On Psychological and Visionary Art: Notes from C. G. Jung's Lecture on Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia

by C.G. Jung, Craig E. Stephenson, Gérard de Nerval

In 1945, at the end of the Second World War and after a long illness, C. G. Jung delivered a lecture in Zurich on the French Romantic poet Gerard de Nerval. The lecture focused on Nerval's visionary memoir, Aurelia, which the poet wrote in an ambivalent attempt to emerge from madness. Published here for the first time, Jung's lecture is both a cautionary psychological tale and a validation of Nerval's visionary experience as a genuine encounter.

Nerval explored the irrational with lucidity and exquisite craft. He privileged the subjective imagination as a way of fathoming the divine to reconnect with what the Romantics called the life principle. During the years of his greatest creativity, he suffered from madness and was institutionalized eight times. Contrasting an orthodox psychoanalytic interpretation with his own synthetic approach to the unconscious, Jung explains why Nerval was unable to make use of his visionary experiences in his own life. At the same time, Jung emphasizes the validity of Nerval's visions, differentiating the psychology of a work of art from the psychology of the artist. The lecture suggests how Jung's own experiments with active imagination influenced his reading of Nerval's Aurelia as a parallel text to his own Red Book.

With Craig Stephenson's authoritative introduction, Richard Sieburth's award-winning translation of Aurelia, and Alfred Kubin's haunting illustrations to the text, and featuring Jung's reading marginalia, preliminary notes, and revisions to a 1942 lecture, On Psychological and Visionary Art documents the stages of Jung's creative process as he responds to an essential Romantic text.

Genres: Psychology

240 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2015

About the author

Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death.

The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.

Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.

Reviews

[Jimmy Ele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Supremely interesting little Jungian nugget. This book includes Nerval's Aurelia, which can properly be described as one of those rare works of art that was never meant to be a work of art. It is Nerval's therapeutic notebook, and this is what is examined by the late great Jung.

I loved this particular edition because it includes all of Nerval's Aurelia, as well as all of Jung's thoughts on Nerval's descent into madness. I have to state here now, that Nerval's description of all of the vivid scenes of his dreams, and their spilling into his daily life were amazingly detailed. I do not think that I have ever read an account of an actual descent into madness. However to be fair to Nerval, what he was experiencing was outside of what we would deem normal awareness. There were whole histories unfolding in his dreams and synchronicities with real life, that would probably have driven anyone mad, if they did not have the proper understanding to deal with them. Nerval took his life shortly after writing Aurelia and he was found with the document on his person.

Jung's analysis helps us to see that some of the images that Nerval saw in his dreams represented deeper processes going on in Nerval's psyche.

One is left wondering what would have been the outcome if Jung had been around during the time of Nerval. Would Jung have been able to help Nerval see clearly again and recover his sanity?

Whatever you might think, this was definitely an interesting read, even if it is just to examine a creative artist's descent into madness and the subsequent opinion of one of the most distinguished psychologists in all of the history of psychology.

[Timothy Ball · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Everything is alive, everything is in motion, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays that emanate from me or from others flow directly through the infinite chain of creation whose transparent network is in continuous communications with the planets and the stars. A captive here on earth for the moment, I commune with the chorus of stars and they join in my sorrows and joys."

[Marcus Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aurelia is a lucid and deeply tragic work, with Nerval's suicide immediately following its publication, it's more or less impossible to divorce his fate from the experience of reading this work. Jung offers a gentle, paired back and precise way into the story, interpreting it as more than anything, a confrontation with the unconscious. The introduction gives a sensational background on Nerval, Romanticism and Jung's relationship to it. A must read for anyone interested in Romanticism, Surrealism, Jung, Schizophrenia and visionary art. It broke my heart!

[Isla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will 100000% be reading this novel again! Hopefully this year