Category: The Way of Art and the Creative Life

This paper is essentially a response to the two keynote speakers at last year’s British Columbia Psychological Association’s annual conference. The challenge of biologist Bruce Lipton to psychology was that the essential law of life is based on quantum dynamics. The challenge presented by Gordon Neufeldt was that psychology needed to recapture its true spirit, which includes a deep understanding of culture and spiritual truths. I argue that Jung’s approach to psychology fulfills both these requirements.

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This talk is about individuation and life as a creative process. I discuss the nature of the archetype and the archetypal image, and then amplify a series of my paintings in order to illustrate their meaning.

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This essay is about ecology of the Self. First, I show how the interrelationship between the individual and the community is essentially ecological. By way of illustration, I amplify a series of four paintings entitled The Turning Point. They demonstrate how the experience of the Self involves transformation over space and time.

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In this paper, I study a poem, Christopher, by Douglas Beardsley from a Jungian perspective. Following Jung, my basic assumption is that images are life. By treating the series of images as if they were a dream and understanding their symbolic nature, one can, therefore, see the psychological forces at play in the poet’s life, at least during the time he was engaged in writing this poem. This is what I do by way of amplifying on the images, in addition to commenting on some aspects of the nature of the individuation process. The poem is evidently about encountering inferior aspects of the psyche, particularly inferior extraverted feeling and sensation.

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In this paper I examine the nature of the aesthetic attitude which is based on a supra-rational instinct that ultimately aims at the beautiful. I observe that it not only operates by way of the perceptive modes of intuition and sensation, but also consists of an Eros-based evaluative feeling function. Individuation of the aesthetic nature involves refining one’s ability to differentiate grades of beauty and beauty from ugliness.

Continue reading “The Aesthetic Attitude and the Art of Life”