelessness of the collective unconscious and traced the historical development of this concept. He began with Jung’s question about whether the unconscious has a double bottom, referring to the personal and collective layers. Henderson explored contributions from eighteenth and nineteenth-century German thinkers including von Hartmann, Leibnitz, and Schopenhauer, as well as literary figures like Shakespeare and Shelley. He highlighted how the term “unconscious” evolved from an adjective describing mental phenomena to a noun representing a substantive psychic realm, challenging the rationalist convictions of thinkers like John Locke who viewed the mind as a blank slate shaped solely by conscious experience.