In my early thirties, I was struck with a debilitating illness for which neither medical science nor years of depth analysis provided an answer. As a last resort, I went to the Jung Institute in Zürich, hoping to make some meaning of my life before I died. In the midst of my despair, I had a dream stating that the cause of my illness was that the threshold of my unconscious was exceptionally low. This dream was most helpful. I gave up seeking outer solutions and committed myself to exploring the archetypal energies assaulting my psyche. For me, individuation, the process of bringing the unconscious shadow qualities to consciousness and integrating them into the personality, was a lifesaving necessity. To be responsible for my own wholeness, I had to integrate my inherent shadow qualities that I had forgotten, repressed, or never known.
Through temperament or circumstances, the struggles faced within the individuation process are uniquely personal. This rather obvious fact hit me when, after years of analysis striving to plumb the depths of the inner world, I suddenly realized that I did not need to go deeper into the unconscious: I was already there.
My task was to find my way out of the archetypal realm and into the world of outer reality; however, I needed to validate the psyche’s underworld domain in order to launch my journey into the mundane world. To function in the outer world, I first had to make sense of the somewhat strange inner landscape of my particular sychic orientation. My experience in this regard has been most valuable as I work with others who find themselves struggling to fi nd the way out of the depths and into life.
The paintings and commentaries I share here are pictorial interactions through which I attempted to relate my fragile ego to the archetypal forces that flooded in on me. The paintings, with their related dialogues, helped contain the chaotic incursions from the unconscious and provided symbolic images that I could meditate upon and, over time, integrate.
