Jung and Art

Excerpt - James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani - Lament of the Dead: Psychology after the Red Book

JH: Well then I think psychology after the Red Book has to be based on the fantasy image. It has to use the language of the poetic, or the analogous, or the metaphoric, or anything that is not, so to speak, denotative.

SS: One finds within the work two levels of language. First is what one could describe as practice of the image. In the fantasies themselves, he tries to enter into the unfolding of dramatic sequences, he enters into the fantasy, he engages with the figures. This is the first level. The second level—I describe this as layer two—is in the level of lyrical elaboration that occurs from 1914 onward, when he realizes that his fantasies in part were prophetic. Within this he tries to understand the general significance of the image, but in the most striking passages, by allowing them to resonate, allowing them to unfold in a metaphorical manner, he encounters for instance the figure he calls “one of the lowly” and this leads him to meditate on his own lowliness, his own destitution, his own beggarliness, so that the figure then unfolds in a metaphorical dimension rather than being translated into a conceptual form. He tries to remain within the imagistic terrain of the fantasies.40