Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Balancing Art

Direction implies exclusion, and exclusion means that very many psychic elements that could play their part in life are denied the right to exist because they are incompatible with the general attitude.

The normal man can follow the general trend without injury to himself; but the man who takes to the back streets and alleys because he cannot endure the broad highway will be the first to discover the psychic elements that are waiting to play their part in the life of the collective.

Here the artist's relative lack of adaptation turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings far from the beaten path, and to discover what it is that would meet the unconscious needs of his age.

Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present.

Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual's conscious attitude is corrected by reaction from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs.

[C.G. Jung]
On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
found in The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism, p.1001-2

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Let's talk about it
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The Shadow & Projection
The Larger Mind
All ego?
Walk a Straight Line
Posted by Forever Becoming at 01:26
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2 comments:

  1. It is, however, possible that the remedy for ills of conscious purpose lies with the individual. There is what Freud called the royal road to the unconscious.

    He was referring to dreams, but I think we should lump together dreams and the creativity of art, or the perception of art, and poetry and such things. And I would include with these the best of religion.

    These are activities in which the whole individual is involved. The artist may have a conscious purpose to sell his picture, even perhaps a conscious purpose to make it. But in the making he must necessarily relax that arrogance in favour of a creative experience in which his conscious mind plays only a small part.

    We might say that in creative art man must experience himself - his total self - as a cybernetic model.

    [Gregory Bateson]
    Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Conscious Purpose versus Nature'), p.444
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  2. The arts, poetry, music, and the humanities similarly are areas in which more of the mind is active then mere consciousness would admit.

    [Gregory Bateson]
    Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation'), p.453
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