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This book contains a number of remarkable essays (presented at the first conference of the International Association of Jungian Studies in 2006), including the introduction by editor Susan Rowland. These essays make important use of Jung's psychology in their exploration of the psychic interiority of art as well as offering a ‘renewed and numinous space for the making, appreciation and criticism of art in our time’ (p. 1).
Rowland speaks of the ‘doubleness’ of Jung's approach to the psyche in relationship to art—that his theories can be understood as both embedded and structural. On one hand, his psychology does not subsume art into its own categories. Art is ‘other’ and cannot be reduced to Jungian ideas (Jung , paras. 99-100). On the other hand, ‘the unconscious is by nature creative, in part unknowable, and … this undermines any other secure knowledge’ (Jung 1954, para. 358). Since concepts do not have anything ‘outside’ to stand upon, ‘Jung admits that his ideas are embedded in his own personality, history and twentieth-century European culture’ (p. 2).
In contrast, Rowland understands the structural component of Jung's psychology as oppositional pairs of concepts that make psychic events comprehensible. She outlines the defining pair of opposites as conscious/unconscious along with the moral opposition of ego versus shadow, the gender opposition of anima/animus versus the ego, and the transcendent opposition of the ego versus the self. It is the task of psyche to convert psychic opposition into a dynamic living relationship. Jung called that task ‘individuation’.
Rowland also illustrates how Jungian theory can be understood by arts criticism as both immanent and transcendent. She gives a delightful example of this understanding in the instance of an artist who left two huge snowballs in a busy London thoroughfare in August. Beginning as transcendent objects—snow in August—the snowballs gently submit to nature by melting into immanent natural puddles. Rowland pr