....and so it begins.

The MA is well and truly underway and so life must now be breathed into this blog, a record of my visual and academic wanderings over the next two years. I have decided to begin by working with Jungian archetypes, using these templates to explore the multi-faceted territory of the mythic feminine. These archetypes are at once personal and universal, resonating with all women through the various stages of the life cycle.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious owes its existence to hereditary forces, its content is not comprised of personal experience and its landscape is essentially one of archetypes. They are the 'motifs' of mythological research. Hubert and Mauss in the field of comparative religion define them as "categories of the imagination". So we are dealing with definitive forms in the psyche, what Jung described as "active living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions'". The word active is key here, implying a generative capacity. Thus in this view of the psyche the mental events we each experience over the course of our lives are not determined by our personal histories alone but by the collective history of the species as a whole reaching back into the mists of time. Jung saw myths as direct expressions of this archetypal nature......

"Just as some kind of analytical technique is needed to understand a dream, so a knowledge of mythology is needed in order to grasp the meaning of a content deriving from the deeper levels of the psyche....The collective unconscious -- so far as we can say anything about it at all -- appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious". - 'The structure of the psyche, 1927'.

First port of call then, review of world mythology, read up on my Jungian theory and re-read 'women who run with the wolves', a seminal book on myth and female archetypes written by a Jungian psychoanalyst.

st as some kind of analytical technique is needed to understand a

dream, so a knowledge of mythology is needed in order to grasp the

meaning of a content deriving from the deeper levels of the psyche....The

collective unconscious -- so far as we can say anything about it at all –

appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for

which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the

whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective

unconscious”

ust as some kind of analytical technique is needed to understand a

dream, so a knowledge of mythology is needed in order to grasp the

meaning of a content deriving from the deeper levels of the psyche....The

collective unconscious -- so far as we can say anything about it at all –

appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for

which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the

whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective

unconscious”