Jungian Art Therapy: Living A Creative Life

What does it mean to live a creative life? Jung’s initiatory journey into the “spirit of the depths“ was creative but required profound psychic courage, suffering, and patience as he confronted the unconscious and discovered “the third thing.”  Upon his “return,” when Jung wrote that “everything of which we are conscious is an image, and that image is psyche,” he elevated the imagination and creative processes. One of the gifts was his essay The Transcendent Function which conceptualized how unconscious and invisible psychic material became conscious and visible through play, dedication, endurance of wrestling with the opposites, and the respect for the ineffable and irrational aspects of the psyche.  Jung thereby came to understand the importance of the “third thing.”  Jung’s investigations into the unconscious through various creative means opened the door and gave credence for the expressive arts therapies. In this lecture the three-part initiation model provides a container in which we consider Jung’s wisdom and how the “third thing” may offer hints on living a creative life.