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The Film and Culture Section is a relatively new one in the long, 60-year history of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. We offer reviews of films, cultural events, exhibitions, music, design projects and the arts of all kinds, as seen through the many varied lenses of depth psychology. In keeping with our international mission, we have invited six members of the JAP Editorial Board to contribute multi-layered pieces centred around the theme ‘Empathy and aesthetics in Titanic times’. The essays to follow offer reflections on art as it has unfolded between March and December 2020 from within each different cultural/societal context. The hope is that through art, image, and metaphor, threads of commonality and difference will emerge and help create a network of plural perspectives, opening our community to an expanding worldview … through art.
With the confluence of recent events, it is as if the Titans have broken out of Tartarus where they have been imprisoned since losing an epic battle with the Olympians, an anthropomorphized race described as more refined and superior to the Titans who are said to be imageless and formless and known for their excess and emptiness (Lopez-Pedraza 1990). Titanic presence crashes into our consciousness with natural disasters such as fire, flood, mud, and earthquakes; and perhaps, now, they have become manifest in the pandemic and the extraordinary fragmentation of social and political systems. They rock our world at very large scales reminding us that we, as humans, have nothing like the powers that they command. For the Greeks, the Titans represented, probably, nature itself, the overpowering, limitless forces beyond human control or understanding that caused terror a