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.
Jungian arts-based research (JABR) is doing therapy with the whole world. It means making knowledge through creativity, the imagination and the unknown psyche or the unconscious, interacting with the wisdom of centuries materialized in art traditions. JABR is being Jungian through art practice, whether that practice be writing novels or poetry, painting, sculpture, filmmaking, photography, internet games, garden design, music-making or arts as yet unexplored. Put another way, the consulting room of JABR is connected to society, nature and the cosmos by materializing the psyche in dialogue with art and history. Synchronicities arise and archetypes are summoned into being through art-making that is deliberately poised to invite-in the more than personal psyche. More depth can be generated through Jungian practices such as active imagination and amplification.
In this paper, I will figure JABR as a four-stage process: one, consideration of it as a new research paradigm; two, preparation with psyche, form, and genre; three, process by inviting spontaneity and the unknown; and four, projection and reflection using the completed artwork. This artwork works, assuming a place in society independent of the artist. JABR art takes on the valence of Jung's autonomous psychic image and materializes it. Such art travels through centuries, speaks to different cultures and generates multiple meanings, fixing none. JABR unites therapy with knowing and being. It is formational, in gathering what matters in the artist and the work, informational in finding out what is hidden, and transformational in offering new ways of being.
A paradigm is a story a culture tells to generate knowledge and to guarantee it as valid. Western modernity is largely shaped by the scientific paradigm consisting of repeatable experiments. This paradigm insists that the researcher
must be wholly separate from the research. It posits a model of reality of stable material objects tha