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What are Jungian Studies? One way to answer this question is to turn to this fine new collection of crafted essays, edited by Murray Stein and Raya A. Jones. Stemming from an academic conference of Jungian studies held jointly in Zurich in 2008 by the analysts' organization, the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), and a Jungian scholars group, the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS), this collection proves the fertility of the field.
In particular, these papers are true to depth psychology in its ability to open up profound questions of knowledge, psyche and culture in ways that frame future research. For example, I found one key to my understanding of Jungian studies in Christian Gaillard's provocative and persuasive ‘Jung's art’. Here (p. 108) he insists that:
It is apparent that Jung's relationship to the arts cannot be assigned to either ‘applied psychoanalysis’ or ‘applied psychology’ …
On the contrary, as we shall see, it is largely as a result of his progressive discoveries of the arts, his exploratory rapport with those works of art that he encountered and revisited and, even more radically, his interaction with what we now call ‘creative processes’, that Jung came to open a new route to psychoanalysis and its renovation from the inside out.
Such a revelation transforms the relationship of Jung's work as a ‘psychology’ to other bodies of knowledge. ‘Jungian studies’ here is not about ‘applying’ Jungian concepts as an external unproblematic to culture or the arts. Rather it is to explore and re-form the arts and culture as already ‘inside’ analytical psychology. Jung wove what is new and provoking in his thought through his engagement with the philosophies and arts of his time. So ‘Jungian studies’ is ready to open up basic questions of Jungian ideas by scrutinizing them as already subject to technologies of the imagination.
Such an approach to Jungian studies acquires further resonance when it encompasses cross-cultural co