The Essays of Erich Neumann: Art and the Creative Unconscious

Four essays on the relation of the artist to his culture – and to himself – compose this volume by the analytical psychologist Erich Neumann. The archetypes of the collective unconscious, Dr. Neumann says, are intrinsically formless psychic components that assume form in art. The mediums of expression through which they pass, the time and place in which they occur, and above all the psychology of the individual in whom they appear mold their varying forms. The author illustrates his theme in the first essay, “Leonardo da Vinci and the Mother Archetype.” The work of art, and art itself, were for Leonardo not ends in themselves but rather instruments and expressions of his inner situation. Two other essays, on “Art and Time” and on “Creative Man and Transformation” treat of the relations of art to its epoch and specifically of modern art to our own time. Neumann sees the artist as a hero in isolation, whose mission it often is to oppose the cultural canon of his age and so to suffer a tragic loneliness. The problem of form in modern art is linked to the chaos of the modern world and to a fundamental change in man’s way of seeking for himself a life of dignity. Dr.Neumann devotes a fourth essay to the modern artist Marc Chagall and his relation to some of the problems discussed in the other studies.