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Arts of the Imaginal World: Rejuvenation & Psychic Creativity
January 17, 2025 @ 7:00 pm PST
Creative practice has a rejuvenating effect. We feel more whole, more insightful and more in touch with our deep psyche. Creativity and art release and focus archetypal energy. C. G. Jung shows how art-making aids psychological individuation. The arts have a long history of materializing the psyche for the collective. A helpful archetype is Dionysus, that breaker of boundaries, including those between humans and nature. This god requires collective worship. Dionysian energy dismembers psychic being, and re-members it as symbols. Doing art follows such a Dionysian process. This lecture proposes that taking Dionysus seriously seeds a third rejuvenation of being, one where creativity dances between knowing and being. Here art and clinical practice are generative partners. My novels, the Mary Wandwalker Mysteries, are my own Dionysian engagement with the world.
Related Workshop: Doing Creativity with Dionysus
SUSAN ROWLAND, Ph.D., is the author of books on Jung, gender, and the arts including Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002) and with Joel Weishaus, Jungian Arts-Based Research and the Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico (2021). She teaches creative practices with psychic images at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. She uses Jungian art practice to explore feminine heroism, trauma, and the climate emergency through writing the Mary Wandwalker mystery series. The Sacred Well Murders (2022) was followed by The Alchemy Fire Murder in 2023, the latter linking alchemy, America, and wildfires. Murder on Family Grounds was published in 2024 and The Swan Lake Murders is due in 2025.
