ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype - 2011 Issue 4

Chie Lee’s deeply moving paper reminds us in the most profound way that the distance between the work of art and the sensitive viewer is a transitional space of recognition, emotion, awe and healing. With raw beauty she courageously guides us into the depths of Xu Bing’s and Zhang Huan’s art, as she invites us to witness its confluence with her life. The word is embodied and the body is tranformed in their art through hers. We understand in a new way how each expresses who we are.
 
As she reveals the art of the two contemporary Chinese artists, she opens a window onto culture and soul. Her work, like theirs, springs from the heart. I am reminded that in The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World James Hillman wrote that Henry Corbin's gift was "to enable us to experience thoughts that come from another language and culture as if they were our own hearts." It is this that Chie Lee gives to us and for it we are most grateful.
 
Chie Lee is a Jungian analyst in private practice. She trained at the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles where she lives and practices her art.

- Mary Wells Barron
 

To understand the relationship between avant-garde art and cultural identity in China, a basic understanding of the historical and cultural contexts is essential. The Cultural Revolution in China did not begin after Mao took power in 1949—it began with the May 4th movement of 1919. After suffering a series of deep national humiliations by the West, the revolution to break down the old culture began. The movement, led by students and intellectuals, proclaimed that if China was to survive in the 20th century with any integrity as a country, the Confucian traditional values had to be rejected. China must openly adopt Western political, economic, and social values in order to modernize and bring about a new China. This was the beginning of the quest for a new cultural and political identity.
 
Some forty some years later, Mao's Cultural Revolution, which began in the 1960s, took the May 4th movement to its extreme. The Red Guards, most of them teenagers, were unleashed onto the populace and carried out the central propaganda edict of "smashing the Four Olds": old habits, old customs, old culture and old ideas. Mao's Cultural Revolution was catastrophic in the indiscriminate destruction of lives, property, and all manifestations of art and culture. When it ended in the early 1970s, the repressive atmosphere began to lift. I believe that, to this day, the deep wound that was inflicted on the collective psyche from this phase of China's Cultural Revolution was repressed and still remains unacknowledged and therefore unhealed and untransformed.
 
In the art world of the late 1970s and 1980s, a vast pool of underground creative energy began to surface in China. Art schools were again popular and drew artistically gifted students. A significant source of inspiration for the art students was that for the first time in almost thirty years of isolation from Western culture, art institutes were allowed to subscribe to some Western art magazines and books. Any and all information was hungrily consumed. One artist said, “After a famine, you eat anything” (Kelley, 2008, p.15). The impact was huge and in the following years the art scene would experience bursts of subversive and exuberant creative energy.
 
In February of 1989, a few months before the student protest at Tien An Men Square and the subsequent brutal crackdown, Chinese artists exploded onto the art world with the first major survey of modern Chinese art in an exhibition named “China/Avant-Garde.” The artwork that was selected departed radically from traditional and acceptable Chinese aesthetics and artistic expressions. Combined with the student protests that erupted in June of 1989, it greatly alarmed the authorities, and a heavy lid was again closed down on artistic expression. Many Chinese artists and intellectuals found themselves navigating on very thin ice between their individual visions and the prevailing sociopolitical values. A number of them left China and emigrated to the United States, Japan, Europe, and Australia.
 
Read Chinese Avant-Garde Art: Body and Spirit Struggle for a New Cultural Identity by Chie Lee in its entirety.

Exploring the relationship between image and emotion has long been a central feature of Jungian analysis. Jung states in his autobiography: "To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images, that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotion, I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them" (Jung 1961, 177). In this presentation, I will attempt to convey my experience of initiating image- making with patients in analysis as a way for them to find the images concealed in their emotions. I will then discuss ways these images, once formed, serve the process of articulating affective states within analysis. In service to this end, I will first explore Jung's use of the terms affect, emotion and feeling.
 
Jung conceptualized emotion as a positively or negatively charged psychic energy similar to physical energy. His study of emotion was primarily focused on emotional dysfunction closely linked to the experience of trauma. It was understood that when ego consciousness was unable to express the emotion of a traumatic experience, the traumatic emotion was split off into the unconscious where it functioned as a dissociated, autonomous complex (Compaan, 1997, pp. 4 – 7).
 
Jung came to differentiate between the concepts of emotion and feeling by describing "emotion" as an intense unconscious reaction that has physiological indicators in contrast to "feeling" – a more conscious and less intense reaction that does not have physiological indicators (Compann, 1997, p. 6 quoting Jung, 1935). Jung used the terms affect and emotion interchangeably. However, affect has come to be used to describe the purely physiological unconscious process or state that can be considered the biological or innate component of an emotion. Jungian analyst Louis Stewart underscored that affect is an inherited regulatory system of the psyche and is, therefore, the archetypal root of all emotion and feeling (Compaan, 1997, p. 37 quoting Stewart, 1996, p. 277). Emotion, on the other hand, is used to describe a complex experience based on affect combined with learned experience and memories that can have both unconscious and conscious elements. If affect is biology than emotion is biography. Emotion involves a sense of physiological arousal as well as an impulse toward action and can be triggered in response to external as well as internal stimuli (Ibid. p.29, p. 35 quoting Nathanson (1992). A feeling, in contrast, is a discernable subtle quality of awareness that can be introspectively distilled [out] from the physiological urgency of emotional experience, without an impulse toward action (Fratarolli, 2001, p.189). As James Hillman points out, "we possess our feelings, but we are possessed by our emotions" (Compaan 1997, p. 14 quoting Hillman, 1960). In summary, affect, emotion and feeling are three degrees of emotional experience along a developmental spectrum. Affect is the biological/archetypal root that combines with lived experience to form complex emotion, which in turn can be introspectively distilled into feelings through conscious awareness.
 
In light of these differentiations, we can return to Jung's quote describing the process of translating emotions into images – of finding the image concealed in emotion. He is, of course, describing the process of releasing internal emotional energy into the image being made. This released emotional energy is no longer just inside him but is also outside of him, now imbedded in the image. Through this process of externalizing internal emotion, his ego is relieved of the internal emotional energy that might have torn him to pieces. In addition his ego gains the perspective from which to consciously perceive and differentiate aspects of the emotion now expressed in the image. This capacity to perceive and to differentiate emotions now imbedded in the image allows the unconscious aspects of the emotion to be transformed into the more conscious experience of feeling. It is this transformation from unconscious emotion to a more conscious feeling that allowed Jung to be calmed and reassured. It is also this transformation of emotions into feelings that informs my incorporation of image-making into verbal analysis.

Read the entire paper.