Submitted by ARASAllison on
ARAS Connections welcomes Ann W. Norton and Andreas Jung as the newest contributors of superb articles from the ongoing Art and Psyche Conferences, the most recent one taking place in Sicily, 2015. The editorial group of Linda Carter, Diane Fremont and Ami Ronnberg has created in Art and Psyche a rich forum for exploring the relationship between image, symbol and psyche. ARAS Connections is fortunate to publish articles from the Art and Psyche conferences as ARAS is constantly striving to find better ways to bridge the inner and outer worlds, to bridge the individual and the community, to bridge different cultures and their unique symbolic material. At the heart of this endeavor is the image.
At our May meetings of the National ARAS Board we pledged ourselves to search for effective ways to bring a symbolic attitude into the world through education and curriculum development. Simultaneously and with great excitement, we also pledged ourselves to expand underdeveloped areas of the archive and have initiated collaborative projects in India, Taiwan, Japan, and China. The ARAS way of developing new projects is to start small, while thinking big for the long term. For instance, it took eleven years to slowly bring to fruition The Book of Symbols which has now been translated into 6 different languages and remains a Taschen worldwide best seller. A current example of starting small with an emerging grander vision is the Pioneer Teens Project—a summer intensive and year long internship for young students to learn about the symbolic attitude. This program has become a small gem in ARAS’ efforts to reach out to the world in a creative way. We are now in the beginning stages of developing a curriculum based on the ARAS Pioneer Teens program experiment which could be used in a variety of settings.
We welcome your ideas for how we can grow ARAS in a way that is true to our unique way of approaching symbolic imagery and bringing it into the world.