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Jungscape jpg Jungscape large jpg

Jungscape

16" X 20"

1997

original sold

(click on picture to make larger)

Notes on Jungscape

This painting is the first in a series of paintings of C. G. Jung intertwined with his concepts. On some level one could conceive of this painting representing the "Sennex" archetype. The sennex or "wise old man archetype is grouped or used in dichotomy with a puer aeternus figure (s). The dichotomy encompases the masculine aspects from childhood through old age.

The Sennex archetype is sometime represented by such images as: "the Great King, the father, the grandfather, the priest (Heirophant), an elder, a Shaman, a Kahuna, an ogre, the outcast, and a cripple like the Fisher King"

James Hillman,  Puer Papers  1979

Carl Jung posited "archetypes" as the organizing principles or structuring tendencies of the collective unconscious. "There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action"

Carl Jung,  Collected Works 9.1  1959/1969

The postmodern Jungian, Christopher Hauke reflects that the "archetypes are as specifically human as the social reality we create; furthermore, they are not 'fixed' just as the social environment is not fixed, but both have an objective existence that each new generation encounters and experiences as 'reality'. Michael Vannoy Adams argues that Jung's conception of collective psychology is one that is need of reconsideration and perhaps reformation. He speaks of the psychical construction of reality, by which he means that,

the individual vision of external reality is mediated - that is psychically constructed - by schemata, categories, or 'types' (be they archetypes or stereotypes), which, if not naturally inherited, are so culturally ingrained in the unconscious that they might as well be. (Adams, 1991; 253)

In his reformation, Adams advocates a psychology of knowledgewhich helps us see how the archetypes of the collective unconscious participate in the formation of human social reality...."

Christopher Hauke,  Jung and the Postmodern  2000

Hauke goes on to say that Jung brings affect to the center of what it means to be human through his theory of archetypes.

"Jung's archetypes are the structuring principles of the human psyche; they are empty of specific content or form until they encounter the individual and cultural environment of a human life. This encounter results in a dialectical process whereby a human psyche is, on the one hand, determined according to the structuring expectations of the archetypes, but on the other hand, reveals an almost infinite variety of expression, a range of vast differences across individuals and cultural groups that, neverthelesss, retains a distinctive human quality. But the theory of archetypes not only bridges the universal and the individual, it also bridges what modernity distinguished as either Nature or Culture"

ibid.