Jungian Arts-Based Research: What it is, Why do it, and How

Abstract

Jungian arts-based research (JABR) is opening the therapy room to the whole world. Even more, it is a way of making knowledge using creativity, the imagination, and the unknown psyche or the unconscious, with the wisdom of centuries materialized in art traditions. For here the sandplay is converted into art practice, whether that practice be writing novels or poetry, painting, sculpture, filmmaking, photography, internet games, garden design, music-making or more. Instead of keeping the space sealed off for therapist and patient to be alone, the sandplay of JABR is connected to society, nature, and the cosmos by materializing the psyche in dialogue with art and history. Synchronicities arise and archetypes are summoned into being through art-making that is deliberately poised to invite in the deep psyche. More depth can be generated through Jungian practices such as active imagination and amplification. Indeed, I will figure JABR as a three-stage process consisting of one, preparation with psychic and art matter, two, process inviting in spontaneity and the unknown, and three, reflection using the completed artwork. That artwork works, assumes a place in society independent of the artist. JABR art takes on the valence of Jung’s autonomous psychic image, only here with the material being to exist for centuries, to speak to different cultures, to generate multiple meanings and fixing none. Here JABR unites therapy with knowing and being. It is formational, in gathering what matters in the artist and the work, informational in finding out what is hidden to the conscious psyche, and transformational in offering to the scholar-therapist-artist plus the audience, new ways of being.