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This book is a welcome venture which crosses the disciplines of art and analytical psychology. Lopez-Pedraza, a distinguished Jungian analyst, has selected paintings from the work of an established twentieth century German artist, Anselm Kiefer and linked these, as the subtitle indicates, to Jung's paper ‘After the Catastrophe’ (Jung 1964).
As might be expected from Thames and Hudson this is a well produced book. It is lavishly illustrated in colour and, although there is no list of illustrations, the pictures are well presented, integrated in the text, and conveniently placed for reference. Lopez- Pedraza's approach is a form of psychobiography and, in some ways this is invited by the artist, whose obsession with his own and with his nation's history is ever present in his art works. Lopez-Pedraza's expressed intention is: ‘To explore … the personality of Kiefer and his creativity’ (p. 13), and he draws on his many years’ experience as a Jungian psychotherapist and his interest in art to do so. His theme is that although: ‘words may get entangled in semantics … the image speaks directly to the emotions’ [and that] ‘psychology learns from art’ (p. 13).
Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II. This was the same year that Jung wrote ‘After the Catastrophe’. Lopez-Pedraza links this paper