Artist and daimon
Was C.G. Jung an artist? It would be difficult to think otherwise judging by the newly available materials documenting a lifetime of drawing, painting, writing, sculpting, and building – yet Jung insisted that he was not an artist. The 2009 publication of the Red Book/Liber Novus (Jung’s private illuminated manuscript documenting fantastic encounters with the imaginal figures of his unconscious) elicited a new wave of interest surrounding Jung as a psychological pioneer, a complex and imperfect man, a possible mystic, and a prolific creator. Fascination with Jung has kept his autobiographical memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections in print since its initial publication in 1963. It is in this volume, where he describes himself as a “creative person” but not as an artist. He recounts an episode that occurred during the years in which he experienced profound encounters with the unconscious; the encounters that would later be articulated into the Red Book:
When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it? Whereupon a voice within me said, “It is art.” I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was writing had any connection with art. . . . I said very emphatically to this voice that my fantasies had nothing to do with art, and I felt a great inner resistance. . . . “No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature” and prepared myself for an argument.
“Anima” was the name that Jung gave the feminine voice that spoke to him and through him. In this same passage he indicates that he shared his own “speech centers” with the voice, so that she might explain to him why she considered his writing and painting to be “art.” Unfortunately, neither Jung nor his editor and secretary Aniela Jaffé included the Anima’s “lengthy” reply in the final version of the memoir.
What did Jung mean by making a distinction between art and nature, and what were his conceptions of art, nature, and anima? What can these conceptions, along with his insights into creativity itself, contribute to the contemporary creator? One way to approach these questions is to consider Jung’s lifetime of personal creative expression; he never claimed the title of “artist” but had no hesitation referring to himself as creative. He spoke about his personal creative struggles just as an artist would:
I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me. . . . I could never stop at anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. . . . A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon. . . . The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me.
Creative individuals will surely recognize and relate to Jung’s feelings of captivity to a power greater than himself. Poet Stanley Kunitz referred to this power as a “dark angel,” while dancer Martha Graham called it a “quickening” that propels the creator into a state of “blessed unrest and divine dissatisfaction.” The idea of a daimon, a personal guiding spirit companion, has a long and complicated history in Western culture. The souls who chose their lots at the end of Plato’s Republic in the Myth of Er undertook their journeys into human life with the companionship of a daimon, a personal guide who would remember their destinies. Socrates’s daimonion, as featured in Plato’s Phaedrus and Apology, offered critical direction and admonitions that Socrates always obeyed. While most contemporary scholars are quick to diminish or dismiss Socrates’s relationship with his daimonion, Plato’s dialogues themselves reveal Socrates’s devotion to a force, or an entity, that spoke to him personally. Like Socrates, Jung’s legacy is also complicated by his insistence on the reality of unconscious forces, or psychic entities, that he did not create but which communicated personally with him.
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