You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
WHEN PROFESSOR HENRI ELLENBERGER chose as the title for his monumental book, The discovery of the unconscious (ELLENBERGER 3), he may have given us a name for our epoch. If one views man's advancement as a developmental process (sometimes fallow, sometimes regressive, and sometimes forward-moving), and looks at certain eras as containers for specific developmental tasks, then our time may also become to be known as the time of the discovery of the collective side in man. While Freud opened the doors to the scientific study of unconscious processes, it was primarily C. G. Jung who walked into man's collective substance and described it for us. The task ahead centres on the means for studying this substance scientifically.
That there are many profound thinkers who are yet to be convinced that a collective side does indeed exist, points up how much we are still at the beginning of discovery. A collective substance in man has long been implicit in Eastern thought, but its application was seldom separated from theological problems and illuminations. Yet the startling subtleties and masterful achievements in Eastern religious art are a function of how the artists worked in a tradition of the projection of a personal, inner world. There is a profound connection between collective sources and artistic creativity in Eastern art forms, and these forms applied to religious themes spilled over to influence all of Eastern art. Art theory was unified by theology.
There are of course parallels in Western religious art. However, much of Western religious art was created by secular artists who worked in an individualistic tradition. Biblical themes connected the work of Western artists, and Jartaka stories about the life of the Buddha connected Eastern ones. The difference lay in Eastern art theory's having been based on techniques in some ways similar to dream logic, whereas art theory in the West was based more on sources inside the formal logic of consciousness.
There were individua